Trout Eyes

by William G. Tapply

  For a couple of hours, it was glorious. Andy landed and measured a 24-incher. I broke off two that looked to be about that size, and I spotted a few others rolling and swirling for mayflies that were surely bigger.

  Later, as we made the long trek around the lake back to the truck, I said to Martin, “I suppose you local guys are so used to the wind that you don’t even notice it.”

  He smiled and waved his hand at the white-capped water. “That, senor, is a very big wind. I have not seen wind like that in a long time. But,” he added with a shrug, “this is Patagonia.”

  21

  Volkswagen Cove

  In the last month of my father’s life, when he knew his days were numbered, fishing memories comforted and sustained him. He’d had a good life, he said. No regrets. He’d been pretty lucky.

  I knew I’d been lucky, too. Dad and I never had any of those silent agendas and unspoken tensions between us that so many men seem to have with their fathers. We’d been best friends from the beginning.

  One afternoon when I went into his bedroom, I found him lying there with his eyes closed and a smile on his face.

  I pulled up a chair. “You sleeping?” I said.

  He blinked his eyes open. “Nope. I was just thinking about that week on Upper Dobsis. How long ago was that?”

  “Over fifty years, I guess.”

  He nodded. “Remember Volkswagen Cove?”

  * * *

  We fished together as a family, my mother and father and little sister and I, once a year, on a wilderness lake in northeastern Maine, a different one each summer, for the one week in early July that Dad took for his vacation from the wars he fought in the city the other fifty-one weeks.

  My father, of course, loved fishing. It was never clear to me how my mother and sister felt about it, although the fact that they didn’t fish at all aside from that single week in July was a clue.

  Actually, typical of a not-quite-teenaged boy, I didn’t care about anybody else. I was obsessed with fishing. For me, this was the best week of the year.

  * * *

  It was an all-day car ride from our home in eastern Massachusetts to that part of Maine. The turnpike ended in Augusta in those days, and after that we bumped over winding two-lane country roads through the dusty summer countryside for several hours.

  That particular summer, our lake was near the end of an unpaved logging road owned by the paper company. Dad’s friend George Smith, an old-time Maine guide whom I called Uncle George, had permission to use it. Uncle George had built the log cabin on the other side of the lake by sledding everything except the logs across the ice in the winter. He kept a big Grand Lake canoe hidden in the bushes where the road passed closest to the lake.

  So late in the afternoon, after that long day of family togetherness in the car, the four of us loaded a week’s worth of food and fishing gear and clothing and bedding and games and books into the canoe, and we paddled across the lake to the one-room cabin on the other shore.

  It came equipped with two sets of bunk beds, a table with four chairs, knives and forks, plates and glasses, an icebox, three kerosene lanterns, a wood stove, and a soapstone sink with a manual water pump. Four rickety wooden rocking chairs sat on the porch for watching the loons. There was an icehouse and a two-hole outhouse out back.

  Twenty years earlier this lake, like all the other cold-water lakes in northeastern Maine, teemed with landlocked salmon. My father had fished there then with Uncle George. They trolled Grey Ghosts and Supervisors and Warden’s Worrys behind their canoe, and I think Dad’s memories of the fabulous salmon fishing on these lakes, which no one but George Smith and his sports fished, were what kept luring him up there.

  But by the time we started going to Maine as a family, white perch and smallmouth bass had invaded the entire watershed. The perch and the bass were more aggressive and more adaptable than the salmon. They foraged on the smelt that were the salmon’s main food source, and they probably foraged on baby salmon, too, and now you could troll all day without hooking a single salmon.

  My father was philosophical about it. Everything changes, he said. Anyway, we came here mainly to have fun as a family, not to fish for landlocked salmon.

  The decline of the salmon fishing didn’t bother me. I didn’t have my father’s memories of it. I thought white perch and smallmouth bass were swell.

  * * *

  We spent the entire first day circling the shoreline in the canoe. “Getting the lay of the land,” Dad said, meaning the water. Commenting on the area’s pristine wildness, he observed that it was a place “where the hand of man has never set foot.” My father, no Yogi Berra, mixed his metaphors with a purpose.

  My mother and sister trolled streamers. I sat in the bow, casting toward the rocky shore. Dad paddled. We didn’t expect to catch much, and we didn’t. A few sausage-sized smallmouths latched onto the streamer I was casting. Twice that day the trolled streamers intercepted a school of white perch, and my mother and sister brought in two or three apiece in rapid succession. Dad circled back so I could cast to them, and I caught few, too, before the schools went down.

  We kept twelve of them for dinner. White perch freshly caught from a clean cold lake and filleted and fried in butter over a campfire, said Dad, were the best-eating fish in the world, and after we completed our circuit of the lake that afternoon, he proved it.

  After supper, he looked at me and said, “Who wants to go fishing?”

  My mother and sister rolled their eyes. Eight hours in a canoe was enough for one day.

  “Me,” I said.

  The summer sun hung low in the sky, and the water’s surface lay as flat as wet glass. Dad headed diagonally across the lake. He paddled hard, in a hurry, and the canvas-covered canoe hissed through the water. He said he’d noticed something earlier in the day that deserved a closer look.

  We drifted into a big cove. It covered four or five acres, as I recall, and it was studded with giant boulders. Back then, I’d never seen a Volkswagen. But, in later years, Dad and I recalled that those round boulders looked like half-submerged Beetles, and we started remembering the place as Volkswagen Cove.

  He tossed me a deerhair bass bug. “Tie that on and cast it out there,” he said, and when I fumbled with the knot, he said, “Come on. Let’s go,” and I knew something had excited him.

  I lobbed the bug against one of those big boulders, let it sit, gave it enough of a twitch to make it burble, let it sit . . . and the water under it imploded. The bass bent my rod double and leapt several times and, when I finally managed to stick my thumb in its mouth and lift it from the water, I saw that it was easily the biggest smallmouth bass I’d ever caught. Accounting for the passage of half a century, and in the interest of caution, I’ll remember it as a 4-pounder, though I bet it was closer to 5.

  I held it up and showed it to Dad.

  He nodded. “Put it back and get that bug out there. It’s getting dark.”

  One or two smallmouths lived beside every boulder. They were all about the size of that first one, and they walloped those deerhair bugs.

  When darkness had fallen over the lake and Dad said we better head back to the cabin, we’d only fished a small part of the cove.

  In the mornings and afternoons of that week, the four of us had ourselves a relaxing family vacation. Sometimes we trolled streamers from the canoe. Sometimes we drifted and dangled worms over the side. Sometimes we just turned our faces up to the sun and trailed our fingers in the water. We swam, we napped, we picnicked, we poked around in the woods. We read, we played cards, we told stories.

  But every evening after supper, Dad and I paddled as fast as we could across the lake to Volkswagen Cove, and every evening monster smallmouths—no small ones—were waiting, eager to pounce on our deerhair bass bugs.

  * * *

  Dad had his eyes closed, remembering. “Best bass fishing of my life,” he said. “And it’s been a long life, full of fish.”

  “Best bass fishing of
my life, too,” I said. I hesitated. “There’s something I never told you.”

  He smiled. “I’m not surprised.”

  “After three or four evenings on Volkswagen Cove,” I said, “I was kinda wishing we could try someplace different. I mean, it was great. But it was—”

  “A sure thing,” said Dad.

  “Exactly. After a while, knowing exactly what it was going to be, even as great as it was, it got a little, well, boring.”

  “How come you didn’t say something?”

  “I thought you’d be disappointed,” I said. “You seemed to be having so much fun.”

  “That’s pretty funny,” he said. “I felt the same way. Kept going back because of you. A sure thing, no matter how good it is, wears thin after a while.” Dad turned his head on his pillow and smiled. “I’m glad we finally cleared the air between us.”

  PART V

  Fly-fishing Conundrums

  “A man can be a fish hog with a fly rod as easily as he can with a cane pole. Easier perhaps.”

  —H. G. Tapply, The Sportsman’s Notebook

  “As the old fisherman remarked after explaining the various ways to attach a frog to a hook, it’s all the same to the frog.”

  —Paul Schullery, Mountain Time

  “People who fish for food, and sport be damned, are called pot-fishermen. The more expert ones are called crack pot-fishermen. All other fishermen are called crackpot fishermen. This is confusing.”

  —Ed Zern, How To Tell Fish From Fishermen

  22

  Thinkin’ Mean

  A late-May evening at the Powerline Pool on the Willowemoc. I was blowing on my fly after releasing another nice 16-inch brown when a nearby angler reeled up and waded over towards me. He was a lanky middle-aged guy, salt-and-pepper stubble, shapeless felt hat. I’d noticed his casting stroke. Smooth. I’d also noticed that he wasn’t catching any fish.

  “Hey, fella,” he said. “You got the secret fly, I can see that. Mind telling me what you’re using?”

  My first thought was: “Figure it out for yourself, fella. It’s taken me years of aggravation to understand this hatch and find the right flies for it. Why should I make it easy for you?”

  * * *

  Pale Evening Duns. Little sulphurs. Ephemerella dorothea. They are lovely mayflies, delicate, pale yellow, size 18 or 20. In certain pools on the Willowemoc, in the heart of the Catskills on a soft evening in late May or early June, the little sulphurs begin to pop about two hours before sunset.

  It’s my favorite hatch. It’s predictable, it’s lavish, and it brings every trout in the pool to the surface.

  For several seasons the Catskill sulphur hatch frustrated me. All around me trout would be gobbling mayflies. I’d isolate a little yellow natural, watch it drift down, see a brownish-gold shadow lift under it, watch a nose tilt up, a white mouth open, the bug disappear. I’d float an identical (to my eye) imitation down the same current, over the same fish, see his shadow materialize and drift under it . . . and then he’d sink back out of sight.

  Frustrating, yeah. But fascinating, mesmerizing, and exciting, too. The first few times I found myself surrounded by tiny yellow sailboats and gorging trout I behaved badly. Once I realized that I wasn’t going to catch every rising fish I covered—wasn’t, maybe, going to catch any of them—I cursed the fish and the bugs and the river. I spent more time rummaging in my fly box, changing flies, lengthening leaders, moving around to see if I could find just one stupid trout, than I did casting. If there were other anglers nearby (and on the Willowemoc in May there are almost always other anglers nearby) I spied on them, hoping they were as frustrated and unsuccessful as I was. Mostly they were.

  Between seasons I scoured my fly-tying books. I found new sulphur patterns and tied ’em all. I invented a few variations of my own, too, and the following May I showed them all to those Willowemoc trout. Once in a while I caught a couple of fish, and I thought, Aha. But then would come the refusals, and I realized I had not found any magic fly. Mostly the trout greeted them all with a sneer.

  My only consolation during those several seasons of aggravation was the fact that nobody else seemed to have any better luck with the sulphur hatch than I did.

  When I figured it out, it was by slow uncertain increments, not in one great burst of insight. First, I noticed that the riseforms in the early stages of the hatch did not break the surface. I guessed that they were eating emergers just under the surface. A little experimentation (well, a lot) led me to discover that a size 18 pheasant-tail flashback nymph dangled on six inches of 6X tippet from the bend of an unobtrusive dry fly would take some of those early fish. Casting down and across and twitching the nymph as it drifted into a feeding trout’s sight windows would take more of them.

  Their riseforms changed in subtle ways when they switched from subsurface nymphs to half-hatched emergers drifting in the film. Then I clipped off the nymph rig and tied on an emerger pattern similar to a fly that a guide showed me one day on Nelson’s spring creek in Montana. This mongrel had a short, brown marabou shuck, a bi-colored body (brown for the abdomen, sulphur yellow for the thorax) with sparse thorax-tied ginger hackle, and a stubby gray cul-de-canard wing. This fly drifted low, halfsunk in the film. It would usually take some fish during the transition, and it was the nearest thing I found to a Magic Fly. In fact, even when their riseforms indicated that the fish had begun eating off the surface, my brown-and-yellow emerger would continue to catch an occasional trout, whereas no dun imitation I could find would elicit anything more than a half-hearted follow.

  But, as the hatch progressed, the trout would begin to snub even my magic bi-colored emerger. Mayflies would continue to blanket the water, and the fish would continue to eat, and nothing in my fly box would entice them . . . and my frustration would return.

  Then one evening—why hadn’t I noticed this years ago?—I saw a dun pop to the surface and instantly take flight. As I watched, I observed that this happened consistently, and I thought: These bugs didn’t spend enough time on the water to get eaten.

  In a flash of inspiration, I tore my gaze away from the water’s surface and looked up into the twilight sky. First I saw the swallows and martins and waxwings, a frantic chaos of birds darting and swooping over the river. Then I saw the clouds of insects. Swarms of swirling bugs. Spinners . . . and, yes, they were falling onto the water.

  About then it dawned on me that these fish weren’t even trying to eat the jittery newly-hatched duns. They were gobbling the vulnerable spinners. When they first lit, exhausted, on the water, the spinners’ wings were still upright, and in the fading early-evening light they looked like duns. But when I looked closer, I could see that the spinners’ wings were glassier, their tails longer, and their bodies rustier than the duns. And then I saw that amid those with upright wings, the water’s surface was littered with spent-winged spinners.

  The spinners were falling while the duns were hatching, and once the spinners started to hit the water, that’s all the fish wanted.

  Aha.

  I got a lot of satisfaction from figuring all this out. I loved knowing what I was doing, approaching this lovely hatch with confidence, and catching trout on a fairly regular basis.

  I’d worked hard for this understanding. It felt valuable and important to me. When I shared my Willowemoc pools with other anglers during the sulphur hatch, it was hard not to notice that I was catching more trout than most of them were. I was aware of the fact that sometimes other fishermen stopped to watch me hook and land a trout. I heard them muttering to each other, and I imagined they were saying: “That man must be one helluva good angler.”

  I confess I liked it, that feeling of superiority. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

  * * *

  Now, as this guy on the Willowemoc was asking me to give away my hard-earned secrets, I remembered a July evening a few years earlier at the notorious Y Pool on the Swift River. Big trout were cruising the deadwater under the spillway
, humping their heads and shoulders, eating . . . something. Midges, I thought, but I tried a dozen different patterns—various pupae, emergers, and adults—without a single take.

  Meanwhile, the fisherman directly across from me kept catching them. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. When he hooked, landed, and released yet another fat rainbow, I said, “Nice fish. What’d he eat?”

  “Cigarette fly,” he said.

  Right, I thought. Thanks a lot. Cigarette fly. Sure.

  “Never mind,” I muttered.

  “No, really,” he said. “Dumb name for a fly, but that’s what they call it. Here.” He cast across the deadwater. His fly landed at my feet. “Cut it off and try it,” he said. “I got plenty.”

  “Hey, thanks,” I said.

  I tried it. It worked. And I thought: Not only is that guy a good angler; he’s also a good man.

  The fragment of a poem by Edgar Guest called “Gone Fishin’” ran around in my head. My father had framed the poem and hung it on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. Back then, decades ago, I’d memorized all three or four verses, but now I remembered only the first:

  A feller isn’t thinkin’ mean

  Out fishin’;

  His thoughts are mostly good an’ clean Out fishin’;

  He doesn’t knock his fellow man

  Or harbor any grudges then;

  A feller’s at his finest, when

  Out fishin’.

  I knew what my father would do if somebody asked him for advice. Dad never thought mean when he was out fishin’.

  I opened my flybox and plucked out a couple of rusty spinners. “They’re eating spinners,” I said to the man on the Willowemoc. I dropped the flies into his hand. “Take a couple of these, too,” I said, adding a few of my magic bi-colored emergers. “For next time, early in the hatch.”