I’ve narrowed my trout fishing down to about a half-dozen fly patterns, but I didn’t start out as a minimalist. No fly fisher ever does. I was reminded of this while rummaging around in an old fly box that I found in storage. Where did this swarm of insects come from?
Curious, I dumped the contents of the box unceremoniously onto my desk and began sorting through the jumble of forgotten flies. Here among the ruins were a few bass and bluegill monstrosities that I had used on lakes and ponds when I was living in New Jersey, back in the Pleistocene Era. And there were at least a dozen stiff and bristly dime-store trout flies that I had picked up on the day I bought my very first fly rod. That stick was a Heddon Pal Mark III fiberglass pole that met all my fishing needs at the time, because it was the cheapest fly rod on the rack at the sporting-goods store. I still own that rod, a serviceable 7-weight, versatile enough for trout or bass. But those dime-store flies? So stiff I might have gotten them at Madame Tussauds. I have no idea what to do with them now, other than maybe donate them to the New York Times Hundred Neediest Cases.
But there were other flies from the old box that held my attention. Like those dark-green caddis larva imitations, about a dozen each. These forest-green nymphs sent my mind meandering back to the first trout river I ever fished. That was the Musconetcong, a forest stream on the Jersey side of the Delaware Water Gap. In those days, the Musky was loaded with green caddis larva and hatchery trout. I caught my first trout on one of those green caddis nymphs. It was a signal event in my life. The Musky was also rich in another insect prominent in the old fly box, a dozen or so Cress Bugs, or scuds, tied to resemble tiny freshwater crustaceans that thrived in the river. These flies even had a local name, “Musky Shrimp,” and all the sporting-goods stores around Hackettstown and High Bridge sold them.
I started sifting through the contents of the old box. Speak, memory. A succession of lapidary fishing episodes drifted up from my subconscious. At the time — this was back in the 1970s — I was living on a barrier island at the Jersey Shore and teaching myself how to fly fish. My goal was to become a trout fisherman straight out of an Ernest Hemingway story. New Jersey is the butt of many jokes, most of them well deserved. But it has pockets of natural beauty, too, such as the forested hills and ridges in the northwestern corner of the state by the Delaware Water Gap, where there are bona fide trout rivers, including the Musconetcong, the South Branch of the Raritan, and the Big Flat Brook.
And then there were the Jersey flatlands where I lived, in the southern part of the state, with its pine forests and shore towns and casinos rising high above marshlands that hid a few bodies. As a newspaper reporter, I had covered some of those mob hits. The rural patches that survived suburban sprawl continued to look a bit like the American South, with its small truck farms and muddy tidal creeks. The Southern aspect showed plainly in the sandy scrublands of the Pine Barrens, another good place to hide a mob rubout, a mysterious world of pitch pines, blackjack oak, cranberry bogs, and Atlantic white cedar made famous by John McPhee and an episode of The Sopranos. The dark cedar rivers were wonderful to canoe, but too tannic for trout.
So to become a trout fisherman, I had to travel many miles from my home. This posed a problem. Unlike Bruce Springsteen, I was not born to run, if that meant spending any time in New Jersey traffic. There was nothing under the hood of my car that held any interest. But I was determined to become a trout fisherman, even if it killed me. So every weekend in April and May I would force myself to make the tortuous journey northward to either Hackettstown or High Bridge to fish for trout, just like they did it in all the Charlie Fox and Vincent Marinaro books I was reading.
Hackettstown is a small burg nestled in the valley of the Musconetcong. Even to this day, the region remains somewhat free of the worst aspects of real estate development and even a bit rural in character, if you squint hard. It was originally called Helms Mills, until a pioneering settler named Samuel Hackett stood so many of his neighbors to free drinks at his newly constructed hostelry that they agreed to name the town after him. The year prior to my inaugural visit to Hackettstown, which was in 1978, if memory serves, a young man named Emil Pierre Benoist, who was the son of a former borough councilman there and who suffered from what we now call “mental health issues,” shot and killed six people at random as he strolled along the railroad tracks that run through town.
There were no lingering signs of that trauma on the day I arrived for my trout premiere. The Musky looked like one of those Rip Van Winkle rivers fifty miles to the north in the Catskills. Or at least like the photos that I had seen of them in Fly Fisherman, which at the time set the standard for trout pornography. The hardwoods were leafing out in springtime glory, and a dozen or so fishermen were knee-deep in the Musky, weaving magic with their fly lines. A gent in an Irish tweed fishing hat stared at the water as if studying the Book of Kells. He showed me his fly box: lots of green caddisflies and Musky Shrimp. He told me cream-colored mayfly duns would be hatching later on in the day, and he loaned me a couple of Light Cahills, a popular fly thereabouts, as it once tended to be all over the Northeast. I was off to an auspicious start.
I stepped into the Musky and made my first casts ever to trout. I figured this was as close as I would ever come to a religious experience without donning a monk’s robes and swinging an incense burner. It was a merry crew, and I learned the ways of trout and how to handle a fly rod by watching my fellow brothers of the angle. They were generous to a fault, and I became familiar with the hot spots on the river and the seasonal progression of hatching mayflies: small and dark in early springtime, growing larger and lighter until June, and then all but disappearing in the heat of midsummer. That was when those tiny Cress Bugs came in handy. A New Jersey state trooper showed me how to fish the flyspeck stuff on the bottom, and that saved the day on more than one occasion. He also told me that some of the holdover hatchery fish had “gone native” and that there were even a few wild trout around. I did a lot of exploring by myself on twisty country roads, asking directions from red-faced tavernkeepers and gas station grease monkeys. And then one day an auto mechanic who was replacing the timing chain on my Toyota clued me in on the Ken Lockwood Gorge.
After a short, but confusing drive from Hackettstown to High Bridge, site of America’s oldest abandoned iron foundry, I came upon the South Branch of the Raritan River as it flowed past a few farms, minimalls, millraces, and colonial-era homes that for all I knew still had grapeshot in the lintels. A narrow dirt road led onto a forested ridge overlooking the scenic Ken Lockwood Gorge. I could spot through the trees on the opposite bank an ancient railroad trestle, the remnants of the old Central Jersey Line. The river in view looked like eye candy to any trout fisher, and the whole place felt saturated in angling history. Ray Bergman had fished here. I had studied his classic book Trout as if it contained the plays of William Shakespeare. Downstream of the gorge, the water was posted by a private fishing club, but the public water in the gorge had the look of a truly wild trout stream. I found out that looks could be deceiving.
The gorge had been named after Ken Lockwood, a conservationist and outdoors columnist for the old Newark Evening News who promoted setting land aside for hunting and fishing. He died in a freak auto accident on his way home from his weekly radio broadcast, and a short time later, the Ken Lockwood Gorge was named in his honor as a wildlife management area. It became best known perhaps as a fishing destination and often comes up in lists of the ten most beautiful spots in New Jersey. (Although to my mind, ten is a bit of a stretch.)
Despite all the visual clues, the Ken Lockwood Gorge held mostly hatchery trout. Fishermen swore they quickly “naturalized,” converting to wild trout behavior the longer they stayed in the river. But I had my doubts. I had come to feel that following hatchery trucks was uncool. And I soon wearied of the gorge, despite its pastoral charms.
So I headed north for the Big Flat Brook River, which drains the Kittatinny Mountains by the Delaware Water Gap. It was by far the finest wild-trout stream in New Jersey and certainly the most eye-catching. It, too, resembled a classic Catskill river, as well as freestone streams in the Poconos on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. You could glimpse a rural yesteryear in picturesque villages hosting arts-and-crafts fairs in the valley of the Big Flat Brook. Everywhere, I could feel the past creeping up behind me and then receding. The forests had been spared submersion after a monolithic dam project proposed at Tocks Island on the Delaware was defeated by conservationists. The Big Flat Brook flowed unmolested on its way to meet the larger Delaware. It had a lot of hatchery rainbows, but also wild brown trout and, in its headwaters, brook trout.
The most appealing stretch was around the Junction Pool, where the Big and the Little Flat Brook joined. When things got slow, I might wander downstream from the village of Wallpack Center to fish the “Rhododendron Stretch,” where the evergreen bushes grew as high as the trees and the water was deep enough to ship into your chest waders, if you didn’t mind your step. By mid-May, there were good hatches of Hendricksons, a popular mayfly all throughout the Northeast. And sure enough, there were plenty of Hendricksons in that old fly box that I was sifting through, the one that had gotten me to thinking about those Northeastern hardwood streams now three thousand miles distant.
What else was in the slush pile? I had forgotten about the Sulfurs. This was the major hatch on Falling Springs Branch in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania. I had a friend in Mont Alto, Pennsylvania, who tied those mayflies for me. “You have a friend in Pennsylvania” ran a catchy tourist ad playing on TV at the time, and indeed it was good to have such a friend nearby. The secret weapon in the arsenal of any New Jersey trout fisherman was a Pennsylvania fishing license.
Donna and Marco Aurelio lived close by some of the finest limestone spring creeks in the eastern United States. I had met them through a mutual friend. Marco worked as a Defense Department troubleshooter and telecommunications whiz. His wife, Donna, was a veterinarian’s assistant and a part-time commercial fly tyer. I had steered her to her second career after giving her my fly-tying vise and materials, once it finally dawned on me that I lacked both the patience and the dexterity to wrap dainty bits of feathers and fur around hooks. (I wasn’t very good at tying my shoelaces, either.) Donna, the most skilled fly fisher I knew at the time, had converted an entire room in the Mont Alto house into a fly-tying workshop and raised chickens for their capes. Their home near the Letort Spring Run and other limestone treasures became, for a time, my trout headquarters. Frankly, I’d had my fill of New Jersey.
I remember opening day on the Yellow Breeches and the mob behind the famous stone house at Allenberry. I suspected that about half the fly anglers who assembled there, like me, came from out of state. After that morning on the Yellow Breeches, we fished the Falling Springs Branch, a fertile limestone creek choked with emerald watercress and dimpling trout. Clouds of white-winged Tricos were hatching in a meadow behind a picturesque stone house that often makes a cameo appearance in photographs of this creek, and Donna took several weighty browns on tiny black-and-white flies she had tied at home. I also made it a point to fish the Letort Spring Run, the most famous limestone creek in the Cumberland Valley, if not the United States, but in truth, I didn’t savor the experience because of the whine of diesels off the highway and the suburban sprawl of Carlisle. There was definitely a fly in the ointment there.
One dark afternoon, we fished Antietam Creek, a woodsy stream gurgling beneath overhanging laurels and rhododendrons. One of the Civil War’s nastier engagements happened downstream in Maryland. It was the bloodiest single day in North American history, although it was hard to reconcile the violence of the Battle of Antietam with the pastoral beauty all around us. A soft rain fell, mixing with wet snowflakes. The creek was loaded wild brook trout, their flanks bejeweled in blue halos. Later, we drove to a tavern a hundred yards north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where we tucked into blue crabs trucked in from Chesapeake Bay. There was a goat tethered to a shed outside, looking forlorn in the rain.
What else was in that fly box? A large hairwing dry fly suddenly caught my attention. This fly signified a seismic shift in my fishing life. With this very fly I had crossed the Great Divide, so to speak. Not only the continental one, but the demarcation between Eastern and Western trout fishing. I had watched this fly, or its cousins, disappear in the swirling wakes of cutthroat trout while floating in a Mackenzie drift boat on the Snake River in front of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. Now that was a big day in my life. Anyone who was even halfway serious about trout fishing wound up in that part of the Rocky Mountains, and now it was my turn.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up fishing the Rocky Mountain West. For psychological reasons, I needed a lot of room for my back casts. Fishing in the East always left me feeling hemmed in. Back East, I would drive through the claustrophobia of suburban sprawl in search of rivers trickling through a few remaining pockets of nature. The pools were always packed dense with other anglers, something I had grown to hate. I felt increasingly stifled back home. But the Rocky Mountain West was another story entirely. This was the Big Wide Open. Life was finally living up to all my expectations.
The Tetons pierced the Wyoming sky, and an ostentatious display of snow encrusted the mountains. Bright-yellow cottonwoods followed the blue artery of the Snake River. Dark pines and fluttering aspens stood out against the white peaks under a crystalline September sky. My fly rod dipped and pumped against the current as yet another brilliantly colored cutthroat seized my hairwing fly.
Those flies coaxed them up from beneath brush piles and logjams, or where the currents eased around submerged boulders, in the seams of water forming between faster and slower currents, and in the deep pools that the river gouged out below islands. That hairwing from my fly box had a name, of course — it was called a Trude, although I would have named it Charisma. Every sporting-goods store in Jackson Hole sold them. They were flying off the shelves. The year previous to my trip, this superfly had won the Jackson Hole One-Fly Contest. It was the fly of the year. You could have run it for president. And so for a week in Jackson Hole, I fished the many-braided Snake below the Grand Tetons, the dry-fly water of Flat Creek in its elk pasture, the Hoback in its canyon, the Gros Ventre below Crystal Creek Campground (still visible was the massive scarring left by a huge landslide that created Slide Lake in the 1920s), and Crystal Creek itself, a stream dense with tangled brush and wild roses, its water ouzels singing madrigals to the rushing stream. All of this was within a short drive of the mountain town of Jackson, a melting pot of the New West, a tolerant and culturally safe place for a tourist from New Jersey. It was known for hipness, creature comforts, and tony affluence — and thus completely unlike the rest of Wyoming.
Michael Checchio’s excursion through his fly box will conclude in the September/ October issue of this magazine with his experiences elsewhere in the West and California.
