We were about 12 years old, two of my best friends and I, floating down the Monocacy on old, discarded inner tubes, pausing along the way to swim and skip stones, we’d make the afternoon last forever. In the morning, Jeff’s mom would drop us off at the Apple Tree Restaurant where Rt. 512 crosses the “crick,” telling us to stay out of trouble, our sandwiches wrapped in double layer bread bags, and a few Boy Scout canteens full of water and Kool-Aid.

So, down the creek we’d float, raising a ruckus for the first few minutes, trying to knock each other over, splashing each other, startling the ducks and the gardeners along the way. We’d sneak around the old caboose up near Bella Vista, and dare each other to go inside. But gradually we’d settle in and just float along quietly.

    When I think of those days the picture in my mind is of lush green – woods green and bushes green, and pools green with thick beds of water weed. Elodea, I’m told. The weed beds became so heavy by July that the water level would raise to bank-top level, and always there were quick gravel runs between them in the otherwise slow pools. And these runs held trout and pods of red-horse suckers.

    We’d coast silently down the channels between the heavy weed beds where the waters quickened and swept the gravel clean of silt. I’d float along, feet propped up on the tube, knees shielding my eyes from intruding sunlight, staring down through the tube into the stream below, spotting the trout tucked up against the sides of the weed banks or suspending motionless in mid-channel, sometimes surprisingly big ones, brown trout, stream bred and skittish. If you moved your arms they would bolt upstream or drive into the weeds, seemingly without moving a fin or tail, only a puff of debris, like dust, where they once were. I learned that it was sometimes easier to spot the shadows of these fish, hovering like spirits over the bottom gravel, while the trout, so well camoflaged, held invisibly above.

    In later years, I would enter some of these weed-filled pools from below, and wade my way through the channels, casting my line upstream to the quick riseforms, picking up trout on dry flies. One could only fish straight up or straight down stream, held in check by the weeds. It forced me to learn accuracy, to lay the fly right up against the edge of the weed beds, and to learn to manage extra line to avoid the tendrils which would grab a stray coil trailing behind, causing me to backtrack, causing more ripples, causing frightened trout. Sometimes, however, the temptation to cast across into the next channel over was too great, and when a trout was hooked on one of these casts, I had to horse it quickly upon the hook set, getting its head up and out of the water, to skate it across the intervening elodea bed.

    On May evenings, the yellow flies would hatch from the gravel runs and ride the current between the weeds. The trout would move from the edges of the weeds and into the center of the runs as the hatch grew heavier, abandoning some caution as the day’s light waned. Back then, these flies were “pale evening duns” – now they’ve become “sulfurs.” These were the first hatches I ever fished, with an old South Bend bamboo rod I got for free, with dry flies bought for 25 cents apiece (!) from a local tier named Frank Germuga. I had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly I was catching fish. I fished every evening back then, or so it seems in retrospect, rushing home from work, skipping dinner, casting well into the dark as the flies kept coming. Fishing by sound as the light failed altogether in the shaded pools, lifting and tentatively setting the hook at the sound of a trout rising in the general direction of my cast. The pale evening duns hatched in great numbers back then, drawing me back to town and to the Monocacy for many years even after my work took me away from Bethlehem. But it seems their numbers have waned in recent years.

    Sometimes I think the decrease in the hatches is coincident with the change in the stream’s weeds. In the last twelve years or so, the great beds of elodea began to disappear. The slow pools became devoid of the weed that used to channel and speed their flow, and began to fill with silt. And without the weed to displace the water, these pools seemed to draw shallower. And they widened, the banks collapsing and creeping back, further slowing the flow.

    Lately there’s been a resurgence of weed in the pools, which at first seemed encouraging to me – the green color returning as the summer deepened, as the new weed covered the bottom. But now I’m not so sure. The weed I see now is different, with long filaments like hair stretching out and blanketing the bottom completely, unlike the broader-leafed elodea growing upward in discreet beds, forming the quick-water channels. The new weed spreads down low, like a carpet from bank to bank, smothering the gravel so essential to the mayflies and the caddis and the spawning trout. I’m told this new hair-like weed is harboring scuds and such, but I know of no mayflies or caddis flies that can survive in such a weed alone – these insects must burrow amongst the gravel, or cling to the rocks. I may be way off base here, and I hope I am, but something seems sinister about this new weed and the way it grows, and I know that the insect hatches are not what they were.

    But none of this concerned us at the age of twelve as we drifted along in the hot sun. The day would unwind slowly as we made our way towards Center City. The best part of these lower reaches was the rapids at the old paintmill dam. These we’d run over and over in our tubes, slamming and banging down, bruising limbs on the fractured concrete if we tumbled, clambering back up to do it again, laughing and shouting the whole time. But eventually we’d run out of energy and continue our drift down to Johnston Park. My friends and I sat atop the falls in the park, dangling our legs over the edge in the flow, tired and quiet and satisfied, looking down towards the Tannery and up at the Orr’s parking deck. Then the car horn, Jeff’s mom in the Suburban, heralded the end of our adventure.

home