Knees creak by wee creeks

First brookie of the day in hand.
First brookie of the day in hand.
This spring I have spent more time than usual creeping around the “little blue lines,” those streams that show up on good maps as, yes, little blue lines.
This is where to find wild trout. Often brook trout, occasionally browns or rainbows.
The first thing to do is get used to kneeling. The fish are generally aggressive, but they are also incredibly spooky.
Once they catch sight of an angler, or even a rod going back and forth, they will zoom off to their hidey holes and sulk.
If you don’t believe me, go to one of these streams and wade right on in. Watch as the little dark shapes whizz around.
When I was a callow youth of 45, kneeling was no big deal. At my advanced age, I have gone to knee pads, as worn by roofers and the fellows who restock potato chips at the grocery store. (It was one of the latter who kindly took his pads off and showed them to me.)
Reading the water is more important than ever in this context. What you want is “soft water.”
Imagine a pool that has a chute or plume of water coming in from above. As the faster-moving water enters the pool, it creates white water. On either side of the chute, there is calmer water. That’s soft water.
You’ll read about finding the seam. The seam is the line between slower and faster moving currents, or white water and soft water.
Trout like to hang around somewhere that offers protection from predators, not too much current to battle against, and adjacent to faster current, which brings food.
Finding the balance of these elements is what trout do all day, except once a year, when they have what passes for sex in the fish world.
It’s a depressing prospect for an ambitious fish, so don’t dwell on it.
So when approaching a likely pool, identify the different currents, areas of soft water, and the seams. Do this from a kneeling or crouching position, of course.
Soft water flows down the little blue line.Patrick L. Sullivan
Now you have figured out where to stick the fly. Pausing briefly to savor the lower back pain, try a dry fly first. A bushy dry fly that floats well and that you can see.
Park it in the soft water. It will bounce around. Don’t let it sit more than a second or two. Flick it in, wait and flick it out.
Sometimes they’ll whack it right away. Other times they will want to see it a few times.
Next hit the seam. Sometimes it will disappear in the foam. Maybe it will sink. Don’t worry about it. Keep flicking.
When you do this often enough, you’ll get good at making miniscule adjustments from cast to cast. On big water, this is a matter of feet or a few inches. On a little blue line, it’s an inch or two tops.
None of these casts are going to be long. Use water loads, bow-and-arrow casts, even roll casts if you’re good at them. (I am not.)
You’re probably not going to be rearing back with a standard forehand cast too often. Not enough room, and no point to it either, since you’re sneaking around in kneepads and peering around boulders.
Whatever you do, don’t get stuck at one pool just because the big one flashed your fly but did not take it.
A good rule of thumb is: Show the fly to them six times. After that assume you are boring them, and move on.
When do you go subsurface? As usual, it depends.
One of my favorite tactics is to use a Chubby Chernobyl or any foam-bodied dry fly, really. It serves as an indicator 90% of the time.
I tie a piece of fluorocarbon tippet, usually 4X, to the bend of the dry fly hook with a clinch knot. The tippet piece is usually between one and two feet.
I start with a wet fly or an unweighted nymph. If that doesn’t work, I go to a brass beadhead nymph, which sinks some. And if that’s a bust, I go to a nymph with a tungsten bead that really sinks.
And if all that fails I cuss a bit and chuck a Wooly Bugger in there, just to show them who’s boss.
What rod to use?
I have a number of small stream rods, ranging in length from five and a half feet to eight feet, and in line weights from one to five.
More often than not I grab a Cabelas CGR six and a half foot four weight. It’s a slow action fiberglass rod, quite inexpensive. I have a discontinued CGR click and pawl reel for it, and a double tapered line.
For fixed line fishing in small streams my favorite is Dragontail’s Kaida, a zoom rod that fishes at nine feet and a bit, and 10 and a half feet. This is considerably longer than the fly rod, but the extra leverage allows me to keep most or all of the line and tippet off the water. The extra length is also helpful if I latch onto one of the little blue line Leviathans.
About that: Little blue line fishing is extra-crazy. You have to accept this.
After all, you are expending considerable energy in difficult terrain, performing a highly technical task, in pursuit of quarry you are not going to kill and eat.
And even if you did, a creel full of six-inch trout will yield only enough meat to cover a few Saltine crackers.
You wouldn’t be fishing for dinner, but for hors d’oeuvres.
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.