But stay with me a bit further here. Even this figure isn’t the end of it, and if were talking not of fish beached or netted, but fish I was somehow involved with, the number grows even higher. What about all those fish that rose and I missed? The deep strikes that never resulted in a hookup? These were part of the experience, too, often the most exciting part. In midsummer, fishing in desultory fashion on a slow-moving river near my home, I made a just-for-the-hell-of-it cast toward the center in featureless water over fifty feet deep. Instantly, as if the fish had been waiting there for just that very thing, the water burst apart, the uplift so violent the popper came spitting back at my face, causing me to duck so violently the canoe nearly overturned.
Nothing. The pull with no bottom to it; the grasp that comes up empty.
A big fish certainly, but what? An adventurous bass roaming far from shore? A stray salmon on his lonely, homesick way back to the Ammonoosuc? One of those mysterious trout that are rumored to live in the river, slow and weedy as it is? The fish we miss are the ones whose shades we remember longest, and there are hundreds of them each year, surely at least three for each fish actually landed, which—going back to my original 356—adds another 1,068 to our total, bringing it up now to 1,780 fish I was busy with last year, in one way or the other.
And what about those fish we manage to hook, but lose on the fight? There was a big, heartbreaking one on the Upper Connecticut last autumn—a monstrous rainbow that took a Royal Wulff five yards from where I was casting, stayed attached for the first jump, but snapped the tippet on the second as I stumbled frantically to get downstream. Even a modest computation would include at least one fish escaped for every one landed, another 356, swelling the year’s total to 2,136 fish.
The iceberg is emerging past the tip now, with more yet to come. What about all those fish seen in the shallows that despite all our efforts refuse to strike? I’m not particularly adept at spotting fish in a river, even with Polaroids, finding my myopia no match for the complex shadows on the bottom, all of which I’m more than willing to believe are trout, but even so, there are dozens I do see in the course of a year, managing inevitably to scatter them apart on my first reckless cast. Bass, too—there are days after a high-pressure system moves through when they roam the shallows with their jaws set in a puckered and painful way, as if they had locks through their jaws, locks no key of mine can possibly turn. How many of these fish are there each season, seen but not caught? Let’s keep it on the conservative side, a quarter of my 356, which still swells the larger figure to 2,225.
I fish with my family a lot. Anyone who has young children knows how strenuous an operation this can be. Child Number One’s rig readied, bobber adjusted, worm attached, the whole to be tossed gently sidearm to a likely looking spot. Repeat operation with Child Number Two’s outfit, only the process is interrupted by Child Number One’s bobber disappearing . . . frantic instructions to reel in, landing the perch for her, rebaiting the hook, casting it gently out again . . . back to Child Number Two, who meanwhile is near tears from impatience; get his outfit rigged now, but before it can be cast Child Number One has managed to get her hook caught on some weeds, go over to free her, then back to Child Number Two, who really is crying this time . . . soothe him, cast his rig out, keep watch on both bobbers simultaneously . . . rebait, recast, detach perch, apply sunscreen, rebait, recast, feed, and water . . . In comparison, wading upstream on the Madison near Slide Inn seems easy, an effortless stroll.
I have to be tactful here, and a loose accounting is in effect, but let’s say Dad has a hand in catching just about every fish. That’s easily another hundred fish a year, and a new subtotal of 2,325.
Had enough? What about partners I go fishing with, all the fish I net, or even the battles where I merely sit and cheer them on? I have a friend who took two rainbows over twenty-five inches from the Bechler River in Yellowstone last year, fishing hoppers in a wind hard enough to knock us down, and watching him play those fish on a 6X tippet from the bank, intent as a heron, balanced right on the border between panic and calm but balanced there perfectly, was one of the high points of the season. Fish with the right person, someone who shares the excitement with you, and the fish soon become joint property; stories told subsequently are apt to begin, “Remember that first rainbow we caught on the Bechler?,” that expansion in pronoun, I to we, being the identifying mark of a real fishing partnership. Certainly there are 150 of these mutual fish a year, enough to bring us up to 2,475.
And maybe this is where we should let the figure rest, though there is another category that would at least double the figure, perhaps even triple it. We see the fish landed, of course, even many of the ones that get away, but what about that surely larger class, the unseen fish that spot our lures, follow them for a second, but then turn away in boredom or contempt? There must be hundreds of these a year. Occasionally you’ll see some sign . . . a brief swirl well back of the fly; a shadow deep beneath your streamer as it’s withdrawn from the water for the next cast . . . but for the most part they remain invisible, the great fishy majority of the unconvinced.
But let them go. Two thousand four hundred and seventy-five fish landed, lost, spotted, felt, or shared is still a huge number to be in any way involved with, and yet a much more accurate representation of the fishing year than my original and too modest 356. A season turns out to be not grudging and niggardly, but full of fish, fish won and lost, opportunities squandered, near misses, vicarious success—fish everywhere, fish by the thousands, fish galore! Any diarist, any calendar jotter like myself, should keep these in mind, even if choosing to commemorate the few in honor of the many. I picture them there right now, the trout and bass recorded in those calendars from 1990 and 1991 and 1992, squeezed in what space remains beside the exhortations to Pay mortgage! or Change shocks!, reducing these forgotten and burdensome chores to their proper insignificance, feeding on the quotidian like it was a new and tasty form of crustacea, until the decades go by, the calendars yellow, and all that remains in the record of those years is water and fish and those generous moments stolen from the trivial when against all odds we manage to connect.
May 29
It wasn’t my kind of fishing, which is why I said yes. My kind of fishing had been consistently lousy; with the rivers so high, the ponds so cold, I hadn’t caught anything longer than a salamander all month. So yes, by the time my friend Ray Chapin called with his unexpected invite, fishing for shad immediately below a nuclear power plant in the middle of a mob under a broiling May sun seemed the very thing.
Words can attract you even more powerfully than fish, and this was the determining factor. Shad. That’s a word worth saying out loud, with its sibilant start so suggestive of speed and stealth; it’s hard, rakish and sound, rhyming with had and cad; its quick, compact finish, suggesting a fish that packs a considerable punch. Free-associate with all the fine old American connotations . . . shadbush, shad roe, shad bake, shadfly; shadberry; shadrach . . . and you have something that exerts a pretty strong fascination, even though, at the moment Ray called, I had never seen one in the flesh.
Neither one of us had the slightest idea how to catch one either, but what the hell. We hitched Ray’s boat trailer to the back of his car, stopped at Wings for some meatball subs, drove an hour south to the big dam that crosses the Connecticut just below the nuke, kicked the winch loose, shoved the boat in, hopped aboard. The shad run, exterminated by the early dams, has pretty well been re-established, and now substantial numbers of fish are finding their way ever further north.
Were we in time to hit the run at its height? For once in my life I was hoping for a crowd, not only as evidence that the shad were there, but to steal some hints as how to catch them. The dam forms a huge pool here, the cement of the spillway merging into bankside cliffs that are even higher. In the middle of the current a flashy runabout was anchored, monofilament lines stretched taut out the back like thinner versions of the power lines that crisscrossed overhead
; around and behind it, zipping in and out from the dams base, was a smaller aluminum skiff with a big antenna mounted in the middle, a man sitting in the stern with earphones, squinting in concentration; closer, on the rocks, were (not to put too fine a point on it) a shirtless redneck bully and his entourage of Budweiser-swilling friends. With the pylons, the cooling towers of the nuke, the nearby traffic, all this seemed perversely appropriate. Put a couple of effete fly-fishing sissies in the middle and voilà—the scene was complete.
“What do we do now?” I asked. Caught in a whirlpool, our boat was spinning around out of control—but it takes more than this to break Ray’s concentration.
“We put on one of these,” he said, tossing me something that, compared with trout flies, seems lurid in its redness. “Shad dart. I tied some up last night.”
You’re supposed to fish these slow and deep, something we didn’t know at the time, so we fished them fast and shallow, since, as mentioned, the very notion of shad seems to demand speed and haste. Over on the Vermont side of the river was the fishway, and we could see a family peering over the fence, staring down and pointing, so it seemed pretty clear that there were indeed shad passing within reach of our darts, probably shad in great numbers, and yet two hours went by and we had nothing to show for it but sunburn.
There was a saltwater kind of feel to this fishing, what with our long casts, the expanse of the river, the anchored boats—even the sunbathers on what passed for a sandy beach. The longer we went without catching a shad, the greater my respect for them became. Shad are so powerfully anadromous that even the presence of them in the general vicinity carries the flavor of salt air, far horizons, wheeling gulls. Standing in the bow of the runabout, trying to keep my balance, hauling away, furiously stripping, I felt stretched, mentally and physically both, and it felt good to be so.
When it came time for lunch we put-putted downstream until we found a sandy island shaded by some huge silver maples. Up by the dam all was commotion and hurry, the river industrial, but a few hundred yards away a much more quiet, pastoral mood was in effect, and both of us were pleasantly surprised by how lush and rich the landscape was on both sides of the river. Three states come together here, but they all seem invisible; there you are down on the water hardly aware of anything but the steep and sandy banks, the swallows darting out from them, the trees silhouetted obliquely against the sky, a glimpse now and then of wide, darkly furrowed fields, the rush of current against the boat’s bottom.
Exploring, we thought we might stumble into some fish, and we did—but not shad. Tying on a chartreuse Sneaky Pete, I tossed it out to where a sandbar cut abruptly down into the current, and immediately found a nice three-pound smallmouth. They were stacked up there in line, strong, gutsy river fish, just waiting for our poppers; as I’ve noticed before, they always seem to hit these, not from hunger, but from an outraged, betrayed kind of anger, as if the poppers didn’t represent food at all, but little totems or miniature gods the bass had once worshipped, but then had been disappointed by in some essential way (allowing the invention of bass boats?), to the point where the fish struck back at them every chance they got.
Which, of course, is a lot to read into a bass hitting a popper, but how else to explain that ferocious explosion? I’ve been searching for the perfect analogy to describe it for many years now, and—since I love smallmouth so passionately—perhaps always shall.
Once the sun got lower we went back up to the dam to take another crack at the shad, though by now the day had the feel of going fishless (at least with shad), and that’s a pretty hard notion to shake.
Then a funny incident happened (and yes, it also had the feel of being a funny-incident type of day). A pontoon boat festooned with fishing rods steamed into view from downriver, heading right for the center of our little flotilla. There was a suntanned man steering—in age and demeanor he looked like someone who had retired too early and was having trouble filling up his days. In the bow stood his attractive, suntanned wife, ready with the heavy anchor. Reaching us, he had her heave it . . . but apparently it wasn’t the right spot for him, because not two minutes later he shouted for her to pull the anchor back up. A second spot they tried, closer to the dam in the heavy current, but this wasn’t quite to his liking either, because no sooner had the boat come taut on the anchor line than he had her pull it up again, hand over straining hand.
This went on at least six times—which was obviously one time too many. Suddenly the wife turned her head, said something we couldn’t hear, something especially pungent and to the point, and the next thing we knew the pontoon boat was disappearing downriver the way it had come. We looked at the fishermen in the boat next to us; they looked at us—we all burst out laughing.
Yeah, that kind of easy, relaxed day. Holding each other’s gunwales, we talked for a while with the man in the antenna boat, discovered he was doing research on the salmon smolt released upstream, seeing how many made it through the dam intact, then, on our way in, drifted over closer to the Budweiser boys, and found them to be pussycats, all excited about the shad they had caught the day before. Pulling the boat out, breaking down our fly rods, we took our own beer out of the cooler and strolled over to the concrete fish ladder to see what we could see.
There were shad all right, hundreds of them, three or four pounds each, as compact and purposeful as their name suggests. That each one of these had sailed right past our shad darts without interest seemed beside the point now; it was wonderful just to watch them, admire the way they turned, turned a second time, then shot over the next step on their way up and across the dam. Their color, a silvery brown that veered toward yellow, seemed peculiarly foreign and exotic, emphasizing their migratory quality, as if they were indeed emissaries from a watery kingdom far more colorful than the one we knew.
“Incredible,” Ray said, pointing at the biggest. “Beautiful, huh? Wonder what they feel like on the end of a line?”
I shrugged—but at the same time felt those little sensor muscles in the middle of my forearm, that higher, vital fishing pulse, go taut in sympathetic vibration as I imagined their power . . . the power to run three hundred miles up a once polluted river and gladden us on a perfect May afternoon.
Part Two: The New River
The New River (I)
It wasn’t love at first sight or second or even third. Seen early in June, its water still busy with springtime cleansing, the river has the gray-silver color of a playground slide—a dangerous, slippery one, with treacherous steps and no handrails, something a prudent mother wouldn’t let her child on alone. And while a river that has the potential to kill you is in many respects more interesting than a river that doesn’t, on this perfect late spring morning, as I pulled on my waders, looked around at the radiant bowl of mountains, meadow, and field, smelled the mica sharpness of rushing water, sensed that vernal crescendo of bursting and triumphant life, I was even more strongly than usual in no mood to drown.
So gently was the operative word. To the river, this silver-colored, unknown thing racing past the alders twenty feet below, I would bring gentleness, stealth, efficiency, calm—this though my skin had already tightened in anticipation of its temperature, my heart was thumping in anticipation of its force. Anyone with a sense of prudence, anyone approaching the down slope of life, will always be respectfully frightened of a strange and powerful river; its perhaps a tribute to the fact I wasn’t quite over the hill yet that this fear, though real enough, only contributed to the fun.
Booted, wadered, armed with the lance of my fly rod, the visor-like brim of my fishing hat pulled low against the midday sun, I clanked toward the banks ready for battle—and then, remembering the prudent part, found a boulder and sat down to look things over. I had picked the most obvious spot to start: a dirt pull-off where the river first came into sight from the road. Of course this was the spot most likely to be fished most often, but this sometimes can mean it’s the spot most deserving of fishing often—and in any case, this
is exactly the kind of self-serving logic you start playing around with on a river where otherwise you don’t have the slightest clue.
What I was looking at as I sat there shaping up my nerve was a river twenty yards in breadth, with a current fast enough to form haystacks against the granite boulders that forced it into a curve. On the far side, the New Hampshire side, was a cornfield that had just been planted; in the middle distance I could see the red tractor, the sunburned farmer, moving at the head of a vertical halo of chocolate brown dust. Higher, looking up, were the northern peaks of the White Mountains—pyramids, a child’s perfect drawing, and yet jumbled, lying in a plane that seemed remote from the one the river ran through, pictures hung on a separate wall. The Vermont bank, the one I sat on, was steeper, with enough alder and raspberry vines to make getting into the river a challenge. A bit to my right—the water that had drawn my immediate interest when I parked—the current pushed hard into the bank to form a long sluice flecked with bubbles, running between a corridor of smaller, sun-bleached boulders, their tips white with bird droppings and the dried skeletons of bugs. There were no insects showing, but the air had the humid softness that generates mayflies. And, while this is a hard concept for the nonfisherman to grasp, over everything—sky, fields, boulders, even mountains—hung the distinct and unmistakable aura of trout.
And it was all new to me—that’s the important part. I was badly in need of a new river. The one I’ve fished religiously for ten good years had declined to the point where I could no longer pretend the poor fishing was due to seasonal fluctuations—fool myself, that is, that it would someday bring me the rewards and pleasures it had in its prime. Too many houses had gone up too close to its banks; too many lawns had received too much fertilizer; too many trees had been felled; too much shade had been hacked away by the highway crews; too many gravel pits were now gouged into the hillsides, too many trout decorated too many stringers—too much of the kind of abuse and neglect whose effects are malicious, downright criminal. Its native trout had disappeared completely, and even the stocked ones were gone by July, so what had been a living, thriving miracle was now nondescript and empty, any stream USA.
A River Trilogy Page 36