A River Trilogy Read online

  For the flyfisherman, this goes right to the heart of the problem: the chore of keeping your backcast free of the trees. After an hour and perhaps fifty collisions, it hardly seems like casting at all, but a particularly vexatious form of air traffic control; you spend more time looking back over your shoulder than you do looking in front, and any cast that manages to uncoil without hitting branches seems a pretty successful flight. Take a day of this, and you will be left with the illusion you haven’t fished the water at all but the air, and your dreams that night are apt to be laced with hemlock-dwelling trout that mock you with their inaccessibility.

  I’ve learned the hard way not to fight this, but to incorporate the obstacles as part of the challenge. Rather than bring a hundred flies along and moan each time one is broken off, I now bring only two—a Muddler and a backup, thereby assigning a definite limit to just how clumsy I can afford to be. I usually manage to snap off the first one by the third or fourth pool, but you’d be surprised at how long that last one stays on. I’ve climbed my share of Copper Run trees, plunged my hand deep into pools to work feather out of bark, and even occasionally twisted a hook from my earlobes, but never once have I headed home early for the lack of a fly.

  The two-fly limit has another happy effect: it simplifies the process, and simplicity is what this kind of fishing is all about. All fishing, both sport and commercial, has about it something of a complicated hide-and-seek, but small-stream brook trout fishing—the fishing that fascinates me—retains the hide-and-seek quality in its most basic, childlike form. Mountain trout spend their lives hiding in an environment that is perfect for their concealment, and what I find so compelling and interesting in fishing for them is the trick of waving a fly across the water and thereby finding out exactly where they are. The fight, the actual landing—for fish this size, none of that counts. It’s the first flash I’m after—the brief but exquisite pleasure that comes when a swirl of water swirls suddenly faster and a life from out of nowhere firmly tugs you, shouting “Here!”

  In some pools the trout are just where they’re supposed to be—the satisfaction is the smug one of knowing their hiding places so thoroughly. In other pools the hiding places are there, but not the trout—my smugness stands chastened. It’s beyond these, in the unexplored water downstream, where the game becomes most interesting. That plinth-shaped rock in the current’s fringe—there should be a trout right in front or right behind. Is there? A careful cast, the fly landing perfectly, the current sweeping it down . . . No. That log aslant the bank with the deep pocket along its head. There? Yes! and a good one, all splashing iridescence, to be brought quickly to my feet, defeathered, and urged gently home.

  Once this simple curiosity is satisfied, there’s room left for a whole complicated superstructure of conjecture and wonder. Why do Copper Run trout seem to migrate with the seasons and in a direction reverse to what you might anticipate, heading upstream when the water turns colder, downstream when it warms? What autumnal hint triggers their color change, when their copper deepens toward crimson and their spots take on a vivacity that makes even maple leaves seem dull? Why does their size seem to diminish the farther from the road you go? Why will they smash a dry fly and not rise, at least perceptibly, to a living insect? Why this, why that, and then suddenly I’ve raced through three new pools and some pretty connecting water, and my wondering has run away from me and I find a dry, sunny spot to climb out of the water and rest.

  There are several of these resting places along the stream—flat, grassy terraces just big enough to admit my outstretched body, slanted so I can stare at the water while flat on my back. Removed from the iciness, plied with oranges, I am free to devote myself, for a few minutes anyway, to one of those vast metaphysical questions that only occasionally seem worth the asking. Why, if I am so enchanted with the sheer beauty of this stream, must I bring along a rod and reel in order to fully appreciate it? Why can’t I just stroll down its banks in simple adoration? Why, when you come right down to it, fish?

  There’s a teasing, quicksilver-like quality to Copper Run—like any stream, the moment you try to grasp it, it’s gone. And so, too, with any question posed on its banks; the best you can hope for is a partial, impressionistic answer that leaves in the air as much as it settles. Still, fishing for brook trout on a small mountain stream is about as simple and pure as the endeavor becomes, so that motives stand out with a clarity they lose in bigger, murkier waters.

  Why fish? Leaving out on one side the obvious reasons like being outdoors and the healthy exercise, and leaving out on the other side the complicated reasons of blood lust and the ancestral promptings of our watery origins, I think I can begin to find the beginnings of an answer. It has to do with the exploring I mentioned earlier—that ritualistic, challenging version of hide-and-seek. Fly fishing is the only means I have to enter into the hidden life of a stream and in a remarkably literal way, so that if my cast has been a good one and my reflexes sharp, that life—through the energy of its fishy emissary—pulses up a taut leader through a taut line down a curved rod to my tensed arm . . . to my arm, and by the excitement of that conveyance to my heart. A fishless stream might be every bit as beautiful as Copper Run, but it’s the fish that whet my curiosity, stocking it with a life I need to feel to understand.

  Discovery, and the vicarious thrill that comes with having my surrogate self—my Muddler, Royal Wulff, or Cahill—go swimming off through a pocket of rapids, being at one and the same time an extension of my nervous system and an independent, unpredictable agent of free will. Like Alvin, the tethered submarine guided by cables through the Titanic’s wreck, the fly answers our commands and does our probing; in some mysterious, sympathetic way we see through our fly and understand the water better beneath it than we do the water we’re actually standing in twenty yards upstream. That little back eddy near the alders, what’s under it? Sweep the rod to the correct angle and our surrogate drifts over and checks it out. That granite reef sunk beneath the brightness? Shake some line loose and our surrogate plunges down.

  Our nerves are transmitted to a tethered cell of tinsel and feather—that and the added, exhilarating bonus of knowing any second we may be jumped . . . that our surrogate selves are liable to be eaten. Anyone who compares fishing to hunting has got it backwards; it’s the thrill of being hunted that gives fishing its charm. For the few seconds our lures swim beneath the surface we recapture the innocence—the dangerous, stimulating innocence—of the days when man walked the earth not as master but as prey. It was, it is, a dangerous thing to be a human, and we need to be reminded from time to time not only of our abstract mortality, but of a mortality that springs from ambush and clamps down.

  Why fish? Notes toward the start of an answer, not the answer itself. In this resting place, beside a small ribbon of water on a fine April day, it’s the best I can do.

  I balance my way onto a rock in the center of the current and begin casting again. With the sun going down, the chill more penetrating, it’s time to admit something I’ve tried to keep from my story as long as possible. The fact, the sad inescapable fact, that Copper Run is threatened, and by the time you read this its miniature perfection will almost certainly be gone.

  This will come as no surprise. Here in the last decade of the twentieth century it has become a given that something beautiful is something threatened. A beautiful marriage, a beautiful custom, a beautiful place. We cannot admire any of these without hearing a meter in the background ticking off borrowed time. If that something is remote, fragile, and cherished, then it is doomed even more—there are garbage dumps on Mount Everest, for instance, and the Borneo rain forest is being ground into pulp. Our century has extracted its share of payment over the years, payments social, political, and environmental, but not yet the full amount. The day of reckoning is approaching, and before it, like a glacial moraine, comes the huge debris of extinction, this heavy, pervasive sense of doom.

  We’re a race of Cassandras now, not Pollyannas
, and I have no wish to gloss over the facts. For the corner of New England woods I love the threat is quite simple on one hand, quite complex on the other. The remote notch Copper Run drains is owned by a paper company that is in the business of selling trees. The trees along Copper Run, the trees that entangle my backcasts and darken the riffles, are fast approaching a marketable size. All winter long, as I sit typing, trucks roll past my house loaded with logs. It is too much to expect that none of them will be from Copper Run. The vague uneasiness I experienced last April was not without reason; here spring is approaching again, and yet when I think of returning I feel not anticipation but only dread.

  This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of timber management. Timberland, at least for the time being, is land not being developed or macadamized, and in this part of the country the paper companies have traditionally allowed public access to the woods. Still, any organization whose sole raison d’etre is greed cannot be trusted to do anything except be true to that principle on any and all occasions.

  As it turns out, I know the man who owns the company that owns Copper Run, at least by sight. He’s in his fifties, balding, of average height and weight, fond of wearing the rumpled chinos and flannel blazer of the perpetual Ivy Leaguer. He doesn’t appear particularly greedy; occasionally, I’ll hear him joking with our postmistress when I go to pick up our mail. It’s hard, looking at him, hearing him laugh, to connect his appearance with my happiness—to know at a word from him, at a tuition bill due for his son, some ready cash needed to float a new deal, a political contribution to be made, Copper Run and all its treasures could in the course of a day disappear . . . disappear, and that were I to protest, the whole weight of law and custom is there behind him to prevent any appeal.

  And yet he looks perfectly harmless; he even drives a car smaller than mine. At night when I drive past his house all the lights are on in every room—every room, every light, no matter how late it is, and I feel a hollow spot in my stomach when I see this and know with a certainty beyond reason that Copper Run is doomed.

  Taking the long view, I can reconcile myself to this, at least partially; cut forests eventually grow back. But it’s another characteristic of our age that the threats come shotgun style, so that even if you dodge one projectile, there are enough left to cause serious damage. The threat of development, constant road building, the dangers posed by the warming of the atmosphere and acid rain . . . all these make cutting seem positively benign. Even my own walks along the banks must be included in the dangers; as careful as I am, as gently as I bring them to hand, there are trout that die when you hook them, and the loss of even three or four good fish a season, in an environment so fragile, is the equivalent of a major kill. Like Steinbeck’s Lenny, that animal-loving fool, we can hug the things we cherish until they die.

  But here’s where the complexity enters in. Just as there is a real Copper Run faced with real, mortal dangers, so too there is an abstract Copper Run faced with dangers that are abstract but no less mortal. I refer to the relentless, vicious attack on the beautiful that is going on all around—an onslaught so widespread and successful the only conclusion to draw is that its goal is the destruction of the very notion—the very humane notion—of Beauty itself.

  Like the environmental dangers mentioned above, you can make your own list. The brutality and trivialization of popular culture; the abominations posing as architecture; the not-so-coincidental fact that the richest society the world has ever known is also its ugliest . . . all you have to do is look out the window. And though on one hand a sterile glass box designed for the entrapment of a thousand office workers in Indianapolis, Indiana, would seem to have very little to do with the fate of an upland stream in the New Hampshire woods—the mindless, flickering images these office workers watch with their children on a glass screen when they go home even less—the connection is a direct one, it being, when it comes to Beauty, one world after all.

  For if Beauty dies in the mass, how can it be expected to live in the particular? How can I possibly describe to that caged-in, image-drugged man sitting there in Indianapolis what a hemlock twig looks like spinning its way down a Copper Run riffle—how the reflected sunlight welling up from the bottom enlarges it so the needles drift within their own delicate halo? How can I explain how a Copper Run trout, held against the palm in the moment before its release, will send a shiver through you that for one fleeting second reconciles you to everything? How to explain all my love for this? How?

  A person who writes for a living deals in the raw material of words. And, like rivers, mountains, and forests, words themselves are under attack, so that even the means to describe the desecration are fast disappearing. The gobbledy-gook of advertising, the doublespeak of bureaucracy (beautification for something made uglier; restoration for something lost), the self-absorbed trendiness that passes for literature; the sheer weight of illiteracy . . . again, the wretched list. Words like lovely and fragrant and natural have been inflated so far out of proportion they form a kind of linguistic freak show where words that were once suggestive of all kinds of richness now mean something grotesque. Emerson’s “Every word was once a poem” becomes, in our century, “Every word was once for sale.”

  Again, the connection to Copper Run may seem a subtle one, but again it is simple and direct. For the devaluation of words makes for a devaluation of the things words describe and sets up a vicious circle from which there is no escape. With fewer words left to describe our Copper Runs, it becomes harder to justify saving them; as the Copper Runs vanish, the need for a language to describe them vanishes as well.

  To a writer—to a dealer in raw materials—a polluted, unreliable source is the worst of calamities. But while the assault on words is every bit as depressing as the assault on the environment, at the bottom is to be found a strange kind of exhilaration, at least for those with the spirit to fight back. For perilous, degenerate times put a great responsibility on those who care for what’s threatened, and endow their actions with a significance that is not just symbolic.

  Here is where the link between these separate conservations becomes clearest—the conservation of Copper Run, the conservation of Beauty, the conservation of words. For just as the world has seen the wisdom of creating refuges that are as far as possible removed from the hand of man, the better to protect the lessons of untrammeled life, so too should writers seek to create a refuge of words where notions of Beauty and joy and solitude will endure in the very heart of a despoiled language, so that even if the worst happens and our methods of expression become as vacant as our method of living, there will still be books and stories and descriptions to go back to so we can see exactly what has been lost—so we can see these things and so there will remain a gene pool from which Beauty might flourish once again.

  I spend my life writing fiction; among other things, it presupposes a certain ability of imagination. If I could, I would have no scruple in making Copper Run imaginary, giving it a make-believe course through make-believe woods protected by make-believe laws in a kingdom of my own design. But an imagination that seeks only escape is no imagination at all, and the best I can do . . . the best I can hope for in these twenty-odd pages of celebration and lament . . . is to state the dangers facing Copper Run as simply and directly as language can manage, and thereby protect, if not this wild upland province, at least this wild, upland province of words.

  An ending, and yet not the end. For now it is April again, and I have gone back to Copper Run to find it only slightly changed. The trees are a little higher, a little thicker, but still uncut; the trout are smaller, but they seem just as plentiful; the water, while it may be more acidy, still vaults across the boulders in happy leapfrogs, and the sunlight still takes on that grainy, shaftlike quality as you go deeper into the woods. I retrace it pool for familiar pool, moving so slowly there’s only time this first trip for a small portion of new water: a bright rapid surging between matching boulders overhung by a gia
nt spruce.

  Only one new step, but who knows? Maybe this will be the year I keep my resolution and follow Copper Run to its junction with the larger river to the south. It can’t be far, and it’s only my enchantment with what I’ve discovered that keeps me from pushing ahead at a faster rate.

  Will I be disappointed to find an ending? I don’t think so—well, only partially. For if the Copper Run I love is finite after all and joins a woods road or path I’ve already traveled, at least I’ll have the solace of the pattern’s completion. In the end, it’s all we can ask of the unknown—that it leads us around at last to the familiar and sets us off on the trek once again.

  May 12

  Started this morning with four pages to go before the end of a story. Striking distance, so I went for it, holding out the prospect of an afternoon’s fishing on the Waits to urge me along. A cool sunny day. Adrenaline weather.

  With Celeste at nine months—with a baby due any moment—there are more preparations to be made than merely grabbing my rod and bolting out the door. The Protestant Work Ethic (branded a scarlet PWE on my soul) is sticky enough at the best of times, but add some incipient paternal angst and the guilt slows you down. Is the phone working? The obstetrician’s number written down in plain sight? The extra car full of gas? The neighbors at home and alerted?

  Celeste, who is managing just fine thank you, finally shoos me out the door. Call you every hour, I tell her . . . which turns out to be a lot harder than it sounds. Always before I had thought of the half-hour drive up to the river as a progression past a familiar, pastoral set of landmarks. The bridge over a Connecticut rolling gently in the sunlight; Gray’s auction barn with its holding pens and pensive cows; Morey Mountain with its beetling cliffs; half a dozen farms, each field greener than its predecessor, each barn more eccentric in its windowing and sheds. Now, anxious, I see the drive strictly as a succession of phone booths, or rather a desert of them. I find one by an abandoned railroad station, quickly dial home—situation normal. There’s a long stretch without any, so I pop into an antique store and beg the use of theirs—again, nothing at home has changed. A thirty-mile stretch of Vermont with only one pay phone? I’d never thought of the landscape in those terms. A bad country for spies, philanderers, and expectant dads.