by Hal Borland
The wildflowers along any river will be representative of the area’s meadows, woodlands, and bogs, since there are no wildflowers really peculiar to a riverbank. My river has its dry banks where asters and goldenrod grow lush. It has places where fireweed makes big splashes of magenta-pink in July and August. It has shallow backwaters where marsh marigolds flourish in the Spring and cattails stand stiff and fat-thumbed all Winter. It has a hundred places where milkweed lures the Monarch butterflies and releases its clouds of silk-buoyed seeds in September.
One place along the banks has a great patch of dwarf phlox, magnificent in May, and just ashore from a certain cove I can always find the biggest, darkest, longest-stemmed violets I find anywhere. Vervain likes the marginal mud and turns the area purple in late Summer. There are certain moist banks where we gather yellow rocket for greens every Spring and where the wild ducks feed all Summer. And nearby are bloodroot, anemones, and Jack-in-the-pulpit.
Along the river near my house is an especially lush growth of scouring rushes and horsetails, related plants that reach back in lineage all the way to the Paleozoic era, perhaps 300 million years ago. Both species are quite common on riverbanks and pond margins, but the horsetails are so adaptable that they sometimes grow in the slag and cinders of a railroad roadbed, and I have seen them pushing up through the thin layer of macadam on a suburban side street. Scouring rushes grow in long, tapering canelike stems, leafless and three to six feet in height, stiff, dark green, and segmented in sections like the joints of a fisherman’s bamboo fly rod. They are brash to the touch and are strengthened by tiny siliceous particles that make them abrasive. Pioneers used them to scour pots and pans; hence their common name. The horsetails are a lighter, vivid green and are shaped like miniature pines, with whorls of branches with scalelike leaves. They sometimes grow four feet high on my riverbank and they, too, are brash to the touch. They wither down over Winter—the scouring rushes don’t—and put forth new growth each Spring. Before that growth starts I always find the spore heads, thumblike shoots six or eight inches tall, sometimes tan, sometimes flesh-colored. Their only function is to produce spores, and when the spores ripen they wither and the green plants appear.
In the marshland forests which produced the Coal Age there were ancestors of these horsetails that grew sixty feet high. They looked almost exactly like these miniatures on my riverbank. So when I walk among the horsetails today I am, in a sense, walking with the dinosaurs. All time has done to these ancient plants is dwarf them.
I like to know a river not only from its banks but from out on the river itself, where I can feel its currents and see the way the water responds to its channel. I also like to fish. So we have a small boat that I can paddle or row or fit with a small outboard motor. In that boat I have explored the river, prowled upstream to a place where the shallows strand me except in time of flood. In that way I know the river from early April to December.
In April the water is still high with snow-melt and Spring rain, roiled and strong of current. Then I can explore the backwaters and the brooks, which have become minor estuaries. By July the river has become a sluggish, turbid stream with muddy banks where little yellow-freckled spotted turtles sun themselves and herons stare suspiciously. By October the stream has cleared and the trees have begun to turn color. Catbirds and jays are busy at the grapevines, squirrels are racing in the treetops, the pileated woodpeckers are drumming on dead trees out of sheer exuberance. The sky is deep blue; the wine of swamp maple and amber of popple are spilled in vast reflections, like pigment floating on the water. October is the time to make a long, leisurely trip on any river if you would know how beautiful it can be. Then the Autumn rains come, bringing down the leaves, and the river flows with a variegation of color that is unbelievable.
December comes, and ice. At first the ice fringes the river, brittle lace along each bank, and the river’s water is black in contrast. The cold deepens and one morning I look out and see the river iced over, bank to bank. The ice looks black but really is crystal clear and takes its color from the dark water underneath. A few more days of insistent cold thickens the ice and it looks gray, now masking the dark water beneath. Then the snow comes and my river is a pristine white highway happily free of all wheeled traffic.
The ice will come and go—we say it takes three freeze-ups and three go-outs to make a Winter here—and finally will come the last break-up. The ice will all go out on the surging current of early Spring. And the first mergansers, which some call shelldrakes, will arrive. They are beautiful birds, particularly the males, with their red-orange beaks, dark green heads, and striking contrast of black and white wings and body. The females are drab by comparison, with ruddy heads and bodies striped and speckled in shades of brown and gray with only a little white. We have two species, the common American mergansers and the hooded mergansers. Their colors are much the same, but the hooded ones have long feathers on the head that can be lifted into a spectacular crest. All mergansers are swift of flight, good swimmers, and leave me breathless with their long-distance dives. Now and then I see a pair of them riding an ice floe in March. I wish they stayed here to nest, but they go on north, into Vermont and New Hampshire and on into Canada.
After the mergansers come the ducks, mostly blacks in my area but with an occasional pair of mallards. And wood ducks, those colorful little fellows that are always a delight to the eye. The blacks, the mallards, and the wood ducks nest along the river. Blacks and mallards build nests much alike, in the low brush or tall reeds, close to the ground, sometimes on the ground, making a deep cup of grass and reeds and lining it with down and feathers. The nests are always close by the water and hard to find unless you flush the brooding mother off her eggs. Usually she will stay there until you are within a few feet of her. One afternoon, prowling through the alder brush looking for a patch of yellow lady-slipper, I was almost struck in the face by a black duck as she flew off the nest. I don’t know whether she was trying to frighten me off or what, but my instinctive dodge saved my glasses though her wings slapped me on the head as she rocketed past. And there, in plain sight, not four feet in front of me, was her nest, a roughly matted cup of reeds and stems, lined with soft gray down. In it were eight pale buff eggs with a slight greenish cast, the size of small hen’s eggs but, like all duck eggs, disproportionately long.
The wood ducks nest in hollow trees and are the only ducks I know that perch in trees. Mergansers also sometimes nest in hollow trees, but I have never seen one perch on a limb. Wood ducks often appropriate the tree holes that pileated woodpeckers have cut. One year a pair of them nested in a hollow limb of an old apple tree beside my barn. I have heard of them nesting on a haystack and even in the loose hay in a farmer’s barn loft. Kindhearted people sometimes put up nest boxes on poles in the edge of a bogland and wood ducks happily use them.
After the ducks come, Spring is here. It may throw a cold tantrum or two, but there is no stopping the season. I get my boat into the water and survey the Winter changes in the river, thinking of fishing expeditions.
I have no notion of telling anyone where or how to fish. Rivers, as well as fishermen, are insistently individual. And fish—who can read the mind of a fish? But there are basic rules we follow. One of the first is to explore the river early and see what Winter and Spring freshets have done to our familiar coves, deep holes, backwaters, shallows, and snag-tangles. After that we have to learn by experience, and some things we have to learn all over again every year.
I now am primarily a still fisherman, though I troll from time to time. I have whipped my trout streams in years past and like to think I can still “read” a brook, and I have cast plugs, bugs, and minnows at ten thousand bass in lake and pond. Now I prefer to sit in a boat and do my fishing the lazy way, with time to think and listen and just quietly become a part of the landscape. I fish for fish, but I also fish to learn what is going on out there on the river. Many an evening we have gone out on the pretext of catching breakfast and spent
an hour watching the swallows put on an aerial circus over the water. Or listening to the whippoorwills. Or watching the moon rise. And many a Summer morning we have got up before dawn to go fishing, actually to drink vacuum coffee and eat sandwiches while the mist rises and the sun comes up and every bird along the river sings as though this were the first dawn that ever was. Any time that fishing becomes nothing but fish, the fisherman has missed the real point of life.
But fish are a good excuse. We have more or less the usual assortment of fish one finds in any river of the Northeast. Because the river is fed by many brooks there are trout, mostly browns which tolerate warm water, but occasionally a few brookies. The brookies haunt the colder water at or near the mouth of a brook. The brown trout often are in the deeper parts of the river.
We have perch, yellow perch. Some years we catch more perch than anything else except rock bass and sunfish. Rockies and sunnies like the warm, shallow water and the rockies, as their name implies, like a rocky bottom. Sunfish like the shallows where the sun has made the water tepid; we find them in great numbers in shallow coves and backwaters and sometimes I fish for them with a fly rod, just for fun. They give me a brief, hard fight on light tackle. Rock bass will sometimes do the same thing, but at other times they wouldn’t rise to a fly for anyone.
There are a few pickerel, the Eastern pickerel, which we get now and then by fishing among the tangled roots where a shore has washed to the foot of the trees. They make bony eating, but they are fighters and fun to catch.
Aside from the trout, the black bass, both large-mouth and small-mouth, are the choice game fish in the river. The large-mouths like warmer, shallower water than the small-mouths. We occasionally get a large-mouth in a quiet cove where the water is less than three feet deep. They like weedy water, sedgy places, and old stumps and logs. For small-mouths I usually look for a raft of driftwood in a deep, cool backwater. If I drift a bait or lure down deep in such a shaded place I sometimes get worthwhile action. As often as not I get an old lunker of a rock bass, though, and fight him briefly to the net and try again.
Someone dumped shiners into the river years ago, as careless fishermen do in other rivers, and they bred and multiplied. Now we have what we call silver carp. They are sometimes fifteen inches long, take a worm like a trout, and fight like mad—for one minute, then quit. They are trash fish. So are suckers, some of which are eighteen inches long and put up a struggle worthy of a big brook trout. I reserve special curses for those big brookies which turn out, after a fierce fight, to be suckers when I get them to the boat. Cat-food!
And there are bullheads, small yellow-bellied brown catfish. Bullheads feed on muddy bottoms and bite best in the evening; some fishermen come to the river at dusk and catch bullheads by lantern light far into the evening. If skinned and soaked in salt water, bullheads make palatable fare when fried, but I think they have a muddy taste. When I catch one I throw it back, remembering the big, sweet-fleshed channel “cats” I caught as a small boy in the streams of Nebraska. All catfish have long, sharp spines on their dorsal and pectoral fins and can inflict painful wounds on unwary fishermen. They should be handled with care.
For bait we use almost everything, from garden worms to plugs, from grasshoppers to artificial flies, but we usually come back to worms for serious fishing. Most of the time we use bait rods, but now and then I want more action and use a fly rod, even with bait.
We have found that in the Spring or Fall all kinds of fish, even sunfish, can be caught in either sun or shade. In the Summer most fish except sunnies seem to prefer shaded water. Early morning and late afternoon are the best times for Summer fishing, though we have struck a school of hungry yellow perch in sunny water at 2 o’clock on a hot July afternoon. Perch, by the way, run in schools. Catch one and you probably can catch more in the same place. We sometimes drift down the river, slow-trolling with a small spoon ahead of a big worm until a perch strikes. Then we anchor and fish, usually with luck. We have found some of our choice perch holes that way, places that looked so unpromising we would have passed them by.
The brooks on my place are not fishing water. They tend to dwindle to trickles by Midsummer. They are pleasant places to know, however, with the music of their rapids and insignificant falls and with their wealth of ferns and wildflowers along the cool, shady banks. The bigger brooks have these same virtues, but because they have more water and a steadier flow the year round they are often good trout streams. Trout fishing in the East, however, is too often a matter of catching tame, fishery-raised trout that have been dumped into the streams only a few weeks before. And most of the accessible brooks are so heavily fished that solitude, an essential ingredient of enjoyable fishing, is almost impossible. But if you can find a back-country brook that hasn’t been fished to death, it may be worth casting a few flies.
Most eastern brooks that have trout have brownies, brookies, or rainbows, or some combination of them. All trout usually feed upstream, so the lure or bait should be drifted down to them.
Brook trout usually lie behind an obstruction, a big rock, a log, a sandbar. They also like the quiet water at the foot of a swift rapids. Since they lie deep as a rule, they take bait and wet flies better than dry flies.
Rainbows will usually be out in the fast, heavy water in the middle of the brook.
Brownies often lie between the brookies and the rainbows, between the strong current close to shore and the swift water in midstream. Brownies as well as brookies like back-eddies.
During hot weather all trout tend to retreat to deep, cool, preferably shaded pools from about 9 in the morning till 5 or so in the afternoon. They do most of their feeding morning and evening. In Spring and Fall and on cool, overcast Summer days, however, they are often moving about all day. But I have seen active trout which were constantly feeding ignore every fly in my book and sneer at worms. I don’t know why. I doubt that anyone knows.
But, as I said before, any stream is more than water or fish. And, with exceptions that I can count on the fingers of one hand, the fish I caught are secondary memories of all the brooks and rivers I have ever fished.
There was the late August afternoon when the fish were as sleepy as I was. I let the boat drift into a slack eddy near the bank where it hung almost motionless and I sat there, on the verge of a nap, in the dappled shade. A motion on the bank caught my half-opened eye and I glanced up and saw a half-grown red fox trot up the game path on the bank and pause to look at me, not more than a fly rod’s length away. His dark eyes stared, his big ears cupped, his little black nose quivered. He had been panting, doglike, and his ribs still throbbed. Apparently he got no man-smell, nothing to frighten him, for he sat down and watched me, simply curious, puppy-curious. He sat there several minutes, then opened his mouth and yawned and I thought he might lie down right there and take a nap with me. I am sure he considered it. But something on up that game trail demanded his attention. He went on, unhurried, with no sense of danger from me. He had been so close to me that I could hear his breath as he panted.
One full-moon evening my wife and I had been up the river in the boat and were drifting down, sitting quietly, watching and participating in the half-light world. The current carried the boat close by a small island, and at the downstream end we saw a big raccoon and four kits on the narrow mud flat at the island’s lower end. Their silvery fur glistened in the moonlight; their black-masked faces and ringed tails were sharply contrasted black and white, beautiful. The mother was digging fresh-water mussels at the water’s edge. She held one in her paws, forced it open with her uncannily adept “fingers.” The kits scrambled for the morsel inside. Then the mother saw the boat, sat back on her haunches, hissed, and the kits simply vanished, flashed into the underbrush just behind them. The mother stood there, facing us, defiant, as we slowly drifted past, not twenty feet away. And the blue-black mussel shells she had opened before we came lay shimmering, opalescent, in the moonlight. She was still there when I looked back.
Ther
e was the day we saw the otters. Several times I had seen what I dismissed as an unusually large, light-colored muskrat swimming near the far bank where the current had undermined a maze of tree roots. But something about that rat made me wonder. I wanted a closer look. So we went up and sat on the bank opposite those roots, binoculars in hand, and waited. And the “muskrat” appeared, not a muskrat at all, but an otter. It came out from among the roots, swam about for a few minutes, then swam directly across the river toward us. We watched with the glasses until it was within twenty feet of our bank. I lowered the glasses to watch without them, and it must have seen my motion. It dived, and it looked five feet long as it looped up and over, sleek, sinuous, the epitome of grace in the water. Actually, it probably was somewhat less than three feet long. It swam under water across the river and appeared near the roots again. There a second otter, the mate, appeared just for a moment. They must have had a den in the bank behind those roots, perhaps an old muskrat den, and probably had a litter of cubs. Later, when the cubs should have been out and swimming, I looked for an otter slide on every steep bank nearby, but never found one. Otters, particularly when they have growing cubs, are very playful and take special delight in coasting down a bank into the water, belly-flopping on their sleek, wet fur like small boys coasting in the Winter. They even use snow slides of their own in Winter, whisking down an icy bank into the frigid water. But our otters had disappeared before Winter. They probably moved on, to another part of the river or to another stream, for otters are travelers, unlike mink which will stay in the same stream or swamp for years unless they are trapped to extinction. I have never seen mink in my part of the river, though from time to time I hear reports of them. I suspect such reports, for none of the trappers I know catches mink here any more.