Place Blog #4: A Taste of Spring

The air has warmed to springtime temperatures this week, causing the ice to break and flow down to the Juniata or melt. The land, saturated with the melt water, holds water in temporary ponds and high in the water table. Between the effluent from the ground water and the drainage from roads and fields, the water is high…

…but not too high.

I drove back some twisted side roads that I still had never traveled in the year and a half I’ve lived in McAlisterville. This part of the creek is in the “Class A Wild Trout Stream” designation by the state, but my own exploration has mostly found a thin ribbon of water, too shallow to hold fish larger than a finger. Also, it would have probably almost entirely frozen this winter. I really haven’t seen where the fish could go.

Today, though, I found a bridge, under which Lost Creek runs through a culvert. Here, the current has roiled over upon itself, cutting out a hole which was probably deep enough to hold fish over during the winter. The color was perfect, an olive-teal, yet I could still see the rocks along the edge of the deeper current.

My knee-jerk response, almost my instinct, was to run home, grab my waders and rod and start plying the waters with pheasant-tail or hare’s ear nymphs. There was even a time in my life that I wouldn’t have left my house without having a rod and my pack in the back hatch of my Jeep.

But today, I’m in a van. A cold front is moving back in for next week, and a winter wind is kicking up. I don’t have my rod with me; I don’t even have a fishing license yet—by February, my old fishing journals tell me, I usually have at least a half-dozen days on the water!

I have work to do, though. This prompt to write. Graduation papers to grade for my seniors. Poems to read for Mentorship 1. I guess at some point in my life, I have to set priorities. Do what is most important.

Prompt Blog #4: Cicadas

The periodic cicadas emerged over a swath of land in Central Pennsylvania in 2008. My first born child, Clara, was not yet a year old. I left her and my wife with my mother-in-law while I went with my father, father-in-law, and two brothers-in-law to camp out by Penns Creek for a week. We chased these 17-year ghosts—broad-faced, anterior bullet-pointed, wings hemmed with orange veins—not for themselves in particular, but for the trout that would gorge themselves on these special treats.

There’s nothing that really weird or spectacular about the periodic cicadas other than they can get lost in our memories. They, like all insects, live in our “world” mostly to breed, and lay their eggs. Those eggs then hatch into larva that eat and grow and eat and grow until they’re ready to become adults and breed themselves. The cycle of all life really. Mayflies, stoneflies, and caddis flies (other types of trout food) are all similar, as are many other terrestrial insects.

In fact, their development is almost identical to the yearly cicada. These yearly versions of the cicada are also known as the “dog-day cicada” because they emerge every year (almost everywhere in PA) during the hottest days of July and August. The only difference (other than color) is that the periodic cicadas emerge by the millions compared to the dog-day’s thousands, and the periodic cicadas only come around during May and June every 17 years.

Well, actually that’s not true. Some broods of Magicicada (as the periodic brand of the insect is scientifically known) come out every 13 years. Moreover, it’s not like a blanket emergence all over the United States east of the Mississippi. The Magicicadas pop up out of their underground layers in patches, non-concurrently, all over the East, South, and Midwest. The 13 year broods tend to be more southernly, while the 17 year broods tend to reside in cooler climates. So technically, if you want to travel around the country every summer, you could find periodic cicadas almost every year.

Honestly, I can understand why someone would want to follow them like a “Dead Head” touring with the band. Their emergence is amazing. You hear them before you see the signs of them. Their calls—not quite buzzing, not quite chirping—are so loud that you can hear them if your windows are up and your radio is on.  Their song crescendos and decrescendos almost as if they were conducted by the wind. Then, before you see the bug itself, you see its remnants. Shucks, paper thin, cling to the bark of host trees. Holes, about a ½ inch in diameter, magically appear in the dirt around most trees, as if a giant walked around the woods in golf cleats. Finally, you see them. Awkward and clunky, wings rattling like an old propeller driven airplane, they fly—barely. Their distended rears hanging low like broken landing gear. And when they lose their strength (or when the wind blows them in), they smack the water and churn the surface like a fly in soup. That’s when the trout go nuts. The biggest brown trout slash at the surface trying stuff their jowls full of crunchy goodness.

According to my in-laws, humans also eat them. My mother-in-law said that they picked them off of the trees during one emergence of her youth, and ate “locusts and honey.” I did not bring myself to actually taste one during our camping trip. Maybe next time.

They’re really not locusts, though, which are a grasshopper species. They don’t descend upon crops and consume them with Biblical fury. They will infest trees and drowned out heavy metal music blared from a car radio, but they do not bring death and destruction. Actually, they bring life.

Onondaga Indians from NY still share stories orally of how their people were saved from famine by a cicada emergence. Dogs, birds, and fish will feast, and for fish species like trout, there appears to be a correlation between cicada hatches and the number and size of trout that survive the warm, harsh summers of Pa. trout streams.

When we camped along the banks of Penns Creek at Poe Paddy State Park, this gluttony was evident. My brothers-in-law would seemingly milk dozens of cicadas off of a tree branch into Mason jars, then pierce their hard exoskeleton with hooks, stringing them on their lines. They would open the bail of their reels, cast their bait, which was still alive most times, to watch the cicada dance on a leash ten-to-twenty feet above the stream. If they could avoid birds stealing their cicada, they’d eventually tire it out, and it would land in the currents to attract equally hungry fish. My father, father-in-law, and I tossed hand-tied foam imitations with fly rods. Our patterns would splat off of the water under overhanging branches to find eager 18-, 19-, 20-inch brownies.

It was an amazing experience. We’d wake to the call of these phantom choirs, these momentary, mysterious mammoth “flies”; we’d commune with the trout, who partook in body and blood of bugs.

Unfortunately, though, I didn’t get too spend the entire week in woods with the men, fish, and bugs. My daughter got dehydrated from the flu, as was reported by my mother-in-law who came out to camp to inform me. I returned for an afternoon to see her. She seemed to be getting over it, taking some fluids, and her fever dropping. So I returned to camp to fish the next day. Within hours, the flu emerged in me…all over the woods by my father’s pop-top camper. It was a horrible night, and the next day I returned to my in-laws to tough out my own sickness.

On the morning I returned, Clara went into the hospital, her fever worsening and her color turning blue from the dehydration and a lack of oxygen in her blood. I was helpless; unable to travel a distance greater than 10 feet from a toilet. I had to wait in agony while my wife and her mother took Clara to the hospital for an IV. My wife told me later that Clara had to be strapped to a board, jabbed multiple times before the IV took. She cried the whole time.

She came home the next day, and I was feeling better. My wife encouraged me to go back out to camp. I’m not sure if it was because she didn’t want me to miss this once-in-17-years experience, or if she didn’t want me around to re-infect them in the house. So I went back to Penns Creek, only to find that the action had died down. The two days I missed to vomit and diarrhea were too hot for the trout, and they took to feeding in the early morning and evening—when the cicadas were least active. Plus, more and more along the banks, you’d see a wrack line of cicada corpses meaning that their time with us was soon over.

At the same time, I had experienced my first real cicada hatch and missed it, too. Even before the week was up, I started calculating the years until the next hatch. Clara would be 17, about to be 18, maybe graduated from high school.

“This will be a great graduation trip for Clara if she’s into fly fishing!” I said.

My father-in-law, staring into the campfire, simply said, “Don’t wish these years away.”

I can understand where he’s coming from. Seventeen years before, he was where I was: young, with a young family, the cicadas fattening trout. Now, his children were grown, young men and woman. Mothers, uncles—he was a grandfather. Even worse, the next time that the cicadas would come, he may not be able to wade Penns Creek’s strong currents at the age of 70.

I realized how events like this could end up not only marking major points of our lives, but framing our lives, marking the beginnings and the endings. So as soon as I went home, I studied up. I decided to track where each brood would next appear; I’d run after the magic cicada. I’d take Clara, and now my youngest Layla, all over the east coast catching whatever fish would rise to these fire-brushed insects.

Well, the first hatch that I could track down is this year: 2011. The only place they’ll be hatching over trout is in southwestern North Carolina. There’s no way that I’ll make it there.

But there will always be the next one. In Ohio. Or the upper Mississippi. Or maybe I’ll just wait until 2025 when they come back to Penns Creek. No need to rush. No need to chase. Just a need to know they’re there.

Prompt Blog #3: The Wall

No matter how you get there, Lehman Road is at least two back, country roads away from any major macadamed artery in Halifax. Right before the its terminus, a T-section with Mountain Road, Lehman runs along Powell’s Creek, so close that a retaining wall—about 3 feet thick and 10 feet tall—has to hold back the road from crumbling into the stream. It is here that I still come in the spring to gauge the depth and clarity of the water, to see if this stream or the others in the area are suitable for fishing. It is here that I come to occasionally gauge my own depth and clarity.

I first came to the Wall with my grandpa when I was probably around 8 years old. We would come, park along the crumbling mudrock of the hill across the street from the Wall, and pull out nylon folding chairs to set up on the concrete “bank.” Perched ten feet above the creek itself, we’d toss hooks threaded with worms and corn to dumb stocked trout, yanking them from the currents to wriggle all the way up to our creels: plastic bags. I was too young to feel a connection to the creek, to the fish, but I felt closeness to grandpa—a shared place, shared memories.

As I grew into a teenager, I veered away from fishing. I was too concerned with school, sports, girls. I took for granted that the Wall and my grandpa would be there when I was ready to return. And I did return, to fishing a least. Learning the ways of streams. How fish hold in pocket water, conserving energy by letting the current bring food to them. How insects cling to the bottoms of rocks in their infancy. How they hide from trout, hope for life. How they finally cling to faith, shuck nymphal shells to breathe air, experience unbent light.  How some make it. How some don’t.

I kept making plans with grandpa to go back to the Wall, but I spent too much time fishing bigger creeks and rivers in my new home in the northern tier of PA. Rivers that grandpa could never fish because the current was too strong for 90 year old legs and there were no walls to set up chairs on.

I finally did return to fish the Wall, but this time with the woman who would become my wife. We didn’t have chairs, but she carried on my grandfather’s tradition of baiting fish with corn. I was decked out with all of my new technical gear: waterproof, breathable waders, a chest pack filled with varieties of dry flies, nymphs, streamers,  floatant gel, non-toxic split-shot, tippet the diameter of an infant’s hair. Yet, she was the only one to catch a fish—a horny-chub, named for the bumps on its forehead. I only caught rocks and twigs, which lead me to finally climbing down that wall, into the creek to feel the swell of the water around my legs.

I found the Wall to be not as stable and permanent as I thought, the creek eating away at it from underneath. A lip jutted out from the structure’s flat face, right around the common high water mark for spring, but it was broken off, like the edge of a graham cracker. Underneath, you could see the meat of it all: rebar skeleton, chunks of rock encased by the spongy-looking concrete. The Wall was taking in and letting go. It’s job could only be temporary. Like the road. Like the mudrock hillside beyond. Eventually the creek would consume everything.

After we got married, my wife and I moved back to my hometown of Halifax. My home, just two quick turns from the Wall. I would visit it often. I’d ask Brandy to come, but with our new baby, she couldn’t. I’d ask grandpa to come, but at 92, he finally admitted that he probably couldn’t even sit in a folding chair long enough to make it worth it. So I’d go by myself. I’d take more time working upstream and down. I’d climb down at the upper end of the wall, feel the mud give way as I’d slide step to the real bank of the stream. I’d learn that the substrata of this creek was a mix of silt eroded from farms upstream, naturally occurring cobble stone, and jutting bedrock that was the of the same origin as Peter’s Mountain to the south.

I wouldn’t always catch fish. The trout were still the same: dumb, stocked. They didn’t like to eat much of anything natural like mayfly larva or caddis pupa. So, I’d put on a San Juan Worm or yellow salmon egg imitations made out of yarn—the closest I could come to the bait of my youth. I thought this was cheating, but fished with them anyway—not seeing that I, too, was a mix of bedrock, pebbles, and silt.

A few months after my grandpa died suddenly at 93 due to complications from pneumonia, I was fishing at the Wall. I was alone, working the undercut of the concrete where I thought fish may be hiding from the stronger currents of the spring high water. I was alone, until a PA Fish and Boat truck pulled alongside the creek. From the top of the Wall, a Water Conservation Officer asked me a few survey questions, hoping to improve my experience in the future. I gave him my opinion: a lower creel limit, more special regulations waters with a catch-and-release stipulations, efforts to improve natural reproduction, fall stockings in waters where there was no extended season so the fish could learn the natural cycles of the streams.

Yet, even as I recited off these rehearsed lines that I’ve repeated to many others in discussions about conservation of PA streams, I knew that none of that would enhance my experience here at the Wall. I recognized Powell’s Creek couldn’t really hold over a large population of trout because of warming and siltation. It was made for put-and-take fisherman. It was a place for folding chairs, cans of corn, and plastic bags to take your fish home in. It was made for my grandpa, and that was the only experience I came to the Wall for.

Place Blog #3: Lost Creek, Finding Answers

Here, in a quick zig-zag through a hollow, Lost Creek, still locked in ice, bounces between two thrusts of ridge. Driving over the last bridge before the creek empties into the Juniata River, though, I see that cracks have formed from the thawing and refreezing we have had in the past week. Shelves of ice thrust up over others. Water seeps from these fault lines, running like a shallow fountain over the surface of the ice.  A meandering channel cuts a temporary path through this water rock along the far end of a curving bank.

Standing back by the road, I feel this—this slow loosening of winter, this exhale—is not really melting, but erosion. The creek really has been never still. Always, even where frozen from bank to bank, the water is moving—underneath, unseen. Melting implies that the ice itself gives up, releases itself into liquid. But a frozen body of moving water breaks up, thins out, cracks because of the never ceasing friction from below.

From the cut away hillsides, I know that creeks are change exemplified. I often see in creeks their fluidity, their constancy in adaptability. I don’t remember where I first heard the adage “you never stand in the same river twice,” but I’ve always felt—no matter how the channel has been cut differently, what fallen trees have dammed up this or that pool—I’m still standing the river, which essentially is the same.

Yet, I now realize I have been lost in the illusion of water. It is never the same river. Even when seemingly solid, erosion is part of the make-up of moving water. Dirt is an essential element. I see millennia traced in the rock cuts towering above the stream.

But the change is not always so slow.

I have found that Lost Creek originally got its name because an earlier settler thought the creek got “lost.” While traveling south-southwest toward the Juniata, it abruptly banked north, entering the main river upstream. If this is true, since that time, the creek has taken the mounds of earth that it has stripped away from the hills of this valley and silted in its delta because it now flows south into the Juniata. That was only about two-hundred years ago, very short in terms of geology and hydrology.

And the character of this stream changes weekly. It could be this week, or next, that it flows freely, raked clean of ice by the current. High water will gouge out new undercut banks for trout to hide in. Fish will be planted by trucks and buckets, then to be harvested by overambitious anglers that always kill their catch. Life will come and go—in a season, in an instant.

I feel a change upon me, too. I don’t know what it is, but I feel the claw of current tearing at icy thoughts, feelings. My channel being cut. Dirt in my veins. I have found: why a Lost Creek? Definitions are lost, obscured in ice and mud and wandering streams and silted in history. This is liberation, even though there is still ice.