In Fisherman’s Summer, Roderick Haig-Brown observes, “[m]ost anglers have a parent stream and a home river, which may or may not be one and the same.” Haig-Brown isn’t fussy about his distinction. Streams and rivers can be lakes or bays or, I suppose, sloughs and creeks and more.
His point is that parents and homes are different, however much they may overlap. I think he is right about this, for fishing and for life in general.
We are born from a fluid body and are nourished with fluid food and drink. Biological birth for all mammals is a watery affair. This time of birth would be our parental time. Home comes later and, oftentimes, dries up.
Salmon perform a seasonal division between parental and domestic waters. They are born in freshwater spawning beds, in what are surely their parent streams, and return to them, again, as aged, dying parents. Their home is downstream, in salted ocean waters, the same destination of rivers themselves.
My parents come from two places that are, in some ways, very close, but also quite distant: the Rio Grande Valley and the Four Corners. My own parental streams are not identical to these regions, but there is some important background overlap.
My paternal grandfather—Andres Rocha—fished for giant alligator gar—catán—in the Rio Grande River. I fished for catfish with him on the same river as a boy. He caught a largemouth bass on chicken liver one day; that captured his persona as an angler. I have an uncle—my Tio Meme—who was also an avid bay angler. He taught me to free-shrimp on the ocean for speckled sea trout under night lights.
My maternal grandfather—Pete Montaño—taught me the most about how to fish. He would fish just about any species or body of water but his home water was a small mountain lake where we would spend summer weeks together fishing for rainbow trout. We also fished bays and ship channels on the Gulf of Mexico together. I will write many more stories of our time together. His son, my Uncle Pete, fished their local rivers and brooks and is a skilled fly angler and outdoorsman.
I spent six formative years in Brady, Texas—from junior high through my junior year of high school. During that time, I fished Brady Creek and Lake religiously, along with local stock tanks and the San Saba River. When we visited recently, I took my family to see my parent stream: a small roadside section of Brady Creek, walking distance from my house.
My Grandpa Montaño was a gear fisherman, but he didn’t like bait or big lures. He loved small in-line spinners, small spoons that cast a mile and, of course, black size 6 Pistol Pete’s fished behind a water bobber. I learned that many of his smaller presentation techniques for trout worked wonders on my little creek that did have some largemouth and Guadalupe bass, but had many more bluegills, sunfish, and crappie.
One day, early in my exploration of Brady Creek, I made a long cast with one of my Grandpa’s favourite spinners—a black Panther Martin— from a seldom used walking bridge and caught my first crappie which just happened to also be the biggest crappie I have ever caught or seen since.
That crappie marked the beginning of a new kind of fishing journey, where I would fish by myself almost daily (with some exceptions, like for hunting season) and mostly with lures. As important and definitive as the bays, rivers, canals, and lakes of the Rio Grande Valley were and as inspirational and instructive as the mountain lakes and rivers of the Four Corners all were for me, my parent stream is Brady Creek and its eponymous lake in the Texas Hill Country.
My parents will soon be moving back to Brady. I look forward to taking my kids fishing at Brady Creek and Lake and fly fishing Hill Country rivers and streams. It may not be my home water, though it was for a precious time. When I walked there last, beside overgrown and weed-littered grass and its low, brackish water, I felt like I was walking on something like holy ground.