A River Trilogy Page 17

  There can’t be too many places in the world where it’s possible to stand in all four seasons simultaneously and be uncomfortable in each. The hills above my home are one of them—the oddly beautiful, oddly tortured New Hampshire hills of granite and spruce, brook trout and beaver, bogwater and Frost. By late April the snow is almost gone there, though enough remains to trap, squeeze, and soak heavy boots. The leaves, last autumn’s crop of them, lie in slick matted heaps on the forest floor, their red and gold blended into an amber in-betweenness with the treacherous texture of mud. The sun, with no shade on the trees, burns even faster than in July. The wind, the thawing vernal wind, slaps back and forth like a wet towel, adding a chill in your middle to go along with the chill in your toes. Add a few precocious blackflies, potholes of slush, and some fresh tangled blowdowns and you have a pretty thorough set of variations on one masochistic theme. Come spring and the start of the trout season I would be nowhere else.

  It’s Copper Run I’m talking about here, the small upland stream I’ve come to love in the course of five years’ fishing. Never wider than ten feet, never deeper than four, it drains a small unspoiled corner of New England woods, leaching as it does so all the beauty to be found there, so that it becomes the liquid, flowing locus of the surrounding hills. Seldom visited, it’s possible to walk along the banks the better part of a day without coming upon any human trace other than a rusty bolt or tinny water can dropped by a logger fifty years before. Not in every pool but enough to make it interesting there are trout—miniature brook trout that seem in their color and quickness to be essence of stream, spontaneously generated, living crystals of orange and black. To take even a single six-incher—for one short moment to be attached to something so vivid and alive—is reason enough to suffer the multiple discomforts of the April woods.

  There are more mundane reasons, of course. The need once the weather warms to bolt from the prison a house can become. The need to justify the new graphite rod I treated myself to at Christmas. The need after a long winter’s writing to be out and questing after something besides words. Around the third week in April these things reach their peak, and it only takes a gentle, triggerlike pressure—a surge of sunlight? geese returning? a southerly cast to the wind?—to make me shed the last of my inertia and make the five-mile migration that separates a Copper Run longed for and imagined from a Copper Run stood beside and real.

  Last April’s trip could stand for any. There was the busy rummaging in the closet for leaders and flies, the casual “Think I’ll try a few casts up on the mountain” to a knowing Celeste, the raid on the refrigerator for nuts and oranges, the hydroplaning, swerving ride up our dirt road that in mud season passes for driving—the abrupt dead-end when the ruts became frozen and the joyride stopped.

  The stopping point varies each year, but I’m usually left with an uphill walk of at least a mile. On this trip it was a little more than that; I made it to the frozen pond where the deep woods begin, parked on an icy pull-off, pushed my rod into a rucksack, and started off on foot. It had been a hard winter, and the earth in the middle of the road was still in the process of turning itself over, lined with the stiff petrified creases that are, I suppose, the earthy equivalents of groans. There by the marge the ground was softer, potted with moose prints. I’ve seen moose here in the past on their journeys from pond to pond—great lumbering browns wearing a look of perpetual bafflement, as if they can’t quite figure out who or what they are or whether they should care.

  At about the same time the hardwood starts giving way to spruce there comes a perceptible flattening as you emerge on the height of land. There’s a bridge here, nothing more than a rude corduroy, and it’s possible to walk right across it without realizing a trickle of water flows beneath. Leave the road—follow the trickle through the first tangled briars—and in less than twenty yards you come to the start of Copper Run proper at the towering Gateway Arch.

  I call it this quite deliberately for the drama of the May evening I discovered it. Celeste was pregnant, and in the course of one of our evening walks for exercise we crossed the corduroy bridge on our way to a small pond whose star attraction, besides its wildness, was a resident loon. I had my rod with me, of course; I caught perch in the pond’s shallows as Celeste readied our picnic and poured out our tea. After dinner, curious, I left her admiring the sunset while I walked back to the bridge and followed the trickle upstream to see if I couldn’t find where it began.

  It began in a beaver pond, as it turned out, and a big one; on the far shore, framed by the fingers of dying tree trunks, rose the gray bulk of Slide Mountain, emphasizing the vastness even more. There were insects hatching everywhere; between their rings, the wake left by the resident beaver, and a slight evening wind, the surface of the pond buzzed with as much activity as Lake Sunapee on a weekend afternoon. I managed to balance along the beaver dam to a place I could cast, but if there were trout in the pond they were occupied elsewhere and I soon gave up.

  So back to the bridge then. Back to it—and then off into the woods downstream. I’m not sure what prompted me to do it; it was close to dark and the stream was more shreds and tatters than a definite flow. But the future has a magnetism all its own, and there in the twilight, in the mountain stillness, with the sensitivity toward omens even a vicarious pregnancy brings, I was more attuned to it than usual, and it would have taken a deliberate act of violence not to have given in to its pull.

  “Just a little way,” I told myself—the old indisputable justification. There by the bridge the bank was all briars, and it was hard enough to make any way. Since the future not only tugs us but shapes us into the correct posture to meet it, I was bowing my way (a low, reverential bow) through a particularly bad tangle when the watery tatters suddenly gathered themselves and changed from a pedestrian pewter to a rich, luminous copper; the effect was that of stepping into a sunset turned molten. At the same time, or perhaps a split second earlier, I noticed a darkening overhead, and looked up to see the branches of two white pines meet high above the stream, forming with their intersection a perfect proscenium or arch.

  A Gateway Arch—the expression came to me the moment I saw it. It wasn’t just the perfection of the framing, the changing color, but how both came embellished with a roll of drums—with a deepening and staccato-like increase in what had been until that moment nothing more than a vacant gurgling. Just past the arch, where color and sound were richest, was a small pool formed by the junction of two smaller streams—the outlets of the two ponds already mentioned. Waving my rod ahead of me like a Geiger counter—like the antenna of a probing ant—I shook my Muddler down into the pool’s center, letting it sink toward the sharp rocks that lined its sides. Immediately there came a pull, and then a moment later a six-inch brook trout was splashing across my boots, sending up a little shiver of happiness toward my neck. I let him go, then tried another cast, this time a little farther downstream. Again, a six-inch trout, this one even deeper-bodied and more brilliantly speckled, with a soft coppery cast on his back that seemed the water’s undertone.

  I caught six trout in all that first evening, each a yard or so downstream of its predecessor. In the twilight, in my twilight mood, it was clear they were deliberately tugging me deeper into the woods, the better to ensnare me in their enchantment. After the sixth I broke away and waded back through the darkness toward the bridge. By the time I rejoined a worried Celeste (who knew my Hansel-like susceptibilities well enough), the experience had settled just far enough for me to realize I had stumbled upon what in flinty New England terms was a virtual Shangri-la.

  Something of this surprise, something of this ceremonial quality is still present whenever I go back to Copper Run, and never more than on that first April trip after a long winter away. Again, I slip and slide my way from the bridge through those deceptively small riffles; again, I bow through the hoop of briars; again, the arch of pine forms overhead, and then, after a quick clumsy cast, my fly line is uncoiling down across the
coppery water in floating N’s and straightening in a tug—two tugs, the first as the Muddler swings tight in the current, the second as a trout takes hold with what can only be described as a hearty handshake of welcome. And just as the arch seems to beckon me each time, so too when I’ve passed under the branches it seems to seal me in. Back beyond the arch is noise and worry and confusion and doubt, but this side of it—stream side of it—there is nothing but that shiny, exuberant mix of rapid, riffle, and pool, and no requirement upon me but to align myself with its inspiration and let the current lead me down.

  So into the water then—away from the snow and slush and bad footing and directly into it, frigid as it is. The banks along this first section are too steep and heavily forested to balance along, and there’s no alternative except to wade. I’m dressed for it, of course. Woolen underwear, wool pants, silk liners, heavy socks. For shoes, I wear old suede boots from my rock-climbing days, with hard toes and heels that absorb all the bruises and enough insulation to hold the coldness at bay . . . at least in theory. In actuality, with the water in the forties, my toes lose their feeling about every fourth cast, and I have to climb my way out of the stream and stamp up and down on the nearest boulder for a good five minutes before the feeling is restored.

  By the time I’ve fished through the first pool, if I’m lucky, I’ve caught my first six trout, perhaps even the same friendly sentinels that were there the evening I discovered it. By about the fourth one I begin to relax. Behind all the anticipation and excitement that lure me here each spring is a darker emotion: the nagging worry that something terrible will have happened and all of it will be gone. Copper Run, the dancing water, the iridescent trout—all gone. It always takes an hour of being immersed in it—of feeling those twin chills merge, the coldness of the water and the happy shivers transmitted by the trout—before my doubts finally vanish and I let myself wholeheartedly believe.

  Below the entrance pool the banks taper together and the water drops between rocks in three distinct runs. They come together again at the bottom, then fan out across a broad shelf of granite into a second, slower pool. The water is darker-looking here, deeper, with large mossy boulders that absorb the sunlight rather than reflect it. A good place for trout, only there aren’t any. I fish it each time to make sure, but never once have had even the suggestion of a nibble. Is it too exposed to otter and heron for a trout to be comfortable? Is there some hidden interplay of current that disturbs their equanimity? Or is it just that Copper Run trout are too cranky and original to place themselves in a place so obviously suited to their well-being? If nothing else it gives me something to think about, and lets me know the easy successes of the first pool won’t be duplicated on the same lavish scale.

  As pretty as it is, the first hundred yards of Copper Run are pretty much a warm-up for what comes next. The water spills from the fishless pool in one of those terracelike steps that are so characteristic . . . churns itself over a few times for good luck . . . then deepens to form a bowl that is so perfectly round and so tropically shaded it’s impossible to look at it without thinking of Gauguin.

  If Copper Run is essence of mountains, essence of woods, then this pool is essence of Copper Run. I’ve spent entire afternoons here trying to separate out all the strands that go into making it so perfect. The smell is one of them; besides the wet leaves, the thawing earth, there’s a sharper, more acrid smell that is metallic and not at all unpleasant. The trace elements, I decided—gold and silver tinges scoured by water from rock.

  A short way beyond the tropical pool a small tributary seeps in. I say seep quite deliberately—it’s a damp, spongy wetness more than a definite flow, and it doesn’t appear on any map. Copper Run itself is on the map, but only as a thin scrawl between contour lines, with only the most approximate relation to its actual course. It’s too small to register properly; its improvisational, quicksilver meanderings are if anything anti-map. Were I the cartographer in charge of the New England hills I would acknowledge its chanciness, slap a Gothic Terra Incognita over the entire height of land, and let the curious and energetic go about discovering it on their own.

  Which, in my stumbly fashion, was exactly what I was trying to do. The truth is that despite the visits of five years, I still had only the haziest notion of Copper Run’s course. I knew where the water started: the combination of ponds there behind me on the ridge. I knew where, via a larger river, the water ended: an old mill town beside the Connecticut twenty miles farther south. But the things that happened in between—the twists of its channel, the dark woods it traversed, the possible waterfalls, its junction with larger streams—were for a long time as unknown to me as the headwaters of the Orinoco.

  This was not due to any lack of curiosity on my part—quite the opposite. The water I came to seemed so rich in possibility that each yard deserved an afternoon of admiration to itself. My trips were of pilgrimage, not reconnaissance; each pool had to be sat beside, admired, and fished. What with revisiting the familiar pools and lingering over the new ones, about three new pools per visit was the fastest pace I could manage and still get home before dark. Add the fact that between bugs and low water I only visited Copper Run in spring and autumn—add a dozen tributaries that in their miniaturization and mystery were just as alluring—and you can see I had set myself a question mark the erasure of which was beginning to seem a lifetime’s work.

  That was my resolution for last year: to increase the tempo of my exploration, to force my pace downriver, to learn before spring ended where Copper Run came out. There would be less time spent exploring each pool, less time to fish, but a labyrinth has its own charms, and I was trying to focus back on it to reach some comprehensive understanding of the whole. I knew the spill where the water surged across a fallen hemlock, grooving the wood until its grain seemed to ripple; I knew the falls where the water washed sideways off a mica-flecked cliff; I knew the spots where the spray kicked high enough off the boulders to wet my face, the best fording places, the pools most likely to hold fish . . . and now it was time to thread these beads together in a necklace to marvel at, fasten, and share.

  And if I was proceeding downstream in a pleasant geographical blur, I was proceeding in a pleasant historical blur as well. I knew little about the history of Copper Run, though there was little enough history to know. The stone walls that marked the limit of the early settlers’ audacity—the stone walls that climb even Slide Mountain to heights awe-inspiring and tragic—end well below Copper Run. Even the surveyor’s tape that dangles everywhere in the woods now, fluorescent and mocking, has only reached the fringes of this notch. Between these two limits—the patient, backbreaking husbandry of the past; the easy, land-grabbing mentality of the present—Copper Run sits like a lost world, removed for a good century and a half from the curse of events. The trees grew, then someone cut them, then they started growing again, and all along Copper Run danced its way south, oblivious to any imperatives but those of gravity.

  Our exhaustive town history contains only one story from the height of land—the story of a woman who spent her life in the woods as her father’s unpaid assistant in a small logging operation. The older people in town can remember seeing her drive a wagon full of logs past the common to the Connecticut—a straight-backed woman who teetered between proud dignity and shy wildness and never lingered long enough for folks to get to know her. I’ve seen her grave, the last one in a cemetery where everyone else had been buried seventy years before. It stands alone in one corner beneath some birch; in its simplicity, in its apartness, it could stand for all the solitary lives that have escaped history’s record.

  She died in 1957—more than thirty years now. In the decades since probably the only big thing to hit Copper Run have been the Vibram soles of my size-twelve boots, stirring apart the moss on rocks that are as old and untroubled as any on earth. Seen in those terms, I was an invasion—a whole new chapter in what so far had been, as far as man was concerned, a relatively blank book. This placed u
pon me a certain responsibility; it was up to me, in my short visits there, to conduct myself in a manner befitting an explorer—not an explorer hot for commerce, but an explorer out to record what he had found as faithfully as he could, the better to understand the hidden, threatened beauty of this one fragile place.

  So what did I find there? What justified those afternoons along its banks that could have been more usefully spent writing short stories or splashing paint across the barn? What was the payoff for those icy immersions? All pretty stuff, but what—a skeptical Queen Isabella might ask—does this newfound land contain?

  Pygmies. Bush pygmies eking out a precarious existence high in a forest remote from man. Copper Run trout, to complete my metaphor, are small, not stunted; independent, not docile; shy, but not so shy a properly placed bauble won’t lure them from their haunts. Like mountain tribes, they are splendidly suited to their habitat, and have the happy knack of taking on its qualities—not only its coloration but its very element, so that catching a Copper Run brookie is like catching and holding a condensed length of spray.

  And since it is pygmies we’re talking about here, it’s best to dispose of the size question right at the start. An average Copper Run brook trout is six inches in length; a good one, eight inches; a monster, nine. By the time you’ve adjusted to the miniature pools and miniature riffles, say fifty yards in, the scale has begun to right itself and you understand what a genius Einstein was when he spoke of relativity. In an eddy twelve inches deep, a six-inch trout takes up a not inconsiderable space; in a shadowy forest, its copper richness is not an inconsiderable source of light.

  There’s another thing to keep in mind: small is not necessarily easy. The trout come willingly enough to a fly, but they’re quick, quicker than the current, and it takes near perfect timing to connect. Then too, for all their innocence, these fish are not gullible rubes; a trout that strikes and misses will not come again. Add to this the sheer difficulty of placing a fly on the water—the protective overlay of blowdown and branches, briars and boulders—and you have fishing that is as challenging in its small way as any other.