And he felt he was getting somewhere now. Not arrived, not on the verge of anything major, but making progress, with the solitude stuff and the color both. Fishing with one of his partners he may have seen the color, but not recognized it; alone, the color merged with something inside him and so became even more noticeable, until the amber lightened toward yellow and grew even softer, more diffuse, and yet with a subtle grain (it could have been that of well-sanded maple) that connected everything to everything else. It was the light the Connecticut wore when no one was watching, and it was precisely this feat, to see a river clear, free momentarily of any human tint, that was what he had been after all along.
Closing day. It’s never become the distinct ritual opening day is, and yet to many flyfishers it’s a much more significant event. Opening day in northern New England is a cold and inevitably empty experience, redeemed hardly at all by the fact it’s your first time out. Elsewhere in the country, fishing seasons have become so flexible, with so many special exceptions, that opening day has lost its position on the calendar as a distinctly April kind of event. Opening day is supposed to bring thoughts of rebirth and regeneration, a renewal of vows, a fresh start, but the fishing is so poor then, the climate so wretched, that the mood of nature contrasts too ironically with the mood of the fisherman for any kind of harmony to take place.
It’s different in the autumn—in autumn, the flyfisher’s mood and nature’s mood are inevitably in sync, and even more so if the fisherman is starting to get up there in years, so any autumnal note in the river finds its immediate echo in an outlook that’s taken on the same kind of gentle bittersweetness. A good year, a season full of fish, friends, and stories, and yet it’s almost over now, with only one last chance to make the connections that have become so precious—and how sweet everything becomes when seen with this realization.
The only analogy is to a love affair. The beginning can be lost in obscurity, a matter of glances and idle chitchat, hardly remembered, and yet the ending—well, the ending can be remembered for a very long time. To enter upon one of these affairs each year, the kind that takes up a good deal of your being, occupies many of your waking hours, puzzles you, confuses you, fills you suddenly with delight . . . to enter upon one of these knowing in advance it will all end at sundown on October 15 with no extensions makes you pay very close attention as the days dwindle down, so those last weeks are often the sweetest, the saddest, the most intense.
Almost everyone feels something of this in autumn, or how else could it have become such a metaphor, life simultaneously at its richest and most heartbreaking. The flyfisher feels this intensely, and this particular fly fisherman, the one still sitting there on the sandbar staring out at the river, his thermos of tea sending up wispy, hookah-like clouds of steam past his head, felt it with an extra, very personal intensity and had for many years.
When he was a boy his parents owned a summer house on a lake in what was then still country. They would go there October weekends, rake leaves, take walks, go fishing, and then on Sunday it always came time to leave. The boy never accepted this—that they had to abandon what was already most precious in his life, the shining water, the fragrant woods, the sky with its wind-driven clouds, the ready supply of exhilaration. As they drove down the lake road there would come a final moment when the lake was still in sight; sitting in the back seat, craning his neck, he would steal one last glance at the full expanse of water shining golden under the afternoon sun—and often see there, in the one small wedge of blue still visible through the window, a boat with a fisherman just going out.
Never had he wanted anything so badly—the freedom to do just that, go fishing in October on a late Sunday afternoon when the rest of the world was going back to the dreary suburbs. So intense was this moment that it became one of those you hear about and seldom actually experience: a defining moment, an instant when everything he wanted in life became peculiarly concentrated and clear. A life where he could somehow marry nature, be free of the barriers that walled him off—a life, to put it in simplest terms, where autumn was perpetual and he could go fishing forever.
He was up against that right now—the moment it became clear every year that, fish as much as he wanted to, it would never be forever. This saddened him, but he had been saddened many times before, and so it had become part of the cycle—a pleasant sadness now, without the torment he knew as a boy. All those years of fishing. All those trout and bass. The stories, the friends, the adventures. Minor victories and shattering defeats. The rivers, ponds, streams. The books he had written about them. All flowed from that moment in the car, that brief glance of longing back over his shoulder as his future receded into the distance and disappeared.
But that was the good news—that he could still wish for anything as passionately at fifty as he had at fifteen. It came over him in a wave, between one moment and the next, so he jumped up from the sandbar (anyone watching would have thought he’d been stung) and waded back out into the current, high stepping through the rapids, false casting furiously even before he decided where to aim. It often happened like that in October. The introspection leading toward boyhood, hitting a memory there, rebounding back again, springing him into instant life.
Against the island the rapids ran choppy and deep, but over toward Vermont the river widened over a sandy bottom into a good-sized bay. Not a spot he would have tried ordinarily, but it was autumn, and almost any odd corner was worth a shot. The browns moved a lot in autumn—they were spawning, or soon would be, and the same was true of brookies. October 15 was a bit early for spawners (which is why it was closing day in the first place), but it had been a cold month, and the slow sandy backwater was definitely worth a few casts.
If his fly ever had a name he’d long since forgotten it—a foil-wrapped streamer with a long black shock of hackle guaranteed to make any spawner mad. He fished it near the seam that divided fast water from slow, still not convinced there could be anything in the backwater proper, and only after a half hour went by without a hit did he start casting closer to the bank. Hardly more than a foot of water covered the sandy bottom here, and it was littered with the kinds of things that regularly find their way to shallow backwaters: waterlogged branches, a scum of old leaves, broken corn stalks, a sunken tire. For one impressionistic moment it reminded him of those old Walt Kelly drawings of Okefenokee Swamp, and it was only the bright clattery rush of water to his left that reminded him he was fishing for trout and not largemouth bass.
Three casts, four casts. He took a few steps downstream, aimed for where the Vermont bank jutted out just far enough to add some vivacity to the sluggish flow. In the current, trout hit hard and fast, and so he wasn’t quite prepared for a softer kind of take; the streamer was swimming sideways when something picked it up and carried it on back toward him, as if wanting to save him some stripping, help him out.
The lifting motion brought the trout’s snout and gills clear of the surface. A huge fish—a brown trout judging by its color—and the split seconds that followed this realization were taken up by all the usual clichés. Surprise, shock, the frantic tightening—and then the sudden overwhelming disappointment as the trout, wearying instantly of the game, dropped the package and swam free.
A five- or six-pound trout by the look of it—easily the biggest fish he’d ever seen in the river. That his hunch had been correct didn’t do much to assuage the pain; that the fish had simply let go, through no fault of his own, didn’t help much either. He’d lost the kind of trout that comes only once a decade, the clock was reset again, and it would undoubtedly be another ten years before he had a similar chance.
What to do with this kind of disappointment? Check your barb, check your tippet, blow on the streamer for good luck, send it back out searching once again. For he had another hunch: if there was a big brown male cruising the shallows, then it was reasonable to expect an equally big female. And this is exactly what he found, sort of. A few casts later another trout took hold, and t
his time, rather than swimming straight for him like the first fish, it turned downstream and hooked itself firmly in the jaw.
A brook trout this time, a female about fourteen inches long, with a color not much different from the muted gray-green of the bankside shrubs. A few casts later he hooked another brookie in exactly the same spot, a male, about the same size, and yet a dozen times more fiery, with the kind of flaring redness you see in tanagers and maple leaves and hardly anything else, at least here in the north.
Between them, the three fish gave him a lot to think about. They were obviously fall spawners, ready to strike at whatever came along, so there was very little skill involved with their capture. If anything, he felt more than a little abashed. This sandy backwater formed the trout’s bridal suite, the honeymoon cottage, the inner seraglio—the sanctuary an October 15 closing date was meant to ensure. Here, in all innocence (well, semi innocence; he’d cast there in the first place prospecting for spawners) he’d stumbled into it, and rather than continue any further he turned now and, all but blushing, tiptoed back toward the Vermont shore.
The trout had taught him something, no doubt about that. Here between the light and his memories he’d been indulging himself in a temps perdu kind of mood, seeing everything as mellow and finished, with a patina of regret that went down well with October. But this was entirely too anthropocentric of him, too narrow, because not ten yards from the island on which he lay daydreaming, rebirth and regeneration and renewals were all going on in full force, so it was spring there, and not just metaphorically—those fish weren’t hanging around to give him a frisson of guilt, but planning their species’ continuance, actively working at it, swimming around and around and around as if to spin the water to their genetic purpose.
It took a while before the heavy sense of intrusion left him and he began to see the backwater in a different light. That trout could still teach him things, shake up his humanity, point him where to look for the new lessons anyone his age needed if they were to continue growing was very good news indeed. The great cycle of life—there it was in action; he needed to keep a closer eye on it, factor it more into his autumnal mood, realize nature’s clock didn’t stop sweeping just because the small hand was brushing past the ten. He’d been looking at October 15 all wrong; if it was closing day for the fishermen, it was opening day for the trout. He’d imagined an October composed of wistful sadness; he’d neglected the October composed of exuberant lust.
Time, as a philosopher would put it, for lunch. He walked back through the empty cornfield to his car, folded his waders down around his waist, shook himself like a wet retriever, spread his anorak on the seat, got in. Colebrook in New Hampshire was the closest town, but small as it was it seemed too much like a metropolis, and so he drove the extra few miles to Bloomfield in Vermont, which hadn’t been a metropolis or anything like it since the log drives at the turn of the century.
A pleasant enough drive. He had thought perhaps the amber color was entirely confined to the river, but he could see now it was much wider and more diffuse, and rather than holding over a definite channel it colored barns and farmhouses and meadows all the way up the first range of hills. He also realized he had seen this tint before, in the work of English watercolorists of late Victorian times, those who often set their landscapes in November, seeing as they did with the haze of knowing that the pastoral life, their subject, was coming to an end. It wasn’t November yet, but no matter—the same mood was in the air.
A few miles north up this road a sign announced that you had crossed the 45th parallel—a sign that always seemed to him of a remarkable double significance. First, to think that northern Vermont was just as close to the equator as it was to the North Pole; second, that already, at 45 degrees one split second north, there was not only a definite northern flavor to everything, but a high northern flavor, at least late in fall. The Connecticut ran south, while its valley seemed like a gap up which everything poured toward the arctic, so the river alone escaped the latitude and its implications, but nothing else in the land could.
DeBannvilles sits on the highway just back from where the Nulhegan enters the Connecticut. It’s typical of what country stores have become, here and elsewhere—outlets for lottery tickets, sugar, fat, salty things, and six-packs—and yet with enough chain-saw oil, fishing lures, and axes that it still retains something of the old kind of flavor. Attached on its ell is a small restaurant that serves burgers and fries; a greasy spoon, strictly speaking, but it has one feature that places it in the very forefront of American restaurants: no one cares when patrons come in wearing muddy waders.
Midafternoon now, he had the place to himself. The waitress doubled as short-order chef—an older woman, French, the memere kind that looked as if she would be good at a motherly kind of clucking. She grilled up his hamburger, brought it over with a tall glass of ice water, then stood there staring at the sunshine that streamed through the screen door.
“Slow day,” the fisherman said.
And yes, she did cluck—and followed it up with a phrase in French that was so soft he couldn’t catch it.
He took a swallow of the water. “Looks like winter is coming.”
She faced the door. Oblivious to him now, griddled in sunshine by the screen, she ran her hand back through the gray of her hair, and said something so odd, so off the turn of their small talk, he ended up thinking about it the rest of the day
“Winter? Oh no,” she said, again with the same softness. “It mustn’t come, not this year.”
“I’m sorry?” he said, obtuse.
She turned, blinked to see him, smiled at him like he was a little boy. “We have a very nice maple pie.”
He thought about it on the way back to the river—how much force she put into the simple phrase, how odd the construction was with that prim, old-fashioned mustn’t. May as well insist the earth stop spinning, poor woman. The sky remained soft in the east, swollen with autumnal haze, and yet to the west the clouds seemed hard and suspiciously silver, as if they had already been rolled and coated in December.
Time enough for one last pool. He parked at the airstrip, then pushed and swatted his way down through the briars until he was abreast the sandbar that formed one side of the pool. Up high on the New Hampshire bank the small brown cabin was all shuttered and closed; there was no sign of his friend who, in springtime, would stand there pointing out the trout.
He waded through the easy, slack water until he came to the tail of the pool, then veered out gradually into the heavier current, letting the force of it slide on past his hip. Halfway to the river’s center he heard a sound that lay between a flute’s airy whistle and a whirligig’s frantic click, turned his head around and quickly ducked as two mergansers came racing downstream, their red heads extended as if each were trying to beat the other across an invisible line.
A good hatch of olives was in progress at the tail of the pool, just as he had hoped (olives being the most reliable insect emergence of the year). Little wispy things, olives, more like miniature stick figures than full-bodied bugs, dabbed together with the minimum amount of gluten; easy to imitate if you’re comfortable fishing minutiae. The smaller the fly, the less there is for a trout to dislike—a theory he had always found to be true.
There were lessons here, just as there had been further upstream—the same lesson, only compressed into a tighter cycle. Fall, winter, spring, summer. The olives packed all these into the course of a single day, and this was the spring part, the miraculous regeneration going on in airy swarmings right before his eyes.
The trout rose like it was June, too—busy little sips, as if someone underwater was sticking up a thumb and stirring the surface in quick clockwise swirls. He aligned himself with the current, fussed out some line, then let the fly drop just to the inside of the closest trout. It came up for the midge and missed . . . the fisherman, in striking, skipped the fly backward . . . and a trout he hadn’t seen darted out from behind a rock, curled his flank ar
ound the fly in that endearingly protective gesture trout can make, then plunged toward the bottom with the midge firmly centered in the small bull’s-eye pocket of its upper lip.
And as the trout (a rainbow, a rare one so late in the fall) gambols and prances around the high maypole of the uplifted rod, perhaps it’s time to discard the transparent pronoun that has just barely divided this flyfisherman from me. It’s a rhetorical trick, after all—borrowing the kind of distance grammar can sometimes lend—but not a shabby one. I was trying to see things with particular clearness this last time out, and for a while this kind of transference can help.
But not now. Here at the end of a season and a book it’s as good an occasion as any to explicitly link what at times have seemed separate entities: the writer and the fisherman. “Yield who will to their separation,” Frost puts it, “my object in living is to unite my avocation and vocation as my two eyes make one in sight.” And these two halves are here, or should be, as soon as I pull the knot tight with a few brief words.
Why would a novelist bother to write about fishing? Chekhov in The Seagull has Nina marvel that the famous Trigorin would spend so much time along the river. “And is it not wonderful that a famous writer, the darling of the public, mentioned daily in the papers, with his photograph in all the shop windows, his books translated into foreign languages, should spend his whole day fishing and be delighted because he has caught two chub.” Yes, wonderful indeed, not just for celebrities, but for those humbler, more obscure writers (though I bet I could outfish the vain and cynical Trigorin any day of the week) who find almost as much solace in fishing moving waters as they do in trying to capture moving character, or pinning down, if even for a moment, a secret or two about fate.
A River Trilogy Page 55
