When I moved here I was slow to find out just how good the bass fishing was. There were trout streams to fish, ponds to explore, and it wasn’t until my third summer that I began trying to understand what the Connecticut was all about. Even then, I did most of my early fishing with spinning tackle and plugs, and I soon got bored with the assembly-line monotony of that kind of fishing. It was only when a friend gave me a fly rod heavy enough for serious bugging and a tackle box crammed full of poppers that I began to find the proper methodology—began to see how the disciplined ethic of fly-fishing I’d managed to teach myself over twenty years of chasing trout could be expanded to take in this new kind of river, this different kind of fish. Spin casting is casting at a fish, but fly casting is casting to them, and the difference, small as it sounds, is enough to elevate a recreation into a craft.
The fly rod is an epistemological tool the wielding of which gains us entry into a river’s life—this is just as true on a slow-moving bass river as it is on a freestone stream. On the latter, with long experience and if things go right, fly-fishing can give you the feeling that every secret in the river is potentially graspable, all it takes is a little more care, a little more sharpness. On big rivers like the Connecticut, the knowing is much more tentative; with our casts covering so small a proportion of the total water, it’s like chipping away at a secret with a chisel. And while bass fishing is invariably compared to trout fishing without either being particularly illuminated, I find the two fishings, these two ways of knowing, complement each other perfectly. There is a quality to trout fishing that doesn’t bother me while I’m at it, but which I become aware of when I’m fishing for something else—something cramped in it all, the necessarily small scale (at least here in New England) of fish and river size, and the corresponding mind-set of fitting ourselves into something thus circumscribed. On the Connecticut, with no trees to entangle backcasts, with the views extending far in every direction, with the potential, especially in the backwaters, for seriously large fish, I’m aware of being released somehow—of exercising that part of me that finds joy in expansion, power, and force. Anyone who alternates between freshwater and saltwater fishing will know what I’m talking about here—how refreshing it can be after delicate casting to put all your strength into a powerful rod and really start to haul.
Sloppiness comes as a relief at times, in fishing just as in life. River bass are earthy fish, generously forgiving, and if you have the time and place down right, they will overlook a certain exuberance in your method. Here in the Connecticut their abundance is such that you’re almost certain to find one who’s in the mood for whichever fly you’re using, be it a swallow-sized Dhalberg Diver, a moth-sized Bass King, or a streamer with eight inches of marabou trailing backward over the shank. There are just enough contaminants in the water (as if I’m praising them!) that people are reluctant to eat their fish, and so release them; with this, the coolness of the water, and the extensive cover, catches of twenty-five or thirty bass are common, at least in early summer. By August they’re lazier, but bigger, and there always seems to be a spurt in September when the largest fish of the year become susceptible to yellow Woolly Worms jigged close to shore. But this is only a general trend. There are days even in August when some trick of rain or temperature will produce daytime fishing every bit as fast and exciting as June’s.
The Connecticut, generous as it is, has certain peculiarities as a bass fishery, and anyone fishing my stretch of river will have to come to terms with these before getting into the heavy catches. Backed up by the dam as it is, with the dropoff so sudden, the fish hang in tighter to shore than any fish in any water I know. The cover is there—the bankside rocks and protective blowdowns—and between these, the availability of crayfish on the sandy bottom, the insects falling off the overhanging trees, the relative warmth of the sunny “shallows,” the nearness of deep-water safety, you get a fishery that, in essence, isn’t much wider than a small mountain brook. Many times, in fishing this strip, I’ve had the uncanny feeling I wasn’t fishing water at all, but dry land. One of the most effective casts is to drop your popper on the rocky shingle, then pull it abruptly into the water. Six inches from shore may mean water two feet deep, and the bass, with excellent visibility, will often take the fly before it travels even a millimeter farther. How far they will come is something that varies tremendously from week to week; early in the season they seem to shy away from leaving the bank at all, but later in the summer they will often trail a lure ten yards and more, and the biggest have the trick of taking just as you’re starting your next cast.
There are other peculiarities. Unlike the bass lakes only a few miles away, Connecticut fishing seems to improve in direct proportion to the thermometer, so the hotter it gets the faster the bass feed. This has it limits, of course. We had a heat wave last year that was either one of those unpredictable bumps in the weather pattern or a foretaste of what global warming will do to our summers. In either case, it pretty much put an end to the fishing by early July. But in most years the hot weather brings the fish up, particularly at the beginning of a season or the finish. Conversely, a cold front is enough to spoil the fishing for a day or two; on those crisp, invigorating days of northwest wind, I leave my canoe on the lawn and head for a trout stream instead, finding—after all that wide-open athleticism—the delicate preciseness to be just what I need.
There’s the weather to take into account, and there’s the tide—the daily rise and fall of the water level as the gates are opened at Wilder Dam fifteen miles to the south. The usual pattern is for the river to be at its highest in the morning, then to start dropping as the power demand peaks with the heat of the afternoon, rising again in the evening. Depending on the weather, the range can be extreme; I’ve seen mornings when the river seemed an inch from flooding over its banks, afternoons when there were mud flats along shore littered with sunburnt crayfish. And while I’ve spent many hours trying to find the link between these fluctuations and the fishing, I’ve never come to any conclusions I have much faith in. Is the fishing best when the water level is highest, offering more cover? Not particularly. Is it better at dead low, when the fish have fewer places to hide? No, I don’t think so. If anything, it seems best at slack tide—the water neither too high nor too low, with perhaps just a suggestion of a downstream current.
Lures? I’m tempted to say any standard bass popper will do, but there’s one so superior it deserves special mention: the chartreuse Sneaky Pete. Small and bullet-shaped, with long spidery legs and a pert, feathery tail, it takes more and bigger bass than any other lure I’ve tried (“Did you catch them on Sneaky Pete, Daddy?” my three-year-old daughter will ask the moment I come home). What’s more, it casts well, not like those heavy bass bugs that make you feel, hauling it out there, that you and your lure are traveling in different time zones. You could fish exclusively with Sneaky up on top, pack along a few Woolly Buggers or Zonkers for times when they’re deep, and be set for anything.
But careful here. Whenever I start to offer advice this way I feel the same flush of arrogant guilt I experience whenever I talk about technique in fiction—as if anyone can take something so magical and reduce it to formulas! There are general parameters for bass fishing, hunches and intuitions, but no rules. And whereas in trout fishing the tactics are so complicated and structured that for many fishermen method serves as its own reward, in bass fishing a much more pragmatic ethic is at work: the goal is to get out there and get some fish.
And what fish! Much more delicate than their lake-dwelling cousins, they have the knack of sipping in a popper so quietly you’d swear it was being attacked by a bubble—delicately, but once the line tightens all hell breaks loose, as if by some thermal bassy reaction their fastidiousness has been transformed into sheer bravado. Up they go exploding from the water, then submarining down into the depths, then skyrocketing upward again, this time out on the other side of the canoe, kapowie! . . . Well, as you can see, it’s practically impossibl
e to write about smallmouth without falling into a pinball-machine, italicized kind of prose (just as it’s impossible to talk about them without wiggling your hand back and forth like a Spitfire pilot at a debriefing). They deserve better from a writer, much more lyricism and grace, and my literary resolution holds fast until I have one on the end of my line again, and then . . . Zap! Zap! Powie! Up they go! It’s a great fish to catch on a fly rod, but a lot harder one to capture in prose.
It’s odd to think how many of the happiest moments of my life, literally the happiest, have been spent chasing these feisty little bombshells with the squat, take-it-or-leave-it kind of name. The time I took my father out on the river one morning shortly after the birth of his granddaughter; how instead of our usual skunking we caught fish after fish, and my father’s face lit up in surprise, wonder, and delight. Celeste and I out in Bismarck, our toy inflatable boat; how we caught not bass but one of those fringe benefits you often come across in pursuing bass, a walleye, a big four-pounder that towed us a good hundred yards along shore. Celeste again, this time reeling in a perch only to have a monstrous pike appear from the weeds to sever it in two. Owls, a whole parliament of them, barn, screech, and short-eared, twisting their necks around to watch us at twilight until you’d swear they were about to come unscrewed. All the flotsam and jetsam the river carries, finding among the half-submerged cornstalks Frisbees of all sizes and lollipop colors; Frisbees from new pizza shops opening in villages upstream, Frisbees left behind after river picnics, Frisbees lost in the water by teary-eyed kids—a whole river of Frisbees! The covered bridge at Clay Brook; how one July evening fishing alone in the endless dusk, I thought of writing a short story about a fourteen-year-old boy who must choose between the girl of his longing and the bass of his dreams. All these things, and where did they come from? The intense delight I find in spending a few seconds attached to a smallmouth bass.
We started out on the river this trip, stayed there for the most part, and we’ll soon finish where we began—there in the sunlight catching fish. In a fraternal way I hope I’ve explained, the Connecticut has been my silent partner in these episodes, so when I come home at night it’s not with the feeling that an “I” has caught these experiences, but this much more essential, satisfying “we.”
Me and the Connecticut, brothers unto death. It’s the kind of feeling a big river leaves in you, the endless downstream flow of it being such an obvious metaphor for time’s own inevitable rhythm. Here in New England this note is played even more explicitly than it is elsewhere. Thinking back on its history, remembering the Puritans who settled here with their burden of piety and guilt, it’s hard not to picture New England being born old, and living through the centuries, not toward senescence but toward a much delayed and much welcome youth.
And maybe this explains the fellow feeling—that here at the end of the twentieth century, the Connecticut River has at last reached a mature middle age, and so it’s no wonder I identify with its complicated intermingling of freshness and hope, pollution and neglect—those alterations between wild surges of energy and lazier, more introspective driftings. Old Man, Faulkner called the Mississippi, but it’s different on the Connecticut, and if either of us, river or man, is headed toward old age, I’m the one, and the Connecticut—cherished, protected, valued as the irreplaceable treasure it is—is on its way toward a well-deserved youth when it will flourish as the centerpiece of the first region in America that puts aside greed as the only ethic and ugliness as the only aesthetic and recovers this beautiful wonder world that on first try we spoiled.
Or so I hope. Me, I’m headed the opposite way, but that’s all right—as long as the river flows in that direction for me, and for a few hours now and then I can float along with its current and gain vicariously my own small measure of renewal and hope.
October now, and the bass have long since gone to their deep-water haunts, but then a day of warm and radiant sunshine makes me take the canoe down from the loft of our barn, where I’ve already stored it for the winter. A quick gathering of rods and tackle, a note for my wife, a drive down the mountain, and out onto the Connecticut I go.
The river is full of leaves, leaves of every size, shape, and color, from vivid gold to impeccable green, the preponderance being double-pronged pine needles of burnt yellow pointing like delicate arrowheads downstream. It’s no trick at all to align the canoe so it drifts parallel to this autumnal procession. My fly sinks between leaves and shore, hangs there in the thick sunlight like a jewel set in honey. Seconds go by, I’m just about to twitch it, when a bass separates itself from its own exaggerated shadow there by the rocks, lured by the same sun that’s lured me. The moment I see him I realize his attention is focused on something in the water, and the moment I realize that something is the streamer the streamer is disappearing, and the moment I realize disappearance and bass have some essential interconnection there’s a jolt as the fish takes hold, and then he’s soaring through the air, higher and higher, up over the rocks, up over the banks, up over the spruce trees into the realm of sky-colored remembrance where, if I’m lucky, if I ease off on the pressure and don’t pull too hard, he will never, not in a dozen years, not in a hundred, come down.
August 13
Summer ritual is a sacred thing, but nowhere more than on Cape Cod. We’ve come down this weekend for a badly needed fix of sand, sea, and sky—for these, and to touch bases with the much-loved traditions of summers past.
Arriving at our friends’ house shortly after breakfast, we’re immediately taken on the rounds. The garden to see the state of the corn, the deck to see how far David’s extension has proceeded, the aquarium to see John-David’s periwinkles, the kitchen to see the crabs Katherine has shredded for a lunchtime salad. Finally, after we’ve seen everything else—after the summer’s adventures and misadventures have been quickly chronicled, to be elaborated upon and embroidered that night over dinner—we’re taken down the oak-covered bank to see the biggest surprise of all. There, nestled comfortably against the weathered dock, a spanking new eighteen-foot Boston Whaler, heavy spinning rods mounted in the gimbals, silver gaff propped behind the steering wheel, green landing net—sized for whales—fluttering limply over the flagpole in the stern.
John-David, at twelve, has the fishing bug and has it badly. It’s good to watch him caught up in it—to see myself in the obsessive way he ties and reties knots, his agonized indecision when it comes to lures, the importance attached to wearing just the right kind of battered straw hat . . . better still to watch his dad bring to this the same kind of patience, bewilderment, and grace my father brought to my own equally dogmatic boyhood fussings.
Sandwiches packed? Plenty of juice? How’s the gas? The nonfishers come down to see us off, and for a time there’s enough excitement and merriment on the side of the dock to see off the QEII. Our boasts become mixed with their best wishes, then the water is separating us, until finally all that can be heard is the hoarse bark of the family Chesapeake, in despair at being left behind, and we’re on our way down the pond, ducking our heads as we go under the low causeway that crosses the inlet, then standing straight again, grabbing onto the side rails as the boat comes bow-first into the choppy waters of Vineyard Sound.
David sets a course alongshore in the smoothest water, but even so, we’re in for a good bumping. Out to port is the Vineyard; “like a low smoky cloud,” I once described it in a story, but today the haze is blown away and the cloud has become a felt-tipped line of green and tan.
It’s nice to play guest for a change, have someone else be in charge of figuring out where the fish might be. Father and son confer over the sound of the motor, decide we’re best off in the lee of Nobska Lighthouse toward Wood’s Hole. Fine with me—some of the best moments of my life have been spent in and around that busy harbor, and bouncing off it in a small boat is the one perspective I haven’t tried.
Any doubt we have is overcome by the sight of gulls and terns sniping at the water off a buoy-ma
rked reef straight out from the Steamship Authority pier. Baitfish are everywhere—they shoot across the surface like silver darts. David brings the boat up to where they’re thickest while John-David and I ready our rods. Three or four other boats have raced out from Eel Pond, attracted by these same birds. We form a ring around them—these fish are surrounded!—and in between casts glance around to see who wins this instant, undeclared derby and catches the first blue.
Woods Hole is an interesting enough place to fish, what with ferries coming in from the islands, a fleet of yachts running past, the tide that springs furiously between Buzzards Bay and the Sound. These are all fairly routine, of course, but then the Oceanus comes out, the Oceanographic Institute’s famous research vessel bound who knows where, and cradled in the stern, its name clearly legible, is the Alvin, the homely submersible that found the Titanic. To a rube used to fishing the quiet places of the country, it’s all quite a show, and it takes the hard, vicious strike of a blue-fish to recall me to the water.
It’s a modest blue, two pounds at the most, and nowhere near as big as the twelve-pounder John-David landed earlier in the summer. But still, it’s the only fish taken, and upholds the undeserved reputation I have after writing a fishing book or two. We bounce around some more, try spots closer in toward shore, then, with not much cooking, turn around and race back along the beaches toward home.
Later that evening, reading the paper, we learn we’re not the only ones to have gone blue fishing on this perfect August day. Down in Maine, the president has been taking out his powerboat in the hopes of getting some fish. The papers have been keeping score; to date, it’s seven vacation days for the president with not a single blue landed or hooked.
A River Trilogy Page 26
