A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  “Bring him in, Daddy! Bring him in!”

  Smart up to now, steady and patient, the sight of the huge fish so close to me made me lose my composure, and I all but threw myself at him, the bow wave of my lunge making him ride up onto the grass as prettily as if I had planned it that way in the first place.

  “You’ve got him, Daddy! Got him!”

  I was sweating at this stage, exhausted, with hardly the strength to climb out next to the fish. The kids came plunging down the cliff to stare, reach out their fingers to touch him on the side, see he was real. Celeste was there now, too, panting, sweating more than I was but yelling in happiness as she fumbled in the pack for our camera.

  We photographed it, the kids squatting behind me as I held him up, then—each one holding out a hand to have a part in it, count coup with the trout s strength—released him gently down the bank and watched as he swam away. It was only then that the father in me took over from the fisherman—and I could relax enough to see what I should have seen all along: my kids dancing in victory on the bank, Celeste beaming proudly . . . and not just them, but the wildflowers in the meadow grass, the pines that started behind the lake, the mountains in the distance . . . the wide, unspoiled Yellowstone country, the warmth and majesty of which we only now fully appreciated thanks to its magic embodiment in that fish . . . how it all coalesced into a huge and comprehensible planet of brightness, me lying there on the grass with my eyes closed under the dizzying press of it, a triumphant Hercules who would gladly take ten such planets on his shoulders, my kids in my arms as we wrestled and hugged in sheer delight.

  Put it down as the happiest, proudest moment in a man’s fishing life? Sure, go ahead, but it was a lot more than that, too. The happiest moment in his entire life.

  Part Five: The Long Autumn

  Private Water

  I hardly knew fishing clubs existed until I was invited to fish one. Occasionally I’d come across references in a fishing book to the old “club” water, hear of such along trout streams in the Catskills or on the Restigouche, clubs that took up many thousands of Maine acres or owned the rights to an improbably high number of Quebec lakes. I always associated them with high rollers, timber barons, old money, not my kind of world at all, and I was slow to pick up on the fact that fishing clubs exist on a much more humble and enjoyable scale as well, particularly in Vermont.

  I’m thinking of the kind of fishing club that got its start back in the 1890s, when hill farms were being abandoned and entire mountain valleys could be bought up for a song. Shares would be issued in a corporation (doctors, lawyers, teachers, the local gentry, though a rural, likable enough one), an engineer hired, a rock and earthen dam erected across the valley’s stream, a pond created, a clubhouse cobbled together, rules and regulations drawn up, an Indian name chosen to give just the right rustic flavor—and then the trout put in the pond, brookies usually, ones that were already dwelling in the stream, supplemented by larger fish taken from a nearby lake, transported by horse and wagon over rutted dirt roads in milk cans, the canoes and rowboats coming in on the next trip . . . a caretaker hired to watch over these and keep the wood box full, his wife taken on in summer to cook the meals . . . and there, Club Abenaki (Mohegan, Algonquian, Minnehaha) was in operation.

  The trick was to keep it in operation, change it as little as possible through things like land booms, depressions, and world wars. The result is that there exists today in Vermont six or seven clubs that have changed so little since the 1890s you half expect Teddy Roosevelt to meet you at the door, or Calvin Coolidge at any rate, wearing his favorite fishing hat, and on his face the kind of thin, yet comfortable smile he let only his friends see in these precious moments at ease.

  This is not just fantasy; the club I was invited to is proud of having had Silent Cal as one of its earliest members, and the very first thing I was shown when I arrived was the president’s battered fishing hat hanging ready on its peg in the event his ghost should ever need it.

  Catument, I’ll call this; on the smaller end of the fishing-club scale, it could still stand as representative of any. Its pond is about four acres in size, stocked with brookies and rainbows that grow just big enough to be interesting. The clubhouse was constructed partly of an old schoolhouse that was pulled by wagons up from town, and it sits on a rising lawn above the water, so old, so brown and weathered, it seems not only an organic part of the slope, but the fitting centerpiece of a compact and quiet valley where the land, sky, and water seem perpetually anchored in the early autumn of 1895.

  That’s outside. Inside, the identifying characteristic of any good fishing club is in the furnishings, the knickknacks, the pictures that hang lopsided on the walls. They have to be old and vaguely corny (a genuine antique would look out of place) and they have to be arranged with no thought whatsoever for effect. Catument gets top marks in this respect. Fishing cartoons from the thirties and forties hang on the walls, the H. T. Webster kind that play off the old fishing widow jokes or the small boy with worms. Mixed in with these are badly focused photos taken when color film was in its infancy, handwritten lists of bird sightings, a page or two from ancient fishing logs showing enormous one-day catches . . . and then a fireplace warm with a fire that hasn’t gone out in a hundred years, the kitchen with its oversize zinc sink, the cupboard full of tumblers that have the smoky patina even clear glass takes on if you pour enough bourbon into it over the years . . . and then (glass in hand now, going back out to the club’s main room) the piano that hasn’t been tuned in fifty years, the boxes of snelled flies resting on top (Parmachene Belles, Edson Tigers, Montreals), the playing cards, the Scrabble games, the old magazines . . . the wobbly rocker, the wobbly card tables, the dilapidated couch . . . all of these giving the kind of feel it would be impossible to duplicate without at least seventy years of happy and relaxed usage, and a place I fell in love with the moment I walked in.

  Terry Boone, my friend and host, is the club’s historian, guiding spirit, and very much its chief attraction, at least for this visitor. Short and trim, bearded like a sea captain, the kind of stylish dresser once described as “dapper,” he’s a preacher’s son from West Virginia who’s entirely self-taught—the kind of man who can run a radio station with one hand while inventing a best-selling board game with the other, finding time along the way to consult on political campaigns, volunteer for a dozen charities, and take on the salmon-restoration effort of one of the largest conservation organizations in the country. Catument is the only place where you have a chance of catching him motionless, at least for a few minutes; after unpacking our groceries (Catument doesn’t have a cook; members bring their own food and prepare it family style in the kitchen), he had a few projects to talk over with the caretaker, so I grabbed my fly rod and headed down to the pond alone.

  When the fishing is on at the club’s pond you can catch dozens, without regard to flies or tactics; when it’s off, the fish are extraordinarily fussy, and it’s easy to get skunked. No matter how long stocked trout live in a stream, they tend to remain at the same low level of imbecility, whereas in a pond they become very smart very fast, and these Catument rainbows, get a September midge hatch going, can be inscrutable opponents for even flyfishers of long experience.

  This is rowboat fishing—add that to the soothing, relaxed effect the club induces. I rowed to the east end of the pond, got a good look at the osprey that camps out there in a dead pine, then let the breeze drift me back toward the dam, picking up some nice fish on a Hare’s Ear nymph twitched just below the surface.

  Terry had the swordfish on the grill when I got back, but there was still time to help myself to some cheese and crackers, sip some bourbon on the porch with his other guests, who had only just arrived. One of the things you learn about fishing clubs is that though the ostensible reason for their existence is fishing, talking is of even more importance—the kind of relaxed medium-small talk that can only be done in a setting of rocking chairs, wood fires, and porches. The su
bject is often fishing, sure, but it’s never limited to this, and usually has a way of coming around to subjects freely suggested by what can be seen off the porch: osprey and deer, sunsets and foliage, the natural small talk a Vermont valley tends to provide in autumn without any prompting.

  This was my first experience of Catument. The second was when Terry got married there—a bright October afternoon of such perfection that tears came to your eyes well before the actual ceremony to see how rich and sweet the autumnal note could be played. Chairs had been set up on the lawn leading down to the pond, with an end table taken from the porch for a makeshift altar. Karen Kayen, Terry’s bride, is a good friend of ours, a woman we admire hugely, so it was a perfect match in this respect as well, and just to see Terry’s happy smile as she joined him by the pond was enough to get tears going in those who had successfully resisted the foliage.

  Karen’s father stood to the side playing a soft, lyric sonata on his violin; as the notes faded away across the pond, the minister stepped in and had them recite their vows. Many of those in attendance were dedicated flyfishers, and they all—how shall I put this?—stared with special intentness at the pond with its trout, so a good half of the congregation seemed to be leaning toward the water, as if caught in the breeze. None of them leaned far enough that they actually went fishing, but I know what they were thinking since I was thinking it myself. Anticipating this, in a very clever piece of strategy, Terry and Karen had arranged for gravlax to be served with champagne immediately after the ceremony was over—those rich salmon appetizers there is simply no resisting. It was the best wedding I’ve ever attended, hands down. The pond, the foliage, the warm October breeze; given a choice, who wouldn’t wish to be wafted toward their future from a setting so fine?

  If Catument is one of the smallest and simplest trout clubs in Vermont, then Lake Tanso is among the largest and plushest. With three ponds and a connecting brook trout stream, several hundred acres in one of the steepest, most remote notches in the Green Mountains, a hundred-year-old clubhouse that can accommodate seventy overnight guests, and a loyal membership devoted to keeping things the way they are always been, Tanso is one of those miraculous Shangri-Las you have no suspicion of until you’re actually standing in its center, then, upon leaving, have trouble believing you were ever actually in at all.

  I came to it first on a rainy September morning when the clouds hung so low over the ridges they seemed to merge into the placid water on the pond’s far end. There was a fire going in the fireplace (three times bigger than Catument’s, with three times as many rockers pulled up in front), but the lodge was deserted, and I had to poke around the empty rooms until I found my host, Dick Connors, sitting where I should have figured he’d be sitting—out on the porch with the geraniums, rocking contentedly with his pipe, staring out at the rings pushed into the water by rising trout.

  “Good to see you!” he said, getting up to shake my hand. Then, a second later, reaching behind him to the wooden pegs that held his rod: “What are we waiting for? Let’s catch some fish!”

  The largest pond is over eight acres, and thick with brook trout and rainbows. They reproduce naturally here, at least the brookies, and each season fish are taken upward of three and four pounds. As at most fishing clubs, there’s a continual debate in progress about whether the pond’s natural food supply should be supplemented by feeding, and at Tanso those in the proactive camp win. Two coop-like contraptions are mounted on platforms on either end of the pond. Inside is fish food, and an automatic timing device that twice a day casts pellets out in a broad circle. The trout have learned to expect this, and the shark-like frenzy that erupts when the timer goes off is something to see. Visiting fishermen immediately try to catch one of these monsters, but it’s impossible, even if you have a fly that resembles a food pellet; like junk-food addicts, these fish can spot the difference between a real Twinkie and a fake one in a quick supercilious glance, and the only thing to do is wait until their jag wears off, and a size 24 Gray Midge once again begins to look palatable.

  Dick is a school superintendent in a midsize city that’s seen better days—no more grueling a job now exists in this country. At Tanso, out in the boat, he seems like a man who has had a very heavy weight temporarily lifted from his shoulders; when it comes to the ponds, the fish, the mountains, he wears his heart on his sleeve.

  “Deep spot here, might try a leech. Tommy North caught a four-pound rainbow here last week. Not a bad summer—decent hatches until August. Hey, is that a bear? Saw one yesterday when I got up to row coffee out to some of the old fellas. Whoops, rise up ahead, two o’clock. Think you can reach him if I turn us around? God, I love the look of those clouds! Smell those leaves!”

  Only on Scottish lochs, fishing under a similar kind of mist, have I sensed such perfect self-containment, as if trout were the only purpose in life, water the medium in which the purpose dwells, a rowboat the magically suspended derrick by which the purpose can be mined. And, as mentioned, I love fishing in rowboats. Tanso has a whole fleet of them, docked inside a long weathered boathouse that dates from the turn of the century. Lapstreaked, the long wooden kind with two pairs of davits, they’re just heavy enough to withstand some wind (any good rowboat is heavy), and just broad enough you can stand up in them to cast. There is something about the yielding sensation a rowboat creates in the water, the way it responds so fast to the slightest leverage, that makes you feel as if you’re combing the water, and it’s the kind of intimate gesture that makes you feel perfectly at one with it, a craft the water somehow likes.

  The various streamers of mist eventually found one another, fell as a solid curtain of rain that drove us back to the boathouse. From the club’s long porch came a deep drawn-out sound I thought at first was the call of a moose (or the mountains yawning), but which turned out to be one of the young women who worked in the kitchen blowing on a conch shell to signal it was time for lunch. And what a lunch. Homemade potpie, a huge spinach salad, Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia washed down by coffee laced with good Vermont cream. Tanso is the kind of club where wonderfully prepared meals are a big part of the attraction—not just the food, but the easy kind of talk that comes when the fishing is right outside the window and you know it will wait until you’re done.

  A few other members drifted in now, including Dick’s mother and father, who live not far away. The club has members all over the country, but the ones who live within driving distance use it the most, especially in autumn. Dick’s father showed me around the clubhouse. Like Catument’s, it’s decorated with old black-and-white photos from the club’s early days, cartoons cut out of newspapers fifty years old, joke flies made of coat hangers, duck feathers, and ribbons, piles of old word games and Reader’s Digest condensed books. The bedrooms are small and simply furnished—the bedsteads the old-fashioned iron kind even a hurricane couldn’t shake, and on top are folded army blankets of thick green wool.

  We fished again after lunch. Three or four boats were out now, but they hardly dented our sense of solitude. That’s another nice thing about rowboats: so slow is their locomotion that there is a natural tendency to remain pretty much in the same spot, focus only on the water within reach . . . and Dick and I talked about whether this might be the simple low-tech solution to overcrowding on trout water everywhere—require everyone to fish in rowboats.

  Still-water fishing is static enough that it bores some people, and often in springtime it bores me, but not in autumn; there’s a relaxed feel that goes down well with the weather, the whole autumnal package of pleasurably sad regrets. Back in the shallows where the inlet came in I lost a nice fish, then landed one that was big enough to make up for my disappointment—a brookie dressed for autumn, with so much color and vibrancy I was half afraid to take it in my hand, convinced that, like the bright golden leaves that clung to the trees above us, its beauty would burn. All the more reason to release it in the water; I reached my fingers down to the hook, twisted it gently, and saw the sca
rlet drop back into the amber-colored transparency from which it had emerged.

  Every now and then I’ll be asked, in what I’m sure is a deliberately offhand manner, whether or not I might be interested in applying for membership at one of these clubs. It’s tempting, since the financial end of it is surprisingly reasonable. At Catument, you pay for an initial share plus yearly dues; at Tanso, you also pay each time you come, at least for room and board; in this respect, it functions like a small private hotel, so there’s an economic incentive to have as members’ young families who will use the lodge often.

  So far I’ve always turned down these invites with thanks. We have many of these kinds of delights very close to home free of charge, and the prospect of being on a waiting list for five years or more, any waiting list, is more than my patience can handle. I’m not a particularly clubbable sort of guy, which is also part of it, though perhaps I’m being overly shy in this respect; sitting on those porches, sharing that bourbon, I’ve found the members of both clubs to be an interesting and surprisingly varied sort, and if the conversation turns momentarily to the events of the larger world, you’re apt to find you’re talking to as many liberal Democrats as reactionary Republicans, the one common denominator being a healthy conservatism toward any changes in the club’s own domain.

  There are lessons in this kind of stewardship that are applicable to public waters. The state of Vermont owns a pond over in the east-central part of the state, the site of a fishing club that couldn’t pay its taxes. It’s now run as a fly-fishing-only park (pay as you go, reservations required, two-fish limit), and an excellent one, combining the access of public fishing with the restricted numbers of a club. I fish there often in the fall, again using rowboats (aluminum ones, alas, a material that should be used only to wrap sandwiches), and find it has very much the same feel as Tanso, even to the clubhouse, which is not only used for conservation-related conferences and wildlife seminars, but offers simple lodgings for the night.