Palouse Outdoors: Fishing the Trestle

"So, you wrote a book on bird hunting? You should write one on fishing", Scott said.

"That's a strong possibility, considering I have twenty years' more fishing stories over bird hunting in the bank," I replied. "Lately, I've been thinking of the days when we fished below the train trestle where the creek spilled into North River."

Scott is one of my long-time fishing buddies from Virginia. Hunting just never resonated with him the way fishing did, and I could hear him light up at the mention of our childhood days spent on our best local bass waters.

North River is a tributary to the South Fork Shenandoah River that begins its journey as a brook trout stream in Virginia's George Washington National Forest. From there, it generally flows southeast approximately fifty-five miles, winding through the beef and poultry farms of the Shenandoah Valley to its confluence with Middle River between Weyers Cave and Port Republic. Shortly after the river exits National Forest, fish species transition from trout to a variety of basses, catfishes, and sunfishes.

While trains crisscross the river at several locations along its course, the particular trestle that Scott and I reminisced of was a unique spot situated near his home. In those days, anticipation would keep us up most of the night, and with the rising sun, we would march to the river, which was only a mile or so from Scott's house.

At the end of the street where we jumped onto the tracks was a small pond off to the left. Canada geese honked noisily and guarded their tiny yellow chicks as we passed during late spring. That pond has some stories of its own, like the night Scott caught the likely world's record yellow bullhead catfish in the hissing glow of a Coleman lantern with the aroma of chicken liver on the air.

The tracks were carved through limestone bedrock, leaving a steep and high embankment along its course. A quintessential Valley woodlot shaded the tracks beneath a canopy of native maple, black locust, and oak. Where the tracks spanned the river corridor, the sun shone on the trestle like a spotlight at the end of a tunnel.

At the river's edge, the terrain fell away from the tracks, plummeting approximately sixty feet into the floodplain carved by the river over millennia. The descent (and later ascent) was characterized by limestone outcrops, slick red clay, and gravel from the above train corridor. Conditions worthy of breaking rods and tackle boxes, as well as bones if we were to take a tumble.

The river split around small islands just upstream of the trestle. Scott would fish the bigger pool and boulders beneath the tracks while I hit the braids and smaller pools upstream. A white, two-inch Mister Twister grub, banana-scented, was one of the few items I carried. To this day, I cannot fathom why or how pieces of banana-smelling rubber were so effective or how we even wound up trying them out, but those grubs literally caught everything that swam big enough to eat them. Rigging them up on a hook with no weight, I would toss them into the current and let them spin or cast across current and drift them down over boulders and bedrock seams, much like swinging a fly for steelhead, which I knew nothing of in those days.

On occasion, I would switch from the grub to a tiny crankbait like a crawdad or "crick-hopper". I recall a time fishing upstream at the creek mouth a couple hundred yards above the trestle, working a crick-hopper along the water surface with the bait's tempting wobble. The creek mouth formed a beautiful delta, perched a few feet above North River on bedrock slabs. A deep pool was carved off the end of the delta and a massive sycamore tree and root wad lay on the upstream end. Casting the crick-hopper near that root wad provided hours of entertainment. Once it was engulfed by what I assumed was a sizeable smallmouth bass, but as the fish approached shore, it turned out to be the biggest rock bass or "goggle eye" I would ever see.

Rock bass are an olive-colored panfish with black speckles and similar in shape and size to bluegill, but have a bigger mouth and deep red eyes. This fish, however, was easily fourteen inches long, eight inches deep, and four inches thick. The crick-hopper was wedged sideways in its mouth. Trying to grip the fish's jaw was futile and with a hefty flop, the line snapped. I dove on the fish, frantic because Scott had yet to see the spectacle, but the beast escaped without witness, locking the fable in my singular memory. Despite sampling thousands of those fish throughout western Virginia as a fisheries technician with the state, I would never see another even remotely comparable in size.

Sometimes we would wade beyond the creek to a large pool carved off to the right at a bend in the river. A different aquatic plant grew there on clean sandy substrate. Similar in appearance to bunchgrass, plants grew in clumps with open riverbed between them. We would cast for largemouth bass there and occasionally land one.

I am far in time and distance from those days below the trestle, and bluebird days of winter stir the memories. I envision wading the rivers of my youth with friends, skirting the cattle (and cowpies) that speckled the riverbanks, and experiencing the innocent wonderment of complete immersion in Mother Nature. No sense of time. Mesmerized by the roar of the river, the aroma of creosote and livestock, and the tug of something finny on the opposite end of the line.