I had been concentrating so much on the river that I’d lost track of the weather. The promise that was in the sun had been blotted out by clouds, and as I headed back to the car it began to snow. I’d have to hurry to reach the headwaters; reluctantly, I passed up the fork in the road that leads along the beautiful North Branch, and continued on the main stream, past what surely must be the smallest ski area in the state of Vermont, then a cemetery, its stark granite markers silhouetted against the snow like miniature Stonehenges, then a small farm. Most Vermont river valleys narrow and close in upon themselves as you approach the headwaters, but here the landscape opens and spreads apart, admitting wider vistas of light and sky. The knobby hills and open meadows reminded me of the highlands of Scotland, the lonely road that travels from Inverness to Ullapool.
Signs of life were infrequent. Snowmobile tracks across a deserted field. A tireless car drifted in snow. Billboards so faded and illegible that they’ve escaped Vermont’s prohibition: Blue Seed Fee, Nana’s Craft Shop, Maple Syrup 500 Feet. At a point where the river narrows, I saw the first people out enjoying it besides me: a group of schoolchildren using their recess to ice-skate on the overflow.
It was past three now, and I remembered I was hungry the same time as the general store appeared up ahead on the right. I know too many loquacious Vermonters to accept the laconic stereotype, but the clerk behind the counter made me think twice.
“Cold out,” I said, blowing on my hands.
On cautious eyebrow half-raised. Yes.
“Have any coffee?”
The lips, already pencil thin, thinner. No.
“This snow supposed to last?”
He threw discretion to the wind and ventured to half-raise his eyebrow and tighten his lips at the same time, as if to say any damned fool knew that snowstorms in that part of the state always lasted.
He was right about that. When I went back outside with my Twinkies, snow covered the road and I had to drive it at a crawl, my wipers in a losing battle with the ice.
The river—brook trout water now—was further from the road here, only visible by the row of bare trees lining its bank. Another mile and it was obvious that this was as far as I was going today. As I pulled over to turn around, the snow slackened for a minute, letting the sun shine through the clouds. Ahead of me, I saw the twin mountains in the shadow of which the river has its source. The view was gone within seconds. The snow fell back into place with doubled intensity, giving the effect of a curtain that had been teasingly raised, then immediately dropped.
I needed to get to the river once more before going home. Taking a chance that the plows wouldn’t be by for a while, I left my car on the side of the road and started through a field toward the trees. It was a part of the river I don’t know well, and the seesaw I’d been riding between recollection and anticipation tipped decisively toward the future. The river is narrow here, dwindling toward its first springs and beaver ponds. Watching it, I promised myself I’d come back after black fly season and follow its windings to its source. It felt good to make a promise; it joined with the vow I’d made to teach Celeste to fly fish, the vow to pick some lazy summer day to float the length of the river in inner tubes, the vow to learn how to fish a nymph once and for all, my vow to catch more and bigger browns.
The ice extended bank to bank, and the only break in the monotony was a small hole a few yards downstream. In the disorienting gray, the blinding snow assumed a significance out of all proportion to its size, looming in my imagination like one of those black holes in space that, collapsing, take with it all matter in its reach, becoming pure essence. The hole below me was the essence of my Vermont river, and as I turned regretfully to go, something bright and silver rose toward the middle, and faster than I can write it down was gone.
A trick of ice? A surge of water? A trout?
Spring will tell.
2
Quadrangles
Every March, I go temporarily nuts over maps. Not just any maps. Oil company maps, National Geographic maps, maps tucked in guidebooks, street maps, atlases, and globes all leave me cold. Maps on placemats, maps on matchbooks, maps on ashtrays or cribbage boards I positively despise. No, the focus of my addiction is much more limited, but infinitely more detailed: the beautiful green and brown topographic maps of the United States Geological Survey.
The local hardware store stocks them, in a fine metal case where the sheets lie immaculate without folds. The complex but rewarding Camels Hump quadrangle of 1948; the state-straddling Mt. Cube of 1931; the modern, somewhat mundane East Corinth of 1973; the vintage, all but legendary East Barre of 1957, companion of some of my happiest map-browsing hours . . . Mr. Waite’s chest contains them all. On rainy afternoons I’m apt to spend a good hour or more going through them, tracing contour intervals up mountains I’ve hiked, following trout streams to their obscurest tributary, spreading the maps out on the wooden floor to match them to their neighbors, not stopping until a gentle inquiry from Mr. Waite makes me replace them sheepishly in their bins.
Occasionally, I even buy one; at three dollars a fix, they are among the cheaper addictions. I have four maps spread on the carpet below me as I write, their corners weighted down with fly reels. It is too warm and muddy to go skiing, too cold yet for fishing, and I am neither fly-tier nor hobbyist. The maps fill a vacuum, use up time that hangs heavy in the long weeks before spring. But they are more than that, too, and my fascination with them is comprised of many elements—their beauty, their elaborate detail, the mysteries they offer, the discoveries they reveal.
Beauty first. Even as mere objects, topographic maps are attractive things, and even less-inspired efforts like the East Corinth quadrangle are of gallery quality. They even feel nice; the crisp, no-nonsense paper reeks of trustworthiness and good sense. In unrolling it, the edges will tug gratifyingly on your fingers, as if the paper has a life and will of its own.
Hung on a wall and seen from a distance, topographic maps resemble late Van Goghs, with swirls and coils, elaborate circles and extravagant loops. The contour lines in their convoluted twistings are as suggestive as ink blots, forming here a butterfly or amoeba, there a breaker or cloud. Color is everywhere. Blue streams curve across brown contour lines over green forests. Red roads bisect black boundary markers by aquamarine ponds near terra cotta cities, and all is centered perfectly in broad, even margins of white.
But as beautiful as the colors are, I think the deepest beauty topographic maps offer is more cerebral: here spread before you is a small, comprehensible portion of the earth, its hills and valleys lovingly traced, its man-made additions duly marked, its unceasing hurry for one moment checked.
Within these lines and symbols there is much to explore. But a word of caution is in order. If there is one hazard in being addicted to topographic maps, it is in the danger of being overwhelmed by their detail, not seeing the mountains for the contour lines. After years of puzzling over them, I’ve begun to understand some of the basic details; i.e., that a 15-minute quadrangle covers a square that is fifteen minutes of longitude by fifteen minutes of latitude, and that a 7.5-minute quadrangle covers a quarter of that area with correspondingly greater detail (but with less sweep and breadth of view). I also understand about contour intervals; if the contour interval is twenty feet, then any point on a contour line is twenty feet above or below any point on the neighboring contour line. Scale is just as easy; if it’s 1:62500, then any unit such as an inch or centimeter on the map equals 62,500 of the same units on the ground. The magnetic declination diagram in the margin shows how far magnetic north differs from true north—nothing tricky there. I know about bench marks, too, having tripped over one while fishing once, and given a good ruler, I can handle mileage scales tolerably well.
Some things, however, are mysterious. Grid ticks, for instance. Are they yardage markers in football or a new species of insect pest? On the East Corinth quadrangle are several small patches that are comprised of green polka dots. What could
they possibly mean? Could there still be corners of Vermont that are terra incognita, polka dots being the government’s way of saying they have no idea what’s there?
After wondering about these and other equally arcane symbols, I finally sent to the US Geological Survey in Virginia for a folder describing topographic maps in detail. Grid ticks turn out to be “a network of uniformly spaced parallel lines intersecting at right angles,” useful for engineers and their ilk. Green polka dots turn out to represent an orchard—in Vermont, an apple orchard more than likely. Three wavy lines in a river means rapids or falls. A straight line with crewcut hair growing out of it means a wooded marsh.
Some of the more interesting symbols aren’t likely to be found on Vermont quadrangles. Green polka dots that are more tightly bunched than those for an orchard depict vineyards. A sinking ship represents an exposed wreck. A pretty green floral design means a mangrove swamp. A box with little curls in it means a lava field; a little triangle, oil wells. My favorite is a small black circle with a crescent on the top. The meaning? “A mosque or Sheikh’s tomb.”
There is a lesson in all this, and it is a simple one. If topographic maps are the most precise of precision instruments, then they are also the most suggestive, and an active imagination can find hours of pleasure in poring over them in wonder.
Take the quadrangle unfolded before me now, the one that maps the upper reaches of my favorite trout river. It’s probably as close as you can come to a typical fifteen-minute swatch of Vermont, including as it does two or three mountains, a score of hills, a whole network of unimproved dirt roads, idiosyncratic boundaries, several small hill towns, two or three “notches,” at least one “hollow,” and enough cemeteries hidden away in the forest to hint at how many human lives ran out there in the century before. The place names are a joy to say aloud: Michigan Hill, Duplissey Hill, Lyme Emery Hill, Pike Hill, Hurricane Ridge, Mount Pleasant; Riders Corner, Riddle Pond, Foster Notch, Hart Hollow, Goose Green . . . each one suggesting a story, each one a monument to a time when every feature of the Vermont terrain was familiar enough to some caring soul to be called by name.
A legend on the bottom of the map says that it was “compiled in part from aerial photographs taken in 1938,” and as I look at it, I picture a yellow biplane circling the ridges, a camera mounted on its wing, the plane soaring on the updrafts on a Vermont summer day. For it is an aerial, bird’s-eye view that topographic maps provide—run your eyes quickly from top to bottom and the effect is as dizzying as flight. And nothing short of flight gives you such a quick appreciation of terrain. The two symmetrical mountains between which the river has its source, the ones that always look to me like twins? Sure enough, there they are on the map, both topping out at exactly 3,166 feet, proof to the eye. That steep ridge above the pool in the river where I caught that big rainbow trout last June, the ridge beyond which I could never see? There it is, the contour lines pressed together like isobars, and beyond it is a plateau in the middle of which is a swamp. That tiny stream that comes into the main river over a miniature falls? I trace it back into the hills, find its source in a small pond a mile and a half above the river, vow to fish up to it come May.
There are houses back in the hills, tiny black squares that form the human dimension in the crosshatches and grids. Beside some of them are the white squares that represent barns; when they are connected barns, the white and black squares are joined. I imagine my way up to the most remote of them, my finger running west out of the small hill town that straddles the river (the homes, the church, the school are all depicted, the last with a little flag), tracing my way past the small cemetery, passing one or two lonely houses strung along the high open meadows beyond town, then entering the woods as the road turns to dirt. I can picture the ruts in that road, picture the humpbacked middle, the way that steep ridge pinches it in toward the stream. The house, by my ruler, is a mile further—not a house really, but a cabin, sharing a small clearing with a fallen-down barn, nest to owls. That nameless hill behind the house (elevation 2418) must catch a lot of the sun—night comes early in the late summer and fall. Looks like that swamp at its base must breed clouds of mosquitoes. Then, too, the nearest house is three miles—lonely place for a wife and kids. No wonder the barn is fallen down and abandoned. No wonder the town never votes to improve the road. No wonder it’s lost now, lost except for this lonely black square on a forty-year-old map.
These journeys to polka dotted fields and abandoned hill farms I may never actually make, but there are other trips that I will start upon and topographic maps will be an inestimable aid when I do. This is the year I’ve promised myself that I’ll follow my favorite river to its source, much the way Speke and Burton traced the Nile. Fishing the headwaters, it’s hard to know which of numerous branches that form the main stream is the main stream. On the map, all is clear. The ultimate winding of the river departs from the highway opposite a small cemetery (elevation 1827), parallels a dirt road that shortly ends (good place to leave the car), and climbs through fairly gentle terrain for the first two miles, giving me time—once I start hiking—to limber up my legs. The contour lines gradually start closing up into arrowhead-shaped wedges—there may be falls here, forcing me to detour further from the bank in order to make any progress. After about half a mile, the contour lines flatten out, the mountains open up a bit, and with most of the climb behind me, it will be a fine spot to eat my lunch. Another hour should do it. The stream will become smaller and smaller, smaller than my stride, and I will cross it many times before I come to the spring in the ground that must be the river’s highest source, smack on the crosshatched boundary lines of two Vermont counties.
Staring at the map, I can imagine the sound of that stream, feel the ache in my calfs as I climb, smell the breeze as it comes down off the mountains. But it is April now, the temperature climbs tentatively toward fifty, and as suddenly as my map-scanning passion came on, it is gone. Vicarious trips no longer suffice, blue lines make poor substitutes for streams, and stuffing the topographic maps in an old bookcase, I grab my fly rod and rush outside.
3
April Fourteenth
The water, like the sky, had a scoured look to it. The dead reeds that lined the banks lay perfectly flat, as though a wire brush had been run through them a hundred times preparatory to spring—ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred, smoothing them into a part, their tips all trending in the same direction. Above them, the sagging branches of uprooted trees touched the water, and where they touched the water their bark was burnished gold. Out in the current—the current which for its hard green brilliance might have been the coruscating agent itself—the rocks were as polished as gems. There was nothing extraneous in the landscape. It was stripped down to its elements—water and sky—the debris of winter washed away in one great torrent of brightness.
I went into it at the long stretch above the pine canyon, the part of the river I love most. The state of Vermont allowed me to fish beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, April 9, but I had chosen to start the trout season at my own convenience—at 8:01 a.m. on Thursday, April 14. Even later than that, as it turned out. For the season began this year, not when I got up in the morning, the adrenaline racing me through breakfast; not when I loaded my rods in the car and drove the thirty minutes of highway; not even when I first stepped into the current and began to cast. No, the season began at 8:05 or thereabouts, the moment when after picking my way gingerly around several huge and dangerous ledges, I found myself twenty yards out in midstream with the full weight of the river on my thighs.
Of all the sensations associated with fly fishing, this is the one linked most closely to spring. For if spring is energy—the light that lures crocuses from the soil, the warmth that birds track north—then this is energy made manifest, the pushing, rushing current breaking against your legs as you cast. Implicit in it are the fifteen miles of river upstream, all the tributaries to the river, all the tributaries to the tributaries, the trickles, run
s, pools, drips and springs that comprise a watershed—all this is at your back, pressing your waders until the fabric clutches at your legs, pushing your feet out from their hard-won stance, supporting you when you lean against it, shivering you, even through lined pants and long underwear, with its chill. For all the current knows, you are part of the river itself, to be sprung against and pried at like any other rock or branch that gets in its way.
Current is the continuous note of a flyfisherman’s day. All the casting, all the probing for trout, the tactics, are merely embellishments to that throb. And like any deeply felt sensation, it carries with it its own echo, so that even now, writing four days after I fished, I can feel the power of the river on my legs, a vague and very satisfactory hum.
The feel of it all—the sense of once again uniting muscles and nerves in harmonious, graceful ways—is one element of an April start. The other is more cerebral, depending as it does on the thread of memory that links the fisherman standing in the river to the boy who dreamed of standing in the river. Part of you is that boy, and the sensitivity to realize this is never sharper than on opening day when the dream is renewed with the most ceremony and deliberation.
I caught this thread several times that morning. The first was when I stopped in town to buy some flies. They lay in trays on the counter, bushy Marabou Streamers, slim Gray Ghosts, nymphs as hard and spare as stones. I picked through them with the same sense of anticipation I felt as a boy of fourteen buying lures to throw at bass on the Connecticut lake where I grew up.
It only lasted a few minutes. By the time I paid for them and went back outside to the car, my mind was back in the present, worrying how high the river would be. But the same thing happened again when I put together my fly rod at the river’s edge; my hands shook just as they shook when I walked down to Candlewood Lake on opening day twenty years before. I went with the feeling this time, deliberately prolonged the link, until by the time I waded out to the middle of the river and began to cast, I was in some sense standing aside from myself, looking at this tall fisherman waist-deep in a Vermont river with the eyes of the boy who wished for nothing so much as to be one day standing in a Vermont river casting for trout.
A River Trilogy Page 4