A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  This book covers a year on the Vermont river I love. Mostly it deals with fishing, sometimes with the absurd, humorous aspects of the sport. Little advice will be found here. I am a writer first, not a fisherman, and the insights I am after have little to do with catching more trout.

  Fly fishing is a discipline that in sensitive hands can account for a special perspective, putting its practitioners by its very nature into a closer, more harmonious association with the river they fish. When the fly fisherman goes empty-handed to the river, merely to sit and watch, he notices half the incidents and events he would notice if he brought a rod, the concentration fly-fishing demands being the price of admission to the intimacy he’s after. Novelists are aware of the mysterious process by which the hidden truth of a situation or character often comes unbidden at the typewriter, revealed only in the act of being written down. So too with fly-fishing: the truth of a river comes in fishing it. Merge the fisher and the writer, merge the river and the word.

  The perfect river does not exist. My Vermont river does. Here then, its exploration.

  1

  The River in Winter

  Having grown to love the river in the course of a season’s fishing, I decided to revisit it in winter to see how it fared as snow and ice. It was a quick, unpremeditated decision; I went with a curious and fraternal feeling, as if to a seldom-seen friend, expecting it to be different but essentially unchanged. The river isn’t long—seventeen miles if you iron out every bend, forty if you include the trout water on its two main branches. As closely as possible I would follow the length of it from its mouth at the Connecticut to its source back up in the mountains in the short daylight hours of one February day.

  I left the house before dawn, in time to be caught in a snow squall that kept my speed down around twenty. There weren’t any other cars out yet, and the only sign of life visible through the slanting flakes were the soft yellow lights from barns. In summer, I make the drive in half an hour, driving faster than I should, my mind caught between the writing I’ve just left and the fishing ahead of me, my nerves a turmoil of both. That morning, though, I was between novels, between trout seasons, and there were no ungrasped metaphors or streamside tactics to torment me. The quiet solitude of the road, the soft drape of flakes matched perfectly my own contentment.

  The diner comes conveniently halfway on the trip. It’s a welcome sight that time of morning, its warmth and light too tempting to pass up. A magazine had just given it an award for the best cup of coffee in the state, and this is what I ordered—a big, thick mug with cream. It was crowded: telephone repairmen, construction workers, lumbermen, drivers. Their low voices and laughs went well with the clatter of plates. Someone had put a quarter in the jukebox to play a song three times, and as I nursed my coffee, Juice Newton’s voice repeated the same lilting phrase over and over: “Blame it on the queen of hearts.”

  Back outside, the snow had stopped. The highway here is pinched in by cliffs, and whatever dawn there was in the sky stayed hidden until I broke clear of them south of town. I crossed the river on the Main Street bridge, parked in a lot by the post office, and started down a snowy bank intending to walk the short distance to the river’s mouth.

  It was officially sunrise now, but directly east are the White Mountains and it’s always a few extra minutes before the sun clears the peaks. Looking back toward town in the gray light, I could see the glacier-carved terraces down which the river falls in three abrupt steps: the steep upper terrace leading back from the dam into the valley; the flat, crowded plain of the town itself; the matching flood plain below town over which the river curves to a gentle intersection with the Connecticut.

  Part of the lower terrace has been made into a golf course—the flag pins waved in the drifts like the lonely pennants of a polar expedition. A band of oaks marked the river bed, and without them it would have been difficult to determine where the stubble-dotted white of the cornfield on the opposite shore became the unblemished white of the river. It’s at its widest here, lazy and almost delta-like. I climbed down the snow-matted sedge on the bank, intending to use the river as my path, but the ice cracked under me, and after a few tentative yards I retreated back to the trees. At least I could see where the river entered the Connecticut, and I decided that I was close enough to say I was there.

  The sun was up now, and with it came various sounds, making it seem as if all the scrapings and bangings, whispers and skids that comprise a town’s morning had been waiting for the sun’s energy to give them voice. A dog barked. A horn beeped. The river, muted by ice as it spilled over the dam, made a sound like wind through foliated trees. Of all these sounds, though, the one I fastened onto was both the steadiest and most subtle: the sibilant, folding lap of water racing between banks.

  Sure enough, there it was behind me, missed in my hurry to get to the mouth: an open stretch of river extending for a hundred yards or more below the dam. Walking toward it, my adrenaline started pumping; ludicrously, I found myself wishing I had brought my fly rod. I stared at the running water trying to memorize its color and texture, then hurried back up the cliff to town, anxious now to reach the part of the river I knew best.

  I took the long way around to my car, walking beneath the tarnished Christmas decorations that—two months after Christmas—still overhung Main Street. The town was coming to life. By the falls, the carpenters restoring the 1847 mill sorted out their tools. A man with a Santa Claus belly unlocked the laundromat across the street, paused to spit toward the river. An old woman wheeled a shopping cart up the steep sidewalk. Above them by the library, the statue of a Spanish-American War admiral, town born, squinted warily toward the east with poised binoculars, as if expecting Cervera’s Spanish fleet to come steaming up the Connecticut in battle formation. Just as the river is the epitome of Vermont rivers, the town could be the epitome of Vermont towns: battered, living half in the past, but with a sense of itself more fashionable places will never know. Close your eyes, then open them again. The plume of spray gushing over the dam, the slender stalactites on its fringe, the musty Victorian commercial buildings cheek by jowl with the simpler Colonial homes, the smell of wood smoke, the view of the mountains, the forty-eight stubborn stars on the flag before the American Legion’s 150-year-old-hall—you could be nowhere else.

  The alternate road out of town follows the river toward the mountains. There are a sawmill, a few old houses, then—just before the comparatively rich soil of the valley gives out—a last red farm, its back turned resolutely on the forest behind it. Beyond this is trout water, fifteen rushing yards from bank to bank, and as I drove along it one part of me tried to take in what I was actually seeing, while the other part raced back toward the summer and was caught up with swirling afternoon light and quick strikes and the feel of a trout trembling exhausted in my hand.

  This is how it should be in winter. A river is a better metaphor than most, and half-frozen it becomes a blend of anticipation and recollection, flowing one moment toward the future, one moment toward the past. Proust, were he a trout fisher, might have summoned his remembrances in the Loire or some other French stream, finding its ripples and currents as evocative as the richest, most memory-laden of wines.

  There is a cutoff by the first deep pool, and this is where I pulled over and got out. The previous May I had come here for the first time. Wading against the steep current to a smaller pool between an island and a cliff, I had caught a trout on my first cast—to a fisherman, never readier for miracles than on his initial try in new water, the most propitious of omens. The trout (admittedly, a small rainbow) went skipping across the surface as if to beach himself on the island, then changed his mind and headed straight for me as if to surrender. I am heretical in many angling habits, but none so much as in the landing of fish. By the time I’ve hooked a trout and controlled its first run, I begin to see things from its point of view, and after a few more minutes, have no particular desire to land it—in fact, I’m rooting for it to break off
. (Once on Long Island’s Connetquot, I fought a ten-pound brown—a world-class fish—for forty-five minutes, and was positively relieved when, in trying to beach him, he slithered out of my arms.) This first rainbow, though, came to me like a puppy on a leash, and when I twisted the Muddler out of his lip, he hovered by my leg in the current as if reluctant to leave.

  I walked down to the river through the snow, half-expecting to see that same trout swim up to me, wagging its dorsal fin in recognition. But there was little chance of that. The pool where I caught him was now a jumbled mass of ice, resembling pictures I’ve seen of the Khumbu icefall on Everest. The entire channel on the far side of the island was frozen, and the only open water was the stronger current at my feet. The weather had turned dry after a stormy spell earlier in the month, and the river level had dropped dramatically, stranding the old ice. It was piled on the bank to a height of four or five feet, extending three or more yards back from the river, laying in glacier-like slabs and blocks, some square as tables, others all sharp edges and points. The plates nearest the river had debris embedded in their exposed edges: fallen leaves, sticks, even small logs. I stepped on one of the largest ice floes, and it immediately broke away downriver, carrying me with it like Little Eva, and I had to do some fancy boulder-hopping to get back to shore. Chastened, I climbed inland a few yards and paralleled the river upstream through the safer snow.

  The banks get steeper here. Before long I was thirty feet above the river. Some of the trees had been marked with orange paint for cutting, but the blazes were old ones; the road crews had overlooked them, and I used their branches to brace myself from sliding down. At a point where the road curves right and climbs uphill is the most productive pool on the river: the Aquarium, a deep, lazy flow at the foot of a sharp rapid. In an afternoon’s fishing I would catch upward of fifteen trout there without changing positions. Now, though I could peer right down into it, I saw no fish. The weak sunlight washed everything into an impenetrable gray.

  Further upstream the banks level off, and I was able to cross an ice bridge over a small tributary and make my way to the water. The snow that covered the ice there had a puffy look to it, like the crust on a freshly baked pie. The river itself was half slush, half ice depending on where the sun hit it—ice dissolved into slush where it was brightest; slush crystallized into ice in the shade. In the middle, where the current was strongest, the water flowed against the ice with the gentle slapping sound of a sailboat on a downwind reach.

  There was little color in that landscape, and when my eye happened to catch something reddish-orange on the opposite shore, the effect was that of a match flaring suddenly in the dark. Determined to get closer, I picked out a spot where the river was widest and thinnest and started to cross, risking hypothermia with every step. The dash of color turned out to be a Mickey Finn streamer embedded neatly in the branch of a willow, its monofilament tag blowing in the breeze. It had to be mine—I fished the Aquarium all season without seeing another flyfisherman—and getting down on my hands and knees to penetrate the tangle, I quickly found three more flies, all broken off within a foot of each other: a bushy Bivisible, a tattered Light Hendrickson, a rusty Muddler. In order to fish the far end of the pool, it’s necessary to wade chest deep, putting even a high back cast perilously close to the branches. At a dollar or more a fly, it’s an expensive place to fish. I searched through the trees some more without success, then stuck the four salvaged flies in the wool of my ski hat.

  Back to the car, through a wind sharp enough to bring tears to my eyes. I poured a mugful of hot tea from the thermos and sipped it as I drove upriver. Above the Aquarium, the river flattens out for three miles, a broad, rocky stretch reminiscent of the Housatonic Meadows. The gentler grade had given the ice more leisure to do its work, and it was frozen solidly from bank to bank. Anticipation was becoming more urgent as I moved upriver; I resolved to come back to the flats during June when the insect hatches were at their peak—in June and at night, when the browns would be on the rise.

  The South Branch meanders in here, but the dirt road that parallels it was too icy to chance on my bald, impoverished-novelist’s tires, so I continued along the main river. My favorite stretch lay ahead, a series of pine-shaded riffles and pools that compose a landscape out of any fisherman’s dreams. The moment I pulled over, I realized the beauty was still there—if anything, the winter had only enhanced it. The sun had come out. The water streamed past snow-covered ice islands, long, flat, and narrow, the mirror image of the smooth granite ledges on the bottom, making it seem as though the river had been turned over and dusted white. As I made my way along the banks, I subconciously began to fish—dropping a fly in the eddy at the ice’s prow, letting it drift down the edge of the miniature berg to the pool below.

  It was on this stretch in early October that I met Doctor McKenzie. I had been fishing hard all day with little to show for it except weather and foliage so perfectly autumnal that they seemed like a cliché. On the rocks near shore were some of those furry, orange-and-black caterpillars that Vermonters like to claim portend a heavy winter. Tying on an orange Wooly Worm to imitate them, I was rewarded with a solid strike in the pool below the falls—one of my rare browns. I was releasing him when I heard a car door slam back up on the road. Turning, I saw a leprechaun slide feet-first down the bank.

  I say leprechaun in all the gentle, sparkling sense of the word.

  Doctor McKenzie—for so he introduced himself—was eighty-three years old and about five feet high, a retired surgeon who had traveled all the way from British Columbia to photograph the beauty of New England in the fall. He had a camera and tripod. He asked me to stay in place until he could cross the river and set up his gear.

  Now I must admit that I made a pretty picture that day. When fishing, I usually wear an old chamois shirt and battered jeans, stuffing my fly boxes into whatever pockets happen to be available. That day, though, I was dressed as immaculately as an Orvis model: close-fitting waders, fishing vest, swordfisherman’s hat, the works. Add to that a backdrop of forest at its most vivid red and shimmering gold and you have a calendar shot just begging to be taken.

  “I’ve been looking all day for this,” Doctor McKenzie said, excited as a boy. “Beautiful! It’s absolutely beautiful!”

  I was flattered, of course, but worried, too. I simply didn’t see how a man so old and frail-looking could cross through that current without being swept away. I picked out the spot where I would plunge in to rescue him before he went flying over the falls, but it wasn’t necessary—he waded through the rapids as daintily and gracefully as a heron, setting his tripod up on the one dry rock left above the foam.

  He was there forty minutes and more, snapping away as I cast, muttering to himself in delight, signaling me to move here and there as the light dictated. When he finished, I followed him back to the car and we talked. He must have assumed I was playing hooky, because he assured me several times that my face wouldn’t be recognizable in the picture, that he only wanted me to complete his setting. When he left, he handed me his card. Later that night over dinner, I told the story to Celeste and dropped the card on the table. Celeste, retrieving it, wrote the good doctor without telling me, and on Christmas morning I opened a package to find the picture beautifully framed: me, the river, and the trees, as perfect a souvenir as that autumn day deserved.

  Some of those same trees were fallen over now, their uppermost branches splayed across the water as if, tiring of winter, they had flung themselves there from desperation. I am tree lover enough to mourn their falling, but fisherman enough to wonder if the new eddies and currents formed around their trunks will create holding places for trout come spring. Before, I had always thought of the winter as a quiet time when the river slept, but in the course of that day I found that exactly the opposite is true. The pressure from the built-up ice, the constant change back and forth from liquid to solid to liquid, the runoff from the snow—it’s in winter that the river is being shaped, its
weaknesses tested. The life in the water may be relatively dormant, but the life of the water is never more active.

  The forest pools give way to a miniature canyon here—a dark, shadowy place where I am never comfortable. At the head of it, I walked back on the ice, lured by a fresh pattern of tracks. Deer tracks first, their pattern disappearing into the half-frozen slush in midstream. Fox tracks paralleled them—neat rows that as they neared the edge suddenly became skid marks. I laughed, thinking of the fox slamming on the brakes to avoid a dunking. There were other, smaller tracks, too, patterns that went every which way, as if left by creatures who had met there to dance a complicated quadrille. All the tracks were centered in an area no bigger than a pool table, giving the effect of an African waterhole. I wondered why they preferred this spot and no other.

  There was a subterranean gurgle beneath my feet. I knelt, brushed away the snow from the ice. Through it, I could see milky bubbles running back and forth like disoriented atoms, trying either to flee the ice altogether and join the current or find a roughness to which they could adhere. One after the other found a small edge; a few minutes more and they were all pressed together, waving back and forth with the lambent quality of flame.