Native to This Stream: Brief Writings About Fly-Fishing & the Great Outdoors

By Paul Weidknecht

Native to This Stream: Brief Writings About Fly-Fishing & the Great Outdoors is a chapbook collection of short stories, essays, and poems that lifts you from your chair and puts you on the stream ready to drop a fly three feet upstream of a rising trout. Native to This Stream takes the reader from the storied waters of Pennsylvania’s Letort Spring Run to the wonders of Yellowstone National Park and beyond, revealing one angler’s love of the outdoor America we embrace and why we embrace it. So whether contemplating a classic American painting about the Catskills or pondering the peril of putting a hook through one’s leg in the mountains of western North Carolina, Native to This Stream will have you yearning for the brook in no time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Weidknecht
• Release date: Feb 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310518263

Paul Weidknecht

Paul Weidknecht’s stories can be found in A Readable Feast: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Tales for Every Taste, Once Around the Sun: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Tales for All Seasons, and A Christmas Sampler: Sweet, Funny, and Strange Holiday Tales (all from Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC). Previous publications include work in Best New Writing 2015, Fur-Fish-Game, The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine Anthology, The Los Angeles Review, The MacGuffin, Outdoor Life, Potomac Review, Rosebud, and Shenandoah, among others. He lives in New Jersey where he has completed a collection of short fiction and is at work on a novel.

Book preview

Native to This Stream:

Brief Writings About Fly-Fishing & the Great Outdoors

PAUL WEIDKNECHT

Copyright© 2016 by Paul Weidknecht

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

E-book edition: February 2016

All photographs© by Paul Weidknecht

Cover design © by pro_ebookcovers

Published in the United States of America

Acknowledgements

The Native first published in Pisgah Review, Vol. 6, Issue 2, Summer 2012

The One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighteen Mile Trout first published in Yale Anglers’ Journal, Volume X, Number 2, 2009

Wishing You Knew Jersey first published in The Comstock Review, Volume 28, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2015

No Story Here first published as A Story in The Raleigh Review, Vol. 1, Summer 2010

Slough Creek first published in Gray’s Sporting Journal, May/June 2014

Forest Legs first published in Snowy Egret, Spring 2009, Volume 70, #1

Reservoir Overlook first published in James Dickey Review, XXIX (II), Spring/Summer 2013

Limestoned first published in Structo Magazine, Issue 11, Spring/Summer 2014

"On Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849)" first published in Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2014

Pushing the Hook first published in Southern Trout; April/May 2013

Resilience first published in Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2015

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

The Native

The One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighteen Mile Trout

Wishing You Knew Jersey

No Story Here

Slough Creek

Forest Legs

Reservoir Overlook

Limestoned

On Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits (1849)

Pushing the Hook

Resilience

About the Author

The Native

Our native brook-trout is much loved of man. It has come to be something more than a fish: it is an ideal. —G. L. M. La Branche, The Dry Fly and Fast Water (1914)

Fried chicken and mashed potatoes were favorites, but Brandon stared dully at his dinner, uninspired by any of it. He sat slouched, his chin resting in the heel of one hand, a fork dangling from the other, pushing the food around his plate in an aimless way that normally would’ve brought about quick instruction for him to sit up and start eating. But Sarah simply looked across the table at Craig, her face as downcast as the boy’s. Before dinner, she’d briefed him about Brandon’s day at school, and in the two hours since, Craig had tried to think of a solution.

He remembered when he’d been a ten-year-old in school. Like any kid, he wasn’t crazy about all the studying and homework, but the part about being around friends and making new ones had been great. Looking back, he had to say he was somewhat popular, and athletic too. Whether on organized teams or among a bunch of sandlotters after school, he’d always been the first one picked, or close to it.

He tried to recall a problem he’d encountered then, a difficulty he had overcome, and by drawing on some old lesson he might help his son through this new conflict. Craig searched for parallels between the two of them, and while he surely had his