I am back from an always-too-short annual pilgrimmage to Grand Lake Stream (pop. 130), way Down East near the New Brunswick border. The third novel in the Mike Bowditch series is set in Washington County so I justified this trip, to some degree, as research. But in reality, I've spent too many hours this past year behind a desk, a podium, or the wheel of a car, and I needed some time on the stream to clear my head.
Grand Lake Stream is famous as a destination for fly-fishermen and, oddly, economists. I belong to the former category. The weather was unseasonably warm, and the land-locked Atlantic salmon (which are fall spawners) have just started to drop down from West Grand Lake into the river itself. But I brought four salmon, two smallmouth, and a fat fallfish (known in Maine as a chub) to hand on my first afternoon.
And for a while I forgot all those worries that had seemed so important the day before.