A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  I could all but feel the scale tip—LUCKY. Getting home late, I rushed right out to the barn and rubbed the totem responsible there in its bracket above the paint: my beautiful, well-tempered number-eleven wrench.

  A River of a Certain Age

  In shaking a life loose from the trivia of daily routine, airing it out in the open where there’s a chance for perspective, there are at least two approaches. The first is to appraise everything you do with the eye of the twelve-year-old that lurks in each one of us, delight him or her by the actual immersion in an experience that as a child was only dreamed. The other is to look at that same experience from the opposite angle, from the old person we will all too soon become, and from that perspective savor every experience for the fleeting moment it really is. At forty, you’re torn between both approaches—rewarding the kid in you for all that wanting; consoling the old man in you for all those regrets.

  Because I realize this—because, forty myself now, I can begin to sense the shadows cast by even the most commonplace events—I have a hunch there are certain experiences that better be stored in memory right. Moments of love, moments of labor, moments of fun. Part of the delight in these has always been to think of my twelve-year-old self romping in an adult world of endless possibility, but increasingly, with this new prescience, I find the pleasure is apt to come from that other focus, of thinking how good this will all be summoned back in leisurely remembrance.

  And so in the store of these last, knowing I’ll need it, I would like to enter the following: a hot and sunny mid-June afternoon in any of the years 1982–90. I’ve spent the morning writing and managed to finish something I’ve struggled over for weeks. Now, with the long afternoon ahead of me, I’m sliding my green fifteen-foot Old Town Acadia canoe (remembrance delighting in specificity!) into a lazy-flowing river a short distance from my home. Into the canoe goes an extra paddle in case I drop one; a thermos full of cranberry juice; a frozen bottle of Guinness lager; a bag of ham and cheese sandwiches; an eight-and-a-half-foot graphite Orvis fly rod; an old Almaden wine box filled with extra bugs, flies, streamers, and leaders; and—most important of all for a redhead—a six-ounce container of number-twenty-eight Johnson & Johnson sunscreen.

  And yes—myself, dressed in the khaki-colored pith helmet that makes my friends kid me about safaris, orange sneakers still damp from the last time I made this trip, and green hospital scrubs I was given the morning I was coaching Celeste in labor, and—coaching aggressively—my pants split down their seams.

  Everything loaded? Fine, off I go. The water—cobalt and mysterious in the center of the river, startlingly clear in the six-foot-wide fringe along the banks—is flowing downstream at a slow but perceptible pace, the gates being open at the dam fifteen miles below. I see the motion first in the way the pale green weeds off the boat landing stream in that direction, then feel it as the canoe comes fully out into the current and takes on motion itself; the effect, in water so otherwise tranquil, is like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk that frees you of any obligation but to keep to the right and glide.

  Motion first, then smells. Manure up on the banks—I look up to see some Holsteins tranquilly crapping as this horizontal apparition sails past. Honeysuckle blossoms lower down—a sweet wild smell that seems broadcast and exaggerated by the heat of the sandy banks. New-cut hay, an old favorite—in a field on the far shore a red tractor finishes its sweep and turns in a wide circle around. A water smell that’s not of water at all, but of earth carried down from the tributaries upstream, held in suspension, so that the whole river, in an olfactory sense, seems an enormously long furrow turned in warm and fragrant soil.

  When motion and smells drop into place—a hundred yards from where I started—I touch the paddle long enough to make the canoe drift closer to shore, then, like a man reaching out to measure familiar boundaries, I work out my line in a first cast. There are trees in the water here, old spruce that crashed from the bank in the high water of spring, and from the complicated archipelago of bark formed by their branches a silver twenty-inch pike comes up to devour my Sneaky Pete popper. He fights wildly, bizarrely, fleeing out into the river away from safety, and for a change the leader doesn’t snap in his teeth and I manage to carefully land and defeather him. Beyond, in a smaller tree, is a monstrous rock bass, a brute of a sunfish, and a cast beyond him is a fat bluegill sunbathing above a sandbar, and here it is ten minutes since I left and I already have three good fish and I haven’t even started trying for the species I’ve come for.

  They’re over on the New Hampshire shore where the banks become both steeper and rockier. I have one on almost immediately, then a second and a third—smallmouth bass, absolutely frantic with energy, and they prance and splash and dive like contestants in a swim meet whose winner depends upon my scoring. Bass by the mile—there’s no end to them!—and they’re in tight a few inches from shore where the overhang of branches makes the taking of them require just enough preciseness to make it interesting; preciseness, and yet the casts that bring fish fastest are the bad ones that rebound off the leaves into the water like vertiginous bugs.

  The rocks give way to sandier, more barren stretches, but it’s no trick at all to paddle a few times on the left and let the current glide me back over to Vermont. There are all kinds of rocks here—the Boston and Maine railroad tracks run right along the river—and basses twenty, twenty-one, and twenty-two are quickly hooked, fought, boated, and released. I’d like to think there are differences between New Hampshire bass and their Vermont cousins, the latter being less reactionary, more generous and fair, but they refuse to fit my political anthropomorphism, and fight with matching splendor, free of any cant.

  A pause now—a low, barely perceptible disturbance in the river makes me think a beaver is about, but then the sound loses its liquid quality and becomes established as a definite rumble in the embankment to my right. A freight train approaches from the south, chugging slowly up the tracks with the cautious side-to-side wobble a dinosaur might display returning from extinction. I have a bass on, and with a little upward nudge from my rod he obliges with a jump just as the engineer leans out of the locomotive and waves. The engineer—God bless him!—blows his horn in salute, and between the vibration of the rocks and the shadows of the boxcars and the lonely hoot of the horn, the bass, train freaks all, really go nuts, so for many yards it becomes literally impossible to retrieve the popper without having a strike.

  There’s a cliché about catching so many fish your arm starts to ache, but it’s no cliché because my forearm throbs now like I’ve played six sets of tennis, and I pull over into an eddy below some spruce to recuperate over lunch. When I’m trout fishing I eat abstemiously (like Cyrano de Bergerac, a grape and a macaroon), but when I’m bass fishing I like to wallow in all the fat and alcohol I can stand—for me, a piece of strawberry cheesecake and a single twelve-ounce beer. Finishing, I take a walk along the shallows near shore. The river mud is slick and treacherous, peppered with raccoon tracks, but it’s cool on my bare feet, and above me the blue spruce shadows shimmy back and forth like fans.

  The afternoon is much the same. More bass, more sunshine, more of that lush, pastoral landscape with which this valley is endowed. Six hours go by and I don’t see another boat or another person, not even up on shore. This beautiful river, the splendid fish, and no one has caught on yet, not a single person! After a while it doesn’t seem I’m drifting in a canoe at all, but riding the crest of a blossoming something, being lifted up by the life force’s outspreading petal, and not a life force that’s abstract, but one comprised of those leaping bass and darting swallows and the warmth exuded from the river’s center. The feeling impresses itself so deeply—the feeling of abundance, of being able to dip my hands into a well of anything I want, fish, flowers, farmland, and sky—that it stays with me long after I leave the river, so for the entire night I feel gliding, uplifted, borne.

  All these things, and then, with a long paddle home ahead of me, the b
reeze switches direction and blows my canoe back upstream with the effortless, stately propulsion of an emperor’s barge.

  The river I’m talking about here, the ribbon of experience that ties these memories together, is the Connecticut—the longest river in New England, and, on a June day like this one, the prettiest. Starting hard by the Quebec line in a pond hardly bigger than its name, Fourth Connecticut Lake, it flows south nearly three hundred miles through four states to the whitecaps and sandbars at its mouth in Long Island Sound. For most of its course the width stays remarkably constant—the width, to compare fair to foul, of a four-lane interstate highway complete with shoulders and median. And while narrow in one sense, the river is absolutely central, drawing upon a watershed that takes in well over half of New England. You can see this best from the air. Every intersecting valley from Canada south, every parallel hill, every ridge and fold, furrow and trickle, seems to have as its purpose one goal and one goal alone: to support and nourish the low silver line looping back and forth at its center.

  So essential is the river to this region that whatever allegiance local people seem to have to a “place” is to what is called the “Upper Valley”—that corridor extending from Windsor-Claremont an indefinite distance upstream. There’s much logic in this—a watershed forms a better natural division than a state, and people hereabouts have much more in common with Vermonters across the river than they do with people living beyond the hills in Concord, the state capital. And while valley dwellers can be susceptible to narrowness of focus, they seem increasingly willing to acknowledge a basic truth: that we live upstream of neighbors and downstream of neighbors and in this day of environmental interdependence, we’re all in one valley together.

  Just as the Connecticut is central to this region, it’s central to our town, even though few who live here seem aware of the fact. The village itself is set a mile east of the river where its plain meets the first big hills; the town owns no land on the riverbank, there is no place to launch a boat, and it’s my guess that the majority of townspeople have never ventured out onto its water even once in their lives. This includes our local fishermen. They will spend hour after hour trolling circles around our swimming pond for hatchery trout, while only a short distance away is one of the best wild-bass fisheries in New England, which is almost totally ignored.

  This seems exactly opposite to how things should be. Meeting a neighbor casually on the common I’m tempted to begin every conversation with the query “How’s the river today?”—make a ritual acknowledgment of its presence. Even apart from the fishing it forms the best wildlife habitat in town, though people hereabouts, for all the lip service they pay to “country” life, are too suburbanized in outlook to care much about that. When the town does notice the river it’s usually to destroy it; there was a grassy knoll at the mouth of a tributary where fathers would take their kids fishing, but our local developer has seen fit to build himself a boathouse there, a monstrosity straight out of Disney World, and so the families can’t go there anymore and another bit of riverine beauty is chipped maliciously away.

  The town did not always ignore the Connecticut this way. In the years when the fields were all cleared many of the farmers would have been along the banks for the better part of a working day, and a good proportion of men and boys worked during the winter rolling logs onto the frozen river from cuttings up in the hills. There are pictures of crowds lining the bank in the spring to watch the log drives, which must have been the great event of the year. One picture shows them on the North Thetford Bridge (swept out in the ruinous 1936 flood, so only the classic stonework of its supports now remains), peering down in happy curiosity at some bedraggled river men standing wearily amid a logjam with their cant dogs and pikes.

  The bridges were private in those days, crossed by paying a toll, and there’s a story they tell from Civil War days about the town contingent of 16th New Hampshire volunteers marching away with a splendid send-off toward the railroad station across the river in Vermont. When they got to the toll bridge, the collector—a true Yankee—wouldn’t let them cross until they paid their toll, thereby putting things like patriotism and martial glory in their proper place.

  The last log drive was in 1927, and it’s been years since the river was worked here. Upstream by the paper mill in Groveton you can still see traces of what it was like heavily used—tawdry and nondescript—and it’s these mills starting at Saint Johnsbury that explain in part why our town has so relentlessly turned its back on its essential geographic fact. Pollution—the filth that once made cynics call the Connecticut “the most beautifully landscaped sewer in the world.”

  There’s an irony here—thanks to the heroic labors of river advocates, the Connecticut is being cleaned up. But the cleaner it gets, the more people find their way to its water, and what was once spoiled by sewage now becomes spoiled by fleets of powerboats and homes built too close to the banks. It’s the familiar American paradox—neglect or crush, neglect or crush, with no possibility of a sensible in-between.

  I’ve strayed a long way from that perfect June afternoon. But it’s one of the characteristics of big rivers that anything puny tends to get swamped, and I suppose measured against the weight of those 250 miles, all the dreams and defeats of the human landscape through which this water runs, my own moment of quiet enjoyment forms barely a molecule. Rivers flow two ways, at least the big ones, and even here in rural New Hampshire the Connecticut carries the sense of Springfield’s concrete and Hartford’s sprawl and all the various forms of ugliness and indifference to be found from here to the river’s mouth.

  Big river. I can all but hear the snort of contempt from those who know really big rivers—in Mississippi terms, the Connecticut is an irrigation ditch for watering the cows. But there are other ways for a river to be big besides size—big in history, big in spirit—and in these measures, the Connecticut, New England’s locus, has always been world-class.

  And even if it wasn’t, in my mind, on my own personal scale of river size, the Connecticut would still rank as big, and for a reason I’m reluctant to admit: I’m afraid of it. In the narcotic lull of that perfect June afternoon, fishing late on moonlit summer nights, casting for bass in September’s bayou-like fog. Nine tenths of me is aware of nothing but sheer joy in being out there, but that last tenth, the wary, too-imaginative tenth, is vaguely waiting for the river to pounce.

  There, I’ve said it: big rivers are the ones that make us scared. Part of me is afraid of the Connecticut, though I’m not even sure what it is that makes me feel this way. There are objective dangers of a kind here. The dam down at Wilder backs up the river a distance of forty miles into a long and very narrow lake; unlike most lakes, there is no gradual drop-off from shore—six feet out, you’re in water over your head. Deep, the river stays colder longer into spring, so even in June, a capsize can spell trouble. Not too long ago a canoe was found floating empty here, it’s owner, a champion white-water racer, discovered drowned a good distance downstream. Similar things are always happening—the Connecticut seems to have the evil knack of taking the young, gifted, and strong.

  What’s more, the Connecticut looks dangerous, at least up close. There are logs in the water, the heavy business ends two-thirds submerged in the sardonic manner of alligators and icebergs; chunks of collapsed bank with those bad-looking sweepers; weed beds whose strands are so long and oddly tropical they could be the abode of man-eating clams; enough pollution, on rainy days, to turn the river a shade too brown. Added to these is a haunted quality that gives the sensation you get on a man-made lake created over an abandoned village—the sense you’re floating over a vanished epoch and can all but hear the ancient fiddles tuning up for a ghostly dance. Rural self-sufficiency, pastoral isolation. What was here is no longer and never will be again—the Connecticut knows this, and there’s something resonant in the riverscape that can send a frisson of regret down the neck of even the dullest.

  But I think in the end what my fear s
tems from is the reading of another message the river is constantly doing its best to transmit: that harnessed and tamed as it is, reduced from its wild glory, a Samson in chains, it still aches to burst loose from its channel, regain its freedom, destroy the dams, and until the day that happens, it will erode a bit, haunt a little, wreak its vengeance on one unfortunate canoeist at a time.

  The Connecticut, then, is a channel of secret beauty running through the plain of everyday—a suggestive layer of remembrance superimposed over our amnesic age. The exploration of its riches should be enough to fill up the leisure hours of even a non-introspective man, and yet in my case—God forgive me!—it is not. Like a boy reaching into a cereal box for the toy at the bottom, I ask more from the Connecticut than just the spiritual nourishment that comes with silence, scenery, and space: I want, want even desperately, a prize.

  Smallmouth bass. It’s their inhabitance that fascinates me, their pursuit that lures me out. The river is full of them here, fish that take on the same green-gold darkness as the water, so you can say of them what Thoreau said of Walden’s pickerel, that they seem the “animal nuclei” of the river—Connecticut “all over and all through.” Not large in the average, they more than make up for it with the spirit in which they fight. We’re talking strong fish here, wild fish, and they react to the curtailment of their liberty with more instinctive rebellion than almost any creature that exists. Their huge indiscriminate mouths (smallmouth is only a relative term), the flexible armor of their gills, their squat fullback bodies, and the muscular spring of their hurdler’s tails—these are fish that are superbly equipped to eat, run, and jump, and to be fastened to one for even a few seconds is to feel plugged into the life force at its maximum voltage.