A River Trilogy Read online

  One of the things I love about the Waits is how it comes into sight suddenly, the road making one fast left-to-right swerve. Voilà. It’s high, but clear, the midstream rocks covered in clean purpled shadowings. Perfect shape for early May. Parking by the pool called the Aquarium, pulling on my waders, I formulate Wetherell’s First Law of Fishing: That the success or failure of a fishing trip is determined by the ease or lack thereof with which a fly line is threaded through the guides of one’s rod. For a change I do it smoothly, without missing a guide or having the line sag maddeningly back through the seven I’d already threaded. Add to that the ease with which I tie my first blood knot of the day and all the auguries are favorable.

  As well they might be. I wade out into the middle of the current at the base of a broad pool; the water, catching my legs, finding my waist, gives me the same surge of togetherness that comes with donning a new pair of jeans. All spring I’ve been trying out a new act on the smaller streams:, a weighted nymph fished upstream with an indicator. Now, with the water level high, streamers not producing, I’m ready to open, as it were, on Broadway.

  It’s a weighted Hare’s Ear I’m using, though from the look of it a hare’s turd would be a better description. The indicator—a sticky fluorescent press-on of orange—goes around the leader eighteen inches up from the fly. The whole rig is cast clumsily upstream. The orange press-on bobs around a bit, aligns itself with the current, then starts downstream like a guide scouting out the river for the timid nymph. If the orange suddenly stops—if, better still, it suddenly dips below the surface—you strike hard with your rod and thereby hook, in textbook fashion, your nymph-feeding trout.

  Which, to my amazement, is exactly what happens. Not only once, but seven times in a row. Cast, orange stop, fish. Cast, orange disappear, fish. What’s odd about the whole process is that, unlike fishing with a dry fly or streamer, there’s a built-in delay between the time you strike and the time the fish is felt—a fish that is, after all, swimming toward you in order to catch the nymph. Thus, it’s hard to know who’s more startled: me to find the trout is attached; the trout to find he is attached. The fight doesn’t take long as a result—the trout all but raise their fins in surrender.

  I twist the barbless hook out and off they swim, a new lesson stamped upon the miniaturized, solid-state computer chip of their brains.

  It’s a lot of fun. No, more than fun—exhilarating. To have a new method by which to explore my river, to probe riffles and currents where I’ve never been able to raise a fish before. Exhilarating! There’s something in the enterprise reminiscent of fishing a bobber with worms for sunfish, and takes me back to those eleven-year-old days when all my longing, all my hope, was pinned on that little plastic bubble of red and white—on intensely wishing for the moment it would give a tremulous side-to-side quiver and abruptly sink.

  Law Number Two. We fish for our childhoods.

  I continue to catch fish all afternoon, though never so easily. More than fish. Those old stock cartoons of a fisherman pulling up a dilapidated shoe? I’ve never caught a shoe, never so much as a sneaker, but on one drift my nymph manages to snag the rubber lid of a mason jar, souvenir of some farm wife’s autumn canning. At four it begins to rain, but I keep at it until trees, fields, stone walls, and sky are washed into the same gray intermingling.

  It’s been five hours since I called home. When I arrive there it’s to the aftermath of mass hysteria. Cars parked on our grass, people running about, a man toting a camera. One suggestive touch: a baby carriage on our front porch complete with freshly plumped quilt! I rush inside, ready to apologize for not calling, ready to boil water or coach breathing exercises, my emotions a churn of guilt, anxiety, and pride.

  But there is no baby, at least not one that’s ours. Celeste is in the parlor talking excitedly with a friend from up the road who cradles their three-month-old on one knee. The scene outside is quickly explained. A moose—a young male—had wandered down through the village, stopping traffic, causing a mad rush for cameras. The moose, head tilted in bemusement, sauntered past the post office, then crossed the road and began eating the flowers in our neighbor’s garden . . . or at least sniffed at them as if he would like to eat them.

  Tulips. The old Unicorn in the Garden syndrome. Celeste, walking carefully, takes me over to show me the evidence of the trampled stems.

  River of Rivers

  It’s a fish story that starts on dry land, the stretch of route that drops from Peru to Manchester like a gigantic slide. A water slide to be exact—it was May and raining hard. I was on my way to the Battenkill for my annual visit, and to pass the drive had slipped into the cassette player one of those rare inventions that helps justify our age: a tape-recorded book. In this case, it was the short stories of John Cheever, and not just any Cheever, but “The Swimmer,” in which suburbanite Neddy Merrill decides to swim the eight miles home from a cocktail party via neighborhood swimming pools.

  “He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curled across the country. . . . When Lucinda asked him where he was going, he said he was going to swim home.”

  It’s a classic story, read well by the reader, and if nothing else it made me slow down enough to fit the ending in before the snarl of Manchester traffic. By the time I was down to Arlington, the tape was over and the sun was out again, silvering the raindrops that clung to the guardrails and trees. My mind, so absorbed in Neddy Merrill’s problem, only gradually switched focus to W. D. Wetherell’s: Battenkill browns and what they would be in the mood for after a week’s steady rain.

  I parked near the store in West Arlington, and within minutes was up to my waist in cold water, false-casting an antique Honey Blonde toward a hemlock that tilted over the current like a finger pointing “Here!” It was good to be in the Battenkill again—good to see those deceptively lazy folds of water come sweeping past, making me think as they always do of an exquisitely fine silk being ceremoniously unrolled.

  And it was good, or at least not that bad, not to catch trout right away. The Battenkill being the Battenkill, there were no suicidal trout waiting around to hurl themselves onto my hook, so after an hour without a bite, it was obviously time to forget my literary daydreaming and put some effort into the enterprise.

  I switched to a Muddler, began paying more attention, and yet a part of me was still off in Neddy-Merrill-land, so that as the fishless casts began mounting up, I began concocting a Cheeverish fantasy of my own. What flashed before my waterlogged brain wasn’t a chain of swimming pools (yuppies or no yuppies, there still aren’t that many in Vermont), but a chain of trout streams. Would it be possible, I wondered, to travel all the way around Vermont, all the way up the Champlain Valley, across the Green Mountains, down the Connecticut, and never once leave a trout stream? To fish clockwise around the state and never touch dry land?

  Two images immediately came to mind, the first superimposed over the second in a graphic overlay: the vivid sharpness of a Vermont state road map, with its twisty red highways and even twistier blue streams; the vaguer, hazier, but no less real map of memories I’ve garnered in fishing several dozen Vermont trout streams over the course of the past twenty years. On the matter-of-fact level where they met, it was clear that to fish one stream into the next and never leave water was impossible. You could come close, tantalizingly close, but eventually each river would end on a height of land separating it from the watershed in the adjacent valley. What was possible, though, was to drive around Vermont and never be more than a few miles from prime trout water, setting up the possibility of an around-the-state trip fishing each river in turn. As a stunt, you might be able to do it in two full days, three if you lingered a bit over the scenery. Thirty rivers in three days? It was a nice idea for a future expedition, say in the indeterminate future of postponed dreams and procrastinated projects I always refer to as next “autumn.”

  Back to the fishing. While my mind was busy
computing mileage and routes, my Muddler was taking a leisurely swim downstream toward some alders overhanging the undercut bank. Forty feet upstream, still daydreaming, I stepped around a saucer-sized pool of sunlight, scaring up a good-sized brookie. I cursed, mad at my clumsiness, and was starting to strip in for my next cast when there was a heavy tug on my line in the direction of the vanished Muddler.

  I struck immediately back, half expecting to find I’d hooked a canoe or at least a good-sized inner-tubist. But it was neither of those things. The water, heretofore so silky, splintered upward like a burst piece of metal, and through the hole where the river had been appeared the snout, the Muddler-festooned snout, of the largest trout I’d ever seen, dreamed, or read about—a once-in-a-lifetime trout, that is; a butter-flanked-hooked-jaw-monstrous-old-granddaddy Battenkill brown.

  A smart Battenkill brown. The moment he felt the hook he set off in the direction of Sushan, stripping off thirty yards of line before the significance of what was happening to me fully sank in. I started off in pursuit, running through the shallows as fast as my waders permitted, every now and then staring down anxiously at the bare spots in my reel where the backing was disappearing fast. It was obvious now that the brown was trying to pull the old cross-the-border trick on me. I had no New York license, and once he made it around the tight bend that uncoils across the state line he would be safe.

  Risking everything, I hauled back on the rod. The trout, startled, pranced across the water on its tail like a sailfish. My leader made the ominous pinging sound wire makes before it snaps, but—miraculously—it held. The brown raced upstream past me, giving me just enough of a glimpse to turn my legs to syrup. Fifteen pounds, I remember thinking. Fifteen pounds!

  I ran upstream after him, retracing our route, getting into new water above the covered bridge, then making it into that classic tree-lined stretch that parallels 313. There were a lot of fishermen about, and they scurried to the banks to make way for us, calling out encouragement and advice. I felt pride and embarrassment both—the fish, after all, was playing me. “Give him line!” one fisherman shouted; I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be shouting this to the trout.

  We were already up to the curve where the river approaches Route 7 and heads north. The soles of my wading shoes, thin already, were wearing out fast on the rocks and briars along shore. The trout showed no sign of weakening; if anything, the colder, faster water where the Roaring Branch comes in seemed to invigorate him, and he increased his speed to something phenomenal. Luckily, there was an old Grumman canoe lying abandoned on the shore. In a flash, I was into it, and, instead of chasing the trout along the shallows, let him tow me in comfort up the center of the main stream.

  It was a wise move, at least at first. We were into that beautiful, unwadable stretch below Manchester suggestive of a river lazing its way through the château country in the south of France. It would have been sticky going without the canoe, and the extra drag on the trout—the sea-anchor effect—slowed him up by a full knot. Unfortunately, the river as we approached the Equinox Golf Course began to shallow out, forcing me to abandon the canoe again and start after him on foot.

  Somewhere to the left was Orvis headquarters, and I had half a mind to tether my trout to a tree somewhere, rush off, and ask my friend Tom Rosenbauer for advice. Tom knows more about trout fishing than any ten men I know, and what’s more he knows how to have fun while fishing, an even rarer quality. I was just deciding I’d have to manage without his help, when who did I see cheering me on from the riverbank but Tom himself! He was waving a pen at me, shouting something that sounded like “Make him talk! Make him talk!”

  Tom might be able to make trout talk, but not me. I chased mine upstream past the falls in Manchester Center (over which he leapt with salmonlike ease) to the cheers of shoppers in the street above. The trout, shied by the traffic noise, continued straight up the Battenkill through town. There was a moment when I thought he might veer off into the West Branch, try to force his way to the Mettawee back toward New York, but a subtle tug on my part kept him on the main river. I raced after him, tired now but feeling a lot more optimistic than I had since Arlington. It was clear that the trout would soon run out of water to thrash around in—that at the point where the Battenkill becomes a brook hardly deep enough to support a chub, the trout would beach himself on a sandbar and be mine.

  Mine? It is to laugh. For it was here, where the Battenkill vanished, that the trout proved what a truly extraordinary creature he was. An ordinary trout would have surrendered at this point, turned belly up and finned toward my net. A brighter than average trout might have tried to make the leap into Emerald Lake, swim across it in a futile attempt to reach the headwaters of Otter Creek. What my trout did—what this fabulously huge, fabulously intelligent trout did—was make a flopping, jackknife motion with its middle, wiggle up onto the bank across some pine needles, then—my Muddler still attached to his lip—start cross country through the rain-soaked lowlands heading north.

  I scarcely trust my memory here, so surprising was this shift in the trout’s strategy. I’ve caught my share of fish over the years, but never one that did its fighting on dry land. Still, there was no use standing there feeling sorry for myself. I loosened the drag on my reel, hitched up my waders, and started after him. Rather than force his way through the raspberry bushes, he elected to follow the railroad tracks that parallel Route 7, flip-flopping from tie to tie. It was tough keeping him in sight, but after a mile of this he changed tactics again and squirmed through the puckerbrush over to north-flowing Otter Creek.

  Fine, I decided. Otter Creek gave me roughly one hundred miles of water to play him in, and if worse came to worst I could land him in Lake Champlain. We were up to Danby now; as if reading my thoughts, the trout veered east into the first tributary we came to: the beautiful Big Branch, one of my favorite mountain streams. Besides its impressive gorge, an interesting stretch of Long Trail, its wild rainbow trout, it boasts one of the truly great assemblages of boulders ever deposited in one spot. It was through these that my trout was now porpoising, heading directly east past Mount Tabor into the heart of the Greens.

  Fatigue-wise, this was the hardest part of the entire battle. Not only did I have to race upstream, I had to do it over boulders, so that it was more rock climbing than fishing. Somewhere along the way we passed the mouth of the Black Branch, where on a cool October day in 1971 I saw a man with forty-two dead brook trout laid out on a newspaper; the man was smirking proudly, waving hikers over to see, and in his lapel he wore the button of a prominent conservation organization.

  I raced past the spot with a shudder, determined now to catch up with the trout once and for all. He went under the suspension bridge below the Long Trail, did a somersault in the next pool, then raced back downstream toward Otter Creek, forcing me to spin around like a clumsy matador, but giving me a good look at his totality. It was gargantuan—on the scale of the Big Branch boulders. His tail alone was three times bigger than any trout I’d ever hooked!

  In some respects, our battles up to this point had been all preliminary; we had been feeling each other out, as it were, and now it was time to get down to some serious fish-playing. Unfortunately, I was currently in a poor spot to exert any pressure: downtown Rutland. Otter Creek being too deep and foul to wade there, I hitched a ride with a passing motorist, sticking my rod out the window and signaling with my free hand which way to turn. By this method, I was able to follow the trout past the State Street Bridge. Some school kids, on their lunch break, began tossing Hydrox cookies down at him, scaring him upstream. We followed, swerving recklessly to avoid oncoming cars. In a few minutes, free of the city, I hopped out, thanked the driver for his help, and began wading through the marshland along the river near Pittsford and the mouth of Furnace Brook.

  I was hoping the brown would swerve off into this stream as he had the Big Branch—it’s a pretty little river and has a starring role in Harold Blaisdell’s fine book The Philosophical
Fisherman. This trout, however, was not about to grant requests. After the briefest of forays into Furnace, he continued upstream, making similar short runs into the Neshobe in Brandon and the Middlebury ten miles farther north.

  The New Haven was the next tributary after that—an excellent dry-fly stream and one I know well. Apparently, the trout thought highly of it, too, for the moment he got to its mouth he sped right up the middle, not stopping until he reached the open stretch behind the Dog Team Tavern. He chased his tail in ecstasy for a good ten minutes here, drunk on the smell of sweet rolls emanating from the restaurant’s kitchen. The smell was a nostalgic one for me, too. As a freshman at Middlebury back in the sixties, I would hitch rides north to fish the New Haven, cutting class to do so, hitching a ride home again after a long, trout-filled afternoon.

  There were lots of memories here, both of people and days. My friend Murray Hoyt, a fine writer and a gentle man; Murray, who loved the New Haven as much as I did, and when someone asked him how the fishing was, would take the single good trout he’d caught out from his creel, hold it up for admiration, put it back in, then pull it out again, repeating the performance three or four times. The willow-shaded pool near the cemetery below Bristol Flats where on a hot August afternoon of joy and crushing disappointment, I hooked and lost the biggest trout I’d ever seen prior to the one I fought now. The stretch above the swimming hole where in the years before development it was possible to take a dozen iridescent brook trout in as many casts. The tiny upland cemetery near West Lincoln where, one morning before sunrise during the height of the Vietnam War, I passed a burial in progress, with an honor guard of three uniformed soldiers, a flag-draped coffin, and nothing else—no mourners, no spectators, nothing to disturb the heart-wrenching poignancy of the scene.