Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  As I grew older I became more and more determined to do whatever I wanted to do and now look upon it as an obligatory challenge. And an obligatory challenge means exactly what it implies: You suffer the aches and pains and ridicule along the way.

  If I have no balance, which is dangerous when you are crossing a swift river in waders, I would forgo the waders. I would cross the river anyway. People who know me have seen me do this time and again, without any comment about it. Besides, I rationalized that water was only cold in early June—by mid-June I didn’t need them. I’ve gone down in waders before—once when I was crossing the Norwest Miramichi alone. All of a sudden my feet were bobbing along like buoys and my head was slapping the rocks.

  It was not that much fun, but I did manage to pull myself out.

  One morning Peter decided to take the day off work.

  The river was just the right level, and filled with fish. It was early July, dark and fertile pools were the right temperature, the water was lowering after a night’s rain, and he hooked fish all day. Finally disgusted that he was hooking so many, and me none at all, he crossed the river and climbed a tree that tiered over the far bank in the shimmering summer air. I hadn’t a clue what he was doing, but I watched him as if I did. Every now and then I’d wave, just to pretend I knew exactly why he was thirty feet in the air.

  He crawled way out on a limb, which sagged with his weight, and looking down at the pool he began pointing out fish to me.

  “There,” he said. “There, there, there, and there,” he said, pointing at grilse lying in the run out from me, as if he was tapping with one finger on a giant fish tank. But even so, I couldn’t make them come for my fly. Peter mumbled something, I don’t know what, but I think it was: “David—are you brain dead?”

  And then: “Oh, a salmon—he’s coming—he’s coming—he’s—stopped. Throw your fly over him again.”

  Which I duly did.

  “Oh—here he comes. He’s coming—he’s coming. He—oh—he stopped.”

  This went on for the better part of an hour. Finally Peter crawled back down the tree and crossed the river, totally compressed. He picked up his rod on the far bank, and with his fly dangling haphazardly above the funnel of water at the bottom of the pool he started to cross the river again. To my astonishment and his, a grilse leapt right up out of the water and grabbed his dangling fly. He played it behind his back, as if he was wrestling with an invisible growth on his shoulder.

  Finally he landed it, playing it behind him all the while, and picked it up, looked at it, and threw it back.

  He began to mumble again, mumbling and mumbling away to himself. I think in a certain way he felt embarrassed. I know I did.

  After that day, I began to question everything. My line was too visible. Fish could make out my line—or they could see my boots. Fish could hear me, when they couldn’t hear anyone else. I would have to sneak up on them. I would have to come at them some different way. While other people just walked to the river, I would have to fall to my knees and crawl behind them through the woods.

  I kept changing flies after every few casts. I became suspicious of the fish. The fish knew who I was. I’d have to camouflage my feet—so they wouldn’t think I was me.

  There is a psychology to this of course and I am not the only beginner to have experienced it. It is quite simple and therefore remarkable, and it is a mental catch-22. In order to have the confidence to catch fish, you must have caught fish before. If you keep fishing without luck, then you are bound to lose this confidence, and once this is gone, nothing seems to work. This is the experience in every sport, and it is the same in fishing. So not only did my ability, such as it was, to catch fish diminish, my ability to cast, to read the water, to work a pool all suffered. And was to suffer for the better part of the first two summers. The statement that nothing succeeds like success is true.

  I had yet to experience this rather remarkable indication of expertise. When I found it in later years, I too felt I could take a fish in any pool given a chance. But it was an apprenticeship that most fishermen go through.

  I had, in fact, without realizing it, learned a great deal. I had learned where a fly would work and how a fish would show for a bug, how to cast a dry fly, and something about the water level and the fish’s desire to take. I knew about the chance you’d have in high water, or water dropping, or the time of day. I always remembered where a fish took, who took it, and what fly they were using.

  Later that summer we walked the south branch of the Sevogle every day. On it, there was a nice little run above Three Minute Pool (a pool we’d reach after a forty-five-minute walk over large boulders and stingers), and I decided to try it our last day fishing that year. I crossed the river in the rapids and walked up above the run, threw my line across, watched the fly work in the nice current, and realized I was casting for the first time not too badly. I had on a Copper Killer—a fly I always loved, and have put on at least once a fishing trip ever since.

  I worked my way down the meandering run, and a fish boiled for my fly. I rested it and worked towards it again. About two or three feet from the far bank, the fish, a grilse, took. I knew he was well hooked, and I knew I wouldn’t lose this fish. I didn’t. I also suddenly realized that once I began to fish alone, and travel the rivers by myself, I would gain confidence and have better luck. And I did.

  Seven

  EARLY IN THE SEASON of my third year I went down to Dave Savage’s to get some flies. He was sitting in his shed, alone. Across in the dooryard he had his large canoe on the trailer ready to go to the Restigouche, a red flag tied to the stern. His outboard motor, gas can and a poling pole were sitting upon the lawn. Evening was coming on, and the road was silent. Far away you could hear mothers calling out to their children, while below the Miramichi flowed out towards the bay, in a way that melted water and horizon in the far-off distance. A buoy light twinkled and everything was still.

  Savage was tying up flies to take with him. They were in part some of the same flies he would fish with on the Miramichi but he put a double barb on some, like the Black Dose, the White Ghost, Blue Charm, and he gave me a Black Dose to put into my box.

  As I stood there, near a hundred new flies, a dozen plumbed feathers, the last of the quiet evening sun came through the door’s window.

  I helped him load the equipment into the trailer. In the clear clean midsummer air he spoke fondly about the Restigouche, the only river he considers a match to the Miramichi.

  He came back from the Restigouche with a thirty-three-pound salmon, as my older brother and I prepared to go.

  We went there in late July of that year, by ourselves, in a small canoe with a motor that didn’t work well. It was large water, and wonderful huge pools, but we needed a much bigger canoe. Its ratio of big salmon to grilse was about three to one; just the reverse of the Miramichi. But this was our first try at it and we had to learn as we went, so to speak. On the Restigouche one fishes from the relative comfort of a canoe. You start at the top of a pool, cover the water your cast will allow you to reach, then drop down a canoe length, drop anchor, and start the process again. Sooner or later you will have covered all your water, and if lucky, have a fish or two to show for it.

  By the time we got packed into the camp, after running the canoe eight miles or so, it was supper hour. It was a glorious night, the camp was nestled in the hills and the river flowed beneath us, a canopy of stars and shooting stars over our head.

  Camps of course are always centres for nostalgia. And there are many reasons for it. The air drifts through patches of board and mattress that have been there thirty years, the men and women have come and gone. Whole lives are lived out in moments of exhilaration, in showing off flies that took a certain fish, or the way in which a fish was lost, after fighting you for thirty minutes. The camps will wait, and come alive again only when someone is in them. That is when the memory of the fish comes alive also. Camps generously hold the memories and ghosts of others. Of
other fish, of other days gone away. These memories, reminiscences, come alive in the glow of the propane lanterns, just at the edge of the corners.

  So fishing camps force themselves upon you, and become a place and a time for reverie and a certain spiritual readjustment. Those people who might never believe in a religious retreat will retreat to these camps deep in the woods near a living river, feeling the grace of the sun, seeing wondrous splendid stars, and, even if it is unconscious, re-examining their lives. For here is another life, not only the life of the fly and the rod, but a life that says that so much of our concerns—which we put so much stock in and trouble ourselves so much about—does not matter in the least. We have too much, we fret too much, we hoard away too much for ourselves. These camps can and always do tell us this if we listen to them and the water running below them. That human kindness matters, and companionship, and our love of and protection for those who are far away from us at that moment, but not much else.

  In the camp pool that first evening I hit a salmon but couldn’t keep it on. I saw its enormous belly roll over my fly as it tightened the line, before my leader went limp. But it was a great thrill, although I had caught two salmon the year before; I don’t think either of them went half that size. So it would have been a tough fight. Sometimes you present the fly in a wrong way for a fish to take well, but present it well enough for a fish to show or touch. Often the fish won’t come back. That night it didn’t though I fished over it for a long time, cursing myself for what I might have done wrong.

  The next day we were up early and out on the river. We got up at dawn, and spent most of the warm, clear day on the river. We travelled back and forth from one pool to the other, until our arms ached from casting. But unfortunately the motor we had gave us problems the entire time, especially travelling up against the current. At some places we would have to get out, and tinker with the engine at the water’s edge for an hour at a time. The river is wide, and the pools are large. If you are on your own the first time, it takes you a while to read them. If your motor is no good, you’re in a worse bind.

  So we did not have much success. Late on the second day my brother took off his pants, got out of the canoe, and waded the river. He found a small run about a mile below the camp that we hadn’t bothered with. He put on a butterfly. I sat watching him from the canoe, chewing tobacco and having a tea. (You can do both at the same time if you’re careful.) Suddenly I saw this huge shape come from a lay towards his little fly skittering across the run.

  When the salmon did take, an instant later, it almost tore the rod from his hand. It took him forty-five minutes to land. He was dead tired at the end of it. But one thirty-pound salmon made it a grand day.

  As he was playing it, wearing fishing vest and underwear, two canoes stopped to take pictures.

  In the camp on the Restigouche later that second night, after supper was over and I was outside chewing some tobacco, I thought of my uncles and my grandmother. The night was soft and warm. We had befriended the camp squirrel who would come down the spruce tree and wait on the bottom porch step for pieces of bread. This was where half of my life was from—my uncles and aunts.

  It seemed, however, that their lives were so removed from mine. They grew up in a much harsher environment. In the 1930s, things were much different on the river. The guides, for instance, who all seemed to wear ties, erectly posed in the old pictures I have seen. But it was always a harder and more uncomfortable journey for the sport.

  This environment has changed considerably and with it the rivers. The woods might be still deep or dark, but the journey into those woods is accommodating. When my uncles had to walk for miles through those woods, now a half-ton makes it in an hour or two. The land has been muted and stilled.

  I remembered my grandmother into her early nineties, the first time I took my wife to meet her. She came into the dooryard and grabbed my arms in hers, and shook them with her still strong hands, a kinsman of her blood. It was the last time I was to see her.

  She told me that she had never been to a circus or a dance. My mother’s family never spoke about their past. But it would come back in glimpses as I spoke with this frail, still active woman. Her sons, one died when he was a child, all went to work in the woods when they were little more than children themselves, and guided the American and Canadian sports.

  Back in my youth I would hear the stories of fishing at the table in the afternoons from uncles who came now and then from the great green-watered Matapedia, and fished and guided the sports along those sweeping rivers long ago, in large twenty-four-foot cedar canoes, with poles. This was far, far back in the 1950s when I was a child and the country was still innocent and ignorant, about what our resources were and what we could do with them. And the men who came to fish would look at those guides, I suppose, as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And many of these guides were my uncles.

  Sometimes when I see old documentary films about fishing on the Miramichi, I can relate them to old documentary films I’ve seen about fishing on the Amazon, or game hunting in Africa. They sometimes have the same flavour about them. Some of the men my uncles guided were essentially like Teddy Roosevelt shooting the rhino and the lions on his eighteen-month safari through Africa, with African guides, living off the land in tents. Like Africans, we were always in some way part of someone else’s hinterland. That, in a way, is our life as rural Canadians. But even if that is so, let us not be scornful of it or diminish its worth.

  The Teddy Roosevelts of the world continue to come here, like a man I once met in Montreal, not without the indecent naiveté to expect too much from the land we offer, completely, without knowing at times what it is truly worth.

  This was my reverie that night. But it was not harsh. It was a reverie tinged with a sad kindness. The Congo, the Nile, the Amazon, the Miramichi. One is not more peculiar than the other to the imagination of men living in the Midwestern cities, or in New York, or walking in the evening to some out-of-date empire club.

  Men, similar to Mr. Roosevelt, men like the great sharp-shooter, Mr. Boa, came here for caribou and moose. And they came here to fish as well. I suppose the guides they had might have acted out a part for them similar to the part Mr. Roosevelt’s guides did. Always with smiles and running about to make sure things were done well. (This is never to deny Mr. Roosevelt’s greatness as an adventurer or his boundless courage.)

  Yet there is something that would always separate the guide from the sport. Sometimes it was as different as life knowledge compared to acquired taste.

  And that is the indigenous quality of the Miramichi and its guides. They take these sports to places the sports have never been in search of those fish that those sports remember they have searched for as far back as the Mother Goose stories of their childhood. It becomes in part a certain longing to make good on the promises you made to yourself as a child. And I thought of this as I fed the little squirrel its bread.

  Once one of my uncles, at the age of seventeen, was walking into a camp one day in midwinter. He was travelling with an older man, who became tired halfway along on their journey, on this cold day in January of 1935. My uncle built a fire and tried to warm him, and get him moving again, but, as the afternoon wore on, it was to no avail.

  “You go ahead,” the older man said. “I’m ‘bout done.”

  “You’ll freeze in the night before we can get back to you,” my uncle said. The wind had come up strong and there was a palpable taste to the air.

  But the older man said he was unable to walk. That his legs had given out.

  “I did the only thing I could,” my uncle said.

  “What was that?”

  “I carried him.”

  My grandmother, who cooked for sports and men all her life, would never have expected anything less.

  I do not know which uncle was the greatest in the woods, nor would I make it a contest, but one, Richard Adams, became world famous as a guide. The most famous people he guided were Jimmy Carter and
his wife Rosalind. When Rosalind took a salmon that day they asked my uncle how much it weighed. He glanced at it—“Twenty-eight and a half pounds,” he said.

  When they weighed it the scales said: twenty-eight and three-quarters.

  He is a frail older man now, but until last summer he was still guiding and doing things, which he said you couldn’t learn in a book.

  That was my reverie, my source of reaffirmation, that night on the Restigouche. The little squirrel went home to bed, the propane light in the cabin flared out into the dark, the river ran on.

  The sports have their own stories; the guides have theirs. Sometimes on a hard day, it is harder on the guide than on the fisherman. The guide will begin to hate the river he loved for so long. If the fisherman is cranky or unsatisfied, and if the guide is conscientious, it is a hard go.

  Sometimes the guide will have to listen over and over again to the same hopes in stories told by people who believe in the esotericness of fly-fishing, without understanding much more of it than that.

  The meandering river, the sun just behind the trees, the fly dropped perfectly just at the right point in the pool, the line laid out so softly it gives a beat to the heart, and then from deep under the water in a hidden lay, a swirl and the line tightening. The guide knows this but still it is hard for him or her at times to act enthusiastically after forty straight days, rain and shine, on the river.

  Sometimes a guide will tell a fisherman he has seen a fish rise, just to keep interest alive.

  “You just raised a fish,” he will say. Sometimes a fisherman might know this isn’t true but hope keeps him silent. Or they will talk about how fishing was the week before. Or how it will be better the next day. Fishing can break your heart if you are between the good days. And this is how you can generally gauge things. If you get into a camp late at night, and people are talking about how well fishing had gone the week before, you are almost certain that fishing is going to be hard and slow.