A River Trilogy Read online

  The fulfillment of a childhood dream is fishing’s deepest reward. I think of an eighty-year-old I met one fall on the Battenkill (an eighty-year-old, by the way, with three fat trout in his creel)—how he talked constantly of next season’s opening day, even though the season wasn’t yet ended. “If I’m still around, that is,” he added cautiously when he mentioned his plans. Opening day, youth, one more chance—these were all clearly linked in his phrase, and I felt tender toward him, and marveled that childhood’s excitement and need could persist so long.

  Thus, April 14.

  “Here I am,” I thought as I stood there casting. “Here I am!”

  The fourteen-year-old in me would have had me catch a trout—a big four-pounder, bright with spring—but the part of me that’s thirty-four knew better, and I worked through the reach without really expecting to find any fish. The water was clear enough, but too high, fast, and cold; the trout were still in a state of suspended animation, hungover from winter, in no mood to chase my fly. On the theory that cold water deserves a cold lure, I was fishing a Polar Bear Muddler, but on my third cast I snapped it off on a branch, and the rest of my flies seemed too summery to have much of a chance. I drifted a bucktail through the last pool, then climbed up onto the bank to warm myself in the sun.

  There were some homemade doughnuts in my vest, compliments of Celeste. I ate them while I watched the river. On the opposite bank a flock of goldfinch assembled in a great congregation, darting from tree to tree in their swerving loops, chattering excitedly away. They’re a common enough bird in Vermont, but I never seem to see them, and I welcomed the chance. I was wondering where these particular ones had spent the winter when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye in the river—a log, I thought at first. But when I turned my head to look, it wasn’t a log that I saw shooting past, but a kayak—a kayak and a life jacket and a helmet. By the time I realized there was a man in the center of all this, it was gone.

  Three more came after that, spaced at intervals of about a minute. Judging by the way they threaded the rapids, they were all experts; there was an abrupt ledge above the canyon, but they steered right for it, as if this were exactly the sort of challenge they were seeking. Paddles windmilled back and forth as they fought to keep the kayaks from swinging broadside to the current . . . a moment of suspense as their bows shot over the ledge . . . then they were gone down the canyon, trailing behind them the sound of their triumphant laughs.

  Motion, color, dash. The kayaks made me feel sluggish and land-bound, and I decided it was time to get back into the river. Not the main river. If I was going to catch a trout that day, it would have to be on one of the tributaries—the river itself was simply too high. I had talked to a man down in Woodstock earlier in the week who had caught his limit on one of the small feeders to the White. Nymphs, he said. Weighted and brown.

  I drove the three miles to the junction pool, crossed the river on the new bridge, and started up the road that runs back along the South Branch. About a mile up, I pulled over and parked. I could hear the stream before I could see it; the bank is overgrown here, and I had to pick my way along it before I found an easy way down to the water.

  The South Branch is much less pastoral than the main river, steeper and more mountain-like. Even so, I was counting on less water—during spring runoff, the higher tributaries usually clear first. What I hadn’t counted on, though, was that the valley had retained more of winter, and there was still ice along both banks of the stream.

  It was too late to back out. I crossed one of the ice slabs, and made it to a rock below a likely looking pool. Casting quickly, I laid a Hare’s-Ear nymph on the spot where the current fanned apart, and let it bounce down the middle of the pool toward my stance.

  No response. I cast again, this time shading it a bit more to the left. No response. The right side now, a slower drift. No response. I abruptly switched directions, cast for distance, let the nymph swing across the current in pocket water above a downed tree. No response. I let the nymph drift below me, let it hang there like a worm.

  I spent an hour or more fishing all the water within reach. Only once did the nymph stop its drift, but when I tightened, it was on a submerged branch, not a fish, and I broke off the fly. Since fishing was hopeless, I decided to hike upstream, prospecting for likely pools I could fish later in the month. But even this modest intention came to naught. Above this stretch the ice on the banks became thicker, the blowdowns more frequent, and by the time I gave up climbing and headed back to the car, I was sweating from effort.

  I took the rod apart and was pulling off my waders when a pickup drove past, going far too fast for that narrow road. A hundred yards above me, it squealed to a stop, went into reverse, went fishtailing across the road and stopped six inches from my knees.

  A man my own age got out, grinning from ear to ear.

  “How’s the fishing?”

  I told him. As he listened, he kept nodding up and down, as if he were taking great delight in what I was saying. He had the lean, ascetic look of a marathon runner, but rather than jogging clothes, he wore battered work pants and a thin cotton shirt.

  “You don’t see many fly fishermen on this river,” he said, once I finished.

  I shrugged.

  “I’m a fly fisherman,” he said, with the slightly defensive air of someone who doesn’t expect you to believe him.

  And so we talked. He was out of work—the lumber industry, the housing slump—and was trying to cheer himself up by thinking about all the time it would give him to fish; “for dinner,” he said, laughing. He was new to fly fishing, and I answered his questions as best I could. Yes, nymphs were probably best this time of year. No, I hadn’t read Schwiebert’s later article on stonefly imitations. Yes, it was a beautiful river. More than beautiful.

  “Big browns down there,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m going to fish at night this year. You ever fish much at night?”

  He asked me what I did, and I told him. He listened to me complain about the book business for a while; I listened to him complain about logging, and that settled, we got back to the fishing again.

  All the while we talked, I was bothered by something in my tone—a note of condescension and weary patience. Where did it come from? He was my age, after all, and there I was talking to him like that eighty-year-old on the Battenkill had once talked to me; it was all I could do not to call him “Sonny.” I think it must have been the difference in ages between our dreams. Mine was established and mature; his was brand-new, resembling in its enthusiasm and rough edges my excitement at fourteen. No wonder I sounded so all-knowing and wise. The latest theories, the latest tackle—once upon a time I had been full of these myself.

  “Hey, I’ve got to go,” he said, for the fourth time in ten minutes. “See you on the river, right?”

  “Look for me.”

  “Hope you sell more books.”

  “Thanks. Good luck with the job!”

  I had been intending to quit for the day, but our talk left me feeling the dream again in all its original intensity, and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. I ended up fishing the entire afternoon. There’s no need to go into details. It was the stretch above the Aquarium, but for once there were no fish there, and I wouldn’t have caught any if there were. I cast quickly and badly, changed flies much too often, slapped the line against branches, rocks and logs, twisted the leader into knots, waded into spots where I had no business being, and in short made every mistake a flyfisherman can possibly make. I was aghast at my behavior, of course, but deemed it necessary; after a winter cooped up indoors, my impatience was as high as the river, and like the current, must have its way.

  Four hours in water a little above freezing works wonders. By the time I climbed out onto the banks in the soft light of dusk, I felt as scoured as the river itself, rid of all the staleness that was in me, washed of my impatience and ready—once more—to begin.

  4

  My Brilliant Care
er

  It occurs to me that, at least on paper, I qualify as an expert on fishing. I could list my stories, which have appeared regularly in America’s most prestigious fishing magazine, my time as an editor at another fishing publication, my career demonstrating fly rods for a famous tackle company in Vermont. To the nonfisherman, these accomplishments may seem as nothing, but to the flyfisher, it is roughly like saying that W. D. Wetherell is Ernest Hemingway, A. J. McClane and Charles Orvis all wrapped up into one.

  This is troubling. Not because I have anything against these men, but because I distrust experts in general and fishing experts in particular. (This is not necessarily uncommon; I once met a man who had developed a bitter grudge against Jason Lucas, the old Sports Afield columnist, and vowed to drown him should he ever appear on the same lake.) Am I an expert myself then? One of those smug, insufferably knowledgeable bores who inhabit with pollsters and developers the lowest terrace in my personal modern-day inferno? Let us examine the evidence in more detail.

  My short stories. They have indeed appeared in America’s best fishing magazine (I’m entitled to call it that, having worked three years on the worst), but any fisherman trying to garner tips on landing more fish from them would probably be more likely to give up fishing altogether. One concerns a man who fishes for bass “in order to free them from the mortal terror in which they swim” and ends up succumbing one night to the same terror himself; one deals with a trout fisherman undergoing a midlife crisis in a Manhattan bar; the third is about a man who goes to Maine to spread his dead brother’s ashes on his favorite lake, and in doing so, absent-mindedly destroys his reputation at the fishing camp where he had gone for years. Whatever their value, these are not your usual me-and-Dad-fishing-for-old-Mossback-in-the-lake-no-one-knew-about-except-us-and-those-times-sob-are-now-gone-sob-forever stories. If I try to come up with an influence that was behind me as I wrote, it would be Kafka—Kafka as a flyfisherman in a long black coat, casting shyly in some Prague trickle, fishing for the absurd the way other men fish for trout.

  This, of course, is a long way from A. J. McClane.

  Harder to explain are the three years I spent as an editor at a New York magazine I’ll call Angling International. In tackiness, Angling International was akin to some girlie magazines, the cheaper kind that look as if they’re printed in Peru. Rather than bosoms and rear ends, A.I. featured shots of enormous, repulsive-looking bass, only we weren’t allowed to call them bass, they were always “Hawgs!” with an exclamation point. Alliteration was very important in all our titles. Hooked on Hawgs!, Horsing for Hawgs! and Hip Hip for Hawgs! were typical. The circulation was claimed to be upwards of 100,000, but we at the magazine never had a hint that anyone actually read it, and it was the considered opinion of most of us that the publisher ran it as a tax dodge.

  Like a lot of sad involvements, mine began with an ad in the New York Times: “Editor wanted who enjoys fishing.” I had just graduated from college with a degree in philosophy, a passable roll cast and not much else. Wes, Angling International’s managing editor, was intelligent enough to accept the essential absurdity of the magazine, and in keeping with this understanding, was quirky enough to hire me, sight unseen, as assistant editor.

  Wes himself did most of the work. It was my job to copy-edit the stories, proofread, write a column on new products and do some research. One of my first assignments involved an article on fishing in New Zealand. All the prices mentioned were in New Zealand dollars, and I was to convert them into their US equivalents, the easier for our readers to plan their trip. Unfortunately, I used the wrong formula, dividing where I should have multiplied or vice versa, the result being that all the prices were converted into half the New Zealand amount when they should have been double, thereby making New Zealand appear the cheapest destination in the world. It was printed that way; I remember vividly the sad yet forgiving look on Wes’s face when he learned of my error. Such mistakes were an inevitable accompaniment to his life, and even if they were someone else’s fault, he naturally assumed they were his own.

  We had another assistant editor, a blonde woman in her thirties who could neither fish, write nor spell. Joan was incapable of saying a sentence that didn’t contain the word “hah” in it, and she would emit it with a honking, nasal intonation, like a goose. Depending on her mood, “hah” could be invitational, interrogative, denunciatory, decorative or prayerful—sometimes a mixture of all five. To this day, I’m not sure what she did at the magazine, but it must have been something.

  We had some famous bylines in the magazine, fishing experts I had read and admired as a boy. As bad as it was, A.I. paid on time, and this attracted a lot of people who had to wait for their checks at the glossier publications. I was looking forward to working with these writers, and hoped that my involvement with them would lead to fishing invitations, free trips and gear.

  Imagine my disappointment, then, to learn that some of these experts were for all intents and purposes illiterate, their careers having been established by rigged photographs and a great deal of cronyism of the old-boy-network variety. These weren’t just bad writers, they couldn’t write at all; much of my time was spent finding their subjects and predicates and linking them in some sort of reasonable order. It was a depressing task. It was 1974, the year of Watergate, and working on these ineffable manuscripts caused in me the same kind of disillusionment that other people were feeling toward politicians.

  But like Wes, I gradually came to accept the essential ludicrousness of it all, and even began to enjoy it. Of all the Angling International absurdities, Wes himself was by far the most interesting. He looked like a fisherman—his eyes had a distant focus to them, as if they had spent hours studying rivers for the hatch; his body was slender and wiry, like so many good casters—and he was originally from Montana. But if the truth be known, Wes—editor of a large fishing magazine, writer of a superb column of angling advice read by thousands—did not fish.

  What he did was sit in his office waving a fly rod around while he watched the elevated trains roll by. I rarely saw him do anything else. Occasionally, he would talk on the phone to one of our writers; occasionally, he would wander off to the art department and wave his fly rod around in there, but this was the limit of his small world. I would come back from weekend fishing trips full of stories, and he would listen to these with a look of haughty condescension on his face, as if to say that these amateurish junkets of mine were all very fine, but to a man who knew the Yellowstone . . . Well, someday he would explain.

  It was a comfortable life, but then the day finally came when he was invited to go fishing out west by a famous fish and game organization. His face was white as he put down the phone. I think he realized that after five safe and lazy years, his bluff had been called.

  There were too many past refusals on his part, too many last-minute cancellations for him to back out of it. He was gone three days. When I came to work the morning of the fourth day, he was at his usual place in the office, whisking the fly rod around with his left hand—his left hand because his right one was in a cast.

  I never asked him about it and he never explained. From that day on, though, his column began to take on a bitter, mordant quality, and our receptionist had strict orders to screen all calls, making sure he was never asked to go fishing again.

  This brings us to the third and seemingly most unshakable pillar of my expertise—my time on the staff of a famous tackle company in Vermont. I may as well admit right at the start that I have occasionally taken advantage of this experience to assert myself in the subtle one-upmanship flyfishermen sometimes indulge in. For instance, Til meet someone on the river who drops references to his trips to Labrador, his new Garrison rod, his good friend Lee Wulff.

  “That’s interesting,” I’ll say, stifling a yawn. “Reminds me of my time working at.”

  “Your time working at where?” he’ll say in disbelief.

  “My time working at.”

  “You worked
at?” Disbelief now turning to awe.

  “Yeah, for a while. Is that a rise over there?”

  Now saying you worked at is roughly like saying you were in the Yankee outfield when Maris and Mantle were in their prime. And I did work there once, the summer I was nineteen.

  It came about like this. I had bought enough flies through the mail to be on the company’s mailing list; reading their newsletter one day, I saw an ad for a flyfisherman to work in their store for the May to October season. They had started a fishing school that year, and the regular salesmen would be teaching, creating the opening. I immediately sat down and wrote a long letter listing my fly-fishing credentials, making half of it up (most of my fly fishing at this time being strictly vicarious). About a week after mailing it, I received a call from the company’s manager asking me to come to Vermont for an interview.

  I took the bus from New York. During the interview, I kept stealing peeks at all the beautiful gear displayed on the walls: bamboo fly rods, canoes, waders . . . this soon could be mine! As nervous as I was, I managed to stay fairly calm under the manager’s polite questions (“I see in your letter that you once caught an eight-pound rainbow on a #22 Adams. Tell me about that.”). An hour later, when I walked back through the snow to the bus stop, I had the job.

  The position began in May. I spent the intervening two months practicing my casting, studying every fishing book I could find, memorizing the diameter of 4X tippets, and in general trying to assimilate enough information to hide my lack of experience. I drove up to Vermont the day before I was scheduled to go to work. Needing to find a place to stay, I stopped first at the store. The manager introduced me to the other salesmen; like Angling International, the company was fond of alliteration, and everyone had a nickname that started with the same letter as his surname: Sip Simmers, Pete Peters, Rap Roberts and so on. Thus, I was introduced not by my first name (which, alliterative as it was, wasn’t quite alliterative enough), but as “Weth Wetherell.”