It was dark when I woke to the sound of rain. I lay still, staring up into the eaves of the loft, listening to water move in streams across the tin roof and onto the porch. I thought of my waders draped over the railing and hoped they wouldn’t be washed away. I’d probably be better off if they were.
I had been in New Brunswick for three days and had yet to catch a fish. I was on assignment, trying to write a story about catching my first Canadian striped bass, but had been deterred by hard winds and uncooperative tides. That left me holed up in my cabin, poring over weather reports, praying for a break in the gloom. I tried to stay busy by scratching out an introduction for my story, but eventually, the days began to blend: wake up, put the kettle on, write a line, delete a line, end up scrolling through someone else’s fishing trip on my phone. It was exhausting in the way only boredom can be—and from the sound of things outside, today would be no different.
Sliding to the edge of the bed, I rested my chin on the windowsill. A dim glow crept through the gaps in the pine, and the air trembled with the unmistakable approach of dawn. Somewhere, high above the valley, the sky rumbled. It will be light soon. No sense in going back to bed.
I was staying in Boisetown—New Brunswick’s geographical center—and it is from this heart that the Miramichi River beats toward the sea. The region is famed for its silvery runs of Atlantic salmon and spawning striped bass, but I was just excited to be in Canada. On the drive north from Brooklyn, I fantasized that every stream and roadside pond teemed with fish holding little signs that said will work for dry flies—in short, success felt inevitable.
The skies were clear on the evening I arrived, and I hurriedly unpacked the car, pulled on my waders, and slipped into the river beneath the cabin. The property owner had told me about a pool not far downriver, and the setting was pristine—a riffle tumbling into a sandy bowl lined with birch and boulders, bathed in pink light. How could I not catch a trout here? After fifty casts, all I could muster was a single bump. It was probably a stick.
I brushed off this initial skunk and found myself oddly grateful that my anticipation only deepened. If anything, it felt like a promise that some sort of redress awaited me in the coming days. So I trudged back upriver, peeled off my waders, and settled into my new home for the week. My plan was to light out for the coast at daybreak, but that’s when the weather moved in.
Climbing down from the loft, I clicked on the kitchen lamp and lit the stove with a match. The rain had softened into mist, and gray light bloomed in the windows. As the kettle warmed, I checked the forecast—and waiting for me was something new: a break in the rain. It was predicted for that afternoon, a brief hammock of dry weather suspended between 1 and 4 p.m. The wind would still be kicking too hard for a run at stripers, but it was enough of a respite to escape the cabin.
I packed the car after lunch and bumped my way out of the forest on dirt roads, moving slowly around the washboarding until I hit pavement. Above NB-8 the sky had pulled back, revealing a bright dome of clouds overhead, and in the building heat, the asphalt smoked with humidity. Finally free, I dropped the windows and tore west along the river.
I didn’t have a destination in mind; I just wanted to put distance between myself and the wifi. There’s not much else to do when you are rained in than to wallow in the success of others, and if comparison is the thief of joy, then Instagram might as well be Bernie Madoff. Scrolling through my feed, I was inundated by a flood of posts featuring sunglass-ed anglers in jaw-dropping locales—Belize, the Seychelles, Montana—each with a meaty paragraph espousing how hard work merited their personal-best tarpon, trevally, or trout. It felt like everyone else was getting their grip-and-grin in paradise while I was stuck here in the rain.
Licking my wounds, I passed through Boisetown and crossed a short bridge over a stream. It was slender, no wider than a tennis court, with tannin-stained water bubbling over flat black stones—but it looked promising. I drove on a bit before turning around, this time watching the banks as I crossed back over the bridge. No bugs, no birds. Just the din of rushing water.
I pulled onto the shoulder and checked Google Maps. The waterway was nameless, bleeding south for miles into uninhabited logging tracts. With my window beginning to close, I wasn’t in a position to be picky. I threw the car in park and suited up.
In the shadow of the bridge, the air was cool, and it felt good to be momentarily protected from the humidity. Now face-to-face with the stream, I realized how dark the water was. It felt like staring into molasses, and the scent of earth boiled up from cream-colored foam that blossomed on the surface. I waited, listening to the rumble of cars overhead as I planned my first cast. The stream descended into a pool behind the bridge’s concrete pylons, and I placed my streamer into the seam of the current break. Nothing. I worked this patch of water for another half-hour before giving up, and instead of scrabbling back up the bank, decided to hike upstream to find fishable water.
Moving out from under the bridge and leaving the hum of the road behind, I noticed the stones along the bank were coated in an orange film, and the mud gave off an iridescent sheen. The culprit was a layer of barely perceptible refuse—box springs, scrap metal, old wire—sandwiched between the forest floor and the river, like a geological display of poor judgment—decades-old trash from when this stream was a dumping ground. I began to wonder if the water was as clean as I’d hoped. For a moment, I considered turning back—but instead, I rounded the bend to see what lay ahead.
I hiked until the water lightened and found myself staring down a corridor where the stream narrowed, and a dead birch rose from a small pool at its center. It stood proudly, like a totem pole, and though the trunk had been savaged by woodpeckers, its bark gleamed against a backdrop of black spruce and fir.
My first cast was toward the rootball of the birch, half-submerged in the water. I figured that if I were a trout—which I often wish I were—I’d choose to hide in that kind of structure. The streamer bounced along the bottom, and I cast twice more before I felt a tap, like something kissed the tail of the fly as it floated by. I cast again, and this time hooked into something small but angry. It was a native brook trout, no bigger than my finger, with jeweled spots and a dark, mottled back. I held it in my hand for a moment to admire its coloring before it wriggled free, plopping into the water and back into the rootball.
The birch gave up a few more bite-sized trout, and when things cooled, I continued upstream, squeezing between the trees and boulders that began to dominate the flow. What followed was three hours of stalking this nameless creek—kneeling in cordgrass, bow-and-arrow casting into slices of water no wider than a doorway, catching fingerling brook trout that skipped and danced across the surface as I stripped them to hand.
I hiked for two miles before the rain returned, and in the interest of quitting while I was ahead, began my long walk back with my hood pulled tight. Halfway back to the bridge, I reached an island, and decided to take the right branch instead of the way I came on the left. The stream here deepened into a chute, with tall grass on either side, shrouded beneath a cathedral of pine trees. Under a log spanning the chute, fish rose, so I tied on a Parachute Adams and knelt again in the grass.
After ten minutes of casting, I glanced up and saw that I was face-to-face with a mink on the opposite bank. She was sleek and brown, with a tuft of fur clutched in her mouth—her baby. She eyed me curiously, cocking her head to one side as if to communicate how absurd I looked before turning and trotting away into the duff. Following suit, I reeled up and hiked out.
The next day was clear and blue, with puffy clouds and a warm northwest breeze that cleared out the weather. I made it to the coast with no problem and found a surplus of stripers on the flats, and managed to get plenty of photos for my story. My trip to Canada had been a success after all, but not for the reasons I anticipated.
That day on the nameless stream was more than a way to kill time—it was a reset. True beauty winks. Sometimes, to find it, you just have to keep hiking upstream.