The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 14.4 • MINT CREEK

Chris Anderson casts into Mint Creek as the sun settles behind the Blue Ridge foothills. Winter has loosened its grip—allowing the first shoots of the creek’s namesake flora to poke through the mud along the banks. Within a few weeks, the treeline will fill out and hide much of the creek from view.

Eden is not above the earth, underneath the earth, beyond the earth; it is the earth: sunlight and water, earth and stones, life as it is, which burns but is never consumed. Mana. Wakonda. Shakit. Trout.

-Harry Middleton, The Bright Country

It’s 4:18 in the afternoon, the sun sets at 4:49, and my gear is packed. It’s always packed, because if an opportunity presents itself, I can get to Mint Creek in 10 minutes and fish until after the sun sets—if the moon is out, maybe longer—and still make it home for bedtime stories with my three young boys.

Mint Creek (not its real name) is the only wild trout stream known to the public in this richest county in the U.S., and I was born less than two miles from its source, a small spring emerging from the dissolving subterranean karst below my hometown that formed around 350 million years ago. In my head, its origin story goes something like this: On the eighth day, the Great Maker thought of me, wielded her magic wand and, with a wave, created the world’s most interesting trout stream.

Think of it as a tiny New Zealand waterway forever flowing inside a globe. Outside of the globe, everything is wrong: there are exhaust fumes and the incessant noise of traffic crossing the culverts that fracture Mint Creek’s streamscape; suburbs forever “in progress”; my own shadows, regrets from my past, defunct family relationships, unavoidable tragedies. But inside the globe, despite the darkness surrounding it, glowing rainbow trout fin in the icy clear water of the South Island of my mind.

Shrouded by mundane roadside details like thistle and broken glass, the main spring pools secretly next to the interstate, then begins to wind gently down a subtle gradient for a short while, through private property, before finally ushering its temporary magic into a mostly forgotten section of the Potomac River.

The famous limestone creeks of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley aren’t that far away, but while I live in what my close friend calls the “Karst Belt”—a geographic strip of the mid-Atlantic that gave birth to chalk streams that resemble those of England—I choose to fish Mint Creek not only because it’s nearby, small and unknown, but because there is no pomp and circumstance here. No fisherman’s parking lot with memorials to famous fly anglers or local fly shop to monetize the angling opportunity. No real pictures or stories about it, save a framed photograph of the spring from the early 1900s that used to hang in my childhood dentist’s office and a long-gone relationship between the local Trout Unlimited chapter and the late landowner at the headwaters. When their deal relapsed, the landowner employed me to continue monitoring the stream quality, my payment being access. After he died, I met another landowner who still grants me permission to fish the stream.

If I showed you where the biggest fish reside, you would laugh at the mere notion that any wild trout could live there, let alone believe how big they get. It’s not a complete secret, though, so knowing what I know, I like to play dumb at the local fly shop. The last time I was picking up a few tying supplies for my favorite Mint Creek patterns, the shop owner pulled up my information in his system as I checked out. When he saw my zip code, he batted his eyelids in such a subtle way that it was a tell—he thought that I might know what he thought he knew.

“Yep, I live in little ol’ -----.” He gave a courteous but hesitant smile.

“Nope. Never heard of it,” I replied quickly, as visions of chrome bright fish with peppery black spots and lavender-hued flanks made it difficult to remain expressionless. He seemed relieved.

“Good. Rumor has it it’s got wild rainbows, but the landowner closest to the spring is a Chinese National and he monitors the property with armed guards. Like, big rifles.”

I smiled back, because on one hand he had a point: Mint Creek probably should be protected by armed guards given its hidden treasures, even though the last fisher I saw there was a friend over a decade and a half ago. On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to see Mint Creek, let alone convince someone else it’s real. You must feel Mint Creek, hear it and smell it. Sit along its banks and watch long enough for the sound of traffic to yield to birdsong and the smell of exhaust to wane and be replaced by wafts of the sweet mint and honeysuckle that envelop its cutbanks in summertime. It’s a sensory scientific method that, after a few trials, might challenge what you think you know about wild trout streams or, for that matter, most everything else in the world.

Tonight, for a few minutes before dark, it’s enough to simply be in this mythical place where the trout are as big as your imagination, and sometimes bigger. Beyond the fish, it’s a place to find joy and wonder where it’s always available in small, reliable doses, in the patches of bluebells and bloodroot that will soon bloom below the sycamores and black walnuts and Osage orange. More than quarry, the trout are denizens of my homeplace wrought with paradox, beginnings and endings, hope in the form of a fish; resilient harbingers of the changing seasons of my own life that often end with bedtime stories for my three young boys. The trout matter less than they ever have, but it’s still the trout that make Mint Creek special.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 14.4

MINT CREEK

-Harry Middleton, The Bright Country

Issue List

The Flyfish Journal 13.4