had to get out. Two, maybe two and a half hours of fishing, then I would have to face the road and the walk again to get out before 8:30. I also found, right at that corner of the river, one of the few places where the river could be crossed, but not without risk. In for a penny, in for a pound. Once across,on the south bank with a whole river and screening trees between me and the road, I felt as safe as I would ever feel up there.
The river was beautiful; clear and quiet, about the size of the North Umpqua. The only footprints in the sand were deer and raccoons. Marmots whistled in the rock cliffs high above. No-see-ums introduced themselves to my skin and my consciousness.
So began my life of crime, developing two dominant fishing habits that would take years to fade. I fished frantically as someone who only has two hours to fish when the stakes are very high, and
I looked around a lot and jumped at the sound of a car.
How good is the Upper Green? That's hard for me to say now. Good enough that I could, from a knowledge base of zero, catch one fish that first day. But it was 12 inches long! I walked out without
event, and laughed all the way home. I made my 9AM summer job at the bowling alley with twenty minutes to spare.
Two days later I was back at the gate at daylight, and two days after that, and the next day, and so on, right on through the summer, always fishing alone, always half terrorized, always fishing that same 200 yard stretch of river above the crossing point, learning to flyfish from scratch. Slowly and painfully, without books or seminars or even another flyfisherman to advise me, I got to know every lie and holding place in that 200 yards of water, with slowly building success.
How good is the Upper Green? One Sunday morning coming out I happened to fall in behind two men (the only time in three years I was ever to see another fisherman in there) who were also walking out. They were toting spinning rods with two big and bushy flies coming off as droppers above a terminal weight. They had been fishing the deep slow holes above my stretch. One man dragged, literally, a fish too long to clear the road. About six or eight pounds. A rainbow, and certainly a resident fish.
Good enough that, two months into the summer my father quietly let me know that he would break my arm if I brought home another fish that year, since he felt obliged to help me eat them. Thus was
a catch-and-release philosophy independently born.
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