I was a tougher fisherman in those days, but even so there were limits. Toward noon, I’d had enough, and started back toward the gatehouse. Walking helped warm me up—between this and the “one last cast” theory, I decided to fish the pool below the dam.
I went in on the left bank. It’s an abrupt drop-off there, but being right-handed, fishing downstream, it would allow me to get the longest drift. The water comes into the pool in a heavy gray surge from the spillway, churns through the middle, then widens into the broad, placid tail. I tied on a brown Matuka, the New Zealand pattern that was all the rage, then, with the steep bank rising behind me, I roll cast out into the current and let the streamer swing down.
I hadn’t been casting long when a brown caught hold of the Matuka and skittered across the pool toward me. He was small, and I was hardly paying any attention to bringing him in, when between one moment and the next the middle of the pool fell away, as if a petcock had suddenly been opened in the river bottom. But no—that simile isn’t violent enough. As if a depth charge had gone off in the pool’s center, so what I was aware of was the odd, backward sensation of seeing the water implode.
If the rise of that salmon on the Cheticamp was so measured and graceful it gave me time to see it all in slow motion, this was exactly the opposite experience—it happened so fast it’s recorded in my memory as a bewildering blur. At about the same instant I realized something had slashed toward the trout I was playing—a rogue alligator? a misplaced shark?—my rod bent double and nearly snapped, and I remembered, with an emotion that nearly snapped me double, the monstrous trout that had frightened me back in the spring.
If it wasn’t he, it was surely his brother—his big brother. I’d always heard browns turned cannibal when they reached the right size, and this was evidence of the strongest, most vicious sort. Engorged with the smaller trout, the brown turned toward the middle of the pool, giving me a good view of his huge, incredibly powerful tail—in turning, he left a shadow in the water that was part silver, part cream. That it was the largest trout I’d ever seen or even thought about was obvious at once; that I was attached to it seemed a hallucination.
Fight back, I told myself. Fight back! I was charged up now, ready to follow him down through the marshes to the Atlantic, but he hardly seemed concerned with what little pressure I dared apply. He lived in the center of that pool and in the center of that pool he was going to stay, and we both knew my leader was too miserably light to do anything about it. I thought about changing my stance, applying pressure from another direction, but with the bank so steep, the drop-off so sudden, I was stuck. The best thing to do, at least for the time being, was to stay where I was, keep the line tight, and await developments.
These were not long in coming.
(Remembering my disclaimer at the beginning of this essay, I write the following two paragraphs in the full knowledge not a single one of my readers will believe them, yet every word is true. The only thing I ask you to remember is how the laws of probability necessarily imply the improbable—that a tossed penny, tossed frequently enough, will eventually land on its edge.)
The trout was toward the middle, placid part of the pool, deep, but not so deep I couldn’t see him. There was no sign of the smaller trout he had swallowed or the fly the smaller trout had swallowed to start the chain off, yet my leader ran straight down the big fish’s mouth (I remember wondering if, when it came time to brag of him, it would be more accurate to say I caught him on bait or the fly). My pressure, light as it was, irritated him enough that he swung his head around and started calmly back in my direction, thereby changing the angle enough that the hook came loose.
I stripped in line furiously, unable to come to terms with the fact the big trout was gone. Instinctively, doing it faster than I write these words, I swung line, leader, and trout-impaled fly back into the center of the pool. Again, the bottom of the water seemed to drop away, again the rod bent double, and not more than ten seconds after I lost him, the big trout—the big cannibalistic gluttonous suicidal trout—was on again.
There the two of us were, bound tight to each other in a swirl of frigid gray water, fish and man. The snow had dropped back again, stinging my eyes; my legs were numb from iciness, my arms all but palsied from the effort of holding the rod. A few yards away was the trout, bothered himself now, the hook embedded at an angle that must have plugged directly into his nervous system and hurt something essential, coming back to me with grudging reluctance, his thoughts filled with—what? Anger? Homesick memories of the ocean where he had spent his adolescence? Guilty reminiscences of all the smaller trout he must have eaten to obtain his weight? Or was his entire awareness centered in that sore, relentless ache in the jaw that meant his time was up? We swam in our misery together, danced our stubborn dance, and for upwards of an hour stayed attached in that partly sweet, oddly bitter symbiosis that is playing a fish of size.
The rest of the story doesn’t take long to tell. Gradually, over the space of that hour, we were both weakening, and it was merely a question of who would reach exhaustion first. As in any epic of endurance, there were minor battles won and lost, various swings in the pendulum of fate, but twenty years later these have all been lost in the predominant, simplified memory of my tug versus the trout’s.
Toward the end another fisherman appeared. With over forty beats on the river to choose from, he had reserved the pool by the dam, and he didn’t act pleased to find me there.
He was a cool customer altogether; looking down from the spillway, he could see the trout quite clearly, but he hardly seemed impressed. I asked to borrow his net and he scaled it over to me, then, with a sullen expression, starting casting as if neither I nor the fish were there.
The trout was coming closer now, to the point I could start worrying about how to land him. The net was far too small to do the job, which left beaching him as the only alternative—beaching him, only there wasn’t any beach. Behind me was the steep mud of the bank; to my right, the deep water near the dam; to my left, bushes and saplings that overhung the bank far enough to push me out over my head.
It was the bank then—that or my arms. I had the fish close to me now—he was so large I was shy of looking at him directly—and by increasing the pressure just a little I was able to swim him around so he rested between my waist and the bank. Coaxing my legs into motion, I waded in toward him, gradually narrowing the space he had left to swim, until there was less than a yard between him and shore. Again, there was no shelf here—it was like backing him against a wall. Finally, with a dipping, scooping motion, I got my arms under his belly, lifted him clear of the water . . . held him for a moment . . . then, just as I tensed my muscles prior to hurling him up the bank, watched helplessly as he gave that last proverbial flopping motion, broke the leader, and rolled back free into the pool from whence he came.
How did I feel? How would you feel?—that multiplied by ten. While obviously I never had the chance to put the fish on the scales, I’d had him in my arms for a few seconds, and kept a clear view of him for over an hour before that. I put his weight at eight pounds (no, I put it at twelve pounds, but I’m going to reduce it to cling to what credibility I have left, though reducing it is the only lie in this essay). An eight-pound brown trout—a fish that would be large for Argentina, let alone Long Island. I knew, with a feeling beyond words, that it was the biggest trout I would ever have a chance for, and that the rest of my angling career would be nothing but a futile search among lesser fish for his peer.
Melodramatic, perhaps, but I was slow to snap out of the bitter aftertaste losing him had left. In one sense I had landed the trout, if landing meant getting him out of the water into my arms, and in any case I’d decided during the midst of our fight to release him. There was some comfort in this, but when I shuffled my way out from the pool onto dry land, I was shaking with cold and stiffness and disappointment, and something even more intense I didn’t believe existed until then: buck fever.
To
be that close to something immense, to fight it for what from the trout’s point of view was life or death, to have it and lose it in the very same instant—these were the ingredients tangled together at the emotion’s core. But there was more that’s harder to explain. It was as if during those minutes I was attached to him, all the civilized, dulling layers that separate me from my ancestral, elemental self—the hunter and gatherer that, reach back far enough, dwells in us all—had been tugged away, giving instinct its chance to romp through my nervous system in the old half-remembered patterns, so what I felt was the sick nauseous human emotion of a hunter at the end of the chase.
It didn’t last very long, at least in one respect. In five minutes I was back at my car, dumping ice out of my waders, pouring the warm tea and bourbon directly over my toes. And yet a trace of that emotion lingers on to this day, as if the trout had been attached so long and fought so determinedly he welded a circuit between myself and that ancient, vaguely suspected self—the self that once fought giants and defeated a few and knew what disappointment was right down to the thrilling marrow of the bones.
October 15
To the river.
The leaves were blown down in a Columbus Day gale, and what foliage is left drifts just beneath the surface of the current like a separate soggy river of red and gold. Now, in the brilliant sunshine of the storm’s passing, with no shade, the color is blinding, stronger off the water than at any time during the summer. But no—off is not quite the word. The brightness is in the water, as if the usual laws of reflection have been suspended, the sun taken in rather than mirrored, the subtlety washed out into something that is already closer to December’s steel than to August’s velvet. The sun is tossed up in the rapids and aerated, stirred out in the pools and cooled, turning even the most familiar lies into mysteries of impenetrable radiance, so—wading into all this, trying to get my bearings, flipping down my Polaroids—I immediately feel at a loss. Brightness to the left of me, brightness to the right—it’s as if the water has turned molten, and I have no idea where to cast. When the radiance gets into the water the fishing is over—it’s Wetherell’s Third Law of Fishing, and I try to take comfort from it, since it’s apparent in the way my line and fly disappear in the hard beauty that this will be an afternoon without trout.
For all the times I’ve fished the river, there are stretches I still haven’t tried. This is one of them—a quarter mile of riffles and pools backing the overgrown acreage of a newly abandoned farm. It’s the classic New England scene, of course. Stone walls choked with briars, a rusty thresher obscured in milkweed, the ungrazed fields going back to ivy and birch. Up on a knoll is the abandoned farmhouse and barn, the boards already sagging into a closer, snugger fit to the land, though it’s only a month since the last struggling farmer failed there and moved on. New England’s landscape, at its purest, has a genius for nature’s soft reclamation—ashes turn to ashes nowhere prettier than here.
There are stories in all this—it’s the classic New England literary landscape as well. Ruined dreams, vanished villages, the bittersweet suggestion of an apple tree growing beside an old cellar hole—these have been the staples of the region’s fiction through Frost and Jewett and Wharton and Howells all the way back to Hawthorne, whose genius not only captured the lonely shadows over these hills but cast his own that lingers in our imaginations to this day. Many talented writers have worked this terrain; many talented writers work it still, mopping up the tragic leftovers—the last farmers struggling to stay afloat; the irony of a flinty land dying through prosperity—though it’s clear that here as the twentieth century lurches and stumbles its way toward a finish, New England has become a literary backwater, and its writers of fiction will have to turn their attention outward from our old familiar parish if they are to avoid total irrelevancy. Me, when I see the birches I think of Russia and copses and Tolstoy—my imagination glances off.
Fishing? No, but the kind of thing I’m apt to consider when I’m not catching fish. For all the perfection of the water behind the farm, despite the generosity of an afternoon that gives me, in quick succession, sights of hawks, grouse, mink, vultures, and deer (plus a rarity, a turtle sunbathing in the stream!), it’s obvious my first instinct was right—that I could change from using a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear to TNT and still catch nothing.
The realization that you will be skunked is one of the hardest things in the fishing life; when in the day that moment comes is one of the diciest timings. Sometimes the signs are so ominous you know with the first cast you’re going to strike out all day; other times, conditions are so ripe you can work for hours, and, fishless, still feel certain your next cast will bring a rise. I’ve had my share of both experiences, particularly the former. In September, just before leaving for an overnight trip to the upper Connecticut, I was met with the following weather report: “The eye of Hurricane Hugo will pass over Pittsburg, New Hampshire (our destination!), sometime during the morning Saturday, bringing torrential rain, followed by an Arctic cold front that will leave up to six inches of snow by Sunday morning.” Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, but I had a strong presentiment—subsequently confirmed—that it was not going to be a trip rich in trout.
There was one obscure period in my life when I used to venture into singles bars; I remember the disappointment that came, usually with the third vodka and tonic, when I swallowed the fact I would be leaving alone. A similar disappointment is what I’m talking about here; we put so much behind us when we go fishing, work, trivialities, worries, that, with disappointment, we risk having it all flood back. That the fish isn’t everything, that it’s enough merely being outside surrounded by beauty, up to our waists in living water, is certainly true, of course, but it’s amazing how much truer it seems if we’ve caught at least one trout. Fish-less, the temptation is to fish longer than conditions warrant, thereby setting up a vicious cycle—the longer you fish without a fish, the more you need one; the more you need one, the more your disappointment grows; the longer you fish, et cetera, et cetera.
Flyfishers differ in nothing so much as they do this, the willingness to admit defeat. It’s one of the trickiest things in a fishing friendship, the fatalist ready to throw in the towel too quickly, the optimist fishing far beyond hope’s outer bound. The best partnerships work out a code to face facts gently . . . “Anything doing down your way? . . . What do you make of this cold front? . . . Does that store down the road sell Molson’s?” . . . and with mutual commiseration agree the moment has come to transfer hope to the next day out, take down the rods, and quit.
Alone, it’s a harder decision for me, since it means not only ending the day, but the season. Between the empty brightness of the water (my thermometer measures it as forty-nine degrees), my fishless conviction, the sense of regret and finale suggested by the abandoned farm, my thoughts change focus, so somewhere between the log-sheltered pool at the start of the run and the undercut bank at the finish, I’ve turned from hoping what the next cast will bring to remembering what the long season has brought.
A good year, I decide—no monsters, but even so. There was the spring when I finally got the hang of fishing a nymph; a June morning when I caught two dozen smallmouth, the slightest of which was two pounds; the discovery of a secret brook trout stream no wider than a sidewalk; the start of some new fishing friendships (to this habitual loner, a miraculous thing); the rediscovery of my river after a year of drought and too long a time away.
The season was over; as they say in Hollywood, “That’s a wrap,” and then as I turned to climb up onto the bank a brown trout tugged on my trailing Muddler, re-creating for the time he was on the hope I had already given up. But what was odd, as careful as I handled things, it hardly seemed like I was playing him in the present tense at all, but off in the future somewhere—that beautiful as he was, he was pulling at me from April of the coming year, so at last, when I landed him on the rocks, knelt down, and released him, I was faced the right way for winter, with the ri
ght spirit, with just enough hope to pamper toward spring.
Why Fish?
I have an uncle for whom I have a great deal of affection, despite the fact we have very little in common. Over the years, by default, most of our conversations have been about his bowling, the only subject I’ve ever found that will take us past the uncomfortable silence after preliminary remarks about weather and health have quickly been exhausted. People need a tag, a quick label, to make it easy for insensitive dullards like myself to work up some chitchat. Mine—now that the tables have been turned and I’m an uncle myself, with nieces and nephews faced with the daunting prospect of making me talk—is fishing. “So, how’s the fishing been, Walter?”—this in lieu of asking me about my latest novel, or the condition of my back, or all those murky, complicated things that might, with unpredictable consequence, get me started.
So I tell them—so I tell you—that by and large the fishing has been very good, thank you. A balm and supportive to the soul, an antidote to bitterness, a relief and a restorative and a reward. What I don’t tell them, though I’m tempted to, is that I’m going to quit it any day now and take up bowling myself.
It’s amazing, now that I think of it, how much time I spend dreaming, not about fishing, but about quitting fishing—of selling off my tackle at a tag sale, ripping up my waders to use as chaffing around our fruit trees, donating my fishing books to a responsible charity, turning my canoe into a planter. For all the gentleness of the sport, it has the maddening trick of suddenly turning on you, becoming a burr and an irritant, a breeder of bitterness, a plague and a problem and a pox.
These manic attitude swings have been a feature of my fishing right from the start. I remember once as a fourteen-year-old being deposited by my parents near a river that was said to have monstrous bass, and being picked up again in tears four hours later, driven to despair by the dozen lures I had lost on the brush-choked bottom, the wet clay I had foundered in, the sweat that poured over my face, the branches that knocked off my glasses, the terrible disappointment of catching, for all my agony, absolutely naught. Even closer than that, even yesterday. After three days of rain, three days of being locked in the house, I was desperate to go fishing, to the point where I talked myself into believing the rivers wouldn’t be flooded, though I knew in the suppressed half of me they would be exactly that. Forty miles later, arrived at the river I had inexplicably chosen, I saw the situation was exactly as I foresaw: the river was over its banks and unfishable. Nothing daunted, I drove on to another river, fooling myself into thinking it hadn’t rained as much over there; that river, of course, turned out to be flooded, too, and there I was at eight in the evening a hundred miles from home, exhausted, disappointed, and so mad at myself I feared for my sanity.
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