A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  The difference is as much good as it is bad—people who linger here, make the attempt to know the region intimately, agree on this, too. There’s the Connecticut, of course, its winding beauty, the locus for all that is soft and easy in the landscape, at least in summer. The beaver ponds lost in the ridges near the Quebec line, the brook trout lost and lonely in their centers, splashing to a fly like drowning swimmers to a life ring. Those moose that are everywhere—the wildness that clings to them like a second, more exotic pelt. The sense the surrounding forest gives of true northing—of boreal spareness and boreal flint, hills scraped as clean of ornament as the people who by stubbornness or inertia make it their home. The fact that it’s a yuppie-free zone and always will be—that even its lakes haven’t been gentrified or tamed.

  You can take the difference even deeper. Living in most parts of America is like living on an inclined plane or gigantic slide, one that’s tipped in only one direction, toward the great American middle ground—middle in jobs, middle in culture, middle in aspirations—so all you can hope for, growing up in it, is to drop pinball-like into one of several inevitable and ready-made slots. Here in this forgotten corner, up high on the height of land where the watersheds begin slanting over toward the St. Lawrence, the sense is of sliding away from America altogether, lives running in a totally opposite direction. Those radio talk shows in French. The poverty so pervasive the Depression is remembered as a prosperous time. The legends of bootleggers, draft exiles, and smugglers. The roll call of hermits and loners and misfits who have fit in here and nowhere else. The old communes and forgotten marijuana fields rotting away deep in the woods. The cranky politics. Yes, in a nothing direction entirely.

  Cranky politics? For anyone driving through the region this is most apparent in the local custom of planting your property every four years with an orchard of campaign signs, ones that, once staked, are only reluctantly removed, so, feeling in something of a time warp already, seeing those signs, you’re apt to think Ford/Dole is still running against Carter/Mondale. The shabbier the house, the more likely it is these signs will be for Republicans, though many are hand-lettered and crude, warning the US out of the UN, or vowing fidelity to guns. This is your basic old-fashioned cranky New Hampshire reactionary right, the kind you might have thought had crept up here to Coos County to die, were it not for the fact it seems to be spreading. There’s an anarchistic flavor to it all; you get the feeling, talking to them even casually, that what these people really hate is any government interference whatsoever, though in the same breath they’re berating it, they complain about how the state government down in Concord (or Montpelier) hardly seems aware of their existence.

  It’s a strange, potent brew. Who should stumble into its middle a few years back but Newt Gingrich himself, at the height of his power and influence, up north to do a little moose spotting, his euphemism for testing the waters in the primary state for a possible presidential run. Followed by an entourage of doting reporters, he stopped beside the Androscoggin near Errol for a photo op, started chatting up a flyfisherman waist-deep in the river (I picture the stampede scaring away a nice trout the fisherman was just on the verge of catching), who looked up at him, the cameras, the tape recorders, and scowled.

  “You’re the meanest thing that ever happened in Washington,” the flyfisherman said, making the most of his opportunity. “Jesus, if it was up to you and your cronies there wouldn’t even be a river here. Go home now—get.”

  Newt seemed considerably taken back at this—and as history records, shortly thereafter decided not to run for president that year.

  This independent streak goes back to the region’s start. Upper Coos County was once an independent country of sorts, the Indian Stream Republic of the early 1830s, when a free-spirited assortment of settlers, crooks on the lam, and wildcat speculators took advantage of a border dispute with Canada to create an “independent” country with its own laws and courts—an independence that lasted until 1842, with the signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty between the United States and Britain, and the arrival of the first militia units from New Hampshire to enforce the new boundary.

  The only thing left of all this, beside the independent streak mentioned, is a historic marker on Route 3 and a good, characteristic story—a story about how a reporter was sent north by a Boston newspaper to interview a local Vermont farmer, who, when the reporter informed him the boundary had been redrawn and he now lived in New Hampshire, scratched his chin whiskers for a moment, pondered on the implications, then trotted out in his best laconic drawl, “Well, young fella. Mighty glad to hear it. Couldn’t have stood another one of those Vermont wintahs!”

  There’s tourism here, of an old-fashioned blue-collar sort—northern New Hampshire is one of the last refuges of your basic twenty-eight-dollars-a-night tourist cabin—but nowhere near the kind that overwhelms the White Mountains every summer. Over on the Vermont side of the river there’s even less in the way of visitors, and it’s possible to drive the roads in October at the height of foliage season and never see another out-of-state car. What the region does experience in the way of mass invasion comes in appropriately bizarre fashion; the biggest event of the year in Colebrook, for instance, is the “Blessing of the Bikes” in May, when thousands of motorcyclists from all over New England drive their machines past a Catholic shrine set in a little grotto off Route 3. The shape of the two states accounts for a difference in the tourist flow; when you drive north in Vermont, you’re driving toward the broad base of its inverted triangle, spreading everyone out; when you drive north in New Hampshire, you’re driving into the apex, so everyone becomes concentrated.

  Logging is the main industry here and always has been. It’s an important part of the economy in the lower parts of both states, but up here it’s the only industry and so it’s more visible, with logging trucks as common as cars, tote roads going everywhere, scars on the mountainsides from recent cuts, and, in mill towns like Groveton, mountains of sawdust and the sweet, heavy smell of boiling pulp.

  Skidders, forwarders, and whole-log “harvesters” have made logging into a humdrum, brutally efficient business, though one that still carries with it more than its share of danger. It has its romance, too, or at least its history of romance. A hundred years ago the Upper Connecticut was the starting point for the great logging drives on the river (still the longest in world history), wherein the timber cut from the surrounding hills was sledded over the snow every winter, piled on the river’s ice, then—with the help of a great deal of manpower—floated on the springtime head of water down to the mills in Massachusetts, three hundred miles to the south.

  Log driving was one of those hard, miserably paid jobs that, like cow punching and whaling, seems more glamorous in retrospect than it probably did at the time. Look closely at those old photos of rivermen posing by their bateaux or waist-deep in a river full of logs: along with the pride and cockiness, you see a great deal of plain old bone-weary exhaustion. For logging was a brutal way to make a buck, one requiring agility and great strength, accomplished by a mix of Yankee woodsmen, immigrant Finns, and itinerant Québécois. Rising before dawn to spend fourteen hours up to their waists in forty-degree water, ordered about by dictatorial woods bosses, preyed upon by hustlers of every stripe—it’s no wonder rivermen were famous for their brawls (caulked boots festooned with case-hardened spikes three-quarters of an inch long were their weapon of choice, the flying leap toward the face their favorite tactic); the not uncommon murder (Canaan, Vermont, once had a lawless, rock ‘em-sock ‘em reputation to rival Abilene’s or Dodge’s); the devil-may-care attitude that made them spend their money as fast as they took it in (brothels, even up here at the drive’s start); their chilblains, lumbago, and TB.

  There have been attempts over the years to put a sheen over all this, make of these men heroic Paul Bunyans, but it’s never really caught on, not with the Connecticut River log drive, since if anything the real interest and awe comes from remembering
it realistically, as a remarkable example of the partnership between man’s cleverness and the sheer driving force of nature. This was before the internal combustion engine, before paved roads. The Connecticut was the highway south, and every April the river was crammed bank to bank with rough, potato-colored logs, poked at by quiet, deadly earnest men—the logs jamming frequently (including the infamous North Stratford jam of April 1914, when thirty-five million feet of wood piled up in one extended jam thirty feet high), getting blown up when these jams proved recalcitrant, the drive sweeping downriver and taking with it every spring its sacrificial quota of a dozen or more lives. The bodies, those who no one claimed, were buried in pork barrels by the side of the river—in some cases, the victims’ spiked shoes were hung on a branch by way of tribute.

  The men in charge of these drives were not chosen for their compassion or sensitivity. The most infamous was George Van Dyke, a notorious bastard who saw nothing wrong with paying the men starvation wages, then finding every opportunity to cheat them out of those. But fate had its ironic way with him in the end. As he was watching the finish of the drive down in Massachusetts from his chauffeured touring car, the brake slipped and down he went over the steep bank into the river, never to rise again—the river’s final sacrifice, for after this, with the interruption of the Kaiser’s war and the introduction of the first trucks, the Connecticut River drives were never again the same, though pulp wood continued to be driven in the upper reaches until 1948.

  There remain few visible traces of those days. At Lyman Falls you can see what’s left of an old wooden dam and sluice; detouring into the woods to get to better fishing positions, you’ll sometimes stumble upon the rusty old cables that held boomed logs in place . . . but thats about it. At least once during my fishing day I find myself wondering what the river looked like full of logs (and what it did to the trout—did they just hunker down until all the confusion swept past?), but it’s a tough feat for imagination to pull off. Partly this is due to the fact that my fishing is in the clement months, so the river seems too relaxed and gentle to have ever been involved with anything so chaotic; partly because, on this side of the mythic enlargement time brings, the river now seems far too small.

  But there are other moments when I can picture the log drives perfectly—autumn days, for instance, when the water is high and the leaves are gone from the trees, when the water seems darker, more furious, capable of something mighty, waiting only its chance. You can also sense something of the atmosphere of log-drive days just by cruising the roads, looking at the hardscrabble towns, sensing the feeling that something essential about the region, its very heart, has long ago been swept downstream.

  The kind of man who found the log drives his escape—you can picture him, too. Earlier this season, after fishing just above the covered bridge at Columbia, climbing back up to my car, I discovered my keys were missing. I gave myself the usual frantic shakedown, then, thinking I had left them locked in the car, started prying at the window trying to get my hand far enough in to pull up the lock.

  I had just found them (in the most obvious spot, naturally—the toes of my waders) when a pickup pulled over and a young man in a T-shirt and jeans jumped out, ready and eager to help. He was no more than nineteen, short and wiry, with a large French nose, bright blue eyes, and a restless, blinking kind of expression that couldn’t stay fixed in one mood for long.

  “Stupid of me,” I said, holding up the keys. “Thought we were going to have to smash that window.”

  The young man grinned. “Why I stopped! Wouldn’t have been the first time I smashed one.”

  I pointed to the chainsaw and gasoline cans in the back of his truck. “Looks like you’re pretty busy in the woods.”

  “Nope. Not anymore. Got laid off”—he glanced down at his watch—“two hours ago.”

  “Christ. Sorry.”

  He grinned even wider. “No problem. They’ll hire me back if I want. Old man Toller, he lays off everyone after nineteen weeks so we don’t get enough consecutive in for unemployment. Then he hires us back, starts it over.” He looked toward the river, spat without any particular malice, added by way of afterthought, “He’s a bastard. Anyway, it don’t matter. This time Sunday I’m out of here.”

  I played a hunch. “Army?”

  “Marines.”

  Well, there it was, the North Country’s other industry, the export trade that works full-time in so many of the forgotten places of the world, the beautiful places—sending its children to places less beautiful, less forgotten, less hard. With time, if he serves enough years for a pension, perhaps he will come back again to hunt and fish out his retirement, be able to enjoy the land without having to wrest a living from it, fight that particular battle at such long odds.

  But he was excited with the future the way any young person gets excited when it comes time to tell the place you grew up in to go to hell. He pointed to the river, bent his head over so he could peer under the first tree limbs upstream.

  “Always wanted to try a fly rod, see if I can keep myself from strangling in all that line. But up there’s where you want to be fishing. Base of that little island, current scrapes out a big hole. Go there at night sometime. That’s my secret spot, and here I am handing it over free of charge.” He shook his head, ruefully this time. “What good is it to me? Hell, you can have them all. Up there by the town hall—good spot, too. You go down to where you see those cows, there’s a little sandbar that’ll take you right out in the middle of the river like a causeway. Rest is mud, so that’s the only way. Good spot for browns. You know the old gravel pit down by the airport?”

  On and on he went—my brain raced to take all this down; I kept wishing I had a tape recorder—going over his favorite spots, all the stories that went with them, so it was as if this were another part of the burden he had to shed before he could be free of the place and leave. Light, wiry, tough already at nineteen—it was easy to picture him growing up by the river in the days of the great drives, begging each year to go, being reined in by his mother as long as possible, until finally comes the day—and off he goes with his stagged kersey pants cut short in river-man fashion, the black felt hat, the peavey or cant dog, the spiked boots . . . and with a last farewell glance or, more likely still, without any backward glance whatsoever, away he floats down that river, never to return.

  If getting to know a region helps you to get to know the fishing, the converse is true as well—there are few better ways to get to know a region than spending your time fishing it. Out in all weathers through six months of the year; poking your nose into all kinds of unexpected venues as you seek out new water; spending long hours in what is often someone’s backyard; relaxing on the bank near a road, watching the traffic stream past; helping yourself to wild raspberries; learning where the old apple trees are that still bear fruit, if only by snagging your backcast on their branches; having the local flotsam and jetsam drift past your waist (red Frisbees, a blue Styrofoam “noodle”—whatever water toy is currently the rage); sliding down the midden heaps that river banks often become, so the archaeological perspective comes into play; talking to the local fishermen, the occasional duck hunter, the kids who come down to the river to throw stones in the current or hunt crayfish; being involved in a common pursuit people enjoy asking you about; making friends in the diners where you break for coffee or the bars where you go to celebrate your success. After a while, all this adds up. This is even more true if you go about your fishing quietly and modestly, so you all but become a part of the riverscape yourself—a tree, a willow, albeit one with eyes and ears and understanding.

  I’ve often thought a good book could come out of this—a collection of tales on the order of Ivan Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, changing the hunter into a flyfisher who in the course of his or her exploring learns much about the local people and their customs, their heartbreaks, and sadness, their losses and their loves (Coos County, New Hampshire, badly needs its own poet or novelist; Fros
t never got this far north, and all the fiction writers seem to be concentrated on the Vermont side of the river). Just last week, fishing the river in the course of a long June day, I came away with enough locales to fill the book s first half. I started fishing behind the county old folks’ home, a Gothic pile straight out of Dickens, where people in wheelchairs sunning themselves on the terrace waved as I waded past; a hundred yards downstream (the state liking to put all its institutional eggs in one convenient basket), I passed the county “farm” that serves as the reformatory—young men this time, too busy piling up hay to wave, hardly noticing as, right below them, I landed a good brown. A little later, driving upstream, I fished behind some abandoned factories, had my thoughts filled with a temps perdu kind of moodiness that made me think again of the region’s boom-and-bust history. In late afternoon I was caught in a sudden hailstorm, took shelter in DeBannville’s, where French memeres in curlers shook their heads and clucked in sympathy as the ice melted down from my hair. At dusk, waiting for the sulphurs to get going, I ran into a ninety-two-year-old bait fisherman, pumped him shamelessly, not only for information about the fishing, but for his memories of the old days (these took a morbid turn; most of his stories were of young men and women who had drowned in the Connecticut and people he knew who had helped pull them out).