The Virginia countryside was glorious in the bright green shades of Spring , the May sun coming out of a clear blue sky pushed the morning temperatures up through the seventies, and the Rose River, still cold after its tumble out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was full of fat rainbow trout waiting to be caught, some of them by young Joe Devan. But Joe, in the words of one observer at the 2nd Annual Two-Fly Tournament hosted by Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc., was "kinda glum."

Mind you, Joe's glumness did have some legitimacy, even if he had barely missed a one-way trip to one paradise in exchange for a day at this more earthly paradise on Doug Dear's Rose River Farm. Joe is a kid from Baltimore who learned the hard way about war and about a particular type of roadside bomb that the military, with its penchant for acronyms, calls an EFP, which stands for Explosively Formed Projectile. All you need to know about EFPs is that one took Joe's right leg off below the knee during his fifth month in Iraq with the 101st Airborne. The shrapnel from the blast also "sliced one ass cheek right in two," Joe said, which has made sitting very uncomfortable ever since he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in February to be sewed up and made as whole as possible again. Now Joe is nineteen years old and has a cute wife named Stephanie who is even younger and has a prosthesis where his right calf, ankle and foot used to be. He's new to the prosthesis so he walks with crutches when he's not in his wheelchair.

So you might excuse Joe for a touch of glumness now and then, even standing there on the banks of the Rose River about to go flyfishing for the first time in his young life under the tutelage of Kiki, a bamboo rod of a woman who will be his volunteer guide today.

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, Inc., was created by a retired Navy captain named Ed Nicholson, who was also present, managing by walking around and occasionally speaking into a walkie-talkie or a TV station's camera. Ed was like a comet, trailed by a tail of people wanting to ask him something or tell him something or just say hello. A couple of years ago Ed had gone to Walter Reed for, as he says, "issues of my own," and saw for the first time all the young wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and he thought, as a fly-fisherman will do, "These people need to go fishing." With support from Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers and virtually everyone else he asked, he started PHWFF, Inc. and began to take the wounded warriors on fishing trips. In 2007 the organization pulled off the First Annual Two-Fly Tournament, and it was such a hit that for this second annual event Doug Dear's streamside fields looked like the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Two white tents, a big one for eating and socializing and a smaller one for a seven-piece bluegrass band, flapped in the May breeze. Men (and Women) in Waders clomped around, waving flyrods and discussing which two flies to use ("Lose 'em and you're done," they were warned) while in the streamside gazebo that served as tourney headquarters people like Sandy Pappaianni and Toni Duchi and Lloyd Williams handled the admin stuff, checking off rosters and assigning stream beats to the two-angler teams.

Joe Devan was assigned the beat just above the bridge where Doug's road comes in from the state road. Joe and Kiki and Stephanie and Joe's chair and crutches were driven upstream to the beat by a kid at the wheel of an ATV big enough to have a backseat.

"I'm thinking it would be okay to get this leg wet," Joe said, looking down at the stainless steel and carbon fiber device below his right knee. "It's a temporary leg anyway."

"No, Joe," Stephanie said. "It's not a water leg. Remember?"

"That's right," Joe agreed. "It's not a water leg." No wading.

With the help of crutches and Stephanie, Joe made it down over a little embankment and onto a strand of freestones which would be his casting platform. Kiki coached him on where to cast, and Joe put lots of energy into it, false-casting four or five times then dropping his line across the current, which took his fly and strike indicator down to where the rainbows were holding. Kiki was full of positive reinforcement. "Good, Joe! Good one," she cried after nearly every cast, good or not. But there was a cloudless sky, and a bright sun high overhead, and the rainbows seemed happy to work on their tans, or maybe they were on diets, or, as one angler put it, had "temporary lockjaw." But finally one fish forgot not to strike, and Joe Devan had hooked his first trout on a fly.

When the air horn signaled the end of fishing, Joe and Kiki clambered up the bank and the ATV came back to pick them up. Stephanie had already walked back to the tent on her own, and Joe was anxious. "Where's my wife?" he wanted to know. When Joe and Kiki reached the tent, Joe saw Stephanie and brightened. Someone asked Joe, "How'd you do up there?"

Joe tried to nonchalant it, but he couldn't pull it off. "I landed a 15-inch trout!" he said, not without amazement. Joe Devan was not glum now. He sat down with Stephanie and told her what she'd missed: her husband catching a rainbow -- in more ways than one.

For the first time in my flyfishing life, I have purchased something from Cabela's. L.L. Bean had better watch out.

I needed a flyrod rack, something to hold my various rods, in their tubes. The old lean-'em-in-the-corner method of rod storage looked a bit sloppy and disorganized. Time to spruce up my image, make the place look a bit less like a bachelor flyfisherman's pad. I don't know why my office at home should be any neater than my professorial office at the university, but it was just one of those urges for yet another piece of fishing equipment -- or in this case, non-fishing but fishing-related equipment.

Each week of this past semester as I have driven north on the Maine Turnpike on my weekly peregrination from classroom to home I have cast glances at the humongous new Cabela's store taking shape in Scarborough. In the past I have thought of Cabela's as a southern basser's store, a place to buy another jar of DayGlo orange pork rinds or a Hula Popper. Then I received Cabela's flyfishing catalog in the mail.

Not only did the Cabela's catalog outweigh the L.L. Bean Spring Fishing catalog by nearly a hundred pages, they have a wider range of options on rods, reels and other gear. And they had something L.L. Bean did not offer in their catalog or in their store: a flyrod rack. Just what I'd been looking for! I went to the Cabela's website, where the rack was even cheaper than in the catalog, and bought one. It arrived within a few days. I unpacked it, assembled it using only a Phillips-head screwdriver, and it now stands in a corner of my office where all of the rods that used to lean in various corners are now standing in neat ranks in the rod holder.

Needless to say I am not a shill for Cabela's and I have been a faithful customer of Bean's for forty years; I still feel like I'm sneaking off to the No-Tell Motel with a floozy when I buy cut-rate flies online. But as I said, L.L. Bean had better keep its corporate head up. The Scarborough Cabela's opens in May.

The weather hasn't warmed up quite enough for a trip to the river yet, and the pond is still covered with ice. My boss, Louie, and I were reminiscing about the Opening Days of our youth when we would crash through the crust of the remnant snowbanks to reach open water and dangle a fly or a worm into the frigid waters in anticipation of the first trout of the season. Often, in those years, my first serious fishing would not occur until school was out and the Old Man and the Bro and I would head north to the Alder Stream to spend a few days in Norman Field's little camp. In the still-frosty June mornings we headed through the woods to the stream, which in those days abounded with little brookies. I fished alone, usually, while the Bro and the Old Man would fish together. We would come back to camp in the late afternoon with bulging creels, having each taken our ten-fish limits. On the little gas range, the Old Man would fry some bacon, and then in the hot bacon fat he would fry the trout, rolled in corn meal, and we would gorge on the crisp, unforgettably delicious little fish.

It was not until I caught the 20-inch brook trout that David Footer mounted and which now beautifies my home office that I stopped killing trout. In the past couple of seasons at the Dam it has pained me to see anglers catch big brookies and kill them -- though of course, given my personal history, I couldn't fault the anglers. This season's Open Water Fishing Regulations thus bear good tidings for me: all brook trout caught in the Dam pool must be released alive at once. As compensation, it would appear, the size limit on landlocked salmon has been lowered from 18 to 16 inches, with a bag limit of one per day.

One other change in the regulations cheered me: from the New Hampshire border to the Gilead bridge, fishing in the Androscoggin is catch-and-release, artificial lures only. Of course, an artificial lure may have as many as six hooks, which can do a lot of damage to a fish and can render the catch-and-release regulation less meaningful. I think artificial lures in such waters should be limited to a single hook.

As I write, it's Opening Day on real grass: Fenway Park, where the World Series Champion Red Sox played their home opener against the Detroit Tigers. What happier conjunction of events exists, than Opening Days on Maine waters and at Fenway Park? Springtime is here, and we rejoice.