A River Trilogy Page 2

  I find an abandoned kayak in a river backwater, tow it to shore, wonder who’s it is, find a hand-lettered “Missing” sign at our general store, call the number, have a delighted young boy thank me profusely—he was in serious hot water for letting that kayak get away . . . A woman scuba diver, working at pulling milfoil from the bottom of a Vermont lake, comes back to shore for her lunch break, walks right over to where I’m stringing up my rod, smiles beautifully, points to the back of her wetsuit. “Can you unzip me?” she asks . . . A hot air balloon, in silence, skims the water inches behind my canoe . . . Flowers, waterlogged roses dropped by mourners on a lake as a memorial where a young teacher was brutally murdered, touch the sides of my boat—touch me . . . An osprey strafes up a trout, struggles skyward with it, shifts it around in its talons; an eagle, gliding down from the pines, patiently follows it until it lets go . . . A Jewish fishing guide born in Casablanca, sharing lunch with me on the banks of a Quebec salmon river, confides in me his worries about his wife . . . A dam starts releasing water long before its scheduled to, sending down a wall of water that knocks me over, rolls me around, strips my rod away, almost drowns me.

  Things happen.

  There’s a subject I would spend more time on if I was writing these books now: fishing ethics. I may have given myself a pass on this in the trilogy, reasoning that since I feel such goodwill toward fish then surely they will understand, bear me no ill will, if I hook them in the lip and tug them toward me; surely the reader will understand, too, that ethically speaking, I’m one of the good guys.

  That’s what I used to think. Now, I’m not so sure. Our relationship with animals has come under a lot of scrutiny in our new century, and this includes reassessing such “blood sports” as fishing. We flyfishers think that practicing catch-and-release absolves us from moral blame, but animal rights activists think catch-and-release is particularly cruel. Killing a fish for food they grudgingly accept; playing it just for fun they can’t accept, and in some European countries releasing a trout back into the water is now against the law.

  I could be flippant on this . . . Surely Mr. Trout, if asked, would prefer to be caught and released rather than eaten. . . but it’s a serious enough argument that I wish I had the room here to go into it with the attention it deserves.

  I would end up admitting a lot of what activists are telling us, but, in the end, defend fly fishing with all my power, at least if practiced ethically, by men and women who bring to the river great humility and respect. As another writer once pointed out, ninety seconds spent with a small hook in its lip, when compared to the countless hazards of a trout’s life, is far from the worst challenge it will face.

  Then, too, what is hard on an individual fish is good for the species. Trout, bass, stripers, and the other “game” fish. Their deciding to look beautiful and fight hard, in evolutionary terms, was a very shrewd move, since it’s convinced man to do everything we can to protect their environment. Nowadays, an animal needs political clout in order to thrive—needs a fan club, a constituency, lobbyists. Those fish that don’t have this . . . lowly squawfish, various suckers, tiny darters . . . lead a perilous life, environmentally speaking, and never having to worry about a Royal Wulff in their lip is probably scant consolation.

  (If anything, trout have succeeded too well politically. Out in the Rockies, the native cutthroat, let alone those squawfish, is taking it on the chin because of fishery policies favoring invasive browns from Germany and rainbows from the Pacific, who, from the fly-fisher’s point of view, are sexier and more desirable.)

  If pressed, I would admit that I may well give fish pain when I play them on a fly rod; certainly, they have better things to do than be pulled toward my net. I treat them as gently as I can; I do everything in my power to insure they will be released unharmed (this means, among things, no photos); I work for their environment; I write about them, with, I hope, the kind of sensitivity they deserve.

  Is this enough to redeem the potential cruelty? For me, it is enough. For others, it may not be. But the argument, in my own heart, is far from over, and I’ll be puzzling over these things until the day I die.

  But these moral qualms pale when compared to a much larger issue: climate change. If it’s as bad as scientists think it will be—and already is—then it’s not just trout that are threatened; the two of us will be fighting for space on whatever spaceship goes flying out to try another planet.

  I’m puzzled when people question whether climate change is really happening, since the evidence here in northern New England is everywhere you look. It’s happening all right, and at breathtaking speed. Some of the trout streams described in these books are now too warm to support trout. Mayfly hatches begin earlier every season and last longer into autumn. Smallmouth bass spawn ten days earlier than they did when we first moved here. Blackbirds return to our hedgerow earlier and earlier every spring. Our blueberries ripen on the Fourth of July now, not on Bastille Day like ten years ago. The flowers in our window boxes bloom to mid-November. Celeste—the acid proof!—swims in our local pond beginning in June, when in years past it was too cold for her until July; I swim outdoors until mid-October, and last year fifteen of us plunged in on Christmas morning.

  Warming is real, and for any writer who celebrates the natural world, this means it’s hard to look our subject matter in the eye without feeling tremendous guilt and shame I’m not immune to this; I’m happy I wrote these books while I still could. If I wrote them today, the tone would be darker.

  I began fly fishing when I was fourteen; I’m now sixty-nine. Do the math and you’ll see why this trilogy is subtitled “A Fly-Fishing Life.”

  And I still fish as ardently as ever, though not quite so hard. The young man in me—stubborn to let go—still shakes with excitement when I approach a new river or lake. God, I love fishing! And when I calm down enough to string my line through the guides, wade out to the first pool and start casting, I always pause just long enough to remember how lucky I am to have pursued this sport, this art, for so many years, played with so many trout, explored such beautiful water.

  Do I ever feel guilty about this, that my fishing time could better have been spent doing what we’re supposed to do in a capitalist system, making money? I do not feel guilty. If I’m ever tempted in that direction, then I think of all the other things I could have devoted this ardency to—selling high-risk mortgage bonds, making up fake news, writing advertisements, lying for a politician, cheating on Wall Street, wheeling and dealing on a golf course. No, I don’t feel guilty at all.

  And I’ve always liked that part of the sport, the anti-establishment aspect. Yes, fly-fishing has been trendy for a good thirty years now, the activity of choice for the young and well-heeled, but there are signs this is fading out now, and we lovers of quiet and solitude will reclaim our sport as an antidote to all the havoc the one-percenters have caused. And young men play video games now rather than enjoying the outdoors; we may well see a time in the near future when a flyfisher working a good stretch of river is an increasingly rare sight.

  In the meantime, resist! If you spot flyfishers accoutered in $4,000 worth of gear, coached by a $500-a-day guide standing obsequiously at their elbow, sneak through the bushes and throw stones in their pool.

  More and more of my fishing is for smallmouth bass. We have fair-to-middlin’ trout fishing here, but an outstanding bass fishery, and going after them with bugs and poppers is an enormous amount of fun. No one fly fishes for them around here but me, and the bass boys in their high-powered boats tend to go elsewhere. After vowing to never write another book about fishing after One River More, I went and wrote a book about this new passion, Summer of the Bass, motivated by a missionary zeal to rescue this wonderful fish, so typically American in all its virtues, from the tournament fishers, the hucksters, who have held it hostage for far too long.

  And I now fish still waters more than I do rivers. This is a natural progression when you get older—wading a rocky river g
ets harder on the knees. But it’s not just old-fart fishing; fishing lakes is how I learned as a teenager, so it’s coming back to my roots. I’d like to write a book about a lake or pond someday (I have the title all picked out: Still Waters Run Deep), since, while right off the top of my head I can think of a dozen classic books about men and rivers, I can only think of one for a pond, the obvious one by Thoreau.

  I’ve become fascinated by “gulper” fishing, which means that when it comes to the ponds and lakes around here, even the largest, I’m primarily interested in the top three inches. This is the zone where cruisers cruise, gulpers gulp, sippers sip—often rainbows, sometimes browns, occasionally brookies. They’re feeding on subimagos of the mayfly that haven’t escaped to the air, midge pupae hanging shrimp-like in the surface film, terrestrials that have crash-landed before reaching shore. Trout cruise along happily sipping these, their noses bulging the water like the snouts of submarines, which, after looking things over, prudently submerge.

  Often their fins are visible—they cut through the surface like they’re slicing and dicing the water into private soup bowls they can slurp from without using a spoon. If you do everything right, you can catch them, though it requires a fussy style of fishing that’s not for everyone.

  Tiny flies, gossamer leaders, careful stalking (no bow wave from your canoe), delicate casting, a precise way of striking if you do raise a fish—how easy it is to mess up at any stage of the process. No, it’s not for everyone. Not for anyone? I often wonder about this. Around here, the lake country of central Vermont and New Hampshire, few flyfishers try still waters at all, and when they do it’s deep with streamers or weighted nymphs. Out west, on Hebgen Lake, fishing for gulpers is a popular activity, and lake fishers in British Columbia love their chironmids, but in all the years I’ve fished for cruisers here, I’ve never seen another fly-fisher doing it, no matter that a lake at sunset will come alive with rising trout.

  It involves great beauty, gulper fishing. I don’t mean the beauty of the lake as a whole—intensely focused on the trout, I hardly have time to take in the larger picture—but the beauty of those top three inches. We hear the term “surface beauty,” and react in negative terms—true beauty, we’re told, runs deeper. But the surface of a lake, wonderfully ruffled by the noses of trout, is as deep a beauty as I know, even though it extends only millimeters downward. If human skin is where our inner world meets the outer world, then a lake’s surface film is where the mystery of the water’s depths interacts with the world we dwell in ourselves, so it’s no wonder that it’s a zone of fascination, thin as it is.

  The thing about surface film is that it’s filmy—it does thing with light that are magically distortive on one hand and startlingly clarifying on the other. That creatures live and feed in this film makes it even more interesting—it’s an animated film, a cartoon of happy motion, with some pretty grotesque characters to boot. Matters of life and death are played out there—this isn’t a film played just for laughs—and so the surface film is of all places on a lake the most visibly dramatic.

  I’m gulping, too, when I fish these lakes. I’m trying to cram in as much beauty as I can, skimming the surface for it, nourished just like those trout.

  But now I’m gushing, not gulping. Let me just add this before I get carried away entirely. One of the delights of this kind of fishing is that it extends the season well into autumn, so nowadays I’m fishing #24 gray midges on the surface almost to Thanksgiving.

  And there’s one autumnal phenomenon I look forward to with great anticipation. Leaves will blow off the trees along shore, vivid red and yellow ones, and, collecting on the lake’s surface, wafting out toward the middle, go on to form very distinct floating isthmuses or islands or rafts of foliage, in a pattern that sometimes winds sinuously from side to side for hundreds of yards.

  Trout love these rafts. Many of the leaves have insects riding them that soon end up in the water; the rafts, acting like breakwaters, also trap and concentrate what insects are hatching in the surface film. Trout will rise right in the middle of the leaves—your first impression is that they’re grazing on foliage—and, while it’s difficult because of the debris, you can throw a zebra midge to them and be reasonably assured of a take.

  I spent a wonderful morning fishing for these on Lake Fairlee in Vermont last Halloween, in one of the thickest fogs I’ve ever been out in. After much canoeing back and forth, I finally located the raft out in the middle, paddled to the center where the leaves were thickest, and not only saw dozens of rising trout, but heard them, the bulges left by their noses disturbing the leaves just enough to make a faint but very distinct crinkle.

  Crazy, fishing the foliage! If I wrote about it, honestly, you’d think I was lying. But as it’s much fun fishing as I’ve ever had.

  In the thirty years since writing the first of these books, I’ve been fortunate enough to sometimes combine fishing with traveling. These are not jet-setting expeditions underwritten by major sporting publications, but trips funded by putting spare dimes in a piggy bank and scrimping. A dozen times to Montana, once to British Columbia, twice to Scotland, once to Labrador, once to Slovenia, once—by the time you read this—to Iceland.

  Great fun—but fishing local is still what I love best. Most of my trips are solitary, two or three hours built into the day’s routine. I like to go fishing on impulse, especially when—writing here in my office—I look outside and realize conditions are perfect. I’m too busy to (fill in the blank) seems to be everyone’s motto these days, but I enjoy bragging the opposite. When it comes to what I love in life I’m not too busy at all.

  Celeste accompanies me when she can, though she doesn’t fish. She sits in the bow and takes pictures, or grabs the oars and plays guide, or yank-starts the 1954 Evinrude outboard we bought last year for our vintage Grumman Sportboat, or finds some shade and cheers me on from shore.

  My kids, grown up now, still enjoy coming out with me. Matt has become a strong caster; he loves rock-hopping brook trout streams, searching for natives. Erin has become a proficient bass angler, and has the pictures to prove it. I introduced them to fishing when they were young, but was careful—maybe too careful—not to force it on them, hoping it would eventually take hold on its own. It has, and I feel a certain smugness, that my strategy had such happy results.

  My great fishing pal—my partner in adventures going back thirty-five years—remains Ray Chapin, the best fly-fisher I know. Ray read Vermont River when it first came out, and was brave enough, at a party at a mutual friend’s, to come over and tell me so, though we’d never met before this. He was born in Vermont, an avid fisherman, but just getting started with fly fishing.

  “Why don’t we go try the Waits some afternoon?” I suggested, drawn by his eagerness—and we’ve been fishing together ever since, not just on the streams and lakes around here, but the White in Arkansas, the famous Yellowstone waters, the Penobscot in Maine, Kepimets Lake in Labrador, and, just this past spring, a long-overdue pilgrimage to the historical Catskill waters like the West Branch, the Beaverkill, and the Willowemoc.

  He has a new canoe, Ray has. Last October we launched at the mouth of the White River in Vermont, floated down to its junction with the Connecticut, tied on some nymphs, and started casting. Further downstream we came upon a hunter walking his Labrador along the steep bank.

  “Catch any?” he called out to us.

  We shrugged—zilch. He shrugged back at us. It was clear from his expression that 1) he didn’t think much of our fishing capabilities, and 2) he was a lot more bullish about the river’s potential than we were.

  “Surprising,” he said. “This river is riddled with trout.”

  Riddled with trout. We laughed over that all the way down to our cornfield takeout. It would be a good epitaph someday, perfect for a headstone, at least for flyfishers who love their sport as much as we do. Or, better yet: riddled with rivers. He led a life riddled with rivers.

  Vermont River


  The perfect river does not exist.

  It takes a second to write the phrase, twenty years to learn it. The lesson is drummed in every time a fisherman goes out. Plans are planned, hopes hoped, dreams dreamt, and subtly but surely the magic river of our desire begins to flow—a trickle at first, widening to embrace our fondest imaginings, deepening to hold our longed-for trout, eventually carving out a channel that can seem so real and attainable that it dooms all actual rivers to insignificance. No river can match the rivers of our imagination. We stock them with fourteen-inch trout that rise readily to the fly, grace them with abundant shade and gentle breezes, preserve them from harm. There are no dams in our imaginary rivers. No pollution, no highways, no debris. They run unsullied between immaculate banks, our own inviolable preserve.

  The river in this book is not imaginary. Were it, I would make some of the pools deeper, put them further from the road, inhabit them with bigger browns and shyer brookies. As beautiful as they are, the trout rivers that flow into the Connecticut in Vermont are not wilderness streams, and the towns that border them have their poverty and trailers and junkyards like everywhere else. Yet the realization that the river is less than my ideal subtracts not one iota from my enjoyment. Perfect rivers being mythical, the fisherman must adjust as best he can, finding what pleasure there is in the reality of it, facing up to the river’s blemishes, trying to right them when he can, not letting thoughts of sylvan streams just beyond the horizon torture him into false comparisons. “Here I will begin to mine,” Thoreau said, knowing that truth was as attainable in the woods around Concord, Massachusetts, as it was in the cities of Europe or the mountains of Tibet. It is with this same determination that I have decided to write about what the river has come to mean to me.

  Readers familiar with Vermont will have little trouble identifying my river. If I have left it nameless, it is not for protective secrecy but because to me it stands for the dozen New England rivers I have come to know in twenty years of sometimes hard, sometimes casual fly fishing. Indeed, so similar are their qualities that my river could well be the epitome of them all, could actually be part of the same overlapping flow, making it seem as though I have been slowly fishing up the rest of them toward it all along. Vermont’s Battenkill or New Haven, Grand Lake Stream in Maine, Connecticut’s Housatonic, the Quashnet of Cape Cod . . . this book might have been written about any one of them, and there is not a memory or observation in these pages that didn’t have its germination on one of their banks.