The Long Winters Night

I don't remember ever making the decision to fish thru the winter. Every year I still feel that panic every fall to get in that last frantic few trips before winter sets in. But now afterward I still fish. I'll look up startled by the absolute quiet of the streamside woods and realize nothing at all is moving,seeming nothing alive is out there, that I've crossed some line into real and absolute winter. But every cast upstream, every drift of the jig downstream just pulls spring that much closer. I am a fisherman and I fish. It's what I do. I think sometimes that maybe on some subconscious level part of me even sees this winter fishing as the price I pay for the easy fishing that will come later. Some misplaced Midwestern ethic that feels nothing is ever really for free.
You can cheat winter though. I'll have had enough and three or four times during the winter make the two hour drive to the nuclear plant on the Ohio for hybrids. Or take a morning and make some sort of dumpster love to the carp and buffalo that stack up in the discharge of the local wastewater treatment plant. Or, if the years cold enough like this one, chop holes in the ice and haul up startled bluegills on waxworms. But these are just stunts, parlor tricks to pass the time till the real fishing starts.
I don't even mind not catching fish in winter. I do mind the short dark days. For someone used to spending every available second outdoors so much cold darkness can suck the spirit right out of the soul. So I fish. The river is still alive. Just today a friend showed me a sturdy little stonefly crawling on riverside stones. I might even catch the occasional small fish. I am not reassured.
But I know it can happen. The magic of fishing that is. It has in winters past and it can again. There was the day we found bass stacked on a bluff and caught them all day while the other half of the lake was covered in ice. The day the only strike was a soft tap that turned out to be a twenty six inch sauger. Or the big smallmouth that hit a January hair jig swirling in a river eddy like a bat out of hell. And all the while the river keeps up it's inexplicable journey towards the sea as generous or as unforgiving as time. And so we fish. Until, like now we have finally made it thru another winter and fishing, real fishing is at hand.