A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  And what about William Faulkner? Why didn’t he leave us a fishing equivalent of “The Bear”? He lived in a region where fishing was a way of life, and he must have listened to his share of fishing stories during his spell of purgatory at the local post office. Mississippi is bass country—the stories would have been of monster largemouths caught on frogs. And while these were the kind of oral legends Faulkner thrived on, he never got around to writing as lovingly about fishing as he did about hunting.

  There is one account of Faulkner’s interest in fishing, and it’s a poignant and moving one. After his death in 1962, his neighbors in Oxford put their recollections of the man they called Bill into a book. Among the contributions is one by J. Aubrey Seay in which he describes meeting Faulkner by a lake four days before the great writer’s death. Seay was going fishing, and he asked Faulkner if he would like to come along. Faulkner politely declined—he wasn’t feeling up to it—but he asked if he could sit and watch them fish through binoculars.

  I’ve thought of that scene often lately—the great man bundled up against the death that was around the corner, staring out over the lake’s surface with an old pair of binoculars, trying one last time to watch and learn. I think of Seay casting for bass from the bow of that boat across the lake—how fishermen can never know when they’re posing for someone who might just possibly make them eternal. I picture myself on the river under that doomed, all-seeing gaze, and it makes me cast a little more carefully, doing everything in slow-motion so that Bill Faulkner—his hands trembling on the binoculars—can get it right.

  7

  June Sixteenth

  I teeter between two illusions when fishing. The first is apt to come on dark afternoons in early May when the river is so rain-swollen and muddy that even to think of casting into it seems an act of maddest optimism. No insects brighten the surface, no fry scoot from beneath my feet, and no trout intercept my streamer on its dull and hopeless course downstream. At these times I’m apt to conclude that acid rain, pesticides, and hazardous waste have finished their poisonous work, leaving the river utterly fishless, devoid of life in any form.

  My second illusion is the direct opposite. It consists of the absolutely unshakable belief that there are fish in the river after all, and not only in the river, but that the very river itself is composed of fish, and that what normally would be taken for rushing water is in truth the speckled, iridescent backs of countless thousands of trout, rainbows and browns combining like hydrogen and oxygen in an elemental bonding. For a fly fisherman, this is a happier illusion. It makes fishing a much simpler chore, the taking of even a large trout being about as difficult as the act of dipping your hand in the water to drink.

  I indulged in this second illusion once for fifteen-sixteenths of a perfect June day. The river, after being near flood stage for over a month, had settled into its proper springtime banks. The sogginess in the air was gone, swept out by a northwest wind that managed to combine the sharp clarity of fall with the lush promise of summer. The farms along the river had roses growing in the marge of their fields. Baby lambs tripped over wildflowers; cows pranced as exuberantly as colts. Ten-year-olds, newly released from school, marched single-file through the meadows above the junction pool with butterfly nets, hunting for who knows what adventures in the tall and waving grass.

  Me, I was fastened to a trout. It was the shady, narrow stretch above the cemetery, a part of the river I had never fished seriously before. As usual when searching new water, I had on a Muddler—a fly whose effectiveness and versatility make it a fine tool for probing. In confirmation of this, the fly was attached to the lip of a ten-inch rainbow who was bouncing out of the water below me as joyously and airily as spray. After a fishless month, I badly needed to feel him in my hand, and beached him more carefully than his size required. I held him in the current for several minutes before releasing him, partly to let him recover his strength, partly to re-establish my connection with the pulse of the river’s life.

  I had four more trout in the next eight casts—five if you count the miniature brookie I caught when I changed positions and let the line drag unattended behind me. Sometimes a river will come exactly into place with all its components—proper hatches at the proper times, perfect blendings of light and shade, optimum water level and temperature—and the fish will feed freely all day, as if compelled by the classic setting to do their part.

  This is the kind of perfection I was wading through. By eleven, I had gone for the cycle—at least one rainbow, one brookie, and one brown. It’s not an uncommon feat on the river; the bright, native brookies tend to inhabit the upper stretches, but I have caught the paler stocked ones as far downstream as the dam, and the rainbows turn up everywhere. Brook trout are the natives here, of course, but in this part of the river there is a rootlessness about them that makes them seem like interlopers. I catch them in the riffles mostly, spots that are probably their second or third choice after the rainbow- and brown-usurped pools. It’s a pathetic story, this—a hundred years ago, the river was entirely theirs. The human analogy would be the sons of farmers you see milling about the bars in New England towns, perpetual renters, their fathers’ land gone to condominiums and malls.

  There is a bit of this in the rainbows, too, as abundant and strong as they are. They’re flashy and intelligent, these western transplants, but a bit much so for these quiet Vermont hills. When they zip across the river toward the west on the end of a line, I always imagine that they’re trying, however forlornly, to get home.

  It is the brown trout that seems most comfortable here. Why this should be so, I’m not sure, but I sense it every time I catch one. The brookies dash about in a semidisoriented way; the rainbows go airborne, but the German browns pull with the knowledge and power of successful imperialists. Just before noon, I took a fourteen-incher—on the river, my best brown by far—and he fought with what can only be described as a supercilious air, running downstream with enough hurry to let me know he was annoyed but not enough to betray any anxiety. When I beached him, it wasn’t because he submitted, but because he was bored, and he swam off after his release with the offended air of gentry compelled to argue with tradesmen over the price of beef.

  And so it went. I caught fish on whatever fly I tried—a yellow Marabou, a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Matukas in three different shades. The only thing that seemed to matter was the direction they were fished; on a slow drift diagonally across the current, I could count on a trout every third or fourth cast. There came to seem an inevitability to it after a while. The line uncoiled and landed across the river; the fly surfed for a moment on the lip of the current’s edge; the main, heavier current caught the belly of the line and pulled it under; the fly swung in a long arc downstream; the line, just as it tightened straight below me, tightened again, harder this time, as a trout took hold.

  The catching became a pattern, a consistency that seemed part of the warp and weave of the day itself. This unfolding, scalloped arc of the fly-line as it gradually swung downstream . . . it was hard not to believe that this was precisely the dynamic geometrical line that nature had picked to align itself on during that particular June day, and my success with the trout was because—recognizing the grain—I had aligned myself with it, too.

  Number nine, number ten, number eleven. With each one, I came to like this new stretch of river more and more. Vermont rivers, with their infinite variation on the basic riffle-boulder-pool theme, have the ability to suggest a great variety of other, more distant trout waters. The hundred yards or so I was fishing is particularly rich in these suggestions. Below me was a gravel bar that could have been right out of the steelhead/salmon rivers that run down from the Olympics in Washington. Behind me, the river narrowed enough for the willows in either side to touch tops and form a tunnel, reminding me of forest brook-trout water in Maine. The pool I was fishing now had the sandy bottom you can find on the streams of Cape Cod, and the rapid beyond it was as steep and tumultuous as any mountain broo
k in Colorado.

  With a nice rainbow, I was up to a dozen, and it seemed like a good time for lunch. I climbed out of the river below the cemetery and walked over to the grass near its edge, sitting down only when I found a spot where the shade had my face, the sun my legs. Celeste had packed some sandwiches. I had been carrying a beer around in my wader pocket, and it was still satisfyingly cold.

  Now it is hard to be near a cemetery sipping beer without doing some serious reflecting. What I mainly wondered about was whether anyone had ever written a treatise explaining why so many good fishing spots seem to be near cemeteries. I can think of half a dozen places off hand, and that’s only in Vermont.

  Is it because people avoid the area around a cemetery, thus ensuring that the pools there are underfished? Is it because our eighteenth-century ancestors had a lovely eye for terrain, and always picked out meadows to bury their dead, meadows that would be situated above placid, easy stretches of river? Is it because cemeteries with their calm, thoughtful air make the fisherman calm and thoughtful, too, thereby instilling the perfect attitude for taking trout? Or is it none of these things, but a mystic something that establishes communion between the ghosts of trout and fishers past with trout and fishers present?

  I opened the gate to the cemetery to take a closer look. It’s rectangular in shape, about an acre in area, with a gentle slope uphill from the river. Three sides are bordered by stone walls, the fourth by a strange Victorian version of a wire fence. With the sun at its highest, there was enough shade for all the graves—shadows cast by oaks that were saplings when the last burial there took place.

  None of the headstones are dated past 1880—most are from a time far earlier. Roughly half are the same four-foot height, simple and unadorned, but here and there one rises above the others where a family had indulged in some morbid one-upmanship. (Seeing them, one can picture the conflict in the eighteenth-century Puritan mind between the need to show that dear departed whoever was no better than anyone else and the belief that he or she was in fact better, and thus deserved a slightly higher headstone.) The only truly extravagant one features a scowling man in what’s apparently meant to be a toga, towering above his headstone with one finger gravely raised to heaven like the Commendatore in Don Giovanni.

  Efforts had been made to keep the cemetery neat, but the grass hadn’t been cut in weeks and several of the headstones had tipped over. There was yellow lichen growing in the inscriptions—it was only by kneeling down and squinting that I could make out the words.

  There are some real patriarchs buried in that little grove. Phineas S. Cobb, for example, who died February 27, 1832, aged seventy-four; a Revolutionary War veteran who would have been eighteen in 1776, old enough to be with Johnny Stark’s men down at Bennington. Not far from him lies Susannah Thompson, who died September 20, 1859, aged ninety-three—a life span that took her from the time Vermont was an unexplored wilderness to the eve of the Civil War.

  Some of the headstones are tragic reminders of a time when parents routinely outlived most of their children. Thus, “Freeman J. Claflin, Died Dec. 24, 1831, Aged 1 Year 7 Months 21 Days,” or below it, “William W. Claflin, Died Nov. 25, 1831, Aged 20 Days.” Picture that hideous winter in the Grant home. The baby dead first, just when the trauma of birth was over and he had begun to be dear to them all, then the other boy, down with perhaps the same flux or cough that had taken the baby, dead Christmas Eve.

  Some of the headstones have poetry that is still legible, including Esther Loop, who in 1852 was addressed as follows: “Thus Like the Sun, slow Wheeling to the Wave;/She sank in Glory to her welcome Grave.” Others are unintentionally funny. The last headstone I read marked the final resting place of a Wealthy A. Flint and her husband, Worcester T. One can picture the charming old fellow, a character out of Dickens as played by W. C. Fields.

  When I returned to the fishing, it was with the feeling that I knew a little more about the river and the valley and my place in it. The sun had gotten around the trees now, and there was a sheen on the water that seemed as liquid and real as a second, higher river superimposed over the first. I caught my thirteenth trout of the day on my first cast, and within half an hour was up to fifteen.

  Flyfishermen insist that it is quality, not quantity they are after, but even so most of us go around with a figure in our head that represents our own personal high. Mine is fifteen trout caught and released—tied several times, but never broken. I’ve come to think of it as a psychological barrier, a limit beyond which sport veers toward greed. The truth is that by the time I’ve caught even ten trout, I’m sated, and any further catching seems repetitive and dull. Even worse: at ten, a fisherman can pat himself on the back, pride himself on his skill; at fifteen, it’s easy to believe that skill has no part in it at all, and that even Wealthy A. Flint herself, dead these ninety years, could catch her limit.

  Still, it was too nice an afternoon to quit—I saw no harm in raising my record one more notch to sixteen. About twenty yards upstream, the river divided itself around a small island; the channel closest to the bank spilled over a large, flat rock into a pool the size of a card table. There was a trout there and a good one—I could make out his back beneath the competing swirls of sunlight.

  By crossing to the lower end of the island, I could drop a fly over him without any problem. Once hooked, he would speed down the pool into the main current where I would have room to control his runs. Checking off number sixteen in my head, I tied on a nymph.

  So far, so good. What I’ve forgotten to mention, though, is what I had forgotten to take into account: a water-smoothed log jutting obliquely out of the water in the pool’s center, as sharp and menacing as a tank trap. There was no way around it. I could wade upstream and fish from above, but the river shallowed out before the pool, and there wouldn’t be room to get the necessary swing in my drift before the fly grounded on the island. Even if I did hook him from above, his first run would inevitably carry him around the log, dooming my leader.

  I started thinking. Maybe not a nymph after all—maybe a small Hendrickson dry. But no—there weren’t any Hendricksons hatching. Perhaps a Quill Gordon instead. A Quill Gordon, or maybe an Adams.

  I ended up using all three. My first cast brought a rise, but a halfhearted one, and when I struck at his shadow, the fly snapped back into my face.

  Fine. A little more determined now, I went to the Muddler—for the trout, the kiss of death.

  “Sixteen, you’re mine,” I said to myself, working the fly out so it would drop a little shy of the log.

  If I listed all the flies I left sticking out of that wretched log in the next hour, you would have a complete inventory of my fly boxes; if I described all the different positions I cast from, you would be bored. The upshot, of course, was that I didn’t catch that fish. No more rises, not even a quiver of interest as the occasional fly bumped his nose. By the time I gave up trying for him, the other fish had stopped taking, too. In the shreds and patches of my illusion, it seemed as if the trout-composed water had evaporated into dusk.

  I was mad for a while, damned mad, but reflecting on it now, I realize that this last uncatchable trout was the most important fish of the day. The balloon of my pride had been expanding all afternoon, and the trout had been the gentle agent of its puncture. My sated, smug feeling was gone, replaced by the puzzled yet hopeful attitude a flyfisherman should never lose.

  Next time, I would deliberately cast a small Bivisible across the log, letting it swing down like a pendulum left to right, teasing him, until . . .

  Next time, I vowed as I climbed out of the river. Next time, trout. Next time!

  Which—when you stop to think about it—is the nicest gift a fish can give.

  8

  Dusk into Dark

  The past is often compared to the twilight, but what about comparing the twilight to the past? It has that remoteness to it. In July, when the sky at nine is three faint shades from the most delicate orange, it has that remotene
ss. It has the finished quality of the past, the sense that nothing essential can any longer be added or removed. The moving hand, having writ, moves on; the sun, having warmed the day and glorified its last few seconds, moves on. The past’s serenity is reproduced in its setting. Watching it, the hurry in us dissolves, vanishing into a spacious sense of well-being and completeness that mirrors the dusk’s calm. Anxiety can’t touch it. It is the only moment in the world’s long day that demands a single response: peace.

  And so I fish it, staying as close as I can to its edge.

  Edge. It’s difficult to pin down. Put simply, it’s the dividing line between dusk and dark, the light remaining between the moment the sun disappears beneath the horizon and the moment when it is finally night. The first limit, of course, is charted and fixed. In Vermont, summer sunsets are around nine, though fragments of blue and white may persist in the sky for another hour. This makes the other limit of the edge, the dark, much harder to determine. Is it when the soft pink is gone over the western hills? Is it when the flyfisherman can no longer see his fly riding on the river’s surface? When he can no longer see his line?