A River Trilogy Read online

  COOPER, the sign near the loading platform reads. Above it is another sign, this one hand-lettered: “If I’m not here, honk three times. If I’m still not here, honk some more.” Beyond it is a notice warning people that they enter the shop at their own risk. In order to read the faded print you have to enter the shop anyway, so it seems stupid to leave.

  There was a big wooden tub on the platform, the kind farmers use to water their cows. Next to it were some boards that Maurice hadn’t gotten around to cutting. Closer to the edge were footstools, birdhouses, and printer’s trays, the kind of things Maurice keeps in sight in case any stray tourists happen by.

  An important October birthday was coming up, and I had my eye on one of his chests. Maurice sells them unpainted, for a fair price. Even better, a portion of his personality comes with them, and a blanket chest made by Maurice Page is a lively, solid thing, part of a Vermont that is vanishing.

  I was looking one over when Maurice came out. “You don’t want it,” he said, shaking his head. He opened the lid, then banged it in disgust. “See there? Top don’t fit. I messed that one. I’ve got something better inside. Watch your step now.”

  Pine is everywhere in the shop—in the corners, on the lathes, in the air. Sawdust and shavings are September smells, sweeter than incense, more honest than perfume, and every leathery inch of Maurice comes bathed in its glow.

  “There’s your chest,” he said, slapping its side. “Course you want, I could make it bigger. Here, come up here.”

  Deeper and deeper, up the stairs. There’s the old water-power transformer near the top, dusty now that the dam is gone (1924 was the date it went out, but Maurice talks about the catastrophe as if it happened yesterday). Among the scraps and leftovers in the loft is a pine board that measures fourteen inches across, and Maurice decides it is just what I need for my chest. We agree on the dimensions—

  Maurice hands me the tape measure and lets me do most of the measuring myself.

  Maurice is a Vermonter who likes to talk. It’s next to impossible to describe the texture of it; in it are weaved strands of laconic understatement, subtle teasing, old-fashioned courtliness, rhetorical interrogation, free association and whatever elocutionary devices Maurice happens to be in the mood for. As he talks, the light from the windows catches the stubble of his beard with the effect of a thousand sequins, making him twinkle.

  “Yep, lived here all my life up to now,” he’ll say if you’re a stranger. “Born in that house right there across the road seventy-five years ago.” Then, if you’re a woman: “You come up here in winter, I’ll take you for a ride in my snow machine, don’t forget now.”

  We talked for a while. A documentary had recently been made of another cooper up in Barnet, and I asked Maurice if he had seen it.

  “Wasn’t that a marvel? That Ben, he’s a wizard. Aren’t too many of those fellas left still use water power. Me, I flick a switch, on it goes.”

  He reached behind him. Instantly, the pulleys, gears and belts that line his shop clanked into action. He waited until the shop was really shaking, then shut it off.

  “Nope, don’t pay me now,” he said when he saw my wallet. “I might not finish it, and then what happens? I don’t want to be in debt to you, do I?”

  We settled upon a pick-up date. I turned the car around in the cutoff and was circling past the shop when he flagged me down.

  “Here’s a wooden spoon,” he said, jabbing it in the open window. “Good for porridge. Give it to your mom.”

  There’s a short story by V. S. Pritchett about a businessman who’s good at falling down. Whenever he’s at a loss for words, bored, embarrassed, or surprised, down he goes. It’s his only talent. He knows a dozen ways to do it; when the story ends, he’s showing off his latest tumble to his aghast business associates at an important meeting.

  It’s a character I can relate to. I’ve had some classic falls of my own this month, half of them caused by impatience, half by my dislike for waders. I’ve been fishing in jeans and sneakers since summer, and the cold water has finally caught up with me. I clanked from pool to pool like a wind-up monster with rusty gears, an angling Frankenstein.

  There’s a good lie near the cemetery that can only be covered by casting from a rock in midstream. I was halfway up it when I slipped. As falls go, it was only fair—say an 8.5 in difficulty, a 7.5 in execution. Still, it was enough to drench me and I had to hurry back to the car for a dry set of clothes.

  My waders are the cheapest kind you can get, slippery, ill-fitting, and porous. Wading wet, though, was out of the question, so I tugged them on. What I gained in warmth, I lost in traction, and later in the afternoon I took another spill, this one much more spectacular than the first.

  I was back in the Aquarium, stalking the big trout I had missed earlier in the month. We’d had the usual heavy rain around the equinox, and the water was higher than it had been the previous time—high enough to increase the force on my legs and feet. About a foot to my left was a nice flat boulder that would allow me to get above the worst of the pressure. I shuffled over to it and gingerly stepped onto its middle.

  False-casting about twenty yards of line out, I dropped a big Spuddler a foot above the rock where the trout had struck. As the fly landed, I shifted position slightly, just enough so that the tread under my weight-bearing foot slid from the security of gritty granite to the peril of slippery moss.

  It was a backwards somersault this time, a fall I had never pulled off before, not even in school. What was remarkable about it was its slow-motion quality—I had enough time and horizon left at the apogee to see a huge boil beneath the fly. Upside down, I yanked back with my rod hand, but there was no rod there—it was flying through the air behind me with the arc and thrust of a javelin.

  “I must prepare myself for this,” I thought, but before I could, I was splashing in the water, already past the icy shock of entry. I grabbed for my sunglasses, but the current had them on the bottom, scurrying over the rocks like a plastic crab. I started to chase after them, but the river was in my waders, and the weight tumbled me over so that I was floating face-up. My wallet, buoyed free of my pocket, bubbled dollar bills past my chest; my fly box, sprung from my vest, bobbed like the coffin of the Pequod.

  There was no use fighting it. I gave myself up to my klutziness and let the current push me over to a sandbar—a lump now, a sack of wet nothingness to be stripped clean and flung disdainfully on the shore. Somewhere in my passage from vertical to horizontal to vertical again I managed to bump heads with a rock, resulting in a concussion that laid me up for three days, giving me plenty of time to puzzle out the moral of all this.

  Never underestimate the capacity of a river to humiliate you, and always wear felt-bottomed soles.

  Autumn is leaf-peeping time in Vermont, and after a few sudden stops you learn not to tailgate out-of-state cars. Of all the unofficial seasons here (mud season and black-fly season are the two others), foliage season is by far the silliest. While flatlanders are peeping at the leaves, natives are peeping at the peepers, and peeping-atrocity stories are numerous.

  I have two this year. I was driving over a hill on I-91 this morning when I came upon a station wagon with New York plates parked right in the middle of the northbound lane—in the lane, not on its edge. A man in a safari suit was sitting on the opened tailgate studying the view with his binoculars; a willowy blonde sat on the hood absorbed in a sketchbook. I honked at them—they waved pleasantly as I swerved past.

  The second happened on the river. I was on my knees trying to revive a small brookie before letting him go when I heard someone beeping a horn up by my car. Tourists had been stopping all morning to take pictures of me against the trees, and I assumed it was someone wanting me to pose. I swam the trout back and forth until he was able to manage on his own, then waded over to the road.

  Ohio plates, a carful of peepers. The man who was driving stuck his head out the window—it had a red and mushy look, like stewed tomato
es.

  “Where’s this desert thing at?” he demanded.

  I have this strange capacity to understand illogical questions. Most people would have looked at the man in incomprehension; I understood right away which desert he was after.

  “You mean the Desert of Maine?” I said, referring to a popular tourist spot.

  “Yeah, that desert thing, Where’s it at, pal?”

  “You take this road over to New Hampshire, then turn left on Route 10 up to 302. It’s right down that about 180 miles.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  Off they went.

  And just for the record, the foliage peaked this year at precisely 3:38 p.m. on Thursday, September 29. I was there when it happened. I was fishing by the elementary school, and had stopped to stare in awe at the trees. There were dark storm clouds overhead, the wind would be stripping most of the leaves off by dusk, but for now the black sky framed perfectly the bittersweet reds and yellows, giving them a color so vibrant and urgent that their radiation was a tug on the heart.

  As I watched, something remarkable happened. The sun found a hole in the cloud just large enough for one crepuscular ray to leap through. It slanted obliquely toward earth, catching a gold tree on the bank and casting its radiance onto the surface of the river, spinning it gold. My fly rode on its shimmer for the space of a yard—for that one fleeting moment I was fishing a golden fly for golden trout on a golden river. Then the cloud clamped shut around the sun, and the peak was passed.

  I heard voices up on the bank. A boy and girl, each about eight, were kicking through the leaves piled against the trees. Every few yards they stooped to pick one up and put it in a plastic bag they jointly carried.

  They waved, and came over to watch me. As it turned out, the leaves were for their oldest sister, in college out west. She was homesick for Vermont’s autumn, she had written; they were collecting a bagful of the yellowest yellows and the reddest reds to send her to cheer her up.

  “Here’s one for you,” the girl said, handing me a maple leaf.

  “Thanks, I’ll keep it on my desk this winter. It will remind me of September.”

  The boy saw his chance.

  “September,” he said, spreading his arms apart as if to embrace the smells, the colors, and light, “is my best favorite year.”

  15

  Fathers and Sons

  Between the years 1961 and 1966, I was the most obnoxious teenager to fish with in all of New England, and if you don’t believe me, ask my Dad. Vain, overzealous, opinionated, dictatorial, insufferable, fierce—any combination of negative adjectives would aptly describe the tall redhead I can see in my mind’s eye casting from the bow of the battered, fifteen-foot runabout, and it was my poor father, casting patiently from the stern, who took their brunt.

  Fishing fathers, fishing sons. The literature on the subject is immense, and invariably follows the same pattern. Wise, experienced, pipe-smoking father (Big Bill) teaches eager, barefooted, gum-chewing son (Little Bill) the tenets of good sportsmanship, the better to tame the youngster’s fish-killing propensities. (“It’s a noble brown, Little Bill. Let us raise our hats to him and give him his freedom!”) Teaching a son to fly fish has become a sacred duty, a rite of passage, a cliché.

  And, of course, a very difficult chore. It’s not easy to instill tradition in a teenager whose every instinct is to smash tradition. I saw a father and son on the river who perfectly illustrated the problem. Both were dressed in the same wader-fishing-vest-Tyrolian hat combination; both fished with expensive rods. I could see the father teaching the son how to roll cast—the son was nodding, albeit grimly. There were trout rising in the next pool, and the father went to investigate. Left alone, the son started whipping the water in front of him with his rod—actually whipping it, as if punishing the river for some infraction . . . No, not an easy chore at all.

  In our family, it was backwards. I was the one who taught my father how to fish, damned near killing him in the process. Naturally, I harbor a lot of guilt about this. The memory of how I treated him goes with me each time I fish the river, descending like a sudden black cloud on an otherwise perfect day. One taste of the madeleine was enough to recreate for Proust the chaotic emotions of youth, and so it is with me. One snarled leader, one sloppy cast, and I am fifteen years old again, slapping the side of our boat in impatience, giving my father hell.

  Life puts a statute of limitations on the apologies that are due between a father and son, a few quick years after which they will remain permanently unspoken. Here then, before that limit expires, is mine.

  It started the summer I was thirteen. My parents had owned the lake house for a year, and in that time I had become totally dedicated to fishing. My long-standing passions for baseball, basketball, cocker spaniels, and West Point were as nothing compared to it; I read every book on the subject I could get my hands on, subscribed to three different fishing magazines, spent every allowance dollar on lures and flies. It was an enthusiasm with all the force of puberty behind it—whatever I was sublimating, I was sublimating in a big way.

  It wasn’t long before I considered myself an expert roughly on a par with Lee Wulff. This had nothing to do with catching fish; indeed, it was only about once in every six weeks of casting that I managed to find a trout or bass suicidal enough to take my lure. Teenagers being teenagers, my lack of success only made me more rigid in my theories. I fished where the books said to fish whether I caught anything or not, and sneered at those who caught fish where they weren’t supposed to be. In short, I became a fishing snob—a snob who combined an inquisitor’s detestation for heresy with a Schweitzer’s missionary zeal. Casting about for a disciple to mold in my own image, I found my dad.

  Dad had fished a bit before. Friends from the office would charter a party boat out of Freeport on Long Island and he would go with them, returning at the end of the day heroically sunburned and unshaved, reeking of flounder. For a time when I was small, we owned a boat of our own with friends of my parents—a leaky wooden cabin cruiser called the Betty Wayna in honor of the wives. It was over the Betty Wayna’s side that I caught my first fish. Dad asked me to hold his line for a second while he went for a beer; taking it, I immediately caught a bright and wiggly porgy, a fish I suspect was already securely hooked when Dad handed me the rod.

  As much as he may have enjoyed fishing before I got my hands on him, Dad’s enthusiasm was limited by one important fact: he was legally blind. It had happened gradually after the war—why, the doctors couldn’t say. Having two young children to support, he had tried to ignore it as long as he could. Driving to work one day, he realized he couldn’t see the crossing guards outside an elementary school, and that was it—he never drove a car again. Through a tremendous effort I can only guess at, aided all the way by my mother, he used the blurred remnant of sight that was left to him to continue his career, and succeeded even more importantly at ridding himself of self-pity and despair.

  This battle won, his eyesight became the source of some famous mix-ups, slapstick routines that no one laughed over as much as Dad himself. Most of these occurred at our summer house, and were of such a dramatic and sudden character that they remain etched in our family’s memory as a series of tableaux, each with title. There was, for instance, The Time Dad Walked Right Off The End Of The Dock In His Business Suit; The Time Dad Threw Out Mom’s Bag Of Jewelry Thinking It Was Garbage; or, most memorably, The Time Dad Snuck Up On His Friend Charlie Beaudrie Floating In An Inner Tube And Dumped Him Over, Only It Wasn’t Charlie Beaudrie, It Was A Stranger.

  The manmade lake where all this took place was a typical New England resort lake, with summer homes, marinas, and camps along one shore, trees, rocks, trout, and bass along the other. It was still possible in those years to meet old-timers who remembered the valley before the lake had been created, but they were dying out fast, and the traditions of that corner of New England were going with them. It was still country in 1963, but the corner had been turned, and in t
he years we lived there it steadily became more suburban.

  Most of our fishing was done at night, after dinner. We’d walk down to the dock together, me weighted down with three rods, a huge tackle box, and a lantern; Dad with the landing net and the simple spin-casting rig that was all his eyesight could handle. During the day the lake was blighted with water-skiers and speedboats, but at night it was calm and deserted enough for me to pretend I was in Maine.

  “We’ll go over to the island,” I’d say, nodding sagely (I’d been reading Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods that summer, and I thought of myself as Gerrish the Guide). “If we don’t get lunkers there, we’ll head down to the big rock, fish the drop-off. I’ll steer. You sit in the back and keep quiet so we don’t scare lunkers.”

  There was no question of Dad’s authority in every other aspect of my life, but when it came to fishing, he abdicated all responsibility.

  “I think I’ll try a popper,” Dad would say when we coasted to a stop. He loved catching bluegills.

  “No poppers,” I’d say, frowning. “We’re after bass tonight. We’re big-fish fishermen.”

  Dad would take this all in. “Big-fish fishermen, huh? Okay. Tie on something good.”

  I had to tie on all Dad’s lures, untangle his line, point him in the right direction to cast. I wanted to be patient with him, knew I had to be patient, and yet was never patient enough, and would end up getting more and more irritated with him as the night wore on. “You’re casting too close to shore. Cast further out.”

  Dad probably couldn’t see the shore. He’d nod though, and start casting in a different direction.

  It would be quiet after that. If the moon were out, our Jitterbugs would glide across the milky beams as gracefully as swans. Occasionally, the wake would reach us from night-cruising boats further out—easy swells that gently rocked us, then draped themselves across the rocks near shore. It was peaceful, but frightening. I had a friend whose father had explained the facts of life to him when fishing one night, and I was afraid that Dad would choose the same time and place for his explanation.