“It’s August now,” he was reminded.
“Yes, but there’ll be another July.”
“Oh, you mean next July. Yes, there are always two—last July and next July.” He thought that over and smiled as if the idea pleased him, but he made no comment.
The swans were at the far end of their pond. On the water beside the road were a dozen or more mallards. Parking, the fisherman’s companion asked: “How old are you now?”
At first there was no answer. Then, tentatively: “Six.”
“Oh? When will you be six?”
“Tomorrow.” His birthday is in September.
Reddish-brown weeds showed a little below the surface. “Throw it where the ducks are,” the fisherman said. He laughed when the bobber, split shot, and hook plopped in near a duck, startling her. “Now hold the rod still and watch the bobber,” he was told.
“What’s a bobber?”
“That red and white thing.”
“That’s a floater,” he said, but not impatiently.
Drawn by curiosity, two ducks swam slowly toward the bobber, eyeing it.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” the fisherman said. He saw some tall shrubs. “I’ll go behind there.” He went off at a trot.
While he was gone the bobber submerged, but the bait was lifted clear before a fish could strip the hook or, worse, get himself caught in the fisherman’s absence.
“A fish pulled the floater underwater,” he was told on his return. “Be ready to catch him.”
In a few moments the bobber broke into a jig. The fisherman cranked his little tin reel. Except for a tiny nubbin of worm, the hook was bare.
“The worms are in the car,” his companion said. “Keep fishing with that and I’ll get another.” By the time he got back the hook was clean.
“Next time the floater sinks,” it was suggested, “jerk your rod up first to set the hook in the fish and then crank.” In a moment: “There! Good, now crank. No, I’m afraid you’re caught in the weeds. Just keep cranking. No! You have a fish. Keep cranking. See him?”
A pale belly flashed right, left and right again. His lips set, the fisherman reeled furiously. He dragged a nine-inch bullhead onto the bank and stared at it.
“Is that the first fish you ever caught?”
“Yes.” The tone was hushed.
“Come on, then. We’ll take it home and then I’ll skin it so your mother can cook it.”
“My mommy will laugh her head off,” he said. He was jubilant now.
“I’m crazy about my family,” he said. “My mother and father and my sister and my cousin Kim, they’ll laugh their head off.”
TED WILLIAMS’ TRIPLE CROWN
BLACKVILLE, NEW BRUNSWICK, 1978
When Theodore Samuel Williams batted .406 in 1941, the Elias Sports Bureau meticulously recorded his 456 times at bat and 185 hits. When he won the triple crown in 1949, baseball’s official statisticians took careful note of his 39 home runs, 159 runs batted in and the average of .343 that gave him the American League championship.
Now in the sixtieth summer of his life, Ted Williams is going for another triple crown, and he has to keep his own records. He has caught 1,000 tarpon on a flyrod. He has caught 1,000 bonefish on flies. Next month or maybe in September, he will sink a tiny feathered hook into the lip of his 1,000th Atlantic salmon, turn the fish loose and record the catch in his logbook. No flycaster in the world ever mastered 1,000 of the giants they call the “silver king,” 1,000 of those blindingly swift torpedoes that range the coral flats, and 1,000 salmon, the wary monarch of all game fishes.
Ted’s salmon count had reached 968 when his camp on the Miramichi was invaded by Bud Leavitt of the Bangor Daily News and an accomplice from New York. Ted said salmon coming home to spawn had been moving up the river only in dribs and drabs, though a crew had been here making a film a few days earlier and 17 fish had been taken on camera.
On the first day of the invasion nobody caught anything. Not the tireless and talented host, who can lay out 85 feet of line in cast after cast, hour after hour, covering a pool like a tarpaulin. Not his guide and fishing partner, Roy Curtis, who knows more about salmon than salmon do. Not Bud Leavitt, who is such an authority that the other day a judge in Bangor sentenced three young poachers to study fishing regulations at his knee. Not the city guy, who means well.
On the second day the city guy took a fine salmon. The experience reminded him of Shirley Povich of the Washington Post. Shirley is a smallish guy who can’t hit a golf ball out of his shadow but once, with one swing on one hole in one round in his life, he outdrove Sam Snead. Catching that salmon when Ted Williams didn’t and Roy Curtis didn’t and Bud Leavitt didn’t, the city guy knew just how Shirley had felt when his ball came to rest beyond Snead’s. His glee was unworthy, and secret.
On the third and last day, Ted took two fish, Roy got into one that tore free, and with about half an hour of showery daylight left, Bud Leavitt took one. In the late afternoon an animal was seen swimming across the pool.
“A muskrat, I guess,” Roy said. “Could be a groundhog. I guess any animal would swim if he has to. One day I saw what looked like brush floating downstream. It seemed too long for an animal but it was moving across the current toward my side. I slipped down behind some bushes to watch it come ashore, and it was a fox. It was the tail made it look so long.”
The muskrat had dived near the rocky island that is an old bridge abutment. Now it reappeared, recrossing the river at top speed.
“He must be late,” called Vince Graves, a state of Mainer fishing out of the camp across the river. “He is in an awful hurry.”
Later Ted Williams sat on the porch of his camp in a copse of white birch high over the Home Pool. If there had been a designated hitter in the American League in i960, Bud Leavitt asked, might he have stayed on in baseball a couple of years longer?
“I don’t think so,” Ted said. “I’d had it. In the winter I kept hearing and reading that maybe I wouldn’t be around long. I think the Red Sox were ready to get Yastrzemski started in left field. Anyway, I told Dick O’Connell, If you don’t want me, I’ll retire.’
“‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘don’t believe what you hear. We want you.’ He gave me the same contract I’d had for a couple of years, $125,000. I tore it up and said, ‘Now write me one for $90,000.’ I took a $35,000 cut because I hadn’t had a good year and every time I’d signed a contract before, with Eddie Collins or Joe Cronin or O’Connell, they always asked me, ‘Are you happy? We want you happy.’
“During that season Fred Corcoran called me.” Fred, the great golf promoter, was Ted’s friend and sometime business agent. “He said, ‘Dan Topping wants to know whether you would pinch-hit for the Yankees for two years. He wants to hear from you before he talks to the Red Sox. He’ll pay the same as you’re getting, $125,000.’ Even Fred didn’t know about the cut. I told him no, I was going to pack it in, and that’s the last I ever heard from Topping.”
Late that summer Ted announced that the last game of the final home stand would be his finish. He would not make the last road trip with the club. Most of New England moved into Fenway Park to see him hit Baltimore’s Jack Fisher for his 521st home run on his last time at bat.
“What were you thinking that last time up?”
“Nothing. I’d had it and this was the end. I wanted to hit the ball and get out of there. Mr. Fisher threw me a fastball and for the only time in my life I didn’t know whether I was ahead of the pitch or behind, over the ball or under it. It flashed through my mind, ‘This guy thinks he can throw it past me.’ Next time he threw, I was swinging.”
THE SEWER OF BEAVERKILL
1981
One stormy April night three men rode out of the darkness into the streets of the Catskills village of Roscoe. “Gentlemen/’ said Sparse Gray Hackle, “remove your hats. This is it.”
“This is where the trout was invented?” the driver asked.
“Oh,” Mr. Hackle said, “he existed in a cru
de, primitive form in Walton’s England—”
“But this,” said Meade Schaeffer, artist and angler, “is where they painted spots on him and taught him to swim.”
It was the eve of Opening Day of the New York trout season. It can be said without irreverence that to celebrate Opening Day on the Beaverkill is a little like observing Christmas in Bethlehem. For the Beaverkill is the shrine, the fountainhead, the most beloved and best-known trout stream in America, the river of George LaBranche, Theodore Gordon, Guy Jenkins, and the Flyfishers Club of Brooklyn.
In Roscoe, the willow of the Willowemoc join those of the upper Beaverkill in the Junction Pool, and here the Big River, the main Beaverkill, is born. The Junction Pool is also the birthplace of the beamoc, a two-headed brown trout of vast proportions and agonizing indecision. From the day he is hatched, one head gazes wistfully up the Willowemoc, the other yearns for the upper Beaverkill. Unable to make up his minds, the beamoc lives his life out in the Junction Pool, surviving twice as long and growing twice as big as he could in either tributary.
There are many streams in America more densely populated with trout and productive of more trophy catches than the Beaverkill. There are rivers that are easier to fish. But this is the cradle of flyfishing in America, the treasured stream that draws thousands from all corners of the nation every summer.
It is in imminent danger of becoming a sewer.
Titan Group, Inc., a corporation with headquarters in Paramus, New Jersey, has a 919-acre tract in the town of Rockland that it plans to develop as a 1,000-unit hotel-motel with a trailer park containing 1,000 service hookups, an eighteen-hole golf course, and all supporting facilities. The plan includes a pipeline four and a half miles long to discharge about 550,000 gallons of treated sewage into the Beaverkill every day.
A Sullivan County court has granted Titan the right to condemn private property for construction of the sewer line, and up to now appeals by property owners and conservation groups have been rejected. Among those fighting the project are the Theodore Gordon
Flyfishers, the Federation of Fly Fishermen, Catskill Waters and the Beamoc Chapter of Trout Unlimited.
Property owners and the conservation groups, banded together as the Beaverkill Legal Defense Fund, appealed the Sullivan County Court Condemnation Order but were turned down by the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court.
They are trying now to find an accommodation that would enable Titan to go ahead with its project without destroying the Beaverkill as a fishery. Failing success there, the fight will be carried on through reargument or appeal to a higher court.
To help the campaign, a “Save Our Beaverkill Fund” has been created under the sponsorship of the Beamoc Chapter of Trout Unlimited, with headquarters in Livingston Manor, New York.
“The Big River,” Sparse Gray Hackle wrote, “from the junction at Roscoe to the junction at East Branch (the junction with the East Branch of the Delaware) is a challenge, whereas the Little River is an invitation. It takes stronger legs and longer chances to wade the Big River, a bigger rod and a better arm to cover its waters.
“It is here that the ten- and twelve-pound monsters are taken and the five-pound bass that makes the startled angler think he has hooked into a trout twice as big. Here the stalker can watch an hour, a day, or a week until he sees a great trout feeding and then wade armpit-deep and try to keep sixty feet of line off the water as he works out the single cast which will either raise the fish or put him down.
“Fishing the Big River is a sport but fishing the Little River is a recreation. This dozen miles of the loveliest trout water in America, with the Balsam Lake Club at the top and the Brooklyn Fly Fishers at the bottom, is what the old-timers referred to when they wrote about the Beaverkill, the classic water of the Golden Age.”
Little River or Big, the Beaverkill is a holy place, marked by wayside shrines called Foul Rift and Lone Pine, the Deserted Village and Painter’s Bend, the Picnic Grounds and Summer House Pool. When they become repositories for man’s waste, something special will go out of life.
THE CANOE
OLD TOWN, MAINE, 1981
There were these two kids in Green Bay, Wisconsin, faithful readers of Boys’Life and The American Boy. Both magazines carried seductive advertisements for the Old Town canoe, and the kids had a dream. If they had an Old Town canoe they would ship it by rail to the Chain of Lakes country in the northern Wisconsin woods, paddle through the lakes to the source of the Wisconsin River, ride the Wisconsin southwest to the town of Portage, where a mile overland would take them to the headwaters of the Fox, which flows northeast through Lake Winnebago to Green Bay.
They agreed to save their pennies to buy a canoe, “which in those days,” Mike Faunce said Wednesday, consulting an old catalogue, “would have required about 3,600 pennies.”
“An unreliable memory,” one of the former kids told him, “suggests that we had about $1.69 in the treasury when we quarreled about something and dissolved the partnership.”
For the first time in his life, the former kid had found himself in Old Town, and had steered directly for the five-story plant where Old Town canoes, kayaks, dinghies, and even rowing shells are built. Old Town is a translation of the name the Penobscot tribe of Abenaki Indians had for an ancient settlement on the Penobscot River. To a faithful reader of Boys’Life and The American Boy, it is pronounced “Mecca.”
“Your canoe,” Mike Faunce said, “would have been canvas over a wooden frame, the only kind the company built in those days. We still build them that way but we also have wooden canoes with fiberglass covering, fiberglass canoes and plastic canoes. Today they retail from about $550 to $2,000 or so.”
Mike Faunce and Sandy Christensen doubled as guides on a tour of Mecca. Here was the classic wooden canoe.
“The planking is western red cedar,” Sandy said. “The ribs are white cedar. The thwarts and decks are ash. On the gunwale, the inner rail is Sitka spruce, the outer rail mahogany. Recently we’ve gone back to the traditional diamond-shaped head on the bolts holding the thwarts.”
“Some people,” Mike said, “buy these boats and never put them in the water, just keep ‘em in the living room as a work of art.”
In the next room Joe Lavoie and John Hardesty were fitting ribs on the iron-bound form of a canoe, which is to a boat builder as a dressmaker’s dummy is to a seamstress. John took the cedar strips out of a steamer and together they bent them over the mold and tacked them down. Then, working swiftly before the pliable wood could dry, John fitted on planking lengthwise, securing it with brass tacks temporarily stored in his mouth.
“A visitor asked how many tacks this job took,” Mike said. “The man doing it thought that over. ‘About twelve mouthfuls,’ he said.”
Joe said they used to have a man here who could chew gum with a mouthful of tacks. John said there was another who tacked and chewed tobacco. When he wanted to speak he would remove the tacks and put them back in their box. After seeing that, John stopped sharing the box.
When the planking is finished, the stem caulked with a compound and seams closed with wood putty, the canoe gets a lye bath, then is fitted with a top coat of canvas or fiberglass. Two layers of woven fiberglass cloth are bound on with layers of matting for added strength and this surface is sanded four times. Then the boat gets a layer called gelcoat before painting.
A two-year supply of wood is kept in the plant. A one-year supply is in use and a like quantity is drying for a year. Besides the boats, virtually all accessories are made here, including sails.
“Until recently,” Mike said, “we had a seamstress in the sail room who was eighty-two years old and had been working here since she was fifteen, with just enough time out to have two children.”
“This is the Tripper,” Sandy said, pausing before a seventeen-foot plastic canoe. “Maybe you saw the ad.”
She referred to a sequence of photographs showing the canoe being flung from the factory roof about sixty feet from the gro
und. First, the advertisement testifies, “we flooded her and wrapped her around a bridge abutment. Twice. Each time the material’s built-in memory allowed the hull to return to its original shape.”
“Then,” Mike said, “they had to throw it off the roof five or six times so the photographer could get his sequence. The boat is still on display here.”
In the office archives are records on every boat the company has sold in this century. If replacements are needed, the files will have a description of the necessary parts.
“Sometimes it would be cheaper to buy a new canoe than restore an old one,” Mike said, “but the owner wants the old one.”
“It can be a sentimental thing,” Sandy said.
BEFORE THE MOUNTAIN ERUPTED
1980
Boiling mud traveling 30 miles per hour overflowed local river banks, smashed bridges, swallowed homes and killed millions of salmon and trout. Some rivers got so hot that fish actually jumped out. . . . The waters of the Toutle River rose from their normal 50 degrees to nearly 90. . . . An estimated 70 million salmon and trout died in the river and in several state hatcheries that were engulfed by the mud flows. . . . At one point along the flooded Cowlitz River, which was jammed with timber carried down from the mountain, people made light of their plight—walking on the logs and scooping up steelhead trout that wriggled on the surface.
Reading of the devastation wrought by the Mount St. Helens eruption in the state of Washington was a wrenching experience, for it was only a few years ago that a small but inept party of anglers fished those very rivers for steelhead and reveled in the wild beauty of that mountain country.
The party included Jack Murphy of San Diego and Will Yolen of New York and was led by Norm Nelson of the public affairs section of Weyerhaeuser, the forest-products giant. A good man and true on his job, Norm was dedicated to the proposition that cutting down trees was good for them. He truly believed that he would never see a poem lovely as a tree on its way to the sawmill.
“How do people feel about Joyce Kilmer?” Norm was asked.
The Red Smith Reader Page 27