Armed with those most precious of weapons, hindsight and expectancy, I would catch him next year—or so I thought. All through the following spring the water was too high to let me get across to the hole, or even to tell where it was located in the bank-to-bank dance of rushing white peaks. It was the middle of July before I had my chance—a soft rainy day when the sky and weather blended into the same pewter grayness and anything seemed possible.
Tom Ciardelli was with me—he was the only one we had let in on our discovery. Still, he seemed skeptical . . . it was all that talk about bowling balls . . . and stayed downstream to fish the pockets while I plowed on upstream.
I found my way to the hole all right. I stood there gauging it, trying to figure out a game plan to use if and when the trout took again. The rapid below me was the crucial factor; no way could I hold anything immersed in its force. If I stayed on the outside of the rapid, though, I would have difficulty following anything in the treacherous footing of those rocks. After thinking about it for a while, experimenting with various stances, I decided my best bet was to plunge through the waist-deep current and get on the Vermont side of the fast water; if worse came to worst and I had something too strong to hold, I could step up onto the bank and follow him on dry ground.
I’d checked and rechecked my leader before starting and felt pretty confident in that respect. I had a Wulff on, since I wanted to repeat as nearly as possible every step that had worked last time. Nervous, knowing it was unlikely anything would come up the first cast, but knowing I had to be ready just in case, I worked out some line, then dropped the fly just below the boulder that marked the holes upstream start.
The strike was instantaneous, solid and hard; I’d seen the snout appear below the fly and was already lifting up my rod when it took hold. It’s difficult remembering which came first, my amazement that fate had come through again in such classic fashion, or my surprise that this wasn’t my rainbow at all, but—as if by a miraculous feat of transfiguration—a large, a very large, brawn.
I’ll spare you the details of the fight, other than to say this: how delightfully rare it is in New England to fight a fish that is a long way off, making you feel like you’re flying a remote-control airplane, something that’s attached to you but remains almost entirely independent, so you marvel at being able to exercise even a modicum of influence. It was a powerful fish, but nowhere near as fast and dangerous as the rainbow; I had the sense, even as I fought him, that it was an old fish, a year or two past its prime. It got in the fast water just as I feared, but the second part of my plan worked to perfection; by hopping up onto the bank and hurdling various boulders I managed to stay below him and slowly led him over to a gravel shingle that sloped into the water as gradually as a boat ramp.
Tom, hearing me yell, seeing the commotion, had hurried up to meet me, and with his help we had it measured, photographed, and released in the space of a few seconds. Twenty-four inches from snout to tail, with a big angry hooked jaw, a yellow that was brighter than any I’d seen on a fish, and just a trace of slackness on what was still a fine, thick flank. That I was pleased to have found him goes without saying, but what pleased me even more was the feeling that the river had come through for me big-time. I had explored and experimented for a good five years, tested and probed in all kinds of weather, watched and observed, tried my best to divine its secrets, and here in the middle of a rainy July day I had at last been deemed worthy of initiation, been accepted by the river into its bright and wondrous fold.
A fitting end to my journey of discovery—and yet I can’t quite end this here, feel reluctant to sever myself even temporarily from the river of delight that runs so strongly it’s as if I can feel its energy pulsing through these keys. But in sharing the wonders of my new river I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite spot of all, something that sits on the western bank a short distance downstream of the town of Canaan, Vermont, beside one of the river’s best pools. It’s a sewage-treatment plant, squat and unlovely, resembling with its cement severity and flat storage tanks a service station for UFOs, and yet from it, and from its cousins downstream, flows everything beautiful I’ve described.
The best landscaped sewer in the world. This was the Connecticut’s reputation just a few years ago, when so bad was the pollution and neglect no one would go near it, let alone write rhapsodies in its honor. That this has changed is directly attributable to the enormous collective effort to win back the river undertaken in the late-middle years of this century, including the federal legislation known as the Clean Waters Act. A long story, full of villains and heroes, successes and setbacks, but one I’ll draw a simple moral from, including with it as deep and heartfelt a thank-you as I know how to write. Ray, Tom, and I. The fishermen we’ve met on the stream. The canoeists, the picnickers, the hunters, and the birders. Our children and our friends. We’re the first generation to reap the benefits from the efforts of the generation just before, and it’s because the fight was made to restore the river to health that everything follows. The trout, the mayflies, the otters, mergansers, and moose. All the enjoyment, the mystery, and joy. Conservation works . . . that’s the motto I’ll end on . . . and the task it works best at is the creation of delight in the human heart.
Part Three: Full Season
Cohorts
Like I came late to friendship. Like many people who reinvent themselves after their teenage years, I was ruthless in cutting off the friends I grew up with, and it was a long time before I found anyone to take their places. Suffering badly from the form of egoism called shyness, with a stern and idealistic view of the novelist’s task (Proust called friendship an abdication of the writer’s duty and I fully agreed), I felt friendship was simply not on my list of life’s requisites. When I eventually softened in this regard, began to feel the need for friends after all, life wasn’t willing to accommodate me just like that. I was living in the country, cut off from anyone I knew, and though northern New England’s reputation for iciness is in many ways unjustified, it is and always has been a place where friendship doesn’t come easy.
The upshot of this is that for over twenty years whenever I went fly fishing I went fly fishing alone. I mentioned this in an earlier book and it won me a certain amount of pity—perhaps the reason I mentioned it in the first place. But I can say now that nothing in my fishing has changed as much as my habits in this regard, to the point where I now pal around with the best of them, have become, at least compared with my earlier standard, as gregarious as a Rotarian. Like a reformed drinker or exsmoker, I feel compelled to mount a platform, testify to the evils of my former ways, and thank with all my heart the two men who are largely responsible for converting me from fly-fishing loner into fly-fishing friend.
First, a few words about fishing friendships in general. It’s not as easy a relationship as the nonfisher might think, since anyone with a passion likes to approach that passion in a certain way. I don’t know how many times I’ve had people try to set me up with the fishing equivalent of blind dates—“Oh, you have to go out with Ranald, he just loves fishing!”—only to discover that Ranald and I come at fishing with a very different set of assumptions and expectations, so our day on the river is a disaster right from the start.
A fishing friendship is a hard and demanding thing—a good, lasting one something that is rare and priceless. So much goes into it. A tacit agreement on how much seriousness to put into the enterprise, how much fun; an admiration and respect for the friend’s abilities; a competitiveness that is playful, not corrosive—the ability to tease and the ability to commiserate; a genuine delight in the other’s successes; a telepathy that works even when you’re far apart on a stream, so understandings about lunch breaks, quitting times, and meeting places always seem to take care of themselves; a shared willingness to put up with disappointment, not let it get you too far down; facing a certain amount of discomfort together, even danger, giving the friendship some of the enduring loyalty known by soldiers in combat; the abil
ity, most of all, to be young together, if only for the space of an afternoon, to work like men or women at being boys or girls.
I met Tom Ciardelli after our wives had already become friends. In the same aerobics class together, they had discovered that both their husbands were passionate about fly fishing, thereby setting the stage for us all having dinner together, and—for this is the way the women pictured it as they burned up those carbs—the men to become friends as well.
I resisted—my first impulse toward any social invitation is to turn it down. I’m sure Tom resisted, too; I’d published a book on fly fishing by then, and it was easy for him to picture some egotistical know-it-all arrogant yuppie scum snob. But Celeste worked on me (there was talk about a private one-acre pond), Andrea worked on Tom (couldn’t he steal from me some secrets?), and the matter was settled—we would be going over to their place Saturday night at five.
We surprised ourselves by hitting it off, at least after the first awkward moments. Tom was not a man who put much energy into the social graces, and I can be stubborn in this regard, too. What saved us was that all these greetings and introductions took place outside—that ten yards away, shining in the soft way of semigloss paint that hasn’t quite dried, was a gray-green expanse of water, Tom’s famous pond.
We walked over together, stood in the shade of a tall white pine watching as out in the middle of the pond trout rose toward wispy brown mayflies. I commented on how healthy and strong the fish looked; “There’s bigger than that,” Tom said, with a little laugh. He reached down in the grass for some fish pellets that had spilled, tossed a handful out, and for the next few minutes we watched a feeding frenzy that would have done justice to sharks. Talking about his pond led us to talk about other ponds in the area, then streams, then rivers, our separate experiences on each overlapping like the rings sent up by those trout, until without really thinking about it, standing there with our Molsons, we began a dialogue about fishing that is still going strong thirteen years later. And right from the start I was struck with one thing; that Tom is one of those surprisingly rare fishermen who admire and value trout on their own and not just as quarry, finding trout the one species that really speaks to them about nature and wonder and the large scheme of things, so it’s quite accurate to say, without irony, that trout represent to them something spiritual in life, not just sporting.
Tom looks not only like the kind of man who would be good at fishing, but the kind of man who would be good at almost anything, as long as it involves hard, largely solitary effort. He’s not easy to know—there’s very little to read on his surface—but this is more than made up for by the kind of granite toughness you see a lot of in these hills, if not always in scientists of his caliber. Biochemistry is his field, pure research; like many talented people who live up here, he disdains the glitz and perks of a showy kind of career in return for being able to remain in the place he loves. He’s of medium height, broad chested, walks in the even measured way of a good athlete (power volleyball was his game), and it’s only his beard that gives any indication of his anarchistic leanings—he’s not a man who has much use for the usual orthodoxies, not in politics, not in science, not in fishing. He and I are the same age, born within a couple of weeks of each other, and this has proven not the least of the strands that make up our friendship—the synchronization of outlook and expectation that comes between people who started out on this planet at exactly the same moment.
Before dinner was over we had made plans to go out fishing. There’s a pond over in New Hampshire he wanted to show me; it was one of the few bodies of water he’d found that had a significant hatch of hexagenia, those humongous mayflies that drive trout wild. Since I had never actually seen one of these, I was more than happy to go along.
It was an interesting enough night, though I don’t remember catching anything. Tom proved to be a good man with a canoe, and a generous guide; when we did see a rise, he maneuvered so I could get the best shot. I think both of us were a bit nervous those first few moments; okay, we both talked a good game, but how would we do when the money was on the line? Sitting in the bow, I found it hard to judge his casting style, though I did notice how gently his line landed on the water, and I was impressed by his ability to identify what minutiae the fish were taking. We broke for sandwiches and beer, then paddled around the shallows waiting for the Hex to show. And finally they did—eight or nine of them anyway, big and yellow, looking like swallows in comparison to the flies we’d seen until then, drying their wings with the kind of deliberately slow macho flappings you see in weight lifters, then taking to the air—to be immediately snared by real swallows, so not even one Hex managed to escape as far as the trees.
In the years since I’ve fished with Tom many dozens of times; we’ve covered quite a bit together in the way of river, stream, and pond, been skunked on occasions when we should have clobbered them and clobbered them in situations where by rights we should have gone fishless. I think we’ve grown as fishermen in the course of all this, not so much in our tactical understanding as in the delight we find in our sport. Like a lot of people who work very hard to get time out on the water, Tom was once apt to let a fishless day bring him down, knowing it might be a long while before he could get out again. Now he seems more relaxed in this respect, having learned to accept, even relish, the bittersweet kinds of defeat trout can toss at you—though they don’t defeat him very often. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have dared tease him about losing a fish; now he kids himself, clears the air with the kind of loud clear “Damn!” that does the heart good.
He’s one of the three best fishermen I know. So strong is my faith in his talent that I often shamelessly take advantage, feel perfectly comfortable, come late afternoon, with lazing on the bank while Tom checks out whether the fish are still interested.
“Anything showing, Tom?” I’ll call, lying there in the shade.
“A decent rainbow over there by the bank. Want to try him?”
“With what?”
“Bluewing Olive.”
“You sure?”
“Try it.”
Yawning, moving slowly, I let myself be coaxed . . .
Tom has an even more important role: he acts as my reality checker. If he can’t catch them, then I know they can’t be caught, thereby absolving me from any requirement to try.
I’ve tried to analyze over the years what makes him so good—why he takes the most trout when we go out and usually the biggest. I think the chief of his gifts is a superb patience. And by this I don’t mean the lazy kind of patience most nonfishers think you need, sitting motionless on the bank watching a bobber and worm, but an active patience that combines an energetic seeking and probing with an understanding that the rewards for these might not come all at once; a willingness, in other words, to wait fate out. This is the one trait that reveals the scientist in him; he does not like to leave a problem behind, but meets it squarely, determined to find a solution before moving on.
What this means, put him on the river, is that he concentrates on just one or two spots, working them thoroughly, blotting out from his consciousness the fact there’s more fishable water just upstream or down. He refuses to give in to the easiest and most dangerous of fishing temptations—believing that the fish are biting just one pool away—but digs in and fights it out on turf of his own choosing. Me, if I haven’t connected within an hour, I’m out of there; Tom, after an hour, is just getting warmed up, and—having noted patterns in the water, flashes, hints, threads—will be a more dangerous, sharper fisherman at the very moment when other fishermen begin getting sloppy, lazy, and bored.
Patience carried on a few casts too long becomes stubbornness, but Tom is smart enough to avoid this; stuck, at a complete dead end, he accepts it and switches over to a more improvisational, hunch-based kind of fishing. Last summer, floating the Connecticut, I was doing fair with Hendricksons, but Tom wasn’t quite satisfied, and switched to a Blue Quill—not an unknown fly, but one few fisherm
en carry in their box, even an expert tyer like Tom. But it proved to be just the ticket—the slight variation in color between his fly and mine was enough to overcome all the trouts’ inhibitions. I’ve seen him do similar many times: catch fish with the grain, then catch just as many cutting across it.
I admire Tom for all these talents, but what I admire most is the sheer beauty and grace of his casting. Tired of fishing, or even just glancing up between casts, I’ll become totally absorbed in watching him work out line over a far and fussy fish—decide, not for the first time, that his casting seems a kind of elegant handwriting against the sky. Those forward downstrokes so precise and measured, like bold Gothic Is; the great coil of script as the line comes back; that extended question mark it briefly becomes . . . and then the downstroke again, another signature letter added to the blue tablet on which his line falls.
It’s casting of the old school, when a flyfisher’s ability was measured not in how far he drove a fly, but in how effortlessly.
Tom’s casting is wonderfully effortless, so, watching from the distance, you wouldn’t think he was putting muscle into the process at all, so much as merely wishing the line forward, and wishing it forward in the most fluid and perfect loop nylon is capable of assuming. Not once have I seen him strain to complete a cast—not once. Yes, I’ve seen him make sloppy casts (though damn few), but these are only the natural little imperfections that, rather than spoiling great art, are its surest indications. He looks genuinely surprised at these moments—surprised, I think, that there turns out to have been effort involved in the process after all.
A River Trilogy Page 42