An Angler Goes Ever Farther Upstream with Tenkara [PAID]
Notes on building an identity through tenkara fly fishing
Note: This essay originally published in High Country News on 3 Dec 23. For some additional backstory, please see today’s free companion post. Also, as promised, the audio version of this essay is above.
The clear water of Quartz Creek runs over my wading boots, the Alaska sun bright in a sky of crystal blue. Mountains, impossibly green and rich from the long summer hours of daylight, chew the horizon. Spawning sockeye salmon swim mere feet away, their chrome sides blushing scarlet as they near the graveled nests in which their mothers laid them some five years ago. My steps frighten them, but only for a moment. They dart away, then return to hold and wait until it’s time to move again. Ever farther upstream. Ever higher in the watershed. But I am not here for them.
The creek turns left, current pushing hard and deep against an undercut bank. A pine is losing its long fight to stay on solid ground, its trunk twisting into the dark blue beneath it, its roots silhouetted in the water feet below. There, I think, fingertips tight on the wet cork of my rod — a massive rainbow trout holding in the deep slow eddies behind. I can feel it there: patiently waiting for the current to deliver a meal of insect life, a bit of flesh from a dead salmon, perhaps a bright red protein-rich egg bouncing along the creek bed.
And I am going to catch it.
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