A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  It was at this point—racing after the trout where the river climbs the mountains toward Lincoln Gap—that it began to occur to me that the trout was familiar with an unusually large portion of the state. This was startling in its way. You expect a trout his size to have a map imprinted on his brain of every rock, current, and channel in his home river, but to have a map of Vermont imprinted there? It made me curious to see which route he would choose to cross the mountains: the New Haven south toward the headwaters of the White, or the woods overland toward the headwaters of the Mad.

  The Mad. In one long plunging sweep he was out of the river, into the underbrush, up and over the old logging roads that crisscross the height of land. At Sugarbush, he took to the ski trail, sliding down on his belly like an exuberant otter to land with a magnificent splash in that big Mad River pool above Waitsfield. My arm at this point felt as if I’d just received six tetanus shots in a row, double strength; my waders, torn from sliding down the mountain after him, flapped indecently. Even so, a new determination had taken hold of me, and by the time we tumbled over the falls below Moretown, I had half convinced myself the trout was beginning to show signs of tiring.

  Down the Mad we raced to the Winooski, upstream past the statehouse in Montpelier, up the Dog past those sylvan, gravel-bottomed pools that back the Norwich campus—the trout towing me now, so that I hydroplaned on my stomach back and forth past the startled picnickers, drenching them in spray. I shook the fly line up and down like the reins of a horse, trying to nudge him toward Roxbury and the headwaters of the Third Branch near the hatchery. But no—this trout had an itinerary of its own. Back down the Dog he rushed, up the East Branch of the Winooski through that fine rocky pool by the high school in Plainfield, then into the sandier, high-banked pools below Marshfield farther along. He paused to catch his breath here—I tethered the line to a willow, rushed into the Rainbow Café for some brioche and a Linzer torte—then off we went again heading due north.

  Time blurs here. I’d been fighting the trout for the past five and a half hours, and the strong May sunlight was beginning to do odd things to my brain. Nevertheless, when I got home that night I was able to trace our route on a map with a felt-tip marker, and it makes for an interesting line. When the trout ran out of Winooski, he went overland to the chain of ponds near Woodbury, traversed them toward Hardwick and the Lamoille, followed the Lamoille downstream to the Wildbranch, followed the Wildbranch upstream to the headwaters of the Black at Eligo Pond, sped north on the Black all the way to Lake Memphramagog in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom, swam across the lake to the Clyde, headed up the Clyde south to Island Pond, ran down the Nulhegan to the Connecticut, up and down Paul Stream to cool off, up and down the Wells for a bit of sightseeing, up and down the Waits for more of the same, back down the Connecticut to White River Junction, up the White to the Tweed to Mendon Brook, and so across the main ridge of the Greens back to Otter Creek heading south.

  There’s a book’s worth of adventures in our two-hundred-mile odyssey, but of all the memories several in particular stand out. How the trout danced a cha-cha up the Clyde near Derby Center. How depressed I became at the tires and innersprings and bleach bottles tossed down the stream banks; how that was nothing compared to the discouragement of seeing too many For Sale signs by too many farms. How lovely the Wells turned out to be, with deep undercut banks that rolled us out of earshot of the century. How on the Waits—the lyric, fragile Waits, my home river—I passed a teenager fishing the pool known as the Aquarium; how during our brief talk he mentioned a man had written a book about the Waits and I was able to tell him it was me. How on the White I spotted my friend Terry Boone sipping coffee on the bank behind Tozier’s; how this conservationist friend of all Vermont trout cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled, “You’re going to release that fish, right Wetherell?” How my other fishing friends, Tom Ciardelli, Dick Ayers, Peter DesMeules, and Ray Chapin, stood behind him, nodding their heads in agreement. How below the hatchery in Bethel the salmon parr clustered around my trout as though they had found their long-lost mother. How as the fight continued on into the early evening I began feeling as though I wasn’t attached to a fish at all, but a deer or bear—something too mammalian for comfort, so that as we raced down Otter Creek back toward the Battenkill, I began half rooting for him to escape. How I almost had him once on the Tweed—was able to lead him exhausted to the bank, when my clumsy boot poked him in the side and sent him tearing off again.

  In Cheever’s story, Neddy Merrill swims through so many swimming pools it’s all he can do to pull himself from one to the next. “He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupid with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague.” In a similar manner, I stumbled my way down the Battenkill to the spot where my Muddler had first disappeared back in what now seemed the remote past. Like Merrill, my mind swam in exhausted circles, so I no longer could tell hallucinated trout from actual ones, literal rivers from dream rivers, a Vermont of the imagination from a Vermont that was real.

  There ahead of us in the middle of the river now appeared the largest logjam I’d ever seen before—one so huge, complex, and twisted it could only have been built by steroid-drunk beavers . . . and built in the course of a single afternoon. The trout, sensing its chance, made right for the middle, plunging toward the bottom where the branches were thickest. At first I was able to hold him—for an instant the leader ran free—then with a sickening sensation that was half victory, half defeat, I saw the line stretch, hold, stretch . . . stretch . . . and snap.

  I don’t remember much of my immediate feelings; I think I was too drained to think about much at all. I do remember looking down at my watch. Ten-thirty, it read. Ten-thirty a.m. The morning sun had risen enough to erase the silver from the tree limbs. I shook my head to clear it. Downstream in the riffle where the logjam had vanished, a twelve-inch brown rose to a floating mayfly—rose twice, knocking it down in a splashy second effort. I stripped my Muddler in and changed quickly to an Adams.

  One river at a time, I told myself, working out line. One beautiful Vermont river at a time.

  May 27

  Needing some flies, needing a nice zinfandel to go with a picnic we were planning for Memorial Day, needing to have some film developed, needing most of all to spend a few minutes with a man I admire a great deal, I stopped Monday at Lee Chapman’s store over in Vermont. I’d call it a general store, if it wasn’t for the inspired specificity of the place: rare books marvelously arranged; flies just as marvelously disarranged; bag balm, cough syrup, and other patent medicines; antique gowns and lace doilies collected by his wife, Oddie; the wide selection of wines tended knowledgeably by his son Will. It’s a store where you might buy just about anything you want, as long as the wanting stems from something curious, tender, and happy in the human spirit, not something venal, quick, and mean.

  Perhaps it’s only in retrospect, but something hollow—a vacuum, the actual empty feel of it—was present the moment I swung open the heavy screen door. Oddie and Will were standing by the counter near the old-fashioned cash register; what they said was said first by their expression.

  “Lee died Saturday.”

  It was the jarring kind of news that can’t come as a surprise. Lee had been in and out of the hospital down in Hanover for the past few years; his heart, just because it was so generous, was having trouble keeping up. Saturday night it had finally quit, but not without one last Chapman quip. A few moments before the end, Lee opened his eyes, looked around, saw his family sitting there, and staring right at them said, “My God, am I still here then?”

  That was Leland Chapman—druggist, fast squad leader, air force officer, storekeeper, fisherman, hunter, fly-tyer, and friend to an amazing cross section of humanity, from the kids of the village to the movers and shakers of the larger world. I’d written about him in a little book, described him as a “moody Santa Claus” (it wasn’t until I knew him better that I realized only the last two
words applied), and after the book came out I was a bit apprehensive about how he would take it all. I needn’t have been, of course. Lee was tickled pink by his inclusion, and to the shelves of liniment and typewriter ribbons and spinning reels was added several dozen copies of my book.

  We talked about fishing a lot the last few years, planned on going out together, but it was one of those things—we never found the time. Now that it was too late I felt guilty and intrusive. After the usual inadequate words—after finding out when the funeral would be—I was starting to leave, when Oddie took me gently by the arm.

  “We’d like you to read something at the service,” she said.

  At first, I demurred. For all the respect I had for Lee, our time together consisted largely of turning through plastic fly boxes, searching for some elusive pattern he wanted me to try. But I was wrong to think this kind of friendship wasn’t just as real as one developed over long years. Lee’s life was full of such friendships, the friendship that comes in short intense bursts, and as representative of the hundreds of people who knew him this way, I was honored to have a part.

  This was on Monday. Today, in brutally hot weather, they held the service in the white Congregational church that stands within casting distance of Lee’s store. It was standing room only—the overflow sat out on the lawn. The numbers were matched by the variety. Farmers, leftover hippies, a contingent from the Masons, an honor guard of firemen and police, people in suits, summer folks from the lake, the flamboyantly artistic, the self-effacing and polite. As I stood there waiting to go in, I tried matching each person to the appropriate merchandise in Lee’s store, wondering which were the fly-casters, which the book collectors, which the liniment users or connoisseurs of wine.

  Lee’s coffin was set in the middle of the church, covered with a flag. His family sat in the pews to the right. I slipped into one of the last spaces toward the back, and nervously read through my reading while waiting my turn. The minister did his part, but it wasn’t until they came to the portion of the service where his neighbors and friends spoke that the proceedings seemed to have anything to do with Lee. They were funny stories mostly, tender and human. A woman read a poem she’d composed about Lee’s love of fishing, and when she finished the minister signaled me and up I went to the pulpit, sweating bullets.

  What I read was by Robert Traver, a man whose love of life mirrors Lee’s own. “Testament of a Fisherman,” it’s called. Oddie, coming up to me later, said it fit Lee to a T.

  I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where trout are not found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters; because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness; because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there; because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid; and finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important, but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant—and not nearly so much fun.

  Last Voyage of the Bismarck

  Buoyancy is a quality I have always admired, but always from afar. To be carried along on the choppy froth of things, bouncing, floating, skipping, held above the turbulence by an unquenchable welling up—these seem to me in my leadenness the happy pinnacles of joy. Swamped as I am by bothersome detail, weighted down by brooding, ballasted by doubts, it is all I can do to manage a rough treading water, let alone actually float. And though I have never had it tested, I suspect my specific gravity corresponds to that of granite. Solid, Wetherell undoubtedly is. Buoyant, Wetherell definitely is not.

  I feel the lack most tangibly when I’m fishing. An awkward enough wader at knee depth, I become positively enshackled when I venture into waters above my waist. The wader fabric clings to me like one of those heavy rubber suits the pearl divers were wont to drown in; my wading shoes send up vibrations frighteningly similar to those produced by ball against chain. What makes it worse is my aspiration. Not content with the shallow, easily wadable stretches, I’m always reaching out for more—reaching so far that my right hand furiously false-casts a rod held aloft like a sinking Excalibur, while my feet—touching nothing—pedal back and forth like an inebriated duck’s.

  The ultimate futility of this struck me quite forcibly one morning several years ago when I was on Franklin Pond. As usual, I was up to my shoulders in ice-cold water, casting to brook trout that, as usual, rose a teasing yard from my best efforts. I went through double-hauls and triple-hauls and hauls for which no name exists, but they had no effect whatsoever except to chase the trout out even farther; I could cast forever and not catch a fish. And though the long-term solution was obvious, it penetrated my waterlogged brain very slowly, as if having to course the same slow evolutionary furrows up which it dawned on prehistoric man.

  A boat. Of course. Something to float me out to where the fish were feeding. Eureka!

  For a moment, I let the thought of it carry me away. As always, the effervescence of that first inspiration quickly sank into something heavier and dull: the writerly poverty in which I dwelled. For if I was going to acquire a boat, it would have to be a modest one. No flashy runabout with gleaming outriggers, no cedar skiff with loving overlaps—these were unquestionably too dear. Nor did the “belly boat” have any appeal for me, that weird bastardization of waders, inner tubes, and fins that makes a fisherman resemble a cross between a hanging tenpin and one of the lumpier pea pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. No, what I needed was an actual craft of some kind, maneuverable, portable, lightweight, and cheap.

  It was in the flash of that first dawning notion that the solution lay. For if I was aping prehistoric man in the similarity of our ends, so too could I ape him in the actual means. Man did not make his first leap from shore in a Ranger bass boat with dual Merc outboards, nor did he shove off in an Old Town ABS canoe. He made the first timid venturing on a raft made of hippo bladders, a glorified and bubbly balloon.

  As it turned out, our local sporting goods store had three of the latest models. Inflatable rafts, two-, three-, and four-man versions, propped next to one another on the wall like siblings of steadily increasing plumpness and height. They weren’t made of hippo insides, but plastic—plastic that had all the quality and thickness of a ninety-nine-cent beach ball. So although I’d had visions of myself coming home with the kind of durable Avon favored by Jacques Cousteau and amphibious commandos, it was apparent that I was going to have to settle for something considerably less grand.

  I examined the rafts more carefully. For something so simple, there was an amazing proliferation of reading matter stenciled across the sides, with extravagant claims of weight-bearing capabilities contradicted by repeated cautions about life jackets. That the rafts were made in Taiwan didn’t bother me: the Chinese were an ancient people, and hadn’t they invented the junk? The price was reasonable, too, with the two-man model selling for the same price as a dozen bass bugs.

  It was the two-man model I finally chose. With a weight-bearing capacity of four hundred pounds, it could carry Celeste and me with freeboard to spare. The coziness of the actual sitting room bothered me (I estimated its measurements at roughly three by five feet), but I let the box illustration override all my doubts. Pictured were four bikini-clad models riding the two-man model in what appeared to be not only comfort but also outright joy. Convinced, I went over to the shelves and pulled a box out from the bottom. The actual purchase, for something that
was to become so lifelike and personal, seemed anticlimactic and crass. The see-through wrapping, the smell of newness, the exchange of cash. It smacked of buying a child.

  I unswaddled it gently when I got home, worried lest any stray pin or splinters puncture it at birth. Spread across the carpet with the flat whiteness of pita bread, it was slow to inflate. (Indeed, the inability of any of a dozen pumps to inflate it in anything less than half an hour was the Achilles’ heel of the whole enterprise; the slow press press press of foot against bellows was the monotonous cadence of its life.) Only gradually did it grow into a delightful roundness and buoyancy. And round and buoyant is how the raft looked when inflated, with the swelling billow of a magic carpet yearning to be airborne. The contrast between the loftiness of its ambition and the modesty of its means suggested the name. By the time I called Celeste into the room to marvel at what air had wrought, she was Bismarck, and Bismarck she remained.

  Her maiden voyage came that very evening. There’s a remote lake on the height of land behind our home that is so wild and lovely I hesitate to even whisper of its existence. Lightly visited and seldom fished, it harbors a fussy population of largemouth bass, some running to size. An old jeep trail runs up to it, but there are no launching ramps, and it would be a long, brutal portage for a canoe. Various rowboats and runabouts have been carted in over the years; their stoved-in wrecks dot the shallows like huge planters deliberately installed for the propagation of lilies.