Gone fishing with some clown | Hatch Magazine

While trout fishing on a rural Pennsylvania spring creek a few summers ago, I came upon a five-foot-tall wooden clown standing in the river. Cut from a piece of plywood, and painted in simple shades of red, yellow, and blue, it must have come from one of the small towns a few miles upstream.

I pictured it washing down from an annual fireman’s fair or Fourth of July carnival during a heavy downpour. Or maybe some kids, bored with summer vacation, stole it, then heaved it off a bridge and ran. In any case, now the clown stood smiling, wedged in a logjam, with its bright polka-dot trousers and string of deflated balloons.

But the clown also marked a favorite pool, one where fourteen- and fifteen-inch brown trout would rise in the afternoon to hatching mayflies. That summer, with the river empty of springtime anglers, I fished with the clown as my only company.

When I landed a particularly nice trout, I would show the clown before I released it. If I missed a good rise, or piled a cast up in an overhanging branch, I would glance across the pool at the clown and chuckle. Week after week it was always there, happily smiling, eyes shut as if basking in the summer sun.

One day, late in the season, the trout rose well into the evening to a hatch of tiny blue-winged olives. Before I knew it, a misty evening gloom rapidly swallowed up the forest around me, and I could barely see my line on the water. I was thinking about changing to a larger fly that I could see better when a sudden, uneasy feeling came over me.

I stood still for a moment, listening to the water gurgle around me. Then, slowly, I turned and looked at the clown.

By now, after weeks in the river, its colors had bleached to a ghostly pale, and long tendrils of green algae grew from its submerged clown feet. The once bright smile and closed eyes had faded into lifeless slits. A floating log or branch had knocked it off-center, and it leaned to one side like an old, settled gravestone.

A chill shot through my body, and I found myself wading to the bank as fast as I could. The river tugged and pulled at my waders as I splashed along crazily, spooking every fish in the pool. When my fly snagged in the brush along the shore, I snapped it off without stopping, and half-ran up the trail to my truck a half mile away. Forty-five minutes later, driving sixty-five miles per hour on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I felt a little better.

A week later, a two-day autumn rainstorm sent the river raging over its banks. When I returned, the clown had long since washed away, replaced by what looked like an old shopping cart—from upstream, I guess.

“Gone fishing with some clown” is an excerpt from the new book Every Cast, by frequent Hatch Magazine contributor Stephen Sautner. Every Cast is available now at Amazon and wherever books are sold.