LAND OF THE GIANTS
I COULD TELL YOU THAT IT’S THE RIVER I FIND SO ALLURING.
In the headwaters, cornfields in the valleys nudge against sycamores and mountain laurel as the river, here little more than a creek, twists through banks clad in vine and wildflowers. Farther downstream, it gathers flow from limestone springs, and its rock-ribbed pools are cooled in the shade of soaring hemlock groves. The Soque River (pronounced so-quee) flows for about thirty miles contained in a single county—Habersham, merely four counties northeast of metro Atlanta—an intimacy that lends it a homey, winsome, tucked-just-out-of-sight appeal.
But I’d be lying if I said I’m here for the river—or the repasts spread on split-log farm tables or the end-of-day cocktails lit by a sun setting over wild, timbered ridgelines.
It’s the fish. I’m here for the sight of a two-foot-long rainbow trout leaping four times across a stream my dog could jump in a single bound, and the how-do-I-stop-it pull of big fish. I’m here for the trout that took my son, Jack, on a hell-for-leather sprint down the river.
I was working a nymph rig under a sycamore tree in a skinny section of the Soque when Jack hollered from upstream.
“Coming through, Dad! Reel up! Reel up!”
I saw the line zing around the bend and then the bent top half of the fly rod and then Jack scrambling through the gravel-bar bushes, running in his waders. It was a big fish, unstoppable for the moment.
I took a big double step into the creek and crouched low so his rod and line could pass. He ran for another thirty yards, rod tip high, slipping on rocks and plunging through water to his thighs.
On the bank behind me, Mark Lovell laughed. His grandfather pieced this farm together,
