Mark Taylor

Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.

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BUENA VISTA -- Sitting silently content on a riverside rock, William Humphries seemed lost to the world.

In a way, he was.

"This is where I usually fish, and I've caught some big bass here," said Humphries, his eyes on the tip of the well-worn fishing rod resting in the crook of a forked stick. "I used to come here when I was a kid."

This river doesn't look much different now than it did then. The riverside trees are larger, and more have "No Trespassing" signs on them than they did 50 years ago.

But the rocks along the bank are the same, the river's path little changed.

"The fishing isn't as good as it was," mused Humphries, a 67-year-old lifelong resident of Buena Vista. "You used to catch a stringer full in no time. Now you can't hardly catch one.

"But I don't care if I catch one or not. I just like to get to the river and relax. It's peaceful."

And just like that Humphries had captured what had brought me here, the latest stop on my three-decade obsessive quest for smallmouth bass.

This journey, which started on a river near my childhood home in Southern Oregon, has had its stages, from fascinations with catching as many fish as possible, to quests for trophies, to where it is now -- just getting out there and enjoying it.

This summer the path will take on a more organized form.

The Maury River is the first stop on what I'm calling a Summer Smallmouth Tour, a two-month trip to eight of this region's smallmouth bass waters.

The tour will include some of the expected players, famous rivers such as the James and New. And it will include others that don't get as much attention. They will all be public and accessible.

It won't be just about fishing, but about people, places and issues.

Why start here?

Nostalgia, really.

The Maury is about the size of that river of my youth, the South Umpqua.

And the settings are similar, too, both rivers flowing through rolling rural country that is home to people like Humphries who find joy in the smallmouth bass.

I was on that river almost every summer day when I was a kid.

While the stream ran full of stocked trout and huge, wild steelhead in the cooler months, summers were another story. It became warm and quiet and clear, and squawfish and suckers were the only things around. But they kept us busy and that was fine.

Then one day I saw two strange fish finning in my favorite hole.

They were green, with piercing red eyes. Their bodies were deeper than trout, but not as deep as the sunfish we'd catch in local ponds.

They wouldn't bite.

When I reported the sighting to my dad, his eyes brightened.

It was confirmation of something he'd already heard: Smallmouth bass had arrived in the river, courtesy of an illegal stocking.

We went to one of his favorite fishing holes, a deep, boulder-filled channel at the bottom of a small riffle.

I cast my nightcrawler-baited hook into the run and watched the bobber bounce. Suddenly it disappeared and I was fast to my first smallmouth.

The 10-inch bass pulled and jumped. It was much stronger than a trout of similar size.

My days of fishing for squawfish and suckers ended that instant.

On that recent warm Sunday afternoon more than 30 years later, Humphries surveyed my equipment, an ultralight spinning rod rigged up with a little Rapala plug.

"So, you use artificials?" he wondered "I've never had much luck with artificials."

At his feet was an open plastic carton of nightcrawlers, the big worms wriggling in the dirt.

I had a carton of nightcrawlers in a cooler back in my truck. I'd left them because it was warm, and nightcrawlers get nasty fast when they get warm.

Still, I knew what I had to do.

"I'll be right back," I said.

Returning, I wished Humphries luck and headed upstream.

At the first appealing pool I spotted a cruising 10-inch bass. I pitched a whole nightcrawler toward it, and the bass turned and attacked.

As I knew it would.