One day when I was a little boy I went fishing with my father and my uncle--Snuffy and Smitty to each other. We went to a place we called a creek to fish for bream and bluegills. The creek was the upper fork of Potomac Creek, one of dozens of tributaries of the nearby Potomac River. This little stream was about twelve feet wide. It was filled with alternating log jams and debris dams, silt bars and gravel bottoms. Occasionally there were pools where, except in the deepest ones, we could see the fish. The deep pools we skirted past on the bank, but fished them carefully before walking on.

I remember it as a day that, now as I look back, put into place all the elements of my love of the outdoors and my particular love of fishing. What I remember is my father and my uncle talking, laughing, and fishing all at once, working their way upstream, lifting me over the snags or across the deeper pools. I remember the laughter and the sounds of birds, and I remember the fish. We must have caught 20 or 30, but with each one Uncle Smitty said, "We don't need this," so we threw them back. We never called it catch-and-release back then, but I was learning lessons that would guide me ever since--lessons of the best kind--where the teachers are fathers and uncles and grandfathers. I have never ceased to learn their lessons. Sometimes, today, despite a Ph.D. and thousands of books, I think the only things I know worth knowing I learned from them--mostly in fields and woods and along streams.

We fished and explored, climbing the banks, peeking around the turns. At the end of the day as I scampered up the tall bank at the bridge with wet and muddy sneakers, I slipped and fell backwards into my father and knocked us both into the bridge pool. It is one of the few times I heard him laugh out loud. It was a great day of fishing--and we came home wet with no fish! We winked at Mom's pretended disgust at our ineptness.

I suppose I date my love of little streams from this experience. So often when we grow up and begin to fish "seriously" it is the serious waters that interest us--the big lakes and rivers, the bay, the ocean. These require great skill, much equipment and truly great seriousness of mind to enjoy them safely and successfully. But for a child the world of fishing and waters need not be so large nor certainly so serious. Potomac Creek, Hazel Run, Mott's Run, and all the others too small for names were the streams of my childhood. These were the streams to play in, streams measured by the measures of a child's body--measures such as hops and jumps, measures such as twigs and small sticks, and tiny fish darting past our toes and fingers.

Today, more than forty years later, I have come back to these small streams. I sit beside them again, wade in them, and watch the light wiggle over the pebbles in the bottom. And I delight in the laughter of children throwing rocks and giggling as they wet their clothes and upset their moms. And today as I look at the deepening loss of environmental quality across our nation, as I look at generations of young people lost about the outdoors, as I look at the pointless pollutions that seep from our yards and farms into our once pure waters I remember the small streams of my childhood. The lessons of that childhood are still unfolding as I explain to my and other men's children why these little waters are so important.

The smallest streams may be no more than 8" or 12" wide. Here is the source of the true health of the watershed. These little streams begin the first accumulation and filtration of the water as it seeps back to the sea. This is where rocks begin to separate into sand, where nutrients and natural chemicals begin to dissolve, where the first invertebrates grow and begin to pass their life into the food chain downstream. Here darters, minnows, sculpins and chub rule the miniature pools. In the micro spaces between grains of sand the toxins and pesticides begin to do their first deadly work in the river system. The final ecological health of the big waters is only an accumulation of all that we have done to the little streams that lie further upstream out of sight to all but children.

As a fisherman, I also discovered that little streams don't necessarily mean little fish. I know of a stream where a ten pound fish came from water hardly more than one rod length across. I once took a wonderful rainbow trout, a fish of ancient appearance, dark and mottled, and with a hooked jaw or kype, perhaps the best fish I have ever taken, in a stream less than one rod wide. He had been feeding successfully for years in the bottom of a pool hardly larger than a twin bed when I saw just a glint of early morning sun touch his golden side. He took my Gray Stonefly and in the fight that followed almost took it for good. Many of my fishing friends smile at my interest in these small streams, but they often hold good fish. Sometimes the small streams that feed tailwater rivers attract large fish who discover the rich supply of insects and minnows in them. Occasionally the big fish feed in the small streams when the water is high, and sometimes they linger behind when the water goes down.

Little streams can be very hard to fish especially if the fish is a trout. I have one little stream that I go to from time to time that is about four feet wide, and it will almost always produce a brown trout. I go there in the winter when I can't get on the big rivers because of generator flow; I go in those times when I absolutely need to fish and it seems spring will never come. And in that little stream, if I take a brown trout, it is usually because I got the fly within an inch or so of the sheltering root or limb the fish was under. This stream is in a part of the watershed that is completely overgrown so conventional casting--especially with a flyrod--is out of the question. On this stream I do a lot of dabbling and a lot of half-roll casts. Brush and limbs are everywhere and I spend a lot of time unwinding leader and flies from twigs and branches. Little streams are meant to teach us patience.

These little streams also offer something that may be as rare as the big fish they hold--almost perfect solitude. These streams are not glamorous, so they do not attract either the pot-fishermen or the pro-style fishermen. So they are good places to be alone. And they are very good places to take a child and begin that instruction in the laughter of little waters where the earth is seamed and where all oceans begin. That one day on a little stream may be the best gift my father ever gave me.