Dam It
Until a few years ago, I’d lived my entire life in eastern—which is to say, suburban—Massachusetts. This part of the world is famous for its institutions of higher learning, its Green Monster, its high-tech industries, its liberal politics, and its intimidating traffic circles, which locals call “rotaries” and out-of-towners liken to Russian roulette in automobiles.
Conversely, virtually nothing has been written about the trout-fishing opportunities in eastern Massachusetts—not because there are well-kept secrets, but because there are no such opportunities worth mentioning. Some of the scummy streams that flow behind strip malls and through culverts support populations of stocked trout for a month or two in the spring, until the heat and drought and toxic runoff get them. Most of the ponds, regardless of water quality, are stocked, and the fishing can be quite fast in April and May if you’ve got a good hatchery-pellet fly and don’t mind a lot of competition.
Then, at last, I moved to southwestern New Hampshire, a hilly, heavily forested and sparsely populated region that fairly bubbles with cold, clean water. Every crease in the earth flows with a river, stream, brook, or rill. Big lakes and small lakes and millponds and kettle ponds fill every depression. The first year I lived here, I was a starving man all by myself at a lavish buffet. I flitted from stream to pond to river to brook, and everywhere I fished I found trout. And best of all, maybe—I rarely saw another fisherman.
So why, in the second week of the second July of my residency in this New Hampshire trout paradise, did I buy myself a non-resident Massachusetts fishing license?
Because my New Hampshire streams had withered and shriveled in an extended June drought, as freestone streams sometimes will do. I needed cold, moving water. I needed healthy trout to cast to.
I needed a tailwater, and there were none in my part of New Hampshire.
But there were two just over the border … in Massachusetts.
The Swift and the Deerfield rivers in western Massachusetts were actually closer to home now than they’d been when I lived in suburban Boston, and I fished each of them several times that summer, whenever the urge to wade cold water and cast to husky, insect-eating trout got the best of me.
And each time I crossed the border, I was reminded of how dependent I’d become on dams for my trout-fishing pleasure.
In my family, the word “dam” didn’t need an “N” on the end of it to be a curse. We worshipped any landscape that a river ran through. The Army Corps of Engineers, which apparently existed for the sole purpose of stopping water from running freely, was the devil’s army. My father believed that the army corps built dams because the rivers were there and that’s all they knew how to do. He called the corps “serial killers.”
Dams on the great New England rivers that once flowed freely to the sea—the Connecticut, the Merrimack, the Penobscot, the Kennebec, and on virtually all of the lesser oceangoing rivers and streams, too—blocked the spawning runs of the Atlantic salmon and, in effect, extirpated this great gamefish.
My father believed that fish were more important than factories, and as a kid, I absorbed his religion and made it my own. As I explored my local brooks and streams, I noticed that virtually all of them had been dammed, and that mills and various other waterworks had been built at the sites. Inevitably that’s where villages sprang up. In my hometown, one millpond sat on the site of a Civil War gunpowder factory and another next to an abandoned pencil factory. Many New England villages grew up around water-powered mills that ground corn and other grains or ran sawmills. Even today, you’ll find very few New England towns that some river or stream doesn’t run through.
Dams on bigger rivers powered turbines that supported textile and paper factories. Cities appeared here.
In all cases, free-flowing rivers and streams were halted, diverted, and manipulated for the power that the water-plus-gravity equation provided. The water that flowed over the tops of the dams into the river that resumed downstream was always the warmest and least oxygenated. The fish suffered accordingly.
Hating dams, of course, is like hating progress, or hating civilization, or hating people. It’s easy and satisfying and justifiable depending on how you interpret your information. When I was a kid, I liked fish better than people. That was part of my family’s religion.
A neighbor of mine here in New Hampshire, an early-retired CEO named Chuck with more money than he knows what to do with, not an angler but a nice guy nevertheless, kept inviting me to fish for the trout he’d introduced into the swimming hole he’d built for his grandchildren on his south pasture. I kept making excuses. Catching pet trout from a swimming pool didn’t interest me. But he kept mentioning it, and finally my wife suggested that I couldn’t make excuses forever. I should either just say “no” or get it out of the way.
I took the easy out and showed up one afternoon with my 4-weight and a box of flies. The rectangular “pond” covered about half an acre. Chuck said it was fed by water piped up from the aquifer and stayed cold year round. He’d stocked it with one hundred Kamloops rainbows that now had grown to about 16 inches on the special fish food he gave them.
A few dragonflies flitted around the edges of the pond. I saw no bugs on the vodka-clear water, nor did I see any sign that a fish lived there. Chuck was watching me expectantly, so I tied on a small black Woolly Bugger—if anything lived in this hole in the ground, it would be leeches—and cast it halfway across the pond. Let it sink. Twitched it back. Nothing.
Chuck was frowning at me as if I were an incompetent fisherman, and after a dozen or so futile casts, he said, “Watch this.” He produced a coffee can of grayish-beige pellets and cast them upon the water, which almost instantly began churning and flashing with hungry fish.
I found a size-16 Hare’s Ear nymph in my box—a fair imitation of a specially formulated, multi-vitamin fish pellet—tied it on, cast it out, let it sink, saw my leader twitch, came tight, and caught a very strong Kamloops rainbow from a man-made swimming hole in southwestern New Hampshire.
Chuck was pleased that I caught a trout from his pool. I was pleased to have fulfilled that social obligation. My wife was pleased that I didn’t offend Chuck or, especially, his wife.
The experience reminded me of the reasons I love fishing. It’s to transcend man-made things, to encounter wild creatures on their own terms, to leave civilization and to enter, as a predator, the natural world. Catching fish assures me that I’m an effective predator, and I need that once in a while. Otherwise, it’s about fishing, not catching. It’s about Being There.
And yet …
I delude myself. I’m a hypocrite.
By actual count, nine of my personal top-fifteen favorite trout rivers are man-made. They’re as synthetic as Chuck’s swimming hole.
They are tailwaters, coldwater rivers that flow from the bottoms of giant dams where once warmwater rivers flowed.
Aside from a few spring creeks and a couple of freestoners, my most beloved rivers wouldn’t harbor a single trout were it not for man’s willingness to corrupt the natural landscape for the sake of hydropower and flood control and crop irrigation and drinking water. They are: the Bighorn (created by the Yellowtail Dam), the Green (Flaming Gorge Dam), the Missouri (Holter Dam), the Frying Pan (Ruedi Dam), the Norfork (Norfork Dam), the Farmington (Colebrook Dam), the Swift (Windsor Dam), the Deerfield (Fife Brook Dam), the White (Bull Shoals Dam), and the San Juan (Navajo Dam).
Tailwaters, by definition, are fed by the consistently cold and fertile water that is released through the dams from the bottom of the reservoirs.
These rivers are angling destinations. They hold dense populations of large trout, they produce lavish and predictable hatches of mayflies and caddis flies, and they can be fished year-round. In many cases, trout fishing has supplanted power generation as the most lucrative product of the dam. Whole towns spring up around these rivers, with fly shops and boat rentals and outfitters, not to mention hotels and restaurants and gift shops, whos
e income depends on visiting anglers.
In spite of their artificial origins, tailwaters are infinitely interesting. No two pose the same challenges. Each has its own unique combination of water temperature, oxygenation, and fertility, each riverbed had its own characteristics, and each dam releases and holds back water according to its own—generally unpredictable—schedule. Insect populations vary. The sizes and densities of the resident trout differ in each tailwater, too.
Once I learned to turn my back on the dams, those towering engineering monstrosities that give tailwaters life, I experienced some of my most memorable days of trout fishing—and catching—on these man-made rivers.
Sometimes I feel like a traitor to my father’s damn-the-dams religion. But Dad never fished any of the great tailwaters. If he had, I like to think that he was enough of a Yankee pragmatist to join me in my comfortable hypocrisy.
Out of Season
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, the trout season opened on the third Saturday in April and closed on the last day of September. As much as school vacations, Christmas, and my birthday, the annual opening and closing of the trout season shaped the rhythm of my year. I celebrated Opening Day, fished hard and often all summer, and counted down those dwindling September weeks to the Last Day. Fishing was a warm-weather activity. Venturing to a river or pond in the fall or winter would’ve felt unnatural even if it had been legal.
Many years after I’d internalized these annual cycles so that they had become my own biorhythms, Massachusetts eliminated the closed season on trout. Suddenly you could cast for trout anytime.
Not me. The law had nothing to do with it. I had no desire to go fishing between the last day of September and the middle of April.
When that changed—as, of course, it inevitably did—and the idea of fishing in the fall or winter no longer felt criminal to me, I traveled to warm places like Florida and New Mexico, Argentina, and Belize.
Fishing in the northeast out of season, as I still thought of it, held no appeal for me. New England weather in those months ranged from mildly unpleasant to downright miserable. Besides, any trout that had managed to survive through the summer spent the cold seasons resting their bellies on the bottom like waterlogged driftwood waiting for warming water to inspire them to eat. You could always go fishing; catching was another story.
So when Phil Monahan called me in the third week of October and asked if I wanted to go trout fishing, my, “Yes, of course. I always want to go fishing,” sounded feeble and unconvincing to my ears.
Phil apparently didn’t hear me the same way. “Excellent,” he said. “This’ll be fun.”
“Where?” I said. “What’ve you got in mind?”
“A float trip,” he said. “On the Deerfield River in western Mass. It’s like floating the Madison or the Yellowstone. These brothers, Tom and Dan Harrison—Harrison Anglers, they call themselves—they earned their chops guiding in Montana and Chile. They’ve been floating the Deerfield for several years now. They think it’s as good as anyplace they’ve been.”
“The Deerfield, huh?” This interested me. I’d fished the Deerfield River dozens of times over the years. It was a big brawling tailwater, with a healthy and self-sustaining population of browns and rainbows. The Deerfield was a big-fish river, and when I’d managed to hit it on low or falling water, I usually had good dry-fly fishing.
But I’d only seen the Deerfield by wading the few accessible areas that I could find. Much of the upper several miles flowed through deep gorges and thick forests far from any road. The chance to experience the river from the inside out, so to speak, and to fish water that wading anglers such as I couldn’t reach, was enormously appealing.
We agreed to meet at the Charlemont Inn, on the banks of the Deerfield, at 9 AM two days before Halloween.
“Bring your six-weight,” said Phil. “We’ll be throwing Glo-Bugs and split shot, and maybe streamers. Don’t forget to wear layers. You never know about the weather this time of year.”
Prophetic words. When I left my house in southwestern New Hampshire the morning of our Deerfield float, the woods and fields lay white under the first snow of the season. Roiling gray clouds hung low in the sky. The temperature, according to my car thermometer, was 34 degrees.
I’d dressed in layers, and I brought my 5-mil neoprene duck-hunting waders, and woolen gloves, and a knit hat, and two pairs of socks. I figured I’d end up chilled to the bone anyway.
Tom and Dan skidded their rafts down a steep slope not far down from the river’s beginning at the Fife Brook Dam. Dan rigged me up with a pair of Glo-Bugs, several split shots, and a big strike indicator. The reservoir was full and the river was running high. “High water pushes the fish up against the banks,” he told me as we eased into the flow. “Fishing from rafts, we love high water.”
Dan rowed hard to keep us in position against the persistent, chill wind that was blowing directly downstream. Pretty soon it began to snow, and the wind grew teeth.
From my front seat in Dan’s raft I lobbed my indicator-Glo-Bug-split-shot setup along the current seams and mended it through the slots and steered it against the brushy banks. Now and then my indicator would dart down, and I’d lift my rod and come up tight for a second. “Gimme a look at your fly,” Dan would say, and sure enough, we’d discover that I’d left tippet and split shots and Glo-Bug on an underwater rock or sweeper, and patient Dan, whose fingers were no doubt as numb and chilled as mine, would rig me up again.
This, of course, was why they’d made autumn trout fishing illegal when I was growing up: Because otherwise anglers might actually go fishing, and they needed to be protected from their own dumb enthusiasm.
After an hour, our only excitement was seeing the indicator twitch and dip. I busted off the whole rig several times.
I was chilled, yes, and the trout weren’t cooperating. But I was hardly miserable. Experiencing the Deerfield this way, drifting between the steep timbered slopes of the gorge and through the rocky rapids and down the side channels, with no sign of human life except our two rafts, but many signs of wildlife, I was transported back to other big wild rivers I’d floated—sections of the Yellowstone and the Missouri in Montana, the Box Canyon of the Henry’s Fork, the Green River in Utah and the Bow in Calgary, the Class-4 rapids of the Rangitaiki on New Zealand’s North Island, and, especially, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho where it cuts through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.
You don’t need to be holding a fly rod to be utterly captivated by a wild river.
After a while Dan dropped his anchor. He pointed. “There. That current seam.”
On my third or fourth drift through the slot, my indicator dipped. By now I was a little gun shy. I hated the idea of busting off yet again. But when I lifted my rod, this time I felt the throb of a fish, and a moment later Dan netted a pretty rainbow of maybe 13 inches. “There are bigger ones down there,” he said. “The browns are starting to spawn, and the ’bows hold below them, sucking up their eggs.”
The next time my indicator disappeared, I came up hard on something big and strong. “Good fish,” I grunted.
A minute later Dan laughed, and then I saw what he saw. I had another average-sized rainbow, but I’d hooked this one in the tail. Tail-hooked trout pull hard.
A couple of drifts after that, when my indicator twitched, I felt power at the other end of my line, and when the fish rolled, Dan said, “Oh, yeah.”
It was a fat, yellow-bellied brown with spots that looked like drops of fresh-spilled blood. Dan measured it against his net. “Seventeen inches,” he said. “A worthy trout anywhere.”
Dan told me that his and Tom’s clients had caught trout up to 24 inches long from the Deerfield. “We don’t guarantee you’ll catch a two-footer,” he said. “But they’re here. In the summer when the high water pushes the fish against the banks, we drift dry flies along the bushes, and the biggest fish in the river are there, waiting to eat. When conditions are ri
ght, we have some really big days on this river. As good as any fishing in the Rocky Mountain West.”
We stopped for lunch on the sheltered side of an island. Phil and Tom joined us. We ate thick ham and turkey sandwiches, and compared notes. Both boats had taken several fish. We all agreed that the Deerfield, with snow spitting from dark skies, felt wild and starkly beautiful.
After lunch I resumed drifting my Glo-Bug rig along the current seams near the banks. When I predictably broke off on an underwater log, I asked Dan to tie on a streamer for me. I couldn’t bear asking the man to keep rerigging the complicated Glo-Bug setup anymore.
Dan shrugged. Reading his body language, I guessed he didn’t have a lot of faith in streamers today. But I was quite sure he was sick of tying knots with numb fingers. He selected a white Matuka. It looked good in the water.
Throwing streamers, double-hauling, stripping, lifting and casting again got my body moving. The blood began to recirculate through my extremities. It felt good.
Then my fly stopped, and when I strip-struck, I felt a heavy weight.
“Hey!” said Dan.
It was a hefty 17-inch brown, a twin of my earlier fish.
Then I had another hard hit, and then another, and during the hour or so that we floated after lunch, I must have had ten solid hits and several swirls. I hooked a few, landed two, and when Dan nosed the raft onto the bank at the takeout and I stepped out, the wind was driving the snow horizontally down the river.
But I felt almost warm, and I realized that I had a new attitude about out-of-season trout fishing in New England.
Tuna Fish Sandwiches and Other Inert Materials
High noon on the Bighorn. The August sun was blazing down from a cloudless Montana sky. The morning Pale Morning Dun hatch had petered out, so Andy and I pulled our driftboat against a high bank and tossed the anchor up into the grass. I sat in the stern seat, catching some shade from an overhanging cottonwood and eating a tuna fish sandwich. Andy, who considers eating a waste of precious fishing time, climbed out and began stalking a pod of sipping trout upstream from where I sat. I was admiring his stealth when a soft slurping noise made me turn to look behind me.
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