A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  And speaking of flies, by October there are great gaps in all my fly boxes, springs and clips that hold nothing, making it seem as if the flies had died off in the cold or migrated with the real insects they copied. I go through an extravagant quantity of flies in the course of a season, and if I didn’t limit myself somehow, I’d quickly go broke. Because of that—because I need a reason to use those experimental flies I couldn’t resist last spring—I declare a moratorium on all fly buying as of September first. After that date, I use what’s in my box, and buy no replacements until the following year. It works fine for a while—I almost always have enough Wulffs and Muddlers to get me through September. By October, though, most of these have been left in trees or trout, and I’m fishing with the chaff. Bushy monstrosities I tied as a kid, snelled wet flies I found at a flea market, saltwater flies from my days on the Cape—they’re all trotted out now, and occasionally a trout will take one from sheer astonishment.

  Halfway through the morning I snapped off the wet fly on which I’d caught the brookie. For lack of anything better, I switched to a Daniel Webster. It’s a “salter” fly—a green and red bucktail designed for sea-run browns—so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t catch anything with it.

  I contemplated my alternatives. There was a Honey Blonde in a size suited for tarpon; some battered Light Hendricksons, and half a dozen other creations the names of which I had forgotten.

  There was one more possibility. In the course of a season’s shufflings and unpackings, flies drop out of their boxes and get caught all over the car—in the mat of the trunk, the floor carpets, and upholstery. I decided to go back and see what I could glean.

  I had waded downstream at a pretty good clip, and it was a long walk to the car. By the time I got there, a hot cup of something was sounding pretty good. I pulled my waders off and got behind the wheel, debating which way to head. A mile east was a general store, but it was a filthy, depressing place. I decided to take a chance and head upriver.

  I didn’t go very far. About a mile up the road and hanging over it was a banner riddled with holes: OLD HOME DAYS OCT. 18–19. Beyond it was a green arrow pointing to the left; on an impulse, I joined a line of pick-ups and jeeps heading in that direction.

  An old farmer with a cane pointed me to a parking spot on a straw-covered field. He was very businesslike. When I tried to take a spot nearer the front, he poked his cane at the car like it was a recalcitrant cow, forcing me back.

  The fairground was simply a four-acre field, half of which had been turned into a rough soccer field for the elementary-school team. It was set on a small plateau above the trees, and the temperature in the wind must have been five degrees colder than it had been back in the valley.

  It wasn’t hard to find the coffee. Boy Scout Troop 82, the “Cobra” troop, was selling it by the abandoned “Dunk A Dummy” booth, and that’s where most of the fairgoers were huddled. Warmed, a few of them broke away to watch the soccer game; the local team was being trounced by a bigger squad, but the cheers were good-natured for both sides. Vermont schools often lack the boys to make up an eleven-man team, so girls play, too, and the ones I saw were doing just fine—there was a small, shifty redhead who had a murderous shot from right wing.

  The rest of the fair was just getting started. An auctioneer who could have been Robert Frost’s brother was unloading junk for the charity auction—some old skis, broken televisions, sleds, and shovels. Further up the hill was the tag sale, the vendors sitting on lawn chairs before their merchandise, wrapped in blankets. Behind them was the horseshoe pitching. Though it was still early, a dozen or so games were already in progress, and the clank of shoe hitting stake was the metronomic sound that underlay everything—the distant cheers, the tape-recorded music, the wind.

  I found some shelter in a dugout along the first-base side of a diamond that Abner Doubleday might have played on; there was an old-fashioned dirt cutout between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, and rickety stands straight out of an 1880s mezzotint. It was a good vantage point. There in right field a crew was setting up the carnival rides and food concessions, testing the neon. Try a Jaffle! one sign urged. None of the fairgoers seemed interested. They were selling ices, taffy, and soda; the rides were summertime rides, too, and it all seemed out of place in the wind.

  For the carnival, this stop was the end of the line. The larger towns booked for summer, then the medium-sized ones, then the small ones, and then finally—on the last open date before winter—the hill villages like this one, 500 or fewer souls trying to pretend it was still summer.

  But it didn’t matter, of course. It was all good-natured, the take was for charity, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. Two members of the 4-H club found me in the dugout and sold me a raffle ticket. The word was out after that, and I had to turn down chances offered by the quilt club, the snowmobile club, and the Masons. A reporter from the local paper came up to me next. Yes, I was having a good time, I said into his tape recorder. Yes, I thought things were done just fine.

  We talked for a while after that. He was upset about his assignment—he would have much preferred to be down at Dartmouth for the football game. Still, it was kind of nice with the kids and the leaves and all. His daughter was a Rainbow Girl and if I wanted to buy a chance on a new woodstove, he’d send her over.

  I stayed long enough for another cup of Boy Scout coffee, then started back to the river. I was still ambivalent about fishing. The morning hadn’t been very productive, and I was worried about pushing the river too hard again, prolonging the season past the point of reasonable expectation and reward.

  But I couldn’t quit, not yet. When I was a boy, we would drive back to the city from our weekend home on Sunday afternoons; in following the lake, I would see men going out in boats to fish, fly rods sticking out from the stern, their parkas puckered tight around their chins. I would envy them, wanting nothing so much as to be out there, too, in the October wind. To be able to do what appeared to me the very epitome of freedom, and autumn afternoons have generated the same yearning ever since.

  “One more time,” I said, for the second time that day. I went into the river three miles upstream of the stretch I had fished in the morning. I was getting up into the headwaters now—the water was six or seven feet wide at the most. The falls, rapids, and pools were all miniaturized, and I fished downstream expecting nothing bigger than miniature trout.

  I had on a tattered white nymph I had found in my box under some Irresistibles. In this kind of water, tactics aren’t complicated—do what’s necessary to keep the fly in place, and the rest is up to the trout. Thus, I concentrated on letting the nymph dangle worm-like in the deep spots, and did my best to avoid the leaves.

  There was nothing for the first hundred yards. The pools deepened slightly as I moved downstream, until I came to the deepest of the stretch: a slow, hemlock-shaded glide between matching boulders. I fished the far side of the left boulder without a rise. I fished the far side of the right boulder—nothing there, either. There remained one possibility. Letting line out slowly, I swam the nymph in the dark channel between boulders, and—so perfect was the spot—hooked the fish in my imagination a moment before the real trout took hold.

  One of the delights of hooking a fish on a nymph is that for the first few seconds you gain no impression of its size. The current had tightened the line enough to set the hook, but the trout’s first movement was upstream toward me, and I had to reel in fast in order to get to the point where I could feel him. It was this moment—the instant when the line came taut and I sensed his weight and power, sensed, that is, a life beyond my expectation—that was the best of the fight.

  The rest was interesting enough. A trout that size in such narrow water could easily have broken free, at least in a big-river style of fight. But by some accommodation I couldn’t penetrate, the fish geared his struggle to the miniaturized stream, and confined his runs to short, flashing darts between rocks. As usual, I was fishing a 6X
leader—the merest gossamer—so I didn’t dare force him. I waded from rock to rock, flushing him with my wader boot, gaining eight or nine inches of line before he made it to the next rock in our progression.

  Space was on my side. The water was getting shallower as the river widened, and each rock gave the trout less protection. After ten more minutes of tag, I urged him gently toward shore, and he was tired enough to go along. The rocks gave way to wet stones that eased his transition from water to land; I nudged him onto the sand, and he lay there gasping in the mingled surprise and fear with which the first prehistoric fish must have flopped from the sea.

  A rainbow and a good one—fifteen inches, with a thick, streamlined flank and a brightness fresh as the sky. For that part of the river, a very big fish indeed.

  I looked around for a rock large enough to kill him. It’s a tradition with me; I release all but three or four of the trout I catch each year, but the last one is to be taken home, cleaned, cooked, and eaten, thereby reminding me of exactly where in the food chain I stand. (I have an anthropologist friend who refers to my fishing as “hunting and gathering,” and at some basic, instinctual level she is right.) I had the rock in my hand—I had picked out the spot on his head where I would hit him—when for a reason that wasn’t immediately evident, I changed my mind.

  I took the trout with both hands and brought him back to the water. Kneeling, I swam him into the current, moving his tail back and forth until he had revived sufficiently to hold his place in my loosely cupped hands. We retraced the path of our fight in stages; I held him behind each rock in turn, letting him adjust to the increased pressures before moving him on. It was ten minutes before he was strong enough to release. I started him off with an encouraging shove, and this time there was no flank-turning, sideways retreat back to my hands—he swam off powerfully toward the depths of the pool.

  It wasn’t until I saw him swim away that I found my reason for releasing him. Winter was coming, and I wanted to be able to sit at my desk and picture him there in his dark pool, enduring the snow and ice as patiently as I did, waiting for spring with the same kind of certainty and hope, my emissary to May.

  Winter. It was in the river now—the light was washed from it, the warmth and life. I had my reel off and my rod unjointed before I reached the bank.

  A good season. It was time to get out.

  17

  A Tracer of Streams

  One could do worse than be a tracer of streams. Following a river to its source through every winding, battling flood, drought, and disease, a Livingston in moral fervor, a Burton in intelligence, opening up to human imagination a country spacious enough for a million dreams, pinning down its origins on a map heretofore blank, sharing the journey in a book more adventurous than any Odyssey—they have always been epic tasks, fit for the Lewises and Clarks of the world, the Stanleys and the Spekes.

  To those who only know it in its navigable reaches, a great river’s source is among the most unimaginable of things, an Ultima Thule we can never picture, so small and obscure is that first irreversible impulse that gives it life. The Hudson is the river that flows past the skyscrapers of Manhattan a thousand yards wide, but it is also that portion of the small waterfall high in the Adirondacks which, splashing on a convex rock, follows the right-hand grooves south.

  To follow great rivers to their source was my boyhood dream. I pictured myself a mountain climber dipping my hands in the Andes brook that was the Amazon, letting the water flow off my face before continuing its run down to the sweltering jungle, coming home through great peril to write the book of my adventures. As dreams go, it wasn’t a bad one; as time went on, it was less abandoned than transformed. At fourteen, I made the acquaintance of the great writers, men like Tolstoy and Conrad, and realized that they were following streams to their source as well—streams of character, history, and fate, on journeys every bit as difficult as the greatest explorer’s. It was this kind of trip I eventually embarked on, starting off into the jungle with a rusty machete, a wobbly compass, rebellious bearers, and no guides, but with all the hope in the world.

  And yet there turned out to be a river in it after all—the river of this book. It is no Missouri or Nile, not even a Hudson, but a gentle trout river flowing from modest mountains in the small state where I live. I went to it first partly as a relief from the expeditionary labor of writing—the tracing of various threads through novels and stories—but in time, the river began to seem a thread worth writing about on its own, linking as it did not only the separate, sunlit afternoons when I fished it, but the memories of fishing that lay scattered across my life without locus. In writing about the river through the seasons, I had been trying to trace it to its source just as surely as if I were hiking along its banks, map in hand. The river at dusk, the river in August, the river in fall—these were all windings that had to be explored if I was to reach the elusive spring that was its beauty’s source.

  At the same time I was following the river in a figurative sense, I was following it in a literal one. The fishing season’s impulse was upstream—each afternoon seemed a bit above the one that preceded it, until by October I was fishing the river where it was only a few yards wide. Below me the river was familiar through a hundred trips, but upstream the water was always new, and I waded through it with increasing delight.

  I had made the resolution to hike to the river’s source as I stood by its banks in a February snowstorm, but the time had never seemed propitious. Spring meant black flies, mosquitoes, and mud; summer brought heat, and September had been crowded with too much fishing. Beyond these reasons was my own insistence on doing things in the right order. I wanted to find the spring or pond that was the river’s source only when the rest of it was thoroughly explored, saving that final expedition as the cap on all my experiences. The moment would come when striking out for the headwaters would seem as natural and unpremeditated as fishing a slightly higher pool, and I trusted my instincts enough to wait.

  I went the same October afternoon I released the big rainbow. It was on an impulse—it wasn’t until I was in the car driving west that I understood what had prompted me. As curious as I was to find the source, I had been waiting until the fishing was over for the year so I could walk the river’s banks without feeling compelled to wonder about its trout. In fly fishing, each pool and rapid becomes momentarily the entire world, curiosity is localized, and the rest of the river may as well not exist—we fish in fragments of space just as we do fragments of time. Fishing was the medium that had taught me most about the river, but now, in trying to grasp a larger section, it would only be in the way.

  The road stayed by the river at first. There’s a small hill town where the valley starts to narrow. I had thought of it as having the neat, rectangular perfection of a village on a model train layout, but that was in summer, and without the camouflage of leaves, the homes looked battered and exposed. Beyond its outskirts, I came to the summit of the river’s main valley. At the top, the road joins another road that crosses it like a T, changing the trend from vaguely east-west to vaguely north-south. The river’s channel was less obvious than before, but I knew from studying the map that it was still somewhere off to my right. A few miles after turning, I crossed it on a highway bridge. It wasn’t parallel to the road anymore, but at a right angle to it, racing down through a dark tunnel of spruce. I was tempted to park my car there and follow it through the woods, but then decided to see if I could pick it up again further upstream.

  It was a different country I was driving through, an open, lonely tableland that had more of Montana in it than Vermont. For some unknown reason, I had expected the river to become more like itself as it neared the top, and the transformation from pastoral, meadowed valley to rugged, timbered plateau took me by surprise. Signs of man were few. There was a fallen-down, roofless barn with the words “Barn Dance!” scrawled across it in mocking red paint; a cemetery whose headstones just barely cleared the weeds; a bullet-scarred road sign announc
ing a change in counties. Other than that, nothing—just two quiet mountains with cloud shadows laying across their synclines like heavy wool blankets.

  The river started somewhere high in the folds of those slopes. I drove the highway to the top of the height of land, looking for a road or trail that would branch off in the right direction. I went too far—over the summit of the plateau, down into the beginnings of a separate watershed. Turning around, I came upon a dirt road that looked promisingly obscure. It was worth a try—in Vermont, dirt roads head toward water with the sure instinct of thirsty cattle let loose on a Texas plain. There were too many ruts and washouts to drive it. Leaving the car on the edge of the pavement, I got out and started to walk.

  I went about a mile before I picked up the river. The road ran toward the mountains’ base through a meadow-like expanse of second-growth timber, spiky larch on the verge of turning amber, and gnarled apple trees that had survived every cutting. Every now and then I would see a bullet casing in the leaves by the edge of the road, gleaming like golden chips dropped by hunters so they could retrace their way. But for once there were no bottle or beer cans to go with them, no roaring power saws, no harsh reminders of the land’s misuse.

  There was a stream where the road first dipped, but it was too small to be the river proper, so I kept walking. About ten minutes later, I came to the main stream, or at least its bed. It was five feet wide here, nearly empty. It hadn’t rained in several weeks, and there was even less water in the center of the rocks than there was in the tributary. Still, it was obviously my river—I walked upstream just far enough to make sure its course aimed for the sag in the mountains where the map said it began. There wasn’t time to follow it now. It had been a successful reconnaissance, and in the morning I would be back.