Give me readers of simple hearts and subtle minds! Readers who know what a river feels like full on the chest! Readers who see in trout the richness of the living world, and find in books something of the same wonder!
But here, let me quote from a handwritten letter I received just this week; see for yourself what I’m talking about.
Dear Mr. Wetherell,
My name is John Grienan. I’m 61 yrs. of age. And recently retired from my Sales job w/a Tool Co. after 32 years.
I have owned a camp on Sheckle Pond in Vermont for close to 27 yrs. My Wife of 38 yrs. & I purchased this Piece of Heaven when my 2 Sons were Young & Still at Home. Outside of my Wife, 2 Sons & 5 grandchildren it’s my most precious possession.
Your book is the first & only book I ever read. I’m not proud of that but it is a fact none the Less. I read Magazines, Short Stories & the paper cover to cover; but till your book I never finished a Book.
Mr. Wetherell I’m writing to you to tell you how you put on paper all that I thought & felt while walking my river. I’ve sat like you on the Bank or dreamed of someday putting into words all the feelings I have about my River; but you have said it all I guess I needn’t put mine on paper. I’ll just Read & Talk about yours.
If you ever want to Try my River; please contact me. I would be proud to Guide you through & maybe even catch a few Browns, Rainbows or Brookies to Boot & Introduce you to some of the wonderful People I have met on my river.
Thank you.
p.s. Please forward to Mr. Wetherell.
That’s a collaborator for you, my partner already, the two of us putting our backs to the words and together wrenching out some meaning, then some more, than still more, until finally we’ve built something where the words disappear—a riverine world in which we dwell simultaneously, if only for the space of a page. Thank you, Mr. Wetherell? No, it’s thank you, Mr. Grienan, for a high so unexpected and delightful it has brightened what is otherwise a cold dreary day here, lumined my spirits with it, so I feel like a man should feel heading into spring—alive and giddy, silly with sap, madcap, coltish, corny, ready to foxtrot, jitterbug, levitate, soar.
Hey, I’m a fishing writer! Drop me a line!
7. WRITE A BOOK
What’s important to remember about fishing stopgaps is that none of them work, not entirely, not for very long. Substitute fishing is substitute fishing; its pleasures, though real enough, are like solitary notes waiting for a melody to sweep them along. What they’re up against is not just the frustration of waiting for that oh-so-distant opening day, but the lingering regret from the season having ended the year before—for me, a real downer that colors my mood well into winter. Here for a six-month cycle fishing and all the joys that come with it has been woven into my everyday life, and then suddenly—just because the northern half of the planet happens to be tilting on its axis away from the sun—it isn’t, and the bittersweet emotion attendant upon this is not easily assuaged by anything but another year immersed in the same cycle.
And the weather doesn’t help. That first spell of warmth never lasts in these hills, nor does the second, and the storms seem to get fiercer and more perverse the further it gets into spring. Worse, each fair interval is more beautiful than the last, until anyone who is at all sensitive to fluctuations of the vernal mood feels like they’re being embraced by a skillful and experienced lover (there is no other analogy) who knows how to tease and stroke until you’re all but crying from desire . . . and yet the climax never seems to come, so the stroking, pleasant as it is, loses its point.
Spring, when it does arrive, with its chorus of bird calls, its high-pitched choir of peepers, the warmth that not only pours down from above but wells up from below, seems so new and overwhelming it demands an extravagant response. For my children, it’s going outside with a kite, or kicking through last year’s leaves in search of balls and Frisbees abandoned there in the fall; for our retriever, it’s kicking up her heels like a puppy, chasing her tail; for my wife, it’s digging in the top inches of soil, the miraculous inches, so warm, so particulate, so suggestive of bursting life. Kissing a pretty girl, driving with the top down, knocking out fungoes, painting the birdhouse, caulking a boat. Spring is response time, always the response.
Writers, too, even those most thickly ensconced behind impervious study walls, are asked for a springtime response. Often, this can take the form of starting a book. For this writer (for whom study walls tend to be more like drafty, permeable membranes), it can sometimes take the form of writing a book on fishing, a journey which—having made it twice before, seen what I wanted to see, shown my slides, written my postcards, paid my entry fees, left my tips, gotten home healthier, less wealthy, more wise—I never thought I would embark on again.
My determination to not write about fishing became, in the seven years I stuck with it, something like the ice that covers the Connecticut River near my home. Glacier-like, solid, seemingly immune to change, caring not a whit for the variations in warmth and light that create such longing in humans, it appears in March like something that will literally be there forever, having forgotten how to be anything but what it is: ice. And yet, even in the deepest recess of winter, there are other forces, less spectacular, less obvious, and by themselves less powerful, that work invisibly to erode and chip at it from all directions, until, between one day and the next, the ice is gone, and anyone staring at the blue, sparkling water where it had been could only with the greatest difficulty be able to imagine there ever having been ice there in the first place.
As in ice, so in writers, and the only thing left to do here is explain as best I can those little nudgings and chippings that have once again caused things to flow.
The first of these is that my fishing days have gotten into the habit of coalescing themselves around stories, and it’s a tendency I enjoy and approve of, to the point where I’m not sure I could call a halt to it even if I wanted to. Yes, I enjoy fly fishing, but I also enjoy thinking about myself fly fishing, and it’s just this added bit of refinement that gets my stories started. Or put it another way. I’ve a habit of noting things on rivers I wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t interested in getting them down on paper, sharing them, and I find that if I throttle this urge, I see less, notice less, enjoy less, even catch less . . . and so the selfish and unselfish motives are pretty well mixed.
And as a close corollary to the above, I feel I’m not quite done with sharing my adventures with my collaborators, feel their own interest quite strongly, and—again like that ice—find I’m not proof to it, not by a long shot. It’s not just those letters, the pleasure they bring, but the fact that I sense my readers so clearly, me who hardly ever meets any of them face to face. In writing novels, I’ve always found the dreaded creative isolation to be a real and painful fact, one that has to be struggled with constantly, and yet I feel none of that strain in writing about rivers and the natural world, and I’m just human enough to find this comforting.
And more experience is waiting on line, demanding to be described so as to come fully to life. This is another motive and a strong one. Trips to western rivers; new friends made fishing; watching my children learn to fish; a new river I’ve fallen head over heels in love with or, rather, a new portion of a river I’ve known for years. Runoff, current, sunshine . . . the ice starts to crack.
And there’s another nudge, a strictly personal one this time. Having written two books on fly fishing, I want to write a third partly because of the magic that resides in the number three. Troika, trio, triad, trilogy, trinity, trico. The first book on the left, exuberant and rambling, an unabashed love letter to my favorite stream; the second in the middle, more realistic and sober, an examination of the fishing motive and why it takes hold; the third here on the right, impelled by a reformer’s zeal this time, the feeling that the tremendous surge in popularity that fly fishing has undergone in the last ten years has seen much lost in terms of quietude and contentment, modesty and simplicity, solidarity and fell
owship, and since these are the qualities at the very heart of my own love for fly fishing, I want to do what I can to preserve them, sing their virtues. A desire, that is, to steer fly fishing back to its roots, when Izaak Walton, in all tranquillity and fullness of heart, could describe fishing as “a rest to the mind, a cheerer of spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness that begats habits of peace and patience in those that profess’d and practis’d it.”
Thus, my intentions. What kind of book will it actually turn out to be? I honestly don’t know, not at this stage, not when the long season of commitment a book represents hasn’t properly started yet, other than these preliminary jottings, this slushy March of good intentions. Humble is the operative word here. Someone starting out to fish the Battenkill or the Madison would hardly say, “I’m going to catch three rainbows sixteen inches long, then top things off with a brace of twenty-inch browns”—not a fisherman I would care to know, at any rate. No, what he or she would say is, Til be fishing the river tonight, and my hopes are high, but it’s a funny game, fishing, so you never know, though at a minimum I bet I’ll catch a delightful helping of earth, water, and sky.”
It’s the attitude that motivates this book—to find words fit to match the beauty of the locales it inhabits. I want it to be a random, artless kind of book, not one that is shaped too deliberately; I want to give the writing a chance to wind (as fishing writers of an earlier age might phrase it) hither and yon, pooling up eddies when it needs to, forming broad slow oxbows that double back on themselves, sluicing off the rocks into wild, chaotic chutes, carving its way through a willing landscape of collaborative hearts.
This may involve being a cheerleader at times, celebrating the joys of rivers, lakes, bays, and ponds just for the sake of celebration; there will be other times when this is not possible, and the cheerleader in me will give way to the Cassandra, the Jeremiah. This is the writer’s double role now, since here at the millennium it’s impossible to write honestly about nature without confronting many hard things. Yes, a trout is the most beautiful example of sentient life I know, so perfect in its adaptation, so colorful, so strong, that merely to see one finning in the shallows, taking a mayfly with that delicate rise, tip, and fall is enough to anchor an entire book on; this same trout, scientists warn us, can contain enough poison in its tissue that a person concerned about their health should eat no more than two or three a year. No, celebration alone is impossible, but only the worst pessimist would be blind to the beauty of the natural world that still surrounds us, though we try so hard to spoil it, tame it, beat it back.
In angling terms, this book will stick to the middle ground. I’m neither expert nor duffer, but someone who is lucky enough to have made fishing a part of their everyday life. Hence, there will be many detours into other subjects, other ground; my best fishing days are often those where fishing barely fits, and I see no reason to change this pattern when it comes to writing about fishing.
So be it! Here is the source—my hands on this keyboard, this head full of memories, this surge of happy intention—and there out this window are the granite hills and limestone meadows down which all this will run. Where the current will cut deepest, whither it will lead, no man, least of all this one, can know.
And one more thing before starting, the answer to the question I didn’t quite solve at the chapters start. When exactly is that border when the fishing season in imagination becomes the fishing season in fact? In the quirky, stubborn state I live in you’re allowed to fish beginning January first, but this, in a personal-responsibility kind of way, only throws the decision back onto the individual, makes the answer an impressionistic one, having little to do with the calendar and everything to do with mood and feel.
I can’t give a precise opening day, but I can give a precise opening moment. Taking a break from writing around ten when the sun warms my study window, I wander out into our meadow where one last snow drift rises like a humpbacked island from the sea of flattened grass. Down the side of this island runs a rivulet of water, cutting a small bluish channel through the wood-flecked snow, fanning out when it touches earth, thinning to transparency, then collecting itself again, running down the all but imperceptible declination formed by our hill. I’ve watched this before, but now, straddling it, staring down, blinking in the sunny brightness, with a sudden intuitive knowing that must match an animal’s or bird’s, I realize there is no refreezing in store for this drift, no more storms waiting to add to its bulk, nothing in this landscape but a myriad of such trickles running down the hills in perpendicular interminglings, restoring to full and vibrant motion the brooks they fall into, the streams, the rivers, the life in the rivers, the life in whoever loves that life—and that it’s the wide and exhilarating sense of these contained in the trickle at my feet that, for this flyfisher at any rate, starts the season once again.
Times Seven
It was a good day, not a great one. Only three trout, but one each of the species we catch here, and so victory enough to commemorate in some appropriately small way. On the inside of our kitchen door, hung high for convenient jotting, is a calendar—the family kind, with pictures of grazing holsteins and date squares so fat and open they seem to generate appointments on their own. On impulse, I took out a green marker from the drawer near the stove and printed my own message in what little space remained on May 20 between Dentist appointment 9:00 and Return IRS call late p.m.
Three trout. Sugar River. Brook, Brown, Rainbow.
On impulse—and yet more than that, too. It was my way of saying “Take that!” to the messages already scribbled like a maze across the month, giving them the metaphorical finger—the appointments to have the brakes checked, the boring lunch dates, the nagging reminders to do this and that. The following day, managing to sneak out for an hour before breakfast, I crammed in another entry beneath those already written across May 21.
Two smallmouth Clarkson Pond.
This was surprising in a way, because I’ve never been one to keep a fishing journal. Every few years I receive one for Christmas, beautifully bound, often gorgeously illustrated, with lines for recording stream, species, fly, water temperature, and hatches—even space at the bottom for what is referred to in the more expensive editions as Musings. Each year I resolve to start making entries in these, but always wimp out at the last moment; there’s something too business-like and precise about it, a note that is only exacerbated when friends who do keep fishing diaries tell me how valuable they are in forming a “data base.”
No thanks. But the quick, harmless jottings on the family calendar—these soon become my regular habit, the brief formality of taking out a pen, finding the proper date, squeezing my little triumph in what space remained, becoming—like a beer from the fridge—part of the ceremonial withdrawal from fishing to nonfishing.
Any habit needs limits and bounds. Mine is that only gamefish can be listed, which here in northern New England means the three trouts, largemouth and smallmouth bass, landlocked salmon, and pike. When circumstances warrant I may add the size and appropriate punctuation to the entry, as on July 15: One brown 22 inches Connecticut River! Once, teased and toyed with by a big northern for a good twenty minutes, only to lose him at the net, I felt justified in listing A pike! There’s only one more rule—any size counts, so a two-inch trout goes on the calendar beside the large one, all fish, within species, being equal.
I can sense purists objecting already—numbers and fishing do not go along. There’s a danger of turning our pastime, like so much else in this culture, into a matter of keeping score. Those big squares on my calendar. What do they resemble if not the inning squares of an old-fashioned baseball scoreboard, the kind that once in fond memory rose above the bleachers at Ebbets Field? But, to my credit, I’ve resisted the temptation to think of it in those terms, count every fish as another run. No, the pleasure for me is in marking and acknowledging the seasonal rhythm of a fishin
g year—the two or three trout wrested from a grudging April, the sudden surge in numbers during late May, the June so crowded with entries I begin to write sideways along the calendar’s edge. And reassurance is there, too. No brookies yet from Franklin Pond? Well here, rummage through my bookcase until I find last year’s calendar, flip quickly to May and discover I didn’t catch my first one until the 15th, the year before on the 17th, so nothing to worry about, right on schedule.
Beside me on the desk is the calendar from the season just completed. It was an excellent year. I managed to get out often, the weather was cooperative, and by playing some lucky hunches I was able to find fish all the way through the first week of November. At the end of each month I added things up. June was the leader with ninety-seven fish; August, with family trips, the slow spot with only thirteen. Totaling up each month in turn, I find I caught and released a grand total of 356 fish.
Now, this is a modest enough figure—roughly a fish for every day of the year, which, considering how many of those days are actually fishless, seems a most appropriate figure to shoot for. It’s the total of someone who goes out two or three times a week two or three hours at a time. Certainly, on the right water, fishing hard, you could match this figure in three or four days of good fishing, and there are anglers who do just that. But it occurs to me that my total, so definite and final on the calendar where I inked it in, is of and by itself a completely misleading number, one that doesn’t begin to convey the complexity and richness of a fishing year. For starters, it represents only gamefish: bass, trout, and pike. If I were to count every fish landed—the pugnacious bluegills that swerve about like flying saucers, the rock bass that punch so hard before collapsing, the gregarious perch and misanthropic pickerel, the chubs that rise so annoyingly to a fly—I would have to double the total, which in one swift calculation brings me from 356 fish caught per year to a more realistic 712.
A River Trilogy Page 35