A trout fisherman discovers it’s not always conventional medicine that brings respite. Courtesy Garden & Gun, December 2025/January 2026 edition, by Jeff Zillgitt

Two fried chicken thighs and two legs. When I shuffled into the Wolftown Mercantile Country Store, on a two-lane road near two of my favorite brook trout streams in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, that’s the order I placed as a matter of routine.

But on this day in late March 2023, I had no business going fly fishing, much less eating a meal for two. Three weeks earlier, I’d lost 80 percent of my stomach during surgery for gastric cancer. Alison, my wife, was desperate to get me out of a funk (even a bit of depression) and asked my friend Grover to go fishing with me. “When am I going to get my old Jeff back?” Alison asked. She knew getting me to a mountain stream was a step in that direction.

My new tiny stomach allowed just a few nibbles, but returning to one of my fly-fishing rituals felt gratifying—a dose of normalcy amid uncertainty, not to mention a much-needed break from the bland hospital food and unsatisfying high-calorie shakes that nourished me postsurgery. In a quick photo Grover took of me, I’m holding a nice brook trout, with a hint of a smile coated in a sheen of grease emerging. The stream, the trout, the fried chicken: They all helped me find a day better than the one before.

If you fish, hunt, hike, kayak, or boat, you undoubtedly have rituals—routines that become embedded in your pursuits. Rituals are not always the same as superstitions. Superstitions are attached to luck or fortune, and I don’t ascribe my fishing success or lack thereof to my rituals. I practice them because they bring comfort, appreciation, and balance.

Take the streamside lunch. Or even better, the in-stream lunch, sitting on a boulder with water flowing around me. I need that meal to feel right about a day on the water. Beyond sustenance, I need the joy of sharing that meal with a friend, when discussions drift from fishing to other important matters: family, marriage, living, dying. I have never walked into the woods and waded a stream to escape anything. I go to find and rediscover and leave the mountains a better person than when I entered—or at least with a reset equilibrium and deeper connection to the natural world.

Lunch doesn’t always come from the same place. Depends on where I’m fishing. Sometimes it’s a chicken salad sandwich from Red Truck Bakery in Warrenton, Virginia, on my way to a stream near Sperryville. Sometimes it’s a Capri sub (prosciutto, Genoa salami, provolone, and spiced capicola) from the Italian Store in Arlington, or it might be a pulled pork sandwich from Bean’s Barbecue in Edinburg, while headed to a seldom-fished brook trout stream tucked inside the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests.

As time has passed since that first post-surgery outing, I now eat more than a few bites. The surgeon told me the 20 percent of my stomach that endures would “stretch out,” and I’d be left with a functioning organ the size of a small fist. It’s still a task to eat a large meal, but my enjoyment of the streamside lunch has not waned. And I find that when I’m removed from the stress of daily life and eased by the peace of the stream, sometimes, even if just for a minute, my situation doesn’t feel as daunting.

The barbecue place sits next door to Murray’s Fly Shop, the store Harry Murray founded in 1962. He is the unofficial dean of brook trout fishing in Virginia. His book, Trout Fishing in the Shenandoah National Park, is required reading, and learning from Murray will put you into fish whether on a mountain creek along the spine of the Blue Ridge or big Western rivers. My copy is tattered from years of use, and it’s one of a handful of fishing books I revisit during the winter, when my fishing is reduced to daydreams—another of my rituals. I flip through for tips I had forgotten and for stream information. Should I try Big Run or East Hawksbill Creek in the spring?

As with others enamored with both fly fishing and literature, A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean’s classic, remains a steadfast friend. No matter how many passages I have marked, I find new ones to highlight each year. Christopher Camuto’s A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge is a naturalist’s solemn rumination on each season. I can open to most any chapter and I know where he is. Harry Middleton’s The Earth Is Enough is another book I return to each winter. An extraordinarily thoughtful author on all things fly fishing in the Southern Appalachians, Middleton, who died in 1993 and spent his last days working on a garbage truck, deserves wider appreciation.

Those books and authors have been with me for decades—companions unaware of their impact. In late 2016 and early 2017, I underwent treatment for metastatic colon cancer, and chemotherapy caused a debilitating and life-threatening heart condition called coronary vasospasms that kept me awake through the night. As I struggled through discomfort in the quiet of 3:00 a.m., books about rivers, trout, and fly fishing provided intermittent respites from the pain, allowing my mind to get lost in the waters of Maclean’s Big Blackfoot River and Middleton’s Starlight Creek. Middleton’s honest, brutal, and poetic prose is a soulful ode to small mountain trout streams and the earned wisdom that spills from the hills. It’s a salve for the mind, spirit, and heart.

“The angler hopes for nothing and prays for everything,” Middleton wrote. “He expects nothing and accepts all that comes his way. And although he knows all along that he will never sink his hook into a trout stream’s true mystery, the desire to try, to cast once more and once more again, is never quenched, for there is always that chance that one more cast will carry him beyond skill and luck and bring him untarnished magic.”

See, it is not always conventional medicine that provides healing. Another spring arrived and another one after that, and then a few more, and I am grateful. I read those books before cancer and will continue rereading them, waiting for another spring.

Even the drive to the stream is an important ritual—a snippet of time reserved for undisturbed thought. With each mile, stress diminishes and excitement mounts. I cue up a playlist of familiar tunes—the SteelDrivers’ “Sticks That Made Thunder,” Tim O’Brien’s “Restless Spirit Wandering,” Steep Canyon Rangers’ “The Mountain’s Gonna Sing,” and lately, Billy Strings’s “I’m One of Those,” among them—and it’s as if I can hear the fiddle coming down the mountain. When I get closer to the water, I turn down the volume, roll down the windows, and listen for the stream. The river’s song is vital too. Too loud, and the water might be too high to fish. Too quiet, and it might be too low. But there is a volume that indicates the perfect flow. Listen to what the river says.

While I’ve long appreciated time on the water, I’d be naive to minimize the impact of two gastrointestinal cancers on my gratitude. Time is limited, and for me, that calculus is more acute. The days turn from endless to numbered, with the idea that another winter and another rereading of a classic will lead to one more streamside lunch. That hope has helped sustain me this far.

At the end of my final day of the season last year, in mid-November, I hiked back to my car and snipped off the fly, an orange Stimulator pattern, a go-to for brook trout in these waters. As I tossed it into the center console, I recalled that I’ve kept a fly, not the same one, in that spot for about the past decade. A leader and a spool of tippet sit alongside. They stay there through the winter—not as talismans but as reminders, of days spent on the river, and of days still ahead.

An audio version is here https://gardenandgun.com/articles/healing-on-the-fly-how-i-found-myself-again-in-the-rituals-of-the-stream/?utm_source=emma&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=december2025_tots_2&utm_content=troutfisherman