A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  Picture all this, then try to give it a date. Eighteen ninety-eight, when Henry Van Dyke was writing essays about little rivers and it was no trick at all for a beginning flyfisherman to take fifty Catskill trout in a short afternoon? Nineteen ten, when Theodore Gordon and George M. L. La Branche were developing techniques and tactics so fundamental that they are still in use today? Certainly in our great-grandfathers’ day, the glories far enough away now that they’ve taken on a bittersweet patina and shine through the years like the afterglow from an extinct Valhalla.

  But the funny thing about golden ages is that you never realize you’re in the middle of one until the gold turns to rust. Change a single word in the opening paragraph and you have, in every particular except one, a perfect description of the situation that applies today.

  Change the word trout to bass.

  It’s a simple change, but one with wide significance. Fly fishing for bass, so long the dowdy stepsister of fly-rodding for trout, is at last coming into its own. Next to me as I write is a catalog from a leading tackle house, and on its order blank are no less than fifty different fly and bug patterns tied exclusively for bass. Beside it is a recent issue of a fly-fishing magazine, with three articles on bass, each written at a high level of technical expertise. New graphite rods make casting bugs easier than it’s ever been before, and tiers are creating flies that actually resemble what the bass eat. And while organizations like Trout Unlimited are doing wonders in preserving the trout’s domain, the bass’s range is scarcely threatened, and there are few places in this country where good largemouth or smallmouth fishing isn’t available within a convenient drive.

  But it is not what links these two golden ages that’s important here, but what separates them. We have the fish and the tackle and the scientists, but there is one thing we don’t have and it’s a pity.

  Where are the writers on bass?

  I don’t mean the lunker and hawg boys. There’s a plague of these, God knows, each with their pet little theory to sell, each with their high-powered state-of-the-art user-friendly fishing reel and high-powered state-of-the-art user-friendly prose style. I mean instead the real writers, stylists who can compare with a Haig-Brown and Howard Walden from an earlier generation, or a Nick Lyons and Robert Traver from our own. It’s not hard to make a list of people writing about bass with the same kind of originality, grace, and beauty these writers bring to bear on trout. The list begins and ends with a single digit: 0. The bass, for all its familiarity, is a noble fish, well deserving of a poet laureate, and instead it’s held captive by a court of illiterate jesters tearing around in sinfully overpowered boats equipped with a thousand dollars’ worth of superfluous gear.

  The absence of a bass literature to compare with the trout’s has several reasons, some obvious, some not. The tradition from which American fly-rodding stems is a British tradition, of course, and British, too, are its literary antecedents, with Izaak Walton as patron saint. Thus, right from the start the poetic trout was deemed a proper literary subject, while the humbler bass—unknown in England—was deemed, if not beneath contempt, at least beneath dignity.

  Actually, bass fishing does have a patron saint, but he’s a much different sort of man than Father Walton: Dr. James A. Henshall, M.D., he of the white walrus mustache and silver pince-nez. I have the ninth edition of his classic Book of the Black Bass in my collection—a beautiful copy, with a golden smallmouth embossed on the cover, and above it the famous motto that, like a catchy advertising jingle, made the bass’s reputation: Inch for Inch and Pound for Pound, the Gamest Fish that Swims.

  Henshall, writing at the turn of the century, makes no pretense of his intentions. “The Book of the Black Bass” he writes in his introduction, “is of an entirely practical nature. . . . It has been written more with a view to instruct rather than amuse or entertain. The reader will, therefore, look in vain between its covers for those rhetorical flights, poetic descriptions, entertaining accounts and pleasing illustrations of the pleasures and vicissitudes of angling which are usually found in works of like character.”

  So there we have it right from the start; Dr. Henshall rules that for bass, poetry is out of bounds. It’s a Philistinism he doesn’t always stick to—there are lovely passages in the book where the good doctor quite forgets himself and writes most lyrically—but for the main, he puts bass writing in the technical, how-to groove it remains in to this day. Along with this, he launched that other annoying quality that still infects so much bass writing: an obnoxious jingoism; a boosterism designed as a corrective to the trout fisherman’s disdain, but which in the end becomes so established and ingrained it becomes a reverse snobbery of its own.

  The Kentucky bait-casting reel didn’t help matters either. Its perfection (and the perfection of the spinning reel a few decades later) pushed fly-fishing for bass to the periphery of the sport, and widened the divergence between the English lyric tradition and the new American technocratese. If the best way to catch largemouth was to throw a one-ounce River Runt Spook at them, then the person doing the throwing was less apt to pick up a book of fly-casting recollections by, say, Lord Grey of Falloden, and more likely to pick up Sports Afield to see what Jason Lucus had to say about plug weights. Thus, the would-be bass writer had no Eugene Connets to emulate, no A. W. Millers. That bass fishing could be a beautiful experience, a balm and restorative to the soul, wasn’t macho enough to be admitted; what counted in bass fishing, right through the plastic worm/tournament era, was horsing in those hawgs.

  Even the bass’s prolificacy worked against him. While the trout stylists cherished their fish all the more because he was so threatened, bass writers could wallow in their fish’s abundance and afford all kinds of sloppiness, not only in their conservation ethic (or rather their lack of one), but in their prose. The catching of one trout became a ceremony to be celebrated, while with bass there was no use talking about it unless you came home with a full stringer. An individual trout was thought of as a miracle; an individual bass as a statistic, so there’s no wonder someone with talent and sensitivity preferred writing about the former.

  But if there are compelling reasons why bass writing has never produced its A River Runs Through It or its Upstream and Down in the past, there is no reason why it may not do so in the future. For there are signs of hope. Fly fishing for bass is undergoing a tremendous resurgence of interest, as witnessed by all those new fly patterns, all those new tactics. Some of our best fishermen are beginning to realize that not only is fly-rodding a good way of taking bass, at some times and at certain places it’s the best way. Every year around the first week of July, I have the same conversation at a boat landing near my home on the Connecticut River. A jump-suited bass man will trailer out his souped-up Ranger and allow as to how he’s given up for the year, since the bass have gone deep where he can’t get at them, even with his fish finder. I smile at this. All summer the smallmouth will be rising freely to bugs along the shore, and the finest surface fishing of the year is only just starting as the plastic-tossers give up.

  The resurgent popularity of bass bugging is bound to result in new writing that comes from the flyfisher’s unique perspective—that is, from a perspective that combines profound curiosity with deep respect. The new breed of bass writer will not be afraid to give us those “rhetorical flights, poetic descriptions” and “entertaining accounts” that Dr. Henshall so disdained—will instead glory in them and so produce a body of bass-fishing literature that can stand proudly against our best, most lyrical writing on trout.

  What kind of literature will this be? I’m playing hunches now, but they’re strong ones. It will be a literature with a remarkable geographic range, taking in not only glacial lakes in Maine and farm ponds in Indiana but swamps in the Louisiana bayou country and man-made impoundments in the Nevada desert. It will be a literature set on still water more than rivers, plains more than mountains, with perspectives that are those of expanse. It will be an aural literature, splashy with sou
nds. It will be a literature that is tangential, full of anecdotes; things happen in bass fishing, crazy things that aren’t necessarily connected to the fishing. It will be a literature that is nostalgic for a simpler era without being maudlin—a literature that treats with respect the old wooden plugs and sparrow-sized bass bugs and boats that had to be rowed. It will be an extroverted literature, the focus being on the other fishermen in the boat rather than on the fisherman telling the tale. It will be, above all, a literature that is as pugnacious and brave as the bass itself, one that comes at you with unexpected leaps and cantankerous little flourishes and a great unquenchable tug of joy.

  I think of the bass writing to come, and I think of two evenings last August when I fished a small mountain lake on the height of land behind my home. It’s a clear, stony lake of the kind found in northern New England, complete with its resident loons and its osprey and its deer coming down to shore at sunset for a curious stare about. There are smallmouth in it, few very big, but possessed of a brightness and energy that do ample justice to the beauty of the scene.

  Near the eastern shore is an old logging dam, and from its base extends a vast shallows of boulders dark and craggy enough to gladden the heart of a Robert Frost. I was in a canoe on that first night; for reasons I’m not sure of, I’d brought along a spinning rod with a tackle box full of ancient Bass o’Renos and rusty Jitterbugs I’d used as a boy.

  About seven, just as the sun touched the mountain’s shoulder on the lake’s far shore, smallmouth started rising on all sides, so that within seconds the surface that had been completely placid was dimpled with interconnected, outspreading rings. The effect was that of a rainstorm with no rain—I held my palm out, expecting to feel drops. As it turned out, the bass were rising to a small white mayfly I’d never seen before, and totally ignored my meatier plug. Some were leaping free of the surface and not just sipping; there was something so startling and unexpected in the explosive way they shot clear, yet so fixed and regular in the parabola described by their reentry, that I began thinking of summer fireworks and not summer rain.

  I was back the following night, this time with my fly rod and some small white Irresistibles that perfectly imitated the hatch. By the time I actually saw a fish jump it was too late to cast to him, but if I kept my line in the air and waited, I’d notice a rise a few feet away, and by dropping the line a few feet from that I could anticipate the bass’s direction and so have him.

  It was fishing of the most exciting and yet gentlest sort, and by the time it became too dark to see, the pattern of the catching had become mixed with the whistly gargle of the loons and the humming crickets back in the beaver swamps and the steady lap of water against the canoe’s bow, so that it seemed I was reeling these in, too, and not just fish.

  Thirty bass, thirty-five. I don’t remember how many I caught and it’s not important. What is was that sense of levitation—the feeling that all the smallmouth in the lake were devoting themselves that night to pushing the already airy surface even higher, so that the whole experience, myself included, floated a foot above the real lake in a magic realm where anything might happen.

  That was your golden age for you, right down to the sunset, which—touching the far shore now—sent a ripple across the lake that transformed itself halfway across from a ray of magenta light to a pulse of cool wind that shivered me in absolute delight.

  July 24

  There’s luck and there’s luck.

  A simple illustration. We’re lucky to live a short drive from the picture-perfect village of Strafford, Vermont. Set in a valley where the fields are cleared and open in the old way, its dwellings little changed in appearance since the Civil War, the village boasts what my editor friend Tom Slayton likes to call the Chartres of Vermont—the immaculate white meetinghouse set high above the west side of the common. It also boasts, a short way down the common, one of the best bike-repair shops in New England. Me being the avid bike rider and mechanical illiterate I am, I’m lucky in this proximity.

  The shop’s proprietor is a multitalented, sophisticated man whose world encompasses a lot more than ten-speeders. Among other things, he’s a devoted bird hunter, and I always make a point of asking him how the shooting’s been while he prods and pokes my gears. He tells me a hunting story or two, I lie about the fishing, and the conversation is, I like to think, conducted on a plane of mutual curiosity and respect worthy of Piscator and Venator in Izaak Walton.

  We’re lucky to have a man like that around. As I was leaving his shop one day, Richard—who never loses faith in one’s ability to surmount one’s mechanical deficiencies—yelled after me this advice: “Try fixing that yourself next time! All you need is a number-eleven wrench!”

  Right. But the advice was generously offered, and I filed it away in the list of things I must do someday. I drove the dozen miles home, parked my car near the village common, cut across the grass toward the general store, felt something hard crunch below my shoe, bent down, and discovered there in the grass a wrench—a wrench that, when I lifted it and brushed off the dirt, had the number 11 engraved on its stem.

  That’s luck.

  Of course, there’s bad luck, too, but even this has a way of turning in unexpectedly happy directions. This afternoon I managed to clear my desk off early and drive up to the Waits after too many days away. I went in by the cemetery stretch, waved on my way by the cheerful red-bearded farmer who works the adjacent farm—seeing me, he likes to hold his hands apart, tilt his head in a question mark, and laugh. This stretch of river is set well below the road and pretty much ignored, but since it’s the upper limit of brown trout range, the lower limit of brookies, it’s fun discovering which ones are currently in residence.

  The brookies as it turned out. On my first cast a decent ten-incher took my Royal Wulff in the pocket along a fallen, water-scoured maple. I landed him quickly, released him into the current, and was heading upstream to the next pool when my wading shoes came against a mossy rock and I slipped. Slipped, not fell; in fact, it was hardly even a “slip” more than a quick readjustment in my posture from slightly tilted to fully upright. Unluckily, what tilted the most was the hand carrying my new Orvis graphite fly rod. The butt came down on the table-sized boulder next to me, and then, with a plastic sighing, separated out into its approximately 130 constituent strands.

  Strands that, luckily enough, hadn’t been severed. Always before when I’ve broken a rod, it’s been at the ferrule where the break is dramatically complete. This time the filaments, separated on the latitudinal plane, were still connected on the longitudinal one; it was as if the rod had transformed itself into an eight-and-a-half-foot assemblage of black spaghetti. That it was three hundred dollars down the tubes bothered me, of course; what hurt even more was that, weaponless, my fishing trip was prematurely over.

  So, alternatives time. Cast by hand? I’ve seen it done, casters whipping out line as dexterously as Indiana Jones, but only as a stunt. Not fish at all, wade upstream, do some “research”? Good idea in theory, but a flyfisherman without a fly rod is like a microbe hunter without a microscope, and it’s my fixed belief that it is only through the delicate intermediary of the fly rod that we really focus our attention on a stream’s life.

  There was another alternative, the one I went for. Up in my glove compartment was some electrician’s tape used to patch some earlier victim of my clumsiness. I tore off a piece, wound it as tight as I could from the grip to the ferrule, waved the mended rod back and forth in a mock cast, then took it back down to the river hoping for the best.

  It cast. It didn’t cast pretty and it didn’t cast far, but it cast. That was the lucky part. The unlucky part was that when I rose the next trout, the response time—the time it took my upward-lifting impulse to be transmitted through the tape to what was left of the fiber—was so slow the fish was long gone by the time the line tightened. The same thing happened on the next pool upstream: another good fish, another slow-motion miss.

  Wel
l, I was almost there. What I needed besides the tape was a splint of some kind, something that would add rigidity—a branch, say. The moment I brought my head down to look for one—the very moment!—I saw something long and cream-colored on the bank: a kid’s fiberglass fishing rod, the cheap kind that costs a few bucks in the five and ten, abandoned there who knows when, absolutely perfect—when broken in half—for my splints.

  It was the work of a few seconds to unwrap the tape from my rod, graft in the added section of the kid’s, and wrap the bastardized hybrid back up. I tried a cast, and the action seemed much stiffer than before, much faster. I waded up to the next pool, worked out as much line as I dared, and—holding my breath the entire time—hooked and landed a twelve-inch trout, the nicest brookie I’d taken all summer.

  That’s luck.

  But even then it wasn’t finished. If you fish the Waits much you’ll hear stories about an eighty-year-old woman who divides her time between tending a tag-sale table outside her simple home and fishing the river every night just long enough to catch dinner for her cat. I’d heard about her from several sources, and though I’d kept my eyes open, six years had gone by and I’d never actually seen the fish lady in person.

  I don’t have to tell you what happened. Driving home that night, trying to decide if it was my unlucky day because of breaking the rod or my lucky day because of mending it, I saw a movement in the twilight near the river’s edge . . . pulled the car over . . . and saw emerge from the alders a little stooped-over woman carrying a spin-casting rod, a worm bucket, two long trout, and—trotting behind at a respectful distance—a smug-looking Siamese cat.