I did quite well for myself. There was an Italian spinning reel marked down from $59.99 to ninety-nine cents; a Garcia fly rod that went for a quarter; Cortland fly lines for ten cents; Rapala plugs at five for a nickel. By the time Stern got transferred and the scam came to an end, I had enough fishing tackle to last the next twenty years.
In a way, the cheap gear at Macy’s was too much of a good thing. It ruined tackle shops for me, at least temporarily. Having bought so much for so little, I couldn’t bear paying full retail for a rod or reel. There were other tackle shops in the next few years, but none with sufficient charisma to recreate that former allure.
It was 1976 before I found another one worthy enough to add to my collection. I was spending the autumn in London, and on rainy afternoons would take the tube to St. James Park and cross over to Hardy’s on Pall Mall.
Hardy’s, of course, was the snobbiest fishing store in the world. When it came to disdain, the clerks made Abercrombie and Fitch’s look like Kiwanians. This gave them a certain historical charm—with all the changes in the world, it was nice to find a place where you could still be patronized as a rude colonial. For a long time, I was tempted to buy one of their Northumbrian jackets. It’s a waxed game coat, the kind you can’t buy in the States, but at sixty pounds it was too far out of reach. Still, I enjoyed trying them on. A clerk gave me his understated sales pitch the first time, but after that they began to recognize me, and I was left to browse in peace.
British tackle shops are five or six times more interesting than American ones. They understand about shops in Britain—there are no malls, and the people that wait on you have a broad knowledge of their sport. Hardy’s aside, I’ve found them quick to ask about American fishing, and generous in their advice. I visited two tiny shops in Chester last year. One was devoted to fly fishing, one to coarse fishing. In the first, I had a delightful conversation with the owner about trout; in the second, I listened for an hour to a monologue on roach. It was a fine afternoon.
Now when I go to Europe I make it a habit to stop at any tackle shop I can find. You get a lot of instant camaraderie that way; you can also find some really good stuff. The best souvenir I’ve ever bought came from a small tackle shop in Paris on the Seine: a twelve-foot-long metal pole, the kind those eternal Parisian fishermen use on the quays. The best fly boxes I’ve ever seen come from a shop on the Zentralstrasse in Berne; the Swiss have a way with miniaturization and these boxes are spaciously compact.
It’s a long journey from Bob’s Bait in Connecticut to Hardy’s of Pall Mall. From Hardy’s to Sanborn’s of Vermont is in a sense an even longer trip, for my attitude toward tackle shops has evolved over the years. I no longer want the predictable rows of mass-produced rods and ray gun-looking reels, but shop instead for the unexpected and offbeat. I have a Vermont river that is varied, full of wonder. The shop that goes with it must be the same.
Sanborn’s. Liniment, udder softener, antique clothing, wine, books, and flies. My kind of store at last.
13
A Home by the River
There’s a piece of land for sale on the river, six acres of meadow, pine and oak rising gently from the south bank. Through the middle runs a stream no bigger than a person’s stride, a stream bridged by weathered planks that creak as they sag. An old woods road runs up to the open field at the hill’s crest. There are wild blackberries growing along the edges of this road, blueberries further up in the sun. A spring on top provides water. The view east is of hills and farms and the sunrise.
I walked up to it yesterday in the middle of a summer rain. The small, hand-lettered For Sale sign had been nailed to a tree on the far side of the river since May, and though I had been tempted several times, it was only now that I had gotten around to crossing over.
It’s good land. If you poke around abandoned hill farms as much as I do, you come to have a sense of whether the land you’re walking on was once cherished or once cursed. Shadows that never disappear, even in winter; ground that is rockier than most Vermont ground; stone walls that seem hastily thrown together, as if hurled there by the farmer in his frustration at tilling such soil . . . these are all tokens of land that has been detested, to be avoided no matter how cheaply it may be had. No sunlight for those solar panels you plan so hopefully to install; no soil for the tomatoes your wife wants to plant; a well that dries up every June—land that broke people in the 1780s can break people in the 1980s, in subtle, persistent ways.
My parcel (and how ready I was to call it mine!) had traces of a gentle hand. Someone had taken pains in cutting the road, looping it in gradual curves that understood the contours of the hill. In clearing the meadow, they had spared many of the trees—some of the oaks I was walking under were probably as old as any in Vermont. The stone wall that ran along the western boundary was skillfully arranged, not merely dumped; someone had matched flat rock to flat rock, round one to round one, and it was a masterpiece of its kind. The land, having once been loved, could be loved again.
I found a stump to sit on under a hemlock that held back some of the rain. Our house, I quickly decided, should go in the center of the meadow facing the river. The oaks would provide shade in the summer, but by fall their leaves would be gone and there would be sunlight to warm the bay window in our study. I could write there. We could have a library on the side, with built-in shelves for our books, cedar cabinets for our rods. The bedroom would be upstairs where the last sound we’d hear at night would be the voice of the river. A guest room would go nicely above the garage. A guest room with a large picture window facing east so all our friends could enjoy the view we had come to love.
There would be fishing, of course—fishing that required no advance planning or long drive, but came as easily as a whim on a warm summer’s night. The water there is not the best trout water on the river, but its broad and easy air would wear well over the years. There are no deep pools or fast runs. You get the feeling there are only small trout there, not monsters, and it frees you from the burden of catching them. It would be a fine stretch of river on which to teach a child to fish.
I dreamed, in short, of a home that would be worthy of the river that ran by it. There are dozens of homes in this valley; many are weathered farmhouses that blend into their setting as only New England homes can, yet they all turn their backs on the river, and not a single one has been built deliberately to enjoy it.
Wondering about this, I began thinking not only of the land I was walking on and the home my dreams erected, but of the valley and its future. Was it wrong in the 1980s to put all your love into a piece of unspoiled earth? Wrong to think that the work and worry and hope that went into it would ever be requited by anything except pollution and development and noise? More to the point: did anyone cherish this river besides me? Even to pose the question like that was an egotistical conceit, but I was considering the river’s future now, adding up its allies, and it was a question worth asking.
The farmers cherish it in their sober, undemonstrative way. I hear them speak sadly whenever a good piece of farmland is gone back to trees or sold to summer people, and the river is why their own land continues productive when all the hill farms have been abandoned. You can catch them staring off toward it in their rare respites from work; after a lifetime of toil, it must come to seem a brotherly presence in the year’s slow turn.
Anyone else beside them? Do the fishermen who come here cherish it? I don’t think so, not as they should. The people from town fish it in spring and at no other time, and I’ve followed enough of them through the pools to know they are the ones dumping bottles and cans. The flyfishermen I meet are almost inevitably out-of-staters, and though they may value the river for its productivity, their interest is of necessity only brief and intermittent.
The river is not famous. There are no summer resorts along its banks, no major ski areas or tourist attractions. Sometimes I think that it is this very obscurity that saves the river, makes it worth loving. Other times, I know I’m wrong, realize that
the only thing that will save the valley from the development that will one day come isn’t neglect, but the concerted efforts of people who love it as I do, people whom I fear are simply not there. Conservationists have banded together to save portions of the Beaverkill and the wild sections of the St. John, but what of all the smaller, more obscure rivers in between? How many of these vanish with hardly a whimper, undefended and unloved?
Vermonters are easy marks for developers. Their insistence on being able to do what they please with their land makes them reject zoning out-of-hand; their distrust of anything abstract makes them suspicious of regional planning and imposed controls. Times are bad here now—there are people in this valley who live in cold trailers throughout the winter. In the face of their poverty, meeting their eyes, it would be hard to argue against the construction of a new highway or large factory, yet either would doom them just as surely as it would doom the river. Development brings in skilled workers from Massachusetts with whom they can’t compete; better highways bring in commuters with money, drive up the land to prices young families can’t afford.
The trend has already started. The six acres I was walking across would have sold for two or three thousand dollars as recently as five years ago, but with the condos and second homes inching closer, it was probably priced at eleven thousand or twelve. I wondered if we could afford that with a house. I began to think of mortgage payments, insurance, building permits, taxes. I thought of those things, then I thought of the income the kind of fiction worth writing brings in. My dream house, so easily created, just as easily disappeared.
If it weren’t for reality, none of us would have any problems. Still, it costs nothing to dream, and it’s a time-honored way of spending a rainy afternoon. I walked slowly back down the road from the meadow, doing my best to rid my thoughts of the future and concentrate on the here and now. The rain, so gentle at first, had changed just as gradually as my mood, and fell now with a cool and determined hardness, rattling the trees as loudly as hail.
The wind, switching directions, blew from the north. There was the smell of damply packed earth, the sound of a distant chain saw. A leaf fell ahead of me on the road, then a second, then a third, and as easily and gracefully as that it was fall.
In a hurry now, I turned my collar against the rain and climbed down through another man’s land to my car.
14
A Year of September
The best day of the year to go fishing is the first day of school. Leaving early, you drive past children waiting by the road for the bus—newly clothed, sneakers white, immaculate; skin scrubbed as shiny as pot bottoms, hair glossy as palominos’, obediently banged, ponytailed, shagged, whatevered; book bags slack, empty, like deflated balloons; pencils stiletto sharpened, pens bursting blue; voices raised, biceps pinched, races run, footballs tossed; children, that is, with their lightly worn burden of crabby teacher, bossy coach, unrepentant bully, unrequited love, pickled beets, algebra, condemned to spend this fairest of September days locked indoors, regretting summer, hatching plots, humming revolutionary song (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school”), wishing more than anything to be outside. You pass all these, and you head on toward the river to play with trout, unscrubbed, unshaven, nonimmaculate but free.
In the valleys that run west from the Connecticut, there is a direct correlation between wealth and no trespassing signs. In the more affluent valleys they are everywhere, so thick it makes it seem as if the owners of the land are trying to lock the rivers away in boxes, each slat of which is another sign: VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW!
Travel up to the poorer valleys that begin north of the White River and you will see few such signs. The Vermonters who live there are still too close to the old days to make much sense out of the kind of miserliness that puts limits on the land’s enjoyment. On the river, I can think of only one no trespassing sign, but it’s in a vital spot, and it involved me in three seconds of moral dilemma.
Below the elementary school is a powerful chute I had never fished before. On my third cast with a yellow Marabou, I hooked a rainbow who immediately tore off downstream, right through the middle of a deep pool.
I couldn’t coax him back in the current, nor could I follow him downstream through the pool—it was well over my head. My only recourse was to take to shore and follow him along the bank. I had started . . . I had gone about five yards . . . when I ran smack into a big NO TRESPASSING sign and a rusty strand of barbed wire.
I hesitated, both because I was surprised, and because that black print was so intimidating. No Experience Allowed This Side of Me, the sign seemed to say—No Enjoyment, No Wonder, No Curiosity, No Joy. I thought about it for a second, then I thought about Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land,” and the last verse, the one they don’t sing in the easy-listening versions or teach the kids in school.
As I was walking that dusty highway,
I saw a sign said Private Property,
But on the other side, the sign said nothing,
That side was made for you and me!
And stepping over that barbed wire, I went in pursuit of my trout.
The leaves have been slow to turn this year. I drove to the river on the tenth expecting to see those early reds and yellows that lead the way into autumn, but everything remained stubbornly green. The only colors I found were on dead maple leaves lying along the banks. There was a yellowish-red flush to their scalloped edges, a deeper red where the veins came together near the stem.
Where had they come from? Further upstream where it was higher and wilder, solidly fall? Spontaneously generated from the crispness in the air? There weren’t any bare trees around and their presence was mystifying. They seemed plotted—arranged. They overlay each other on the rocks like decoys set in sunshine to lure the other leaves down.
September means morning fog in Vermont. If you were flying in a glider across the mountains you could look down and see tributary fog in narrow white seams, each of which hides a valley. The seams gain amplitude as they flow east, joining snowier bands, merging finally with the great fog river that is the Connecticut.
These rivers are lifeless from the air, but were your vision somehow to penetrate the white, you might see a flyfisherman at the very bottom—a giant fisherman, his size exaggerated by the magnifying quality fog has. He’s casting slowly, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. In summer, the fog hides the sun’s heat and is welcomed; in fall, the fog hides the sun’s heat and is endured.
Fog is expectation. Something momentous is going to be revealed—you feel it the moment you enter the river. It adds an intenseness to the fishing that can seem almost unbearable. You are in the midst of a secret, part of that secret, unable to decipher it from the center. Fog will halo a man, throw a penumbra round his shoulders, but it’s a shining that can only be detected from outside.
Morning fog. When it lifted this morning, the sun streamed in on my back like a jet of hot air. Turning, I saw a huge rock that was the last bit of river the fog hid, a glacial wanderer that had come to a stop in the middle of a broad pool. It gradually emerged—the broad tawny base, the narrowing, prow-shaped middle, and then on the very top, the secret. A blue heron, as immobile as the rock itself, watching me with a knowing and patience that were prehistoric, sculpted of the same timelessness as the fog.
There are trade-offs to be made in fishing a river. One may be full of huge trout, but be impossible to wade; another is wadeable, but too crowded to enjoy. Each trout stream carries with it these contradictions, and it’s up to the fisherman to reconcile them as best he can.
Take my river, for instance. The wading is a pleasure—the bottom is firm and comfortably rocky, and there’s enough room so the trees don’t imperil your casts. The valley is beautiful, fishing pressure is light, and trout are abundant in three varieties. Big trout, however, are scarce. The three- and four-pounders are down in the White River or over in the Lamo
ille, and to take anything over fourteen inches is cause for celebration.
All the more reason, then, to rue the trout I missed yesterday morning. I was chest-deep in the Aquarium, casting upstream with a grasshopper imitation. Earlier in the season I couldn’t have stood there without being tumbled over by the current, but the pressure had eased with autumn and my stance was secure. I had missed a teasing rise over on the left bank; there’s a rock a yard out and a trout lying behind it can get first crack at anything drifting over the falls.
I cast again, this time aiming it so the line draped itself over the rock. It’s a trick that’s worked before; when the line tightens and pulls the fly onto the eddy below the rock you get a vital second of drag-free drift.
Perfect. The grasshopper, landing on the rock, crawled over its downstream edge and hopped into the water. Immediately, a trout was on it—the river fell away as if in the vacuum of a depth charge, and in the gap where water had been appeared a monstrous back. I struck as hard as I could, but tightened on nothing—the fish and its promise were already irretrievable, a moment in the past.
Stripping the line in, I examined my fly. The hook was intact and sharp, but its hackles were flattened, as if it had been scared out of its wits by the trout’s ferocity.
A big one, then—a once-in-a-season trout. In missing him, I felt like I had missed some connection with the river itself—had lost a chance to learn something important about its capacities, and the huge swirl with the question mark in the middle tormented me the rest of the day.
I went up to Maurice Page’s this afternoon. His shop is on the North Branch, a hundred yards above its confluence with the main river. It’s a rickety affair of red boards that contract and expand with the seasons. In the warm September sunshine, the cracks in the walls were fully open, as if the entire shop were inhaling one last time before winter.
A River Trilogy Page 12
