Growing Gills

by David Joy

  I stepped into the cold mountain stream and wiggled some line out of the end of the rod. I read the water, trying to decipher the new creek to discover where the fish would hold—not that trout behavior differs much from stream to stream, but often they may hold more in runs on one creek versus pockets on another. A perfect eddy pushed to the right behind a large piece of shale, and a shallow run emptied into a pool upstream. I hadn’t made my first cast, but I knew that there would be fish.

  *****

  Fishing has taken me to the most beautiful places that I’ve ever seen. I’ve watched pelicans dive bomb breakers while I stood knee-deep in crashing waves, casting to pompano; I’ve seen great blue herons wade on stilt legs through hydrilla while I cast balsa wood bass bugs to largemouths; I’ve observed deer weaving through naked trees during the fall brook trout spawn; and I’ve gazed at a mother beaver guiding her young across the crosscurrent of a rushing river as I stood in a mayfly hatch casting to rising browns.

  Fishing has taken me to places transfixed by time, places that remain untouched, places with the power to hold me motionless. Without fishing, I would not have the same respect and love for places wild. Yet, times on the water have taken me to other places that I wished weren’t there. I’ve stood in a boat anchored beside oil rigs and reeled in redfish, sheepsheads, and spadefish through oil slicks; I’ve watched a creek slowly fill with runoff until the water became shallow, raising the temperature, and forcing native trout to find new water. I’ve read about dams cutting off the yearly migrations of spawning steelhead, and I waited helplessly while developers clear cut miles of riverfront property, pushing wildlife away from their maternal waters.

  I’m livid at the destruction and wonder how far I’m willing to take it in order to save one stream. I read Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang and envy his characters’ reckless abandonment of the law. I want to sabotage those earthmovers and keep one stretch of land safe for a few more days. Sara and I turn Abbey’s name into a verb and say, “We ought to Ed Abbey that lumberyard. We should Ed Abbey that development. Let’s Ed Abbey those sons-of-bitches.” Abbey’s infamous character, Hayduke, is our hero, and we fantasize of disappearing into the night with the Monkey Wrench Gang. In the end it would settle nothing. This damnation, this whole damned nation, is completely out of my control, but I can’t help feeling responsible just because I’m human. When I return to the water, cast my line, and observe all that is around me, I’m filled with an undying appreciation for these wild places and assume a responsibility to try to stop them from disappearing.

  *****

  I headed upstream on Beetree Fork Creek toward the eddy on the right and hoped a trout would be holding in the swirling current. With enough line off the reel to make the cast, I started waving my 81⁄2-foot 5-weight, my flies shooting closer with each progression. In one final double-haul, thirty feet of lime green line rolled out above the stream, dropping leader, tippet, and flies softly on the outside edge of the pocket. I threw mends, trying to hold the Adams circling in the eddy while the Pheasant Tail had time to sink. The drift was natural but a fish never rose.

  I made another cast, dropping the flies perfectly into the seam that pushed out on the left side of the eddy. The Adams rode high, calf-tail parachute sticking straight up like a buoy as the dry came downstream toward me. I stripped in line with the same timing as the current, drag-free, invisible tension, but again nothing. With the first hole showing no signs of trout, I waded further up the creek toward the pool below the shallow run along the banks. The only motions in the hole were soft ripples running straight down the center, the current funneling down from the head. If there were any trout in that pool, I knew they would be holding either on the outside edges of the current or directly in the middle of the ripples. I picked a spot, deciding on the left side seam, and made the cast. The Adams floated like a cork but fooled no trout. I fished every line. Nothing.

  I followed the same approach on the shallow run above the pool to no avail. I wasn’t sure if the creek was barren, if there was something unknown about that watershed, or if I was spooking the fish; but as I looked around, it didn’t really matter. I hiked further up the creek, finally moving out of sight of the bridge and my truck. All that mattered was that I stood in a place surrounded by nature, with no signs of human passage besides the jingle of tools clanking on my vest and the soft swish of Gore-Tex as I waded up the creek.

  Upstream a giant hornets’ nest that looked like a papier-mâché piñata hung on a limb of a water oak stretched over the creek. Black hornets climbed all over the hive and swarmed through the oak’s leaves. At first I was hesitant to get close, but as I moved toward the nest and stayed on the far side of the stream, I was awed by those insects: the way they attacked any approaching bugs, the way they followed me with their eyes and repositioned themselves on the nest to watch me, and the way they seemed to systematically come out, one by one, flying off to pollinate a forest of wildflowers. I thought about coming back in the winter when the hornets were dormant and taking the hive home, but I couldn’t take anything from a place so perfectly untouched.

  I watched chipmunks chase each other around the loose bark of a cedar. I lay on a mattress of moss and stared up through the layers of leaves at fingerlings of blue sky. I followed the tracks of a raccoon that had searched the sandbars the night before. Eventually, I did catch a couple of native brook trout, but that was unimportant. I was happy just knowing the fish remained, that there was still cold water for the trout to fin through—knowing that the place was still wild was enough for me.

  I stayed in those woods until encroaching darkness forced me back to my truck. Even then, I never wanted to leave. I hiked back with cicadas buzzing loud, then fading. Lightning bugs scattered bio-luminescent lanterns under the darkness of turkey oaks. Unseen animals began to scurry across the forest floor, and the dead leaves cracked under their tiny footsteps. When I got back to the truck, I slid my wet waders off, unlaced my boots, broke down my fly rod, and climbed into the cab. Everything was slower: my movements, my thoughts, the wind, time.

  *****

  My biggest fear is that eventually, during my lifetime, there will be no more places like this, that eventually homes will take the place of wood groves, runoff will strangle the streams, peaks will be flattened into mesas, and the animals will disappear in a final failed exodus with nowhere else to go. People come to my mountains to escape urbanization, to see a place still holding onto its virginity, but with them they bring risk. The more people who come, the more roads that are built, the more homes that are constructed, the more these places vanish. When the wild is gone, we will be diminished. Cutting trees slices ourselves. Encroachment is our suicide.

  I often think about what I would do if I hit the jackpot playing Powerball. The answer is always clear. I would buy every piece of untouched property I could afford. I would never cut a tree, never clear a plot for a home, just leave it the way it was. When I died, I would donate everything to an organization I knew would do the same; yet I know that even with twenty billion dollars, I couldn’t buy it all. Places I have never seen would still be destroyed, and no one would ever see them again. Acreage around my home has risen in some places from $50,000 to over a $100,000 an acre. I flip through the pages of Jackson County real estate guides and wonder what the price will be for the last tree.

  As for now, I fill my gas tank (an irony, I know) and drive as far as my wallet will allow, trying to find the few wild places that remain. I never pull into national parks; I leave those pruned refuges for tourists and people afraid of the wild. The parks are a valiant effort, but Aldo Leopold foretold the result. Parks bring roads, roads bring people, and people destroy solitude. In “Marshland Elegy,” Leopold wrote, “Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.” The same can be said for my mountains. Solitude is only precious to trout.

  I search for places where trails have neve
r been cut, where trees have grown from saplings to eighty-foot towers, where the jack-in-the-pulpits are still fresh with dew. When I finally find a place, I plant myself in soil, let the wild surround me, attempt to fuse with the natural world for just a moment, and then leave.

  *****

  Back in my truck, I started the engine, rolled down the windows, and pulled out of the gravel. I bent down, temple touching the steering wheel, and looked straight up through the windshield. I could see the wisteria-colored sky with scattered stars beaming down like ancestral guardians. The road grew dark under the blanket of overhanging leaves. As I steered around a sharp curve, a red fox rushed across the pavement, its body low to the ground, its thick tail held straight out. I slammed the brakes to avoid hitting the small mammal. The fox never missed a stride, disappearing into the thicket of rhododendron and mountain laurel hugging the outside edge of the bend.

  Further ahead, my headlights illuminated the tapetum lucidums (the mirrorlike characteristic in animals’ retinas that gives the eyes that nighttime glow) of creatures hiding in field grass along the roadside and animals that held firmly onto the limbs of trees. I couldn’t be sure what animal belonged to the glowing green pupils, but I enjoyed knowing they still had a place to hide.

  I could see the old farmer’s house in the distance. The windows shone yellow through the darkness, and as I approached I wondered what that tough highlander was doing in the early night. Driving past his home, I slowed down to peer through the windows hoping to see him. An orange glow grew bright on the front porch, the flame of the cigarette giving light to the hardened lines of the man’s face. He was nodding back and forth in a rocking chair on the porch. I knew he was probably enjoying this place just as much, if not more, than I was. Certainly he was closer to this place than I could ever be. As I turned the corner past the farm, bats cut flips after fluttering insects spiraling through the cool night air right in front of my windshield.

  I thought back on the few fish that I had caught that day. All were gorgeous native brook trout whose family tree dated back to the last Ice Age in the same mountains and the same streams. It hadn’t been an active day on the water, but I smiled at sharing their refuge.

  Almost home, I saw fluorescent lights break the darkness and knew I was back in “civilization.” I wondered what it meant to be “civilized.” Did it mean completely forgetting the sanctity of our primal roots, turning our backs on the earth that granted us life? A car’s headlights began to show over the next hill like an electric sun rising over the horizon. As our headlights met, I saw a confused opossum trying to decide which way to move, trapped in the middle of the road. I slowed the truck and tried to give the animal an outlet, but the opossum went to the left and was smashed under the tires of the oncoming car.

  I could have just as easily run over that opossum; I wouldn’t have swerved off the road to save it. If it had been me, I would have been remorseful, but at the end of the day, I would have gone on with my life and probably forgotten. Forgetting our destruction is just easier. I try to force myself to remember, to always be aware of the effects of human life, but the cars keep driving, roads stretch further, and I am caught in the middle with the opossum, not knowing whether to turn right or left. Then I go to places untouched and remember. I make it to the other side of the road and disappear into the laurel with the fox. I escape the nighttime lights of civilization and converge with the darkness. My eyes can’t glow, and I know that the animals watch me hesitantly even though I can’t see them, but that’s all right. At least I’ve made it to their side of the ditch.

  “What in me is dark, illumine…”

  My anticipation of leaving was clear as I rocked uneasily on the couch, sped through television channels, and knocked my knees together. Sara knew it but continued to make me wait. With the kitchen light reflecting against her jade eyes, she looked at me and smiled to offer some comfort, but I was antsy anyway.

  “You ready?” I asked, sitting up to the edge of the couch, my eagerness evident in the loaded springs of my legs. I was a wad of stored energy, ready to explode at any moment.

  “You said it wouldn’t be worth fishing till eleven and it’s only nine forty-five.” Sara paced the hazy kitchen as she grabbed supplies to clean the stovetop, the smell of pork chops still hanging on the smoke of dinner. She was already dressed to go: ripped jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt, and a windbreaker. Her dark hair was pulled tight into a ponytail. She had no reason to wait besides the pure enjoyment of watching me squirm.

  “Yeah, but it takes thirty minutes to get there,” I pleaded.

  “Then we’ll leave at ten thirty.”

  “How about ten o’clock?”

  “Ten fifteen.”

  “Fine.” She drove a hard bargain.

  I looked at the rods resting against the armchair to my left and thought I’d better check the knots. I’d checked them at least three times already, but the urge to be on the water had my mind stuck on one track. I’d tied a Rooster Tail, an in-line spinnerbait that Sara had picked (real girly: black with sparkles along the shaft) from the rows of tackle at Walmart, onto the 6-pound monofilament of a spinning rod. The scratched reel held firm in the brass seat of my grandmother’s rod, a rod with novels buried in the grip before I’d ever touched it, a rod whose story I continued with each cast, and now Sara would add her tale. She was unaware of the significance, but my letting her use that rod was a sure sign of how much I loved her.

  I checked the knot on the Rooster Tail. Tight. Then I ran the line through my fingers checking for any nicks. Flawless. The rod was ready to fish.

  A 7-weight fly rod rested across the arms of the chair, the perfect balance of rod and reel keeping it stable. I’d yet to fish this rod, an 81⁄2-foot, 7-weight with a jet black Ross Rhythm held firm in the rosewood reel seat. I’d bought the setup specifically to night-fish for trout. I’d read the words of George Harvey, Joe Humphreys, and James Bashline on night-fishing for big trout, specifically browns, and built my rod to match the masters’.

  *****

  Traditionally night-fishing for trout has been a northern habit, with the nighttime roots buried in the cold currents of Pennsylvania. Bashline’s prose bragged of monster trout ripping drag to the backing, and the photograph of Joe Humphreys’s 1978 Pennsylvania record brown, a gargantuan fifteen-pounder, spoke more than any number of words. The facts were simple: the biggest trout fed at night, and although the game was harder in the cloak of darkness, I wanted my shot. I had learned their northern techniques and wanted to apply the theories to my southern tailwater.

  When the rod I’d ordered to night-fish had arrived, I’d eagerly waited for the next new moon. I marked the date on my calendar and loaded my fly boxes with recommended patterns (Mice, Sculpins, Harvey’s “Pusher Fly,” and classic streamers like The Professor) for that night.

  Despite popular belief, big trout prefer complete darkness to the lantern-lit nights of a full moon. What means feeding frenzy for giant browns means something entirely different to the fly fishermen who pursue them—danger. I find it hard enough to wade the smooth rocks of a slippery freestone river in the daytime, but doing it at night can easily become a death sentence.

  One of the keys to nighttime trout fishing is to target a fish that you’ve seen during the day. Casting to schools of dumbfounded stockers weeks before, I’d seen mine—a colossal brown trout. It easily topped thirty inches. I’d gotten a good look when the fish torpedoed through the surface to engulf a spinning mayfly just feet from my vantage point. Since then I’d watched the fish hold the same feeding line day in and day out. High water from recent rains made it impossible to chase the monster tonight. I wanted a chance for a trophy, but suicide was not on my to do list.

  The Tuckasegee River was running too high to fish, so I’d decided to try Bear Lake, a deep mountain reservoir southeast of Cullowhee. Sara and I had scouted the lake earlier that day when we were planning where to fish. We had seen schools of fairly large trout swim
ming the shallows and some bigger fish moving among the shadows just out of casting distance. I hoped they might come into range when darkness fell.

  An elk-hair Whitlock Mouse, a giant fly meant to mimic a drowning deer mouse, was tied to the tippet of the 7-weight fly rod. I checked the knot, rubbed floatant into the coarse hair of the fly, and ran the tippet and leader through my fingers. Everything was a go, and after ample begging, I talked Sara into leaving early. At five after ten, we were out the door.

  *****

  Night-fishing was not something new to my résumé. I come from a long line of nighttime anglers, my father spending many nights jug fishing for channel catfish or spotlighting flounder to gig. As soon as I was allowed to stay out well into the night, I was casting from sandy banks, creaking docks, or anchored Boston Whalers to anything that would bite.

  I’d caught fat-bellied channel catfish, coolers full of speckled crappie, schooling bass busting shad on the surface, and even a longnose gar, all under the cloak of darkness. I instantly fell in love with the feeling. Night-fishing was not a sight game but involved the sound of bait clickers running, a bump on the rod, a swift hook set into something unseen and unknown until the fish came to hand.

  I longed for that feeling, the mystery of not knowing what it was that tugged on the end of the line. I remember standing on an abandoned dock in a North Carolina inlet when something picked up the squid on the end of my line, ran off two hundred yards of 20-pound test, and never looked back. I still don’t know what bit that night, but that’s just it—the mystery of the unknown is what drives me forward into the black.

  *****

  Swerving through the bends of mountain roads, I felt fishing fever take hold. My mind raced, and my palms sweated as the addiction set in, the feeling comparable to an alcoholic denying himself a sip of rotgut after a weeklong drinking binge. The withdrawals wouldn’t subside until the first cast. Sara was excited at the chance of her first real fish, but a lifetime of dependency was evident in my shaking limbs. The difference between us was obvious: Sara came from a family who occasionally dropped a line in water on vacation, but I was of a different breed, a family of fishermen, children who had been raised with rods in hand rather than crayons.