A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  “And what happened then?” Celeste asked. We were driving the opposite way along this same road now, on a bright sunny day nine years later.

  “My left front tire went flat.”

  “Right here?”

  “Up ahead somewhere, I think. It was almost dark. Luckily, there was a spare in the boot. I changed it, then just before I got back in the car saw something that had been there right behind me all along.”

  “A sheep?”

  I shook my head. “A mountain.”

  And not just any mountain, but one so unusual and compelling I fell in love with it at first sight. There rising above me in the darkness from a slope of scree, its sides barely outlined as a richer shade of black against the dark northern sky, was a crenellated ridge of abrupt towers and weird spires that in variety and steepness would have made a fit playground for trolls. It was like looking up at the walls of a fantasy castle in Spain, a bit of Yosemite transported to the Highlands, a . . . Well, all my comparisons were feeble. It wasn’t the highest mountain I’d ever seen, not even the most spectacular, but between its isolation there by the sea and the abruptness of those towers, it was impossible to look at it and not want to stand on top.

  It wasn’t until the following morning back in Inverness that I discovered this beautiful and suggestive peak had a beautiful and suggestive name: Stac Polly. The book I found it in was called The Scottish Peaks by one W. A. Poucher, who describes it lovingly thus:

  This peak with its bristling summit ridge of sandstone pinnacles is the favorite of all mountaineers visiting Coigach. Bold and steep buttresses rise at each end of the mountain; the weird formations of sandstone are a great attraction and those crowning the terminal points of some of the very narrow spurs can only be reached by a sensational scramble. The whole of Stac Polly is the delight of the photographer, and is the most rewarding and sensational subject in all Scotland.

  I brought the book back to the States with me, glanced at Stac Polly’s picture surprisingly often in the intervening years, daydreamed about going back one day and climbing it. Gradually, it became one of those lesser ambitions even a happy life becomes littered with, and yet fate took a lucky turn with this one, and here I was nine years later parking my car in the turnoff at its base and tying on my hiking boots and starting toward its ridge with my wife.

  Again, we were blessed with the sunshine that had drenched us every minute of the trip. Between the darkness of the night I’d first seen it and the natural exaggeration of memory, I was prepared to be disappointed by Stac Polly’s size, but if anything the sun only emphasized it, throwing the towers and spires into even bolder relief. I understood now the appropriateness of the name. Weathered indents made the towers look stacked rather than carved, and homely as the mountain was, there was a wild, merry impudence in the way it rose there from the scree—a perfect Polly through and through.

  Our legs were in that happy condition that comes after a week’s strenuous climbing, when up hardly seems up at all, and we made good time along the dry bed of a burn. There were lots of sheep about with their lambs; in a short while we were above them, or at least all but one.

  “Hear that bleating?” Celeste asked. “It’s a lamb. He’s stranded up there on the cliff.”

  “He’ll be all right,” I said.

  “That must be his mother down below. I think you should climb up and chase him back to her.”

  I wasn’t worried about the lamb; he was perched on a ledge fifty yards above us, as rigid and proud as the hood ornament on a ‘53 Buick. We were out to climb Stac Polly—why deny that privilege to him? But unluckily for the lamb, I was in a frisky mood, and the idea of chasing him from his smugness was irresistible.

  Off I went. Within seconds I was in among the lesser towers and buttresses that make up Stac Polly’s flank. It was hard to keep sight of the lamb from in close. Celeste, below me on the bulge of scree, kept up a running play-by-play.

  “He’s still there. . . . No, he’s moving through the heather. He’s coming your way. He sees you. . . . He’s heading uphill. He’s trotting. . . . He’s trotting faster.”

  Each time I drew even with him, he took off again, climbing those rocks as daintily as a mountain goat. I doubled back under him, came at him from the steep slope to his left, hid behind a boulder to let him settle, then traversed to the right to take him unawares.

  “Gotcha!” I yelled, all but springing.

  There was nothing behind the rock. Above me, a long way above me, the lamb stuck out its tongue.

  We played this game for an hour in all. When I finally gave up, I was panting from effort, my knickers were torn from briars, Celeste was doubled over with laughter, and the lamb was back in the exact spot he had started, bleating in happiness as his mother trotted past us to fetch him.

  “You did good, honey,” Celeste said, patting the spot on the shoulders where my ego resides. “Real good.”

  Chasing lambs doesn’t leave much strength for climbing mountains, but we’d come too far to quit now. The trail leveled off, then swung to the right to get around onto the north face. As we turned the corner a whole new view opened up—the country unrolling into Sutherland—but the footing was becoming dicier as the slope steepened, and we couldn’t take our eyes off the ground other than to peek.

  Toward the top the trail left off switchbacking and went directly up the rocks. The last ten yards would have been rock climbing in the States, but is called “scrambling” in Scotland—scrambling and kicking and scratching and clawing. Celeste got up first, let out a delighted yell, then reached down to help me up the last bit of rock. In a second I was beside her, and together we were looking out at the world falling away beneath our feet.

  There to our left were the lower round pillars of Stac Polly, grooved brown by the weather, aligned so they pointed like a gunsight toward the sea. At our backs was the twisting line of the road up which we had driven—in one coil was a loch with a fisherman’s rowboat moving at the apex of a green, outspreading V. Directly in front of us, seemingly endless, stretched the wild country north of the mountain—a furrowed, treeless expanse of loch and lochan, moor and hill, with the sea on one side, mountains on the other, and in between nothing that hinted at the presence of man. In the stillness of that windless day only one sound could be heard, and it seemed the very call of that landscape, impossible to locate, distant, unutterably sweet.

  “Hear it?” I said.

  Celeste smiled. “Cuckoo, our old friend.”

  In the afternoon slant of sun, the misty softening provided by the sea, it was at the same time the wildest landscape I’d ever seen and the gentlest. I thought of Thoreau’s happy phrase: “A breadth of view equivalent to motion”—just looking at it made you soar.

  “What’s that one called over there?” Celeste said, pointing to the nearest mountain, the one with snow in its gullies.

  I turned through the guidebook. “Cul Mor,” I said. Then, flipping to the glossary: “Great Nook.”

  There were no foothills to these mountains—they rose directly from the moorland, so they seemed many times their actual height. The most impressive was wedge-shaped Suilven directly opposite us over Loch Sionscaig; as often as we spun around to point at something new, we kept coming back to it, and when we finally sat down to eat our sandwiches, it was facing Suilven’s direction.

  We stayed on top with the light. My legs were tired with satisfaction at having completed the climb, and it was matched by the kind of contentment that comes when you find—from the height of years—that one of your ambitions was worth the dreaming after all. For a long time the view alone was enough to occupy me, but then mountains being the metaphoric prompters they are, I tried focusing on some thoughts that seemed as large and compelling as distant Suilven. Story ideas, a rush of remembrance from that earlier, lonelier visit, resolutions for the future, not just about travels, but ambitions and difficult, all but unobtainable goals. I tried capturing them, but they floated off into the soft ai
r, where, measured against that scenery, they popped apart into the fine, scattered mist of insignificance.

  But that was all right. One did stay intact, the one I brought down with me, my one and only Highland souvenir. The things we had seen, our small adventures, the sense we’d had in all our circling of coming closer to the secret of these hills. We weren’t there yet, not by a long shot, but the challenge was clear now—to take home from the landscape a new breadth of perspective; to keep it in memory; to someday come back again; to learn this key to wisdom . . . to know two places well.

  September 30

  My hunch is that we flyfishers, away from the water, measure rather less gullible than average. Fly fishing, after all, attracts many of its practitioners from the professions that deal with precise measurement of fact on one hand and intuitive gropings toward truth on the other—actuaries and historians, engineers and poets, draftsmen and bakers, scientists and philosophers. Then, too, it’s not in front of the television set swallowing lies that we choose to spend our leisure time. No, on the whole, we’re rather less gullible than the norm.

  We overcompensate for this skepticism once you get us out on the water. There, when it comes to gullibility, we’re the biggest suckers there are. You can test this yourself easily enough. Next time you see another flyfisherman walking along your favorite stream, stop him thus:

  “Good morning.” (You say.)

  “Hi. How’s the fishing?” (He says.)

  “Not so hot. But I’ll tell you what. There’s this blonde sunbathing up there in that meadow, I believe she said her name is Miss June or Miss July, something like that, but anyway she needs someone to help her with her suntan lotion. . . .”

  Or, as a variation:

  “Not so hot. But I’ll tell you what. There’s this wildcat oil well up there in the meadow all ready to start pumping, all it needs is someone to invest a little more capital. . . .”

  Now an ersatz flyfisherman will perhaps rise to these baits, but a skeptical flyfisherman, a genuine flyfisherman, won’t bat an eye. This is where the real test comes, variation number three:

  “Not so hot. But tell you what. There’s a three-pound brown sitting in tight by an alder up there in that first pool. I gave him my best shot, but nothing doing. He’s all yours.”

  And off our skeptical flyfisherman will run, hurrying past you so fast you can all but feel the slipstream of his credulity.

  Fiction writers have a term for this: the willing suspension of disbelief. What makes it possible, I suppose, is the mystery of the watery element we probe. Measured in cosmological terms, it wasn’t that long ago we were water dwellers ourselves, and our hunch that a huge fish might be lurking just beyond that outcrop of coral was the defensive safety mechanism by which our species thrived. Now, emerged, our other instincts dulled, we still remember this one ancestral lesson: in the water, as in the dark, anything goes.

  Not all waters are created equal in this respect. I find, fishing a dark muddy pond, that it’s hard to believe there are fish in the murkiness; conversely, fishing the Caribbean, where it’s no trick at all to see bottom fifty feet down, I find it just as difficult to believe there are fish in such clarity. Hope requires neither transparency nor opaqueness, but flourishes best in exactly the right blend—the transparency of a trout stream, say, where we can see just far enough into the bright swirls of color to make of them huge fishy forms.

  I was given a good refresher lesson in all this yesterday afternoon. I was down on the White River, famous water in New England, but for me—with all the best intentions in the world—a stream with which I’ve never quite hit it off. The water’s always too high when I get there, or too low; there are lots of fishermen about, lots of canoes, and the presence of the interstate, in an already sloppy valley, pretty well spoils most of its charm. Still, there are serious fish in the White, big rainbows I’ve seen racing away from my boots, and the salmon restoration effort has, if nothing else, drawn to its banks a loyal band of river advocates I admire very much. Between this and the undeniable beauty of the remoter stretches, the White and I have reached a grudging truce over the years: it gives me a trout or two each time I visit; I don’t push it and don’t bad-mouth it to my friends.

  Yesterday I drove up past Stockbridge, where the river narrows to a width you can pretty well cover in one cast. Even so, I had to watch my footing; as relaxed as the river is there, there are surprisingly deep holes. For the first hour I spent most of my time freeing my hook from the salmon parr that throw themselves on even the biggest dry fly with maniacal persistence, as if demonstrating they have the moxie it takes to swim round-trip to Greenland. There was a trout where the flow was smoothest, not a big one, but rising so perfectly to dusty white midges, with such fastidious grace, I felt honored just to share a seat at the same table.

  I was wading a little deeper out into the current to try and see if I couldn’t cover him with less drag, when I heard something upstream and to my right—heard it the way you hear a skyrocket going off, first in the gut, then in the ears. Recovering, jolted, I realized what I’d heard was a tremendous splash—a splash that resolved itself into outspreading ripples almost seismic in their velocity.

  My first reaction was the skeptical one—some kid had thrown a rock. But there was no kid, only some innocent-looking Holsteins a hundred yards back from the bank. I was wondering if something that loud could possibly be what I hoped it might be when the sound came again, perhaps not as explosive as the first time, but—in that narrow glen—sufficient to shatter apart what remained of my doubt.

  A trout! And not just any trout, but the Queen of the White River, Miss Stockbridge herself. This was the chance I’d been waiting for all season. I immediately forgot about the feeding trout in front of me, waded clumsily past him toward the far bank, then—just before sinking—got control of myself and started plotting things out.

  The fish, wily monster that she was, had stationed herself in a deep channel hard against the shady bank. I couldn’t wade directly over but had to backtrack fifty yards, then ease my way up through the shallows until I came within range. I did this carefully, keeping my eye on the spot the sound had come from, but—damn! A dicey spot made me glance away for a moment just as the fish splashed again.

  I looked up, and this time managed to spot the epicenter of the rings, the place the fish had surfaced. It was within casting range—a long cast, but makeable. I was fishing a Light Cahill, and it made sense to stick with that. I tied a few more half hitches into my blood knot, then—my hands shaking—worked out line.

  First cast—nothing.

  Second cast—nothing.

  Third cast—my God! I brought my arm up in a reflex motion, literally gasped from the force of striking, and clenched my teeth waiting for the monster’s weight to come tight against the line.

  Nothing happened.

  Five minutes went by.

  “Trout?” I felt like saying. “O trout? Are you there, trout?”

  I was so surprised to have missed, so speechless, the disappointment in my stomach was so sudden and cold, that I didn’t even try casting again, but bulled my way through the current to the place she had rose, trying to at least get a glimpse of what I had missed.

  I was there looking down into the water when she rose again, this time so close it made me jump. I spun around, and was just in time to see, splashing into the water at my back, a beautifully ripe, beautifully crimsoned McIntosh apple, dropping from the highest branch of the outspreading apple tree that shaded the lie. Again, I glanced down into the water. There they were, bobbing just beneath the surface—splashes one, two, and three. I scooped one out and took a vicious bite of its middle, determined to have my vengeance on something’s flesh. I understood immediately the ludicrousness of what had happened; it’s hard enough to be had by a trout, but to be had by a McIntosh apple?

  That was yesterday. Now, looking back from the perspective of my typewriter, 1 have only one regret—that the apple didn�
�t hit me on the head. It worked, after all, for Newton, and God knows he was not a gullible man.

  The Bigger They Come

  My friends know me as a man who likes to exaggerate, but for the next five thousand words I’ll stick to a sober recitation of the facts, the better to deal with events that are themselves sufficiently exaggerated. What I’m referring to are the two most extraordinary fish of my angling career, the first extraordinary for the circumstances of its capture, the second, for the circumstances of its capture and the extraordinariness of its size.

  There are two schools of thought on catching big fish. One school holds that you fish for them deliberately, use outsize lures and streamers, fish only those lies capable of sheltering fish of weight. The second maintains the best way to catch big fish is to work your way through as many lesser fish as possible, harness the laws of probability to your cause. This last may be called the lottery school of fly-fishing, and it’s the one to which I belong, since it pretty well matches what I’ve learned of life. The big things come unexpectedly amid the ordinariness of daily routine, and to deliberately go hunting Joy or Love with a metaphoric net would be to doom yourself to failure by the very nature of the quest. No, I’m a small-fish fisher, a small-fate man, who hopes, like we all do, for miraculous things.

  But this by way of preface. From here on in I’ll adhere to the Joe Friday school of angling literature: the facts, ma’am, just the facts.

  It wasn’t meant to be a fishing trip at all. Nova Scotia for two weeks—a trip we could manage with our baby. That I packed a small fly rod was of no significance; it goes into my duffle bag the automatic way my razor does; it wouldn’t matter if my destination were Bahrain. That Nova Scotia has some fine fishing is something I was aware of, of course, but that only added a vaguely illicit interest I wasn’t going to allow myself to pursue.