Remembering a true fisherman

The news came in the form of a Christmas card from his wife. My old fishing partner Don Graham had died in September, 2008.

The news didn’t surprise me, he had been in poor health and we talked about it when I called him the Christmas before.

Don was a master fly tyer. Taught me how to tie parachute flies that looked like the real thing on the water. His were always perfect. Mine were always serviceable. Don was a meticulous fly tyer. I was an apprentice who never lived up to the standard.

The flies had to be meticulous. Don cherished, more than anything, those Pennsylvania spring creeks with gin-clear water and thousands of different bugs and thousands of different and picky brown trout, all of them with their own tastes.

He said his fishing career was an evolution. He started out trying to catch as many as he could in a day. And then he went for only big fish. And in the end, his pursuit was the tough fish, on dry flies only. No nymphs. No strike indicators. He called using a strike indicator “bobber fishing.”

But he wasn’t elitist. He worked for the railroad and was a practical man. He just liked catching fish on his terms. Of course nymphs work. But what fun are they?

In the right mood, you’d get him talking about those spring creeks and he’d go on from the time you stepped in the truck to the time you stepped in the river, a half hour later.

It was perfect conversation. No arguing. No politics. Just talk about fish and the beautiful places fish live. I always drove. Don drank a beer. He almost always had one, tucked in his waders.

We once went down and fished one of those gin-clear beautiful spring creeks in Pennsylvania. The water is well-known, written about thousands of times. It rained the whole weekend and the memory is soggy and hazy and the fishing wasn’t very good because it rained so hard. Still, it was beautiful and I caught a few fish. I never went back.

The local river wasn’t far from home. It had good, but not great fishing.

It could have been a fantastic river. Had potential. But New York State is more interested in dumping fish into rivers than actually doing anything about the habitat.

Still, you could catch wild brook trout in the right places and it was a pretty little valley and a pretty little river with lots of bugs and we went there often.

Don would fish one direction. I would fish the other. We’d end up back at the truck. He always out-fished me. We rarely got skunked, on the other hand, we rarely caught anything big, either. The largest trout I caught was a brown at dark on a big weighted streamer sulking under a bridge.

The trout ran and ran and I finally landed it. It wasn’t huge in the hand, sort of long and skinny and angry that it had made a stupid mistake by eating my fly.

I’m not sure I ever told Don about that fish. He wouldn’t have approved, dredging the bottom like that with a fly.

He’d have looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you just use a worm?”

And then he would have laughed.

Chris Peterson is the photographer for the Hungry Horse News.