What Kind of Sickness is This?

It’s 4 a.m. and the room is silent except for the thumps coming from my neighbor who, too, is waking and fumbling around in the dark. I’m layering up—wool, synthetic, wool again, down, Gore-Tex—building armor against a day I know won’t be kind. My waders wait where I crawled out of them, slumped on the floor looking as lifeless as I feel. I stayed up too late swapping heads and tips, tying fresh 20-pound leaders, obsessing over fly boxes and lucky flies as if preparation might somehow tip the odds in my favor.

Outside, April in northern British Columbia greets me with a familiar kind of hostility. Snow has fallen overnight, the kind that isn’t soft or quiet, but sharp, crunchy, and slick. Every step requires intention. Cleats bite into ice as I make my way toward lodge coffee, the only real necessity of the morning. Yesterday, the temps rose into the 60s and it was enough to start a melt, blow out the river, and burn my cheeks. Today, that same skin stings under a different assault and yesterday’s melt is seized once again. Spring here doesn’t arrive peacefully, although below the iced deck that delivers me to coffee, a fluffy baby bunny nibbles on fresh crocus flowers sprouting through the snow.

The Skeena watershed near Terrace is a place anglers revere for its summer steelhead abundance, filling the lodges through August and into October with long rods, traditional flies, and solarflex hoodies. This is the watery highway that all things chrome and shiny must pass through on their pursuit home to legendary tribs such as the Babine, Sustut, Kispiox, Bulkley (and others we don’t name). But the Skeena’s spring steelhead fishery is an entirely different beast.

Which is where I stand today, waist-deep in 40-degree water, the cold seeping in slowly, methodically. A football field wide at some spots, the lower Skeena is a complex of runs within runs: islands, shelves, high banks, pools, riffles, and logjams. The Coastal Mountains rise 6,000 feet in every direction, cloaked in heavy white snow that feels temporary and unstable. The mountains don’t look like scenery in the distance, they feel alive and so close you could poke them with your rod tip. They groan and rumble, shedding winter in thunderous avalanches that echo down the valleys like distant artillery.

And the steelhead passing through today, trickling in at high tide, will not travel nearly as far nor wait to spawn; they are fully sexually mature—bucks in rut and does in heat—and they are ready to rip you a new one. A majority of spring steelhead that enter the Skeena are destined for the Kalum, Kitimat, Copper, and many small creeks on the west side of Terrace, only a short push for them in comparison to their summer kin.

My hands lose dexterity first. Changing sink tips becomes a test of patience, frozen fingers fumbling with loops that suddenly feel microscopic. Then a chill to the spine and my teeth begin to chatter. The wind howls upstream turning every cast into a heap at my feet. I swear I could cack-hand yesterday. But I work my fly through each swing, patiently waiting for what may come. A grab, a swoosh, a sniff is all it takes to keep me in the river, applying a wiggling action to my fly I don’t intend.

By midday, I’m spent and questioning the entire idea. What kind of sickness is this? I’m running on something deeper than energy. Something quieter. Pride? Is it pride? Maybe it’s the hot tub that awaits at the lodge. The steam room. The Caesar (Canada's far superior version of the Bloody Mary). These thoughts get me to my next cast. My guide calls me in for hot soup and encouragement. This is what I signed up for. Every cast could be the one.

Less than a mile from the ocean, in a river known for producing some of the fastest, most powerful steelhead in the world, my line comes tight. Not a tap. Not a question. A jolt. She erupts from the water, dime-bright and impossibly chrome: a massive hen. Then she runs. Backing, gone in seconds.

My knees go weak and I wait for my brain to send the message to my legs to move. We bolt downstream after her, boots slipping on rocks, breath short, as she tears around the bend. My guide, watching her cartwheel down the river, has joined me now and is shouting instructions. Let her run! Stay tight! Reel! I gain line, inch by inch, heart hammering, only to watch her surge again, ripping it back out like it was never mine to begin with. She jumps and thrashes on the surface. I gain line onto the reel only to have her run again. We go like this, line in, line out, so long that I think she must be tiring. She isn’t. She shakes and surges, using every ounce of the river’s power against me. By the time I see fly line appear in my rod, my arms are barely functioning and my reel hand is cramped into a claw. I think I should start going to the gym. The guide steps forward with the net. For a moment, it feels like it might actually happen.

But with another surge of life that defies everything I thought I knew about physics, thrashing on the surface just within reach, this fight between she and me ends the only way it should. The hook pops free. The line goes slack. She is a ghost again in the watery highway, back into the current carrying her million eggs, her unwavering strength, and the future upstream. Both hers and, I hope, mine.

I stand in stillness with a grin. What kind of sickness is this?

Later, I do find that hot tub and the Caesar. I find a bed with my name on it. I find a fish that stays buttoned up all the way to the net, a memory of the one that got away, and a date reserved for next spring, when I no doubt return for the tortuous thrill of spring steelheading in BC.

Destinations Visited: Skeena Spey, Skeena River Lodge Nicholas Dean Lodge