Parking the truck and eating a ham sandwich if I remember right and just looking around I wander down to the creek.. The kind of thing you sometimes do when just killing time waiting to go out and climb a tree that evening. I had on my rubber knee boots that I often wear in early bow season before it gets too cold. I stepped down to get a closer look at the little pool before me. You could see every grain of sand, every stone on the bottom thru the gin clear water.
A striking yellow and red maple leaf floated down into the pool. At first gliding along smoothly and gracefully. Then it began to tumble and then slowly revolve horizontally, slowly turning a circle about the size of a Frisbee just off the bottom of the pool. Then it slid along and a couple feet further along began a slow spiral with each circle slightly tighter than the one before it. Finally just rocking in place as it gently came to rest on the pool's bottom.
I waded out into the six inch deep riffle and launched another leaf into the pool. Less soggy this one sped right over the spots where the other leaf faltered without missing a beat. Hmm...The more buoyant leaf rode higher in the water column in a different layer of current. One unaffected by the drag of contact with the bottom. Intrigued I launched another leaf that floated on top. This one jetted down the main flow but just before it left the pool the leaf got caught off to one side and slowed dramatically before slowly turning and creeping back up the bank three or four feet before turning and slowly curly curling back out to midstream. And so it went. In the gin clear water with hardly any discernable differences in flow every leaf followed a different path.
I hoped no one was watching as this fifty year old man launched leaf after into the tiny stream. Some sailed gently thru the pool while others spun like figure skaters while others tumbled along the bottom. Slowly their floats began to make sense as I reasoned out the invisible flow thru the pool. I thought about my two favorite streams, Forney creek in the GSMNP and the Little Miami. How wildly violent the path a leaf would take as Forney creek falls in one head high waterfall and cascade after another. Or a leaf slowly making a thirty yard circle around a smallmouth wintering hole on the Little Miami.
And how the current must seem to a trout in the creek or a smallmouth in the river. As much as I try I have such a hard time comprehending how thru it's lateral line a fish can feel the current. Sure I can feel the force of the water against me as I wade and can intellectually grasp the idea of a lateral line. But just I can grasp intellectually the idea of a bat navigating thru its world by hearing the sound of the clicks it makes bounce off things I can't even begin to imagine what either must be like. To the smallmouth or to the bat. The bat seemingly hears where there is a space to fly thru, forming a 3-D image in it' mind of where to fly. Which is how it must be to the bass, science tells me the bass feels the currents that flow the stream. The entire pool filled with mental "leaves" all floating simultaneously by at once.
Laminar flows sliding one atop the other at different velocities, gentle eddies, swirling tornadic vortices, soft pillowy resting lies, defined seams. Even the tiny pool I was standing beside much provide a rich tapestry of information to a fish. While a pool in the river must be like a surreal, speeded up version of a McDonald's playland, full of tiny rooms and slides and passageways all stacked one on top of the other. Okay, see that sounds crazy, there's just no way to put into words a fishes world. In many ways an astronaut walking on the surface of the moon is much easier to understand than the world of the fish in the streams in our own backyards.
I do know that when I keep this concept in mind, that there's more there than meets the eye, I fish better. Or at least feel that I do. I find myself way too often looking at a section of stream in the 2-D manner of those drawings in fishing magazines. Here's a run, here's an eddy, here's the seam. All neatly labelled and drawn out in my head like an illustration. I forget that there's layers to this cake. That a river is a 3-D thing with an up and down that are as changing as the side to side is. Sometimes it's obvious, a hidden boulder creating a slick on the surface telling you it's there. But often it's like the invisible currents in my gin clear baptismal pool, unknown except to floating leaves, lateral lines and the power of your imagination.
Fantastic post, Steve.
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