The great days of a state’s acquiring park land through tax sales and eminent domain are over, I suppose, but it’s an idea that would certainly be a good one for these overcrowded days—a state taking a few ponds or streams that are already in its possession and operating them on this controlled-access basis. I would never want to see all the fishing operated this way—our tradition of public access is too valuable and ingrained, and gives every flyfisher a stake in protecting all our water—but some such arrangement in each trout-fishing state would offer quality fishing and a club kind of feel, this time to a much wider cross-section of flyfishers. A place that is deliberately anachronistic, removed from the competitive pressure that mars so much of our current fishing? Well yes—why not? If I haven’t said so already pond fishing in a rowboat for wild and catchable trout is the best way ever invented for interesting a young person in fishing, and to do this in a setting where fly fishing is honored as the simple, traditional pastime it should be makes the experience all the more vital.
Some people in Vermont find even private club waters far too public, and do most of their fishing right at home. A bulldozer is hired with a crusty old-timer who’s been at this game for years, an acre-sized hole dug out where the clay lies thickest, a stream damned if there is one or an overflow pipe hooked up to a reliable artesian well, ten-inch trout ordered from one of the fish farms or feed stores, a willow or two planted on the banks, a little dock knocked together out of lumber—and there, you’re in business, with your own private trout water you can stroll down to any time you want.
I’m surprised at how many of these lie scattered about these hills; driving, I’ll glance through the trees and catch a quick glimpse of a compact bowl of silvery water tucked away into the landscape where it’s all but invisible. Many of these contain large trout, rainbows of seven or eight pounds (my guess is the best fly fishing in New England is in private ponds), but sometimes the environment remains a little artificial and forced, so it’s like you’re fishing for pets in an aquarium, not catching them so much as dipping them out.
The best private ponds are the most natural—those where the water is gently borrowed from a stream and gently returned. I have a friend (let’s call him, uh, Tom) who lives in a narrow valley well up in the hills. Above his property is the source of a small stream: a beaver flowage that is always marshy, even in seasons of drought. Where the flowage begins to narrow into a definite channel his property begins, and a hundred yards below this, many years ago now, a previous owner built an earthen dam housing an outflow pipe and a wooden spillway. The resulting pond isn’t much over an acre, and fits into the flowage perfectly, being little more than a natural widening, the slightest pause, in the water’s rush down to the valley floor three miles away.
Native brook trout live in the beaver flowage, and in times of high water will come down into the pond and do just fine; there are also brookies in the pool just below the dam, attracted by the cold and reliable spillage. Tom stocks the pond once a year with several dozen brook trout and five or six rainbows, and these grow to serious size, without his having to feed them. I’ve caught twenty-inch brook trout here, a twenty-four-inch rainbow, and they have the kind of thickness and strength you see on fish out in Montana.
If the pond fits perfectly into the natural order here, it also fits perfectly into the man-made one, which is what gives a private pond much of its charm. The lawn slopes down to the water from the house; a birdhouse-festooned willow overhangs the bank on which a rowboat is pulled up, waiting for guests to help themselves; the kids have left their butterfly nets about, and out in the middle of the pond floats a Wiffle ball driven there in last night’s game. Tom constructed a dock near the spillway that lets you cover the deepest part of the pond with an easy cast; playing a fish here, if you give even a little yell, everyone will rush down from the house to see whether it’s big enough to get excited about and stick around until it’s landed.
Charming, of course—what flyfisher hasn’t dreamed of having this kind of action so close at hand? And yet it’s not without its worries. Careless road work will silt up the flowage, turn the pond muddy for days. Poachers will fish it when the family is gone, keep everything they catch. The dam is a constant source of worry—every now and then you read in the papers about one going out, causing a destructive flood (the great Johnstown flood, remember, was caused by the rupture of a dam at a private fishing club). Natural as the pond is, it suffers from a natural kind of predation—heron and otter can wipe out the fish in a very short time. Over the years a pond can become so precious it’s hard to leave when it comes time to move on. I have friends who, faced with pressures to move to better jobs or better schools, found their pond had become so integral a part of their happiness they could not bear leaving it behind, and so took cuts in pay or accepted the fact that they would have to spend long parts of their day chauffeuring their kids to and from a distant school. Love any small portion of the landscape and an obligation falls on you to take it seriously, cherish it, protect it, and in this day and age the burden can seem exhausting.
Is it worth it? I know Tom would say yes, even though he fishes the pond only occasionally now, taking most of his pleasure from seeing his friends and his kids catch the trout he all but knows by name. He’s given me a standing invite to fish it anytime I want, which usually turns out to be three or four times a year. In April, just after the ice melts, I enjoy going out with him in his canoe, to catch fish at a time when there’s nowhere else to catch fish, become reacquainted with that firm tugging pressure in the arm, that dancing rod tip, the wet spring, and coil of color in my hand. In June, waiting for a windless, cloudy day, I enjoy taking fish after fish right on top with my little two-weight. A bit later in the summer I’ll bring my father over, help him catch some trout his poor eyesight wouldn’t allow him to catch anywhere else.
My favorite time to fish the pond is in October after a season spent chasing difficult and fussy fish. Tom will be at work, his family will be off at school, and it will just be me, the rowboat, and the trout—generous and eager fish who don’t require much persuading to come leaping over to my side. Behind me the bank with the pines will be golden beneath fallen needles; by the dam the sumac and willows will have turned red and the brightest yellow; up in the shallows the brookies, the anxious ones, will be already spawning, turning in tight circles of the utmost concentration and intensity—a concentration not even a rowboat, not even the streamer that takes trout so easily just a few yards away, will manage to shake. These are gorgeous fish, the males coral and fiery, with hooked jaws that let you know what you’re dealing with is passion, serious passion, that will stand no interference from the puny likes of you.
Part of my pleasure in fishing here is a selfish one, to have a trout-filled body of water all to myself, and yet it’s not the snobbery, I-have-it-and-you-don’t kind of selfishness, but something that carries with it gratitude and thanks. Thanks for what? For being able to concentrate so directly on the fish, know there will be no interruption in the intense and important business of trying to understand the workings of this small cup of wildness, coax it occasionally to my purpose. You realize, in the end, that even this homey body of water carries with it as much mystery as a large and untamed lake, the mystery all life seems to contain at its healthiest, something you sense very strongly, feel you can all but pull from the water with a quick dipping hand, and yet even on a perfect autumn day like this one, borne and uplifted on the backs of willing trout, will never quite be able to grasp.
All trout water is private water, seen in this light. A trout tugs us and from habit we tug back—and yet how much better to let the fish, the dweller in the mystery, pull us down into its center so we can see for ourselves what it’s like to live in paradise, even the paradise that comes to us one precious acre at a time.
September 18
Perfect conditions. The sailor asks that the wind blow from just the right quarter, at just the right speed; the kayaker th
at the river level be propitious, neither too high nor too low; the mountaineer that the weather fronts behave themselves; the photographer, that the light be soft; the hunter, that the biological rhythm that animates the game he seeks has them fully on the move . . . and yet the flyfisher is fussier than any of these, because when he wishes for a perfect day he speaks of all these things combined, wind, water, weather, light, and instinct, so a perfect day for fishing is perhaps the rarest, most precious circumstance in any of the outdoor sports.
How rare? There’s a day I look forward to all year long, yet only get perhaps one season out of five, so fussy are its requirements. It needs to be a day in the second or third week of September, when the Connecticut that runs past my home has been scoured by a long summer’s flowage, so it shines brighter than it does at any other time of year, with a good three or four feet more of transparent depth. You need a frost in the early part of the week—the water must have noticeably, but not drastically cooled. It can’t be past the equinox, since the storms we get then muddy things up. The wind must be from the south—from the north, you may as well stay at home. Most important of all, it must be a day when it’s significantly warmer than it has been, so it feels like midsummer has been returned to you on a golden platter, with apologies for that trick of frost.
Get all these things without exception and it means the best smallmouth fishing of the year, a day when their biological clock is so exuberantly on it’s as if you’re fishing a solid river of bassiness, the water having by this perfect stirring of variables taken on striped bars and golden flesh and chevroned fins and glistening scales and extravagant muscle. It’s something I anticipate all summer long, deliberately avoiding all engagements or appointments so I can be here at the right moment . . . and then spend September keeping track of all the various factors, trying not to get my hopes up but getting them up anyway, feeling good when that first early frost comes, feeling even better when it’s followed by warmer weather, rooting for the wind to stay in the south, all but applying body English to the atmosphere, trying to bend and shape the elements to my purpose, if only for a single day.
When I woke up yesterday morning I thought I had the combination I was looking for. We’d had our frost earlier in the week, the northwest wind had swung around to the south, and there was a nostalgic stillness in the air that harkened back toward August. A heavy fog was fine with me, since one of the other ingredients in this kind of perfection is the slow warming of the shallows where the bass roam, and you get this when there’s enough moisture in the air to act as a gentle scrim. By eleven, conditions would be just right, giving me time to work on my novel and thereby achieve that other cornerstone of perfection: going out to the river with a conscience that’s clear.
I suppose there was some self-congratulation in my attitude—that I was clever enough not only to recognize perfection when it came, but to keep my calendar open for its arrival—and thus enough pride that it was goething for a fallething. I had the canoe up on the car, had my rod stowed, my poppers packed, a lunch ready . . . I was heading back to the house for my hat, feeling the kind of happy urgency that transforms a middle-aged man into a ten-year-old kid . . . when there was a hard, sudden tap on my shoulder, the kind that fate often likes to deliver aurally, in this case as the frantic yipping of an aging retriever who had chosen that moment to impale herself on a rusty strand of barbed wire out on the far end of our stone wall.
At thirteen, Cider is as lively as a puppy and a bit nearsighted—a bad combination when it comes to stumbling into barbed wire. She’d cut herself badly on the back of the leg, and it was obvious it was going to take stitches to close the wound. This was the kind of thing I hadn’t figured into my calculations, and made me realize that my criteria for perfection, though stringent enough, were nowhere near adequate, since they hadn’t taken into consideration the chances of life becoming snared in the various entanglements that seem spontaneously improvised just to ruin your day.
Our vet lives twenty miles north. Cider did fine once I got her on the back seat; her expression was a combination of guilt and embarrassment, in the usual way of goldens, and every now and then to comfort her I had to twist my head around and say something reassuring. I was vexed, of course—more than vexed. Impatient, pissed, furious. The further I drove—the greater the distance I was putting between me and the day I had planned—the angrier I became, to the point where in order not to go flying off the road altogether I had to get a moral hold on myself, start figuring out what was going on.
Part of this was easy—the normal vexation anyone feels when their plans go awry. This was multiplied (let’s say doubled) by the fact that it came at a particularly bad, or rather good time: the perfect day I’d been waiting for all season. This is something any flyfisher will understand, something so intrinsically part of the game it’s hardly worth mentioning, but after this things became a bit murkier, more personal, and it was a while before I figured them out.
My reasoning went something like this . . .
Normally I’m the luckiest of fishermen, someone who can go fishing almost any time he wants. To suddenly have this taken away from me—to discover my charmed fishing life was mortal after all, and could be lost not to a major catastrophe, but a minor one—was a hard thing to swallow, though not without its value as a kind of therapeutic lesson, a reminder of just how remarkably lucky I am most of the time. Okay, I could understand this, reason was doing its job. But not being able to go fishing, even in this one slight instance, was making me overreact in a way that went far beyond this, and I finally realized it was because it made me remember a time when I couldn’t go fishing at all—the long years I was stuck in the suburbs, someone who only dreamed of fishing, but for reasons too complicated and difficult to go into here, hardly ever went out. This only changed in my thirties when I broke away from that life, moved north to the country and was, quite literally, reborn.
Thinking in these terms, it’s easy to see what was at stake: even a small threat to the kind of life I’d established inflamed the old scar tissue, burned as something I had to smother immediately with all the emotion I was capable of mustering—not a small vexation in an otherwise fine day, but a threat to my very existence.
And further. Fishing, right from the start, was an expression of the rebellious half of my nature, the anti-establishment part of me, the kid who went fishing when the rest of his generation stormed ROTC buildings or did drugs—the passion in me that is partly a finger jabbed toward the conforming philistine materialistic culture I’ve so thoroughly despised, actively when younger, latently today. Give my new life even one small check and the old emotion comes flooding back, the fury that used to possess me in my twenties when I realized the life I imagined was passing me by.
Poor Cider! There she was bearing stoically something that must have caused considerable pain, and there her master was gripping the steering wheel like he wanted to throttle anything and everything he could get his hands around, never mind the aching dog. But I got her to the vet without ramming into anyone. I held her as Dr. Wheeler examined her, helped where I could when he sewed her up, carried her back out and laid her gently on the back seat—and like a pet-ambulance driver, raced her back home in record time.
One o’clock—only two hours lost. I got Cider settled in the mudroom, drove down River Road to the dirt launching area owned by the Nature Conservancy, loaded up the canoe with my fly rod and poppers, shoved myself off into the river. The sun had it shining in that penny brightness I had reckoned on; below the canoe, as I pried it out toward the wooded island thats my favorite spot, I could see small bass swimming over the sandy bottom, with the kind of heads-up alertness, eagerness, and hunger you see in June during spawning and then not again until a fall day like this one.
The river here is only slightly wider than where I fish for trout, and yet there’s enough breadth now that it seems a much weightier proposition, something that doesn’t rush and dance but sweeps and proceeds. With
the breeze from the south, the surface had those little crisp folds that come at such short intervals they make the canoe seem like it’s on a moving ramp, and in no time at all I was drifting past the weedbed at the island’s upper edge, attached to a smallmouth that had taken the Olive Zonker I’d been trolling out the stern.
I caught six bass on the first seven casts—that’s what I mean by perfection—and with everyone I felt myself relax even more. Perfection? Though from long experience I recognize the conditions that prompt this, I’m still confused as to what exactly is going on, at least as far as the bass are concerned. Yes, the water has cooled off, and their metabolism must welcome this. Yes, the water is clearer, and those crayfish become an easier target for them in the shallows. But how do they know the wind is from the south and why does this please them? How do they sense the relatively low barometric pressure, since by rising or falling a few inches in the river they can make it anything they want? How do they sense winter is coming, by what mechanism or instinct? More specifically, how come they sense winter so strongly on the most summer-like days? It’s reasonable to expect a feeding binge from a creature who is faced with seven months when it hardly eats at all, but why is the frenzy so closely tied to such fussy factors? Fishing magazines have always made a great deal over this feeding binge, so its become an article of faith to most fishermen, but myself, I’ve rarely seen it, find fish in autumn to be at their moodiest, with this one specific exception: on the right day in September the smallmouth on the Connecticut River go absolutely wild.
A River Trilogy Page 52
