First Hatch

A Postcard From A Magical Event on the Mountain

Travelers! I know I just posted. I do not want to overwhelm you, or become an inbox nuisance and I promise I won’t post again for a solid five days, but last night was a magical, first-time-in-my-life event I needed to get up and write about before I lost the memory. Forgive the excess, it’s practically a religious holiday, this.

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I had just finished chores and was enjoying one of my favorite evening activities; sitting in one of the two hanging hammock chairs under the King Maple and taking in the big show. This is where I lean into the end of the day, get a cold drink, watch my animals, and sway.

This was the first time this year I’d done so with warm wind and hot skin. First true sunburn of the season earned planting today. A few hours earlier I was swinging a hoe in shorts and a tank top, like it was high June. I didn’t even touch my computer that day. Instead I weeded the gardens, transplanted tomato starts, and planted three varieties of pumpkins. I reseeded the basil and peas (sometimes using last year’s seeds doesn’t work). I turned weeds and turf into another garden bed for winter squash. I moved livestock to new pastures, making sure everyone gets green grass in their bellies who wants it. I worked with my Mabel, grooming and moving feet. Bill Burr the ram lamb was asleep on the deck. Friday was laying at my feet. Everyone seemed a little better than they were yesterday. Even the ewes thin from feeding their lambs were bouncing back, and watching them fatten on the hill was better than most poetry.

The sun was temporarily out and gorgeous. I knew in seconds it would slide back into the clouds (as the day was mostly overcast) but in this flash of light the scene before me on the farm lit up like the last scene of a movie when the music starts to swell.

Lanterns tied to the giant tree branches above me gently rocked in the wind. Green leaves rustling four stories above my sweaty forehead sounded like music. Merlin and the Mare were a couple yards away—back at landscaping duty—ripping out their first lawn grass of the season. I had fenced off an area with step-in posts I’d picked up at the hardware store earlier, for exactly this purpose. If I still drank, this would be a time for a hard cider over ice spiked with bourbon, but instead I had a diet cream soda. (This was better, trust me.)

I was feeling the accomplishment of using my body to feed myself. A full day outside. A farm better than it was this morning because I existed. I wish this feeling for anyone that wants it. I couldn't imagine anything getting better…

Then it did.

It was then I noticed something land on my soda can rim? Thinking it was a mosquito at first, I was getting ready to swipe it away but it only took a second to realize what I was looking at. A MAYFLY!

The spring had been so cold and wet, so dreary and gray, that I had forgotten about how we were overdue for a hatch! I looked up and all around me were mayflies dancing, doing the magic that is the end of their lifecycle. After two years of living in my stream as aquatic insects they burst out of their old exoskeletons, unraveled their wings, and take flight for their last big show - mating and then falling back to earth to die.

Imagine if people lived 30 years in a dark cave and then got 2 days to fly and fuck in the sky before we plummeted to earth knowing we did our duty to the species? Beautiful and terrible. That’s Nature, baby.

Illustration of a Mayfly in its last Life Stage

I ran inside to get my little 180cm tenkara rod. I quickly tied on a leader and dry fly, the closest looking one I had to the hatch exploding all around me, and grabbed my old sling pack and net.

Within 5 minutes of leaving my front door I was standing in the stream. The sky was still overcast, but there was that warm wind and even at 6PM I felt like I had hours to explore and celebrate. This was such a blessing. All winter, by 6PM I was done. Already finished with yoga and dinner and ready for bed, but forced to stay awake to tend the fire through hours of anxiety and loneliness. But not now.

loml was playing on my shuffled list on my iPhone 8 in my sports bra. It was a haunting soundtrack to every careful foot step among the moss and ferns, matching the beauty around me. Verses washed over me, piano hypnotizing as I scanned the stream, careful not to spook any trout. I whisper-sang parts I couldn’t contain,

“…you cinephile, in black and white,
all those plot twists and dynamite.
Mr. Steal Your Girl,
then make her cry…”

The water was cold but not uncomfortable. It washed the dirt off my old, fraying chacos. Streams of light burst through the clouds and hit patches around me, making unraveling ferns and water burst forth with the brightness of fresh growth. Like spotlights on opportunity, they hit the pools I cast into.

In the beams I saw thousands of dancing mayflies. All around me, fireworks celebrating the start of summer. Before I knew anything about fly fishing I would see these hatches of bugs and cringe in disgust, worried they would bite or fly into my hair or mouth. But a little education later and I realize all this is, is confetti. It’s sparks of energy and life. The last-dance before their short time is over and instead of seeing a mess of bugs I am reminded that while I walk this stream, I’m doing the exact same thing. Dancing along while I’m still alive to enjoy it, hoping to get laid again before I drop.

It was time for the fish whistle. I pulled the small plastic tube out of my pocket and tapped it into my palm, out slid a joint. I took one drag, watched more light beams surround me. I took another and close my eyes:

This is a Monday Night.

How on earth am I this rich?

I put out the joint and slide the rest back into the tube and start walking the stream. I don’t think I ever fished the first hatch on the mountain before? I was always too distracted, by too many other things. But now fly fishing is as much a part of me as horses or hawks or the farm’s soil itself and here I was, with that expanding feeling of warm amicability in the last gasp of a sunlight evening.

I cast to pools, little 1-2ft deep collections with tiny waterfalls filling the stone-bottom stream with oxygen and the constant flow of dying mayflies. I crouch low, walking the way only years of yoga allow, almost entirely at a squat so my big human shadow doesn’t cast over these sacred wells.

I cast my rod, which with a tenkara means flicking the little pole at just the right angle so only that dry fly on the very end of the line lands, perfectly, on the water’s surface. I jiggle it just so. I watch as a slip of gold, a few inches long but bright as a coin in the sunlight flashes. I feel the strike through the cheap rod, into my ribs. THERE IT IS! A strike from a wild mountain trout during the first spin fall! It doesn’t even matter if I hook one. I could not matter less. The whole point of small stream fishing to me is this exact moment. I have convinced one small part of nature I belong here, I’m a part of this dance. And maybe it’s the sunlight or maybe it’s the weed, but I am ready to almost cry right there.

Winter is so hard here. It’s so long. My peers are out getting onto planes to visit family for the holidays or figuring out which restaurant they want to try this weekend after a movie or drinks with friends; and I was curled up by a wood stove on the floor.

In so many ways people would think my life is sad and destitute and unnecessarily arduous. But they don’t know about this. They don’t know about having the ability to walk a stream in beams of light a few feet from your door, after a day of tired limbs and sated livestock, scratches and scars, sweat and tears. They don’t know about spending a Monday before dusk tricking trout with a fake bugs while an orgy celebrates all around you like horny sparkler embers. They don’t know.

But I do.

That night I walk a mile total. I cast to pockets and pools, culverts and under rocks. I get four strikes, FOUR! And while I did not hook anything—and I didn’t even need the net hanging from a loop on my shoulder—I love walking home up mountain with it dangling near my chest.

I love the flies stuck into the wool of my brown hat. I love the tail feather from James, my red-tail hawk, sticking out of the other side. I found a pileated woodpecker’s feather and added it to the deck feather in my brim. This is fashion, baby. I may only make sense to a few, but so much of who I am is bursting from that old hat. A decade of stories, from being stolen off my head by a frustrated hawk to holding flies near trout streams to the pouring rain that fell on it at the Eras Tour… that hat has been through a lot.

I walk home, watching the last light of the day make the canopy above me vibrate. The leaves are swirling with the mayflies, all of it stunning. I am watching my favorite sky, gray and bleak but with sunlight breaking through to make the world glow. Every tree is backlit. There is warm wind, hot skin, horses eating grass and brook trout rising to flies. I am in clothes tattered and worn, the kind you wear to plant tomatoes and fix fences, and I love how the entire world feels.

I don’t experience the Sunday Scaries. I do experience the feeling of being scared every day I won’t make a sale, or people will stop caring, and the day after I make a mortgage payment I collapse and can’t even look at emails or work because the relief is so big, and so hard-won, it’s hard to do anything but let my heart rate slow down and feel a little safer.

I have thousands to earn before June. I have no idea how, or if, it will happen. But I had tonight. And if everything I gave up, and everything I worry about, keeps me holding onto hope I could have this again? Or share it with someone who could love me? Then I will wake up and try again tomorrow to stay.

This is the only life that makes sense. And I’ll never give up the hope that someday I will know what it is like to experience it without fear. Someday I will walk this stream with the mortgage caught up, with a full larder, with new chacos and clothes without mending marks. But even if I just figure out another month, it is worth it. You just can’t know how much.

It’s how I feel this spring.

Light is starting to break through.

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