Where The Silence Starts

There’s a quiet satisfaction in doing your own research — pulling late nights, scrolling satellite imagery, following faint threads of possibility across landscapes you’ve never seen. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like fishing at all. It feels like homework, a private kind of obsession played out in spare moments. You sit hunched over a laptop, coffee going cold beside you, tilting and zooming through Google Earth, tracing blue ribbons across ridgelines and cross-referencing faint logging roads that may or may not still be passable.

It’s a process of imagination as much as anything. That creek curling out of the alpine looks promising on a screen, a pale thread snaking through the timber. But what does it look like on the ground? Is it a trickle, a torrent, or something fishable? Does it even hold trout? Most of the time you won’t know until you’re standing in it, and that’s where the appeal lies. In the age of instant information, there’s something powerful about working for uncertainty.

That’s where the silence starts.

Excerpt from Where the Silence Starts, published in the Winter Issue of Fly Fusion Magazine.
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