A River Trilogy Read online

  My river in its upper reaches is unmistakably baroque. It begins far from the road in a quiet wood where silence is so absolute it seems not the mere absence of noise but a creative force waiting to be tapped. The instrumentation that gathers it is the simplest—there are those raindrops forming into rills, the baby tributaries with their high, brittle bounce, the miniature falls whose notes are as clear and distinct as a harpsichord’s. With no heavy rapids to drown out their sound, the soloists retain their distinctness as the process goes on; close your eyes and you can still find the percolating drops of rain within the metallic, more ornamental notes of the falls. I listen to a Bach cantata by following one instrument or voice as it winds its way through the entirety of the piece, using it as a guide through the beautiful intricacy of sound, and I find myself listening to the upper stretches of my river in the same way.

  Upstream, the sound is channeled into definite boundaries. Walk fifty yards from the banks, and the music is indistinguishable from the wind’s. Below the first substantial tributaries, the sound widens and darkens—waterfalls add their bass notes and rapids pitch everything to a speedier tempo. Culverts give a hollow sound to the river; the supports of the highway bridges make a steely, atonal kind of noise that is out of sync with the river’s lilt, giving the effect of an Ives forcing notes onto something by Schubert.

  There’s a rapid below the last bridge that makes a sound very much like human song—a delicate soprano voice struggling to be heard over the orchestration. The first time I fished there, I swore someone was calling my name from the bank. I turned to see who it was, but there was no one—the sound was coming from the rapid itself, as if there were a maiden entombed beneath the flow. How to account for it? Is there an underwater rock whose configuration mimics the human larynx? Is the rapid’s pitch that of speech? Or is there a maiden entombed there after all, an Indian princess scorned by an early settler who took her life over the falls? Standing there listening to that unearthly whisper, it’s easy to understand how myths begin.

  Below this rapid, it’s harder to separate the river’s sounds into parts. I wade out to the rapid’s edge to listen more attentively, but it’s too close—there is a roar of white noise in which all kinds of boomings, skitterings, raps, and gurgles lay concealed.

  You have to go along with the sweep. With a river as with a symphony there comes a time when you have to stop trying to analyze it and let yourself be swept along in its sensuous beauty. By the time the South Branch comes in, the river’s sound is at fullest amplitude, the various riffles, rapids, chutes, and falls joining into one churning vibrato that becomes its own echo. A jet of water beats apart the muting bark of a log; a poorly balanced boulder rumbles sideways in the current, groaning Fs; a rapid sets up a sizzling noise as it drops shatter apart into spray; white, downpressing water drums furiously toward the bottom, then boils up again further downstream . . . all the river’s effects are in chorus now, allegro now, then presto, joining together for one magnificent finale as the river gathers itself for that last percussive leap over the dam, a showy display of sound that is felt more than heard.

  The invisible conductor of things brings his baton down, the last note fades away. The river makes a random, shuffling kind of noise in its last hundred yards to the Connecticut, like that of an orchestra’s members going their own ways after the concert reaches its end. The river’s undetectable currents finally merge. The flow out of silence into silence returns.

  6

  Take a Writer Fishing

  I dreamt one night that I was fishing with Joseph Conrad. We were on the open stretch of the river above the first bridge. I was casting a dry fly toward a shallow spot that couldn’t possibly have held a trout; Conrad was shaking his head in disapproval, muttering something in Polish that I couldn’t understand. He was fishing with a handline, hauling it in over his shoulder as if it were an anchor rope, really straining—his fine beard was drenched in sweat. I would have liked to help him, but was too shy. More than anything, I wanted him to approve of the river and love it as much as I did.

  Too soon, he faded into Bob Cousy. But so vivid was his image that when I woke up that morning, I went to the library to determine whether there’s any record of his having fished. Had I put him on that trout stream by myself, or was there some half-remembered reference to the sport buried away in Nostromo?

  I suppose I’m to blame. None of the novels or stories contain fishing scenes, and there’s no mention of any interest in his autobiographical writings. In the course of his maritime career he must have known men who fished hard for their living, and fishing for fun must have smacked to him of affectation.

  Searching through Conrad, remembering the dream, I began trying to list all the great writers who are known to have been dedicated fishermen. It’s a remarkably short list, and I’m not sure why. Is it because great writers are too intellectual to take any interest in something so earthy as fishing? I don’t think so—fly fishing has always attracted a brainy sort, and among its practitioners are a great number of scientists, engineers, artists, and teachers. Is it because writers bear too complicated a burden of worry and concern to enjoy fishing’s basic premise? This might be closer to it. Like any other human activity, fishing has its share of ironies, and perhaps the act of trying to fool a trout into thinking a piece of feather and steel is a mayfly is too fundamentally absurd for a great mind to endure . . . partly this, and partly that writers with their torments know too well what it’s like to have a barbed hook in their throat, and have no wish to inflict the same torture on another harmless soul.

  Let’s go down the list. Hemingway is first, if for no other reason than that his love for fishing was the most self-advertised. The popular conception of Hemingway as a fisherman revolves around his days fishing off Cuba and the Keys on his beloved Pilar, with the kind of epic, day-long encounters with marlin that formed the basis of The Old Man and the Sea. While this kind of big-fish fishing, with its competitiveness, its emphasis on sheer physical power and machismo, obviously meant a lot to Hemingway and revealed much that was fundamental in his character, it doesn’t present him in a particularly attractive light. Would it have been fun to be on the Pilar with him fishing the “great blue stream” of the Gulf? For a while, perhaps, then something of a bore. Arnold Gingrich, his friend and sometime publisher, claimed that “Ernest was a meat fisherman . . . intensely competitive about his fishing, and a very poor sport.” This seems like an accurate appraisal; it’s fun to catch a big fish, but not if your manhood is being measured by how fast you reel him in.

  It’s the younger, not-yet-legendary Hemingway—the Hemingway who fished grasshoppers for trout—who’s the appealing one. The golden moments of his boyhood revolved around his trips to the lakes and streams of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the locale of his “Big Two-Hearted River.” In this, and in his early journalism for the Toronto Star, there’s a boyish sincerity and brightness that gives way to pontification twenty years later when he’s writing about big game. Included in his early journalism are accounts of streams he’d visited in Canada and Europe, illuminated by the typically compact Hemingway style. Here’s a man who can sum up the enchantments of a trout river in one beautiful phrase: “A pool whose moselle-colored water sweeps into a dark swirl and expanse that is blue-brown with depth and fifty feet across.” Here’s a man who has an eye for other things than trout, and can include in an account of a Swiss fishing trip meditations on barmaids in station buffets, Napoleon’s army in the St. Bernard pass, and the latest news in a trout-stained Daily Mail. This Hemingway—the young man who hiked across the Black Forest in the ’20s with a rucksack and a fly rod and not much else—is the one with whom I would have liked to fish.

  Thoreau’s another writer it would be fun going out on the river with, though you’d have to be prepared for some trouble. I don’t mean dealing with his reserved personality (Sophia Hawthorne said that taking his hand was like taking the hand of an elm), but with his ambivalence
toward fishing. Did he love it or hate it?

  Read his account of night-fishing on Walden, and you’d swear no one ever loved the sport more. He tells of returning late to the pond from the village and spending the dark hours of midnight fishing from a boat, “communicating by a long flaxed line with mysterious nocturnal fishes . . . now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life probing about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind.”

  Thoreau, for all his talk of simplicity, was too complicated a man to leave it at that. As much as he enjoyed fishing (we have that famous image of Thoreau playing the flute in his boat, charming the perch gathered about the bow), he was convinced that he shouldn’t—that fishing, like hunting, was an important but essentially immature response to nature and its wonders, a pursuit for “embryo” man and not those attuned to the “higher laws.” He puts down the fishermen who come to Walden thus: “They might go there a thousand times before the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose pure.” He’s equally hard on himself: “I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it . . . but always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished . . . with every year I am less a fisherman . . . at present, I am no fisherman at all.”

  There’s no apology at all in that other great nineteenth-century nature writer, John Burroughs. While Thoreau was at Walden deciding whether or not to fish, Burroughs was out on the Neversink, celebrating trout fishing with some of his happiest prose. “Trout streams coursed through every valley my boyhood knew,” he writes in his essay, “Speckled Trout.” He describes trips to the Delaware, Rondout, Beaverkill, and Esopus—trips in which it was nothing for each fisherman to take a hundred trout.

  Burroughs had more insight into the sport than Thoreau. He claims he’d seen more of woods and nature in “threading my native streams for trout,” than he would have in any other way. Fishing “pitches one in the right key” to accept nature; the fisherman “is a kind of vagrant that nothing fears . . . all his approaches are gentle and indirect.” With this attitude, fly selection is no problem: “When you bait your hook with your heart, the fish always bite!” And later: “A certain quality of youth is indispensable to the successful angler, a certain unworldliness and readiness to invest yourself in an enterprise that doesn’t pay in the current coin.”

  Washington Irving fished some of those same Catskill streams. One of the essays in his Sketch Book, “The Angler,” is a self-deprecatory account of his flirtation with trout. Reading Izaak Walton has left him “stark mad [about fishing] as was ever Don Quioxte from reading books of chivalry.” Thus intoxicated, he ventures out on an upstate stream with all the necessary accouterments (“perplexed with half a hundred pockets”) and begins to cast.

  The results are meager. “For my part, I was always a bungler at all kinds of sports that require either patience or adroitness . . . I hooked myself instead of a fish, tangled my line in every tree, lost my bait, broke my rod and gave up the attempt in despair.” Poor Irving! How we can sympathize with him! Nothing daunted, he ends the day reading his beloved Walton under the shade of a gentle oak. “There is certainly something in angling,” he concludes, “if we could forget, which anglers are apt to do, the cruelties and tortures inflicted on worms and insects, that tends to produce a gentleness of spirit and a pure serenity of mind.”

  Irving’s contemporaries were less fond of the sport. His friend Sir Walter Scott described himself as “No fisher, but a well-wisher to the game.” He must have known a little about the subject; there’s a scene in Redgauntlet where Darsie Latimer dismisses Charles Cotton’s writings as not being applicable to Highlands streams, then goes on to spin his version of the familiar barefoot-boy-out-fishing-sophisticated-angler story. Scott’s dismissal of Cotton is echoed in Lord Byron’s put-down of Walton: “The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet; should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.” Tennyson’s poetry includes an occasional reference to fishing—apparently he shared with Burroughs and Irving the opinion that it was good for the soul to engage in something so absolutely uneconomic. “Lusty trout to him were script and share; and babbling waters more than cent for cent.” To find the real angling poet you have to move ahead forty years to Yeats. It’s funny about him. There’s no mention of any fishing trips in his autobiography, and yet he wrote some of the finest poetry on the subject extant. There’s “The Fisherman”: “Although I can see him still,/The freckled man who goes,/To a grey place on a hill,/In grey Connemara clothes,/At dawn to cast his flies”; and “The song of Wandering Aengus”: “Because a fire was in my head . . . I dropped the berry in a stream, and caught a little silver trout.”

  Reading Yeats, you come to the conclusion that what he really loved was the sound of the word trout and the pastoral, innocent image it conveyed. To him, trout were like fairies in the Irish hills—something you thought well of without actually wishing to catch. In all the fishing in print has there ever been a more magical line than the one from “The Stolen Child”? “We seek for slumbering trout, and whispering in their ears,/Give them unquiet dreams.”

  If Yeats is the epitome of the mystical fisherman, then Chekhov is the personification of the earthy one. No great writer ever loved fishing more. Nina, speaking of the writer Trigorin in The Seagull, could easily have been describing Chekhov himself. “And is it not wonderful that a famous writer, the darling of the public, mentioned daily in the papers . . . should spend his whole day fishing and be delighted because he has caught two chub.”

  Chekhov would have been a good man to fish with—caring nothing for orthodoxy, whether in literature or fishing, and with that rare ability to forget he’s a great man. Fishing was a welcome diversion from the cares of literature and medicine; the moment he bought his country estate at Melikhovo in 1892, he began stocking his ponds with tench imported from Moscow in glass jars. Trigorin, the bemused writer stumbling about other people’s lives carrying a notebook and a fishing rod, is in some part Chekhov’s wry laugh at himself. (I once saw a performance of The Seagull in which Trigorin—a man fishing a farm pond for chub—carried the kind of huge saltwater rod Zane Grey might have used, thereby making ludicrous what was otherwise a fine production.)

  Chekhov’s real fishing masterpiece is a lesser-known story called “Fish.” It bears the simplest of plots. Berasim, a peasant, is working by the river preparing a bathing shed when he grabs a huge fish that’s hiding under some willow roots. Other peasants come over and offer their advice on how to land him (“But why do you keep poking with your hand?” cries the hunchback Lubim, shivering as though in a fever. “You blockhead! Hold him, hold him, or else he’ll get away, the anathema! Hold him, I tell you!”); the matter isn’t resolved until the master himself, Andrey Andreitch, hears the commotion and joins the fun.

  “A famous eel-pout,” mutters Yefim, scratching under his shoulder blades. “I’ll be bound it weighs ten pounds.”

  “Mm . . . yes,” the master assents. “The liver is fairly swollen! It seems to stand out! Aach!”

  The fish makes a sudden, unexpected upward movement with its tail and the fishermen hear a loud splash . . . they all put out their hands, but it is too late; they have seen the last of the eel-pout.

  It’s all there—the simple excitement of it, the suspense, the climax and immediate anticlimax. Chekhov has always been regarded as the writer’s writer, and based on the insights he shows in this story, he was the fisherman’s fisherman as well.

  T. H. White was another writer who had an uncanny insight into fish and fishing. We have that masterful scene in The Sword in the Stone where the Wart, the young King Arthur, is transformed into a tench by Merlin so he may swim about the castle moat and complete his education among the fish, nearly being swallowed by a pike in the process. White had a great natural affinity with animals, birds, and fish;
nature was a balm for the torments of his inner life, offering him the companionship he could never find with another human. White—with his falconer’s patience—would have been a methodical fisherman and a learned one; he and Chekhov could have taught each other a lot.

  With White, the list nears its end. (It could be extended by including contemporary fiction writers like William Humphrey, Caroline Gordon, Norman Maclean, Richard Brautigan, and Tom McGuane, people who have written about fishing in imaginative and original ways.) Looking back on the writers mentioned, several names stick out by their absence—writers whose silence on fishing is in some ways a surprise.

  Take Melville, for instance. Here’s a man who in Moby-Dick gave us what is arguably the best “fishing” story ever written (Melville, remember, insisted that the whale was a fish), and yet there are only three or four vague references to fishing in his entire output, and they’re all less than memorable. Take this poem from Mardi: “Fish, fish, we are fish with red gills/Naught disturbs us, our blood is zero/We are buoyant because of our bags/Being many, each fish is a hero . . .” Which is a long way from Yeats. But it’s easy to understand why Melville wasn’t a fisherman. To anyone who had clung to the sides of a whale boat on a Nantucket sleigh ride, catching ten-inch Berkshire trout must have seemed pretty tame.

  Dickens is another novelist you might have expected to write about fishing, if for no other reason than he seems to have written about everything else. There are no anglers among his characters, not even among the sporting Pickwickians. Dickens does, however, hold an honorary place in the angling hall of fame. The Dolly Varden trout is named after the irrepressible Dolly Varden of Barnaby Rudge, “the very impersonation of good-humour and blooming beauty . . . giddy, flirtatious and coquettish.”

  Robert Frost should by rights be an angler. Of all the greats so far mentioned, he’s the only one who might have known the rivers I love, and I regret there’s no record in his poetry of any involvement. Ernest Poole, the novelist who was Frost’s Franconia Notch neighbor, mentions in a reminiscence that Frost liked to go fishing in the spring, but these expeditions left no trace in his work. In his collected poems there is only one reference to fishing; it comes in “The Mountain” where the local farmer, in explaining his relationship to the mountain that rises behind his farm, says “I’ve been on the sides,/Deer-hunting and trout-fishing . . .” And that’s it for Robert Frost. There are no hymns to New Hampshire trout streams, no recollections of fishing trips in the Green Mountains—his Hyla Brooks are always fishless. Like Conrad, he knew too well the hard work that went into wresting a living from nature to spare much attention to people who went to the woods for sport.