The windows are rolled down, my sunglasses on. I smell barbecue in smokers, hear the gentle slosh of half-melted ice from the cooler in the trunk whenever I brake. A pair of hemos on an elastic lanyard bobs from the rearview mirror. It’s sunny with perfect fast-moving clouds, 87°, bright and muggy, another sweaty summer in Alabama. Turn up the Bob Marley.
A fully-rigged fiberglass 9-weight jitters alongside my head, the rest of it running all the way through the folded-down backseat to the trunk, where the large-arbor reel is balanced in a pair of stinky wading boots. I always reel out extra line and forgo the hook seat, preferring to wrap my leader around the curvature of the reel and hook the fly on an upper eyelet somewhere in the middle of the rod – saves the leader from kinking, and I can be lazy about taking apart my rods. I clearly see the fly itself, which is a hand-tied (not by me) gurgler variant, shaved off a wine cork.
I’m headed to a lake outside of Tuscaloosa where I’ll park at a lot on the upper ridge and hike back below the dam and down the spillway to a semi-secret pool I call “Fish Thunderdome.” I’m carrying an extensive topwater arsenal on my back, having even recently acquired gar flies tied with unbraided nylon rope, just in case I run into another 3-foot monster rolling around on the surface, stealing breaths of air after the last big rain.
The fish are feeling feisty. Hungry, yes, but also simply flexing their bodies; it’s playoff time in their ponds, the time in the season when each comes to understand where they fit in the local subaqueous hierarchy. Some are swallowed, some are scarred, some just are. All this hullabaloo means fly anglers can get a little more outlandish in their selection: will this glittering popper the size of a quail egg really catch a fish? The answer is Yes, probably, if you fish it for a while, and in the right places…
I don’t see any dinosaurs today, but that’s okay, the bite is on. I catch several big panfish and a juvenile bass. I cast and absorb the muted plop of my fly as it hits the water about a foot off the reeds on the opposite shore: I’m aiming sixteen inches from the spot where the mud turns from a bright orange to silty brown before darkening into the depths of the rest of the hole, the mouth of some nameless spring-fed creek far uphill. This is a spot of the place I know to hold cruising fish. It’s not a large body of water, mostly man-made, with large chunks of limestone forming the shore and bed, but also spotted with local boulders of prehistoric provenance, everything ringed by the iconic Alabama black pines…but there’s so much else to pay attention to. Between the water and the fly, the fish and the man, the world lies waiting.
Sweat and humidity fog up my polarized lenses, so I fish bare-eyed. A flamboyant froggy concoction slaps the water, and I wait a couple of seconds before stripping in line and yanking the rod tip down to send its head underwater, releasing a perfect swell of bubbles and the reverberating, namesake sound. The fly rides the water and I wait.
A long-bodied Choctaw appears below the fly and slams it from the side in their characteristically violent, head-jerking assault, like a rottweiler breaking the neck of its prey. Of course I adore the noble trout, but bass are even more exciting to hook into on the fly, especially on the topwater – I think it’s because it feels like you’re not supposed to catch bass with a fly. The bass is a popular, hardy creature, and a fly rod is more delicate, specialized. Why use it for bass, panfish? It only makes it harder?
I raise my rod and the line goes taut, my favorite part, the feeling of life on the other end, a semi-visible competitor moving the line of its own volition. It gets just barely into the reel, and I strip in by hand, rod high and flexing hard, every bounce and effort from the fish transferred through the glass to my grip.
Soon it is in my hand, documented, then released even more quickly. My wait is over, yet I cast again, with tiny traces of blood on my fingers. The pine silhouettes meld to a deeper black against the tangerine horizon.
