Fly Fishing in Burgundy

After a long, excessive gorging, we retreated upstairs to our respective quarters. Upon entering my musty room, I contemplated a late-night stroll to exorcise some of calories I’d just ingested. I exited my room, walked to the end of the corridor and stepped out onto the second story landing. The night was inky black, humid and cool. The only noises, aside from the clanging of pots and pans being washed up downstairs in the restaurant, were a couple of dogs barking in the distance, and the “peepers and croakers” that I associate with Adirondack summers. The calm was inviting, but the wine and heavy meal were already slowing my metabolism, encouraging me to get some sleep. So I did.

Another deep slumber followed by another hearty country breakfast, this time sitting on an enormous flat stone table/bench in front of the inn. The night’s chill was yielding to the sun’s warmth, and the cocoa and fresh-baked croissants induced the sort of contentment that animals must feel in springtime after a long hibernation. A lethargy, an urge to linger and absorb warmth. To energize by degrees.

I had been up for an hour or two, wandering around the town, snapping pictures before anyone was awake. The morning was ripe with color, bright, bold pigments emerging from a misty morning. A wayward rose bursting throw a trimmed evergreen hedge in front of a church. An abandoned tractor planted in front of a storage container. A sky blue barn door. Crisp, primary colors, dancing in a rural composition.

We packed up and headed back onto the river as Sunday church-goers began to traffic the bumpy roads leading into town. Michel brought us to a different stretch of water than we had fished the preceding day, and he lead us off in two different directions, my colleague upstream, and I downstream. He accompanied her, and I set out alone, making my way along the bank toward a bend that he had described for me in great detail. After a while I recognized the lazy current he had predicted and made my way along the inner bank of a bulging meander where I identified the ruins of a stone bridge overgrow with moss. Just downstream lay a picturesque stretch of water, speckled with almost submerged boulders.

I waded into the gentle current, fly rod in hand, already mesmerized by the burbling stream whispering seductive tales of the past. I’ve tried to convey the zen-like appeal of fly fishing to the uninitiated and failed. To skeptics and detractors it is simply another type of hunting, predator stalking unsuspecting prey. A barbaric pastime for rather esoteric fly-tying, insect-hatch-monitoring loners. I’ll resist the temptation to refute these misconceptions if for no other reason than to discourage the masses from choking up the pristine rivers and streams of our planet. But suffice to say, it was the serene, meditative state that sometimes comes over me when lost in the solitude, senses awake to the breathing of the world around me, courting the elusive fish lurking in the shadows, it was this rapture that I most remember from my morning on the river.

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