A River Trilogy Read online

  None of the salesmen seemed particularly interested in anyone called Weth Wetherell, and they quickly resumed their interrupted discussion. It was all about “The ‘Kill”—the Battenkill River, which was right down the road. One of the men had caught ten brown trout in the space of an hour using a Yellow Muddler. Another man had caught eleven on a Strawberry Blonde. The third man had fished all day without catching anything. It was a pattern I saw repeated several times the following day; it was considered okay to brag about catching ten or more trout, okay to admit you had caught none, but somehow amateurish to admit anything between one and nine.

  I found a temporary room at a house in town, and went to bed early, ready for the big day. I arrived an hour before the store opened: as before, no one seemed particularly interested in talking to me. When the manager arrived, he issued me the same kind of khaki fishing shirt that everyone else was wearing, and explained what my duties would be.

  These were: (1) to help keep the stock in order; (2) to see that the trout in the casting pond were fed each day; and (3) to help customers when they came in, and especially people interested in fly rods.

  This is what the company was all about—the expensive, exquisitely crafted bamboo rods that lined one wall of the shop. Should a customer want to try one out, we were to drop everything and go outside to the casting pond with him, spending as much time as it took to make the sale.

  Fine. The manager patted me on the back and disappeared. Not much happened for the first hour or so. I rearranged some fly boxes, dusted off a display case, tried to strike up a conversation with Sip and Rap. About eleven, a man came in dressed in a fishing vest. I asked if I could help him, but he shook me off and went right to the book display. Rap mentioned his name to me—he was a famous fishing writer, one I had read as a boy. He had a pencil and pad with him. As it turned out, this is how he did his research, cribbing from other people’s books, which he was too cheap to buy.

  At noon, I went outside to feed the trout. They were expecting someone—they crowded one side of the pond, and when I tossed the fish chow to them, they exploded through the water like sharks. I asked the manager if they had a poaching problem with the unfenced pond being so close to the highway.

  “You kidding?” he said, pointing to where the huge fish were tearing apart the surface. “Kids in town are scared of them.”

  Feeding the trout proved to be the high point of the day. At lunchtime, the salesmen sat on benches at one end of the pond swapping stories, but I wasn’t invited to join them, so I ate alone in my car. I was beginning to feel a little sorry for myself—the job was not turning out to be what I had imagined. Nothing happened during the afternoon to improve things. Customers did start to trickle in, but they were the worst kind of pompous, name-dropping snobs, and I remember being puzzled at the humorless way they went about selecting their equipment. It was a type I was to get to know better in the years to come—the affluent, middle-aged American male, as joyless in his play as he was in his work—but at the time, they were new to me.

  The worst of them was a tall man with a complexion the color of rust. He was going salmon fishing on the Miramachi, and wanted a “fly rod that wouldn’t embarrass” him. I knew nothing about salmon fishing except that you needed a heavy rod, so I grabbed from the case the longest, thickest one I could find, mounted a reel on the bottom and led him outside to the pond.

  Here was my chance. I would sell him this $300 fly rod, sell him a $100 reel and $20 line to go with it, and win the grudging respect of the other salesmen and my first commission besides.

  “Nice rod,” I said casually, threading the line through the guides. “One of our least embarrassing models.”

  I suggested that he try a few casts. They weren’t very successful, partly because his cast technique was weak, but mostly because I had mounted it with a line that was far too light.

  “Feels floppy,” he said, frowning.

  “I think it needs more forearm,” I suggested.

  Now the first rule in helping someone with a rod was never in any way criticize his casting. The man’s face immediately reddened.

  “I think I’d rather have someone else,” he said.

  I ignored him. “Here, I’ll show you how.”

  I picked up the rod. Working out some line, I started false-casting toward the pond. Everything went fine until I had about fifty feet out, when between one moment and the next my carefully constructed dream fell apart. The line, alighting on the pond, was enough to suggest a fish-chow pellet to the still-hungry trout. One of them made a rise toward the tip of my leader. Instinctively striking back at him, the line whistled past my head toward the customer’s. He ducked—I yanked on the line and sent it flailing back again toward the pond, only now it was completely out of control. I had one more chance, but I blew it; the line, undulating back again over my head, coiled itself around one of the benches near the parking lot. Before I could stop myself, I had started my forward cast again, and the moment the line tightened, the rod shattered apart in my hands.

  For a moment, all was silence.

  “Jesus,” the man said.

  Even at nineteen, I was writer enough to recognize an exit line when I heard one. Without saying a word, without telling anyone where I was going, I took off my fishing shirt, placed it carefully by the pond, and voluntarily ended my brilliant career.

  5

  Symphony

  The 21st now, and seventeen of these days have seen rain, most of it torrential. Just when it became insupportable—just when the rain and dampness became permanent in our souls—we had a change. It began to snow.

  Welcome to May in Vermont.

  My bus-driving friend Ken Baker put it best. We were following a snowplow down toward Hanover, watching the unutterably depressing sight of flowers disappearing under a heavy outwash of white.

  “Well,” Ken said, lapsing into the thick Yankee accent he saves for his wriest profundities, “was a pretty good winter until spring got here.”

  Ayuh. But while I can come to terms with mudholes, leaky roofs, and smothered tulips, I’ve had a harder time adjusting to what the rain has done to my river. It’s unfishable, of course—so high and muddy and wide it reminds me of old black-and-white newsreels I’ve seen of the Mississippi in flood. And though my intellect registers that I have absolutely no business wading it, my instincts are programmed to May, and I gravitate toward its banks with all the free will of a withered daffodil caught up in its current.

  I was a fisherman who—before drowning—badly needed a nudge. As it turned out, I got two, and both were gentler than I had any right to expect.

  The first nudge was quite literal. I was casting in the rain above the longest of the river’s bridges, the new steel one they put in last July. It’s a thoughtful place to fish. On the left bank are the ruins of a century-old stone bridge the ice had long since washed out; on the right are the twisted beams of a more recent span, an arthritic victim of old age. I like the continuity there—fords are where the fates of rivers and man are longest entwined, and it’s nice to be faced with reminders of their coexistence.

  The sogginess having entered my brain, it was half an hour before I realized that by far the driest place to fish was underneath the bridge. I waded down through water that was up to my chest. By casting sidearm, I was able to fish the pool below the supports. Except for the pressure of the current on my back and the vibrations of lumber trucks ten inches above my head, it was like fishing indoors.

  I was changing to a bigger streamer when I felt something slam into my waders above my hips—a log, as it turned out. We wrestled each other for a while, me trying to keep my balance, the log squirming like a little boy caught beneath my arm, spitting bark. I yanked on one of its branches and it pranced away downstream and vanished into foam.

  “The trees are starting to go,” my intellect said. It was very clear on that point. My instinct, though, still insisted on May.

  “Three more casts,” it said
blindly. My intellect—scared witless now—said nothing.

  I took a tentative step below the bridge. By leaning backward in the current as if I were hiking out on a sailboat, I somehow managed to keep my feet. It wasn’t easy. The pounding water left me with something resembling vertigo. I felt I was teetering on the edge of a subway platform as the Seventh Avenue local roared by, in constant danger of being sucked in.

  I was well past my three-cast limit when I became aware of a man in a yellow slicker watching me from beneath a pine tree on the bank.

  “Water pretty cold, eh?” he said, displaying an even better Yankee twang than Ken’s.

  “Naw,” I said. “Water’s always nice in May.”

  But there was no fooling him. As he ducked around the pine tree his slicker opened far enough to reveal the uniform of a Vermont game warden.

  “How’s the fishing, sir?” he said, going to work.

  “It stinks.” I twisted around a bit so he could see the license pinned to my hat.

  “Little rainy for fishing,” he suggested. “Fact of it is, the river goes up another inch, highway department’s going to close this bridge here. Won’t be any getting east until it goes back down.”

  West of me were sixteen miles of flooded river, waterlogged trees that were beginning to tumble, dirt roads with no bottom, a car that started temperamentally in the rain. East of me was a warm pub with good Bourbon, my fiancée, a clean, well-lighted home. Getting out of that turgid water was the easiest decision of my life.

  I talked with the warden as I packed my gear. He had been driving along the river intending to warn all the fishermen he met about the flood, but I was the only one he had found. Actually, he admitted with something like awe, I was the only fisherman he had seen in the last three days.

  “Dedicated,” he said, laughing.

  “Stubborn,” I said, putting him right.

  As it turned out, the bridge held—the threatened flood never came. Still, there was enough rain throughout the rest of the week to make me consider all the alternatives to going back to that swollen river. The first was not to fish at all . . . Immediately rejected. Drastic measures were called for, but not that drastic. The second alternative was to head south for a drier Cape Cod and the “salter” streams I had fallen in love with when I lived there in the early ‘80s . . . Considered, then finally put aside. As beautiful as they are, those rivers formed a separate chapter in my life, and it would have been impossible to fish them without a heavy sense of déjà vu. The third was to fish a favorite trout pond in the New Hampshire mountains across the Connecticut. Attempted, then given up. Constantly bailing a leaky canoe has never been my idea of fun, and if any trout were rising while I was there, their circles were indistinguishable from those left by the rain.

  So it was the river after all. There was a deeper reason for going back. This was the year I was devoting to the river alone, and I needed to stay in touch with it through all its moods, cranky as well as calm. As hard as its trout were to catch, the river itself—the sense of it—was even harder, and May was too soon to quit trying. There were occasional afternoons when the sun came out long enough to show what we were missing, and I would put away my writing and race the steaming shadows north. My fishing diary shows two rain-free hours on the 9th; three hours on the 12th; a whole afternoon on the 18th. As rare as the sun was, its effect on my face was galvanizing—I felt as if I had been switched onto solar, and the charge of energy was enough to last me through the inevitable change back to rain.

  There was little chance of catching trout—the water was as high and thick as gravy in an overfilled tureen. But not catching trout is important, too. It opens up the fly fisherman to other moods and impressions, widens his focus from the small crescent of river swept by his fly. Troutless, we begin seeking alternate treasures to take home. Some might begin sketching or taking pictures of the river’s scenery; some might use the time to reconnoiter parts of the river they don’t already know. One woman I know picks up rocks along the river’s edge, searching for fossilized nymphs; another goes into the woods in search of edible plants.

  Me, I did none of these things. I opened up my ears and listened.

  It would have been hard not to. A great deal of the river’s energy was being expended in sound, and all my casts, all my journeys from stance to precarious stance, all my meditations, were backed by this roaring, rushing sweep. The aural power was intense—I felt as if I were in the middle of an amplifier, part of a circuit required for the sound’s transmission. Overhanging branches strummed a whisking sound on the water racing beneath their tips; rocks clattered against each other like cymbals; boulders established a backwash of sound that was pitched to a slower, heavier rhythm than the current’s main theme, a throb as ponderous and regular as surf.

  The river had to raise its voice to get my attention. Like most flyfishermen, the sound of moving water has always been a pleasant accompaniment to my day—an accompaniment, little more than background noise, though of the loveliest kind. It had never occurred to me to try to analyze it. Sound’s part in stalking fish, after all, is largely negative: we try to avoid making any. As a positive force, sound seldom enters our consideration. Fly fishing is primarily a visual sport—the finning trout and quick rise come to us through our eyes. Touch plays a part—there’s the feel of the bottom as we wade, the pull on our line as a trout takes hold. Give up his sight or his sensation of touch, and the flyfisherman would be seriously handicapped; give up his hearing, and his skill would be reduced not at all.

  Trout are partly to blame for sound’s unimportance. They emit no beeping noises that help us locate them; they neither whistle, squawk, rattle nor hiss. A bubbly, splashing sound as they feed is the best they can do. Their dumbness is a curse and blessing both. It makes it harder for us to find them, but easier to fight them once we do. Would flyfishermen still enjoy catching trout if the fish could groan? “I hooked a noisy rainbow in fast water,” we might say. “He ran out a hundred yards of line, screamed at the top of his voice, then took to the air . . .” No, somehow I don’t think we would.

  Between the trout’s silence and the flyfisherman’s unreliance on his ears, sound has not received the attention from fishing writers that it deserves. Like surf and wind, a river’s rush is one of the elemental voices in which nature has chosen to speak. But the writers who are best at describing a river do it primarily in visual terms; we can see Haig-Brown’s Campbell or Grey’s Rogue, we can often feel them, but can we ever hear them?

  Describing sound is not easy. The vocabulary of inanimate noise is limited. Things ring, pop, click, buzz, bang, creak, hum, clang, sizzle, squeak, and not much else. These are landbound, static words—they lack the dynamic flow liquid sound requires. Simile helps a bit; for instance, there’s a small rapid below the Aquarium that makes a steady, sprinkly kind of sound, like the fountain on the terrace of Lincoln Center when it’s turned on full blast. But while it is almost impossible to write about sound without such similes, they stand in the way. If we can only refer to a sound by relating it to other sounds, we sacrifice preciseness, put our words one or two steps beyond the sensations they’re meant to describe.

  A race of fishermen could easily invent a vocabulary to get around this. Take a sound that every fly fisherman knows well: water falling over a weir or small dam. It’s a drumming, happy kind of sound, at least in English. In our angling vocabulary we could avoid all images of drums and happiness by giving it a precise name: umshoo. “I was fishing by the dam, listening to the river umshoo we could say, and fly fishermen everywhere would know what we meant. Water dropping over two or more weirs in succession would make a sound with one beat or more: umshooeen. Water running beneath an undercut bank would make a soft squahish noise . . . and so on.

  Until such a language is adopted, fishing writers must rely on the similes on hand. Luckily, there is one vocabulary that is devoted pure and simply to describing variations in sound, and it fits a river quite well: the
vocabulary of music.

  A river’s sound is nothing if not symphonic—one beautiful whole composed of scarcely less beautiful parts, each of which can be distinguished within the overmastering rhythm. The light, percussive effect of pebble hitting pebble; the reedy drone of sand washing away from a bar; the brassy fanfare of spray against granite . . . they weave their way in and out of the steadier, cello-like continuo of the river’s motion. A river bed is a sounding board over which water strums the earth, shaking molecules against other molecules until a wave is formed which—reaching a certain frequency—reacts pleasantly on our ears. This scale established, the symphony begins.

  A drop of water falls from a branch high upstream with a soft plucking kind of noise . . . solo at first, then joined by another drop further back toward the branch’s stem, then another, then a fourth, until finally the pluckings become simultaneous, and the first liquid chord of the river is created—a high treble rill of sound as the merged raindrops sparkle down a grooved rock into the stream. The rain-formed current pushes a drowned branch against a boulder, then lets it spring back; pushes it, then lets it spring back, establishing a soft metronomic click from which the entire river takes its beat.

  The character of the music is evident right from the start. The White River, for instance, is romantic even in its tributaries—a broad sweep of sound that suggests Smetena’s Moldau. The Battenkill, running in a narrower channel, is more classical, a river composed by a Mozart or Haydn, with pure tones and an effortless harmonic impulse that carries you along.