A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  After catching five or six of these, I eased on downstream, on the lookout for the drakes, trying to appraise the changes in the streambed since the last time I had fished here. These were considerable; there had been two destructive floods in the course of the spring, and a deep pool where the river hooked left was gone entirely, its bottom filled with gravel that had been deposited when the current hit the bend. I accepted this with more grace than I would have thought possible, considering it had been my favorite pool; in the give and take of floods the pool just below had been scoured out even deeper, so most of the trout had simply migrated twelve yards downstream.

  The green drakes were beginning to show. As with a lot of things in fly fishing, they’re not really the color they’re called, but a parchment-like yellow. They’re big, too. The largest Cahills in my box, size 12s, were too small to match them, though the trout—stuffed, on the lookout for lighter servings—took them readily enough. It had been a while since I had seen such a fulsome hatch on such a small stream, and after catching another rainbow, the biggest of the night, I stood hip-deep in water enjoying the way the flies appeared out of nowhere on the surface, dried their wings for a moment, then, with feathery little inhalations, took to the air like Valkyries made of papyrus and dust.

  Time to move on, fish one last pool before dark. There’s another old bridge site, this one much rougher and forgotten, with only a moss-covered abutment on one bank and a vague indentation in the cliff on the other to show where a cart track had once crossed. You can’t wade through the pool without spooking all the fish, so the only thing to do is send a fly down from above, bouncing it off the cliff, then tossing in some slack so you get a few decent inches of drift. Browns predominate here, but they seem made of the same exuberant stuff as the rainbows, leaping to incredible heights. In the twilight, with green drakes everywhere, they weren’t hard to catch, and I hoped to find a big trout before it got too dark to fish.

  For a moment I thought I saw one, the largest trout in the river, swimming downstream with the wiggly, nose-first grace of a harbor seal. I wasn’t far wrong, at least in my analogy. It was a beaver, one that surfaced now right below me and gave a tremendous thwack with his tail. On any night but the Fourth I might have been considerably pissed at him, putting the fish down like that, but as part of the overall celebration his cannonade fit right in. He gave me four or five of these thwacks, each a little closer; he swam closer, too, to the point where I could have jabbed a boot out and spun him around. He (or more likely she) wasn’t motivated by the usual kind of territorial imperative, for on the next pass through the pool she seemed to separate into three parts, one larger, two small. Baby beavers, the first I’d ever seen, no bigger than eight-week-old retriever pups, and just as curious, tumbly, and tame.

  Trout, beaver, tanagers, mayflies. The distant sounds of celebration. Not a bad way to spend a summer evening. If the setting was perfect, my little jaunt through it had turned out perfect, too, so I didn’t feel separated from the landscape, but a deep, essential part. A removable part, of course. In the darkness I waded back upstream, the trout rising so freely now it was as if they were trying to nudge candy loose from my pockets. They put circles in the river’s downstream surge, made the water take on even more of that quality I felt so thoroughly, yet still couldn’t name.

  But then an hour later, driving up over the divide toward my own familiar valley, remembering the color of the water, the even, melodious way it flowed, I came up with the right word in a flash of inspiration, so sudden and satisfying I beeped my horn twice to match its syllables: purling. A purling river, the Dog is. A veritable purl of watery delight.

  Save the Fountain

  I’m a census taker for our local streams, an unofficial, self-appointed one, someone who likes to keep track of how many wild brook trout still grace our small corner of the planet with their habitation. I go out in all weather, three seasons of the year, armed with the traditional tools of my avocation: an old fiberglass fly rod with three missing guides, a patch of fleece with half a dozen flies embedded in the marl, Polaroid sunglasses scratched and stained from long usage, a scrap of paper, a stub of pencil, and, most important of all, the long and puzzled questionnaire that passes for my brain.

  As best as I can determine, there are seven wild brook trout currently residing in our town: three in Slant Brook at the base of a small waterfall where the stocked trout can’t bother them; one in Whitcher Stream where it bounces down to the Connecticut; a hundred or so in Trout Pond up on the slope where our mountain begins—trout so tiny, so miniaturized, you could put them all end to end and still only count them as three.

  Not many fish, of course, but perhaps the miracle is that there are any left at all. Twenty years ago, when I moved to New Hampshire and began my survey, there were hundreds of brookies in all these locales—enough that the counting of them kept several dedicated census takers working full-time. I’d come upon them in the woods, secretive men apt to shy away at your approach, stubby rods pressed under their arms, their faces greasy with fly dope, favoring dark green work clothes, the only splash of color being the bandannas around their necks. Interesting men to talk to if you found ’em in the right mood; theirs was an intimate association with the landscape and its creatures, and they were less apt to talk about entire rivers or streams than they were individual pockets, boulders, and holes. Most of them valued wild trout greatly, yet possessed one self-destructive habit: they thought of their subjects as food—and not just for thought.

  These men are largely gone now. If the trout are down to seven, then the census takers are down to one—me, probably the last one in the neighborhood who realizes wild trout are still among our inhabitants. I’ve taken to wearing green work clothes myself now, that same red bandanna, honoring by imitation a dying kind of breed. And even I don’t go out surveying as much as I used to—I’m tired of walking, knocking, and finding no one is home.

  But here I am veering off into bitterness when a census taker should stick to the facts. The trout I know best are the three in Slant Brook. This is as typical a New England trout stream as you’re likely to find. Starting high on the side of our town’s one steep mountain, it plunges down through the forest in an exuberant rush of brightness, sluicing westward through the uplands, carving a channel for itself through granite bedrock, dropping over two sizable waterfalls and the ruins of old mills, crossing under the highway in a giant culvert, then taking on new life as a meadow stream in the last mile left to it before joining the Connecticut in a marshy bay.

  The lower three miles have trout in them, lots of trout, for two weeks a year. These are brook trout that have been raised in cement tanks in another part of the state, transported here by heavy truck, poured into the brook where it meets the road, caught immediately by people who fish no other time of year, the trout that survive being swept downstream by the first heavy rain, to end up as pike and pickerel feed in that marshy bay mentioned above. Stocking fish has been going on so long now in this part of the country it’s become part of the natural order of things, so you have to step back a bit to realize how odd, how truly bizarre the whole business is. I mean, phony trout? Cement trout? Trout from the city turned loose to entertain the rubes?

  I encounter these trout sometimes in the course of my rounds, and am appalled, not by their meekness, but at their savagery. They strike a fly with desperate fury, turn quickly if they miss and strike it again even harder, as if from an impulse that is homicidal and suicidal at the same time. Catching them, you feel like the butt of a cynical and expensive joke, the kind you see played by art forgers or the worst kind of cosmetic surgeons, those who think beauty is for manufacture and sale. That there is just enough color and energy in these trout to convince the gullible that they are real makes the joke more bitter; it’s only in comparison to the genuine article that the forgery becomes apparent.

  Here’s where the miracle comes in. Despite hatchery trout, the nearness of the road, wanton destructio
n of shade trees, the way the brook’s most important tributary is looted for snow-making by our local ski area, the sloppy leach fields of too many houses, the penchant previous census takers had of eating their subjects—despite, that is, every wanton and cruel trick man can play on it, Slant Brook still manages to harbor at least three genuine wild brook trout, huddled together in a thirty-foot stretch of habitat like genuine flowers in the middle of a plastic garden.

  How wild trout manage to survive here is partly a matter of luck, partly a testament to what, despite their fragility as a species, is an individual toughness that is as much a part of them as their beauty. A few yards downstream of the looted tributary, replenished by what water trickles in, is a pool no larger than a dining-room table, formed by water falling over a burnished log. A plunge pool you call this—the coolest spot on the brook, thanks to that turbulence, and cooled even more by the shade of a pear-shaped boulder that sits on the bottom a foot or so from the lip of the impromptu weir. Upstream of this there is nothing but shallows for a good hundred yards; downstream are more shallows, so the pool, in brook trout terms, sits like an oasis in the middle of a desert. It’s far enough from the road that the stock truck goes elsewhere; it’s shady, deep, quiet, forgotten, and in its center live the last wild trout the brook contains.

  I’ve only interviewed these fish, face-to-face interviewed, two or three times. I pride myself on my restraint, claim it’s for conservation reasons, but the truth is they’re remarkably hard to catch. The stream is hemmed in by brush, making casting difficult. The trout favor the three feet of water between the fallen hemlock and the boulder, so you have a yardstick’s worth of drift when they might possibly take your fly. Unlike the stocked fish, they won’t rise more than once, and there’s much more discrimination in the way they bite—not that greedy boardinghouse grab, but a delicate kind of aristocratic plucking.

  They’re beautiful, of course, drop-dead beautiful, and already in August have begun to take on that rich purple-red blush that speaks so eloquently of autumn. Only eight inches long, they have the thickness of flank you see in the healthiest wild fish, along with an iridescent luster that makes it seem they are taking the granite sparkle of the brook, the verdure of the forest, the dappled sunlight, mixing it all, internalizing it, then through a magic I never get tired of witnessing, generating these qualities back in their purest eight-inch essence, so holding a trout in your hand, for the seconds it takes to release it, is like grasping nature whole.

  The biology of it—how three or four fish manage to survive and reproduce in what is otherwise a desert—mystifies me, and all I can do now is pay tribute to the fact that reproduction, growth, life, does go on here, without any help from man. The Slant Brook trout demonstrate one possibility for the native brookies future, albeit a tenuous one—living in isolated, forgotten pockets but flourishing there, like cloistered monks working on illuminated manuscripts through the worst of the Dark Ages, their most beautiful, vivid illumination coming from within.

  Whitcher Stream, four miles to the south, offers another possibility. Similar in size to Slant Brook, it begins in a chain of beaver ponds in the notch between two steep hills; in times of high water the edges of these ponds lap the rocks of old cellar holes from vanished farms. A meadow stream in its upper reaches, it veers south into our neighboring town, then—as if not liking the neighborhood—immediately swerves back again, finishing its last mile to the Connecticut as a rocky, shady stream with numerous deep pools. Prime trout habitat—and yet to the best of my knowledge, only one trout remains in the entire stream.

  It’s a native trout; that’s the only good news in what is otherwise a depressing enough story. The state stocks only one stream per town, and so any trout in Whitcher Stream is perforce a native. Ten years ago there were hundreds of fish here, two or three in each pool, but each autumn when I went back, there were fewer and fewer, to the point where there’s only one left now, in the deepest, most brush-tangled of the pools—a pool that seems, such are the implications, the haunted graveyard where the last of a species goes to die.

  I caught it last year and I’m sorry I did. It’s an emaciated fish, with the kind of pale, muted coloration you see in creatures who live without hope. This, of course, is anthropomorphism of the worst sort, but there you are—it’s impossible to understand what the last trout in a river must feel without taking into consideration what must surely be a cosmic kind of loneliness. For a moment I was tempted to put it out of its misery, break its neck with a little pressure of my hand, but I found I couldn’t do this. If the trout in the brook hovered on the point of extinction, I wasn’t going to be the one to give them the final shove, or at least pretend I wasn’t, me who drives a car, consumes too much energy, accepts too meekly the prevailing order of things.

  Nowhere else in town do I feel such a direct connection between the fate of trout and the fate of man. The Whitcher family after whom the stream is named, among the first settlers here once the French and Indian Wars ended, is down to one surviving male member—a young man of nineteen who was just arrested for what in some respects was a meaningless crime: shooting at a minivan with his deer rifle. He’s been sent off to prison for this; am I the only one in town who senses a linkage between his fate and that of the Whitcher Stream trout? Dispossession is dispossession is dispossession, no matter which link on the chain snaps first.

  There’s lots more here for our local census taker (taking a break at our village lunch counter, staring down at the one wretched check mark scribbled down on his pad) to mull over. Alongside Whitcher Stream, on a grassy level patch above the ruins of an old box mill, sits an unusual kind of development. Our local millionaire, as sort of a hobby, bought up decaying old houses all over New England, had them trucked here, then reassembled them in a cluster of upscale offices, shops, and an expensive private school. The backdrop of all this is the stream—valued for its scenery, its atmosphere, but otherwise ignored.

  The irony of this hardly bears underlining—that so much effort and money could be poured into rehabilitating a portion of New England’s past while the living symbol of that past, the wild brook trout, is left to die out without anyone noticing or caring. And there are other ironies in this line. Over on the Connecticut millions have been poured into a salmon-restoration effort that, sadly, has shown very little signs of having worked. All this money to bring back something that’s been extinct here for nearly two centuries, and not one penny spent on preserving the salmonoid that’s been here all along, leaving to future generations the hard task of restoring it, an effort that will undoubtedly be as futile as trying to call the salmon back with our impotent whistles of regret.

  And this, I suppose, is the Whitcher Stream possibility for the brook trout’s future: the river as background noise, local color, pretty dead stuff, inhabited only by chub, water spiders, and millionaires.

  To write about a third possibility for our local trout I may have to swerve over into magic realism. The eastern part of town is a wild, high province of softwood forest, beaver meadows, and bright open ponds. One of the largest of these is Trout Pond, reached by a half-hour hike along a shaded woods road the years have pressed deep into the earth. Forty years ago the pond was poisoned by the state to “reclaim” it from the trash fish, then stocked by helicopter with brook trout fingerlings. This was a very fifties kind of operation—the helicopter, the faith in technology, the belief in the quick fix. And yet it worked—for a time. When I first moved here and discovered the pond (it’s hard to find and the locals kept their mouths shut when it came to directions) the trout had established themselves as a self-sustaining population, and—if you could lug in some sort of boat—you could count on several fat fish over twelve inches, coming up with discrimination to the tiniest of flies.

  This was not a fly-fishing-only pond; fishermen would dump their bait buckets in the pond when they were done fishing, and a new generation of “trash” fish grew to maturity with those brookies. For a few years
both populations maintained a rough sort of balance—and then suddenly, in some ecological battle too obscure to follow, the chub got the upper hand, so they were everywhere, huge ones, attacking a fly the moment it landed so you could hardly keep them off.

  As the chub flourished, the brookies declined. I caught fewer each time I went, and found their size was declining, too, so an eight-incher became a real trophy. The good news is that the town obtained control of the pond and saved it from development; the bad news is that no one has the slightest idea how to reestablish the fishery as it once was. Poisoning is out in this day and age, and my own suggestion—backpacking in some chain pickerel to act as hit men on those chub—hasn’t won much support either, for the obvious reason: those enforcers are just as likely to eat up the good guys as they are the bad, finish those brookies off once and for all.

  What’s going on up there is very odd. If you were to have asked me two years ago I would have sworn there were no trout left in the pond at all. I went back anyway last October, lured by the beauty of the pond itself (no mirror reflects foliage better than those three level acres of gray-green glass), and decided, such is the force of habit, to bring along my rod. Someone had dragged in an old aluminum skiff and tipped it against a pine where the inlet comes in. It reminded me of the Merrimack—there were bullet holes everywhere, some perilously close to the waterline—but I decided to take a chance. Using some broken hemlock limbs for paddles, I managed to coax it over to the cove on the pond’s eastern shore.

  I didn’t catch fish, not at first, other than those hateful chub. The problem was that my imagination was totally out of sync with the ponds reality; it was still picturing twelve-inch trout, or eight-inch trout, and fishing accordingly. A couple of hours went by . . . I was at the point you can get to too fast in this day and age, when the beauty of the surroundings begins to deflate without some vibrant life at its core . . . when I noticed a vague upswelling in the water by a sunken log—not a rise so much as the ghost of a rise. I searched through my fly box for the smallest pheasant-tail nymph I could find, tied it on with some 6X tippet, then sent it out to see if it could summon that ghost.