I pulled the watering hose under the hot sun trying to accomplish the endless task of watering plants at a nursery in August. My coworker David pulled his truck into the driveway sweating at the end of his shift.
“Hey man, here’s that lure I was goin’ to give you. You rig it like this,” and he proceeded to wrap a long silver-flecked white piece of plastic around a large fish hook. I verified the directions to the stream he had told me about earlier in the week but after telling me what road to take he added, “But don’t go right where we went. All those fish have sore mouths.” Then he shoved a few of the floppy plastic lures into a bag, handed it to me and drove off.
Like most fishing trips this one started on time but with me worse the ware after a long Friday night. Nonetheless, faded, I poured my travel mug full of coffee and went to pick up my friend Kyle in the Applebee’s parking lot. We drove through some of the richer sections of the nation’s tenth richest county until at last we were in rural middle Tennessee countryside, just south and west of the Natchez Trace and Loveless Café, out where people still plant gardens and raise tobacco and where Indian mounds abound and the glyphs they painted and carved into limestone bluffs slowly erode into the oblivion of their creators. This is Harpeth River country…a last stand of middle Tennessee’s bucolic past but an area soon to be ensnared by Nashville’s burgeoning growth and sky rocketing land prices.
The Harpeth River is a rare free flowing river that drains 895 square miles of middle Tennessee’s Central basin south of the Cumberland River and north of the Duck River. It is a river made up of a handful of tributaries: the Little Harpeth, the West Fork of the Harpeth, the South Harpeth, all feeding into the Harpeth. The river and its flood plains abound with the ordivician fossils and the river gravel occasionally parts to expose a mastodon bone, revealing to our contemporary eyes the identity of past inhabitants. Along with the moundbuilders and their predacesors who once built villages along its bank the river flows through over two hundred years of American history past the homes of great statesmen, explorers, and rouges, and past fields of battle where thousands died in an afternoon and lead minnie balls from the opposing armies can still be found in a plowed field.
Turning off Highway ‘hunert (100) we drove out the curvy little road David had told me to turn onto looking for the bridge where he said we could park and gain river access. “Park at the second bridge, not the first one.” The road followed the side of the bluff as the river snaked around the edges of horse pasture and fields planted in its fertile plane. At the first bridge we stopped midway across and watched two does wading and sipping water. As tranquil as the scene could have been Kyle and I both shared a common thought: Is there enough water down there to find any fish? The creek was split into two channels neither over twenty feet wide. The bottom was rocky and the water clear but there just wasn’t much of it. Is the South Harpeth really just a creek?
At the second bridge we parked in a gravel pull off, rigged our rods and walked down to the creek. Stepping in the water was cold. We headed upstream. Small fish were everywhere, minnows and smallmouth were easily seen zipping around. One thing was obviously clear: the big, floppy lure David had given me wasn’t going to work on any of these fish. It was big enough to eat them and they’d be scared of it. So I replaced it with a small plastic minnow. Kyle used a small green crayfish. On his third cast he pulled out a little smalljaw. I mean really small, less than eight inches. We waded about 750 yards through the idyllic scene and I had one hit that released a twinge of adrenaline in my stomach but nothing else.
After an hour I decided we were going to go to my fishing spot off McCrory Lane.
Driving out to the spot I pointed out the new Travis development. In a former career as a land surveyor I had staked the future course of neighborhood streets just the year before, hacking through a thick woods of cedar, honeysuckle, and saw briar. Now the woods had been scraped off, dirt was exposed and the land has been eviscerated by a wide road cut. Houses will be popping up soon and those little cul de sacs I helped lay out will become a reality. A VA cemetery fans out in waves of white headstones across the road from the development. We fished along the bluffs beneath the cemetery.
I decided to wade upstream aways but the water got chest deep and was strewn with large rocks which made walking hazardous and wading impractical. We managed to fish for a while standing on a rocky ledge at the base of the bluff but this wasn’t a good spot for smallmouth. However there were plenty of fish. A two foot long buffalo swam right up to my toes and just stayed there awhile, making sucking motions with its mouth. Farther out gar swam languidly through the green water. I walked farther up the bank stepping into the water some but still finding it to have too many large rocks for wading. A big Labrador retriever came out of nowhere exhibiting a more surly manner than I would have expected from a lab. I threw a few sticks into the water and the lab agitatedly but obligingly swam out and collected the sticks and delivered them to the far side of the river, never swimming all the way over to me, never releasing me from it’s hackled gaze.
We waded back downstream probing all the way and that’s when I finally caught my one and only fish of the day. Earlier in the summer fishing in the Duck River I caught what was perhaps the world’s smallest bluegill. But my lone fish of the day on the Harpeth was undoubtedly the world’s smallest sunfish. He looked smaller than the lure he bit and I don’t think it was an optical illusion. This fish was less than the length of my middle finger.
Farther downstream the riverbed was better suited to wading. I switched back to the floppy plastic lure. After a couple of casts I had a hit. A good hit. I saw the white belly and felt the rush and in the blink of an eye the fish was gone. Obviously I wasn’t fishing the lure right but that kind of hit is what makes bass fishermen endure early mornings after long Friday nights. We talked with two other men who like us were luckless on this little river that usually abounds with fish. I blame it on the high pressure system that brought in the cloudless blue sky that arched over our heads.
We waded downstream over a thousand yards, past spots where I have extracted many a smallmouth on more successful days but the fish were having none of what we offered today. About two o’clock we decided to punt and headed back upstream toward the truck. Just before we got to where we would climb up the bank to the parking lot I passed a young boy in the water and saw him reeling in a good size bluegill. “Boy, look at that,” I said. “It’s bigger than anything we’ve caught today.”
“Yeah, I caught another one while ago but this one is bigger,” he replied with a big smile.
So I didn’t catch anything but that’s not important. I’m glad the little boy caught a couple of fish. It will keep him coming back and with the interest of a new generation good rivers will continue to have a voice.
P.S. – After talking with David I learned that in my post party haze I had not noticed one of the bridges and the small creek where we began the days fishing was actually Brush Creek.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
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