Eight Days of Hendricksons

May 13
On blind faith, by calendar reckoning alone, I drove to the river and hiked a mile downstream from the bridge to the riffle I call Red Cabin. I had never fished here during the Hendrickson hatch, but the previous summer, while I floated this stretch with Kelly, he nodded at the water and said, "Good Hennie riff. Big fish." Kelly's cryptic comments are usually significant. When he nods at a pool or a logjam and says a big fish lives there, it's because he has direct knowledge of it, having recently seen or hooked or released it. Often all three. The riffle below the redwood-colored cabin stuck in my mind. I thought of it all winter.

The day was classic May in Michigan: cold in the morning, warming to the low sixties by noon, the wind blowing scraps of clouds across the sun. The woods were gray and brown, he buds on the trees closed tight as fists. It would take a warm rain and two days of sunshine to make leaves appear.

The water was higher than I wanted, and dark. To get to the riffle I crossed the river twice at flats that in summer are hip deep. Now the water topped my waders and ran in an icy burn down my waist.

I waded cautiously to the edge of the riffle. The current was stronger than I expected; my boots threatened to roll across the gravel like cargo on skids. My side of the river was smooth, but the slick surface was misleading. I knew I could never cross it. At midstream the surface was choppy with white-tipped waves. Beyond the choppy water, a long cast away, was a large, counterclockwise eddy, running tight against a bunch of logs and old stumps clogging the far shore. Upstream was a sharp bend and a deep pool, with the red cabin sitting on the crest of the bank above it.

I waited until five o'clock but never saw a mayfly. Hendricksons are the first big hatch of the season, and notoriously unreliable. Walking back to the bridge, I met an angler on the trail. He seemed lost, stopping now and then to peer under the cedars at the river. When I asked if he had seen any Hendricksons, he said, "Hendricksons?"

May 14
Doug and I fished the riffle at Red Cabin, but it was a bright day, and Hendricksons rarely emerge when the sun is out. By three o'clock we had seen only a few duns scooting past on the wind, and no rising trout. Doug finally tied on a black Woolly Bugger and waded to the edge of the pool at the bend above the riffle. The water there is deep, perhaps eight feet, and drops off from a sand ledge on the upstream side. It's a place for big trout.

But Doug made a mistake. He cut off his dry fly and tied the streamer directly to the end of his tapered leader, where the tippet was about three-pound test. He should have cut the leader back three or four feet, to six-pound test, at least. But he was being lazy. Or he was thinking that should the Hendricksons start hatching after all, he would be read to switch quickly to dries again. Or he could not bring himself to chop a four-dollar leader in half. Or he had no faith in the fly or the water and figured it wouldn't matter. He cast the streamer into the pool. He stripped once and something large came up, engulfed the fly, and broke the tippet. The swirl it made was so large it drifted downstream for thirty feet before dissipating. Doug looked at me. "Damn," he said. "Damn, damn, damn."

May 15
I suggested that Glenn stand at the top of the pool and keep an eye on the place where Doug had cast his doomed streamer. He stripped twenty feet of line from his reel and started casting a parachute Hendrickson for practice. I waded a hundred feet downstream, to the middle of the riffle, and glanced back at Glenn. A nice trout bounced end over end in front of him.

When I got there the trout was on its side on the surface. It was an eighteen-inch brown with deep, rich colors and bold spots. Glenn tried to lead it a little closer to shore, where I could reach it, and at that moment it rolled over, and the fly shot from its mouth. The trout righted itself and swam with a bit of a wobble into deep water.

Glenn described what happened. At the end of one of his practice casts, he had let his fly drag in the water until it went under. It was swimming in a straight line below him when the trout came up and took it.

Later a few Hendrickson duns appeared on the surface, rode for a few moments with their dark wings held high like sails, then flew off. A trout flicked the surface of the riffle, but only once.

May 16
In the night it rained. The river comes up fast during a rain, and the fishing can be extraordinary if you happen to be there while the water is rising. It's a good time to throw streamers against the banks. You want them to streak through the darkening water, and you'd better use a stout leader.

But I was too late. I reached the river at noon, and it was already as high as it would get and too dark to fish. When I stood on the bridge looking at the water below,a gust blew my hat off and it floated downstream. Two guys fishing bait at the bend saw it and tried to snag it as it went past, but they missed. I waved to them and they waved back.

May 17
At noon I met Kelly, and we hiked to a section of the upper river neither of us had fished in years. This far upstream the river had not been blown out by the rain. It was clear and wadable, glinting gray beneath an overcast sky. It wound in lazy curves across a mile-long band of meadow--a rare stretch of open river in this country of woods and swamps. Hendricksons flew past with the wind. Others sailed on the water. As we rigged up, the wind gusted harder, and pellets of rain drove at an angle to the ground.

The hatch got heavier. Mayflies drifted on the current seams, one every few feet, and rising trout showed everywhere up and down the river. When a hatch is on, it always seems inevitable and continuous, the usual state of affairs. It's easy to imagine that you can come back to the river anytime and find trout rising confidently in every run and pool. If you never saw it again, you would remember this little river winding through the meadow as a place where trout rose every day to Hendricksons.

We walked the banks and took turns casting to feeding trout. The rain turned to sleet, then to wet flakes of snow that clumped together as they fell and struck the water with audible splashes. Trout fed until the hatch ended late in the afternoon, when the woods and fields were covered with a soggy coat of white. We discovered during the walk back to the truck that we were wet and cold.

In the tavern in Frederic, we ordered coffee and beer and watched hockey highlights on the television over the bar. The Red Wings were in the finals, on their way to their first Stanley Cup in forty-two years. We ordered giant burritos and more beer and flirted with the waitress, who was not impressed. She was a lifer. Nothing we could have said or done would have surprised her.

"You guys been swimming, or what?" she asked.

"Fishing," we sad.

While we waited for our meal, Kelly told me about the May a few years ago when he guided on the river eighteen days in succession without seeing a Hendrickson hatch. The hatch should have been on, but every day was sunny and the bugs refused to emerge. Then, the nineteenth day, low clouds covered the sky, and in the afternoon duns started popping and suddenly trout were rising everywhere. The clients were beginners who had never experienced such a hatch. They could do nothing wrong. Trout twelve to eighteen inches long gobbled every fly they threw at them. The clients caught so many that they lost count. They also lost all of Kelly's flies. They were finally reduced to using flies brought along by one of the clients--mass-produced Japanese cheapos with oversized quill wings and webby hackle the color of an old lady's bad hairdo, the kind of flies you find for sale in plastic bubble packs in the fishing department at K-Mart. But it didn't matter to the trout. They couldn't get enough of those imitations of imitations.

The waitress came with our burritos. They were big enough to use as clubs.

"Fishing," she said. "Funny. You guys don't look that stupid."

May 18
Alone, all my friends working, I return to Red Cabin and stand at the edge of the riffle. I watch the water so intently that the trees on shore swoon upstream around me. There is something like an electrical charge in the air, a sense of imminence. The wind is down, the sky gray with patches of blue, and the air temperature is sixty-five degrees, the warmest day of the spring so far. Something's about to happen.

I wade into the fast water, until gravel moves under my feet, making crunching sounds like ice-cubes being chewed. I like the slight edge of danger. I like perching on a moment knowing it is about to end. Something is going to happen, and you never know what. The mayflies are scarce, but at any moment they might break free in an outburst of plenitude. My fly, if cast well, could be mistaken for an insect and taken in a greedy slurp by a trot so large and wary that no human has seen it in the four or five years it has terrorized baitfish and picked off bugs in this riffle.

The sun goes behind a cloud, and duns appear. First they are in the air, flying downstream, looking enormous against the gray sky--clumsy and graceful at once, like lumberjacks doing ballet. Then they are on the water, riding the current with their wings up. And trout begin to feed.

This goes on all afternoon. Each time a cloud blots the sun and the light goes gray, mayflies appear instantly, whole flotillas of them bobbing downstream on the riffle, and trout begin slashing and rolling where a moment ago there were no living things. The trout feed viciously, as if knowing that the bounty won't last. They come up fast, going down and coming up again five seconds later, grabbing as many mayflies as they can. In the eddy the trout follow a tight circuit, around and around, stitching the surface with their riseforms. If my cast is off by a few inches, the fly drifts past the rising trout and is caught in the fast water and pulled away. But if the cast is right--if the line unfurls and the fly lands behind loose curves of leader in the current seam-- the drift is dragfree, and there is a good chance a trout will take. The trout are lined up where the water makes a wall between the fast current and the slow, where they can stay in position without much effort and watch the procession of insects coming down from above. They take my artificials with exactly the same confidence they take the naturals, a bold lightning grab like a dog snapping a housefly in flight. My fly is a parachute Hendrickson on a size 14 hook, with a bronze wing and split tail. It is the same pattern that worked yesterday on the upper river.

I hook and land three brown trout: a seventeen-incher, then a sixteen- incher, then an eighteen-incher. Another rolls over the top of my fly, and when I raise my rod to set the hook it goes deep into the fold of flesh where the pectoral fin meets the body. The trout flares ideways to the current and bucks like a kite. I assume it is twenty inches, maybe twenty-two, but it is barely sixteen. By the time I work the fly out of its fin and release it, the hatch is over.

May 19
At certain moments of certain days, sometimes predictable, sometimes not, a kind of switch is flipped, and thousands of insects crawl from gravel or silt on the bottom of the river and swim frantically to the surface, where they undergo a metamorphosis into graceful winged creatures that ride the surface for a moment, then launch into flight. The event trips another switch: Trout follow the insects to the surface and feast.

Today begins like a feast day. Low slate-colored clouds cover the sky and trap humid air against the earth. There is expectancy everywhere. It's one of those days when you think: Sure thing. If the Hendricksons hatched yesterday, they'll hatch today. You're sure of it. Big hatch, big fish. It's a day for hogs.

When you fish the same spot in a river day after day, you get to know the bottom intimately. Two steps out from the end of the sunken log (half buried like a speed bump; you nearly fell the first time you kicked it), past a patch of sand, to the eddy behind the rock, then veer hard against the current upstream and across for five or six difficult steps until you're at the place where the bottom drops away. The river piles against your belly. You feel the loss of gravity until you reach a balance between your submerged half and your exposed half. To stay there you must lock the muscles in your thighs and calves and lean into the river. After twenty minutes your legs begin to tremble.

Casting is awkward. You twist your torso downstream and lift the trailing line into the air. You make one short backcast that straightens the line, unfurling it behind you in the space between tag alders on the bank, then a snappy forward cast that propels the line forty feet across the current, with a last-second upstream reach so the fly will touch down below the leader and drift for three or four feet efore the line straightens and drags the fly. It sounds more complicated than it is. Once you've learned, it's mostly automatic, like fingers finding chords on a guitar.

Late in the afternoon a few Hendrickson spinners do their puppet dance over the riffle, but no trout feed. You wade to shore and walk into the woods looking for morels. You find none, so you go home.

May 20
I'm waist deep at the edge of the riffle, thinking that a rising fish stirs the predator in us. An angler casting to a feeding trout moves like a feline. He stalks one step at a time, never taking his eyes off the spot where the fish showed, then casts and holds his breath while the fly rides the current into the feeding lane and is accepted or rejected.

Such moments of concentration can be a kind of meditation or prayer, a doorway to the antechamber, at least, of the sublime. When your concentration is complete, layers of residue are stripped away. Ordinary concerns get lathered off, and the alluvium of daily living is swept downstream. Spend two hours intent on a single purpose, and the world leans toward you and says, "Look at me." You look, and what you see sustains you through a week of telephone calls, traffic snarls, and meetings run by unctuous devotees of Robert's Rules of Order.

Outside it's easy to abandon every convention and prejudice and get down to the messy business of being an animal, alive. When you're rooting around in the water or the woods, miles from the nearest strip mall and office complex, nobody is likely to judge you by your clothing or your skin color or your political orientation, and if they do you don't give a damn anyway. Fishing--or hunting or photographing birds or cutting firewood--frees you of such nonsense. If you want society, convention, comfort, and safety, stay home. If you want your life to be a joyous romp, get outside.

Then I see mayflies in the air. They are flying with gathering purpose in a flight a few inches to a dozen feet above the water. And trout are rising to them. Their sipping rises ecome slashing rises, and two large fish begin feeding with outrageous gulping eruptions that seem to devour chunks of the river itself.

It's a gray day, a Hendrickson day, and I'm alone at Red Cabin, at the right place at the right time with the right fly and all afternoon ahead of me. A third big trout begins to feed. I take two steps deeper into the river, to the verge of disaster, and strip line. I wish my friends were here to share this. I cast, and the Hendrickson imitation touches down five feet above a riser. The fly looks good on the water, the dark wings upright, the size and color right, the drift natural.

The sun tries to break free, but clouds move in to cover it. When they do, the sky closes, the river opens, and my fly disappears. RWOL

From The River Home: An Angler's Explorations, by Jerry Dennis, to be published in May by St. Martin's Press. Used with the author's permission.

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