Here we are at last, teetering on the brink of fishing season, the time of year when the first hint of a soft warm breeze makes fools of us and sends us tramping through the mud and rotting snow to reach open water, as though we were lost in the desert and crawling toward the mirage of an oasis. It's been a long winter. We can tie only so many flies. We can inventory our gear only so many times. It's all there. It's ready. It's waiting.

Outside of Keeley's Banquet Center, in the parking lot, the license plates of the vehicles were a giveaway: FLYFSH2, TROUT, FLYCST, BOG NO5, MOXIE. Inside, members of the Sebago Chapter of Trout Unlimited hovered over tables holding a banquet of angling delights -- Winston, Orvis, Sage and Bean flyrods, Battenkill and Abel and SA reels, boxes of flies, a float trip on the Kennebec, framed works of angling art -- all of it to leave the hall that night with the winners of the bucket raffles, silent auctions and live auctions. Oh, yes, we ate and drank, too, but the real feast was on display on the auction tables. The venerable David Footer (Visit Dave's website) contributed several pieces of his highly-prized angling art to the auctions. Dave is all about catch-and-release now and would rather carve and paint your trophy than skin it and mount it. So too Gene Bahr (Visit Gene's website), who displayed several of his astonishingly beautiful trout and salmon carvings, exquisite in detail and vivid in color.

A century ago a magnificent eleven-pound Atlantic salmon left the famed Bangor Pool at the end of an angler's line, and the angler turned the fish over to Nash of Maine, as the Norway, Maine taxidermist billed himself and his patented mezzo process, in which he mounted the skin of the fish over a bas-relief wood carving. Several examples of Nash's work, now highly prized by collectors, are on display at L.L. Bean in Freeport. As the mezzo is not a full-bodied mount, and there are two sides to every fish, this process allowed Nash to make two mezzos from each fish, one heading right and the other going left. And just as there are two sides to every fish, there are often two sides to every fishing tale. Some time back, David Footer acquired the right-facing mezzo of the aforementioned eleven-pound salmon and applied his painstaking restoration talents to it, resulting in a like-new Nash of Maine mezzo. He kept searching for the other side of the fish, and when he finally located it he was tickled to see that the angler who labeled his eleven-pound fish might have exaggerated just a wee bit: the other half was identified as a ten-and-a-half-pound salmon.

The annual Spring Fishing Expo at L.L. Bean was, in a word, disappointing. Much of what was on offer was the same sort of stuff you'd find on any given weekend at the new Hunting & Fishing store -- fly-tying demonstrations, book signings, instructional clinics. To be sure, a handful of big-name anglers including Dave and Emily Whitlock were on hand to tie flies, sign books and engage in a question-and-answer session. (Missing was the entertaining Lefty Kreh, who apparently had recently injured a leg when he missed a step when dismounting from a stage after a presentation.) A few exhibitors lined the passageway connecting the H&F store to the main store. But only two presentations were on the program, one on bass fishing by perennial presenter Harry Vanderweide, and the other on taking your kids fishing, by Emily Jones of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Both of these were made amid the clutter of the H&F store. The impression one got after climbing the stairs to the fishing department was that it was business as usual. Maybe the hunting department on the first floor should have offered a clinic on "Tracking the Elusive Spring Fishing Expo" to anyone heading upstairs. What's more, the big Q&A session with the stars -- a sort of "Inside the Actors' Studio" without James Lipton -- was held in the Casco Conference Center nearly a mile away, rather than in the big white tent which had been erected in years past just outside the store but which was conspicuous by its absence this year.

In past expos the most popular events were the presentations, with video and/or slides or PowerPoint, by good anglers who had been to interesting places and could maybe tell us one new thing that would make the upcoming season more interesting and productive. Those sessions in the big white tent were always packed to the gills, and Bean's could have filled the tent over and over if they had signed up more such speakers. Personally, I enjoy stopping and chatting with lodge operators (I think there were but two), gadget makers (I saw only one, the HMH boys from Brunswick who make tying vises), wardens and guides; the selection seemed slim this year.

What's more, no free box of flies as in years past. This year we had to buy $25 worth of fishing stuff to get the flies -- this after Bean's management reported a year of healthy profits.

The most interesting exhibitor, to my mind, was a tall, attractive young woman named Ellen McCaleb, who is a fish carver in the way that, say, Carrie Stevens was a fly-tyer. If you're a catch-and-release angler, and you catch a trophy fish, you can send Ellen pictures, measurements, and eloquent rhapsodies on the beauty of the beast, and Ellen will carve and paint a lifesize basswood replica of your prize. The finished product will -- and I hope I'm not getting too technical here -- knock your socks off. In fact Ellen told us of one chap who called her, sobbing "Thank you, thank you!" when he unwrapped his trophy brook trout, such a thing of beauty it was.

Ellen left a life in stocks and bonds to carve fish. Don't we all wish for such a career transit? She studied the work of the great British masters of the genre, whose works now fetch six-figure sums at auctions, but she is almost entirely self-taught. She taught herself well. Check out her work at FishCarvings.com.

Last year I wrote about my one attempt to go flyfishing in Afghanistan. The entry began:

Afghanistan and flyfishing are not often linked in the same sentence. Afghanistan is not a destination touted by the outfitters who fly anglers to the exotic last-best-place-on-earth spots such as Russia's Kamchatka or Tierra del Fuego. But in the 1980s, when I was working with the Afghan Resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, I heard stories about a "crazy doctor" who managed to sneak into the north of Afghanistan every year, escorted by an armed band of Afghan mujaheddin, to flyfish for brown trout. I ascertained that there were indeed brown trout, introduced in the 19th century by the British, in the cold streams of the mountains north of the Panjshir Valley where the Soviet occupiers had only minimal command and control. The doctor didn't sound too crazy to me. I had to try it.

Last week I received the following email:

The "crazy doctor" was not a doctor nor crazy...he was myself! I used to visit my adoption family somewhere in north Hindu Kush where trout were abundant in the 70's and 80's. I went back to visit them again since 2001 but there is no more trout around villages, they have been fished by explosives during the war. Now you must go far away in the mountains to have some chance to get one. One remark: brown trout have not been introduced by British, they are mentioned by Marco Polo and also by Herodote.

In further correspondence with the sender, Jean-José Puig, I learned that his first fishing trip in Afghanistan was in 1973, when it was a very different country, and the first brown trout he caught weighed in at twelve pounds. As for the origin of the brown trout, Jean-José wrote a book, La pêche à la truite en Afghanistan, in which he theorizes that the trout migrated from Europe in meltwater streams at the end of the last Ice Age.

Jean-José and I discovered we had a mutual friend. Since the 1980s I have known a beautiful French doctor, Laurence Laumonier, who is one of my life heroes. At great personal risk she went into northern Afghanistan repeatedly during the 1980s to work with the Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud as he and his mujaheddin fought the Soviets, and to treat the wounded in primitive cave clinics in the rugged mountains. Now it turns out that Jean-José became a close friend of Massoud’s in the 1970s and it was he who recommended Dr. Laumonier to Massoud.

I may never get to go fishing in Afghanistan, but I have discovered over the months that this little blog casts a wide net and hauls in some great catches.

And mud.

We've put a lot of miles on the snowblower this winter and it ain't over yet. The vernal equinox is within hailing distance, but closing the gap and crossing into Spring could prove a perilous passage. And even Spring can turn on us. We're still cleaning up after last April's Patriots Day storm.

A heavy snowpack and a rapid runoff can mean flooding, and the chances are better than average that we'll have some of that this Spring. Floods are not only damaging to human activity in the flood plain, but to stream life as well. If the timing is bad, the efforts of spawning fish can be scoured away and swept downriver by the flood, leading to the loss of a good portion of a year class. I have been told, too, that a deep snowpack can lead to fish mortality in lakes and ponds due to excessive blockage of sunlight, but the reports of good ice-fishing would seem to ease fears in that department -- although I think the greatest risk is in small water not open to ice-fishing. If you know more about this than I do, which is not much, it would be good to hear from you.

Surfing the Web for interesting fly-fishing sites is a lot more fun than working, and can occasionally result in a good catch, such as Larry Antonuk's site, ClassicAtlanticSalmonFlies. Larry lives in New Hampshire and ties presentation-quality streamer flies which he sells artfully displayed under glass domes or in frames, accompanied by a photo if desired. Good stuff. Works of art. I'm hoping to lure Larry to Upper Dam this season for a bit of angling, to see if his creations actually catch fish.

A reliable indicator of Spring is the annual L.L. Bean Fishing Expo, coming up at the end of next week. A reliable indicator of the economy is this: Bean's used to give away little plastic boxes of trout flies to attendees with coupons; now I see on their website (and in the mailing that arrived yesterday) that you have to buy $25 worth of stuff to get the box of flies. Things are tough all over.