Where Healing Meets the River

When people hear stories about how someone became a fly fisherman, it seems like they

all usually start the same way. A grandfather spends time teaching their grandchild how to cast at

sunrise, or a dad is taking his son fishing every weekend. Either way, it seems the most common

story is that of family tradition passing down the love of the water. Those stories are great and

hold a special place for many different people because they speak to their own lives, but that

isn’t how my path to the water goes. I didn’t grow up fly fishing; I’m not even sure if my father

has cast a fly rod since he was a teenager. I didn’t have generations of anglers teaching me how

to read the water, or how to tie the perfect flies, and I definitely wasn’t the kid wading out into

rivers dreaming about my morning catching. My story and my love of tight lines started much

later in life, and honestly, it comes from a moment of pure chaos that felt like it would break my

little family and me.

Going through a divorce changed almost every part of my life, in both good and bad

ways. But it was during this time when so much felt deeply uncertain that fly fishing became one

of the few things that gave me a sense of peace. I had tried casting when I was younger, but had

never fully found myself drawn to it. Something about the timing and how you catch every leaf

behind you always annoyed me, rather than relaxed me. But with age and changes come a want

for something different, and what started as trying something new slowly turned into something

much bigger. I picked up a cheap fly rod and decided to get myself out of the house during the

weekends when my kids were with their father. I never thought it would be anything more than a

break from reality once in a while, but you see, fly fishing has this strange way of demanding

your attention. And that’s because a river doesn’t care what kind of day you had when you step

into it. It pays no mind to what’s happening in your life or how overwhelmed you feel. At the

end of the day, a river doesn’t care if every piece of your life is falling apart. The water keeps

flowing either way, moving right on past where you are standing.

Learning how to fly fish forced me to slow down and start to notice things I normally

wouldn’t have ever looked at before. Things like how the sound of the water moving around the

rocks started to catch my attention more, the sound of relaxation surrounding me. Then the ever-

present smell of wet sagebrush after the snow begins to melt off in early spring came to become

my favorite smell. But my all-time favorite thing I began to notice was how quiet everything

feels right before the sun rises over the water. These little things combined, and they went from

moments to breaths, and on to becoming lessons I needed but never realized. They became

memories that stay with me to this day, but some stand out even more in how important they

were to me, like my first fish on a fly line.

It was an icy Idaho November, and I had just hiked down a trail with my gear. I had been

told I could find some trout here at one of the local shops. The day was grey and dreary, and it

was the kind of cold where every breath hung in the air in front of your face. The guide’s along

my rod kept freezing over with little chunks of ice. It felt like my life up to that point, cold,

chaotic, and quickly falling apart. And there I was trying to figure out what I was even doing on

that water. I had barely started learning how to fly fish a few months before, and it was off and

on at best. I stood there on the edge regretting every back cast that tangled into the tree branches.

I felt foolish, and I felt like I didn’t belong here. Then a small sliver of gold on that grey day

happened, a nibble on my fly. When I hauled back and set my hook, I felt the tiniest of tug back,

and then the fight was on. It lasted about three minutes, and that fish would probably have earned

me an award for the world's smallest trout. But I had caught it on my own, and no one could

take that away from me.

It was just a little cutthroat trout pulled from under an ice shelf, and I still remember how

it felt to have that line reel back as it bit onto my nymph. I think I will always remember the sting

of the cold air against my face as my nose went numb. How the smell of river water mixed with

the damp trees all around me. And my favorite part, how bright that little fish looked against the

white pieces of snow and ice on the water. The colors almost seemed surreal as they popped

against the grey all around me. As I stood there holding that teeny tiny trout, something inside

me just relaxed for the first time in months. Up until that point my life had felt pretty frozen, but

here I was, standing in freezing water, learning something difficult, and finding joy in something

again.

The moment that silly little trout created was so much bigger than the whole 4 inches it

was; it showed me something deeper was needed in my life. That trout became another, and

another as I began to cast more and more, becoming new adventures, creating better memories,

chasing the moments of relaxation I felt every time I back casted. Then somewhere along the

way, I realized I wasn’t just learning how to catch a fish. I was learning patience during difficult

times, how to breathe and be in the moment, and most importantly, that even in the chaos, you

can find peace. Those hours and moments on the water showed me that sometimes healing

doesn’t happen sitting still; it happens while walking along muddy riverbanks.

When I think about becoming a fly fisher (wo)man now, I don’t think it has to start with

childhood traditions or deep family history. Sometimes becoming an outdoorswoman means

finding the outdoors when you need it most in your life. Sometimes it means rebuilding yourself

one river at a time. My path into fly fishing wasn’t straightforward. It came through chaos, cold

mornings, frozen guides, icy water, and a tiny cutthroat trout that changed a lot more than it ever

knew. And honestly, I wouldn’t change that path for anything in the world.