Trout Eyes Read online

  It’s that kind of town.

  In my town, there are twice as many miles of dirt roads as paved. It’s mostly forest and meadow and mountain and swamp. Rocky streams bubble through every crease in the hillsides. Pristine ponds nestle in every depression.

  You could spend a lifetime tramping all those woods, driving all those back roads, and casting flies upon all that water. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a whole lifetime. But I’m giving it my best shot.

  * * *

  And so I was bumping down one of those nameless dirt roads on an August afternoon last summer, with my topo map on the seat beside me and my old seven-foot fiberglass fly rod in back, going slowly, exploring, getting the lay of the land.

  At the bottom of the hill, a brook flowed under a wooden bridge. Naturally, I pulled over to take a look.

  On the upstream side, the brook came curling out of the woods and wandered through some boggy marsh. It was barely a trickle. You could jump across it without a running start. It flowed slow and deep and shadowy against alder-lined banks. It reminded me of another trickle that haunted me when I was a kid, and haunts me still. That one was called Job’s Brook.

  Fifty years ago, before the suburbs sprawled, native brook trout lived in Job’s Brook. It meandered through a big trackless bog two towns to the west of my hometown. Of all the places Dad and I fished when I was a boy, Job’s Brook was my favorite. We hit it two or three times a year, and not once did we encounter another fisherman, nor did we even see a footprint or a gum wrapper or a cigarette butt.

  Mostly the brookies ran from five to seven inches long, but once I caught a ten-incher from Job’s Brook. It felt cold and muscular in my hand, and its spots glowed like drops of fresh blood. My father admired it, proclaimed it a trophy and a treasure, and told me to put it back.

  Native brook trout, he made me understand, were rare and beautiful, and so were the waters where they lived. He didn’t use the word “endangered,” but his meaning was clear and prophetic.

  Today, Job’s Brook, the trout water of my childhood dreams, flows through a concrete trough behind a strip mall—reason enough to move to a farm on a dirt road.

  In the summer months that I’d been exploring my new town, I’d cast flies upon all the water that I encountered. I caught bass from every pond—largemouths in the weedy ones and smallmouths in the rocky ones. Most of the rushing mountain streams were running low and warm, and I caught nothing from them. In a few, though, I’d found mixtures of browns, rainbows, and brookies that splashed happily at the foam beetles and bushy dry flies I floated over them. The browns and rainbows suggested that the brookies, too, were non-natives, but I was glad to find them, and I marked those little streams on my topo maps.

  So I got out of my car, squatted beside this little nameless New Hampshire brook, and stuck my hand in the water. Almost instantly the chill ran up to my armpit and whispered, “Spring seeps.”

  On the downstream side, the brook opened into a pool, if you could call it that, before it continued its aimless journey around the rim of a horse pasture marked by a curving row of alders and willows.

  The pool was about the size of the office in my new house—ten feet across, maybe. A big pool, by small-brook standards. Quite possibly the widest, deepest hole along its entire length, unless there were beaver ponds.

  Where the current pushed against the left-hand bank of this pool, it had dug an undercut that exposed the roots of the alders that shaded it. If any trout lived in this little trickle, the oldest and biggest of them would surely live right there.

  I captured half a dozen grasshoppers from the weeds beside the road, knelt on the bank at the head of the pool, and dropped them in one by one. The first five kicked and wiggled their way along the current seam, disappeared in the deep shade of the overhanging alders, then reappeared, untouched, and continued downstream.

  The sixth hopper disappeared in a little splash under the alders.

  That was good enough for me. I looked up and down the dirt road, went back to my car, and grabbed my old fiberglass stick. It was already rigged with an elkhair caddis on a short leader. I knelt at the head of the pool and flicked a little roll cast onto the current seam. The fly bobbed along, entered the shade under the alders . . . and disappeared in a spurt of water.

  I lifted my rod. And laughed. A tiny fish came skittering across the top of the pool.

  I held it in my hand, all four inches of it. It was a miniature brookie, already beginning to show its spawning colors. A beautiful little trout.

  It wasn’t a ten-incher. It was better than that—a truly wild brook trout, too small to have been stocked. It had been born in this water, and possibly it was a genuine native whose line of ancestors stretched back to the retreat of the glaciers. I doubted that anybody had ever bothered dumping hatchery brookies into this little trickle.

  I slid the tiny fish into the water, hustled back to my car, stowed my rod, and got the hell out of there before anybody came along to see what I was up to.

  * * *

  When I discover a new trout trickle, I treat it like one of my secret grouse covers. I mark it on my topographic map, and when I visit it, I park my car half a mile away and skulk through the woods to the water. I resist the urge to brag about it, and since my father’s not available, I invite no one to fish there with me.

  Unless you take turns, there’s room for only one fisherman on a trickle, and most of my friends wouldn’t do it anyway. Catching a five-inch trout from a brush-lined brook you can hop across isn’t for everybody. It’s muddy, sweaty, buggy work. It’s a slog through briars and bushes and blowdown. It’s not contemplative or even particularly relaxing. It’s on-your-knees, down-and-dirty, sneak-up-on-’em fishing.

  You can’t really cast flies on a trickle. You drift them, you roll-cast them, you dab them, you steer them along, and you end up leaving a lot of them in the bushes.

  Exploring a slow-moving trout trickle with a fly rod taps into some age-old strand of my DNA. I feel sneaky and stealthy, predatory and primitive and infinitely patient. I don’t get those feelings anywhere else, and I crave them.

  * * *

  So I returned to my newly-discovered brook the next morning and explored it to its source, right?

  Actually, no. A day became a week, and then a month, and then it was winter, and I never did go back. I want to explain that life interfered, that I had appointments and deadlines and emergencies, that my car broke down or my back went out. You’d understand that, but it would be a lie.

  The truth is, I’ve been putting it off. For now, I’m savoring the mystery of my unexplored brook. I’m letting it fester and grow in my daydreams. I imagine it will be like Job’s Brook, and I’ll raise some five-to-seven inch native brookies as I creep through the alders. I’ll miss more than I hook, but I’ll hook a few, and they will be beautiful. In my fantasy, I’ll come upon a beaver pond about a mile into the woods. Half a dozen fat eight-inchers will be Hoovering mayflies off the surface, and I’ll catch two or three of them before the others spook. Maybe one of them will stretch to ten inches, and I’ll hear my father’s voice, calling it a trophy and a treasure and insisting that I put it back.

  Eventually, of course, I’ll explore the brook and learn its realities, and it will no longer be a mystery. But for now, the daydreams are better.

  3

  Fishing for Stories

  My father was an outdoor writer, and most of his friends were, too. As soon as I demonstrated that I could tie on my own flies and unhook my own fish, Dad declared me his Number One Partner. Whenever his friends wanted to go fishing with him, they understood that I came with the territory.

  So almost from the beginning I got to hang out with writers of my father’s generation, men such as Lee Wulff, Ed Zern, Harold Blaisdell, Joe Bates, Burt Spiller, Frank Woolner, Corey Ford. Household names for American sportsmen back then. To their vast credit, they accepted me, tolerated my youthful enthusiasm and awkwardness, even befriended me.


  What a deal they had, I thought. They went fishing and hunting all the time—and they got paid for it.

  When I started doing it myself, of course, I discovered that outdoor writing wasn’t as easy as those old pros made it look.

  Writers experience fishing with about twice the intensity and focus of non-writers. Not only do writers read the water, study the weather, observe the insects, experiment with flies and, in general, try to catch fish, but they also, with a different part of their minds, look for story ideas. Writers assume that every fishing trip offers a lesson, or an insight, or a new trick or tidbit of information, if only they are smart and imaginative enough to recognize it. Writers go fishing for fun, sure. But they also go fishing for stories.

  For the writer, a day on the water that doesn’t inspire a story idea, no matter how many fish are caught, cannot be a successful day of fishing. The writer understands that there will be such days. Sometimes nothing worth writing about happens. But sometimes the writer finds himself wondering if he’s losing his nose for the story. This is scary. A writer without ideas is like a doctor without patients. Unemployed.

  * * *

  Several years ago Mel Allen, an editor at Yankee magazine, offered to pay me to go fishing on Vermont’s legendary Battenkill River. “We’ll put you up at a nice inn in Arlington,” he said, “pay all your expenses, of course. Just write us a feature story that captures your experience.”

  “You want a fishing story?” I said.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “Fly fishing on the Battenkill. Slanted for our readers, most of whom aren’t fly fishermen, of course. Not an article. A story.”

  He mentioned a fee. It was an offer no writer could refuse.

  I was thrilled, right?

  Wrong. I desperately wanted to refuse. What if I went fishing and nothing happened? The readers of Mel’s magazine wouldn’t care whether I caught some trout or got skunked. Mel wanted a story that transcended the technicalities of fly fishing, and he trusted me to find it.

  I didn’t need that kind of pressure.

  In the end I accepted the assignment. If I didn’t find anything to write about, I’d just pay my own expenses and tell Mel that I’d failed.

  * * *

  We agreed that I’d spend four days on the Battenkill in the middle of May. Prime dry-fly time. If nothing happened in those four days, nothing would happen.

  For the first three days, nothing happened. I caught a few small trout. I mostly didn’t catch anything. I explored many different stretches of river. I saw some wildlife. I talked to the people at fly shops, restaurants, gas stations. I interviewed the other anglers I met on the river. I learned many facts about the river and its history and its fish and its hatches. Nothing new. Nothing particularly interesting for the non-fishing readers of Yankee magazine. The Battenkill was overfished and undermanaged and unrestricted to kayaking and canoeing and tubing and other activities incompatible with fly fishing. A few big brown trout lived there, but not many. Mostly they were caught in April by local old-timers rolling nightcrawlers along the bottom.

  I fished with a desperation that increasingly bordered on panic. I didn’t want to let Mel down. I figured if I could catch one of those big brown trout, maybe I’d snag a story, and that became my goal: Catch a worthy Battenkill brown trout on a dry fly, catch a story.

  The first three days: Nothing.

  The fourth day dawned soft, still, misty. Ideal conditions for a mayfly hatch. The best possible conditions for locating a worthy brown trout. If it was ever going to happen, it would happen today.

  I crept along the riverbank, scanning the upstream water, waiting for my instinct to announce: Here lives a worthy trout. I passed up two dozen promising runs and pools before I found it. Here the river twisted out of the misty forest, funneled through a rocky gorge, then widened into a long, broad pool. The current pushed against the high brush-clogged bank on the left. It was breathtaking. Classic.

  Here I would make my stand. If nothing happened here, nothing would happen, and I’d pack up and go home without a story. I sat on a log and watched the water.

  An hour passed before I spotted the unmistakable trout nose. I didn’t move for ten minutes, the interval it took him to come to the surface four times. He rose in precisely the same place each time, right on the seam about two feet directly upstream from the uppermost sweeping branch of an arching oak tree. The only way I could float a fly over him was from the side and upstream.

  His delicate riseform suggested that he had selected spinners to eat. They drifted inert on the water’s surface, easy pickin’s for an energy-conscious trout. I saw two kinds of spinners on the water—large rust-colored ones and smaller olives. Knowing the perversity of large trout, I guessed this one had selected the olives.

  I found a good match in my fly box and tied it to my tippet. My hands, I noticed, trembled just a little. After three days, the Battenkill had showed me a worthy trout. Now it was up to me. The odds, I knew, were slim. Getting a drag-free drift would require a tricky reach cast and a big upstream mend, and I figured I’d only have one chance to get it right. And even if I hooked this fish, he would bolt to what I assumed was his lair under the tangled timber against the bank. My tippet was too slender. It would snap if I tried to hold him back. Otherwise he would wrap me and surely break me off.

  Perhaps not. When they feel the hook, large trout sometimes shoot directly upstream, or try to slog it out in midriver, or exhaust themselves by jumping repeatedly. I might get lucky.

  I focused on the first challenge, which was to wade into position to make my cast. A careless step would send warning waves across the quiet pool, and the trout would dart back to his hideout for the rest of the day. So I moved downstream and crossed in the quick water of the pool’s tailout. Then I climbed the bank and pushed through the alder tangles to a spot directly across from the fish. I paused there until his nose showed again. Then I slipped down the bank and into the water.

  The river spread about eighty feet wide here, and my trout lay about three feet from the far bank. To drop an accurate cast over him, I’d need to wade to midstream. I began to edge forward, shuffling my feet slowly, wary of making ripples. He rose again. As I moved closer I saw the size of his nose more clearly and mentally compared it to trout noses I had seen on other rivers. An eighteen- or nineteen-incher, I guessed. Not a Battenkill five-pounder. But a most worthy trout.

  I had to resist the impulse to cast. I was still too far from him. One careless presentation would spook him. So I eased cautiously forward. He showed his nose again. He had established a rhythm now, and I had learned it.

  A hollow thunk echoed from somewhere upstream, but it barely registered. I was focused on my trout. I was almost there. I began to strip line off my reel.

  That’s when the man in the canoe materialized out of the mist. He floated down through my pool, half-way between me and the place where my trout had been rising, thunking his paddle against the gunwale on every stroke.

  “Any luck?” he asked cheerfully.

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “Say,” he said. “You got the time?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Two-fifteen.”

  “Thanks.” He waved. “Well, good luck, then.”

  The canoe’s bow waves rolled toward the banks. I watched the man in the canoe glide downstream and disappear in the mist. The thunk of his paddle echoed back at me.

  Then I reeled in, waded to the bank, sat on a rock, and thought about it. I’d been on the water for nearly six hours, all for one decent shot at that one trout.

  I-the-angler could barely restrain myself from throwing rocks after the man in the canoe.

  I-the-writer couldn’t stop smiling.

  I’d failed to catch a worthy trout. But I’d landed a story.

  4

  Hatching the Match

  Around the time Vicki and I figured out that a match might be hatching between us, she asked me to take her fly fishing. She’d nev
er tried it, but she’d seen movies with hunks such as Brad Pitt casting graceful loops over wild Montana rivers, and she knew I pulled on waders now and then. She thought fly fishing looked altogether alluring.

  We went to a little panfish pond not far from my house in the suburbs. I led the way over the winding trail through the woods, and halfway down the slope I stopped short. A fat snake—a four-footer, at least—was sunning itself on the path. It looked like a boa constrictor.

  “What’s the matter?” said Vicki.

  “There’s a rather large snake in front of us,” I said. “I think it’s a milk snake.”

  “I . . . hate . . . snakes,” she said.

  “Indiana Jones,” I said proudly. Vicki wrote a weekly column of film criticism. I’d learned to be alert for her movie allusions. Most of them were way more obscure than this one.

  “I don’t mind bugs,” she said. “Worms and frogs don’t bother me. But snakes . . .”

  When I opened my mouth to speak, she pointed her finger at me. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare lecture me about all the beneficial qualities of snakes. I don’t care how harmless that one is. I don’t like ’em.”

  “I don’t like ’em, either,” I said.

  We detoured around the snake to the pond, and after some trial-and-error casting (with way too much nit-picky instruction from me, which she pretty much ignored), Vicki managed to flick a panfish bug upon the water. Pretty soon one of those generous bluegills sucked it in.

  “You’ve gotta set the hook,” I said when she didn’t react.

  “Huh?”

  “Set the hook,” I said. “Lift your rod when a fish strikes.”

  “Strikes,” she repeated.

  “Eats your fly,” I explained.

  “I was waiting for him to tug on my line.”