A River Trilogy Page 10

I’m not sure when the turning point came. As our relationship deepened, I began looking at the river in a different way. Before, I had always taken in its beauty as something to be hoarded, used in some future translation—a book perhaps, or simply a memory. Now, though, I was trying to see the river through her eyes, imagine what her response would be to its multivarious forms. A trout finning easily in an eddy below a rock; a heron gliding in for a landing on a quiet pool; a coil of silver water swirling over sand—these were my secrets, and between one cast and the next I wanted more than anything to share these secrets with her.

  “Someday you’ll have to come with me,” I said one night, describing the heron.

  “Okay.”

  “How about tomorrow afternoon?”

  Celeste looked at me carefully. “Okay,” she said.

  That easily can a decade’s habit disappear. I won’t describe every moment of our day. I didn’t foam at the mouth, or throw rocks at the fish or feel violated. We fished the pine canyon, then the Aquarium, then the South Branch—having waited so long to share the river with her, I wanted to cram as much into our afternoon as possible, and I raced her madly from pool to pool.

  In one of the last I caught a trout for her—a rainbow who took my bucktail near the surface and put on a melodramatic display, with extravagant leap after extravagant leap, as if he were showing off for her just as much as I was. How macho we both were! There is nothing more satisfying to the male ego than catching a trout for the woman you love, and when I beached it, I laid it at her feet like a knight at a tournament, waiting for her decision.

  “Let’s keep it,” she said in delight. Then, seeing its beauty: “No, let’s put it back.”

  I handed her the rod after that, and showed her the first steps in casting a fly. She made all the beginner’s mistakes—whipped the rod back and forth too fast, tilted it sideways at the wrong angle to the water—but beneath the awkwardness was a rhythm and grace that promised great things for the future. I called out advice at first, but that was tactless, and after a while I was content to sit there on the bank and watch her puzzle things out for herself.

  We stayed until late in the afternoon, started to leave, then decided to stay a little while more. There was a sunset to share with her—cooling shadows and the evening hatch. . .

  We shared the fishing now, and we shared the river, but there was a third, missing step in the equation: Celeste still hadn’t caught a trout.

  It wasn’t any trout she wanted. Listening to my stories, examining the pictures in my books, she decided her first trout should—no, must—be a brook trout.

  “What’s wrong with a brown?” I said.

  “Brook trout are prettier. They’re like maple leaves.”

  “Maple leaves?”

  “They’re part of Vermont.”

  Now there are at least four streams within five minutes of us that contain brook trout, and it would probably have taken a half-hour of lazy effort to fulfill her goal. There was a problem, though: our wedding. It used up all our free time for a month. True, we were going out west for our honeymoon, but that naturally meant a cutthroat or rainbow for her first trout, not a brookie.

  We flew to Seattle and rented a car. The Olympics were first. We spent so much time hiking, climbing, and beachcombing that fishing had to take a back seat, which in a strange kind of way was all right with me. I found the rivers so beautiful that I was half afraid to go near them, fearing that once under their spell I could never leave. We did fish the Skokimish for an afternoon, and then later the Quinault, but only briefly, and without catching anything. The day before we were due to fly back home we were in Mt. Rainier, and we decided to have one last try.

  It was an eerie time to be there. A cloud had settled on top of the mountain, and everything above four thousand feet was draped in fog. At Paradise, the parking lot was filled with bewildered tourists groping around trying to find the lodge, only a few yards away. A ranger had been dispatched to help everyone. We asked about the fishing, and he recommended hiking into Mystic Lake—there were plenty of trout there, some running to size.

  I pointed at the map. “What about this Snow Lake?” It was on the trail beyond Mystic, higher and more remote.

  “It’s pretty,” the ranger agreed, “but it’s sterile. There are no fish in there at all.”

  Mystic Lake it was then. Driving at a crawl, we finally located the trailhead. It was good weather for hypothermia—damp, in the low fifties—and I suddenly had this great desire to end our trip with a celebratory glass of Bourbon back in the Paradise bar. Celeste, though, already had her climbing boots on, and was starting resolutely up the trail.

  The mist grew thicker the higher we climbed. There were wildflowers along the trail, but it was all we could do to make them out. According to our map, Mystic Lake was a mile and a half uphill, but we walked much further than that without spotting it, and the pond we finally came to had a sign that read Snow Lake.

  The ranger was right about its beauty. All we could see of it in the mist was the outlet—a jumble of water-burnished logs under which the lake funneled itself into a stream—yet it was enough to suggest the wild, remote beauty of the whole, just as the glories of a string quartet may lie implicit in its first brief phrase.

  We balanced our way out to the thickest of the logs, and sat down to eat lunch. A few hikers came by. Seeing our rods, they told us what we already knew: the lake was completely fishless. We decided to wait for a while to see if the fog would lift enough for pictures, then head back down to Mystic to fish.

  In the meantime, strange things were happening. Something flew past my head and I swatted at it, without really sensing what it was. A moment later, a second something drifted by. I was ready for the third: a big brown mayfly, newly hatched.

  Without saying anything to Celeste, I scrambled across the logs to get a closer look at the water above the logjam. Out there in the mist, so faint and fragmentary I thought I was hallucinating, were rings. Ripples against a rock, I assumed; but no—they were breaking across the surface at irregular intervals.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Know something?” I said, turning around.

  Celeste looked up from the map. “What?”

  “There are trout in this lake.”

  She didn’t believe me. Still, once she saw me casting, she came over and started fishing, too, more to humor me than anything else.

  “There aren’t any trout in this lake,” she grumbled, only “lake” became a two-syllable word—lake as the first syllable, a scream of delight as the second.

  “I’ve got one!”

  A fish had plucked her fly off the surface just before it drifted into the logjam, hooking itself. It was a bad place to play one, and Celeste in her excitement stripped in line too fast, but it was exactly the right tactic—once into the logs, her leader would have been doomed.

  Snow Lake never heard such happy shouts. Celeste had the fish dancing by our log now. Using my hat as a landing net, I knelt down and scooped him up, pressing him to my chest so he wouldn’t squirm away. It wasn’t until we reached the safety of shore that we dared to look at him.

  “What kind is it?” Celeste asked.

  I kissed her. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “What kind!” she demanded.

  “Celeste, you have just caught yourself a dyed-in-the-wool, authentic, bona fide . . . brook trout!”

  Three Vermonters and there we were, two and a half thousand miles from home. They must have been stocked there, I explained—probably some program that was started with all kinds of hope, then abandoned for lack of funds. It was a long way to go to catch our neighborhood trout, but no matter—Celeste had her fish story now, and the adventure of it sealed our sharing.

  “Take our picture!”

  And I did, and as I focused the lens, the fog lifted, and behind her I saw the snowbanks and glacier and cliffs that framed the pond, revealing themselves only now when the moment was perfect. I held the
camera steady until the beauty of the water and the woman and the trout came together, then—the moment captured—I crossed over the logs and took my wife by her hand.

  10

  The One That Got Away

  Wariness is among the prime Vermont virtues, but it is not among mine. I have not had to cope with the maddening swings of New England weather for an entire lifetime, I have never tried to pry a living from its soil, and my formative years were not spent among a people whose first, instinctive reaction when faced with any dilemma or choice is to do nothing.

  Still, wariness is a quality I could use a little more of, particularly during August’s low water. Take yesterday, for example. I had every intention of making a lazy day of it. Breakfast at the diner, a leisurely drive to the river, then some unhurried casting for some unhurried trout.

  It was all a trick, of course. By lulling myself into a relaxed mood, I was hoping to surmount my usual abruptness, the better to catch trout that were bound to be as wary and uncoaxable in the summer sunlight as the oldest farmer in these hills.

  I got out of bed as cautiously as though the fish could see me; I shaved and showered as quietly as I could. Breakfast was slowly and deliberately chewed, coffee daintily sipped—if I was going to spook any trout today, it wouldn’t be in the diner. I drove the few remaining miles to the river more slowly than usual, and even went so far as to stop when I passed the farm with the hand-lettered sign: GOOD JUNK CHEAP!

  Now, I am not a tag-sale freak, though I’m related to people who are (the date of our wedding had to be changed because there was a tag sale on the common outside the church on the same day, and we seriously wondered whether half the guests, given the choice between second-hand junk and a wedding, might not choose the junk). I will stop, however, if I see some books; for the past couple of years, I’ve been on the lookout for those two gentle classics of Vermont fishing, Frederick Van de Water’s In Defense of Worms, and Murray Hoyt’s The Fish in My Life.

  There was a dilapidated Ping-Pong table on one side of the yard; sugaring barrels and old crocks on the other. In between were card tables and boxes piled high with stuff—muffin pans, headless dolls, old milk bottles, the works. Behind the wobbliest table stood a woman in her fifties who seemed as battered and used as any of her goods. Before her was a sign that read NO REASONABLE OFFER REFUSED, but there was a suspicious, hard-looking quality in her expression that let you know she had very strict notions about what that word “reasonable” meant.

  As usual, the books were all romances, and I had turned to leave when I noticed something jutting out from the bottom of the midden heap on the Ping-Pong table. I’m still not sure what caught my eye first—the soft brown fabric of the cloth sleeve or the bright silver ferrule exposed above it.

  Slowly, doing nothing to betray my interest, I worked my way across the yard, being careful to examine all the miscellaneous junk that intervened. The stuff on the table was high enough to block the woman’s view; kneeling, I peeled the sleeve down far enough to see that it contained a bamboo fly rod, and a good one. The inscription near the butt was worn off, and only one letter was legible, the letter L. L, I decided, as in Leonard.

  Eureka. Still, I wasn’t going to blow it now. With a tremendous force of will, I left the rod where it was and made a circuit of the other tables, doing my best to seem disinterested and bored. Five minutes went by. When I turned to go back to the rod, a man with a complexion like cheap corduroy was waving it back and forth in his hands.

  Where had he come from? I looked back toward the driveway. A purple Lincoln Continental with Jersey plates was parked there with its motor running, three kids crammed in the back. I cursed myself, then went back over to the crocks to await developments.

  The man wiggled the rod back and forth for a while, bent it, whipped it about some more, then with a “why not?” kind of shrug, took it over to the woman.

  “Four dollars,” she said.

  I could have strangled her. A Leonard in that kind of shape (and I was convinced in my frustration that it was a Leonard) is easily worth a thousand. There was still hope, though. Judging by his pained look when he took out his wallet, the man had no idea what a bargain he was getting.

  I intercepted him before he reached the car.

  “I’ll give you ten for that,” I said abruptly.

  It was a mistake. Vermonters may be wary, but New Jerseyites are paranoid, and I had awoken all his suspicions.

  “Naw, it’s for the kid,” he said.

  “Make that twenty.”

  By way of answering, he slammed the car door and locked all the buttons. His boy had the rod now. I could see him in the back seat as the car disappeared, whacking the tip section over his sisters’ heads.

  11

  August Twenty-third

  The river was half its May width. What had been an even, bank-to-bank current was now broken up into separate flows, with scattered rapids that were as small and dainty as the waterfalls in Japanese gardens. Two feet of water had been sliced off the river’s top, exposing a lumpy cross-section of boulders and rocks. Places that were chest-deep in June were now only knee-deep, and there were shoal areas to the outside of the pools where the water barely wet my toes.

  After all the fitful striving of early season, the river seemed settled and at rest. The heavy current that had hidden so much of its life was gone, and the shallows that were left were as interesting as tidal pools on a saltwater beach. Tiny hellgrammites, graceful water spiders, minnows and miniature trout—they were all there among the rocks, scurrying under the crevices to avoid the monstrous intrusion of my hand.

  A day for lazy distraction. A day, that is, for letting life pass dreamily downstream.

  I fished in my bathing suit, not my waders—a bathing suit, sneakers and a long-billed swordfisherman’s hat that kept the sun from my face. I carried only a few flies: gaudy Royal Coachmans in fan-wing and Wulff ties (against all the rules, but I’ve found them to be effective low-water patterns), a few Light Cahills and an assortment of terrestrials. These last are dry flies designed to imitate landbound insects that tumble into the river. Letort Hoppers, Cinnamon Ants, McMurrays . . . There’s nothing very complicated about them, ants and grasshoppers not being among your more esoteric insects.

  I was using a twenty-year-old fly rod that is already something of a relic. Back in 1963 when I first started fly fishing, ultralight tackle was all the rage. Bankrolled by my grandfather’s Christmas present, I ordered Abercrombie and Fitch’s “Banty” fly rod—a four-foot bauble that weighs only an ounce, complete with a special “Banty” fly line and a Hardy Flyweight reel. I remember my delight when the package arrived from New York; seconds after opening it, I was false-casting over the bushes on our snow-covered suburban lawn.

  Long graphite rods are the fashion nowadays, and I suppose I elicit some chuckles when I trot out my “Banty,” but the truth is I like it, and its miniaturization of the whole fishing process suits perfectly my summertime mood.

  I’ve noticed this before about tackle—how you can fit it to the kind of attitude you happen to wake up with. On days when I’m feeling irritated, not to be trifled with, I’m apt to go out with my nine-foot Browning, a brute of a rod that throws an incredible amount of line and lets me feel like I’m dominating the river, beating it into submission. Other days, feeling lazy, I take along an ancient Heddon that handles an equal amount of line, but is much easier on the arm, and lets me roll cast without doing much wading. On my last trip to Britain, I bought a light, seven-foot Hardy; using it, I have to get more involved with the river, wade more carefully—it’s the kind of rod you feel you should be fishing with on tiptoes, and I save it for my artsier moods. Those infrequent days when I wake up feeling well-balanced, I take along my eight-foot Vince Cummings—when it comes to attitude, as neutral a rod as you can find.

  The Banty requires a lot of arm work if you’re going to get out any line, and it was half an hour before my casts started unrolling. The Wulf
f landed with all the delicacy of an anchor, but the trout must have been amused by it, and I immediately began to have strikes. Strikes, not fish. I had assumed the trout would be in a sluggish mood to match the water, but they all seemed jet-propelled, and the fly was in and out of their mouths before I could hook them.

  Just as catching fish will make a flyfisherman quicker to react, not catching fish dulls his senses, leads him into temptations he would otherwise avoid. I was just above the Aquarium, in the shallow, even stretch before the falls. There’s lots of shade here, and the trout will drop back from the sunny stretch above it to cool off. With the reduced current, drag was less of a problem than in spring, and I was getting rises on some very long drifts.

  I let the fly drop near some overhanging shrubbery near the bank, and was stripping in line when I noticed something drifting toward me about six inches below the surface. It was a rose—a red rose broken off at its stem, floating perfectly upright downstream, as magically as in a fairy tale.

  It was as nice a conflict as a person could be offered, but a conflict all the same. What should I do? Reach down and pluck the rose from the water before it vanished downstream, or continue stripping in the line, thereby being ready for a strike?

  My bride of three weeks liked roses. I dropped my left hand from the line and stuck it underwater to intercept the flower; at the same moment, not ten feet away, a fish clobbered my drifting fly. I struck back at him, but he was already gone, and in my haste I dropped the rose and it vanished downstream over the falls.

  No fish. No rose. There was a message there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I could figure out what it was. It seemed like a good time to break for lunch.

  There was a sandbar along the opposite bank. After finishing my sandwich, I stretched out in the shade with my eyes closed, enjoying the sounds and smells of the summer day. These seemed to come in pairs. There was the rich, heavy smell of newly cut hay with the clanking sound of a tractor; the steady buzz of insects with the sweet aroma of honeysuckle.