One bridge over the River Kwai has been of concern to us for more than 60 years. It was a Japanese- and British-made bridge on the Thai-Burmese frontier that spanned a river valley of very old topography and very young strata – that is, the remnants of things gone and the accumulation of things new – over a river that flooded during the monsoon season and very nearly dried up to boulders, sand, and muddy clay in the dry season. In the months that concerned us it had a rate of flow similar to our Brule River in the late summer and early fall.
No bridges concern me at the terminal end of the Minnesota Brule. Neither the American-made bridge over the famous Highway 61, built for commerce and traffic, nor the walking bridge 250 yards upstream, for tourists and day-hikers.
In Hovland, Minnesota, the Minnesota Brule passes through deep valleys and close canyons of very old strata and very young topography – topography created over the past 25,000 years of advancing and receding glaciers and shifting water courses. In the temperate rainforest of northeastern Minnesota it rises in the spring from snow and ice melt and spring rains and again in the late fall with autumn rains and the gales of November. It is low in August and September and October when all the groundwater upstream has been sucked out, and in the winter it flows very shallow and hidden below thick ice and deep snow.
To get to the most remote parts of this part of the Brule, I do not use bridges, but I ford it when I can with chest waders or in cut-off jeans and wading boots, sometimes the water being warmer than the air. When I cannot ford it proper, I sit down in the water and take in the cold water and move down with the force of the river and make my way down and across.
On my first big bend are two cascades, each with a short run below. I tie on a cricket imitation and sink him with a split-shot sinker 12” up to imitate a drowned cricket and drift him in front of the trout’s nose.
I ford again on a chute of shear rust-red rhyolite rock, then again, moving downstream, bank-to-bank, under great slopes of high ridges of white spruce and pine and rock canyon walls of white cedar and red and green dogwood.
Finally to a great wide and deep pool under a five-foot waterfall. Old cedars grasp the canyon walls and overhang us. There is space for casting and time for trying many flies. But here, where the habitat seems most habitable, beautiful and secluded and long, I am frustrated in my fishing.
There was pain and death on the formidable River Kwai, with dysentery, malaria, mosquitoes and labor upon labor with rationing of rations, and always the enemies.
Good things come to those who wait, it is said.
I say that good things come to those who struggle for them.
Sometimes, too often, great things do not come for those who struggle.
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