Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  I moved and she spoke again, as if reading my thoughts from the shoals of sleep.

  “Can we…um…fish in the morning?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll have your fly rod ready to go at dawn. I was also just looking at the map and thinking we might drive on to a place in the Adirondacks tomorrow. It’s called Indian Lake. Maybe we’ll catch our dinner and I’ll tell you a real Indian story.”

  “Mmmm.” Finally, gone.

  I went back to Old Blue to close up the tailgate, heard a rustling, and saw Amos coming slowly through the alders. He walked straight up to me and bumped his sopping muzzle into my pants—a familiar old trick of his, wiping his mouth on me after a long drink. He’d taken himself down to the river where he’d been a pup for a cool evening drink, proving that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus was probably wrong when he said you can never step in the same river twice.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Norumbega Girl

  IT RAINED SOFTLY as we put up the big Bean tent beside Indian Lake, and then the sun suddenly came out from hiding, spreading the remains of a late summer afternoon on the water. A singing redbird flitted past, searching for his choir. An elderly couple was setting out beach chairs by their fire ring in the campsite next to us. The old man kept blowing his nose and swearing. I suggested to Maggie that we launch the canoe and go fish for our supper.

  “Dad,” she asked as we carried our rods and vests down the steep embankment to the shore, “why is it boys act strange?”

  “That’s one of the great questions of the ages, Mugs. But are we speaking in particular of one Nathan G. Toothacher?”

  “Well, kinda. How’d you know?”

  “Just a guess, my love.”

  We’d been talking about Nathan G. Toothacher most of the afternoon, on the drive across the Vermont border into eastern New York, past the water parks and faded tourist haunts of Lake George, which Thomas Jefferson once hailed as the Queen of American lakes but now probably wouldn’t recognize, up New York Route 28 into the heart of the Adirondacks.

  Nathan G. Toothacher was a year ahead of Maggie at Woodside Elementary School and the wavy blond star of the town’s thriving, if somewhat competitively cutthroat, youth soccer league.

  “He stares at me a lot but when I speak to him he never says anything. He just looks kinda weird. Like he has to throw up or something.”

  “Ah.”

  The most revealing male symptom of all—the classic throw-up look. Nathan G. Toothacher was clearly in love and sick as a pup. For all that, he seemed like a decent enough little kid and it was probably a shame I was going to have to break both his legs and burn his family’s wattle hut to the ground. But a Viking father does what he must to protect his firstborn child.

  “Has he ever spoken to you at all?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t count. He told me to shut up once. I wasn’t even talking to him.”

  “Well, darling, that’s no good. Boys who tell you to shut up can grow up to become bigger jerks. He’s probably too short for you anyway.”

  “But I kind of like him. Sometimes.”

  “I guessed as much. Now, pay attention. I want to go over a few basics of good canoemanship.”

  I launched the canoe out into the lily pads and then began a neat little orientation speech I used to make to the tenderfoot scouts when I was Sporty Haislip’s assistant canoe counselor at good old Camp Wenasa. I talked briefly about how a canoe moved and turned in the water, ran through the basic stroke techniques, and told her the cardinal rule of riding in a canoe: Never stand up. Maggie was seated on the rush seat in the bow. I noticed two boys about her age spin-casting across the cove. They noticed us and Maggie noticed them. According to a friend of mine who was tortured at a young age by nuns, the Catholic Church believes seven is about the age when a child begins to notice the world and gains the ability to reason. I reasoned it would be only a short amount of time before the boys on the opposite shore and the likes of Nathan Toothacher Esq. commanded far more of my daughter’s attention than I did, so I’d better get my nice speeches about good canoemanship and other essentials of life in now, while I still had a captive audience.

  “Can we take Amos?” She was interrupting an explanation of feathering the paddle which would have done Sporty Haislip proud.

  “Well, uh, I suppose so.” I paddled the canoe back toward the shore and motioned for him to come down and join us. The canoe was a wide Discovery model with special stabilizer beams. Amos was reclining like a Victorian poet on the top of the bank, watching us with either vague amusement or drowsy boredom. I motioned again for him to come and he reluctantly got up. Having ridden in a New Hampshire float plane and various Manhattan cabs, I reasoned, he could certainly handle a little spin around the lake in a great big canoe, especially with an experienced canoe hand like me in charge. But he picked his way down the slope like a nag being led to the slaughterhouse. I got out of the canoe to lift him up because his arthritic back legs made jumping into the craft impossible. I spread my arms around his legs and hoisted him up as you would lift a sheep. He growled at me, obviously embarrassed, legs trembling.

  “Oh, shut up, you big sissy. You’re a water dog, remember?”

  “Dad,” Maggie said, “you’re hurting his feelings.”

  “Well, he’s hurting my back.”

  I placed Amos in the center of the canoe beside the cooler, fly rods, and life jackets and ordered him to sit down. He looked at me as if I must be out of my mind but I pointed sternly to the floor and repeated the command. He gave another growl of protest and reluctantly sat down. I pushed off from the shore, took a seat, and we glided serenely for a moment back into the lily pads.

  “Put on your life jacket,” I ordered the crew.

  “You should, too.”

  “I will. I just want to get us out into the main channel first.” The boys across the cove, I noticed, had stopped reeling their lines and were watching us paddle out. A nice-looking blonde woman had joined them, perhaps their mother come to fetch them for supper, or maybe one of them had a gorgeous fortysomething girlfriend. Placing her hands on her hips, she stood there watching us, too.

  The canoe began to wobble a bit as I clumsily reversed stroke to try and turn it around. Unfortunately, my paddle snagged in the lily pads and the bow drifted back toward the shore in the light current. Amos took this positive development as an indication that the idiotic boat ride was over. He abruptly stood up and prepared to leap for terra firma, and I stood up to make him sit back down.

  What happened next, I fear, would have deeply aggrieved Sporty Haislip. The canoe rocked wildly as my old dog made a violent lurch toward land. He landed with only the smallest splash and lumbered safely up the bank. I stood momentarily pinwheeling my arms in a highly unsophisticated canoeing maneuver I feel certain you won’t find in any manual on the sport. Then I fell backward into the water.

  When I resurfaced, still wearing my hat, Maggie was clutching the side of the canoe, red-faced, uncertain whether to be terrified or burst out laughing. The boys on the opposite bank, however, had no such doubts. They were howling like town drunks. The attractive woman was laughing, too. Even the elderly couple from the next campsite briefly abandoned their beach chairs to come peek over the bank and see what all the commotion was about. The old woman put her hands to her mouth to suppress a giggle. The old man blew his nose, turned around, and left, obviously disgusted.

  “Dad, that was great,” Maggie said, deciding it was okay to laugh. “I can see why you’re not supposed to stand up in a canoe.”

  “Good,” I said, slogging to the shore, glaring up at my triumphant dog on the bank. “And let that be a good lesson to you both.”

  —

  Once upon a time in America, the central Adirondacks were a fly angler’s paradise, the natural home of the eastern brook trout. Two dozen rivers drained in all directions from a pristine wilderness sitting astride the Precambrian remains of the oldest mountain range on earth, flowing either towar
d the St. Lawrence or the Hudson-Mohawk river system.

  The first men to cast flies there were probably British army officers stationed on the Mohawk who learned the gentleman’s sport of fly-fishing back home in Izaak Walton’s England and began pushing to the region’s wild interior in the mid-1700s. Roughly 125 miles wide and 160 miles from north to south, forbiddingly cold in the winter and difficult and dangerous to traverse in summer, the Adirondacks, originally devoid of year-round inhabitants and unexplored by white men until after the Civil War, were sometimes indicated on a map by a large blank spot.

  Fur trappers were first to penetrate the wilderness for economic purposes, followed by lumbermen looking for hemlock and tanners who found an abundance of tannic acid in the coffee-colored lakes and pools of the region. Those same pools were home to plentiful brook trout, and upon the arrival of railroads the newly opened paradise was within easy striking range of Manhattan anglers, who’d pretty well depleted fish stocks in the Catskills. They came north in droves, staying for weeks at a time at scores of rustic hotels and lodges that sprung up in the 1870s. According to trout historian Nick Karas, by 1875 no fewer than two hundred such establishments were catering to a new species of tourist clientele—the traveling angler. Due to the tannic waters, Adirondack trout were no monsters, rarely growing larger than five pounds in size, but they were so plentiful and full of fight that magazines and journals began to extol the virtues of the northern brookie.

  “By the 1880s,” Karas writes, “the Adirondack wilderness was a thing of the past. The mountains, lakes, and rivers had been badly abused by loggers, miners, railroads, tanneries, and water-oriented industries. The latter at first demanded canal water and later hydroelectric water. Tourism and hotel building on an unprecedented scale also took their toll on the pristine aspect of the area.”

  Ironically, as Karas notes, it may have been the endangered speckled beauties themselves who ultimately saved the wilderness from extinction, as fishermen first raised the public alarm to rescue what was left of this special ecosystem. Sportsmen, hikers, birders, campers, naturalists, and even artists like Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, eventually joined the popular chorus to save the “North Woods” and before long politicians began to see the political wisdom of hopping on board the idea of a legal preserve. One early champion of the cause was Governor Theodore Roosevelt, who’d fished and hunted the Adirondacks as a young man. In an effort to bring back depleted trout stocks, Adirondack rivers and streams were stocked with more prolific-breeding rainbow trout and black bass species—to the detriment of brookies. In 1894, an area containing roughly 5,300,000 acres, still the largest such reserve in the lower forty-eight, was set aside in perpetuity by the New York legislature and named the Adirondack Forest Preserve.

  We paddled down the southern shore of Indian Lake for a while, passing what seemed to be miles of tent campers, then hung a left and disappeared behind a promising hemlock-topped rock island, whereupon we found a group of people frolicking in the buff.

  I smiled politely as we tooled by the nudists, who much prefer to be called naturists, but are naked people any way you care to look at them, which I tried not to do, particularly the lady with the mammoth physique wearing only a big friendly smile and water-stained Mets cap.

  “Hi!” she chirped at us. “Great weather at last, huh?”

  “Very nice indeed.” The weather, I meant to add.

  A skinny naked guy fiddling with a camera on the shore lifted his hand to wave, and several other unclothed people smiled sweetly at us as we glided past. I thought about apologizing for intruding on their private Kodak moment but decided to just keep paddling for dear life. The second we got safely around a corner of the island, Maggie jerked her head toward me, blushing and grinning.

  “Dad, did you see those people? They were all naked!”

  “Really? I guess I failed to notice. Actually, darling girl, I think the proper polite description is buck nekid.”

  “Dad!”

  “Okay, okay. I saw the Mets fan was missing her top. What’s the big deal? You and the Rocket trot around naked half the time and I’m pretty sure the Mohawk Indians who used to live here probably swam without encumbrance of loincloths most of the time. They weren’t the least bit modest about their bodies. Good thing we left old Amos back at camp, though. He’s such a prude.”

  “What’s a prude?”

  I explained that a prude was somebody who lived in the eternal hope of being offended by somebody else’s idea of freedom. The irony, of course, was that the worlds of art, literature, and religion were full of naked people. Half the public squares in Europe had naked people frolicking in their fountains and much of the artwork of the Renaissance, including religiously themed masterpieces, used depictions of unclothed men and women to convey a sense of their human vulnerability and intimacy with God. I explained to her that in ancient times there was a widespread belief that nakedness enhanced the power of a woman and reduced the power of a man, which perhaps explained why the magic of men was said to dwell in their garments—the vestments of war they put on, the armor of battle and badged uniforms that signified their position and rank in society, and so forth.

  “Cool,” she said, looking back to see if the naturists were still in view.

  I almost explained to her that the Roman Catholic Church eventually condemned any ceremonial rite involving nudity as a pagan rite because a medieval priest named Saint Jerome took the hard line that women should be ashamed of their bodies and cover them up lest they distract saintly men from pure thoughts and good work habits, effectively rendering women second-class citizens of the church and their bodies the objects of self-loathing for the next five centuries—something every modern shrink treating an epidemic of bulimic Kate Moss wanna-bes undoubtedly already knew. But again, this was one of those complex discussions perhaps best saved for a later date and her mother’s thoughtful insights. As I had this thought, it suddenly struck me how much more complicated such discussions would be in the near future—one family spread across two households, with a wilderness in between where words, explanations, and insights could easily get lost, poorly translated, or simply misunderstood.

  Happily, Maggie herself changed the subject and asked about the Indians who’d lived on Indian Lake, and I knew a bit about them. The fierce Hurons who inhabited the northern fringes of the wilderness had found the interior so inhospitable they were literally forced to eat bark off trees one winter in order to survive—hence the park’s name. Adirondack meant “bark eaters” in the native language of the competing Mohawks, their neighbors to the south. The Mohawks, I explained, were part of something called the Iroquois Confederacy, six tribes which peacefully came together in the 1770s in what was called the Great Peace to establish property boundaries, laws governing disputes, and codes of living; they even practiced a rudimentary form of voting democracy—the Western world’s first example, many believed—which Thomas Jefferson, among others, studied before setting pen to parchment and creating the Declaration of Independence.

  “Did they believe in God?”

  “Of course they believed in God,” I said. “Don’t you remember when I read you The Soul of an Indian about the Great Mystery and Watan Tonka and the Circle of Life?”

  “You didn’t read us that,” she pointed out, delicately dipping her paddle in the dark brown water, and I realized she was correct. Just as I’d started to read about that to her and Jack by the fire at Acadia, the circus had arrived at the campground.

  “You’re right. How about if we read it later by the fire?”

  “Sure. Can we have marshmallows later, too?”

  “Of course. We’ll invite the naked people over, if you want.”

  “Dad.”

  —

  We found a good spot to fish, tucked in a narrow cove where the sunlight was slanting through low-hanging boughs of tall evergreen trees, stately as a chapel, a setting straight from Longfellow’s Evangeline. We pulled the canoe up on rocks
and got out. I pulled on my hip waders and Maggie sat on a rock tying a floating nymph to her leader tippet. She was good at making Duncan knots, much better than her old man the Eagle Scout, and soon had her gear ready to go. The rod she was using was a Bean Guide Series six-weight graphite with a British-made Silver Guide fly reel equipped with a click drag and right-hand retrieve, good for making short, tight casts as well as longer casts up to forty yards. It was easy to handle and had good smooth action. She got up and stepped lightly over the large, water-polished rocks, studying the surface lines for hatching bugs as she’d been taught to do. Down the shore a bit, she paused and nimbly leapt a few yards out to a large smooth rock and began making easy fly casts, finally dropping her line nicely on the water.

  Watching her, I thought, not for the first time, how effortless and natural her ability appeared, a gift perhaps, unlike my own, which was a slow-learned process of self-conscious wrist flicks and elbow bends punctuated by the occasional, but rare, unexpected throw of brilliance. Plato advanced the interesting idea that we all know our destinies and possess certain skills before birth and that helpful “spirit” guides called daimones are present to usher us sympathetically along the cosmic birthing canal, sometimes even permitting us to select the people who will become our parents. Several Indian creation myths speak of this same idea, noting that we are closer to the Great Spirit at the moment of our births than at any other time during our lives—and simply forget, as we age, where we really came from. We come trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth chose to describe it in “Intimations of Immortality,” and the rest is but a sleep and a forgetting.

  Whenever I looked at Maggie I saw a yellowing photograph of my mother, whom she resembled at her identical age to an almost eerie extent—even down to the dramatic gestures, the occasional flaring sulks, and the way she wore her fine light brown hair pulled back just so. It was probably far too soon to know what if any elements of her mother and me would manifest in her approach to the world—elements that were perhaps the reason, Père Plato might have said, she and her daimones had opted to choose us as earthly guardians in the first place—but she clearly possessed her grandmother’s physical beauty, deep sympathy for others, and lush-spiritedness. I saw powerful traces of her maternal grandfather Sam Bennie, the Scottish fly angler, beginning to emerge as well. It was more than the natural fly-casting gene that had even been apparent to the instructors at Bean; she had the restless curiosity of a traveler and the refiner’s fire of a truth-seeker. If you asked her, she would inform you without the slightest hesitation that she intended to be a film actress and a scientist. Madame Curie meets Meryl Streep.