54 Pennsylvania Angler & Boater • March/April 2017 PFBC Facebook: PaFishandBoat

It’s Friday night, trout camp, the eve of opening day. Clustered around glowing campfire embers, our anglers spin fish stories, tall tales of their greatest catches or the ones that got away. Now, it is my turn. My mind whirls through a mental rolodex of possibilities. The blue marlin on the Carolina coast. The Costa Rica sailfish. The hefty halibut in Alaska’s Icy Strait. The monster Tiger Shark off Ocean City. All are worthy campfire candidates, but I settle, at last, on my bittersweet Brown Trout.

My memory drifts, like a caddis on the current, some 20 years into the past. I find myself standing in my front yard along the banks of the Broad Run, Chester County, my right hand grips a spinning rod. A newly acquired fishing license hangs from my vest, purchased yesterday for this explicit purpose. My wife Patti and I have resided here in the heart of Chester County for 18 years. At ten o’clock tomorrow morning, we will keep our appointment at the real estate office, dutifully sign over the deed and allow this place we’ve called home for so long to pass from our hands

by Tom Tatum

Brown Trout thrive in Broad Run, Chester County.

Bittersweet ph

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55 PFBC website: www.fishandboat.com Pennsylvania Angler & Boater • March/April 2017

from my grandparents’ golden weeping willow back when they were both still living. The willows are aging badly. Their brittle dead branches litter the stream bank. They’ve grown tall over the years as have the evergreens that now shield the house from the road, like a pine-shrouded bunker.

It took over a year to collect all the permits required to build this house (traversing a floodplain and stream can be horrific bureaucratic nightmares), but on the morning of August 18, 1979, a smiling Bill Hollingshed, who constructed this house for us with cheerful integrity, handed us the keys to the front door. Bill had fulfilled his promise and completed the cedar-sided saltbox just in time. Patti and I were married a few hours later that same day.

Suddenly, the monofilament line goes taut. I set the hook and know by the weak-kneed response at the other end that this is not a trout. I crank in a pugnacious chub, remove the hook from its rubbery lip and return it to the stream. I will maneuver downstream to the east.

Both Raina and Jessie are buried here, some 20 yards from the bank where I now stand. Raina was my first hunting dog. I bought her on my very first date with Patti. Jessie was one of Raina’s offspring. They were purebred English Springer Spaniels, liver and white, and deadly on the pheasants that once roamed the hillside behind the house. That first fall when we moved in, Jessie flushed a cackling, long-tailed cockbird from the cover that lined the stream. The bird fell at the shot, and Jessie made a fine and proud retrieve, her coat glistening in the late afternoon sun.

forever. But this morning, I must take some time from the packing, cleaning and throwing away to do one last thing. Before we say goodbye, I will catch one last trout.

We purchased this property in 1977, a rugged, rectangular, 4-acre plot of hillside and floodplain. Through its center churned the Broad Run, a moody little stream that lent the property dignity and character, bisecting the lot with a few hundred feet of meandering uncertainty.

Wild Brown Trout thrive in this stream, though purists may call them stream bred. I discovered that the stream was stocked with Brown Trout. The descendants of those fish had adapted and prospered. I don’t recall exactly when I caught my first Brown Trout in the Broad Run. I’m sure sometime before we built the house. I still remember its delicate beauty, more dazzling than any trout I had caught anytime, anywhere before. Full-finned and a brilliant golden yellow, splashed with blood red and jet black specks, the fish was absolutely gemlike, a swimming jewel. I regarded that first Brown Trout with an awestruck reverence, a kind of disbelieving wonder. I remember that day succinctly, the scent of wild mint in the air and the voices of spring peepers in my ears. Just think of it, a trout stream in my own front yard. It was a boyhood dream come true.

Now I stand at the upstream side of the yard and cast with the current, letting the lure drift along the exposed tangle of willow roots. The stand of budding willows towers above the stream. All were grown from shoots cut

A trout stream in my front yard was a boyhood dream come true.

56 Pennsylvania Angler & Boater • March/April 2017 PFBC Facebook: PaFishandBoat

The wild pheasant population disappeared within a few years. That was the only bird I would ever shoot on our property.

I work my way down to a place where the stream curves beyond the tallest willow. This is a deep hole just before the creek shallows over rocks into riffles. It occurs to me that today is Good Friday, and there is something appropriately solemn, spiritually mystical, about this angling rite of passage. Something hallowed about this ground.

Over the years, I have caught hundreds of trout in this stream, releasing all but perhaps two or three. On occasion, interloping anglers would appear along the Broad Run’s banks, stringers of trout hanging like medallions from their belts. How could they not know? These precious trout were deserving of more respect.

I drift the lure quietly into the slow and swirling water. This pool wasn’t always here. Over 18 years, the ebb and flow, rise and fall, flood and drought of so many seasons have propelled the stream and streambed through a myriad of changes, taking as many unexpected twists and turns as a person’s life story.

The stream banks have eroded in places. Peninsulas of sediment have appeared in others. Assorted branches and debris have in turn collected and flooded away. Currents are funny, unpredictable things. I’m unable to count how many picnics, parties and volleyball games we hosted along these banks. Yes, currents are relentless, irresistible and unforgiving.

The deep hole beyond the willow holds no trout today. I move to the downstream border of the property. The peepers are in fine and deafening voice this morning. Their eerie chorus will be sorely missed. Here, just before the culvert where the driveway crosses the stream, the waters widen into the pond I fashioned by hand with a shovel and stone dam that first summer we moved in. Our oldest daughter, Alex, was born in 1986. This is where she caught her first Brown Trout. Her face was a sunbeam that day. Always a healthy child, she often seemed touched by magic.

Our youngest daughter, Erin, arrived on the scene in 1991. By any measure, she was not so lucky. A mere pound and a half at birth, she was stricken by cerebral palsy. It is, in part, for her that we must move on tomorrow. A stair-laden contemporary on a steep and sloping hillside is not an ideal home for an ornery 5-year-old miracle in a wheelchair. It is unlikely that she will ever catch trout in her front yard.

Today, I have no luck in the pond, but there are always trout in the pool downstream of the driveway, the water cutting a deep and fertile swath where it emerges from the culvert. Years ago, my grandfather helped me pour the concrete that abuts this culvert. My grandmother and he, known

universally among the family simply as Mitsy and Paba, lived here with us for a few years before their passing.

This time, I move below the pool and cast upstream to the mouth of the culvert. For 18 years, this valley with all its natural wonders has been our home—nesting pairs of screech owls in the wood duck box, honking Canada geese, stately blue herons, broods of mallard ducklings, regal red-tailed hawks, sunning water snakes, ill-tempered snapping turtles and raucous nesting redwings. We will treasure every memory.

Of course, I realize, ultimately, that it is a perverse and foolish notion to believe I truly own this land and water—as if any human can physically possess a part of earth despite what any legal documents may say. No matter, tomorrow at this time, this expanse of stream and bank will no longer be ours.

I detect a slight tug at the line but solid, strong and firm. It feels like a Brown Trout. I set the hook and the fish surges upstream, bolting toward the culvert. It jumps, flashing a brilliant yellow in the slanting sunlight. It is as large as any trout I have caught in my stream—perhaps 16-inches long.

I play the fish unhurriedly, easing it near the bank and into the net. I promptly remove the hook and lift the Brown Trout from the net. It is a solid, feisty fish, flaunting the same bright markings and striking colors of that first Brown Trout I caught here many years ago. I delicately settle the fish back into the water, admiring it for another long and bittersweet moment. Tomorrow, though, we will be gone. The rhythms of nature and precious jewels of trout will continue to pulse, relentless as time, through Broad Run.

I absently glance up to the house where Patti is collecting the last of our things. And then, with the scent of wild mint heavy in the air, the chorus of peepers immense in my ears, my last Brown Trout cradled in my hands, I slip it gently back into the caressing currents.

And resolutely, let go.

Brown Trout