A FEW MILES into our hike up Big Run—a stream that hurries off the Allegheny Mountains in Pendleton County, West Virginia—Dustin Wichterman suddenly stops. “That one looks pretty fishy,” he says, pointing his handmade fly rod at a clear pool formed by some trees downed in the stream. Wichterman, who is thirty-five, steps off the bank and carefully wades into water that will—some 160 miles from here—eventually run by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on its way to the Chesapeake Bay. He glances back over his shoulder. Because of the deep summer canopy of this second-growth forest, he has no room for a backcast. So, with his rod in his right hand, Wichterman pinches his nymph fly between the forefinger and thumb of his left and pulls on the fly line, forming a taut arc in the rod, the classic “bow and arrow” cast that any true brook trout junkie must master. He closes one eye to sight his target, and then lets the fly go. It plops gently into the bathtub-sized pool and sinks for a second or two before a fish darts out from under the downed trees and snatches it. Wichterman reflexively strikes and quickly brings the eight-inch brook trout to his net. “Look at this beauty,” he says, beckoning me down from the bank.
As I gaze at this native fish—a product of one of the matrix of
