Home Waters

March 2025

For a long time the waters I felt most connected to were hours away. These are the places everyone knows in Colorado. The big rivers like South Platte, Arkansas, the Blue. This was my interpretation of being a trout bum, an idealized character I got to play on the weekends. Even though I learned my waters relatively intimately, I had to accept you only get to see so much. Each day a polaroid snapshot in a larger photo album with too many pages left blacked out.

Only later, after relocating across the continental divide for a brief stint in Northern Utah, did I discover what a true home water was all about. I was fishing almost every day, even if in brief slices. I watched the seasons unfold, discovering local secrets. I could track how fish would slowly adjust from one fly patterns to another throughout the year, and the blacked out pages in this river's album slowly developed into clearer snapshots.

Today I find myself on the banks of my new home water in the southern sprawl of Colorado’s Front Range. Not even trout water, a small carp pond tucked away in a business park, completely overlooked. But carp have their qualities, and require a precisely delivered fly. My trips here hinge on its convenience, a practice ground to keep myself nimble. But today it smacked me in the face, I've seen more of this place over the past two seasons than anywhere else. My first reaction was to fight the realization, that’s my inner trout bum, yet my chronicles of this pond recounts too many yearly milestones to ignore. Two days ago I watched carp feeding under a receding ice sheet, which iced off within the next twelve hours. And today I watched maintenance workers pump water from the adjacent fire hydrant into the pond, filling it for the season to compensate for evaporation and three vertical feet of water loss since last fall. I know where the carp congregate in the spring, I've named the several koi that intermingle with the others. I know that if I can find the white koi, others are nearby. I've tangoed with an unknown monster while blind casting and stripping streamers, leading to an explosion of line running out of my reel only to feel slack in the midst of my backing. That’s one thing that keeps me coming back.

On rivers, you may expect to track seasonal changes by way of bugs, the predictable passage of insects, one by one marking Earth's procession. I've long since memorized the order of those hatches. That is the idealization of fly fishing enshrined by the Norman Maclean's of the world. But now I'm watching seasons unfold on an algae mat, a place with no glamorized re-telling, no shadow casting, no-one haunted by these waters.

Nonetheless, this might be my home waters now. Thankfully not my only glimpse in fishing but definitely my most frequent. I fill my net with trash when I leave, and weave between the geese to avoid unnecessary conflicts. Still the net touches scales, and the pond harbors sporting opportunities. Peculiar carp with peculiar habits that, maybe, no one else will ever take time to pattern.

The reality is that our world is filled with more of these places than the Maclean’s Big Blackfoot River. And somehow that simultaneously elevates each one’s importance. The same nuances exist anywhere an angler turns their focus. That might just be the nature of fly fishing… and no matter where fish are willing to chase a fly, anglers will see those waters through a rosy lens. Maybe even Norm would have found the same appreciation here.