Water is manifest

 

I first started learning to read the water on the St. Croix River, upstream of Stillwater, and upstream of Taylor’s Falls and St. Croix Falls. That was like reading a book in very large print and with pictures. So, you could see the slow waters of the sand flats where muskies hunted, and the slow, dark pools where the walleye hid. But most importantly the structure like logs in the water and great boulders under the surface that made long boils, and eddies and overhanging trees. This is what we read to catch smallmouth bass.

I learned to read the water too standing on the single-lane bridges in the farm country of the upper Kinny-kinick. The Kinny was famous, and it was a stream, meandering with inside bends and outside bends, shallow water and deep water and back again. In the deeper, clear runs grew masses of seaweed like ribbon grass and watercress and one that reminded me of coontail, and inside the cover of the weeds were plentiful brown trout supposedly.

And I learned some little knowledge about reading the water from a little spring-fed creek, so small that my old man could jump over it, and which snaked through a meadow of grasses so tall that they grew over my head. In grassy meadows a creek’s current carved out underneath the sod, and they called that undercut banks, and it could be like a floating bog at times, so that I – being very small – could walk on top. But that helped me not at all in the fishing because I would spook the trout which were under me.

When you learn to read the currents and find the niches in a river where fish are living or just hanging out, you can catch a lot more fish. Or at least have a chance of catching more fish. It also helps to have a dog who likes to gallop and frolic in the water. Well, it helps the fish anyway. Photo courtesy of James Egan

There is much data to be read in just one quarter mile stretch of the Flute Reed River, but to make real information of the raw data, one needs all the learning and experience from before.

Starting at one bridge and going upstream, there is the spill pool made of a dam of massive boulders. Now, in the spring, the water comes high and hard and over the boulders pounds into a pool – three to four feet deep – that has been made by the force of the plunging current digging it out. Then there is a dogleg where the stream runs into a granite wall and turns. Debris and driftwood gather and stack up there. Upstream of that is a sandy flat, then a smaller spill pool, then a run – straight, slightly fast, moderately deep.

Tonight, with a steelhead spinner which I constructed myself I hooked up a tiny fish – about eight inches – maybe a jack or a creek chub. It shook loose before I could identify it.

Then comes the spawning ground, where there is gravel and pebbles and stones under riffles – shallow, quick water.

Yes, the beaver dam has failed. At its middle. From the snowmelt and first spring rain. The breach has created a chute, which the steelhead will run up for further spawning grounds.

Beyond, then, what’s left is the beaver pond down a foot and a half with muddy banks now and droppeddowned logs crisscrossing the open basin.

Then it runs through another broken dam from five years ago, with a dogleg left and a dogleg right. To the intact upper, older beaver dam, and above that the beaver pool of silt and muck under the second bridge where it is always dark, it smells of tar, and it is sometimes noisy.

I sit on some riprap under the bridge and smell the tar, and in the darkness feel like a troll when a car rumbles overhead. I’ve read about trolls and bridges. Now I am a reader of water. The trolls are fantastical. I am just apart. The water is manifest.