An old book sits propped up in the bedside book stand of my family’s cabin. A gently worn dust cover adorning the painting of a jumping brookie encloses it. The book is Robert Traver’s Trout Madness, a collection of trout related essays written by one of fly fishing’s greatest authors.
The book opens with an essay titled, ‘The First Day’; an ode to the significance of an opening day fishing trip after a long offseason holed-up indoors. With this Saturday marking the start of Wisconsin’s early inland trout season (catch & release angling opens on select streams across the state), I find myself revisiting this brilliant piece of writing. Saturday’s predicted high reaches a balmy 11 degrees F (real feel of 3 F); the success of this first outing is questionable. That matters very little. The First Day needs no pomp or circumstance to justify its significance; its a celebration of surviving another offseason and a taste of what’s to come when the full season opens in early May.
The following are small excerpts from Traver’s essay along with photos of a few flies I tied this winter in preparation for The First Day.
The true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing with all the sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas. There is the same ecstatic counting of the days; the same eager and palpitant preparations; the same loving drafting of lists which are succeeded in turn by lists of lists! And then – when time seems frozen in its tracks and one is sure the magic hour will never arrive – lo, ’tis the night before fishing!
It is this boyish quality of innocence, this irrepressible sense of anticipation, that makes all children and fisherman one. For after all, aren’t fisherman merely permanently spellbound juveniles who have traded Santa Claus for Izaak Walton?
Just as no Christmas can every quite disappoint a youngster, however bleak and stormy the day, so no opening day of fishing can ever quite disappoint his grown-up brother. The day is invested with its own special magic, a magic that nothing can dispel. It is the signal for the end of the long winter hibernation, the widening of the prison doors, the symbol of one of nature’s greatest miracles, the annual unlocking of spring.
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