Green Room Fishing by Scott Burrell The winter wind rattles the storm windows and I pull a tartan blanket over my cold shoulders.  My lap is warmed by a snoring German Shorthair and my gullet by the astringent heat of a whisky.  This is how I conduct, believe it or not, some of the year’s best fishing.  Over the next few months, I hope to resist the lure of the stream through equal parts toil and planning, imagining and reflecting.  Even at the age where I appear to have developed a little patience, I couldn’t face the winter without the Green Room. We live in an old house in which I have been granted sovereign domain over exactly one room.  It is a bedroom painted a grassy shade of green that contains all a man requires to fish almost anywhere in the world.  Nearly a thousand books line the shelves and a not insubstantial number of these are fishing books.  Even a significant number of those that count as literature—Hemingway, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, in particular—contain plenty on the piscatorial arts. The room has a special cabinet featuring slots for all my rod tubes and glass cases for my reels.  An old Crate and Barrel end table serves as a tying bench.  An antique cabinet with special spots for fly patterned highball glasses and a trench for bottles of whisky and port guards the door.  The cabinet even has a spot for a small ice bucket and a compartment for storing cigars though I don’t smoke them.  Seating options consist of a small couch and coffee table and an old leather club chair with matching ottoman.  Elevating the feet is critical to this type of fishing.  I am proud of the David Ruimveld print of Michigan’s Boardman River and the copy of Winslow Homer’s “Jumping Trout” that hang on the wall.  It might not be the Union League Club, but it is cozy and sufficiently manly. I often begin evenings with plans to read an improving book; say a biography of Churchill or Washington, but soon enough some passage sends me on a frolic.  Why is it that every historic battle has been conducted along a small creek with a pleasing name and trouty description?  Before I know it, I am reaching for a Delorme in search of a creek with a similar name or comparable geography. Following the squiggly blue line and daydreaming about warmer days perishes all thoughts of Gallipoli or Valley Forge.  Blue lines eventually end up in familiar spots, which come to life in my fishing journals.  Hopefully, the applicable entry will reveal happy memories, but if not, I keep turning pages until I find a red-letter day.  Sipping the water of life, rolling back my eyes and slouching in the chair, I can almost smell the puckerbush and feel the rush of the current.  I picture the Hendrickson hatch on the Au Sable at opening day or the sulphur hatch on the Gunpowder in May or that day when dark streamers slaughtered them on the Little Lehigh. While the reverie wends its way through my drowsy comfort, it always settles on fly selection, which as if by rote puts me at the vice dashing off a half dozen of the winning dressing.  Once tying that pattern becomes too mechanical, I begin to wonder where else such a fly might be useful.  Inevitably, I am drawn to the guidebook shelf and after the appropriate selection, back to the chair.  By now the dog is so fed up with my moving around that he gives up the Green Room for his nest downstairs. Of course, one cannot read good literature or fishing stories of any kind on a cold night without a bracing drink.  So I retrieve my first whisky, now with the ice melted and making sweat rings on my tying table, and refill it in anticipation of burrowing in.  This works exceedingly well until the second whisky does its magic and all I really want to do is look at pictures.  Robert Behnke’s Trout and Salmon of North America is a perfect match here.  I have read the book cover to cover twice and the prose is as engaging as the dope is spot on, but at these times I pull it out for Joseph Tomilleri’s amazing pictures.  I am also partial at this stage to the photography of Ed Wargin in Voekler’s Pond and William Stite in The Angler’s Life. The pictures serve only as an appetizer and whet an appetite for the more substantial morsels of the poets.  Who should it be tonight? There is a hokey scene in the movie White Christmas where Bing Crosby describes what type of sandwich he eats if he wants to dream about a certain type of girl—“Turkey: I dream about a brunette, a little on the scat back side, but oh, sexy.”  I believe in this theory as it applies to books so I end each of these Green Room sessions trying to force sweet dreams. If I want to dream about a hike-in trip to the Shenandoah National Park I reach for Chris Camuto’s A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge.  If it’s my Groundhog Day on Nelson’s (the day I would like to be repeated over and over again) I pull out Mike Lawson’s Spring Creek.  Feeling homesick for my Northern Michigan then it’s Jerry Dennis’s A Place on the Water.  Sometimes I want to dream about a Europe that I love and that I long to fish so I choose Prosek’s Complete Angler or Norm Zeigler’s Rivers of Shadow, Rivers of Sun.   If I want to suspend geography and envision ethereal trout rising in a limestone Valhalla Marinaro’s Modern Dry Fly Code does the trick.  And on those nights when I am blue and in need of something to burnish my soul it doesn’t matter that I have read Big Two-Hearted River at least hundred times. Hatches Magazine Subscription Price: $6.95 for each issue The Premiere issue is ready for shipping & the Fall 2008 issue will be available September 1st.