Sportsman's Legacy

by William G. Tapply

  We paddled across the glassy lake in the gathering twilight. Somewhere a loon laughed in startling counterpoint to the quiet rhythm of our two paddles carving the water. The sky was pewter fading toward black, and already a few bright stars showed. Swallows ticked the lake’s smooth surface with their wing tips.

  I noticed a bright star moving sedately across the horizon. I pointed with my paddle. “What’s that?” I said.

  “Sputnik. That new Russian satellite.”

  Russian satellites, I thought, did not belong in the Maine sky.

  “I remember a place,” Dad whispered a moment later, “from a long time ago when I was here.”

  We nosed the canoe into a large cove. Scattered across its surface were the top halves of huge boulders—as large, some of them, as Volkswagen roofs. From his place in the stern Dad handed me a fly rod loaded with a deehair bug. “Throw it against the rocks,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  What happened was an hour of bass-bugging heaven. We counted the smallmouths we landed, although I forget the number now. Eight or ten, I would guess. None was smaller than three pounds. They lay against the boulders, and when they struck they exploded the mirrored surface of the cove. They fought like no Charles River largemouth I’d ever hooked—hard runs that zinged line off the reel, leaps that catapulted them several feet above the water.

  We drifted in the cove, moving slowly on unfelt currents of air so that the paddler needed only to feather occasionally to keep the caster broadside to the next boulder target. We played three-strikes-and-out, and never were more than three or four casts necessary before the man with the rod found himself tied to a smallmouth.

  We had only explored half of the cove when Dad said, “Let’s quit.”

  “But—”

  “We’ve got a whole week,” he said quietly.

  So we reeled in and paddled across the dark lake, following the wavering orange reflection of the kerosene lamp that Mum had set on a rock in front of the cabin.

  I spent the next day in an impatient blur of anticipation. Come evening, we would revisit the magic cove. And we did, and the night was soft and the loons wailed and the swallowed swooped and the bass were there. And they were there in undiminished numbers every night after that, too.

  It was a Sure Thing.

  Oddly, I found myself anticipating each evening with a little less eagerness as the days passed. Each successive night it seemed to me that those smallmouths crashed our bugs with just a shade less violence and jumped with less energy, and if we hadn’t kept count, I would’ve believed that we caught fewer of them and that they were smaller.

  In fact, however, our boulder-strewn cove gave us an hour of perfect smallmouth fishing every evening for the week our family stayed in Uncle George’s log cabin on Upper Sysladobsis Lake in the Maine wilderness.

  Dad and I recently talked about our week of twilights in the cove on Upper Dobsis. It was, we agreed, the best bass bugging either of us ever experienced, before then or since. “Paradise,” said Dad.

  “The stuff of fiction.”

  “A bona fide Sure Thing.”

  “I never told you this before,” I said, “but after the first few nights, I found myself losing some of my enthusiasm for it.”

  “You too?” he said.

  “You?”

  He smiled. “You seemed so eager. I didn’t want to let you down.”

  “I was doing the same thing,” I said. “I mean, you hauled us way up there into the Maine woods and you showed me this amazing fishing—how could I tell you it had stopped being so much fun?”

  He nodded. “It was a slice of paradise, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Perfect,” I agreed.

  “Which,” he said, “is the problem with paradise. It’s just too darned perfect.”

  The decline of the small mouth fishing in Winnipesaukee coincided (although I’m convinced it’s not a coincidence) with the invention of bass boats and foot-operated electric motors and hi-tech spinning rigs and crankbits and spinnerbaits and depth finders and all the other innovations that produced the boom of tournament bass fishing sometime in the 1980s. At first we noticed an occasional bass boat anchored in one of “our” coves. Three men would be sitting up on their perches methodically tossing out spinning lures, and although we gave them wide berth, we noticed that they did seem to catch an awful lot of fish.

  I fished Winnipesaukee twice last year with Dad. The first time we stayed out for two hours and landed three half-pound smallmouths. We guessed that a bass boat or two had already raked that shoreline.

  The second time, a week later, we motored around the lake searching for a vacant cove. The bass boats were so heavily deployed that we never found a place to wet a line. That’s when we began to reminisce about our long-ago week on Upper Dobsis. We agreed that we were ready for another shot at paradise. We figured that maybe we’d finally learned enough to appreciate it.

  MUM TAPPLY, BILL AND MARTHA, 2005

  SUNDOWN, FISH UP

  EX-PLORES AND EXPOTITIONS

  On a sweltering August afternoon thirteen summers ago, I said to my son, Mike (then nine), “Think you’re man enough to lift one end of a canoe over your head?”

  He pushed up the sleeve of his T-shirt and produced an admirable bicep.

  I whistled appreciatively. “Then let’s go fishin’,” I said.

  Mike and I had watched bluegills jiggle red-and-white bobbers many times, and he had trolled for Winnipesaukee smallmouths from his grandfather’s canoe. The previous Christmas, Grampa had given Mike a Zebco spin-fishing outfit, a less-than-subtle reminder to Mike’s Dad that perhaps the boy needed a little more encouragement. Mike quickly learned to whang a lure an admirable distance with his Zebco rig.

  So far all of our shared fishing adventures had taken place either in other people’s boats or from land, for the simple reason that my canoe was too heavy and cumbersome for one man to wrestle onto and off of my car by himself. It was a two-man job, and until now Mike did not qualify as one of them. But today, with the help of Mike’s rocklike muscles, we would take our First Real Father-Son Fishing Trip.

  For me, it was a Ceremonial Occasion. For Mike, I suspect it was nothing special. He liked fishing, and he had nothing better to do on this hot summer afternoon. Ceremonies are for adults.

  Warner’s Pond lay about a mile from the house. In the winter, the neighborhoods that cluster near its shores swarmed onto its ice to skate and build bonfires. I’d seen ice fisherman hunkered on it, and in the summer canoes and homemade rafts sometimes drifted on its surface. Adventuresome teenagers, I’d heard, sometimes camped out on the island. A suburban road nearly touched its eastern banks, and an eight-lane highway paralleled its shore on the north. A couple of times I had driven the dirt roadway to the sand beach to study it. Its edges were too weed-clogged for bobber-fishing or Zebco-casting from shore, but I had heard that it was full of panfish and largemouths and pickerel, and every spring the boys at the gas station whispered to me the secret news that someone had taken a big trout from Warner’s. It was one of those places that I had always intended to investigate, but whenever the urge to go fishing had struck, I had opted for more distant waters.

  Warner’s seemed like the perfect place for this ceremony. I liked the idea of discovering something new with Mike, rather than showing him something already familiar to me.

  When we were ready to launch the canoe, Mike insisted on taking the paddle. I understood that he did not intend a gesture of equal partnership. He had just never paddled a canoe and thought it looked like fun. Adventures in partnership would follow soon enough, I figured. So he weaved erratically around the pond, while I flycast a bluegill popper from the bow. I quickly discovered that the place was, indeed, full of panfish. The bluegills ran consistently large, and I caught a few crappies and small bass.

  The hum and honk of traffic from the highway that paralleled the north shore mingled with birdcalls, insect buzzes, and bullfrog grumbles. Suburb
an backyards sloped down to the pond. There was one other craft on the water—a rubber raft that drifted aimlessly in the weeds near the shore. Two pairs of bare legs protruded from it.

  Mike paddled, I cast, and after a while it was easy to ignore the push of civilization around the edges of the pond. The sun blazed down, and Mike peeled off his T-shirt.

  Once a bulge materialized under the lily pads, became a lazy wake, accelerated, charged the popper like a torpedo, and sliced my leader clean.

  “What was that?” whispered Mike.

  “Small pickerel.”

  “Wow!”

  I waited for him to ask for his turn. He didn’t. I kept casting and catching fish. He struggled bravely with the paddle. I considered instructing him on proper technique, sermonizing, perhaps, on the efficiency of the J-stroke, but decided that he was bright enough to figure it out by trial and error or to ask. Trial and error—and last-resort asking—had taught me many things, and I certainly didn’t want to discourage Mike with oblique criticism.

  Finally I said, “You want to catch a fish?”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m having fun.”

  “You like paddling?”

  “It’s okay. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”

  “You like watching me catch fish?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well,” I said, “I like paddling too, and I’d like to watch you catch fish. So how about we swap?”

  He nodded. “I guess it’s your turn.”

  We converted Mike’s end into the bow by rotating in our seats. He picked up his Zebco and wanged a Mepps spinner out there, and it didn’t take more than two or three casts for him to hook a bluegill. His grin showed me that he enjoyed fishing almost as much as paddling.

  I followed the shoreline until we came upon a shallow weed-choked cove. I noticed that a narrow meandering channel of open water cut through the weeds. I paddled into the channel and detected just the hint of current. I dipped my fingers into the water. It felt at least ten degrees cooler than the rest of the pond.

  “Hey,” I said to Mike. “How about an ex-plore?”

  “A what?”

  “An ex-plore. Your grandfather has always been very big on ex-plores. It’s time you and I had one.”

  After dinner, and before he trudged down to his basement office for hHGis evening of invisible writing, Dad made a ceremony of reading to me and my sister. Martha would crawl up onto his lap and I would sit cross-legged on the floor beside his chair. He usually selected a Winnie-the-Pooh story. Dad had special voices for each of the characters. His—and our—favorite was Eeyore, the melancholy donkey, whose life-is-stern-and-earnest philosophy especially appealed to Dad, I suspect.

  Pooh and Christopher Robin, along with Eeyore and Rabbit and all of Rabbit’s friends and relations and Tigger and Kanga and baby Roo (I can still hear Dad’s voice for each of them—the television versions simply don’t ring true to my ears, except for the animated Eeyore, whose voice could have been Dad’s) often took what they called little “ex-plores” and more elaborate “expotitions” to mysterious corners of the Hundred-Acre Woods.

  Ex-plores are spontaneous adventures, however small, and children (of all ages) cannot resist them. Whenever Dad and I were out on the water, he loved to announce an ex-plore. He would push the canoe deep into a previously un-ex-plored cove or up a feeder stream. Sometimes we flushed herons or ducks or geese. Sometimes we found muskrat houses. Sometimes we found pickerel or bass. Sometimes we found nothing at all. It didn’t really matter whether we found anything. We understood that if every ex-plore produced an adventure, the adventures would begin to lose their appeal.

  Dad had either the wisdom or the instinct to understand that kids—or at least I—had low tolerance for “lessons” but an insatiable appetite for adventures. The success of a fishing trip depended less on the number of fish we caught than on the quality of the adventure. Dad and I didn’t always catch a lot of fish, but we always had fun.

  When my kids began to get old enough to hold a rod and I found myself impatient with their fumbling, I asked Dad about his determinedly laissez-faire approach to fishing education. He had never given me lessons. He let me wallow around in my own bumbling. Somehow, I ended up addicted.

  He shrugged. “What’s your goal?” he asked.

  “I want my kids to like fishing.”

  “Or do you want to show off their precocious fly-casting skills to your friends?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I just want them to know how much fun fishing is. I want to share it with them.”

  “Oh, they already like fishing,” he said. “Everybody likes fishing, if they’re given the chance. Unless, that is, some adult comes along to spoil it. You want your kids to like fishing, just don’t get in the way. Take ‘em out and follow their lead. They want to catch frogs? Take off your shoes and go catch some frogs with them. They get tired of it after a while? Do something else. Don’t push. Fishing is just naturally fun. A love of fishing’s in our human genes. Hunting, too—it’s all in the same gene, I think—and if you can just leave it alone, it’ll always be there. Better yet, nurture it.” He smiled. “Remember, there’s more to fishing than trying to catch fish. Skipping flat stones is fishing, too, right?”

  I nodded. I remembered the day when we beached the canoe on a Maine lake to stretch our legs after a long and fishless morning of trolling streamers for landlocked salmon. Dad casually picked up a stone and flipped it sidearm across the surface of the lake. The stone skipped six or seven times before it sank to the bottom. He did it again, and got even more skips. “Can you do that?” he said.

  I tried imitating him, and after several attempts I managed to produce a couple of skips. He repeated his performance. It became a contest that he kept winning, although I had a strong pitching arm. I studied his technique, tried, erred, revised my methods, and after a while my stones were skipping six or seven times across the water. I figured out that successful flat-stone-skipping was a complex art. It depended on careful stone selection (flat-sided, neither too small nor too heavy), proper grip (forefinger curled around the edge), and arm motion (elbow cocked against the hip, quick wristy sidearm flip with the flat edge of the stone parallel to the water’s surface).

  Flat-stone skipping was a fishing adventure—a kind of ex-plore. Dad and I still use it as our metaphor for the infinitely varied ways a father can share time in the outdoors with one of his children. I have challenged each of my kids to flat-stone-skipping contests. All three of them have become deft skippers and enthusiastic ex-plorers. Flat-stone skipping, all three generations agree, is fishing, too.

  Dad and I dug worms from our vegetable garden. We rolled up our pantslegs and hand-captured crawfish from Walden Pond. We turned over planks in abandoned lumberyards and pounced on the fat crickets we found hiding underneath. We waded in rocky streams, and one of us would hold a landing net while the other rolled over upstream rocks to loosen hellgrammites. We turned on the lawn sprinkler at dusk, and a couple hours later we teamed up to pick nightcrawlers by flashlight. We baited minnow traps with bread and oatmeal. We caught yellow perch and sliced strips from their bellies to make skittering baits for pickerel.

  Gathering bait was always an ex-plore—as often as not more productive and fun than catching fish with it.

  We dug for Indian artifacts after lunch on the island in Fairhaven Bay. We abandoned beaten paths to follow brooks up toward their origins in swamps. When we hunted grouse and woodcock in New Hampshire, we drove unfamiliar dirt roads and never hesitated to stop at a new spot that looked as if it might hold a bird.

  Ex-plores were spur-of-the-moment responses to some immediate stimulus. If we needed bait, we caught some. If we saw an intriguing cove or alder run, we investigated it. If there were flat stones lying on the shore, we skipped them.

  Expotitions, on the other hand, were adventures that we planned and plotted with the care and anticipation of a major military maneuver. We spread topograp
hic maps over our kitchen table and read woodcock runs and trout ponds from their legends. Then we slogged through swamp or push-poled our canoe into places where, as Dad liked to say, the hand of man had never set foot. Or so we liked to believe.

  We organized expotitions to distant storied places, often in the company of Dad’s friends. Bob Elliot organized an expotition to a few of Maine’s lesser-known Atlantic salmon rivers—the Machias, the Dennys, the Narraguagus. We raised no fish in a week (the runs were just beginning to come back in those years), but I saw a few of those magnificent endangered gamefish being trapped and moved over the dams. We hunted grouse in Corey Ford’s Field and Stream cover near Hanover, New Hampshire. I caught a twenty-inch brown trout on a Light Cahill (the memory remains crystal clear thirty-five years later—it was my first big trout) from a pool that Baird Hall showed us on northern Vermont’s Lamoille River. Harold Blaisdell led expotitions to Furnace Brook and Otter Creek and Lake Champlain, and to the White and Battenkill river, in his part of Vermont.

  BILL, KATE (MIKE’S WIFE) AND MIKE, FISHING ON WILLARD POND, 2009

  We trolled for landlocked salmon in Sebago and Moosehead Lakes. We anchored over points and dropoffs and dangled crawfish and crickets in just about every deepwater smallmouth lake in New Hampshire. One August we trekked to the uppermost waters of the Connecticut River near the Canadian border, where I tried … and erred … and eventually figured out how to fish a spinner fall for rainbow trout in the dark.

  I’ve taken my kids on some expotitions. We spent a week rafting the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. We slept under the stars and fly-fished for native cutthroats. Sarah, who was then eight, liked to strip in the little gemlike trout I hooked. She kept count of them, and when we made camp in the evening she took my fly rod down to the river and tried to imitate my casting. For the most part, I bit my tongue and let her try and err, and she got so she could slop out a dry fly twenty feet or so.