A River Trilogy Read online

  Or so I thought. At dawn, the drumming of rain on the roof made the thought of bushwacking through the woods less appealing than it had seemed the night before; my exploratory impulse firmly under control, I turned over and went back to sleep. The rain continued for three days, then business interfered, so it wasn’t until the end of the month that I was able to get back: Halloween, as it turned out—a fit day for mad enterprises of every kind.

  I parked at the same place I had on my first trip, and hiked the dirt road to the river beneath the first blue sky in days. The rain had changed the equation. Instead of a dehydrated trickle, I found a racing mountain torrent that in places was over its banks. This was both good and bad. Good in that it seemed more recognizably my river; bad because I no longer had a dry staircase of rocks to climb to the top. I went through my pack to make sure I had a compass, tied my climbing shoes tighter for good luck, then—taking a deep breath—started off into the woods.

  It was easy going at first. There was a deer trail parallel to the banks, and little of the underbrush I had been afraid would slow me down. The river was only a few feet wide here, but the pools were deep, and the rapids strong enough to cover the obvious fords. I hiked an hour before the volume of water appreciably slackened; after that, I could count on finding a place to cross every few yards.

  Without leaves to block it, the sun was surprisingly warm, and it wasn’t long before I peeled off my sweater. Like most Vermont hillsides, this one had once been farmed—there was the inevitable stone wall buried in forest detritus, the telltale apple trees lost amid maple, the barely discernible cellar holes choked with vines. With the leaves gone, the birch stood out with more flair than they had earlier in the fall; their white was more frequent the higher you looked, making it seem as if they were marching in formation up the slopes. It’s an effect I enjoy. For all the talk of foliage, Vermont only seems itself—its gritty, unadorned, spare self—when October’s extended shrug is over and the leaves are finally renounced.

  It was only during breaks that I was able to give the scenery the attention it deserved. The rest of the time I walked with my eyes down, concentrating on the terrain one or two steps ahead. Most of the hiking I had done lately was in the White Mountain trails over in New Hampshire, and it was much easier; the trails were well-marked and graded, and—at least on the easier ones—you could stroll along without worrying what your feet were up to. Here, every step had to be selected with care. Flat boulders turned out to wobble when stepped on; firm-looking logs had a trick of disintegrating. Twist an ankle in the Whites and another hiker would eventually come along and help you; twist an ankle on these rocks, and it would mean a very cold, lonely night to contemplate my mistake. I was going slow to start with, and after getting a foot wet when a boulder used as a bridge unexpectedly rolled sideways, I went even slower. I began to worry that I might not have time to reach the source after all.

  I had crossed the river thirteen times, and was preparing to cross it a fourteenth when I realized that the bank I was following flattened out up ahead into a clearing. This was a change in the established pattern. Always before, the bank would remain level for several hundred yards, then dramatically steepen as the river began to curve, forcing me to cross over to the other bank in order to make any progress. I was zigzagging, walking more sideways than uphill.

  This time, I decided to continue on until I came to the clearing. A deer yard, I assumed, but no—rather than closing in a circle, it shaped itself into a funnel pointing upstream. It was an old logging road, one of those providential passageways you often come on in New England just when the bushwhacking turns ridiculous. It was unquestionably the oldest, bushiest, most obscure logging road I had ever encountered, but I was thankful for it just the same—it speeded up my pace by several m.p.h. It took the path of least resistance up the valley, sometimes hugging the river, sometimes crossing it, sometimes running away from it up the ridge. Times it ran away, I stuck to the river; after following it so long, it had become like one of those nature walks for the blind you see in the national parks, a rope guiding me through the forest which I dared not let go. Sticking to the river meant scrambling over granite ledges, climbing blowdowns and hopping rocks, but it was worth it—more than anything, I needed to stay in touch with that bright, racing ribbon to which I felt increasingly tied. A hundred yards of hard going and the logging trail would rejoin the stream, easing my way.

  I crossed the river three more times before taking a break. Each ford was a new challenge; picking a way across the river required the same kind of half-premeditated, half-instinctual route-finding climbers use in scaling a cliff, and the same kind of balance. The trick was in finding a bridge of stones that led slightly upstream, so that you were crossing from lower rocks onto higher ones, thereby keeping your inertia within reasonable bounds. Hop downstream and the tendency was to keep going head-over-heels; hop upstream and gravity acted like a pair of cushioning arms. The best kinds of fords were where the rocks were flat, but far enough apart so you didn’t take them for granted; the trickiest were the ones where the banks were closest together, tempting you into a jump. At the less obvious fords, I tried making bridges out of whatever log was handy, but this was time-consuming, and by continuing upstream I could usually find a place where the crossing was easier.

  The scale of the river was changing the further up it I hiked. I no longer made diminishing comparisons to the broad stretches where I fished, but began taking it on its own; if anything, its sound and light filled that narrow valley more completely than it did further downstream. The lower water shared the landscape with farms, highways, and towns, but here near the source the river was everything—the dominant fact—and it seemed to paradoxically widen in my imagination the narrower it became, until finally there was nothing else in my senses but that bouncing, impetuous flow.

  I stopped for lunch on a small island around which the river divided itself in mossy, inch-deep riffles. A family of grouse had beaten me to the driest patch of leaves; hearing me, they burst away in five scattered directions. I opened my pack and took out an apple and some cheese. There was a log behind me that doubled as backrest and table. Thirsty, I drank right from the stream, cupping my hands under the tiny falls until the water bubbled off my wrists. The water had the flavor of transparency. Swallowing it, I wasn’t aware of taste, but only idea: purity. Purity had a cool feel on the lips, and nourished a delicious sense of well-being. Purity ran down my skin and made me shiver. Purity made me drink again and again, as if from a well I wanted to prove was endless.

  Sitting there, I had a chance to watch the river more carefully. The rain of the previous week had washed down thousands of small twigs, and the water was still deciding where to put them. Some of the thicker ones were already jammed into a miniature dam; as I watched, smaller twigs were swept into it and gently tucked by the current underneath the upstream edge, weaving the dam even thicker. With the river at its smallest, even a foot-long branch was a major impediment, and the banks were grooved with dry, alternate channels the water had explored and abandoned in its drive downhill.

  My thoughts were following it now, gradually widening my focus from the small, hemlock-shaded island where I sat in the same way the river’s banks gradually widened, admitting more and more. It was an aerial view I was aiming toward—a perspective from somewhere up above those trees. The river was a mountain brook running through a forest abandoned when the white men who settled it in the 1780s moved west a century later. The river was an upland stream moving past the hill towns of two hundred people that still clung to life in a remote valley of rural Vermont. The river was a medium-sized trout stream running through the Green Mountain foothills to a junction with the Connecticut. The river was one of hundreds flowing down the ocean side of the ancient Appalachian chain on the East Coast of the United States. The river was one of thousands lining the continent, one of millions creasing the earth—a microscopic gram of hydrogen and oxygen lost in an immensity of wa
terless stars. A grain of water in the universe, a thread of water on the planet, a small river in North America, a trout stream in the Appalachians, a mountain brook in Vermont, and that brought it all the way back down to me, sitting there against the damp husk of a long-dead oak, wondering where the hell in this immense scheme I fit.

  And what about me? What was this insignificant scruffy atom of consciousness thinking about as it telescoped so glibly up to the stars and so precipitously back down again? I was thinking about the opening day of the trout season back in April—how conscious I had been of my boyhood dream of being able to fish a trout stream at will and the dream’s fruition, the actual river itself, icy, powerful, and real. In between were long years in the city when the only rivers I knew were vicarious ones, just vivid enough to keep the dream alive and torment me by their ever more doubtful realization. The visits I made to real rivers only reminded me of what I was missing, and by my midtwenties, I was beginning to talk about trout fishing as something I used to do. A lover of streams, a good caster, a fan of trout, a reader of all the right books and where was I? Stuck in the city, bitterly wishing.

  But the thing about dreams is that you never know. Herman Melville, an old man living forgotten in New York, had above his study desk the motto “Be true to the dreams of thy youth.” I had another boyhood dream besides fishing: I wanted to write. Pursuing it took all my energy and courage for ten hard years. Slowly, taking three steps back for every advance, I managed to establish a career. With it came freedom; I was able to move to the country, and there in the hills above my home found the river, the second of my boyhood dreams, trailing along in this first dream’s fulfillment. The beautiful mountains, a woman I loved . . . it was as if the dream of writing had been dreamt so intensely that it had established a force-field powerful enough to tug other dreams in its wake, a balm for the bitterness the yearning engendered.

  And so I was thinking how lucky I was to be sitting there contemplating the overlapping valleys, metaphorical and real, the river connected. The other thing about dreams is their shortness, but that was all right, too. I had my dream as few people ever had theirs, and though it should only last this one season, I was going to get it down on paper once and for all.

  The wind was coming up now—I felt it on the back of my neck as the gentle pressure from a woman’s hand. It was time to start hiking again. But there was one more thing I wanted to work through before leaving. It concerned a trout, a fourteen-inch brown trout that appears nowhere else in this book. I caught him on a Cinnamon Ant in the late afternoon of a late August day, and had been trying to put him out of my mind ever since. In playing him, I was never so aware of a trout’s being—its strength and beauty, its single-minded impulse toward life, its perfect coexistence with water. I was torn between wanting him to break loose and wanting to have him in my hand before letting him go. As it turned out, he was gut-hooked, already bleeding from the gills by the time I beached him. I took a rock from the bank and quickly finished the job.

  Happy and sad, happy and sad, the inevitable conjunction! I had felt the life of that trout so intensely because he was dying; the strange sympathy that links hunter and hunted had been in full force for those few moments we were connected, and I felt severed when his life dropped away. Even something as harmless as fishing comes down to it in the end: the bitter and the sweet, the pleasant memory tinged with sadness, the trout living and the trout dead.

  With luck, I would know and love the river for many years to come. Never would I live it with the same intensity. My dream had reached its apogee with the hooking of that trout, and by the time I took the rock and killed him, another bit of boy in me was gone.

  I shouldered my rucksack and started up the eastern bank. The sun had gotten around behind me while I was resting, and its lower edge was disappearing below the trees on the ridge. I walked faster now, taking fewer detours as the logging trail stayed closer to the stream. The climbing was less strenuous than before. After that first narrow valley, the terrain had flattened out into a gently sloping plateau. A steep climb around waterfalls would have indicated the source was near; this easier grade meant the river was less hurried, its energy conserved, its source further off than I had thought.

  Eventually, the logging trail trickled out, and I began bushwhacking through vines, brush, and trees, forcing my way rather than finding it. I resented even the slightest detour now—the river seemed the one life in the forest besides mine, and I hated to let it go. The stream bed was shallower, not as rocky and well-defined as it had been lower down; it wasn’t cutting through the hillside as much as racing over it, and judging by the ferns and moss growing well to either side of its present course, it often slid a bit to the right or left, depending on its mood.

  With the fading daylight, the increasing cold, my journey up the river was taking on the quality of a race. I tried to slow myself down, took frequent breathers, but there was nothing I could do about the adrenaline I felt pumping through me each time I stopped. As it had so many times before, the river itself forced me to adopt an easier pace. Two hours after I stopped for lunch, I came upon the first significant falls. They weren’t high—four feet at the most—but in the reduced scale I was traveling through, they loomed as large as Niagara must have to those early voyageurs trying to work their way up the Great Lakes.

  Above the falls was a surprise: three channels, each as full of water as the one I had been following. I felt like Lewis and Clark at the headwaters of the Missouri: disappointed that the main river didn’t continue; curious as to which of the tributaries led furthest west.

  There was nothing for it but to explore each in turn. The left fork—the one that ran perpendicularly west from the falls—looked promising, but soon petered out into a leaf-choked channel of mud. Retracing my way downstream, I started up the middle fork, the one that ran straightest into the falls. This time I hiked a strenuous half-mile before the water ran out. It was a pretty little brook, probably nonexistent when it didn’t rain, and obviously not the main branch.

  So it was the right-hand fork after all. The minute I started along it, I knew it was my river—there was a life and impetus to it the other two branches didn’t have. And since I had been forced to explore each of them, the time lost was vital. It was obvious now that I wasn’t going to reach the source, not today. The river was dwindling, but in an unhurried way, and the underbrush along both banks was getting harder to penetrate the higher I climbed. Even if I turned back now, it would be dark by the time I got below the island, and I would have to grope the rest of the way back to my car.

  Still, it was hard to stop. The further up the river I traveled, the more private and secret it seemed. I felt I was approaching an answer that had long eluded me, at the stage where the solution was almost in sight, requiring no further decisions or agonized puzzling out, but only endurance . . . that it was there and there was nothing left to reaching it but sheer endurance. I would stop, turn my back on it, start downhill, then turn around and start climbing again, resolved to go just a little bit further.

  The fourth stop was my last. There are mountain summits in the Himalayas that are sacred to the peoples living at their base; climbers, respecting this, stop a foot short of the summit, leaving that final temple of snow forever virgin. It was out of this same worshipful impulse that I turned back from the source. I would never know the river so well that I would lose my awe of its beauty, and it was right that its last few yards—its inviolable beginning—remained a mystery to me still.

  I straddled the river, a leg on each side, then slowly bent down to dip my hands ceremoniously in the water, letting the pure, cold drops roll down my fingers back into the flow from which they came.

  A few things more, the light growing fainter. A leaf brushing my neck on its way to the ground . . . a woodpecker rattling a tree in the distance behind me . . . the wind in the pines as it came down off the mountain . . . the sound of the river . . . a last quiet look . . . and all the rest is s
imply going home.

  Upland Stream

  January 16

  I have this weakness as an essay writer: when I start out with the intention of writing an essay about, say, middle age, the subject has a way of swerving around toward fly fishing; when I sit down to write an essay about fly fishing, it hops tracks and ends up being about middle age. My solution in this book is to let these tendencies have their head, and my own purpose here at the start is to warn flyfishers and nonfishers that the swerves may not always go in the direction they would wish.

  There’s another thing to remember: I write fiction for a living—my job is to lie as persuasively as I can. Link this to the natural tendency of a fisherman to exaggerate and embellish and there may be a passage or two where even the most patient credulity is strained. Nevertheless, except for the parts where I very broadly wink, and a few protective pseudonyms, the events in this book are true, and the only liberty I’ve taken is to sometimes rearrange their chronology, the better to bring everything into the yearly focus on which the essays are framed. Here in rural New England the seasonal cycle is the adventure by which we all live, and a fisherman’s slice of it is made richer by its fleeting and bittersweet briefness. I don’t think I’m to be blamed for wanting to slow the clock down from time to time, stop the hands from moving faster, and even occasionally push them back.

  Mid-January now—a good time to be thinking of streams and rivers and trout. A good time, too, to pay tribute to the man who got me started writing about fishing, the editor and essayist who has written and published more good fishing in print than anyone in the literature of our sport, Nick Lyons.

  Twenty-three below zero last night by the thermometer on our porch, and yet there are barrel-sized openings in the ice, and from their centers the river draws its breath in frosty puffs, gearing up now for spring.