A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  This last is closer to it. There comes a moment when casting begins to lose its measured rhythm and the flyfisherman senses he is beginning to lose control. The fly shoots back dangerously close to his forehead; the leader, lost in half-light, refuses to uncoil. Hooks become un-threadable. Rocks once safely dormant spring to life—malevolent rocks that reach out a gritty edge to trip us. There is a hurry in our fishing that is all the more dramatic for its contrast to the preceding minutes of calm. One moment the flyfisherman is the picture of civilized grace; the next, he’s a caveman caught in the nether world far from fire. This loss of control—this sensation of entering another realm where our power is dramatically reduced—is the essence of night and its only true boundary.

  Put it at 9:40 or 9:45. The half-hour that comes before is my favorite time to fish in the summer. I have a redhead’s sensitivity to the sun, and the intense light of July afternoons makes me as prickly and shy as a vampire. Fly fishing at night is something I’m ambivalent about at best. It is dusk when I am most comfortable, the brief period when enough sun is gone to cool the river, but enough is left to light it.

  It can be a magic time. The haze of daylight is gone, liberating a coolness that was latent in the earth all along. Our sense of hearing becomes more acute as the power of our eyes declines, and sounds that were merged into undifferentiated background noise become separate and distinct. A church bell in the distant village chimes the hour. Firecrackers left over from the Fourth pop harmlessly over the hills. Birds sing with the enthusiasm and purity they had at sunrise; a whippoorwill starts up in that always vague, undetectable locale that is the bird’s domain.

  Casts become like brush strokes. This cast upstream toward the center of the willow-draped pool is a quick stroke of red, spun downstream toward you with a last decorative splash of pink; this cast quartering toward the far bank, a stroke of purplish-black that bleeds into sky.

  Is it the shortness of twilight that gives it such richness? I remember flying out to Colorado once—how for an hour or more the plane kept pace with the sunset, and the horizon retained the same underlining of orange. It was dusk, but not real dusk; without fading it carried no regret, no ending, and lost half its beauty for that reason.

  I wonder if trout are saddened by it. It’s a facetious question, but I wonder all the same. Does the gradual blackening of the water above their lies make them think back on their days as fingerlings, regret mating partners they’ve lost track of, make them sense their mortality? Dusk must be a great disturbance for them, faced as they are with a dramatic change in the elemental lighting through which they swim. If trout were ever prone to introspection, surely this would be the time.

  If there is a caddis hatch on, they’re probably too busy feeding to think about anything at all. In a pool like the Aquarium, they will be everywhere, splashing the water apart as if to fan it back to light. Their hurry can be contagious. Instead of contemplating the sunset smoking his pipe, the fisherman is casting toward the rises in a frantic, beat-the-clock sort of way. It’s the hatch you want to keep pace with, the insects’ urgency, and a trout actually caught at dusk can seem like an interruption.

  The interesting fish are the ones that lead you over the edge. I was fishing the stretch below Jonathan Sharp’s dairy farm—the stretch with the Sphinx-sized boulders—and about fifteen minutes after the sun disappeared, hooked a good trout. At first, the fight went all my way. I tightened on him quickly, managed to hold my rod high enough to keep the line disentangled from the boulders, and had no trouble chasing after him along the bank. If anything, I was too casual about it. Between one moment and the next, dusk was into dark and the equation had drastically changed. The trout could see exactly where he was going, whereas I had begun to stumble. It was no contest—the trout’s night senses were better evolved than mine, and on his next run past the bank, he twirled the line around a boulder and broke free.

  He had taken me into night and left me there—blind, lost, and angry. I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

  It’s strange about fishing at night. Not too long ago, I would have told you that it was my favorite time to be out on the water, but this was when I was fishing lakes for bass. There are all kinds of lights and landmarks on a lake, and the reassuring presence of the boat acts as an axis on which you can orient your senses.

  This is not the case when fishing a river. You’re on your feet in the river, and there’s never any telling what the next step will bring. Landmarks are few. On narrow stretches, the trees form a dome, blotting out the stars. Even if you’re on a section of the river you know intimately, the dark has a way of distorting features until your very knowledge works against you. Ah, a big flat rock. Then surely I must be above the junction pool. But how could I have gone that far? I must have gone by it. Perhaps there are other flat rocks?

  The mind becomes snarled.

  I have been fishing at night all month, and I still can’t master it. There are world-class rock climbers who can never go to the Himalayas because something in their physiology can’t take altitude. Is it the same with fly fishermen? Are there some whose senses don’t have that night adaptability, that mysterious blend of touch, sight, and hearing that only comes into play when light is gone?

  Deeper yet. Is fly fishing all wrong at night, a misplaced conceit? If we use the fly rod as a means of becoming more intimately involved with the river, then perhaps it is. Intimacy does not lie in flailing the water with badly timed casts, nor is it found in stumbling blindly over rocks. The problems night-fishing presents are those of navigation, not presentation, and the less bother your tackle is, the more you can concentrate on this fundamental task. A worm on a bent pin would be best. Against the mystery of night, anything else is ostentation.

  Consider the problems. Here I am again in that meadow below Jonathan Sharp’s night-grazing cows. It is ten o’clock on a perfect Vermont summer night. I would like very much to enter the river, but I can see no way down the steep and slippery bank (a flashlight is cheating; if you fish at night, fish in night). Even if I find a path, I have no idea where the pools are that hold trout. Should I locate one, I will have trouble fishing it, since the absence of a clear horizon makes me mistime my casts. Even if I straighten these out, I still have no idea what fly to use. Dry flies are useless if you can’t see them; I’ve read about hooking trout by sound, but it’s clearly impossible—there are too many other slurps, trickles, and plops around to distinguish a quiet sip. I could fish a sunk fly, but not without hang-ups; I’ve lost over forty flies this month—in tree limbs, earlobes, and bat wings. But what difference does it all make? If I hook a fish, I’ll have no way of following his fight and he’ll break off anyway . . . Here I remain in the meadow beneath Jonathan Sharp’s night-grazing cows.

  I’m sure there are answers to all these dilemmas—the hell of it is, I can’t find them. I’ve consulted my library of fishing books, but without much luck. Fishing for trout after dark was illegal in most states until fairly recently, and there is no tradition of night-fishing lore to draw upon—no Gordon to seek advice from, no Bergman. The only book I found that had much to say about the subject was Lawrence Roller’s Taking Larger Trout. Don’t use conventional flies, he says; lull the fish into a false sense of security, and keep your fly in the water at all times. “In all night operations for trout, the emphasis is on constant casting, quiet movement, and slow fishing.”

  Okay, Mr. Roller. But doesn’t constant casting contradict slow fishing? And exactly how am I going to lull the fish into a false sense of security? If anything is real and unshakable in my river at night, it’s the trout’s security—there’s nothing false about it.

  Out of ten nights’ fishing this month, I’ve caught only one trout. I was wading through the moonlight above the pine canyon last week. I had stopped to examine something there in the water (it was a branch, but I thought at first it was the skeleton of a dead trout), when my line suddenly tightened. This is it! I thought. Night-fishing’
s balleyhooed reward—the monster brown that feeds only at dark. But alas, it wasn’t he. It was a four-inch brookie, the smallest trout I’ve taken all year.

  I’m staying out late again tonight. As discouraging as the process has been, there have been aspects of it that I’ve enjoyed. The light of the moon on the water, the way the current ripples it into overspreading little waves, the scalloped Vs that resemble a child’s drawing of gulls, only in silver; the flickering yellow beams of kerosene lights on farmhouse porches through the trees; the quick, illuminating arc of a headlight thrown across the river as a car negotiates a bankside curve; the distant haze of stars; the new mysteries night brings to familiar water . . . all these things will continue to lure me out, and in the course of the summer I may begin to catch a sense of what night-fishing is all about.

  Until that time, dark will always be a limit—my favorite time on the water will continue to be dusk. Not day, not night, but the peaceful edge of beauty in between.

  9

  A Trout for Celeste

  For me, fly fishing and fly fishing alone have always been synonymous. Out of the several hundred times I’ve gone trout fishing in the last ten years, I can only think of two occasions when someone went with me, and these were both very recently. Being alone has become as much a part of my fishing as the river’s current—a constant push of solitude, sometimes destructive, sometimes soothing, but always there.

  Solitude has always seemed to me an enormous force. At various times I have cursed it, longed for it, used it, feared it, lost it, and found it again. What I have never done, though, is understand it. Thus, it’s difficult for me to account for the strange gaps solitude has created in what’s otherwise been a reasonably gregarious life. I write fiction for a living, yet I’ve never met another novelist; I like opera, yet know no opera fans. So too with fly fishing. Having loved it as much as I have, having pursued it with such attention, you’d think I would have enjoyed many rich friendships based on a mutual love of the sport, garnered many fine memories and anecdotes about my friends. I have none of these, and envy those who do. A friendship made on a trout stream must be a precious thing, almost as precious as solitude itself.

  As solitude itself. I put it that way deliberately, because it’s an accurate description of the way I once felt. Right from the start the memories that meant most to me in fly fishing were those of being alone with the river and the fish. I can remember a September day on Cape Cod’s Quashnet when I fished upstream into a setting sun—how the river seemed the sun’s emanation, a narrow path leading into the secret heart of things, wide enough for one traveler alone. I remember an April afternoon on the Battenkill when the river was so high I had no business being in it, and how as I fought to stay upright, fish suddenly began rising on all sides, so freely and willingly that it seemed I was being initiated into their presence, made—in recognition of my daring—an honorary trout. Closer to home, I can think of dozens of times when I uncased my rod along the river feeling the kind of bitterness about my writing that verges on tears, then returned after an hour alone feeling calm and whole again, ready to work no matter what the cost. . . . All these things solitude has given.

  It would be wrong not to total up the debit side as well. Not having anyone to go fishing with has probably made me less adventurous than a good flyfisherman should be; there are remote trout ponds I’ve had to pass up because they require too much hard bushwhacking to do alone, distant rivers that require too much driving. Then, too, my fishing education has proceeded more slowly than it would have if I’d had a fly-fishing friend to learn from, my store of experience to draw upon when selecting a fly reduced by at least half. I would dearly love to watch a good nymph fisherman in action, for instance; I’ve tried to teach myself how to do it, but without someone to study, it’s been frustratingly hard.

  Two serious demerits. But I think what I have lost most by my solitude is the companionship of another memory and perspective, someone to recall for me events and scenes that have long since slipped away. We’re all aware of the marvelous moments that can come between friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time—how your friend will mention an incident that you had completely forgotten, making you smile in discovery and delight, as if recovering a lost, precious jewel you only at that moment realized you owned. I remember that sunset on the Quashnet and that hatch on the Battenkill, but there are other events of those days that are beyond my recall, and it would mean much to me to have someone else who had shared them—a keeper of one-half the memory who had reflected on and preserved a portion of an experience that can at times seem too beautiful and vast for one imagination to hold.

  Solitude, in other words, came to seem an enchanted castle half-deliberately created, to be longed for at some times, escaped from at others. The problem with erecting castles, though, is that they can become too real to be lightly given up, their ramparts too thick to be conquered by even the warmest of affections. Wanting to fish alone is one thing, but having to fish alone is something else, and I had begun to wonder whether I had crossed the line. With a decade’s solitude at my back, had it become so precious to me that I couldn’t relinquish it? Not be able to go fishing with anyone else without foaming at the mouth, throwing rocks at their fish and in general acting like an unsociable hermit? Exactly how high had those castle walls become?

  Not too high, thank God. The ramparts have come tumbling down and the heroine who bid them fall is as intelligent and beautiful a princess as any fairy tale ever boasted. How Celeste entered my life is outside this essay’s bounds, but what is important is the total unexpectedness of it. I was thirty when we met, at the age when friends start referring to you as a confirmed bachelor.

  “I am waiting for the perfect woman,” I would say, in response to their teasing. “She will emerge out of the woods one morning equipped with a backpack, a fly rod, a tape deck with Jussi Bjoerling on it, a Newfoundland puppy, and a well-thumbed copy of Melville’s Pierre.”

  Celeste came unencumbered with any of these things, but what she does possess is infinitely more dear—a complete willingness to blend her enthusiasms with mine. We shared fishing right from the start. It wasn’t fly fishing, not yet, but the kind of random trolling I used to do with my Dad. We’d drive over to one of the big Vermont lakes and rent a boat, cruise in big loops along the shoreline, talk about every subject imagination can hold. There were muskrats to play tag with, beaver and seagulls and geese. Celeste, being French, has determined notions about what a good picnic lunch should include, and we had some real feasts as we drifted lazily there in the sun.

  Celeste hooked her first fish on Lake Champlain in May. It was probably a bass, and I say probably because I was so excited for her that I nearly fell out of the boat in my anxiety to reach the engine and shut it off. Celeste was just as excited as I was—there was a lot of yelling, a lot of wild balancing to keep the boat from tipping over, then a moment of sudden and utter dejection when we realized the fish was gone.

  No matter. A hundred yards up the shore she had another bite. Through a superhuman effort of self-control, I managed to stay where I was in the bow, and she landed it herself: a fine smallmouth bass of almost two pounds. As I write, I can look up at the wall and see their picture—the bass looking sleek and strong; Celeste holding him with a big grin on her face, the same irresistible grin I’ve seen in photos of her taken when she was five.

  She followed up this first success with a landlocked salmon on Lake Willoughby. Once again I nearly managed to blow it for her. We were trolling, and I kept insisting that she let out more line. Celeste, trusting my advice, let out line even when I didn’t tell her to, until her Dardevle was a good 150 yards behind our boat.

  “Hey, there’s a salmon!” I yelled, pointing toward the far side of the lake. It was jumping, and I couldn’t understand why.

  “My rod!” Celeste screamed.

  The tip was bouncing wildly up and down. Still, I couldn’t see the connection—the salmon was
simply too far away to be hers.

  Celeste’s naiveté won her the fish. She began cranking the reel as if the salmon was hers, and to my complete amazement it was. After a ten-minute struggle, she had him alongside the boat, just in time for me to realize I had left the landing net back in the car. I grabbed the salmon as firmly as I could by the tail . . . For a moment I had him in my hands . . . He gave a convulsive twist and was gone.

  Celeste looked at me with an expression that managed to combine suspicion, hope, anger, and trust.

  “You got him!” I said, putting the best light on it I could.

  “But I wanted to hold him!”

  “Well, we were going to let him go anyway. But as long as we touch him, it counts.”

  “I can tell people I caught a salmon?”

  “Sure. As long as one of us touches him, like I said.”

  Which is a pretty liberal interpretation of landing a fish. We’ve adopted it as a rule now; flexibility in logic makes fishing with Celeste a joy.

  Having shared these things with Celeste, the next step was to bring her to the river I loved. I was fishing it three and four times a week, coming back at night with all kinds of stories. It was funny about these. I talked like she knew the river as well as I did; we shared so many other things, I felt as if by a natural osmosis she should have absorbed my knowledge of the river, too, even though I had never taken her there.

  My stories all ended the same way. “Someday you’ll have to come with me.”

  “Okay.”

  And we left it at that. For a while, it was a satisfactory compromise—Celeste was sharing some of my fishing, but I was left with my precious solitude. The river was still my secret place—not for me as much as in me, and Celeste sensed it too well to intrude.