Almost nothing about the movie had stuck with me. As a native-born Scot, I still winced whenever I thought of Cyd Charisse’s accent (“There’s a laddie, wearrry and wanderin’ frrree”). Other than that, nothing but the image of Gene Kelly peering down at the lights, and the rooftops emerging from the mist. That image, inevitably, was in my mind as I navigated the twists and turns of Georgia Highway 197, through the fog and the cold evening rain, until at last I glimpsed a nimbus of light and the indistinct shape of buildings and an asphalt driveway with a sign that said “Brigadoon Lodge.”

Inside, there was everything a wearrry and wanderin’ laddie could want: a blazing log fire in a great room filled with antlers, Persian rugs, and Audubon prints, and a voice with the soft cadences of Atlanta, saying, “Oh, you poor man, sit down and let me pour you a single malt”— the voice belonging to the owner of Brigadoon, Rebekah Stewart. She handed me a glass and we sat by the fire. A young man rose to greet us, slight and black-haired, looking younger than his thirty-five years: a bamboo fly rod maker from nearby Gainesville with an ascending reputation and the improbable name of Bill Oyster.

Just before we arrived, Rebekah said, she’d had a brilliant idea. She was helping out again this year with the annual fundraiser for the Carter Center in Atlanta. Her friend Jimmy had offered a day of fishing on the Soque, himself and Rosalyn as companions and Ted Turner as guide. The advance bidding had already reached six figures. Now, Rebekah would complement that by asking Bill Oyster to make a presidential rod, seal and all. Jimmy would fish it for a year, then turn it over to be auctioned in 2008. As she laid out the scheme, Bill grinned shyly.

With the rain still beating steadily down, the three of us ventured out onto the covered porch and looked down on the Soque River. The sound of the water was loud, and in the soft glow of the garden lights we saw that it was running high, opaque, and mudbrick-red. There would be no fishing in the morning, although Rebekah assured us that the river came down quickly after rain and we’d be out there by mid-afternoon, hip-deep in the Soque, stalking trophy trout.

By the next morning, the sun had broken through and we could appreciate the beauty of our physical surroundings. Across from the main lodge a sheer rock face reared forty feet or more above the river, higher than the Soque was wide, and although the sky was clear by lunchtime, the sun never fell on this long pool, keeping it cool and shaded, just the way trout like it. Yet, trout were the last thing on Rebekah Stewart’s mind when she bought this property fifteen years ago. After a successful Wall Street career in institutional asset management, she’d come looking for a weekend getaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Driving down Route 197 she’d seen a hand-painted sign on a square of particle board: For Sale, followed by a telephone number. She’d scrambled down the slope to the riverside and tried to walk upstream, but the dense forest of oak, maple, hemlock, birch, mountain laurel, rhododendron, and deciduous magnolia had swallowed her whole. It was love at first sight: fifteen acres in the form of a perfect teardrop, an inholding in the Chattahoochee National Forest, enclosed by the better part of a mile of tumbling freestone water.

For two years Rebekah lived here in a tent, since there was no house on the property. For one nine-month stretch she never set foot outside her fifteen acres. “I cleared out the springs with spades and shovels and buckets,” she said. “I pruned the trees with fingernail scissors — not for the sake of the trout, but just because I wanted double blooms on the rhododendrons. To me the river was just a garden feature. I put rocks in the water to enhance the sound. And all that ended up being beneficial to the fish.”

Rebekah’s real estate agent had always pointed out the potential of the Soque as a trout stream, and after a while she decided to add a few fish of her own. Not many: 125 of them in 1991, with small supplemental stockings thereafter, and regular feeding. That was all that was needed, since the fish took well to the cool temperatures, the natural tree canopy, and the steady flow of oxygenated water from the artificial dams, and they’ve reproduced happily here for more than a decade. Paying guests started coming to Brigadoon for the trout, and the reputation of the place was cemented when Ted Turner, no stranger to the enchantments of fly fishing, bought the neighboring property. Turner took to hanging around the fly shop that occupies the front part of Cragganmore, one of Brigadoon’s two satellite lodges. You can understand why this place is so expensive, one visitor said: she’s got Ted Turner working in the fly shop.