“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s early April and it’s about this time every year when you gird your loins for early season bronze. The weather is still typical of spring in upstate NY – cold days interspersed with near summerlike ones, rain showers, spitting snow and just about everything in between. The hills come alive with the newness of pea-green spring leaves. Dogwood and redbud dot nature’s canvas with white and pink. Occasionally you’ll hear a gobbler looking for love and if you’re lucky enough to be fishing on a river with a tall white pine, you just might witness an eagle on the nest, its spouse roosted nearby.

But you’re always cautiously optimistic. The rivers are dropping and clearing of the blue-green of snow melt. Their feeders, the little fingers that start high in the surrounding hills are no longer gushing. You find yourself checking the USGS gauges, looking ahead at the 10-day forecast, and stopping riverside to get a read on water temperatures, anxiously awaiting spring’s turn.

Those days leading up to early season bronze are always too slow in coming and then too quick to arrive. The spring of winter departing is spent chasing stockies or steelhead and shaking the casting rust free. But all that time you’re waiting for that window to appear. Like the eyebrow windows of old houses, they are there but barely windows at all.

You’ve already geared up. The tackle, vest, waders, wading staff and net are ready and waiting in the truck for windows of opportunity are never convenient; they taunt and tease in their coming and going, and so when one finally arrives, you’ll make up any excuse to be late to work so you can be on the water well before the sun pokes its head out from behind the hills.

You’ll pull up to the river in the truck and 4 wheel it across a cornfield just spread with manure. The river on these spring days is guarded by mostly barren trees, save the conifers, and it calls to you in the stillness of the morning. Your waders and vest are on in no time and you’re soon stringing up an 8 weight with an intermediate sink tip line and a relatively short leader. You pick out a big wooly bugger that fished the fall bite well. It’s long with a marabou tail that doesn’t meet the standard for Fly Tyer magazine, but does it ever dance in the water. You remember Lefty’s words as you tie it on – something like “why feed them appetizers when what they really want is steak.”

You make the short hike through the riverbank woods beyond the cornfield. Now it’s pretty easy but once summer comes this place will be a tangle of briars, Japanese knotweed, and swarms of mosquitos. Breaking into a clearing, you look down on a shallow bay where a small river braid rejoins the river. There’s no direct current here, just a backwater that’s silted a bit over a gravel to rocky bottom. You gaze into it in the half-light of the dawn, and you focus on a few large dark spots, the size of big dinner plates, on the bottom. On one, is a bass, and a sure sign that the pre-spawn bite is on.

This spot has always been good to you. When you fish it right the fishing can be “stupid good” as they say. Every bass you catch is a good one, meaning 16″ plus with some nudging over the 20″ trophy mark. But length doesn’t do these big female bass justice – they are heavy with eggs, their bellies broad, bloated, and deep. And they are on the feed to carry them through the coming rigors of the spawn.

You quietly slip into the stillwater and do your best to avoid the beds. Across the bay is a high bank and narrow peninsula shouldering the heavy current of the main river stem, built up over years of high-water events. Below the tip of the peninsula is a tongue of fine gravel over which the river runs clean and fast. To either side the river deepens. You wade along the spine of this gravel tongue, casting up and across river and letting your big streamer swing. You’ll swim the streamer with intermittent short strips, letting it pause at times, and continue it back to you. And you’ll do this thoroughly like a well-rehearsed dance as you cast and step downriver. It’s a favorite rhythm you fish to.

Under that log was a big spawning bed with a rather large male on it, perfectly positioned for good overhead cover and well camouflaged.

The mornings are always colder than you’ve planned for. It seemed warmer when you stepped out to start the truck in the dark at home high up in the hills. Now in the river valley, butt-deep in the spring cool of the river, your hands wet from casting and stripping, you’re shivering. The sun is still hiding behind the hills to the east but the promise of it warms you.

Wading downriver and casting, you’re just above a depression in the river bottom and in year’s past, that’s where you’ve always picked up a few big females. You’ve reasoned it’s a good place for them to hold as they stage to move up on the nests the smaller males have dug. Swinging the big bugger through that area rewards you with a solid take, heavy spongey weight, head shakes, and strong surges as the bass fights. You fight the fish with your rod tip low to the water to keep this bass from jumping but it still makes some big boils in the river. You slowly work it towards shore and this one has plenty of fight as smallmouth bass always do.

You finally land her, stepping back to admire her laid out in the shallows, bankside. The barring on this girl is heavy – a pattern that reminds you of a jaguar. The brown and golden hues are near-perfect camouflage with which evolution has adorned her, and she’ll need it as she does her thing in the shallows soon enough. Her gut is distended with eggs, the progeny of generations to come.

The hook slips out easily and you lip her and carefully draw her out through the bank water to where there’s current. Kneeling down, you hold her there, letting the river flush her bright red gills with oxygen. She’s kicking in seconds, ready to go, shaking her head back and forth against the hold of your thumb. Then you release her and watch her melt into the river.

Years ago you might have stayed and fished this stretch for hours, picking up more bass and feeling the accomplished fly fisherman for doing it. But in later years, you’ll limit yourself to just a few. With each coming year it’s less about the fishing and more about the immersion in nature.

And so, you leave the river early, hiking back through the woods to the truck, thanking nature that you took part in such a spectacle for yet another year in your life. It’s not every year mother nature grants you this gift – the vicissitudes of early spring weather and river conditions being what they are, but each year that she does is truly a sacred gift. You pinch yourself to have the privilege to be a part of it and to be able to remove from the day having left as little a footprint as possible, the only evidence of your fishing being the grin on your face and a thumb marked with lip rash.