A River Trilogy Read online

  It was, in short, the perfect place to let Bismarck do her stuff. At nine pounds, she was a delight to backpack, and in no time at all, Celeste and I were standing on a granite shelf that slopes into the lake, alternating steps on the air pump. Celeste oohed and aahed over the scenery; I oohed and aahed over Bismarck’s squat lines.

  She looked good in the water. Alert, stable, round. Damn good. Even Celeste thought so.

  “Why, she’s pretty,” she said. She rolled her jeans up to wade out to her, then suddenly hesitated. “Uh, how do we get in?”

  As usual, she had gone right to the heart of the matter. For Bismarck, lovely as she was, was a maddening, ornery, downright impossible bitch to board. The very buoyancy I admired would make her shy away at the slightest ripple, so that approaching her required all the stealth and caution necessary in mounting an unbroken colt. By holding onto the side and bracing my feet against some rocks I was able to boost Celeste into the stern, followed quickly by our fly rods, picnic supper, and wine. By the time all was settled, there wasn’t much room left for me.

  Correction: no room at all.

  “Goodbye!” Celeste yelled, reaching for the oars.

  “No, wait a second,” I said. “Can’t you just . . . scrunch?”

  Scrunch is what we did. Celeste tucked up her legs to make a space, I turned sideways and heaved myself up perpendicular to the inflated thwarts, then by judicious wiggling we managed to wedge me in. My first remark was the obvious one.

  “It’s a good thing we’re married.”

  With our arms intertwined about fly rods, our legs jutting out around each other’s chest, I suppose we must have looked like a pornographic carving on a temple devoted to piscine love. I reached for the oars and promptly stroked them into Celeste’s chin; she, experiencing a cramp in her right leg, stretched it toward my throat, tipping off my hat. Our fly lines immediately became entangled; the overturned picnic basket leaked pickle brine down over our knees. Bismarck, feeling the breeze now, drifted out from shore.

  “You sure this is the two-person model?” Celeste asked.

  I thumped the lettering. “Here, read for yourself. Two people. Two intimate, acrobatic, contortionist dwarfs. And there,” I said, pausing dramatically, “is our bass.”

  A school of them was tearing apart the lily pads on the far shore in pursuit of—what? Frogs? Shiners? Or was it just their own compacted joy in their bassness, the tremendous joy and lust for existence I sense whenever I have one on the end of my line? We rowed over to find out.

  It was a long row. A very long row. Bismarck, filled to the gunwales, was not a happy sailor. Halfway there, I fell back in exhaustion. Celeste took over, and by the time we were actually in casting range, collected sweat had added another few inches to the bilge beneath our bottoms.

  But that’s the sad part of the story. Not another negative word will I inscribe beside Bismarck’s name, for once we got to the lily pads we caught bass aplenty, the largest weighing in at over four pounds. Bismarck’s good qualities were evident on every one: the stealth and silence of her approach; her low waterline, with its canny view into the bass’s own plane; her stability; the ease with which a hooked fish slithered in over her side. By the time we left that night, Bismarck had more than justified her existence, and plastic though she was, I already felt that sentimental affinity that can make a boat the most precious and dearly loved of a man’s things.

  Though Celeste and I continued to play this funny twosie the rest of the summer, it was as a solo craft that Bismarck really came into her own. Alone, I nestled into her bottom as if into a soft and yielding waterbed, casting from a comfortably horizontal position, my neck pillowed by the air chamber in the stern. When I was alone, Bismarck became a delight to maneuver, responding so quickly to the oars that I often spun her around and around in mad circles just for fun. She rowed quickly and steadily, and seemed to skip under all but the strongest breezes with enough freeboard to keep me reasonably dry. Her lightness and airiness were constant sources of amazement. There were days when I had fish on that towed us halfway across the lake, so that I felt like Ishmael on a miniaturized Nantucket sleigh ride, my mouth dropping open in delight.

  What impressed me even more was Bismarck’s sturdiness. I fished her hard that summer and autumn, then again the following spring, often taking her out five or six times a week. One of the smaller air chambers developed a leak, but the other three were enough to float her, and I began deliberately seeking out tougher water, to see what she could do. The wide Connecticut in a northwest chop, Bismarck bouncing along like a stubby tugboat; huge Newfound Lake, where powerboats threatened to swamp us with their wakes; remote trout ponds, where briars scratched the plastic but punctured her not. . . . We fished them all. There was even one magic afternoon when I found some white water for her—the mouth of a trout stream that empties into the Connecticut. She did well, of course. I backed down the current stern first, and she went bouncing off the rocks like an exuberant pinball, impervious to harm. Confidence expanding, I took her to salt water and tried her out on a windy bay; I took her to a nearby lake in deep autumn when a capsize might have finished us both. Bismarck met every new challenge with aplomb.

  And the two of us caught fish. Smallmouth that showered her bottom with spray; trout that scissored back and forth near her bow like escorting dolphins; a pike that threatened to puncture us; big walleyes that towed us farther than any bass. Viewed simply as a fishing tool, Bismarck proved herself many times over, and I was surprised never to encounter another fly-fisher so equipped. Occasionally, I would see sunburned, angry teenagers paddling along in similar craft near shore, but I never saw one being seriously fished, and most of the time I had to myself whatever body of water I was exploring.

  Our partnership remained intact for three full seasons. I had originally thought of her as little more than a disposable boat, to be used several times then discarded like a tissue. Now, her durability proved, I began making the opposite mistake: thinking of her as something permanent and fixed. If I did picture her end, it was always in some cataclysmic happening that would send us both to the bottom in style: a spectacular collision with a spear-shaped rock; a pike big enough to disembowel us; a foot too heavy on the air pump, blowing her to smithereens. That she might die more slowly and subtly never occurred to me at all.

  The truth is, she was dying—dying from neglect. By the time that fourth spring rolled around, I had forsaken her exuberant chanciness for the firmer rhythm of a canoe—a fifteen-foot Old Town with a separate beauty all her own. Bismarck sailed less and less; for long months altogether, she remained in the backpack, her plastic folds stiffening from nonuse. Occasionally, I meant to take her out, but my back was always aching too much to carry her, or it was too windy, or . . . But why make a list? Excuses count for nothing, not in love affairs, not in boats. She was the apple of my eye, then one day she wasn’t, and it’s as simple and sad a story as that.

  And yet we were to have one more day together after all. It was in May, a weekday afternoon when I felt weighed down with a leadenness that went beyond mere fatigue—as flat as one of those leftover leaves one finds on the forest floor. That I desperately needed a filling of water, sky, and trout was obvious. I started to pull the canoe out of the barn, then—motivated by a sudden, overpowering instinct—went back into the mudroom and grabbed the backpack instead.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was hiking up the trail toward Franklin Pond, a bundled Bismarck perched high on my shoulders like an eager baby spotting out the terrain. The morning sun had given way to ominous yellow clouds, and I hiked faster than usual in order to stay warm.

  The pond sits tight against the slope of the one legitimate mountain our town has. It’s about five acres in extent, stocked occasionally by helicopter, and unfishable without some sort of raft. So miniature is it, so silver and round, that the usual analogy is to a gem, though I tend to see it as a bowl instead—a punch bowl cradling the liquefied granite essence of t
he surrounding hills. Trees reflect on its surface; a breeze will ripple the tops of the surrounding spruce, then drop to strum the water, so that the two waves are never quite synchronized, and the dual shimmers shimmer continuously. So pure is the water, so generous the reflection, that casting into its depths gives the sensation of casting into midair.

  I unrolled Bismarck on the rough tent platform that is the only man-made structure on its shores. Again, I went through the old familiar ritual of making her waterborne. The slow accordion press of the air pump; the furious shutting off of valves; the precarious launching and more precarious boarding; the quick assembly of oars. It was good to return to something I loved and find it unchanged. Unchanged except, that is, in one important respect. As I stroked my way toward the far shore, feeling her generous and yielding tug, I realized with what can only be described as a sinking sensation that Bismarck, my neglected Bismarck, was sinking.

  Slowly sinking. The long winter in the mudroom with its constant freezing and thawing had opened Bismarck’s seams. Water seeped in through a dozen thin cracks—my butt was already numb from icy pond water collected in the stern. It was obvious that Bismarck was on her way out, and yet . . . well, it wouldn’t happen immediately. The two air chambers that formed the hull were already empty, but a quick check showed that the largest chamber, the outer one, was still partially filled. With luck—if I handled her carefully—Bismarck had an hour’s float left.

  Risky, sure, but there was a compelling reason not to return to shore at once: the trout. Between one moment and the next, as if on an invisible maestro’s dramatic cue, they had begun rising on all sides. I worked out some line and immediately caught four brookies in a row on a small Gray Wulff. The lower Bismarck sank, the easier it was to slide them over the side, until finally it was hard to determine where pond ended and boat began, and the trout bubbled around my stomach in perfect contentment as I twisted free the fly.

  I don’t remember how many trout I finally caught. The flies were hatching so fast on the water that the pond literally boiled. A hungry swallow flew down from the mountain, then another, then a third, until finally the air seemed just as thick with darting birds as it did with lazy insects. There were swallows everywhere, coming in squadrons, peeling off, strafing the surface, jetting away. It was a miracle I didn’t snag one on my backcasts, but they seemed to be deliberately toying with the line, ducking under it like girls jumping rope. They were teasing me—inebriated with the same airy exuberance as the rising trout and the hatching flies.

  Then it began to snow.

  Huge snowflakes, falling faster than their size should warrant, tumbling down over the swallows and the flies and the trout until everything became jumbled together in a world where there were no separate planes or spheres of perspectives, but everything was one. Was I casting for flies or for trout or for swallows? Was I fishing water, snow, or sky? Man, trout, bug, or bird? It was dizzying, but I was sinking in it, and I began rowing Bismarck toward shore, not from self-preservation, but simply because I needed the ballast of the oars to keep my soul from flying away. As I neared shore, a brown shape glided beneath Bismarck’s hull in a rush of fluid and backward-flowing fur: a beaver, and it was too much for me, and I realized for the first time what those nineteenth-century writers meant when they wrote the word swoon.

  I didn’t, of course. I didn’t turn into a swallow, and I didn’t swoon, and, more importantly, I didn’t sink. Bismarck and I reached shore together, though by now all that was left of her was a thin plastic pressure against my bottom, her last cradling gasp. She boosted me onto a flat rock within stepping distance of land, then made a final expiring sigh and sank away in bubbles. By the time I pulled her up on shore, her seams were open from bow to stern.

  I folded her up more carefully than I ever had when she was whole, then started back down the trail to my car, zigzagging through snowflakes that spread apart into sun. My thoughts were inflated by the miracles I had just witnessed: I walked so fast and with such light-footed sureness that it was almost as if I had inherited Bismarck’s very air. I was . . . yes, there was no mistaking it now. I was buoyant. Buoyant at last.

  Bismarck. June 14, 1982 to May 5, 1986.

  She was a lot more than a toy.

  June 18

  New Hampshire’s an embarrassing state to live in, God knows, what with the reactionary politics; the Manchester Union Leader and its gutter journalism; the “Live Free or Die” threat on the license plates (referring less to freedom than to the state’s legendary cheapness); the reliance on liquor sales for much of the state’s income; the depressing roll call of New Hampshire nonentities who have made it big in Washington, from Franklin Pierce to Sherman Adams to John Sununu; the fact that our most famous native son, Daniel Webster, spent the greater part of his life in Massachusetts; Emerson’s jibe about how “the God who made New Hampshire taunted the lofty land with little men” . . . the fact that no one west of Vermont seems to have the slightest notion of where the place is.

  There are all these things—and then there is Grafton Pond. It’s typically New Hampshire in the best sense of the phrase. Granite shoreline shelving out into astonishingly clear water; banks shaggy with fir trees; a generous scattering of islands; the way the whole pond seems to lie not flat but on an inclined plane tilted toward the bald dome of Mount Cardigan eleven miles to the north . . . the whole set in a part of the state that’s nestled off the tourist routes, scruffy, un-condominiumized, unspoiled.

  I went over there this morning to get a good helping of its beauty and to check whether the bass were in close to shore. They weren’t, but it hardly matters. Just to be out there on the sunny surface, my canoe fitting the water so perfectly it was as if we were propelled by the impression of her shadow, was reward enough for the long drive.

  Even the blackflies seem to respect Grafton’s beauty. They are there on shore when I arrive, all hot and bothered and happy to see me, but once I paddle out from the shady launch area they peel off me like gloom’s bitter cloud. I dab on a layer of sunscreen over the Cutter’s, pop one of Celeste’s homemade brownies in my mouth, toss out some line, anchor my fly rod in the stern, then start west along the shoreline, threading my way through the shallows that separate the first big islands.

  The Laurentian Shield must look like this, rocky, spruced, and scrubbed. Even the weeds; they don’t lay flat and heavy but toss in the current like fields of wheat. Up on shore are old stone walls built by the farmers who lived here a century and a half ago; where they meet the water they keep right on going, and with the transparency being what it is, I can trace them a good fifty yards out from shore, the rocks growing smaller and less golden the deeper they plunge. Grafton Pond, for all its naturalness, is man-made, impounded to provide water for a distant town. What I’m drifting over are the remains of a vanished New England, the rural, self-sufficient life that pretty much disappeared seventy years ago with the paving of the first roads.

  As I make the circuit of the pond, hopping from island to island to take advantage of their lee, it’s hard not to think of those farmers and their backbreaking toil. Could any of them have guessed, at work on a hot day, loading the stone boat with heavy boulders, whipping up the ox, that the wall they so patiently constructed would one day be the shelter for bass? Would anyone believe it now? That the condos and marinas we cram so obscenely around our lakes will one day be the haunt of minnows, admiring their reflections in the cracked and algae-stained glass? I take reassurance from both notions. To go with all its beauty, Grafton has a bittersweet, haunted air; floating over these walls is like floating over a poem by Robert Frost.

  There are lots of smallmouth in the pond, either out amid the rocks of the islands or in among the fallen trees toward shore. I’ve caught three-pounders here in the past, thick and sassy, but today the big ones seem to be sulking. The high barometer probably—so exhilarating to me, it depresses bass no end. All I manage is an occasional bluegill . . . not that there is anything wrong
with that. Sunny, fat, and fierce, the bluegill is a noble fish, and I wouldn’t mind having been one in a previous incarnation.

  It’s funny about the fishing. A year ago I would have tried every bug and streamer in my box, tormented every last inch of shoreline with casts, and—not catching much—let the poor results pretty much ruin my day. Today, though, catching fish seems almost beside the point, and I’m content to try a lazy cast now and then and put most of my effort into watching.

  This is the year I’m devoting to puzzling out the fishing motive, so it’s worth trying to decide what causes this new serenity. Is it the birth of our daughter? The fact that having now spawned (to stay in metaphor) I find my predatory urge much duller than before? Is that what all these hours spent chasing fish are about, a sublimated, ersatz sort of fathering? Does the fishing urge, like so much else, come down in the end to the sexual one?

  Murky depths, too murky for a pond so clear. I paddle faster, drowning out the philosophical in some good honest sweat. While most of Grafton’s islands lie clustered in a convoy near shore, there’s one that sits alone by itself out in the middle, as if demonstrating to the others what real islandhood is all about. There in a cove on its near side is a splashing commotion, and I head over to see what’s what.

  It’s a family of otters—five I can count. My canoe doesn’t seem to bother them, though it’s clear they’re aware of it; they turn a synchronized somersault, then shift their shenanigans a few rods farther out into the pond. Seeing them at play is like watching an allegory by Edward Hicks, and gives me another boost of optimism. The otter shall frolic with the fisherman, the lion lie down with the lamb—on Grafton Pond anyway, on this one perfect June day.