Angling for the noble trout with an artificial fly is widely defined in literature as an exercise in contentment—a process hardly less stupeflying, apparently, than an overdose of goof balls. Bait fishermen consider the practice effete, like tennis as it was played by young females in 1890. Bartenders, undertakers and other sentimental kibitzers assume it denotes high purpose, since fly fishermen—ah damned fool expression!—are alleged to be purists. Fishing experts, and particularly those who write for sporting publications, make fly fishing sound like lion hunting. Experts never have a moment’s doubt as to what fly pattern to use, never cast over a trout weighing less than two pounds and never fail to bring the monster to net after 1) a thrilling battle, which went on long after night fell over the clear pool, or 2) a very short tussle, really, due to the fantastic skill with which the quarry was played.
During my twenty years of fishing with a fly, each and every one of these assumptions and, definitions has caused me vague hot recurring unease and guilt—the sort of fleeting pangs a second-story man with a hangover might experience at the sound of a Salvation Army band. It seems impossible that there could be a grain of truth in any of them, but the fisherman’s hand maiden, alas, is doubt and he is often impelled to ask, “Why am I not a better man?”
The maniac who engineered my worst August afternoon—this was five years ago, but I will remember it if and when I am ninety—typifies the sort of phenomenon which occasions such self-analysis. My first response to his appearance was simple astonishment. He held a wobbling glass rod high in air and, as he lurched slowly downstream, he jiggled and jerked from ankles to head and plucked at his monofilament line—thus activating the lure tied to its end—like Billy Sunday’s own bullfiddle player. The man never stopped; he must have trained for his performance as Dempsey trained for Willard or Hackenschmidt trained for Gotch.
“How ya doing?” he cried as he sloshed up, still jerking spastically, to my side. “No good,” said I. “Ought to use a minnow,” said he, pointing with his chin to his own line. He then shut off his engine for a moment and opened his creel. “Five,” said he.
He lied. There were only three. But each beautiful trout was fifteen inches long. I felt—I cannot deny it— like an orphan child at the wading pool.
It was a moment in which it was impossible not to wonder—even though one could pick no worse time for fishing a fly than an August afternoon—whether a real expert would have been standing there, as was I, with an empty creel and an emptier expression being patronized by an inartistic and greed-riddled bait-using cretin. It was also impossible not to wonder, once the first awful shock had passed, whether I would not have reacted more charitably if I had been truly dedicated, truly sporting and pure. I was privy, after all, to fresh air, sunlight, the sight and sound of running water, the loom of green and gentle Catskill heights and the chance to speak generously to a fellow sportsman—all of the ingredients of contentment, certainly, if man ever possessed them. It did no good. I waited steaming with avarice, until the interloper vanished from view and then attached a streamer fly which imitated the minnow he seemed to have used and did my fruitless best to ape his curious style. Ninety percent of fly fishermen, in my opinion, would have fallen prey to the same lamentable instincts (and would doubtless have failed, as did I) provided they, too, evaded observation by their peers.
It would be incorrect to say that the fly fisherman never enjoys tranquility, never appreciates nature or is incapable of high purpose—even to the point of freeing the trout he has hooked for the masses to snaffle. All are possible as long as the trout are decent enough to rise to the angler’s fly in the first place. These conclusions are based, I must confess, on personal speculation, as is my conviction that fly fishermen tend to be competitive, status conscious and crafty types skilled in the low arts of gamesmanship.
I was enormously encouraged in these views, however, by a recent visit—my first—to the gambling hells of Las Vegas. I was startled out of my wits by the boiler factory din—the crash of slot machines, the cries of crap shooters, the sound of music in which I was enveloped at an hour when most people are eating breakfast. But, for all that, the unlikely scene was instantly familiar. Everyone in the big casino—from the old ladies yanking away after jackpots to the high rollers at the dice table—betrayed that complete obliviousness of all other humans and wore that look of mingled cupidity and resignation I had seen on scores of dry-fly pools.
My own case may very well be worse than the average. I not only bear the scars of a thousand old frustrations and anticipate a thousand more but must admit, after a score of years failing away at streams, that intolerance and prejudice have encroached on my mind as mildew does on last year’s cantaloupe. I would rather catch an eight-inch trout than an eight-pound bass. I am incapable, in fact, of understanding why one wants to fish for bass in the first place—or for perch, or for muskellunge, or for pike. Ted Williams seems, at least from afar, to be an absolutely splendid fellow. What impels him to pursue the tarpon—a piscatorial slob with a cheap suit of theatrical armor and a mouth like a vacuum cleaner? Trout, si!, Salmon, si! you can make fishmeal of the rest for all of me.
I am against roads. I am against detergents. I am against insecticides. I am against logging. I am against food control. I am not against golf, since I cannot but suspect it keeps armies of the unworthy from discovering trout, but I pity them for playing it when they could be putting a fly on the water.
I have been brought to this condition not only by the beautiful, the disconcerting, the succulent trout, but by the Catskill stream in which I have wooed it—come heat, cold, high water, low water, mud, bulldozers, the New York City Board of Water Supply and locals bent on dumping used tires and old tin cans—for lo these two decades. Esopus Creek is a famous Catskill trout stream; not so famous as its sisters, the Beaverkill and the Neversink, but famous enough, thanks in good part to the fact that fishing writers, like many other kinds of writers, tend to live in New York and to find life there far more significant than life in Colorado, Minnesota or Oregon.
The Esopus rises as a trickle of cold, clear water on the shady slopes of Slide Mountain, the Catskills’ highest (4,204 feet) elevation, and ends up, after enduring many lesser indignities, in the faucets, sinks and fire hydrants of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens. My addiction to it, nurtured perhaps by some inner masochism, stems from this contrast between promise and fulfillment.
It is a lovely little river. It runs north, then east, then southeast in a twenty-five-mile circle around a cluster of green, ledge-scarred little mountains—Panther, Wittenberg, Terrace, Garfield, Romer, Cross, Pleasant and Cornell—before its broadening valley angles off, still into the east, to blend after another twenty-five miles with the great valley of the Hudson. Its fall is gradual and it presents, mile after mile, that orderly succession of gentle riffles, noisy, boulder-strewn rapids and long, slow pools in which both trout and fisherman are most likely to prosper. It gathers size and authority from two main tributaries as well as dozens of little hollows, cloves and kills; and these brooks—Woodland Valley Creek and Stony Clove Creek—are pleasant trout streams in their own.
The Esopus is an old American landmark. Henry Hudson paused just off the gates of its valley—as he sailed up the Hudson River—in 1609, and there were Dutch and eventually British settlements there from 1614 onward despite bloody raids by the Sopus, a collection of river Indians from whom it got its name. The centuries have left their imprint. State Highway 28 parallels it along the route of an ancient wilderness path and the roadside is littered, between stretches of farmland, with houses, motels, gas stations, stores and little summer resorts. Hamlets with dusty memories— Phoenicia, Boiceville, Shandaken, Allaben, Big Indian— toe up to the highway for the motorist’s dollar. But the towns are quiet, comfortably weatherworn and resigned. The summer boarding houses doze amid weedy lawns. Tree-edged meadows often intrude between road and wandering river. The soft mountains, which rise abruptly and overlook all, are clothed in unbroken wilderness.
One can drive from New York City to Phoenicia in just two and a half hours, but deer drink in the mist-hung stream at dawn and the fisherman can wade all through a weekday morning in midsummer and never see another soul. At humid dusk, with the last shine of light on the water, he can fancy that he and the angler silhouetted just upstream are alone on the continent. The Esopus nevertheless can drive him out of his mind. It is victimized so steadily by both man and nature that its wounds, ill nesses and distortions of personality, its slow recoveries and its sudden relapses gradually become the major preoccupation of his existence; and he finds himself—even on those rare occasions when the creek is clear, its temperature normal and its water level perfect—cringing in sure anticipation of horrors to come.
The Esopus is tortured by weather. The unprecedented series of hurricanes which belabored the last Coast between 1938 and 1955 almost wrecked its whole system. Tropical deluges accompanied these great storms and roaring, mud-colored foods rolled great boulders down the streambeds, toppled trees, ate out of banks, scoured away insect life and killed thousands and thousands of trout. The scars are still evident along all the creeks. Winter clogs them annually with ice; the snow melt of early spring makes them frigid torrents, and the still of July and August leaves them appallingly low and warm.
Man, meanwhile, labors cheerfully to further the damage. Trout streams are treated with reverence in England and men devote their lives to the art of managing them. But in the U.S. streams are fair game for any lunatic with a bulldozer. Roads are more important. So is a fallacious theory of food control by which wandering, rock-blocked sections of brooks and rivers—the very sort of water that trout need for their survival—are straightened and flattened into sluices which speed up flow and cause worse damage farther on.
The fisherman can do little in response but fulminate. The creek’s torturers are all men of goodwill and are equipped, each and every one, with valid and logical reasons for the depredations—just as were the early tanners who razed the valley’s original hemlock forests in the half century after the War of 1812. Only the bark of these great trees was used; the bare hills were left littered, as by endless acres of great bones, with their rotting trunks. New forests of beech, maple, oak and other leafy trees have mercifully replaced them in the last century, but the beds of the streams are given scant chance to recover from the steam shovels and bulldozers of road builders and food control engineers.
But if the Esopus is endlessly put upon and lamentably accident prone, it has one even more exasperating quality. It is loaded with trout and, though it often makes the fisherman’s life a living hell and often seems on the verge of disintegration, he simply cannot—or at any rate I simply cannot—walk away and leave it to its own fiendish devices.
The New York City Board of Water Supply dammed its lower valley in 1912 and formed the Ashokan Reservoir, a wide twelve-mile lake into which the stream now empties. In so doing, it inadvertently provided Esopus trout with their own little ocean: a deep, feed-rich haven from which huge rainbows and browns launch them selves, the first in the spring and the latter in the fall, on salmonlike spawning runs to the farthest kills and hollows and to which they return, their genetic duties accomplished, to shelter during the rest of the year. Despite its difficulties, thus, the river stocks itself naturally with wild trout and these progenitors of the big brood fish valiantly defy man’s best efforts to eradicate them.
They are benefited, in the process, by the Shandaken Tunnel, an eighteen-mile aqueduct which runs north beneath the hills to tap another Catskill reservoir and which feeds extra water into the Esopus and thence, eventually, into New York’s hydrants and dishwashers. This enormous conduit, known locally as the “portal,” makes the river unique.
In drought season, when every other Catskill stream—including the upper Esopus and its tributaries—is dreadfully low and warm, the lower river is kept high and cool by the flow from the tunnel mouth. It is kept so high for long periods that, in fact, it can hardly be fished at all; the water department, naturally, is more interested in shooting 500 million gallons a day toward the Bronx than in an angler stranded at streamside by raging rapids. The portal water does ease off in August, it is true, often bringing the fisherman negotiable riffles and slow, gliding pool surfaces. But it brings in late-season silt as well, so that the tantalizing stretches of water, rendered more turbid day by day, are usually the color of bad coffee by the end of the month.
In moments of understandable despond I sometimes think desperately of other trout water—crystalline, virginal, shadowed—and particularly of a little lake hidden high on the northwest’s Mount Rainier which I once found by dint of secret directions an old friend cunningly extracted from a knowledgeable ranger. I was the fourth human to fish it. It was rimmed by fir, reflected the great, white dome of the peak like a mirror and, more delightful yet, attracted swarms of flies and bugs from a green marsh which bordered one area of its shoreline. The dry-fly fisherman wants his trout near the surface and I could not see but, in the absolute stillness, could hear the fish splashing away at their insect banquet. They were lovely creatures—a species of cut throat known as Montana black-spotted trout—with scarlet fins and bellies tinted softly with old rose. But they were also, alas, without discrimination; they took any fly I offered.
There was no trail to the lake. I scared myself half to death working up through vertical cliffs to find it and suffered more grievous fright on the way down; for I was privileged, during the latter process, to look past my shoes at treetops two thousand feet below. But the fishing in itself was simply too easy and, even in memory, does not compete with the Esopus—which not only justifies greed and other less admirable human qualities by its own displays of temper, but makes any minor victory a Roman triumph and provides a steady atmosphere of awful suspense. I could easily drive to the Schoharie, the Beaverkill or the upper Delaware from the rambling and rickety summer house I inhabit in Woodland Valley, but in the last two decades, no matter how disappointing the local fishing, I have never gambled a day on trying them. I have invested so many hours of frustration in the Esopus and its tributaries that the prospect of losing even one unlikely dividend because of absence is more than I can quite bring myself to contemplate.
Water constitutes only one part of the puzzle a fisherman is eternally trying to solve. The other part, of course, is the fish he is trying to extract from it. A trout is not, to put it mildly, gifted with intellect; one would be impelled to say, after the most cursory inspection of his mental apparatus, that he is downright stupid. A great many non-addicts, as a result, find the angler a hilarious spectacle. There he stands, draped in more equipment than a telephone lineman, trying to outwit an organism with a brain no bigger than a breadcrumb, and getting licked in the process. But the fisherman is engaged—or he should be—in a far more complex sort of reasoning. He is trying to understand the trout’s environment and to predict the trout’s response to it. The trout, if stupid, has his own low cunning—or is equipped, at any rate, with a subtle set of instincts—and he responds to what is happening around him with amazing accuracy. In thus interacting with the stream in which he lives, he creates the illusion of enormous wisdom and instills a sense of gloom and mental inadequacy in his pursuer.
He is both wary and greedy, and the pull of these two aspects of his nature makes him subject to startling alteration of behavior. When the water is full of feed, as during a big hatch of mayflies, nature seems to bet that the benefits of a full stomach far outweigh any danger which may be encountered in achieving it, and the trout will roll and splash recklessly within a yard of a fisherman’s waders.
But when he is feeding heavily, he also becomes fantastically selective. He will stuff himself on insects, sometimes so small that they can barely be seen with the naked eye, until he bulges like an Indiana hog, and he will go right on choking them down as long as the supply holds out. Since nature does not want him to waste energy capriciously, however, he will ignore the biggest and most delicious bugs and flies of other species while he is concentrating on the predominant insect of the moment. He will ignore even the tidbits on which he is feeding, if they do not wash almost directly into his mouth, and will hardly move an inch, right or left, while doing so.
When such a big drift of feed ceases, however— and it is a phenomenon which can tail off in a matter of seconds—the trout’s modus operandi changes completely. As far as the fisherman is concerned he simply seems to vanish, since his natural sense of alarm reasserts itself and he either takes cover behind rocks or in the depths of pools or beneath the distorted light of riffles, or flashes away to such shelter at the first tiny change in the pattern of light or shadow on the water above him. Having retreated, however, he drops his fastidious airs and gulps anything edible which comes his way.
Each of these manifestations of the trout’s personality confronts the angler with dilemma. But each presents him, simultaneously, with glorious opportunity. When a trout is feeding selectively, he will refuse any artificial fly which does not duplicate the size, the color and, in an impressionistic sense, the shape of the type upon which he is dining. Give him that, though, and he will grab it with suicidal joy—and so, on the next cast, will the trout who was feeding only a few feet from him. All sorts of little things will disturb him when he is skulking behind a rock; but if he is convinced that he is not being gulled, he will often sip in any old fly the angler puts over him. The practice of fly fishing is based on these twin revelations, and the hopes, the dreams and built-in despondency of the fly fisherman revolve around them.
There are hundreds of fly patterns, large and small—dry flies, which float on top of the water, and wet flies and imitations of nymphs, which are induced to wash along under the surface. If a fisherman were able to choose just the right imitation and present it at the right place at the right moment in the right way, he could hook a trout on every cast. He cannot do it. He could not do it with the aid of a computer. But once in a while he can feel himself on the verge of it. If he labors to understand the entomology of streams, keeps notes, memorizes miles of water, always casts with care, fishes continuously and is lucky, he will enjoy occasional brief but dazzling moments of absolute triumph— moments in which he can believe he is the reincarnation of Attila the Hun and the possessor of a mind as penetrating as that of Sherlock Holmes himself. If he enjoys this sort of self-image—and, personally, I find the role of Attila rather attractive—he will be addicted to the fly forever.
He prays for a big hatch of aquatic insects. In the Northeast this usually means a hatch of mayfly, a little creature obviously invented for the fisherman’s special benefit. The mayfly spends most of his life as a nymph—an ugly little underwater bug which lives, de-pending variously on his type, on almost every variety of river bottom. During this phase he does his poor best to keep the trout from eating him. He is finally moved, however, to splendid self-sacrifice. He rises to the surface and changes, in a few seconds, into a dun—a delicate and beautiful little fly with four upright wings, two or three tiny tails and a slender body. The dun bobs on the current like a little sailboat, flutters and, if he is still undevoured, flies slowly upward and away.
In so doing, the mayfly performs several wonder-fully unselfish functions. There is no point in fishing a dry fly—or a wet fly either—if no trout can see it; when fish are feeding on the bottom, an angler can beat the water into a froth without attracting their attention. As the nymphs rise, however, the trout rise with them, eating them en route like peanuts. At the surface the fish begin sucking in the floating duns— and are thus positioned to suck in a dry fly which imitates them.
The mayfly is kind enough to engage in these rites on a schedule the fisherman can often anticipate. Epeorus pleuralis (often known as Iron Fraudator), the blue-gray mayfly which is first of the species to appear in the spring, may be expected on the water at one o’clock, E.S.T., during the last week in April and the first days of May. The fisherman who is equipped with a dry Quill Gordon, size 12 or 14, can expect to slay trout with ease and precision for fully forty-five minutes.
The Esopus watershed is inhospitable in late April; the hills are rust brown under bare trees, wet snow falls with the rain, and the streams are often too high, too cold or discolored. I find it beautiful. A fly fisherman should think of insects rather than fish, for it is they— since the trout merely respond to their presence— which are the real key to a full creel. The knowledge that Iron Fraudator is absolutely bound to hatch during the week, and at an hour which allows a long, leisurely breakfast, is as bracing as possession of a chart indicating buried treasure.
But the season’s exasperations begin in April too. Early mayflies are enormously obliging, but they do not appear simultaneously on the whole river and the fisherman can slop along from pool to pool, maddened by the certainty that duns are appearing somewhere along the stream, and yet never find them—or rising trout— at all. Subspecies of the wonderful insect appear, one after another, through May, June and early July, changing in color from iron blue—through subtle shades and blendings of gray, olive and brown—to creamy yellow forms. Famous old dry fly patterns imitate all the important types; the Hendrickson, the Red Quill, the Grey Fox, the March Brown, the Light Cahill were all invented to match specific mayflies and to take fish when they are hatching. But as the season progresses, the fisherman often finds several different sorts on the water at the same time and can be moved to borderline neurosis while attempting to discover which one predominant insect the trout are actually eating at the moment he casts a fly over them.
There are works of practical entomology (Matching the Hatch by Ernest G. Schwiebert, Jr., Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations by Arthur B. Flick) which provide him with thorough background; but he is often balked, nevertheless, as he stands in midstream glaring wildly around him, for clues as to what is going on in the water. Some forms of mayfly—and the artificial flies which imitate them—are remarkably alike. The Hendrickson and Red Quill, in fact, are exactly the same save for the winding on the shank of the hook. But the trout will take one and refuse the other. They not only refuse the fly, they insult the fisherman. A trout will rise within a quarter inch of a fly which is too big or admits light improperly or is slightly off shade and will contemptuously splash water on it. He will jump clear of the surface and land on the other side of it. There are times when he seems to spit on it. But he will not touch it. And he will refuse a fly which matches the emerging duns in every respect if he has decided, for reasons known only to himself, to keep feeding just below the surface on the supply of rising nymphs.
Nature, it must be admitted, has provided the baffled angler with certain helpful signs and portents. A trout usually rises gently if he is feeding on the surface, but tends to splash and roll if he is feeding on nymphs or spent insects floating just beneath it. There are experts who maintain they can identify sixteen different kinds of rises (amongst them the sip, the slash, the double-whorl, the suck, the pyramid, the bulge and hump, and the spotted ring) and instantly announce just how the fish is feeding by noting the way he disturbs the water. But if a man can see dozens of rising trout and cannot make them pay the slightest heed to his artful casting, he has a tendency to quit thinking. Usually he takes refuge in trial and error and begins changing flies at random—a process which involves juggling his rod, a knife, a fly box and a bottle of dope in which he dunks each successive lure to make it float, and doing it all while up to his hips in a turbulent creek.
If he enters into this rigmarole at dusk, he must eventually ask himself an awful question: if he cuts the fly off the end of his leader, will there be light enough to allow his replacing it with another pattern? He can see dim, aluminum-colored flashes where fish are rising in the dark pool. He takes the course of courage and boldness. He cuts. He instantly regrets it. Swarms of no-seeums sift down and bite him like clouds of red-hot pepper. He cannot swat. He is standing motionless, holding a No. 16 Light Cahill toward the dim sky with one hand and trying to poke the invisible end of his synthetic gut leader through its invisible eye with the other. He grunts and sweats. He may even make small moaning sounds. But eventually he admits the cruel truth. He is disarmed. He turns, disconsolately, to wade ashore. At this moment he is subject to a final indignity and, if he is truly unlucky, he will be claimed by it. He slips in the darkness, lurches wildly, tumbles arse over tea kettle. The vehemence, the utter foulness of the profanity which can be induced by this common, even comic little accident is shocking, and the witness who laughs does so at his peril.
But the angler needs more than a knowledge of entomology—although this is a first requirement—to attack trout successfully on streams as cranky as those of the Catskills. He must do more than cast well, too. The fly must be presented correctly, but casting is simply a means to an end and is a far simpler process than is generally believed. After a few months of practice, any fool ought to be able to put a fly within a couple of inches of his target; he should be able to avoid getting hung up in trees and have mastered the trick of dropping loose line on the water to compensate for the drag of current. This is not to say there are no difficult casts. If an angler sees a big fish rising under an overhanging branch and has to reach out to the limit of his rod’s power to deliver his fly, there is a very good chance he will manage any number of embarrassing mistakes. But on most water the long, difficult cast is seldom necessary. It is my opinion that motivation is more important than technique and that the successful fisherman catches trout when others do not because he possesses sneaky and atavistic instincts which heighten his perception and his ability to concentrate, and make him respond to all sorts of unkind little signals from his subconscious mind.
Something of this sort occurs in my own case, I believe, out of simple hunger. A great many fishermen are uninterested, or at least profess to be uninterested, in small trout. But in most streams—and certainly in the Esopus, save for the preseason and postseason spawning runs—there are very few fish of any other kind.
I am an eight-inch trout fisherman. I must admit I enjoy being an eight-inch trout fisherman. I sometimes keep seven-inch trout. A nine- or ten-inch trout looks like an absolute leviathan to me. I admire their beauty. I like the bulge a collection of them makes in my wet canvas creel. I am grateful to them for the fact that they are as selective, if not always as wary, as big trout and that the intellectual problems and gratification involved in luring them at the fly has little to do with their size or weight. But essentially, I like the way they taste and, when I wade into the stream, I am after something special to eat.
This does not mean that I am insensitive to the social delights of landing a big fish. A few big brown trout do skulk in deep holes or beneath boulder-studded white water during the summer and a few more seem to begin their autumnal spawning run as early as August. These monsters—anything longer than sixteen inches or heavier than two pounds is a monster in the Esopus—may rise to the surface for a few minutes during really big spring fly hatches, but mostly they stay deep and invisible, think dour thoughts and eat such minnows and small trout as incautiously invade their lairs. The chances of hooking one of them on a fly are remote in the extreme despite the experts and their interminable creeds about casting. But if the angler wants to be considered absolutely compleat and even perhaps occult—and a fly fisherman would not be a fly fisherman if he did not welcome such rumors—he simply has to produce a monster at least once.
Between May and September real, live, exciting news in Phoenicia concerns only one topic: trout. John McGrath and Joe Holzer who preside over its two grocery stores are fishermen. The Folkerts brothers, Herman and Dick, who run its social center—a combined tackle and golf shop, soda fountain, newspaper stand, bus stop and sporting goods store—are consummate anglers. So is Fred Muehleck, whose racks of ancient Payne, Leonard and Hardy rods are wondrous to behold. So also is Phil Halzell, his Woodland Valley neighbor and stream-side companion of thirty years’ standing. Half the inhabitants, in fact, are fishermen and the other half cannot avoid listening to them. Let someone—anyone—catch a monster by whatever means (a construction stiff once lifted a big brown out of Woodland Valley Creek with a clamshell power shovel) and the news flashes up and down the valley roads with the speed of light.
Three summers ago, after going year on year without even seeing a monster, I caught two of them in one three-week period—a two-pounder of 17 inches and a three-pounder which measured 20 ⅝ inches. I am willing to admit that I took each of them into town, lugged them through the crowd of people waiting for the Pine Hill-Kingston line bus and thence into Folkerts’ tackle shop to be measured, weighed and admired by hangers-on from the soda fountain. While nobody has since spoken of me as a veritable artist with a fly rod, I have reason to believe that I am no longer considered a mere dilettante from New York. I have, in fact, heard several generous remarks about my prey, and one man, whom I did not discourage, seemed to be under the impression that I was able to track down monsters at will.
Honesty compels me to say that I hooked both of them by accident. In each case, a stray current sucked my wet fly down deep beside a sunken boulder and presented it to the fish, whose presence I did not remotely suspect, in a completely natural way—an effect no one could have achieved otherwise in a month of trying. Both leviathans, I am sorry to relate, acted like Bowery drunks after I put the iron to them. A three-pound trout, of course, will put a splendid arc in a four-ounce rod, but neither of my fish seemed to have any concept of the thrilling fight which was expected of them. The bigger one ran out of steam after half stranding himself in a shallow riffle while I was trying to lead him into a quiet pool for the big battle. I simply fell on him, wrestled him two out of three falls and carried him ashore. And though both were wrapped in cheesecloth and lovingly poached in a court bouillon, neither of them, alas, tasted very good.
Smaller trout—if they are flat, wild and freshly caught—are something else again. The prospect makes my entire endocrinological system thump, palpitate and clank like a houseful of old-fashioned steam radiators on the first day of winter. It has been my privilege to sample the haute cuisine of Paris, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, but neither Maxim’s nor Le Pavillon have offered me anything to match the tender and delicate taste of these lovely fish, They should, to my mind, be rolled in corn meal, sizzled for four or five minutes in bacon flat (better, for reasons I do not understand, than butter) and served with a fresh green vegetable or salad, a baked potato, or macaroni with a bland cheese sauce. The exterior of the trout, properly done, is crisp and gold; the interior, white, moist and of a favor, subtle but poignant, as to pierce the very soul. If the air of the dining room is faintly perfumed by fireplace wood smoke, the fish will taste better: and if one drinks a clear, icy martini while they are cooking and a half bottle of well-chilled Moselle while they are being consumed, he will find himself, when all are gone, sitting mindlessly, happily motionless while his inner being relives and resavors the sensations which have been visited upon it and congratulates itself upon a turn of fortune too splendid to be quite believed.
My memories of such orgies and my unbridled appetite for more of them have a great deal to do, I am convinced, with what successes I may manage in my contest with the Esopus. There are days when some curious perceptiveness—simulated, I can only assume, by messages from my digestive tract—allows me to strike at the split second a trout takes my sunken, drifting nymph, although I can neither see nor feel the fish before it is magically hooked. I am incapable of remembering telephone numbers or even, at times, the names of people I have known for years, but I can visualize miles of stream in infinite detail. The Esopus has its obvious and easily remembered water: the Greeny Deep, Twin Rooks, the Spanish Farm, the Pool-in-Front-of-Bill-McGrath’s-House and a succession of noisy cascades known, simply, as Down at Elmer’s Diner. But I know hundreds of minor riffles, rock-divided eddies and patches of slack water; I know how they change at various river levels; I remember how fish behave in them and I remember when shadow, if any, falls on them, morning and evening.
The Catskill fisherman needs such information just as the prospector needs an understanding of rock formations—not that the knowledge is likely to produce riches in either case, but because it keeps hope alive. He needs a very good, very expensive fly rod for the same reason, even though in 999 out of 1,000 situations one can fish just as well with a cheap glass rod.
A fine rod is made of a particularly hard and resilient cane from North Vietnam’s Tonkin region. Its delicate sections are machined to tolerances of a thou-sandth of an inch to produce a specific and particular bending mode or “action.” It is simple, exquisitely balanced and beautiful to see—at once an efficient tool and a work of art. The very process of removing a good rod (in my case an eight-foot Orvis) from its aluminum case, of jointing it up and carefully attaching an English reel (no others click so satisfiyingly when spun) does something to the spirits comparable, I imagine, to climbing into the cockpit of a Spad or polishing up a set of safecracker’s drills. When the fisherman’s hand closes on its smooth, cork grip he is armed as Arthur with Excalibur and anticipates triumph almost automatically as he wades into a stream.
Once in a while, furthermore, even on streams as exasperating as the Esopus or its feeders, he will win an enormous victory. I cannot help but feel that my own performance during the hurricane of 1955 was absolutely brilliant. On considering it in retrospect, in fact, I am able to discover in myself qualities so admirable that I would be inclined to discount them were it not for the penetrating, even pitiless, honesty with which I have reviewed the episode. I will go so far as to say that I rose as a phoenix from the ashes of defeat and that I hoped and was rewarded while all others were cast down by despair.
The hurricane and its accompanying deluge made a horrible mess of our Catskill streams; they poured down their valleys under opaque curtains of rain in roaring, muddy floods. It made a mess of my house, too. The roof leaked, and when I put pans under the drips, I was impelled to endure something very like a xylophone con cert. Forced into the open by this un-godly racket, I took my rod, drove five miles to the end of the Woodland Valley road and began walking upstream under the trees. I was as wet, in five minutes, as if I had fallen into a swimming pool; but I pressed sternly on and, after two miles, came upon the splendid and gleaming phenomenon I had hoped but not actually expected to find.
Under normal conditions Woodland Valley Creek betrays itself at this high point of its valley only in little skeins and trickles of water among shadowed, mossy rocks. But now it was ten feet wide and, since there were no clay banks to discolor the water, it ran clear as crystal. The native brook trout of the Northeast had been extinct in 95 percent of the Esopus system for a long time—very probably since the tanners cut the hemlocks more than a century ago. But brookies, which had somehow endured year after year in the shadowed trickles of water here, were feeding voraciously in the swollen creek. They were absolutely beautiful fish with a sheen of electric blue, white piped fins, mottled backs and crimson spotted sides. I hooked them for two hours, released all but five of the handsomest, since even a hungry man could hardly deny they had earned the right to freedom, and splashed back down through the rain feeling as though I had discovered the Mother Lode.
Despite such bagman’s satisfiactions, however, I must confess that my pursuit of artistry, restraint and purity of purpose has progressed very slowly, if at all. But I strive. I have a model: an erect, wispy and grave old gentleman whom I encountered at midday on the Esopus above the portal five years ago and have admired, wistfully, ever since.
The sun was bright. The stream was low and clear. It was not a time to fish at all, for any movement sent trout flashing to cover in the still, brilliantly lighted pools and I was carrying a rod only as insurance against some unlikely opportunity. As I strolled along inspecting a stretch of water I had not seen for a long time, I became conscious of the old gentleman only when I saw him bend, perhaps seventy yards below me, and then straighten, net in hand. But in that instant, even at that distance, I saw that the net contained the dark, curved form of a very big trout—a monster, or, at the very least, a monster junior grade.
When he came slowly upstream, minutes later, I began to understand what a feat he had managed under those absolutely impossible conditions. He did not show me the fish or even allude to it. He had wrapped it in newspaper and had contrived to get most of the resulting package into his creel. If I had not had that glimpse of it in his net, I might not have known he had a fish at all.
He must have been eighty; I doubt if he weighed much more than a hundred pounds and he walked slowly and with care. But I could only assume that he had come to the river with his sheets of old newspaper because he expected to stalk that one particular fish and that he had fully expected to land it. He nodded at me, glanced at my rod and, after reaching into a pocket, produced a roll of leader so fine that it was almost invisible. It must have tested less than a pound. He snapped off two feet of it simply by breaking the fragile stuff between his fingers. “Use this as a tip,” he directed. Then he pulled out a plastic box, removed a tiny, curiously bedraggled black fly and handed it to me as well. “Try this,” he said. “I tie them during the winter.”
This was the fly and this was the weight of leader with which, quite obviously, he had subdued his thick, heavy trout. He had been forced, on such water, to take a long, long, almost impossible cast to avoid frightening his quarry. In teasing up such a fish, indeed, he had very probably had to drop the fly again and again, and each time as lightly as thistledown. And having hooked the monster, he had played it coldly and delicately at the end of that gossamer tip, knowing one slightest false move would lose him the game.
He fixed me with a stern eye until I had tied on his contributions and then, apparently satisfied that he had prepared me, too, for higher things, nodded and turned away toward the road. I knew better—that he had only prepared me for a few fruitless casts on such a day. But I got down on my hands and knees, for all this, to approach a pool formed by the confluence of a little side stream called the West Kill and then, sitting up slowly to avoid alarming its inhabitants, I looked carefully for evidence of opportunity.
The pool was deep, blue and still, but there were gnats dancing over the faint currents at its head and I felt that I saw an occasional tiny disturbance on its surface. I lighted a cigarette, and then made a long cast and promised myself that I would let my fly lie on the quiet water until I had finished smoking. But impatience and lack of faith were soon my undoing. I yanked the line off the water in dissatisfaction after three puffs and cast a foot to the right of its first position. As the line was still in the air, the biggest brown trout I have ever seen broke water like a runaway torpedo and fell back with a shattering splash. “Good Lord!” I cried in astonishment and cupidity—I talk to myself considerably when fishing—and, moved to mindless activity, made still another frantic cast. And this time I saw that my little fly was gone and realized what I had done. The big fish had sucked it in at the split second I had retrieved my line and I had broken off the hairlike leader without the slightest sense of having done so. The monster had jumped because my hook was imbedded in its lip. Had I concentrated, had I waited one second longer …
Ah, well. I will, given a bit of luck, be eighty years old myself one day and I like to think a certain improvement in both skill and moral tone will have become evident at that point and that the Esopus—or what is left of it—will yield to the superior man. And, if one matures late, one can always look forward to ninety.