As I came around the tip of the island my lee disappeared and the breeze pushed the canoe over toward the Vermont shore. This was fine with me—the bass line up there along boulders dumped down the bank when the railroad was built well over a hundred and fifty years ago. There are old telegraph wires, too, strung on sunken poles that dip right into the river, making it seem as if this whole vanished infrastructure, trains and telegraph both, have as their only function a soggy communication with sunken ghosts.
As I drifted, I cast—in autumn you can sometimes pick up a sunbathing bass right in the middle of the river—and cast standing up. This is against all the canoeing rules, of course, but we’d been using this Old Town for so many years it’s become an easy and comfortable position, and there’s something daring and stately about it I enjoy, like riding a surfboard towed by dolphins.
Along the bank the wild honeysuckle had turned brown; a bittern, staying just ahead of me, blended perfectly with the color, and it took the crisp rattle of leaves for me to pick him up again twenty yards downstream. Where the bank steepened into a sandy cliff I pulled the canoe in and waded the last ten feet to shore. It’s a good place to relax, since the bank slopes back like a chaise lounge; as I drank my tea, ate my sandwich, my neck was tickled by sand rolling down from the holes left by nesting swallows at the top of the bank.
I was in no hurry to go back out—if anything, the perfect day was turning out to be a little too warm, and so not quite perfect after all. A temperature of seventy-three makes the bass remember winter is coming and gets them feeding; a temperature of seventy-six makes them think its August again and turns them perversely sluggish. I knew it was almost certainly the last day of bass fishing for the season. The forecast called for it to turn sharply colder, and already I could see coral-tinged thunderheads moving across the mountains to the north.
I caught more fish after lunch, though they didn’t come quite so fast. On days like this one the smallmouth want a bullet-nosed popper, the slider kind with rubber legs, and they want it fished without any motion other than what the current does to those dangling legs. Casting these can be tricky. You need a mix of force and finesse to do it properly; force in ramming it sidearm under the overhanging white pine that line the shore; finesse (applied at just the last moment) in making sure the popper enters the thin window you re aiming for, the nine or ten inches between the top of the water and the bottom of the trees.
It’s funny about trout and bass. As much as I love the former, I never experience anything even remotely close to a fellow feeling for them, and most of my interest revolves around finding them and getting them to strike. With smallmouth it’s different. I have a very strong fellow feeling for them, and it comes primarily during the fight. Have I ever written about the glories of a smallmouth’s fight? No fish, neither largemouth nor rainbow nor striper nor salmon, punches as hard as a full-bodied smallmouth. The explosive strike followed by those wild unpredictable first seconds when the fish sometimes jumps (maybe a tailwalk, maybe the classic cartwheel, maybe a wild vault back toward the bank) and sometimes dives, then the frantic second pull, followed immediately by the first seriously deep plunge, getting into your backing it dives so deep, coming back up again entirely on its own and jumping again at a distance, then plunging again if it’s still on, plunging a third time, still reserving enough strength to jump one last time close to the canoe, and even at the very end, just when you reach down for him, retaining enough pugnacity it can flail at your hand and get away.
What is the fellow feeling in all this, the connection that makes me know exactly what the bass is experiencing? I wouldn’t have known what to link it to, not until that little episode with Cider, that frantic overreaction on my part when it became likely I wouldn’t be able to go fishing. Why look further? The bass fights with frantic and uncompromising purpose, and I share a portion of that frantic quality myself, at least when it comes to the passion with which I approach my time out on the water. Yes, I want a gentle, relaxed sport, one that involves myself, the river, the fish in a sometimes complicated, sometimes simple symbiosis, but how fiercely I want this, want this still. Bass and fisherman tug on opposite ends of the line, and yet on a ninety-nine and nine-tenths perfect September afternoon like this one, they end up striving toward the same kind of rebellious freedom, racing to see who gets there first.
Her Woods Still
On a late summer day in 1935, a schoolteacher from Massachusetts named Louise Dickinson neared the end of a vacation canoe trip through the Rangeley chain of lakes in western Maine. Her party was faced with a grueling portage—the five-mile length of the Rapid River, which connects Lower Richardson with Umbagog Lake at the bottom of the chain. The Rapid is said to be the most rapid river east of the Rockies, and an old dirt carry road parallels its unnavigable length; over the carry a man named Ralph Rich was picking up some extra money by ferrying canoe parties from one lake to the other with a 1924 Marmon touring car and makeshift trailer he had brought into the woods over the winter ice.
Louise and Ralph struck up a conversation, found immediately they had much in common. Ralph had sold some patent rights back in Chicago and had saved enough that he intended to spend the rest of his life in the woods; Louise’s was an adventurous, nonconforming soul that until that moment had found little outlet. A few months later they were married and living along the Rapid River in an old summer house, miles from the nearest town, surrounded by thousands of acres of paper-company wilderness—a place Louise was to live for the next fifteen years, with long intervals (the longest, four years) when she never left the woods at all for “outside.”
“During most of my adolescence,” she begins her book, “specifically, between the time when I gave up wanting to be a brakeman on a freight train and the time when I decided to become an English teacher, I said, when asked what I was going to do with my life, that I was going to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods and write.”
Write is what she did, three books on her experiences along the Rapid River, beginning with the volume that sits beside me on the desk as I type: We Took to the Woods. Mine is the paperback edition of 1948, and the publishing history inside the front cover attests to the book’s enormous popularity. First hardback edition from Lippincott in 1942, followed quickly by four more printings; an Atlantic Monthly condensed version published later that summer, and a Reader’s Digest condensation in the fall; a Book-of-the-Month Club edition printed November 1942, with seven printings through 1944; a Liberty condensed version in 1943 and an Esquire condensed version in 1946; a Grosset and Dunlap hardback with four printings between 1946 and 1947; an Armed Services Edition in 1946; the Pocket Books paperback published in June 1948 . . . all of these, with their simple black-and-white photos (logging camp cooks, pulp-filled ponds, huge snowdrifts, craggy-looking Maine guides), their endpaper maps of the Rangeley region, the vaguely balsam, vaguely mildewed scent time has given them, being to this day the reliable staple of flea markets, library sales, and secondhand bookstores all throughout New England.
It’s not hard to understand why her books were so popular. She’s a good writer, with a good story to tell, Thoreau with a happy face, someone who was alive to the romance inherent in her situation, and yet managed to keep her prose and philosophy down-to-earth.
I like to think of the lakes coming down from the north of us like a gigantic staircase to the sea. Kennebago to Rangeley to Cupsuptic, down they drop, level to level, through short, snarling rivers; Mooselukmeguntic to the Richardsons to Pond-in-the-River, and through Rapid River to Umbagog, whence they empty into the Androscoggin and begin the long southeasterly curve back to the ocean. I like to say their names, and I wish I could make you see them—long, lonely stretches of water shut in by dark hills.
There are a few narrow trails, but travel through the woods is so difficult, with the swamps and blowdowns and underbrush, that the lakes have remained what they were to the Indians, the main thoroughfares.
She was lucky
enough to live there when the rough exuberance of the old logging days hadn’t yet been killed off by modern industrial logging, and many of her best stories revolve around the shabby, put-upon loggers who, once they were in the woods, assumed almost mythological stature. She was also lucky in her family and friends: Ralph, her cantankerous, brilliantly improvisational husband; Gerrish, the family’s hired man who became much more than that; Al and Larry Parsons, who acted as winter caretakers at Coburn’s, the fishing camp at the far end of the Carry Road; her son Rufus, a babe, quite literally, in the woods. She had a novelist’s touch with them all. Judging by the photos of Louise herself, she was a plain but strong woman, with an open and approachable face, the kind of person who would be good in an emergency, with just enough tartness to keep you from underestimating her—and this is the quality that comes across in her books, so, reading them, you quickly become her friend.
These things help explain her popularity, but don’t quite account for it all. You only have to look at the dates on the various editions, remember what was going on in the world then, to understand what underlay their extraordinary appeal. Louise Dickinson Rich lived in the woods all through the last years of the Depression and World War II, concentrating on blueberry picking and salmon fishing and sap gathering when the rest of the world was involved with something very different. It’s no wonder people found solace reading her books; to someone caught up in the dislocation and chaos of war, the story of a simple, uncomplicated life miles from anywhere must have seemed an irresistible daydream. She was aware of this herself, was quick to defend her books as something more than escapist fare (“We haven’t tried to escape from anything. We have only exchanged one set of problems for another”), but it’s clear that for hundreds of thousands of readers it was the chance to escape to the woods for a few hours via her books that made them so compelling.
Her philosophy, too. It’s simple and simply stated, yet comes across with the kind of total sincerity that seems so rare and so precious during complex times. “I am free,” she says, in concluding her first book. “All ordinary people like us, everywhere, are trying to find the same things. It makes no difference whether they are New Englanders or Texans or Malaysians or Finns. They all want to be left alone to conduct their own private search for a personal peace, a reasonable security, a little love, a chance to attain happiness through achievement. It isn’t much to want, but I never came anywhere near to getting most of these things until we took to the woods.”
I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I first came upon her books on the dusty lower shelves of our suburban library. In a time of general prosperity her books had lost some of their popularity, and one of the first things I noticed was that none of the books had been taken out in six or seven years. I fell in love with them, of course, and how could it be otherwise, since already by that time living in the woods and writing was exactly what I wanted to do with my own life. Her books are of a type there is no shorthand name for, but which was once a flourishing genre. Henry Rowlands’s account of living alone in the far north of Ontario, Cache Lake Country. Charlie Childs’s still-readable account of building a summer home from scratch on the Maine Coast, Roots in the Rock; The House on Nauset Marsh by Wyman Richardson, and a dozen others, all of which seemed to be illustrated by Henry Bugbee Kane. These are not great books by any means, but they were all good books, and, like the tales Don Quixote read of chivalry, they played havoc with the fantasy of a boy who already loved woods, water, and hills, and yet was stuck in the concrete suburbs feeling the utter impotence, when it came to dreams, of being thirteen.
I was already a passionate fisherman; one of the things I discovered, reading Rich’s books, was that the fishing camp she called Coburn’s (where she worked one spring to distract herself after Ralph’s sudden tragic death) was now called Lakewood Camps. I sent away for their brochure—and for many years, right through my teens and twenties, I would get a postcard every May, with a picture of a pool on the Rapid River and big letters announcing THE ICE IS OUT AT MIDDLE DAM!
A teenager, I had no way of getting there, no one to take me, and even in my twenties I never had the chance to go, so that postcard, arriving every spring just when my hopes were at their strongest, took on a mocking quality, that grown to manhood I still should be so far from achieving even one of the smaller of my boyhood dreams: to fish the country Rich described.
And then I did move north, found myself living only a morning’s drive from her part of western Maine. Now my excuse for not going was different . . . I told myself it’s best to leave at least some childhood landscapes virgin and intact . . . but after a while this seemed overly refined, even silly, and when my friend Tom Ciardelli started telling me about the Rapid and its fly fishing for landlocks, I decided it was time to go, combine some fishing with some pilgrimage. One of the greatest pleasures in life is visiting a place you’ve fallen in love with through books, through imagination. Okay, the Rapid River isn’t London or Venice or even the Allagash, but for a good many years it had teased and intrigued my wondering, and it was high time I saw it in person.
We went in late September, a week before the salmon season ended. Back along the Connecticut the leaves were just starting to turn, but once past Errol, once we crossed the Maine border and drove up the first step in the high inland plateau that dominates the state, the gold was everywhere, a wide rolling carpet spreading down toward the scraggly blue of Umbagog in the near distance to our left.
Lakewood Camps can be reached only by water; the drill is, reaching the small town of Andover, you go to the general store and call ahead so the boat can meet you at South Arm, the long southward finger of Lower Richardson Lake. There were a couple of cars parked on the gravel apron above the dock when we arrived; one of these was a state police car, the other a fish and game truck, but except for Tom making a joke about a game bust in progress we hardly gave these any thought.
Anyone who’s read much Louise Dickinson Rich knows how important South Arm was to her entire way of life—virtually every trip outside went that way; most supplies, most visitors, came to the woods across the lake. On the bluff are some old weather-beaten garages that could certainly date from 1940, where those living in the woods kept their outside cars. On a late September day like this one, with no one around, a good chop cutting up the blue, Lower Richardson seemed high, wild, and lonely, little changed from how it must have looked fifty years before.
We had carried our duffle bags and rod cases down to the dock, were standing there wondering if we had missed connections, when a small cabin cruiser entered the channel, slowed, then edged sideways toward the dock.
We could see three men aboard—a man behind the wheel, a state trooper, a game warden—and it was a few more seconds before we noticed there was a fourth as well.
In the stern of the boat, riding so low we didn’t at first see it, rested a tarpaulin-covered stretcher with a small pair of old-fashioned brown shoes sticking out one end. Tom and I both reached over to pull the boat in, and now, seeing this we involuntarily let go. “Give us room now,” the trooper said quietly, and then without any other words being spoken, he took one end of the stretcher as the game warden took the other, and between them they carried the body up the steep ramp toward shore.
It was the Lakewood Camps boat all right; Stan Milton, the owner, helped us load our luggage, then briefly explained what had happened.
A ninety-two-year-old man had died, a longtime summer resident at one of the camps along shore. He’d come up for the salmon fishing and collapsed suddenly that morning getting into his boat. I did a quick calculation, realized he was a contemporary of Rich’s, could very possibly have known her. Certainly, it was her kind of story—a bittersweet one, a fate that was tied closely to the land. As Stan steered the boat out into the open part of the lake, the engine became too noisy for us to talk about it any further, but we had agreed it wasn’t a bad way to go, not at that age, not doing what he loved. His death, meetin
g us like that, gave a solemn quality to the landscape and seemed to place it even more solidly in times past.
Lakewood Camps sits on the edge of the lake a couple of hundred yards from Middle Dam, the old gated dam where the Rapid River spills down toward Pond-in-the-River. A weathered brown lodge with a wide veranda, brown cottages with their own porch and rockers, various outbuildings, piles of firewood lying in a ring of wood chips, a garden cart full of fresh linen, a dock with boats and canoes, everything looking as if it had been lifted from a sepia postcard circa 1888—it’s all very typical of the classic Maine fishing camp, an institution I’ve some affectionate familiarity with and would very much like in the coming years to have more.
A Maine fishing camp! The state that’s given American culture the lumberman, the lobsterman, the Maine guide, has also given it this: the camp in the woods where the trout bite even faster than the black flies, the salmon leap into your canoe of their own volition, the griddle cakes come stuffed with blueberries, the loon calls at night, the moose bellows, and you sleep soundly under thick wool blankets even in July. I’ve fished several over the years, and find not only do they match up remarkably well against their stereotype, not only do they offer one of the most reasonably priced fishing experiences to be found anywhere, but they seem to be the kind of places where stories happen, and there’s no higher praise in my vocabulary than that.
The first one I fished was Weatherby’s up on Grand Lake Stream back in the ’70s. I remember one night after dinner everyone congregating on the lawn to watch a guest cast with the latest marvel: a rod made out of graphite fiber. Next day, going out with an old guide in a Grand Lake Stream canoe, I timidly mentioned I preferred fly fishing only. “Fine with me, young fella,” the guide said, then promptly reached into his bait bucket and slapped a shiner on my Mickey Finn. A few years later, married now, I took my wife and baby daughter to Kidney Pond in Baxter State Park at the base of Mt. Katahdin—the old Colt family camp, operated as a modest lodge. Celeste and I spent our evenings fishing (in an Old Town wood-and-canvas canoe) a hundred yards offshore from our cabin, listening to our sleeping baby through the crib monitor we’d brought from home. On that same trip, fishing dry flies, I let my line trail out the back of the canoe as I paddled to a new spot—and was promptly arrested for trolling by a hidden game warden, despite the fact that what I was “trolling” was a size 24 Black Midge.
A River Trilogy Page 53
