Fly fishing for me, as for most everyone who does it, is a welcome break from the daily grind. A baker, a master, someone who loves his craft, still knows moments when the hot oven, the demands of his customers, the very texture of flour and salt become unbearable irritants against his overworked nerves; he finds, in fleeing to the river, relief in facing nothing more vexatious than the vagaries of trout. So, too, with the writer of fiction. After a while he’s had enough with words, enough with plot, enough with the long hours sitting bewitched, bothered, and bewildered at his desk, and it becomes of the utmost importance to concentrate on another matter entirely. Fly fishing, in this respect, is my booze, my womanizing—my strong avocational defense of my weak vocational flank. And it s exactly this transference that accounts for the intensity with which I pursue my sport; to balance the prolonged kind of concentration writing demands, you have to place something of comparable demand on the opposite side of the scale. Tolstoy pursued peasant girls, Nabokov chased butterflies—a writer’s passion, off duty, can be an odd and terrible thing.
An understandable enough motive, fishing to get away from it all, known not only by writers and pastry chefs but garage mechanics and insurance executives, history teachers and nurses. But what gives it an added twist is that in my case when I’m out on the river I’m not only a novelist at leisure, but an essayist who sometimes writes about fly fishing, and this brings a portion of my vocation with me, so often I’m looking as hard for the right words on a river as I am back at home.
I’ve always thought the reasons for this are fairly straightforward, so much so that perhaps I’ve never bothered to spell them out. I write about fly fishing because I enjoy writing about delight; because in this day and age, when the worth of a novelist is still measured by how well he or she catches our despair, a fiction writer is not often called upon to write about simple happiness, and I’m determined to seize the chance when it comes. I enjoy writing lyrically, the old way, where the rhythm of words seeks to capture the rhythm of what they describe, and rivers lend themselves perfectly to this kind of treatment. I enjoy writing, not specifically of nature (for I find my eyes are too large and greedy to do this with any patience) but the stage nature performs on—of landscape, moving water, weather, sky, hills, and terrain.
And it’s an odd thing. To the rest of the world writing fiction and writing about fishing seem totally opposite endeavors. “You write about fishing?” someone will say, in praising a collection of short stories. “You write novels?” someone will say, in praising your fishing essays. After a while you come to anticipate the little sneer that decorates the question mark, the upturned eyebrow, the slow confused shake of the head, as the person pigeonholes you as, in the first case, a redneck hick, or, in the second, a highfalutin intellectual.
Yes, I do both, find the rivers I fish in fact merge with the rivers I fish in imagination; watery metaphors are all-inclusive—they flow back around on themselves and merge.
For when you think about it, writing fiction and fly fishing for trout have much in common. Both are difficult (done right), both require long apprenticeships, both involve much patience, the capacity to withstand disappointment and failure, a healthy dose of skepticism, a certain daring, a sense of being part of a long and continuous tradition. Both, most of all, are honest and sincere attempts to come to terms with the world, make sense of it, if only for the length of a paragraph or one heartbreakingly golden yet all too perishable afternoon.
This is my third book on fly fishing—I don’t think there will be a fourth. What they make up, taken together, is a record of three fishing seasons over the course of fifteen years, or rather one season in the life of man—a long one, extending from late youth to late middle age, the vital years of a person’s prime. Together, they form a history of passionate involvement, an autobiography of small delights, and it seems to me in finishing this third book that I’ve gone as far with this theme as I should.
This realization has something to do with the autumnal mood I tried so hard to re-create earlier, the light that, as I fished those olives, remained so pronounced. As a man nears fifty he can become too conscious of that light. Everything takes on a burnish, a retrospective glow, and it becomes harder to find that vernal kind of brightness that makes you want to throw your hands up and shout in sheer delight. Your eyes begin noticing how the pines all seem to be dying from roadside salt or acid rain; you see the houses going up too close to the river, the wanton disregard for all you hold dear; the fishing doesn’t seem quite so good anymore; rapids you would have pushed aside in disdain only a few years ago now seem dangerous; the river, in little ways, seems out to get you. If you’re lucky, there’s still enough boy in you to bull past this sunset kind of vision, but it takes effort now; it’s not something your genes do instinctively on their own.
October 15 is an appropriate date against which to cease and desist, not only to protect the river and its young, but to protect the youthful vision these books have tried to reflect. Yes, maybe someday it will be good to write of late season in a flyfishers life, link it naturally to what’s come before, but somehow I don’t think so—what I have to say about rivers is largely finished. I say this in full and guilty consciousness of all those subjects I’ve never had time to write about at length. Swallows, for instance, the flyfishers bird. Smallmouth versus rainbow, which fights harder. How wonderful food tastes when eaten beside moving water—the delights of a fishing lunch. Casting for gulpers in our local pond. My heretical theories on rods and tackle. My first striper. Which fishing writers have meant the most to me and why. Fishing with worms. All these and more I could have some fun with, and yet that October 15 date looms in finality and I realize there’s no time.
This brings it back to what any flyfisher feels as the season runs down. So many stories yet to tell! And so many places left to fish! I’d like to go back to the Yellowstone again, early in the season when you can expect a good cutthroat on every cast. I’d like to fish the coastal rivers of British Columbia and then continue on up to Alaska, preferably on float trips, so the fishing is right there every moment of a long northern day. Explore alpine lakes up and down the Rockies. The smallmouth waters of Quetico-Superior, a canoe trip with my family. A week or two on the classic English chalkstreams, especially the Kennet, since it’s along its banks where my parents first met each other in World War II. I’d like to go to Argentina and Chile, dust off my high school Spanish, catch trout under volcanoes. And Labrador, since I’m being ambitious—those landlocked salmon and brook trout rivers of the true north. Given time, I’d like to return to the lochs of the Scottish highlands, with my kids this time, show them that high lonely country that speaks to something in my imagination in an intense way no other landscape can match.
Thus, my wish list. Probably most of these places will always remain there, rivers to daydream about and keep alive in the wanting, even if my bank account, my health, or the vicissitudes of fate keep me from ever visiting them in person. There are places close to home I would like to fish, too. In Vermont, I’d like to think I could return someday to a revitalized Battenkill, or a Waits that was treated as the treasure it once was and could be again. In Massachusetts are those stripers that run off the Merrimack—why have I waited so long to find out what that’s all about? In Maine, I’d like to visit more of the old-time fishing camps, get a better sense of the vast northern forest. And, for that matter, there are mountain ponds and upland streams right here in the hills that surround my home I’ve always wondered about but not yet explored.
But most of all, forming the dependable foundation on which these fancies soar, I would like to think I have many seasons left on my beloved Connecticut, running purer now than it has in a hundred years. Days like this one, for instance, when its beauty manifests itself in a guise I’ve never seen before, so it could be an entirely new river superimposed over my familiar one, needing this trick of light for me to see it clear. Watching it, very conscious of every surge and ripp
le, I caught four more trout at the tail of the pool, and the fish were still rising when I decided it was time to quit. The amber remained as pronounced as it had been in the morning, and I wanted to leave while it was still in place, take away with me the illusion that the river would run beneath the color all winter, preserved and protected by that pure crystal palace of autumnal light.
Facing a long drive home, tired, saddened, but no more than I should be, I reeled in my line, carefully distributing it with my finger so it lay even on the spool, knowing it would rest undisturbed there until spring. I was reaching to take down my rod when a fish rose ten yards in front of me—a good one judging by the thick way the ring crested, much better than the little brookies I’d been playing with downstream. I looked at my watch, then up at the sun, which was still ten degrees above the horizon, stalled in the wide bar of its own yellow warmth . . . took light and fish and mileage into consideration, decided it really was time to quit, started toward the bank, then quickly turned and shoved myself back into the current for one last cast.
One last cast! That’s the fly you should use if you want to catch the spirit of this sport—the fly called hope. It filled me now, just as completely, with just as much exhilaration, as if the river had lifted me up on its back and transformed me into the same surging mix of hydrogen and oxygen it consisted of itself. I felt a gratitude so strong it all but made me sob . . . that so deep in autumn I could still feel the gift of such joyous exuberance . . . and at the same time a whole list of demands raced through my wanting—not the greedy kind, but the kind that are part vow, part prayer, part command, part supplication, and together make up a man’s undiminished, unquenchable appetite for life.
One more time into the current, the force of it on my waist. Once more the feel of spray kicking up off my waders, flying in my face, making me laugh. Once more the magic bend and flex of a well-designed rod. One more sunset, slow and soft there in the west. Once more that precious hour before the light disappears. One more rise, slow and dimpled. One rainbow more, leaping wildly. One brown more, pensively gorgeous. One brookie more, skittering about. One hatch more one strike more one surprise more one victory more and below and through and around all these the most vital thing enduring thing now and yesterday and tomorrow and forever one river more one river more one river more one river more.
A River Trilogy Page 56
