A River Trilogy Page 14

  “You’re not making your plug gurgle enough,” I’d say, hoping to keep the conversation strictly on fishing. “Make it gurgle more.” He’d reel a little faster.

  “There’s too much moonlight out,” I complained. “Fish don’t bite in moonlight.”

  “Last week you said moonlight was good.”

  “Not above seventy degrees. What’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You have a bite! Hook him!”

  Dad, who could see neither the plug nor the commotion behind it, would raise his rod tip so gently and timidly that it would infuriate me. “Sock it to him! Pump him in!”

  “What is it?” Dad would say, peering over the side.

  “It’s gone! Why didn’t you reel harder?”

  Dad would smile as broadly as if he had caught it. “It was a keeper.”

  “You lost him,” I’d say accusingly. “You lost a bass.”

  There was no way Dad could win. If he lost the fish, I was furious at him; if he landed it, I was jealous. Luckily for both of us, the fish were few and far between. We’d try every lure in my tackle box, run from one end of the lake to the other, and invariably return empty-handed. It would be ten or eleven by the time we quit. The few simple tasks that Dad could do without help were important to him, so I would wait on the end of the dock while he buttoned the rain-cover over the boat, staring up at the stars—the stars that he couldn’t see. We would walk back along the dark road to our house, Dad’s shoulder jostling mine as he tripped and caught himself, the lantern swinging circles of light back and forth before our shoes. Holly, our golden retriever, would have the scent of us now and be barking in delight. My mother would be reading by the fireplace, ready with her inevitable question.

  “Catch anything?”

  “It was a moral victory,” I’d say. “Dad had a bite.”

  And Dad would tell her about it, laughing gently over how excited I had become.

  I continued insufferable for the next five summers. Dad would no sooner catch up with my latest theory than I would switch it, insist that night-fishing was for amateurs, demand we go out at dawn, use spinners rather than plugs. I started fly-casting when I was fifteen, and my clumsy efforts imperiled his head, yet he continued fishing from the stern as patiently as before, marveling at my new skill. He even went so far as to buy his own fly rod at Macy’s—alone, without my advice. The salesman sold him the wrong kind of line and the wrong kind of reel, and I don’t think Dad ever took it out of its case.

  By the time I was sixteen I was starting to catch more fish. Plastic worms fished slow were my latest tactic, and for a change I had one that worked. I tried getting Dad to use them, too, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough for him to see the line peeling off the spool when a bass took, and he never acquired the knack of sensing a strike with his rod. Still, he took as much pleasure in my fish as if he had caught them himself, and would tell all our friends about my accomplishments, making me nearly burst from pride. His unselfishness was gradually softening my ferocity; I began to need the look of delighted surprise that swept over his face on those rare occasions when he caught a good fish.

  In the meantime, Dad’s store of misadventures was steadily increasing. There was The Time Dad Hooked An Immense Trout, Only It Wasn’t A Trout, It Was A Cris-Craft; The Time Dad, Fishing Without A License, Struck Up A Conversation With The Game Warden; and The Night The Boat Sank.

  This last was especially traumatic. We were fishing again at night, and had anchored along the western, uninhabited shore. My Uncle Buzz had come along with us. I had just reeled in the first fish—a catfish, the only one I’ve ever caught, a mustachioed, portentous creature that we fastened onto a stringer attached to the boat’s side.

  It was an omen, but we weren’t sure of what. We continued casting, listening as usual to one of Uncle Buzz’s war stories.

  “We had catfish like that in New Guinea. These crackers from Alabama would catch them on doughballs. I remember this other time over in New Caledonia this sergeant, name of Runnels . . .”

  I wasn’t listening. There was water sloshing around the bottom of the boat, and I had stood up on the seat to keep my brand-new moccasins dry. Now, though, the water was lapping over my feet again, and I was annoyed. Annoyed, not scared. I took off my moccasins and continued casting.

  Ignorance is bliss. The boat had been at the marina earlier in the week being repaired for engine trouble. The mechanic had neglected to replug the drain hole in the stern—a hole we didn’t even know existed. Planing at full speed, the hole was above the water line, but the moment we stopped, the boat settled, allowing the water to flow in. A frogman boring a hole in the bottom couldn’t have sabotaged us any better.

  Buzz was too busy telling war stories to notice anything was wrong. Dad, of course, couldn’t see. That left me. The water was up to my shins now, and I was beginning to realize that something important was happening. I had just finished reading Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember about the Titanic disaster, and I was very concerned not to do anything that would cause panic.

  “Uh,” I said, as casually as I could, “we’re sinking.”

  The water was up to our knees and rising fast. Uncle Buzz hopped into the stern to see what was wrong, which was precisely what he shouldn’t have done, since the added weight made us sink faster. I fought my way through the water to the steering wheel, intending to get us closer to shore before we went under. Dad, though, had always had this phobia about ramming our propeller on an underwater rock, and he yelled for me to cut the engine. We were about fifty yards from shore now, and the bow was rising slowly in the air as the stern sank.

  Remembering how many people had been pulled under by the Titanic’s suction, I climbed onto the side with the intention of jumping clear. I was on the point of leaping . . . I was up to three in my count . . . when the water suddenly came to me, and I felt the side drop away beneath my feet.

  Dad and Uncle Buzz had been deposited in the water, too; all we could see of the boat was the descending bow light. When it met the water, its heat sent up a ghostly kind of steam.

  “Are you okay?” Dad shouted.

  “I’m okay!” I shouted back. “Are you okay?”

  The seat cushions had floated loose. I found one for Dad, then swam back to get one for myself.

  “Wait for me, guys!” Uncle Buzz, remembering his Boy Scout training, had grabbed the boat’s life ring, and was swimming with it toward shore. What Buzz had forgotten, though, was that the ring was still attached by a line to the boat’s side. In effect, he was trying to tow the sunk boat with him, huffing and puffing from the strain.

  We disentangled him. I saw my tackle box floating in the moonlight, and made a start for it, but I was too worried about Dad’s eyesight to leave him. We formed a little convoy and started paddling toward shore. I yelled “Don’t panic!” so much that Dad probably thought I was panicking, and he kept talking to me in the kind of soothing, reassuring tone he used with babies.

  “Here we go now. Everything’s perfectly fine. How you doing? We’ll just keep swimming now, nice and easy . . .”

  Reaching shore, we argued over what to do next. It was too far to walk home, and there was no trail through the woods. Water and pickerel grass streamed off our clothes—we were shivering in the cold. We decided we would have to call for help.

  “Let’s not panic!” I kept saying.

  “Right,” Dad said. “We don’t want to scare your mother.”

  We called for help as apologetically as anyone ever called for help.

  “Help!” we yelled in unison. “We’re all right, but we need some help!”

  Nothing. We tried again.

  “We’d like some help over here, please!”

  Dad and Buzz soon got tired of shouting. I continued alone, with stranger and stranger variations.

  “S.O.S! Please acknowledge. S.O.S!”

  After about an hour of calling, a passing cabin cruiser heard us. We were b
ack on our dock a few minutes after that. As meek as they were, our yells had woken up half the community, and there was a small crowd waiting for us when we arrived. Some of the women had blankets. One of the teenagers, no doubt having read the same Titanic book I had, offered me a cigarette. I took it—to this day, it’s the only one I’ve ever smoked. It was great being a survivor.

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, The Night the Boat Sank marked the turning point in our fishing relationship. Besides my moccasins, I’d lost a beautiful bait-casting outfit, a fly rod, and a tackle box containing roughly a hundred lures. Losing all this chastened my pride, and I was never quite so dogmatic and pompous about fishing again. Then, too, it hadn’t been me who had stayed calmest during the sinking, for all my fantasies about being a guide, nor had it been Buzz, despite his war stories. The true hero had been Dad.

  By the time the boat was dredged up and repaired, the summer was over. The following year I was working, getting to the lake less and less. Dad would try to go fishing without me, but with little success. I would tie big loops of monofilament on his lures so he could thread his line through them rather than the small eyelets, but I think he used to confine himself to the spinner my mother would tie on before he left; if it broke, he would quit and go home. The times we did go fishing together, I was much gentler with him, realizing at last that the talk and the being there in the twilight were what counted, not the fish we didn’t catch. The last few years before they sold the summer house, he had his granddaughter to go fishing with. They would cast off the dock for sunfish, and he would pull the same hold-my-line-while-I-go-over-here trick with her that he had used with me in those far-off days on the Betty Wayna.

  Dad doesn’t fish much now. I still call him whenever I catch a big one on the river, and he is as delighted over it as if he had caught it himself—no, more delighted. And this is the lesson he taught me, taught me slowly and subtly all those summers in the boat when I cast and pontificated, cast and fumed. Catching fish is a joy, but what is even better is having someone you love catch one, when the delight is doubled. This is the true lesson to be taught a fishing son, more important than any theory regarding fish or fly, and I hope that one day I may pass it on to a son as patiently and unselfishly as my father passed it on to me.

  Dad came to Vermont for our wedding in July. I took him fishing on the river. He got his line tangled. I told him where to cast, and got mad at him when he reeled in too slow. “Catch anything?” my mother asked when we got back to the lodge. We hadn’t. It was the best fishing trip of the year.

  16

  October Nineteenth

  It’s hard to know when to give up on something. A hope, a dream, a friendship, a love. Each of these has a natural life of its own—they are apt to begin in obscurity and flow in ways unpredictable to man. Only their endings sometime enter the realm of our control, and in exchange for this concluding power we are handed a delicate risk. Say goodbye too soon and you risk missing the fruition, severing the feeling before its last echoing chord—the bittersweet afterglow—fades away. Say goodbye too late and emotion that seemed more concentrated and intense than the purest essence can become diluted and stale, losing the enchantment it once had over us, losing by this transformation its accurate place in our memory.

  So it is with rivers. The beginning of a trout season is ritualistic and well-defined; the middle takes on a natural rhythm that is closely tied to the river’s life, offering the angler participation but not control. It is the ending of a trout season, the yearly severing of his connection to the river, that the fly fisherman must choose for himself. Many states allow fishing until the end of October, but usually the sport is over well before that, and the moment the fly fisherman quits for the year depends on factors more instinctual than any fixed date.

  I fished too late last year. The leaves were off the trees, the water was high and discolored, and the trout were as sluggish as carp. Every quality that attracts me to fishing—the hope of it, the mystery, the quick swirling life—was gone, replaced by a cold rushing blankness on which nothing could imprint. What was worse, the blankness stayed with me for the next few months with the tenacity of remorse, blocking my earlier memories of the river with this last wintry impression. It had been a good year, a year full of exploration and delight, but there were those stale, cold afternoons tacked on the end. I had been greedy, pushed the river two or three weeks too far. For a writer, a person trained in endings, the mistake was inexcusable.

  Fly fishing, after all, is an attempt to make connection with the life of a river. If that life is gone, the attempt becomes absurd. Howard Walden, in his classic Upstream and Down, dismisses autumn fishing as “an evocation of ghosts, a second childhood of the trout season, more like a haunting recollection than a living experience. It is a ghoulish disinterring of something better left buried.”

  It can certainly be that; fish too late, the ghoulies get you. But there is an equal, opposite risk in giving up on a river too soon. A fisherman subscribing to Walden’s dictum would have the trout season end with the last small hatch in late summer, thereby cutting himself off from a month and more of fine weather, and trout that still rise willingly to a fly. On my river, quitting too early would mean losing out on some of the year’s best days, cloudless, exhilarating afternoons that I would give anything to have back come December. A trout season is an accumulation of puzzles, some of which can still be solved in the fishing’s last few days. Quit too early on these and the answers may not be offered again. It doesn’t matter if trout are scarce. A fly-fishing season begins in unfulfilled expectation sharpened by optimism; it should end in unfulfilled expectation softened by acceptance.

  Vermont’s autumn trout season is controversial from a conservation point of view—there are spawning brookies and browns to protect—but there is a fundamental rightness about it in one respect: October is the quintessential Vermont month, and it is a fit and proper feeling to be wading one of its rivers with red leaves at your back. I am not a hunter—my means of assimilating the outdoors is a fly rod, and I want to be able to wield it as far into the autumn as new impressions endure.

  “One last time,” I said to myself that morning as I got into the car. It was the nineteenth now, we had had our first hard frosts, and on the summit ridges of the White Mountains east of us I could see faint tracings of snow. Goodbyes were on my mind. I drew out all the rituals of my fishing day as far as they would go—the scrambled eggs and cranberry muffins at the diner, the stop at Sanborn’s for new leaders, the drive upstream along the river, the donning of my waders, the careful preparation of line and fly. “One last time,” I said, and it transformed even the most banal of my routines into bittersweet farewells.

  I began further upstream than I usually go; on this last day I was anxious to have the river where it was comprehensible and small. That it wasn’t the fishiest spot on the river didn’t bother me. What I wanted was the view of the village across the fields, the white church steeple rising over the elms, the Holsteins grazing by the overgrown stone walls—the milkmaid, the arbor, and the meadow.

  It was a trout that brought me back to the fishing. I had on a wet fly, the first I had used all year, and a small brook trout had grabbed it as it dangled downstream. I hadn’t been concentrating; the sudden tug on the line affected me exactly like a sudden tug on the sleeve—it was as if the trout were mad at me for not doing my part.

  I turned my attention back to the river. It was easy to total up all the things that were gone. The leaves, for one. There were great gaps in the foliage, whole trees that were already bare. A New England autumn can be so colorfully full that you forget the curtains of red are supported by a framework of limbs, and their reappearance—stark and straggly—is always something of a shock. The new abundance of light affects you the same way. In summer, the sun on the river comes in shafts, glimmers and reflections; in mid-October, it’s everywhere, hidden by no leaves, merged with high white clouds into a sky that seems fres
hly painted. Had there even been a sky in July? There was no boundary to this October light, and it seemed to well up from the river’s bottom just as exuberantly as it poured down from the sun.

  There was still a lot of foliage to admire, most of it in the river. I caught my share. On every third or fourth cast, my fly would snare a maple leaf the current was sweeping downstream. Some leaves were real monsters, with pendulous edges and thick fatty stems; others were little fry, miniature leaves that could have fit on a stamp. As I pulled them in, my line tightened and they skittered across the river’s surface like miniature kites trying one last time to become airborne.

  The insects were gone. The big hatches of spring end by mid-July, but there is a great deal of lesser activity right through the first few frosts. The long decline in their numbers is never final—I have seen insects dancing over the river’s surface on warm days in December—but early October seems to mark a turning point in their domination. Until then, there is at least one variety of insect whose predictable appearance makes it worth imitating; after that, the river seems as devoid of bugs as it does fish. Nothing swarms over by the far bank, no clouds hover an inch above the river, and nothing plops from the tree limbs into the eddies to be inhaled instantly.

  The autumnal insect in Vermont is the wooly caterpillar—the thick orange and black beastie whose “fur” is supposed to be an infallible guide to the upcoming winter’s severity. (It’s a superstition I don’t take much stock in; their fur is always thick, and predicting a long winter in New England is not exactly going out on a limb.) You see these caterpillars trying to inch their way across the roads this time of year. I’ve caught lots of October trout on orange and black Wolly Worms fished just below the surface, so at least a few of them must find their way into the river.