Having been driven off some of my favorite rivers in maine by an endless onslaught of high water I decided that a trip down memory lane with my fly rod would be a great way to spend a drizzly evening. I decided to hit a small hometown brook that I had not fished since childhood. Armed with a box of nymphs an plenty of DEET I headed out to my fish my childhood haunt, a small spring fed brook that in years past had swarmed with Brooktrout, and likewise swarmed with neighborhood kids, traveling beaten trails along the stream. I had heard stories that the brook had suffered from siltation, and no longer was the place it had been in the past. That the brookies were few and far between, and that it was just not the same. Leaving my truck behind I slipped through the dripping woods and headed toward some of the “upper pools ” as they were called as a kid. Much to my amazement none of the old mature wood along the brook had been cut. The same old willows hung low over the pools , the same old hemlocks and pines gave shade, and the remains of the rotting snowmobile bridge was still to be seen in the brook. The one difference was that the old footpaths had nearly grown in. paths that at one time were beaten to mud now showed hardly a trace of mans presence.Hoping against hope I quietly tied on a small bead head nymph. Maybe the fish were still here after all. treading lightly, I flicked my fly toward a small undercut in the bank, only to have it hang up in a spider web above the pool! With a gentle tug it plunked into the water and right into a log. ” Gotta love Brook fishing….” I thought to myself while I tied on another fly.Having disturbed that run I moved about twenty feet upstream to the next “pool”. This time the cast was on the mark, and a fired up Brook trout raced out and snatched the nymph. The little jewel of a trout was beautiful, his colors vibrant and most importantly in my mind was the fact that the trout were still there!! I began feverishly working all the old haunts now. The Brookies were still there, in fact even more numerous than I remember from childhood. Each pool and undercut was home to a minature “trophy” . The Spring pool, the stone culvert, the farm spring, the falls and the willow pool were not only still there, they still held fish!! Memories from my childhood days spent learning to fish flooded back as I cast from the same spots that I had thirty years ago. I have been fortunate enough to travel and catch some tremendous fish, but trophies are all relative to their surroundings and as I trudged out of the woods in the rain it was good to know that some things were still “right” in the fishing world and the trout brook of my younger days still swarmed with speckled jewels.