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Springtime rivers, and other faithless lovers . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Winter has been real this year. Long. Cold. Wet. For a thousand reasons, that's a good thing. Maybe a few of the bugs who've been killing our trees will finally get hypothermic and shiver themselves to death; it looks like we'll have some water in our streams come summer - and I am almost able to believe (as anglers do in other parts of the country) that the coming of spring will bring a marked change in the state of things, that dwindling wood piles will hold until the nights no longer dip below zero, that frozen watercourses will come alive and gentle rains will soften the dark earth as shoots of green break through, harbingers of the blossoming to come.

Screw that crap. It doesn't apply - well, sometimes, parts of it, but there's the other stuff, the Rocky Mountain stuff.

Years ago when I had both inclination and opportunity to wander, I had a companion in my wandering who was fond of revealing her own inclinations every spring by walking around the place singing the chorus to When It's Springtime In the Rockies. The chorus begins with the song's title, and continues, . . . I am coming back to you. My long-ago companion was fond of ending her gentle humming with a wry comment: "Clearly, whoever wrote that song was a faithless lover. There's no such thing as springtime in the Rockies."

Rather than write one of those sanguine springtime pieces about the returning birds, the sweet smell of rich earth, the newly awakened trout eager to restore body fat after a long fast, how about something a little more realistic.

It will be relatively warm for a few days down low - just long enough to gently raise the water temperature in the valleys. You'll be driving home from work and notice a few rings in a favorite pool, somewhere south of town. Tomorrow, you think, I'm gonna go fishing - after all, it's spring!

When you wake up next morning, you take a peek at your outdoor thermometer, the one hanging on the shed. Half of it's missing, smashed by a massive icicle that crashed down from the shed roof sometime in February, and although the indicator is still there pointing to a knot in a plank on the shed wall, the Basin Co-Op logo is long gone along with the numbers that used to tell you what the indicator is indicating. But it feels balmy. And, damn, the air smells good!

You climb into your waders, throw on your vest, grab your six-weight (who knows what sort of fly you'll have to throw?) and head down to that pool south of town. The water is higher than it was yesterday when you saw the rings. A little off color, but not bad. You drive alongside the river on a gravel road, and the water appears to be clearing!

You park, jump out of your rig full of joy, stumble down the bank and step into the water.

Immediately, ice-cold river water begins to fill your boot. That slow seep you never bothered to fix must have grown, as things tend to do in the spring. The river seems awfully high. And cold. Hell, you think, if I don't go in any deeper than my knees, the leak won't bother me.

As high and cold as the water is, you decide to eschew a dry fly. You eschew the dry fly because it is spring, and you are hopeful, and words like eschew seem to come to mind in the spring. In winter, a term like do without would be far more likely to pop into your head, but in springtime it almost seems as if you've got a choice. Eschewing the dry fly, you tie on a big, black flash-a-bugger. After three increasingly long false casts, you drive the fly forward, and hear a loud THWAAAP, immediately followed by a throbbing ache coming from the back of your head, just below the adjustable band of your prized Master Bait and Tackle Shop cap. Given it's spring, and your casting skills are a bit rusty, perhaps you should have eschewed that heavy bugger as well and gone for a smaller nymph.

By now you notice that the water has continued to rise, above your knees, well above your knees. You are standing in an eddy that has grown waist deep, and your cajones (in the words of my friends from New Jersey) sleep with the fishes. The water is so cold you fear you may never see them again.

Your mind is suddenly nimble, aided no doubt by the invigorating effects of frigid water on once-happy cajones, and you realize that the reason the water was clearing on the way to the pool is that you were driving downstream a lot faster than the current. By now, the snow melted by last night's warm temperatures up high has reached the valley, your pool and the aforementioned cajones. The river is in flood, murky and trending toward chocolate soup.

Rafters hoot and holler as they blow past you, waving. You wave back - with one finger. It's not the rafters you hate, but your faithless lover. The river.

But we'll all do it this spring. Over and over. Even a faithless lover is better than no lover at all.

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans, and San Juan River Chronicle.