I stood there for several minutes just looking at the river. The bridge I was standing on was made of timber which added to the overall aesthetic of the landscape. The river itself had just the right amount of watercress and gravel for optimum aquatic insect hatches. The gradient was ideal for wading; not to fast, but enough stream velocity to retain decent oxygen levels. Someone has done some work here. This is the river I had fished in my youth, only back then it was quite different. It was very refreshing to see a special stretch of river several times more pristine than it was the last time I saw it.

     I left The upper Midwest for Oregon nearly twenty five years earlier and have been back only a handful of times since. This is the first time that I’ve decided to fish my home water on one of these visits and I’m starting to think that it’s the first good decision I have made in a long time. Enough reverie; it’s time to crawl down the bridge abutment and chase after a trout or two.

     Once in the water I maneuvered around a large patch of aquatic grasses to a shallow gravel wash just down river from a small pool about five feet deep. I ran a little pheasant tail nymph through it’s length a few times. On the third pass I was rewarded with a small brookie. The diminutive size of the fish didn’t matter to me. My heart was pounding as fast as it would have been if I had landed a forty pound King salmon. This is proof to me that a fishes size does not necessarily equate to the satisfaction one gets from catching it. Other factors such as surroundings, difficulty of the chase and in this case the sentimental relevance of the river in my childhood memories.

     I could have left just then and been thoroughly content, But I didn’t. There was another two river miles ahead of me and I planned to fish at least one of those miles. There was a large deep, slow run of about eight feet or so.  It was in this hole that I once hooked and netted a large brown of about four pounds. since I was only seventeen at the time this was my first confirmed “monster”.  That was the largest landed fish from that spot, but much larger fish were hooked.