THE WINTER ice that now locks the streams and brooks across northern New England soon will be breaking up. For a lot of us, this means the Opening Day of the trout-fishing season is just about upon us - the day when the waters are officially open to fishermen to cast their lines.
Winter may not be over, but we know it's exhausted - out of breath - and spring is about to overwhelm it with longer days, warm sunshine, and skunk cabbage poking up along the streamsides. There will be the magical appearance of pussy willows, and the bursting of the swamp maple's winter buds into tiny red flowers.
As I get older, all of this is reassuring - the earth's tilting to the sun, songbirds up from the south or down from the tree tops to pick up worms, and the chance to get back to the swollen streams with a fishing rod. When I was a boy, Opening Day was pure excitement - sorting my hooks and sinkers the night before, rewinding the line on my reel, patching leaky hip boots. It made no difference that the fishing is nearly always poor on Opening Day - the water cold and high and murky from snow melt and runoff, rocking the flooded alders along the banks.
As a young man still burning with a boy's enthusiasm for Opening Day, I once had to break through frozen snow in my boots to get to the stream. I bruised and cut my shins on the crust. I was never happier - just me and my fly rod and the prospect of a morning catching wild brook trout in the hills of western Maine. It was as if the sap that ran in the sugar maples was running in me.
Surely it's more than cosmic coincidence that the Opening Days of the fishing and baseball seasons typically fall within weeks of each other. Both are days of renewal, ritual, and joy.
I'm not sure when Opening Day took on a deeper meaning for me. Now that I'm 57 and I've had the chance to fish in rivers far from home, it has become a reminder for me of the place nature has played in my life as reliable friend and mysterious healer. She has always been there to knit my soul and repair my life when I needed her most. There's a nostalgic tug to most fishing, and the fish on the end of the line is often pulling us back to simpler times and easier days - when the background music of our lives was birdsong in the morning and peepers at dusk. It would be easy to skip Opening Day with its prospect of cold boots and frosty fingers. But no, that wouldn't do - spring is about to come strolling over the hill, and she and I have a longstanding agreement to spend the day together at the edge of some brook among the alders, willows, and maples celebrating life's reawakening.
Lou Ureneck is the author of "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-Fishing and a River Journey through the Heart of Alaska." He is the chairman of Boston University's Journalism Department.
