Seasonable Angler: Fishing in Gratitude

"If the only prayer you say throughout your life is 'Thank You,' then that will be enough."–Elie Wiesel

January 07, 2025 By Steve Ramirez

Every day, I wake feeling grateful. I no longer pray to any deity—imagined or immortal. I don’t cast my eyes upward while pleading for redemption or deliverance. I ask for nothing and expect nothing in return. I don’t believe in or live out a transactional relationship with eternity. Instead, I simply choose to be kind and compassionate without expectation of reciprocity. For me, the meaning of life comes from the meaningfulness I give to my life, through my choices. In my own way, I do pray each day, simply by setting aside moments in time, to be grateful. As I wake each morning and as I close my eyes each night my first and my final words to the universe are always, “I am grateful.” And I am.

When I go to the river, I seek nothing but solace, peace, and clarity. I do not count numbers of fish or value them by inches or pounds. I do not compete. It is not a game or a goal for me—it’s a way of life. When I go to the river, I do not chastise myself for missteps, I learn from them. I laugh often and often I laugh at myself. And I don’t allow myself to squander that solace, peace, and clarity by going to the river with those who do not love and respect it. In short, life’s too short to fish with muggles.

When we arrived at the river the crickets were singing their evening love songs. I mentioned to my friend Sarah how much I missed hearing crickets back home in Texas. There are things from my youth that once were ubiquitous, but now seem increasingly rare. They include evening crickets and lightning bugs and the morning calls of bobwhite quail. I remember how midday rainstorms used to send choruses of frogs into synchronistic song, but now all too often the wetlands are dry, and the rains fall elsewhere. There are so many wildlife moments that haunt me because I experience them now only as memories. Our past reflects our potential futures. Which shall it be? Will we live an abundant life or exist with mere memories of it?

Sarah Foster is the executive director of the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont. She has a beautiful soul. I’d fight zombies for her, but I hope I never have to prove that statement. Brew Moscarello is a Battenkill River guide who is knowledgeable, patient, and kind. Before the evening was over, I knew he and I would become riverside friends.

We stood at the riverbank watching and waiting for a while, seeing what activity we might find and looking for bugs in the air or on the water. A few tiny caddisflies flitted above the surface of the river. They didn’t last long as flocks of cedar waxwings were dipping and diving from the overhanging tree branches and picking off every bug they could manage to catch. I tied on a local version of a caddis dry fly that Brew gave me, but after watching the goings on and lack of rising trout he said, “I want to try something with my rod.” I leaned my rod against a sheltering tree and began my first lesson in a technique I had never tried before. We’ll call it caddis skipping.

Brew handed me an 11-foot Euro-nymphing rod that was rigged with a weighted nymph dropper under a caddis dry fly. For the most part, the weighted nymph simply allowed the dry fly to be manipulated so that it skipped and dipped across the surface. Since we knew this stretch of river held trout and good water to fish for them, but no fish were rising, the goal was to get non-rising fish to rise. The way we planned to do this was to imitate a caddisfly as she periodically touched the water to deposit her eggs on the river’s surface.

Brew demonstrated the technique, using the long rod to reach out over the current and then bob and bounce the delicate rod tip up and down so that the caddis dry fly seemed to dance across the surface. His demonstration was so effective that he immediately elicited a rise and take that led to him landing and releasing a nice Battenkill brown trout.

He laughed and said, “I wasn’t trying to catch one, but you can see that it works.” Then he handed me the rod and said, “Here, it’s your turn.”

The technique of caddis skipping took a bit of practice, but after a few floppy attempts and a couple of observations and recommendations Brew called from upriver, I was getting the hang of it and before long I had coaxed my first rise from a brownie that almost leapt from the river in its attempt to capture the dancing caddis. We both missed. I cast again.

There was an oval shaped pool edged by fast current where that brown trout had risen, so I made a few more passes through there, and a trout rose twice more without a hook-up, before it ceased to rise again. I took a couple of careful steps upstream and cast again. After a few passes through the run a trout rose aggressively and took the fly. I set the hook, let out a whoop, and then after a short run and a jump, lost the fish. Merde! I tried again. I continued to skip that little caddis through that same pool and drew several missed strikes before finally landing a nice brown trout, gorgeously colored in sunset tones and shades. And it wasn’t just the fish that looked that way.

I could hear the soft murmurs of Sarah and Drew speaking and laughing together just downstream, but where I stood, I felt only solitude. The sky was bleeding in yellow, amber, and golden swaths of pigment and the treetops seemed to be slightly ablaze, their edges glowing like halos. For a moment, I stopped fishing and watched Sarah casting over a sunset backdrop and beneath the dimly illuminated trees and among the dipping and diving cedar waxwings. It was exactly how I might imagine any heaven to be—if I ever imagined such a mythological place. I don’t. Heaven is wherever I’m standing.

With effort, I pulled my gaze from the setting sun and rising moon and set about the act of casting and catching fish.

As we walked back toward the trucks through the wet grass beneath the silhouettes of second-growth trees with the cheerful sounds of crickets filling the air, I knew what kind of life I wanted to live—and I was living it. While I stowed my gear in Sarah’s truck I saw Brew’s outline in the darkness, surrounded in a circle of light coming from the cab of his pickup. Even in the dim light of dusk I could see Sarah’s smile as she handed me an ice-cold can of Long Trail Blackberry Wheat beer, and we tapped our cans together and said, “Cheers!” And I was cheerful, except for a moment when it struck me that I was going to miss my friend when I returned to Texas the next day.

I felt so fortunate to have shared this evening with her and Brew on the Battenkill, and I told her so. That’s when she said, “Thank you for accepting me.” In that moment I realized that as executive director of the museum, she was used to being surrounded by “experts.”

I almost came to tears as I said, “Sarah, the honor and the pleasure is truly mine. I have fished with many, many people in many, many places and I can tell you that there’s no one I’d rather share this evening with than you.” She smiled again.

If my description of this moment feels magical it’s because it was and became even more so when I looked just past the shoulders of my friend to see flashes of light all around her—and around us. Lightning bugs! I had not seen lightning bugs in decades. I felt like a child in his sixties. It felt like an instance of divine intervention—if only I still believed in such things.

Perhaps I need to revisit and revitalize my faith in a universe that moves me in beautiful directions, when I’m open to being moved. Perhaps I am meeting everyone I am supposed to meet and learning what I need to learn. And perhaps dancing caddisflies and illuminating insects are there to remind me that there is always hope, if we live an actively hopeful life.

Living with hope calls us toward heartfelt healing actions. It calls us to act in the creation of our own “good medicine” and the recognition of our innate magical abilities to help and to heal. I for one believe in the music of the spheres and the magic of the universe. No matter the challenge before us, love finds a way.

Perhaps the lesson the universe is teaching me is that divine interventions happen every day in the smiles of friends and flickers of light on dark nights. As I stood there under the stars in the light of my friend’s happiness, with the glow of life’s exuberance shining all around us, I knew: Life really is too short to fish with muggles. Every cast is hopeful. Every moment is magical. Every breath and every heartbeat are gifts that carry us around the next beautiful bend in the river of life. It’s no wonder that I wake up each day, feeling grateful. Don’t you?

Steve Ramirez is a Texas master naturalist, poet, and Marine Corps veteran. He is the author of Casting Forward, Casting Onward, and Casting Seaward. His newest book Casting Homeward (Lyons Press) went on sale in September 2024.