Steelhead Alley is what they call the stretch of Lake Erie shoreline from Ohio to New York where the Pennsylvania streams come down out of the hills, and Elk Creek west of Erie is the main street of it. The fish are rainbow trout the state has stocked for decades that go out into the lake and come back in the fall built like something else, chrome and thick-shouldered and ten pounds on a good year. They need rain to come up. In October everybody in Erie County watches the weather like farmers, and when it finally rains hard on a Tuesday the creek goes from a trickle to a brown rush, and two days later, when it clears to the color of weak tea, the steelhead are in.
I fished it with a man I met in the parking lot at the Route 20 bridge at five in the morning, who said his name was Dennis and who had the look of someone who had called in sick. Elk Creek in October is not a wilderness experience. You share the holes. There is an etiquette to it, the rotation, the quiet nod, the way nobody says anything when the guy upstream hooks one and his line comes screaming through every drift below him.Dennis fished a centerpin, a big free-spooling reel with no drag, and he could float an egg sack down a forty-yard run with a touch I have not matched since.
My first fish took a pink sucker spawn pattern under an indicator at the tailout of a bend pool, and for a moment I thought I was snagged on the shale, because the whole creek bottom there is flat gray slabs of it. Then the shale moved upstream. A fresh steelhead in a creek thirty feet wide has nowhere to go but everywhere, and it went, up through the pool and back down past me and under a log, with the whole bank watching and offering suggestions. Dennis netted it. Eight pounds, maybe nine, silver as a spoon, with a faint pink line down its side that said it had not been in from the lake more than a day or two.
We took six between us and lost more than that, which is the ratio on Elk Creek and nobody complains. By noon every drift picked up a maple leaf, and the creek was dropping and clearing by the hour.Dennis said tomorrow would be better and the day after would be too good, meaning too crowded. He let every fish go. He said he had a freezer full from the last run and his wife had stopped asking.
In the lot afterward he gave me a dozen egg sacks tied in pink mesh and told me the real secret to Elk Creek, which is to live close enough to go the morning after it rains. I live four hundred miles away. He said that was a problem with me and not with the creek.
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