James waded slowly into the fast water below Denton Falls, eyeing the pool carefully. When he found a spot where he could stand without slipping, he pulled line off his flyreel and began his backcast. In less time that it takes to say “Neversink Skater,” he had snagged his Adams in a branch right behind him. Muttering, he looked over at me, angrily, “I give up,” he said. “I can’t stand flyfishing.”
I wasn’t surprised at his reaction. For a kid who was brought up fishing plastic worms and spinnerbaits for bass, trying to switch over to flyfishing is tough. The fact that he was a teenager with zero patience didn’t help. But he thought it over, changed his mind, and pretty soon was back at it, trying to cast into the trout pools just below the falls.
Up above the white water, we heard James’ buddy, Dave, whooping and hollering. “Got another one,” he yelled. “This place is amazing.” I could see a dark, gloomy cloud beginning to form over James’ head. With a shrug, I turned and started hiking downstream. Rounding the bend, I spied a trout rising to caddisflies in the middle of a long pool. I forgot about the boys, and immersed myself in my own fishing.
The boys had worked for their reward of fishing the river. We were at our hunting and fishing camp, “The Over The Hill Gang,” located about a mile from the Neversink Gorge, on land owned by Benjamin Wechsler. Wechsler, who has owned a huge chunk of property, including the Neversink Gorge, since 1968, is one of those rare individuals who actually gets it, who knows how to manage private property correctly. His land is just a “small,” couple-thousand-acre parcel in the 100,000 acres of Catskill wilderness that sprawls from the Bashakill Wildlife Refuge to the east, to the Mongaup River Valley to the west. Through his good graces, our camp has survived, first on the east side of the Neversink, and now at its current location on a ridgetop to the west, on the Denton Falls Road.
I had brought the boys up for the club’s annual summer work weekend. The deal was that they could fish at the end of the day, so long as they pitched in and helped with the work. And they had, sweeping out the cabin, picking up pieces of wood, twigs and branches from a recent windstorm, stacking firewood … anything they could do.
While the boys were hard at it, the rest of us busied ourselves with the chores that must be done to keep a sporting club functioning. Dan Gibson, his 21-year-old son Keith, and I unhitched the splitter from my truck and started splitting the logs we had piled up earlier in the summer. Kevin Kenney, the 40-year-old son of the camp’s founder, Jerry, was down the road about a quarter mile, chain sawing a black cherry that had come down in a late-spring windstorm. Last hunting season was an especially cold one, with temperatures consistently below 20°. We came close to running out of wood for our two woodstoves—one in the kitchen, the other in the bunkroom—so we were making doubly certain that we had enough for the upcoming season.
While all this was going on, Vin Sparano was out behind the cabin, installing a new floor in the outhouse. Every couple of years, the local porcupine population decides it’s time to feast on our outhouse, and then we have to rebuild it. It’s an ongoing battle, with us staying about one step ahead of the always-hungry porkies. Rod Cochran, out in front, was replacing rotted planks on the front deck, while Matt had grabbed a bucket of paint and was touching up the cabin’s trim.
When Ken Surerus and his son, Raymond, showed up, they pitched in with the firewood, stacking the logs that Dan, Keith, and I had been splitting.
By the end of the day, the old camp—it was built in the 1950s—was in pretty good shape. A new American flag was up on the roof, all of the weeds and brush around the building had been cut back, and the inside had been swept clean. By summer’s end, we’d all be back again, sighting in our rifles and doing last-minute chores such as getting the propane tank filled and stocking up the kitchen with flood for hunting season. Eventually, the roof will have to be replaced. It leaks like crazy in the bunkroom, and we’re getting tired of putting new blue tarps on it every year. And the eclectic mixture of tarpaper and multi-colored shingles on the exterior is starting to fall off. But the repairs will be made, because they’re important. It’s good work.
Author Rick Bass, who wrote The Deer Pasture, once said this about his hunting camp: “For a place we visit only one week out of the year, we worry about it far too much.”
That’s the way the guys in my camp feel. We think about that place a lot. We do go there more than one week a year, of course; there’s turkey season in May, trout and smallmouth fishing in the Neversink from mid-April to the end of September, plus deer season in November—but we’d all go there more often if we could. It’s tough to explain, but a good sporting camp becomes a part of you. The years go by, and members come and go, but you come to realize that part of you is always in camp, cooking up venison stew in the kitchen, debating guns and loads or flies and leaders with your colleagues, or playing poker until the wee hours of the morning. I don’t see even most of the guys during the year except at camp, but that doesn’t matter. When I do see them, we just pick up where we left off last time. The camp has a life of its own, with a pulse that keeps beating from year to year, generation to generation. So you bring the youngsters along and teach them about the woods, you take them down to the river and teach them flycasting, and you show them the types of pools and riffles where the brown trout like to lie. (James, by the way, did not catch a thing that day, but he did later in the season!) And when they get old enough, you let them into the camp as full members, sharing in the work, in the fun, in the good times and, when they happen, the tough times too.
Work weekend—it’s the beginning of another cycle of seasons. Before you know it, it’ll be opening day of deer season and I’ll be in my treestand overlooking the Neversink. Then, in May, I’ll be out the woods well before dawn, hoping to find a gobbler. At noon, I’ll come back to camp, change out of my hunting clothes and put on my flyvest and waders, and hike down to the river to see if the Hendricksons are hatching in the pools below Denton Falls. And life will be as good as it possibly can be.