Maine fishing camps fell upon hard times in the ’80s, partly due to changes in logging practices (more tote roads, clear-cuts, aerial spraying), and partly due to their own lack of foresight. One of the big routines at fishing camps has always been having trout for breakfast, and too many camps were too slow in getting behind catch and release. Now they are starting to see the light; Stan Milton, for example, is one of the most vocal proponents of catch and release in the state. It’s paying off, with bigger fish, more fish. In our cabin at Lakewood was a creel census conducted over the course of a decade. In the first year there wasn’t one legal salmon released by anyone; in the latest year, they all had been released, and the fishing had improved enormously.
The camps still have problems, including the fact that logging roads go everywhere now, and any fisherman with an ATV, a DeLorme atlas, or a Magellan navigation system can find their way to water the camps once pretty much had to themselves. You have to wonder how much longer sports will pay for ambience alone, when there is no longer this de facto kind of privacy. Against this is the fact that the fishing-camp concept is environmentally friendly, limiting the numbers of fishermen and keeping them under some kind of watchful control.
Checking in at a fishing camp is always part of the ritual. Buying a three-day license, asking about the fishing, scanning the logbook to see who’s caught what, buying some locally tied streamers, adding in some postcards, getting meal times set. On the boat ride over Stan told us the fishing was slow, but Sue, his wife, assured us it was splendid, so between them they had prepared us for anything.
We picked up a picnic lunch out in the kitchen, then went back to our cabin, got our fishing duds on, headed down to the river—and right into our second fast story of the trip. The Carry Road follows the river, but we managed to take a wrong turn and before we realized it, we were pretty well lost. This was vexing, and seemed somehow part of an initiation—the land blindfolding us, spinning us three times around. Finally, after growing impatience on both our parts, we spotted Pond-in-the-River below us through the forest and sheepishly made our way down to where the river empties into the pond in what is called, none too promisingly, Chub Pool.
Whoever named Rapid River wasn’t kidding . . . it really scoots along, a staircase of boisterous rapids . . . but where we intersected it the water broadens and slows. The salmon were rising when we got there and it took us a while to figure out how to connect with them, not so much the flies they were taking (small gray midges), but where to best position ourselves in the water. Unlike most salmon rivers in Maine, here the landlocks remain in the river all summer long, but they really get moving in the fall, joined by migrants up from the pond—a movement it’s most enjoyable to witness, since it’s seldom in New England we see the seasonal migration of fish you get in a place like the Pacific Northwest, landlocks being the closest we come to an actual bona fide run.
They’re dignified-looking fish, landlocks—light silver and lightly spotted—and seemed compelled to jump primarily because they’re shaped for jumping, with the muscular kind of leanness you see in world-class pole vaulters. A little one will jump five or six times before you bring it in; a thicker one, three or four times, but with a slower, more graceful kind of panache, the vaulter at the moment of releasing her pole and arcing that final millimeter over a barely trembling bar.
Sometimes in autumn spawning brook trout migrate up the Chub Pool, and for a moment I thought I had one on, but it turned out to be one of the huge and eponymous chub, just red enough around the gill area to have me fooled when I saw it deep in the water. I landed it, then waded over to the low, ragged isthmus that divides the pool in half, found a flat rock, and took a contemplative rest (reading Rich that night, I discovered this was her favorite spot to go smelting in the spring, allowing her to dip her net in either channel). Out in the deeper part of the pool, Tom, as usual, was testing the limits; he’s gone as far as he can, I decided, but then, with a magician’s graceful flourish, he reached into his vest for a gadget I didn’t know he had; a collapsible wading staff. Extended, it gave him just enough purchase to keep going across the pool.
If you travel even a few feet into the brush here you’ll come across reminders of the old logging days, thick rusty cables wound around cedars or peeling yellow birches, making it seem as if giants who had once fished here had left their set lines behind. In reality, they were cables used in getting the pulp downriver each spring; once the logs reached Pond-in-the-River they were collected in huge booms and towed across the water by ungainly vessels called Alligators.
Alligators are built like barges, flat and rectangular, but they have a huge steel cable running from a winch in the bow. The anchor is dropped, the winch unwinds as the Alligator runs backward to the boom, and hooks on; then the winch winds up the Alligator to the anchor, trailing behind her the boomful of pulp wood which is her business to move from the Head of the Pond to Pondy dam at the foot. . . . The crew looked like any gang of men going about a routine job, except they were a little shabbier, a little more nondescript, a little less arresting than any bunch of road menders I ever saw. There wasn’t a plaid shirt in the crew. Tied like a baby’s bonnet under the chin and tucked into the shirt at the back of the neck was a bandanna handkerchief, or, failing that, just an old piece of flour sacking. On top of that was the hat proper, which might be a cheap felt, a visored cap, or a battered derby.
They didn’t even do the job with dash. They just walked apathetically up and down the logs, boring holes, driving pegs and fastening ropes. People who do things well almost always do them without flourish.
A tough, backbreaking job, pulp driving was, and though Rich could romanticize it at times, her eye was too honest not to see it plain.
I thought about this as I sat there watching Tom catch salmon. I thought post-industrial kinds of thoughts, trying to imagine how all this had looked during those years, finding, surprisingly, that I could do this without much trouble. It can be one of the characteristic notes when you fly fish New England in autumn—that between old stone walls and collapsed mills and washed-out dams you feel like you’re fishing over the ruins of Rome. Thats a comforting feeling in this day and age, thinking the dreck we ourselves pile skyward might, in time, come to have the same kind of wistful burnish those rusty cables have taken on, our own era, like the eras before it, tucked to sleep beneath the trees.
Would Louise Dickinson Rich recognize her woods if she came back today, fifty years after she last lived here? On the surface, yes. Her house, Forest Lodge (“From the outside it’s not a bad little house—a low building with a porch and an ell, set on a knoll with a view up the river toward Pond-in-the-River”) still sits above the boulders and rapids of a river she would have no trouble recognizing. Middle Dam is much the same, with its proud white caretaker’s house set beside the lake, its garden with a tall fence around it to keep out deer and bears. Lakewood Camps is much the same. The Carry Road looks the same, though it’s not old jalopies that bounce along it now, but mountain bikes and ATVs. The salmon and trout fishing is probably almost as good as it was then, and may very well soon be better, if the fish and game department stays the course with catch and release. The ridges, the views of distant mountains, the look and feel of the forest, the autumn foliage—on the surface, much remains just the same.
It’s on the deeper level that things have changed here. The pulp operation of the ’40s was a brutal enough process, but not terribly efficient, not when compared with modern industrial logging, with its clear-cuts and aerial spraying, its reliance on bulldozed roads, not free-flowing rivers. You have to wonder how long it will be before someone decides to play around with the dams; originally intended to provide heads of water for the log drives, they have served the Rangeleys well over the years, but in the future, who knows? Already plans have been floated to bury an enormous pipe along the Rapid River as part of a massive hydroelectric project. Second homes go up on Umbagog and the other Rangeleys as woodland is “ha
rvested” and “liquidated.” Powerful forces would like to make money out of the region, big money, and care not a whit for anything but making it pay.
What’s changed the most, though, is the sense people bring to this place—the baggage we all carry now of knowing too much. Too much about what? About the threats that the last beautiful places in the world are subject to even in the best of circumstances, when their rareness and isolation alone are enough to make them targets. Fifty years ago this was a truly forgotten corner of the world; now, even on a casual visit like ours, you get the sense a garish spotlight is shining on the woods from the distance—not constantly, not even deliberately, but including it on each slow, inescapable sweep. Anyone who loves this kind of place, anyone who sought to make a life here, rather than feeling the sense of freedom that Rich felt, would inevitably feel threatened and somehow trapped. There are no malls here, of course. But in a mall kind of culture, the microbes are carried on the wind.
Gloomy thoughts? Yes, but I was trying to see things as Rich would, understand the differences of a half century measured by her own honest standards. She was quick to defend herself against charges of escapism, maybe too quick, since in a world gone mad escapism of her sort, a basic physical escape, is not necessarily such a bad thing. But this is much harder now, if not downright impossible. You duck your head, arrange your life quietly, and just because of this, the world seems to mark you out for extinction. “Happy the land that has no history,” she wrote, quoting the old classic tag; perhaps, coming back now, she would find to her dismay that history has these last lonely places and the people who live there square in its sights.
For my own part, I had come to her woods to see if the land was worthy of being the stuff of boyhood dreams, and the answer to that is yes, even if some of the dream was now in the process of vanishing before my middle-aged and far-too-cynical eyes.
That night Tom and I walked over to the lodge before dinner, and, while we waited, browsed among the various announcements and articles tacked to the walls. One of these, from a newspaper only a few years old, was Louise Dickinson Richs obituary. She died in her eighties, having moved to the Maine coast after her years in the woods and written about her new life there in another round of books. Whoever had done the obituary had done some research, found men and women who had known her in the Rangeleys, including Al Parsons, the woman who was the caretaker at the fishing camp, her neighbor and friend. Mrs. Parsons allowed as to how Louise was a remarkable woman, though too prone, in her view, to swallow the stories the lumbermen told her as the gospel truth. As the obituary writer hinted at but didn’t quite say, hers had been a remarkably successful career, measured in her own terms—a writer who had not only captured the spirit of a unique place, but had managed to color that place with her own spirit so the two were forever twined.
Like any good writer, Rich wrote her own epitaph without meaning to:
It seems to be that the thing you spend your life trying to build, if you would be whole, is not a bank account, or an unimpeachable social position, or success in any one of a thousand lines of endeavor; it seems to me that the only thing worth having is a certainty of yourself, a complete confidence in how you will act under any circumstance, a knowledge of yourself. People who have this knowledge are people who’ve kept their edges intact, people with what I can only call core. . . . Here in this country I found the circumstance and conditions that will make a woman of me, if anything will.
In the center of this is her elegy: Louise Dickinson Rich, taken on her own humble terms, was a writer with core.
After dinner, Tom wanted to pay homage to a local heroine of his own: Carrie Stevens, the famous fly tyer, inventor of the Gray Ghost, who had lived at Upper Dam on the north end of the Richardsons. He’d bought his tying supplies along; what better way to honor her than by tying up some of her famous patterns? Me, I strolled down to the lake, stared out across the water toward the slopes of Metallak Mountain, which still held enough red and gold in its foliage that it glowed like an eastern sunset mimicking in muted terms the one just finishing in the west.
Surely this hadn’t changed—the lap of waves on the rocks, the early stars, Cassiopeia and the Dipper. I walked to the water’s edge, picked up a stone, skimmed it toward what was left of the color, listened as the last faint skips faded into blackness . . . then turned and walked back to the soft yellow light of our cabin, where, silhouetted in the window, Tom bent his head down over his fly vise, getting us ready for morning.
Last Time Out
A certain Autumn light, a particular October color, can be seen on the upper reaches of the Connecticut River in its purest form—a light it’s difficult to find exact words for, but that it might be possible to roughly surround. There’s amber in the base of it, a watery brown-gold that widens from the streaks left in the river by a weakened and softened sun. Amber, the preservative kind, as in amber wax, so the light has an everlasting quality, making the rocks, the banks, the trees glow with the kind of burnish things take on in their final moments, fooling you into thinking they’re eternal the moment before they disappear.
On a dry, crisp kind of day, there’s still a humid quality to it all—you might be submerged in the shallows looking up. The gray element comes from the upper slopes of the surrounding hills, a stain leaking down from an ancient tin bucket. The tinge of copper involves the sumac, the last maple leaves just barely clinging to their branches. Blue comes in, too, but a distant, remote blue, up high in the sky on the other side of the amber, so it seems to box in and emphasize this self-contained, timeless quality all the more. It’s the kind of light that might bring you intoxicating happiness or unbearable sadness, depending on your mood, your age, the circumstances of your life. It’s a light, a color, that a week earlier in the season is camouflaged by the brilliant foliage, and only becomes predominate when the leaves have fallen; it is past the peak of foliage, and yet represents in secret, with hardly anyone noticing, the very height of the autumnal tint, the moment when the season crests and nothing will ever be quite so beautiful again.
A light that seems to carry with it a message, a simple and important lesson, yet one that comes in a code so complex you could spend your life trying to decipher it and never even find the first letter. Certainly, he’d been staring at it long enough as it was—the whole morning practically, time when he should have been fishing. Working upstream of the island he had picked up a few small trout, and had every expectation of catching something larger in the pool that turned itself around in a lazy semicircle, then widened out toward New Hampshire—and yet, seeing this color, feeling it, there was no other response possible but to wade over to the island, find a flat spot in the sandy marge, lie back with his head on a driftwood stump, and try to come to terms with what the light was telling him, even if it spoke in tongues.
The correct light of solitude. A phrase came to him after all—he always felt much better with things named. What the phrase actually meant he wasn’t sure, but there was a nice lyric ring to it, and he had learned a long time ago that words with a compelling rhythm could sometimes form a working substitute for truth. He felt his own solitude with more than usual strength today; happy with friends, with children, he didn’t go fishing alone as much as he had when he was younger, and something nostalgic in the sensation went down well with the amber light. His was by no means of a gloomy disposition, but it was undoubtedly a pensive one, and he had a tendency to see things with an October coloration even in July.
No one else was fishing this stretch of river. Driving north he hadn’t seen any cars parked along the railroad stretch or the Trophy Pool, and even below the bridge to Colebrook, where there was almost always a spin fisherman, the river ran uninterrupted by anyones hips. The island itself was a popular enough spot, at least during summer. The river rolled past a beautifully dark bank of pine, then hooked left in some shallow, ferocious-looking rapids that divided themselves around the prow of a steep island, with deep holding pockets
along both sides. With the water at its lowest level of the season, the island wore a collar of very fine sand, just wet and yielding enough to record the hops, skips, and plunges of raccoons, muskrats, and deer.
The maples on the crest of the island were already leafless; after a summer of green, an autumn of yellow, the branches seemed sharp and startling, studs without sheetrock, a scraggly grid. Toward the Vermont shore the bankside trees gave way in a narrow portal . . . there was an old town hall, a field behind it of stubbled corn, a rusty tractor, a shallow tributary stream . . . and it was through this gap that the amber color poured in at maximum strength.
But he was drifting now, so lost in looking he’d neglected his theme. The solitude part. Well, there was the solitude of the writer, which was no cliché. The solitude of the flyfisher wandering through rivers in search of trout. The solitude of a puny mortal face to face with one of nature’s big deals. Here the Connecticut was the longest river in New England, some four hundred miles of beauty free for the taking, and yet on a weekday on the far side of foliage season how many people were doing what he was doing—sitting there, watching it, trying to figure out one of its tricks. To him the river wasn’t something glanced at in the course of the day, not a flat, boring gray interval crossed on a concrete bridge or an opaque haze seen from an office tower, but something he must sit down and stare at and consider as the biggest, most important fact in the small corner of universe he found himself occupying.
A River Trilogy Page 54
