A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  It could. Something nudged the wind knot in my leader, then came a tug on the fly itself. I lifted my rod in a reflex gesture—and then ducked as a fish came shooting back toward my face.

  This was a lot in the way of gymnastics for a trout that turned out to be two inches long. A brookie, beautifully formed but all in miniature, so for the few seconds he lay in my palm I had the uncanny sensation I was looking down at him through the wrong end of binoculars. Clearly, this wasn’t a baby trout but a mature adult—a male, judging by the spawning colors, the vague jut in the underside of its microscopic jaw. I cast the nymph out a little farther and immediately caught another one, a female this time, Mrs. Tom Thumb, just as perfect, just as small. Realizing that two-inch fish were what I was fishing for, I scaled back on my notions, began looking at the pond differently, saw that what I had assumed were the disturbances left by water spiders and caddis were actually bona fide rises—that there were dozens of trout left in the pond after all, at least in this one deep cove.

  Good news and bad. Good in that I was pleased for purely linguistic reasons there were still trout residing in a place called Trout Pond; bad in that the race had become miniaturized, so it was hardly correct to speak of them as gamefish at all, but rather as the miniature markers used in a game, toy trout, nostalgic centimeters. And yet I admit I enjoyed catching them, felt these germs of trout create a germ of delight in my eyes, hand, and wrist.

  I’ve been thinking about these trout a lot over the winter. Obviously, the chub are crowding them out, making it impossible for them to find enough food, stunting their growth. But it’s hard not to think that the trout are up to a deeper game. It’s as if they’ve deliberately decided, from motives of self-preservation, to become small and smaller, thereby escaping man’s attention altogether, to flourish on as a race of midgets no one bothers catching. Trout as leprechauns only the fortunate ever see? Yes, something like this. Philosophers of an earlier age insisted everything evolves toward pure spirit, and this may be the local trout’s only salvation, to ruthlessly shut down whatever gene controls growth, evolve into something that is little more than a brightly colored minnow, the bonsai of salmonoids, ignored, unsought for, but at long last safe.

  Thus my survey the three possibilities for the familiar neighborhood brook trout of rural New England. Hermitage, extinction, miniaturization—and a fourth possibility I’ve not explicitly mentioned, but that underlies all my hopes: that mankind (or at least the concerned part of it known as flyfishers) realizes what treasures are on the verge of being lost and spearheads an effort to bring our brookies back, quite literally, into the mainstream of local life.

  Census taking, while meant to be a precise science, has built-in limitations, and my methods are not infallible by any means; surveying with a worm, for instance, would undoubtedly result in a more accurate tally, even as it killed my subjects off. Then, too, any census taker, even one who’s been at this game many years, has their instinctive biases, and these must be taken into account in digesting their reports. My own bias is this: I believe the native brook trout, the wild brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis (which in my pidgin English becomes save the fountain) is the quintessential New England creature, the one whose health or lack of health best reflects the health of the natural world here, the being upon whose slender back—not to put too fine a point on it—the whole health of our rural culture depends. Without brook trout, a stream is dead no matter how pretty it looks from the highway; beauty, dead, turns ugly very fast; ugliness, piled high enough, corrodes the soul. There must be a thousand streams in New England capable of supporting wild brookies. Stripped of them, these form a thousand cemeteries, complete with headstones and the keening wail of empty water. Graced with trout, they become springs of delight, reservoirs of solace, fountains of well-being—and not just for trout.

  But then census takers aren’t supposed to get so involved with their subjects, draw any conclusions from statistics alone.

  I count, the number is seven, and unless things change dramatically, in a few years the last lonely searcher through these hills will be able to do all his counting on the trembling fingers of one gnarled and arthritic hand.

  Fishing the Millennium

  I know the man who helped invent fly-fishing schools. This, in his defense, seemed like a good idea at the time. He was working for Orvis back in the ’60s, a decade when fly fishing was at something of a low ebb, at least in mercantile terms. It was a sport your father did, or your grandfather—the baby boomers were too busy exploring other options. What better way to stimulate sales and interest than by holding weekend seminars in which the fundamentals of the sport were taught? Get students casting with instructors, have some lectures on entomology and flies, take them to the river and talk about streamcraft, then give them some time to roam loose about the tackle shop. Great idea, right?

  Thirty years later the answer is yes and no. Randy himself doesn’t fish much anymore, at least on his beloved Battenkill; the crowds, many of them graduates of the Orvis school or one of its imitators, line up three deep on the banks every June to wait for their chance at eight-inch fish. Randy shakes his head over this, rues the irony of his having been at least partly responsible. If in the ’60s he was one of the smart, energetic young men on the cusp of fly fishing’s boom, he’s now one of those burned-out cases you see a lot of today, those who used to fly fish, but have been driven away by the mobs, with nothing left but stories of the good old days, their poignant and sterile regrets.

  Sometimes I’ll see these schools in action—an instructor wading down the middle of the stream followed by eight or nine acolytes dressed in neoprene and pile. They remind me of a mother duck and her chicks, charming and harmless, though at other times—times when, frowning, they stay in close to the bushes and superseriously stalk—they make me think of a patrol in the Mekong Delta, up to no good at all.

  But then I’m a self-taught fly fisherman, have the scorn of the autodidact toward everything academic. There’s something vaguely unseemly about seeing grown men and women still in grade school—everything seems out of scale. But when I get control of my prejudices I realize I’m of two minds about the whole enterprise. Surely these people have every right to enjoy fly fishing as much as I do; certainly it’s a difficult sport to learn by yourself, and what harm is there in getting some coaching?

  When it comes to the larger picture, the huge explosion in fly fishing’s popularity of which the schools are partly cause, partly effect, I’m much more uncomfortable, to the point where I have to fight through all kinds of emotions before I can even begin to comprehend the avalanche that has caught us old-timers unawares. Avalanche? Yep, a biggy, when the mass of snow that lay undisturbed for generations began to creak and groan and shift along about 1978 or so, gathered momentum in the ’80s, then swept on down the mountainside in full irresistible force. Here at the century’s turn everyone is fly fishing or talking about fly fishing, fishing vicariously on television or the Internet, signing up for expensive trips, going to fishing school, crowding up our rivers, wearing fish on their T-shirts, their baseball caps, their jewelry, the trout turned into a totem, the flyfisher, at least when compared with his older, rather comic, and endearing persona, being in like Flynn.

  How does this kind of mass longing come about? How does a sport for loners and traditionalists and the few suddenly become yet another fad in the massive, exaggerated way of American fads? To go back to the avalanche simile, it would take an expert on snow pack to give the correct reasons, but some factors are clearly visible, even to an amateur like me.

  Spinning peaked in the ’70s; after that its chief allure, its mechanical simplicity, became its chief drawback in an era when a lot of folks were looking for the challenging way to do things. Then, too, fly-fishing tackle was being improved by the introduction of new fibers, so the challenge wasn’t too extreme. Hunting was taking it on the chin as a morally incorrect activity, so the catch-and-release aspect of fly fishing (a b
lood sport without blood) exerted a strong attraction to those who would otherwise worry about the philosophic implications. Norman Maclean’s brilliant novella A River Runs Through It and the movie made of it did a lot to glamorize the sport, giving it not only a trendy literary respectability but a glitzy Hollywood sheen. Women were demanding their place on the water—a genuine, grass-roots kind of movement. Saltwater fly fishing kicked in with the return of the stripers to the Northeast. Ted and Jane were seen fly fishing—with Jimmy or Dan or Tom, or whoever was the celebrity of the moment. Once the avalanche started rolling, of course, the hucksters were there to throw in their own snowballs, swelling the mass, smoothing its way with their facile lubricity.

  Anyone who’s been around for a while has seen many fads come and go, from guitar playing to windsurfing. Many sports seem to go through a boom when everyone does it, then a point where only the diehards are left—cross-country skiing for example. Many of those attracted to fly fishing by its faddish allure (you too can have this epiphany) will surely drop out when they discover—despite the fishing schools, the assurances from the tackle companies—that it is indeed a very difficult sport to master, providing gratification that is far from instant and often no gratification at all. This is what my fishing partners long for, a crest to the wave, a gradual diminuation, so we can have the sport once again to ourselves (“I think it’s crested,” they’ll say, when we find three fishermen on our pool, not seven). This may certainly happen; you have to wonder if there is enough water or fish out there to sustain this kind of mass attack. On the other hand, many cultural and sporting booms seem to die out a bit, then start up again in a second, even larger wave, so the worst may still be yet to come.

  The saddest part of this has been the commercialization of a sport that should offer a refreshing antidote to commercialization. A modest dose of material interest has always been one of fly fishing’s subsidiary delights . . . the old cluttered tackle shop; the catalog crammed full of gadgets . . . but, as with so many other things, it becomes a matter of scale. Soon, thousand-dollar rods will become de rigueur for all of us; already, reels come in at three hundred dollars, and that’s not counting an extra spool. Magazines, the worst of them, create fly-fishing “personalities” who are then used to sell things no one needs, and even publications having nothing whatsoever to do with the sport feature fly fishing in their ads, using it to move everything from Jeeps to whiskey. (In the old days, if you saw a flyfisher in an ad, guaranteed he was holding the reel wrong side up; nowadays the ad men are slicker and everything looks authentic, albeit far too prissy and neat.) Fly fishing, like so much else in our culture, becomes a mystique that’s for sale.

  American consumerism at full throttle is not a pretty sight. A good many are confused by all the glitz, yet attracted to the sport just the same; they sense something spiritual may be had in being out on a river, something they can’t find anymore in their boardroom, their bedroom, or their church. These are the pilgrims, and it’s hard not to sympathize with them, even while, on their way to Canterbury, they let themselves be fleeced.

  Between them, the nabobs and the pilgrims, they’ve created a new style of flyfisher, one who wants gratification now; and is willing and able to spend plenty in order to accomplish this. Three hundred dollars a day for a guide, plus tip? No problem. Argentina, a lavish lodge, an imported American guide, a picnic hamper with three varieties of wine? Sign me right up. These men and women are very serious about their sport, grimly so, and, managing a joyless competence, building their resume of rivers, they’re always in a rush toward the next experience waiting on line, and have time to neither smell the flowers nor practice the ethical niceties of fishing etiquette.

  Just a few days ago, as I was working the river under a hot midday sun, a couple of the new breed blundered into my pool. One came in directly opposite me and maybe fifteen yards away; the other, the one with the teal-colored vest, came in just below me on the same side, giving me the ominous sense that like professional hit men they were deliberately boxing me in. In the old days etiquette would have required they ask my permission before venturing into either spot, or that they sit on the bank waiting until I had fished through the pool (the same etiquette demanding that I do so with considerate regard for their patience). Of course, they didn’t know about this, or perhaps they did, because neither one said anything to me at all, or even acknowledged my presence.

  “Hello.” I said it quietly at first, then much louder. “Hello!”

  This got the one opposite me to turn; he glared, remembered he wasn’t supposed to know I was there, put some surprise in his expression, managed a weak little wave. Sharing a pool with two boisterously eager interlopers is one thing, sharing it with two sullen time-servers is something else again, so I reeled in my line, went back to the bank, and started through the meadow downstream.

  An unsavory incident now became something worse. Having fished the pool for all of five minutes, the two darted back into the woods, got into their Jeep, drove downstream in order to beat me to the pool I was walking toward; they were already out there flailing away by the time I arrived, having positioned themselves so there was no room left for me to fish, even if by this stage I had still wanted to.

  Thinking back on this a few days later, I’m of two minds. Okay, idiots exist, in whatever sport, whatever pastime you care to name. Perhaps they were merely ignorant. Perhaps they fish so seldom, have so many pressures on them back at home, that they’ll do anything to catch a fish. Perhaps their fly-fishing school was a little weak in the ethics department. Perhaps they’ve read one too many of the ads or magazine articles, have bought into the competitiveness that has infected our sport (and yes, competitiveness was praised among the highest manly virtues in that little book of Mr. Maclean’s). Perhaps . . .

  Well, I can think of a lot of excuses for them. But there’s one thing I can’t excuse and that’s the grimness with which they went about their fishing. Whatever else these flyfishers were, they were not men who were enjoying themselves, and it’s this new sullenness, this new competitiveness, that’s poisoning our sport, not merely its sudden popularity, not merely the numbers.

  I would like to think that none of this affects my own enjoyment. I would like to think I could continue to fish the forgotten corners in the solitude I love, write my little essays of personal celebration, not have to worry about larger concerns at all. But any man or woman fully engaged in this enterprise will find they often fret and worry about the condition of their sport, eye new developments warily and with inherent distrust, so perhaps it’s not inappropriate to do some speculating in this line, if only as a kind of personal therapy, wondering out loud what the hell is going on.

  And what better time to draw a deep breath, take a look at the state of things, then at the change in millennium? Fishing antiquaries like to push back the dawn of fly fishing to remoter and remoter dates, instancing pyramid drawings of fishing poles with what appears to be yarn or feathers on the end, the prototype fly. But for all intents and purposes, it’s a method of catching fish that was “invented” sometime in the first millennium after Christ, perfected through the long centuries (with increasing speed during the last two hundred years), and is now standing poised to enter its second thousand years with far more practitioners than it has ever known before.

  At first fly fishing was valued for its taking qualities—the fact that when trout were feeding on the prolific insect hatches of spring it was far and away the best means of taking these fish from the river for food. Quite early in its development (at least as early as Charles Cotton, writing in 1676) it was discovered that there was a lot more to it than this taking power alone—that it was an extraordinarily interesting, graceful, and challenging sport, one that, with time, became increasingly divorced from its purely fish-taking function. By the eighteenth century it was caught up in the aristocratic sporting tradition, where doing things the hard way, simultaneously increasing the difficulties and simplifying the
means, was seen to be the highest sporting virtue. The American contribution to this . . . the peculiar genius of American fly fishing . . . was to take this highfalutin sporting notion and make it available to everyman, the aristocratic grafted onto the democratic. Written up by a boisterous sporting press and several brilliant popularizers, blessed by the raw material of seemingly unlimited water and fish, American fly fishing became where the action was in the sport; in fly-fishing terms, like so many others, the twentieth century was going to be the American century, where everyone got their shot at it, at least while those supplies of water and fish lasted.

  The American century is over, of course; what this means, in terms of fly fishing, is that we’re witnessing a perversion of what made our sport so special, a clash of the worst qualities of both traditions rather than a symbiosis of the best—the aristocratic hauteur and snobbiness taken up by a greedy democratic mob. It’s tempting to say that what American fly fishing needs is a heavy infusion of the older, purer aristocratic values, at least as regards fishing etiquette, where flyfishers who pride themselves on doing things right would disdain to enter a pool someone else was fishing, sneer in contempt at all the hucksterism, find interest in figuring things out for themselves, take their greatest pleasure from leaving the smaller environmental impact consistent with their presence on the river.