The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors

by Ian Frazier

  Deren looked at me. “That’s a big river,” he said.

  On the inside of the door to his shop Deren has posted what is probably his most famous maxim: “There don’t have to be a thousand fish in a river; let me locate a good one and I’ll get a thousand dreams out of him before I catch him—and, if I catch him, I’ll turn him loose.”

  For Larry Madison, a wildlife photographer and magazine editor who often fished with Deren thirty years ago, a thousand dreams were hundreds more than his patience could stand: “Jim would get in a pool and just pound it all day. I’d say, ‘Oh, Christ, you been in there for ten hours and you haven’t had a hit. Let’s go home.’ Not him.”

  Fishing is worth any amount of effort and any amount of expense to people who love it, because in the end you get such a large number of dreams per fish. You can dream about a fish for years before the one moment when your fly is in the right place, when something is about to happen, when you hold your breath and time expands like a bubble until suddenly fish and fisherman feel each other’s live weight. And for a long time afterward the memory of that moment gives you something you can rest your mind on at night, just before sleep.

  (The last word I had from Deren came via my brother-in-law, John Hayes. A few months after this article appeared, in 1982, I moved to Montana. That December, John stopped by the Roost, and Deren asked why I hadn’t been coming around. John said that I was now living in northwest Montana. Deren said, “Tell him, ‘Don’t drown.’” Jim Deren died, and the Angler’s Roost closed, the following year.)

  ON THE AUSABLE

  On the West Branch of the Ausable, an Adirondack river three hundred miles north of Manhattan, the stone looks the same as the stone downstate, only wilder. Big rocks of the kind that people sun themselves on in Central Park spill down the bed of the river, which sometimes pools around them and sometimes rushes by, white and fast; granite boulders the light gray or rose-pink of building fronts sit in mid-current in skirts of eddies; smaller boulders on the stream edge make a chain of bathtub-sized pools filled by small waterfalls. Looking into some larger pools from above, you can see sharp-edged blocks of granite lying toppled on the bottom. Tea-colored water pours steadily over lips as smooth as subway stairs. Cliffs of granite climb from the river in small terraces of pine and alder. Crotches between streamside boulders collect bunches of driftwood, along with spiderwebs and pine straw and pieces of broken picnic cooler lids and wads of fishing line. The underwater rocks are so slick with gray-green algae that you have to grope along each one with your foot as you wade. Felt-soled boots are a must; wading staffs, too. The smooth granite of the big boulders, cool in the morning, warm on a sunny afternoon, does not give you much to grab on to when the current starts to pull. In the fast sections, the sound of the main channels is so loud it overpowers the smaller noises of streamlets at the edge. Underneath the rushing is a deep, muffled grinding of the rocks in the bed. The sound is like a train passing under the street. I don’t wade out in mid-current unless I really need to. At a place miles from any town I saw a boulder a ways out in the river with a strange marking. Slipping, sliding, turning sidewise against the current, nearly falling, I waded to it. The mark was a borehole, a hole drilled for blasting at a quarry or a construction site. There is an old quarry near the river someplace far upstream. I climbed onto the boulder, noticed a likely place I couldn’t have reached before, braced my knee in the borehole, cast. My dry fly, an Ausable Wulff, had less than a second to sit on some slack water before the current would snatch it. A rainbow trout shot to the surface, took the fly, dived.

  In 1950, the angling writer Ray Bergman, in his book Trout, described the West Branch of the Ausable:

  A river rife with fishing legends, the home of numerous trout; a stream wildly fascinating, capable of giving you both a grand time and a miserable one; a stream possessing a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde temperament and a character strong enough to spread its fame from one corner of our country to the other. The Ausable commands your respect. It tests your skill and ingenuity. It is not a stream that will appeal to the timid, the weak, or the old. You like it best before you reach the age of forty. After that you wish you had youthful energy so that you could enjoy it as you did before the years of striving for existence had sapped your strength and made you a bit fearful of slippery rocks and powerful currents.

  He does not mention the blackflies. When I stepped from my car late one morning in June, the sunny forest of conifers and hardwoods directed them at me like a ray. I got back in the car immediately and drove to Au Sable Forks and bought some Cutter insect repellent in a solid tube. At the elementary school there, it was recess; kids stood around on the playground twitching and swatting. I rolled the repellent over all exposed skin, stinging that morning’s razor cuts. On the river, when I began to sweat—chest waders can be suffocating—drops flavored with repellent got into my mouth and made my lips tingle. The flies orbited me at several quantum levels, chewed my forearms through my shirtsleeve vents, made inroads under my collar, took long excursions between T-shirt and skin. I continued upstream, swatting and casting, slithering over rocks, splashing, stomping down brush. I didn’t see a single fish. Nothing touched my dry fly, I got no strikes on my nymph. It began to rain lightly, then to pour. I decided to go back to the car. I left the river and climbed a steep cliff and got lost. I found an old logging road, followed it to a gravel road. By a hard-to-explain theory, I reasoned that if I just kept turning left at every intersection I would end up at the car. The theory turned out to be correct; however, the counterclockwise loop I described in the process covered perhaps five miles. I went up and down hills, on paved roads and unpaved. Rain fell so hard it made a loud noise on my hat. Even the money in my wallet got wet.

  This particular trip, I was going nuts because I had not caught a fish in a while. In fact, I had fished two days on the river the month before without catching anything at all. People say, “Well, it’s nice just to get out.” But when you’re not catching anything, a heron flies by with wings creaking like a wooden pump handle, and a kingfisher ratchets over the water, and a beaver with its hair slicked back swims at you and spots you and pounds the water with its tail as it dives, and a robin flies back and forth across the river with something in its bill on each return trip, and a cedar waxwing stops in midair to snatch an insect, and a white gull flies along the river course and disappears around a bend, and two woodcocks go up, one after the other, from a patch of alders, and bluets and violets and purple trilliums and swamp buttercups bloom along the bank, and it all seems vaguely to make fun of you. I’m not really there until I catch a fish. I reached the car, finally, and took off my stuff and drove, soaking wet, to another place on the river without stopping to eat.

  The West Branch of the Ausable contains lots of different kinds of water, from rapids to dammed-up narrow lake to waterfall flume to deep pool to slow, semi-marshy meadow stream. Actually, that’s almost in reverse order. The river’s upper reaches, near the town of Lake Placid, flow over mud-and-sand bottom through a level valley, sometimes past an expanse of potato fields. I had seen big fish rising on that upstream section the year before. It is thirty or more river miles from Au Sable Forks, about twenty by car. I parked behind several other cars at a one-lane bridge over the river. Fly fishermen were standing in the water upstream and down. I walked a long way upstream and emerged from the brush and saw another fisherman. I continued until I couldn’t see anyone. I was hoping to coincide with a hatch of the big mayfly called the green drake. A big hatch or spinnerfall of green drakes can make the river percolate with feeding trout.

  As soon as I stepped into the river, a mayfly disengaged itself from the surface film and flew waveringly by me. I snatched it from the air, saw that it was a green drake, and ate it. Mayflies taste a little like grass stems, and have a similar crunch. Once, I was fishing the Sturgeon River, in Michigan, with my friend Don when drakes began to hatch, and the trout fed so eagerly, chasing insects five feet across the su
rface and coming clear out of the water and slapping logs with their tails and gulping and splashing, that we got hungry, too. We began to grab insects from the water and the air. They were like hors d’oeuvres, little winged shrimp. They left a bitter aftertaste and a dryness, but no other ill effects, and they do fill you up.

  This time I saw no drakes after that first one. The black-flies were as bad here as downstream. On my way I had passed a man fishing in beekeepers’ netting. I fished listlessly and hopelessly. Two guys came by spin-fishing from a canoe and politely dragged it through a shallow channel rather than disturb the deep channel where I was. They asked if I was having any luck (that’s what you ask, I’ve found, in the East; out West, the query is “Doin’ any good?”), and I said no, and they said they’d just started. Hours later, I still hadn’t caught anything. At least the wading here was easier than in the rapids. I ambled with the current, waist deep, half buoyant, bouncing along like someone walking on the moon. I got out and went through brush when I neared other fishermen. The river began to take on that sort of metallic color of a river with no fish in it. I kept casting out of nerve reflex and changing flies faithlessly. The guys in the canoe paddled by again; they had been downstream and were now just cruising around. At my question, the guy in the stern reached down, fumbled for a moment, and, with both hands, lifted one of the biggest rainbow trout I had ever seen. It was two feet long, its belly sagged, its silver sides had just begun to fade in patches of discoloration.

  This revived my concentration wonderfully. I tied on a weighted fly meant to imitate a crayfish—I had noticed bleached shells of crayfish claws in mud along the bank—and flailed it all over the river. It was the size of a hood ornament and caused me to flinch and duck as it whistled past. I lost it on a birch log. I tied on another fly and kept flailing. Rain began to fall again, and lightning flashed. As I approached the pool under the one-lane bridge, the guy who was fishing there left. I moved up to and past where he had been. Close to the bridge I saw a fish hit the surface—the first rise I had seen all day. I tied on a White Wulff—a fly that resembles the green drake. I cast, watched the fly float among raindrop splashes. A fish rose, and I set the hook. I knew from the fight that this would be a decent-sized fish. I maneuvered him alongside and scooped him up in my net.

  I am tempted to lie about how big he was, because it sort of embarrasses me to have been so pleased with a sleek, plump brown trout of no more than twelve inches. But there it is: I felt fine. Calm, justified, highly skilled, even a little dangerous. I released the trout and stepped from the river into the Adirondack scenery, to which I now belonged. I walked to my car. Up ahead, I saw the ski-jump towers used in the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. One tower is ninety meters high and the other is seventy. Lights to warn airplanes blink on top of the taller one. The rest of the structures were dark against the dim gray sky. John Brown, the abolitionist, is buried a few hundred yards on the other side of the towers. He had a farm here in the 1850s, when he helped to build a community of free blacks, called Timbucto. A New York abolitionist gave the colonists the land, but John Brown paid for his own farm. After he was hanged for the raid on Harpers Ferry, his wife brought him back here by train, boat, and wagon. Eleven of his sons and followers lie in the small cemetery with him. John Brown loved this place, and pointed out the beauty of the scenery to his children. The mountains—Whiteface, Marcy, and others—reminded him of the fortresses in the Alleghenies he had planned as refuges for the slaves he would free. He lies next to a cabin-sized outcrop of granite in his former front yard.

  Another morning, my wife and daughter dropped me off at the river near the ski jumps. They were going to Santa’s Workshop, a little-kid amusement park in Wilmington, and would return in the evening. The day was hot and still. Trout were rising all up and down the river, feeding on tiny mayflies called tricos. These insects are the size of half a little-fingernail paring, or smaller, and the artificials that imitate them require tiny hooks with tiny eyes attached to wispy, hair-fine leaders. Working in such dimensions is right at the limit of my patience and dexterity. Many anglers ignore the trico hatches altogether. I found a fly that looked good in my box of tiny ones, and tied it to an 8X leader. Casting something so light and so hard to see is an activity bordering on mime. Finally, I put the fly more or less where I wanted it, and spotted it after it landed, thanks to its white wings. Fish rose all around it but ignored it. I switched to another fly—same result. I tied on tiny fly after tiny fly. The fish continued to rise eagerly. My flies floated unscathed through rising fish like plucky couriers through bomb explosions in a war movie.

  I worked my way far downstream and stopped at a gravel beach for lunch. A water snake zigzagged fast across the surface, in what looked like a shoelacing race. A hummingbird approached a honeysuckle bush in a series of right-angle lines, emerging from each blossom with a small, businesslike chirp. Suddenly I decided I should be fishing someplace far from where I was. I took off downstream, going overland through the brush so as not to disturb the water. There had been plenty of rain, and the bottomland was especially jungly. My too-small waders caused me to walk penguin-style—a style that inhibited leaps and vaults. I suffered several pratfalls. I thrashed through deep brush for forty minutes or more. At one point, a dead tree had fallen onto the dense willows and alders, providing a kind of elevated highway. I walked on the tree until a rotten part of it gave and dumped me into the understory. More plunging and thrashing. I emerged onto a redmuck section of riverbank and breathed deep and looked at my watch. It was gone.

  The watch had been my father’s, a gift from my mother inscribed with a motto and the date of their marriage. She gave it to me after he died. My mind swerved toward panic, imagining the sad-sack story I would tell my wife, and how sorry she and my sisters would be for me. I looked back at the brush I’d been in for half a mile. No way, man. Then I took off my waders—I had ripped out the crotch in the brush—and put my wading shoes back on. The watch must be somewhere. It was shiny metal. I had time before dark. Once I got back in the brush, it all looked the same, and I could not find where I’d been. I found boggy places with no footprints in them. I kept going, tacking back and forth. Off to the left, through the green gloom, I recognized the fallen tree I’d walked on. I climbed on it again, traced my path to the place I’d fallen. Suddenly, among the nondescript broken gray branches below, I saw the brown of the leather watchband, and there it was, there the watch was! I held it in my right hand and raised it in the air and hoorahed.

  (1993)

  ON URBAN SHORES

  My friend Tim and I used to hit golf balls into the water from the shoreline of lower Manhattan. Tim ordered the balls by the gross, used, from a golfing magazine; they had scuffs, smiles, spray-painted dots, and legends like “Tri-County Challenge—’80” and “Lost by Dan Trivino” and “Molub-Alloy The Metallic Lubricant” and “Maintenance Supply Co. Huntersville N.C.” We told ourselves we were working on our drives. All we needed was a place open to the water; usually, we could find cracks in the asphalt or concrete big enough to fit a tee. We picked our targets. Once, I tried to land a ball on a mattress going out with the tide on the East River. I didn’t succeed, but it would have been cool if I had. Once, I bounced a flat, hard drive off the stone base of the nearer tower of the Manhattan Bridge. A following shot struck the inside of an immense, upreaching I-beam, ricocheted to the opposite inside, then sped diagonally down into the water. Tim hit a beauty across a dredged inlet by a construction site at Battery Park City, the ball socking into a distant pile of sand and burying itself in a small landslide. One that he aimed at a passing container ship fell just short of the hull with a white exclamation point of a splash. My best shot came from a pier on the Lower East Side one winter morning with five inches of snow on the ground. Placing the ball on snow had a psychological effect on me, and I hit perfect drive after perfect drive. A cargo ship came along, well out in the channel. I took careful aim, kept my head down, and stroked one of
those unstoppable balls that seem to rise like music, octave by octave—would it hit that glass housing near the bow? would they call the Coast Guard?—as the ship moved but not fast enough: ship and ball intersected, and a puff of snow came from a metal hatch cover amidships. Half a second later we heard the impact’s muffled clang. The name of the vessel was the John B. Carroll.

  Just after dawn one day, we were hitting off an abandoned pier by Rutgers Slip, upstream from the Manhattan Bridge, when a little guy who had been sitting there on a folding metal chair came over and began to talk to us. Pointing to the water, he said, “See that? Those’re anchovies. Like you put on pizza.” Until then, I had never looked closely at the water of the East River—assuming the worst about it, I suppose—but now I observed that it was indeed full of silver-sided baitfish swirling and boiling like noodles in soup. The school was thick down as deep as you could see. The guy continued to talk about anchovies and other subjects as we continued to hit. He had a hand line with what looked like a piece of limegreen surgical tubing for a lure. When he left, he picked up from among some broken pallets a big striped bass he had caught. We had not noticed the fish before. He carried it off—to sell in Chinatown, he said—by a scrap of plastic packing rope strung through its mouth and gills.

  Soon after that, we saw in The New York Times that the International Maritime Organization had issued a prohibition against ocean dumping of non-biodegradable plastics—a category that would include golf balls. To protect sea life, the ruling applied to all oceangoing vessels and to cruise ships’ profitable practice of selling golf balls for passengers to hit. We had suspected that what we were doing qualified as minor vandalism; now, thanks to the I.M.O., we were sure. So we stopped (there is now a net-enclosed driving range on one of the Hudson River piers we used to use), and I began to think more about the guy with the striped bass. I had read about stripers—the game fish that can grow to fifty or sixty pounds or more, the trophy species sought by thousands of oilskinclad surf anglers, the voracious schooling fish that sometimes chase mullet and menhaden and tinker mackerel up onto the beach, the anadromous swimmer that lives most of its life in the ocean and spawns locally in the Hudson River—but I had never fished for them.