I was lost in the woods half a dozen times, once trying to find a better way into Cedar Pool on the Northwest Miramichi back in 1982.
Cedar Pool was such a grand pool back then that a dedicated fisherman would do almost anything to get to it (the winter years have changed it and now it is not as good). There are rapids flooding over boulders at the top, very heavy water in spring, and it’s hard to cross to where one must fish from the other side, but salmon lay from the rip that is about midpoint of the pool down to where the large, flat rock sits just near the bottom end.
Your godfather Peter McGrath and I decided to cut straight through the woods from his camp, and got so completely turned around, so totally bamboozled, that we finally had to do something unusual—we had to look at our compass, and came to realize we were going in the one direction we did not believe we were going in, a direction away from both the great Northwest River and an old nineteenth-century logging road we had walked along just a half an hour before. Once we realized our mistake, we were back on the logging road we had left, within ten minutes.
We tented on the rivers of my youth—that is, the south branch of the Sevogle and the Northwest Miramichi many times—in June or July back in those days, fishing for salmon. You mom’s cousin David Savage and I ran Green Brook, that fertile brook cut out in the Bartibog wilderness that runs down to Green Brook Pool on the Bartibog, a half mile above the Bathurst Highway; ran the Northwest and the Little Southwest Miramichi, took fish (trout and salmon) on all those rivers. Twenty to thirty years ago now. And along Renous River and along the Main Southwest Miramichi, as well. I fished the conjunction of three great rivers, called Square Forks, perhaps one of the most pristine fishing areas in the world. I am proud of that. And I am proud, too, of releasing more fish there than I ever kept.
On the Northwest Miramichi, Peter and I ran a canoe at least once a year from the Elbow Stretch on the Northwest to the village of Wayerton, a distance of about fifteen miles, the great water teeming with young salmon—grilse—moving up, following the big salmon in. We would camp halfway down, make up a fire on the beach, drink our tea, listen to the water in the darkness, and now and then look up at the stars. We would beat that water to death for fish. Years before us, a friend of your grandfather told me he would run the same stretch of river at the same time of year. He and his brother would pole down in a ragged old canoe, hook into a dozen salmon and huge sea-run trout and never meet another soul. That was an age before Peter and David and me, and as you know, our day is now an age ago.
I will also let you in on a secret. There are very few people I would trust with my life. David Savage and Peter McGrath are two.
The Northwest Miramichi was the river where I learned to read a pool and know the hot spots in it. I took my first salmon from that branch, strangely enough with the first cast I ever made. That was far above Cedar Pool and far above the Elbow Stretch, as well; miles of wilderness, of rushing water and jagged hills. We travelled on woods roads so overgrown that branches would snap the truck mirrors off or at times punch a light out.
That seemed all a part of it back then. So, much of the hilarity of our youth was not spent in vain.
It was June 22 over forty years ago. We were at Brandy Landing Pool—B&L Pool, as it is known to Miramichiers.
I cast my first cast. Not a very good cast, either, but felt my line tighten instantly. I was using a red butt butterfly, number 6, with stiff wings. I had in my hands my first nine-and-a-half-foot Fenwick rod.
The rapids at the top of B&L Pool broaden out into dark, deep water where fish rest after their journey up the Stony Brook Stretch of the Northwest Miramichi, but my first cast was right into those turbulent rapids at the very top of the pool, so that particular fish must have been moving through. It was a male grilse; that is, a small salmon, about four pounds. I did not foul-hook him; he took hard.
The next spring—June 4—I took two large salmon and five large trout one evening at that same pool, standing only a few yards down from where I made my first cast the year before. The sea-run trout had come in amid the big salmon, and Peter and I were lucky enough to find them. Peter caught five trout that evening, as well.
B&L Pool is at the top part of the Stony Brook Stretch, in the deepest and most rugged part of the Northwest Miramichi Valley. It is a long bank to climb up or down, a hard pool to get to, and as I write this, it is many miles away. But we went there in late spring and early summer for almost twenty years, listening to the water roar beneath us, as we walked over the long, sweetly shaded hill, meeting very few other fishermen. Anton, I will tell you—I guess I have been as content there as any place I have ever been.
The woods have drawn me since I was a boy, and in many ways when I am there, I am a boy still. I can sit for hours in the shade of elms and birch. I watch others fish. And am just as content as if I were fishing. At one time lots of things mattered to me that do not matter much anymore. Son, I have had enough fame to know it is a lie. And, except for being with my family, I am most content when I am by myself. The woods and waterways of the Miramichi have kept me alive.
I told my brother this past June that I now understood why our uncle Richard went into the woods as a boy of twelve, and remained a woodsman all of his life, appearing at the doorway of my grandmother’s house at ten at night, coming out from some solitary camp way up on the river and then being gone before breakfast the next morning, to come out again three weeks later.
He had much work to do.
That is, your great-uncle Richard Adams was a salmon guide on the Matapedia. And many say he became the greatest salmon guide of his generation, guiding presidents and movie stars. He carried Farrah Fawcett on his back across a river, guided Jimmy and Rosalind Carter. And sometimes I get letters from people as far away as Pennsylvania asking me to tell them of my many memories of fishing with him. I would gladly do so, but I never did fish with him. The memory I have is that one day he carried me down to the Matapedia River and put me into his twenty-six-foot Restigouche canoe to have my picture taken when I was four years old. He never drove a car; he never had his own house. He would hitchhike wherever he went. He told people who bothered to ask that he had heard that I was a writer of some merit, though he did not know much about me. But one day not long before he died, someone I know visited his place to do an interview. The fellow spied three piles of news clippings. When Richard left the room, the fellow took a glance at them. One pile contained stories on the Atlantic salmon. The second were stories written about Richard Adams. The third pile was stories he had collected over the years about me.
Three years ago a man from Boston sent me Richard’s picture, his face chiselled out as if from granite, the shock of white hair to his shoulders, the old hat that had become emblematic of his life.
I have deep respect for the best guides.
An old guide visited Peter and me once years ago, after we ran an upper stretch of the Northwest Miramichi River called the North Pole branch, searching for trout. He came in to sit in our camp at night, and we bragged to him about having come down that hard run all the way from Lizard Brook, having poled the canoe across flats and through rapids. He spit his snuff into the fire and nodded. Then he commented shyly and politely:
“But youse see—the best thing for youse to do is pole yer canoe ‘up’ river nine or ten mile beyond that brook. That’s where the trouts really is. When I was a boy, I would pole up there against the rapids and find the fish. I would camp out fer days up there. I had an old rod and some three or four flies. Some trout up there went seven pound.”
You can imagine we did not think our own journey so exceptional after that.
The very next year—I think I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight—I walked three miles of river in my bare feet because I had torn my sneakers apart on the rocks. So both my feet were cut—but not as bad as one might think. Late that evening, just before I got to my truck, Peter managed t
o take one fish far below a pool called Moose Brook on the Depo Stretch of the Northwest Miramichi River, a stretch of water above the Stony Brook Stretch. That was the year I began to fish brown bug, with orange hackle, and it became my favourite fly, for I knew fish would show for it even if they did not take. Besides, I was never a great caster and a bug seemed to compensate for that fact.
And then I could tell you this.
For almost fifteen years I had a dog named Roo. Well, Roo travelled in my truck, shared my adventures and my baloney sandwiches, drank pop out of my cap, licked my face whenever I caught a fish, sat on the rocky banks as I fished a pool (laid up on the supplies in the middle of the canoe when we ran the river). At times in those years she was as close to me as any person, my only companion along the distant rivers, and except for my wife and kids, I loved her most. Where I needed her most was on the south branch of the Sevogle River when I fished it alone. Down over those great spruce hills one is in solitude and there are many days you might not see another soul.
It is place of retreat, wilderness, where the fishing is best in late July and the black flies are ferocious. Three Minute Pool, Disappointment Pool, Island Pool, White Birch, Teacup Pool, Milk Jug. I have been fortunate to take fish from them all. And by fish, I mean salmon.
The best thing about the south branch is that you don’t need waders; the water is warm enough to fish in sneakers and jeans (though still cool enough so the fish are active). It makes travelling over the slippery boulders easier. And so you can wander along its harsh and slippery banks unencumbered. If I travelled a long way from where we parked and it was late in the day, I would simply say “Truck” and Roo would turn and go, leading me back up the narrow pathways to the overgrown road, stopping to patiently wait until I caught up. I know I would not have made it back without her. Even when she had arthritis, she would hobble with me down to those tea-coloured pools of mornings long ago. Yes, she is gone now, but somehow still with me when I think of her.
* * *
—
This past June I spent a night showing your brother, John, how to tie a blood knot. I used to tie them quite a bit when I used a tapered leader. It is a valuable knot for him to know, just in case he wants to lengthen his leader and I’m not around. We are going into the Stony Brook Stretch with my older brother for two days. The water will be high now, and I know it will be hard fishing. It has been raining intermittently for a week or so, and I have watched it from our old farmhouse near the mouth of the Bartibog. Each day the clouds seem lower in the northwest sky, and the trees toss in the wind.
I am hoping John will catch his first salmon somewhere along the Stony Brook run. I am hoping that this is the year. He grew up in Toronto and has been to the water only three or four times. Two years ago we ran the Northwest on a day in early July and I hooked four fish, but he had no luck. I handed him the rod so he could feel in his arms how beautiful and powerful and majestic a salmon is.
So Anton, your brother arrived from our house in Fredericton the day before. I took him to the Bartibog, and we went to Aggens Pool. The water was high there, and no fish would take. In fact he could hardly walk in his waders far enough out to cast a line. I remembered the trip where I had cut my leg. I was then almost exactly the same age as he was that day, and it was only a week from the same day of the year.
“How many trout did you catch?” John asked, after we fished for three hours without seeing even a small fish roll.
“I caught seven that morning,” I said, “all nice trout. But you will have your day—you will have many days,” I said.
Well, I hoped and prayed that might be true. But the road to Aggens Pool is now a harder road down and we need a four-wheel drive to get in. A beaver pond has flooded the very path where I fell and cut my leg open, and a four-wheeler track—something unheard of when I was John’s age—cuts through to the pool from the right side. Poaching is rampant on the river now, Anton; trolling for fish at the mouth; nets strung across pools far upriver, where wardens almost never venture. And bass are in the river, in ever larger schools.
That night it was still raining hard, down against the raspberry bushes, and the clouds were dark. There was a smell of lilac in the wind and the grass was green all down the four acres that we own here.
The two water barrels at the side of the house were full, and now and again lightning would flash almost splendidly against the far-off pines, and thunder rumble far across the great Miramichi Bay.
So I painfully showed him the knot. Still, John catches on to things. He is a good mechanic and a great carpenter. In an hour he was tying blood knots as good or better than I was.
“Like this?” he asks.
The next morning the storm had rolled away, and we went in my brother’s Jeep, and the road into Stony was different—you know, I simply forgot how long a way it was, and there was a new camp from the last time I was there, oh, such a long, long time ago now. But taking one look at the water I felt it was too high yet. I knew there would be fish here, but I thought: They will be moving through—resting farther up toward B&L Pool.
That did not mean we couldn’t hook one. But after the first day we had not. We fished the home pool, and crossed the river in high water and went down to the pool below. The wind always comes up the valley after one o’clock and makes it very hard to cast—especially for John, who is just learning (but he is doing better and better each day).
John has heard so much about Stony Brook Stretch over the years, during those winter days in Toronto, with its sound of buses and subways, I was hoping for even one fish to show. But the great Miramichi River can break your heart, and yes, it often does.
We crossed the river again, and late in the day, after supper, went to the pool above the camp. It is a beautiful pool that bends left over big rock and you cast into the long, deep run that results. But it was roaring water. Hard to work your fly when your line is carried so swift and straightens too soon. The wind had died, as it always does in the evening, and two deer came out to munch at clover upriver by a hundred yards.
Finally we decided to call it a day.
I was using a wading stick given to me by Dr. Cole, an old fishing pal from days gone by, when I fished the great Square Forks, and I certainly needed it to cross back in the heavy current just at dark. John and my brother Bill managed to cross on their own. Anton, you know they have better balance than I.
Still nothing to show for all that but a small trout.
I told John there would be fish tomorrow.
We woke early.
I did not fish that day. It does not matter to me now. You see, sometimes if you are very lucky, you realize that very little matters except those you love. In fact, nothing else. I am less inclined to rush toward the water, knowing it will always be there when I get to it. And the wind was hard, blowing the water into a kind of endless chop; the sky was dull and grey and then brightened. I went up along the road, collected some firewood, brewed tea for lunch and boiled a piece of grilse we had from last year.
I walked through the woods to each pool, looking down into them with my Polaroid sunglasses, trying to see fish moving, but I could not tell in the wind. I know friends of mine like David and Peter probably could. I sat out in the sun and ate my lunch, drank black tea. So I watched a chipmunk chatter, its tail in the air, and said hello to a birch partridge, which swore at me up and down while trying to protect her three chicks. About four in the afternoon my brother saw fish moving up beyond the home pool. But they weren’t stopping.
He and my son worked every pool again—all day. The water had dropped. But not enough.
Another two days, I thought as we sat out at the fire that night—then it will be great fishing. But we had only one morning left.
That night the stars came out and I remembered running the river with Peter thirty years before, stopping halfway down to pitch a tent.
So I th
ought about what to do, and I said the only pool to go to was B&L. The last pool up on the Stony Brook Stretch, a hard pool to get to still. Especially hard from this side of the river.
Bill hesitated and finally said he did not want me to go.
“I would prefer you not go,” he said. I knew that was coming, Anton. Maybe you knew it, too. I guess I had been waiting for it all year in one way or another. From this side of the river, we would have to go over the bank on the far side of the pool, a horrendous climb, and then cross the river above the falls. It was the long vertical climb back up that worried Bill. The problem—well, it was not a problem to me, but to your uncle Bill—was the two heart attacks I had in the last year. It is not something I worry much about—and I do not want you to ever worry about it for my sake. Still, Bill did. I knew he would say this, so I drank my tea in silence and looked up at the stars, coming out now in the brilliant night. How many, many, nights have I loved this water?
“It’s my heart,” I said. “And it feels pretty sound—and if I do die, I will die at B&L—what better place on the whole Miramichi could I find?”
“I’m not having it,” Bill said. “David, we’re forty miles from anywhere.”
I told him it was a foolish worry, that I could make that climb. But he would not give in.
“If you don’t want us to go, we won’t,” John said.
I shrugged, spit the last of my tea into the fire.
“Don’t be so damn foolish,” I said. “What does it matter besides you having a chance at a fish. Bill and I both want that—but watch how you cross that river; don’t go down in your waders there!”
The next morning I woke John and handed him one of my boxes of flies.
“Look through them,” I said. “Take that green machine that Dave Savage tied me. It will work up there—you will see fish.”
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