October 15

To the river.

The leaves were blown down in a Columbus Day gale, and what foliage is left drifts just beneath the surface of the current like a separate soggy river of red and gold. Now, in the brilliant sunshine of the storm’s passing, with no shade, the color is blinding, stronger off the water than at any time during the summer. But no—off is not quite the word. The brightness is in the water, as if the usual laws of reflection have been suspended, the sun taken in rather than mirrored, the subtlety washed out into something that is already closer to December’s steel than to August’s velvet. The sun is tossed up in the rapids and aerated, stirred out in the pools and cooled, turning even the most familiar lies into mysteries of impenetrable radiance, so—wading into all this, trying to get my bearings, flipping down my Polaroids—I immediately feel at a loss. Brightness to the left of me, brightness to the right—it’s as if the water has turned molten, and I have no idea where to cast. When the radiance gets into the water the fishing is over—it’s Wetherell’s Third Law of Fishing, and I try to take comfort from it, since it’s apparent in the way my line and fly disappear in the hard beauty that this will be an afternoon without trout.

For all the times I’ve fished the river, there are stretches I still haven’t tried. This is one of them—a quarter mile of riffles and pools backing the overgrown acreage of a newly abandoned farm. It’s the classic New England scene, of course. Stone walls choked with briars, a rusty thresher obscured in milkweed, the ungrazed fields going back to ivy and birch. Up on a knoll is the abandoned farmhouse and barn, the boards already sagging into a closer, snugger fit to the land, though it’s only a month since the last struggling farmer failed there and moved on. New England’s landscape, at its purest, has a genius for nature’s soft reclamation—ashes turn to ashes nowhere prettier than here.

There are stories in all this—it’s the classic New England literary landscape as well. Ruined dreams, vanished villages, the bittersweet suggestion of an apple tree growing beside an old cellar hole—these have been the staples of the region’s fiction through Frost and Jewett and Wharton and Howells all the way back to Hawthorne, whose genius not only captured the lonely shadows over these hills but cast his own that lingers in our imaginations to this day. Many talented writers have worked this terrain; many talented writers work it still, mopping up the tragic leftovers—the last farmers struggling to stay afloat; the irony of a flinty land dying through prosperity—though it’s clear that here as the twentieth century lurches and stumbles its way toward a finish, New England has become a literary backwater, and its writers of fiction will have to turn their attention outward from our old familiar parish if they are to avoid total irrelevancy. Me, when I see the birches I think of Russia and copses and Tolstoy—my imagination glances off.

Fishing? No, but the kind of thing I’m apt to consider when I’m not catching fish. For all the perfection of the water behind the farm, despite the generosity of an afternoon that gives me, in quick succession, sights of hawks, grouse, mink, vultures, and deer (plus a rarity, a turtle sunbathing in the stream!), it’s obvious my first instinct was right—that I could change from using a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear to TNT and still catch nothing.

The realization that you will be skunked is one of the hardest things in the fishing life; when in the day that moment comes is one of the diciest timings. Sometimes the signs are so ominous you know with the first cast you’re going to strike out all day; other times, conditions are so ripe you can work for hours, and, fishless, still feel certain your next cast will bring a rise. I’ve had my share of both experiences, particularly the former. In September, just before leaving for an overnight trip to the upper Connecticut, I was met with the following weather report: “The eye of Hurricane Hugo will pass over Pittsburg, New Hampshire (our destination!), sometime during the morning Saturday, bringing torrential rain, followed by an Arctic cold front that will leave up to six inches of snow by Sunday morning.” Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, but I had a strong presentiment—subsequently confirmed—that it was not going to be a trip rich in trout.

There was one obscure period in my life when I used to venture into singles bars; I remember the disappointment that came, usually with the third vodka and tonic, when I swallowed the fact I would be leaving alone. A similar disappointment is what I’m talking about here; we put so much behind us when we go fishing, work, trivialities, worries, that, with disappointment, we risk having it all flood back. That the fish isn’t everything, that it’s enough merely being outside surrounded by beauty, up to our waists in living water, is certainly true, of course, but it’s amazing how much truer it seems if we’ve caught at least one trout. Fish-less, the temptation is to fish longer than conditions warrant, thereby setting up a vicious cycle—the longer you fish without a fish, the more you need one; the more you need one, the more your disappointment grows; the longer you fish, et cetera, et cetera.

Flyfishers differ in nothing so much as they do this, the willingness to admit defeat. It’s one of the trickiest things in a fishing friendship, the fatalist ready to throw in the towel too quickly, the optimist fishing far beyond hope’s outer bound. The best partnerships work out a code to face facts gently . . . “Anything doing down your way? . . . What do you make of this cold front? . . . Does that store down the road sell Molson’s?” . . . and with mutual commiseration agree the moment has come to transfer hope to the next day out, take down the rods, and quit.

Alone, it’s a harder decision for me, since it means not only ending the day, but the season. Between the empty brightness of the water (my thermometer measures it as forty-nine degrees), my fishless conviction, the sense of regret and finale suggested by the abandoned farm, my thoughts change focus, so somewhere between the log-sheltered pool at the start of the run and the undercut bank at the finish, I’ve turned from hoping what the next cast will bring to remembering what the long season has brought.

A good year, I decide—no monsters, but even so. There was the spring when I finally got the hang of fishing a nymph; a June morning when I caught two dozen smallmouth, the slightest of which was two pounds; the discovery of a secret brook trout stream no wider than a sidewalk; the start of some new fishing friendships (to this habitual loner, a miraculous thing); the rediscovery of my river after a year of drought and too long a time away.

The season was over; as they say in Hollywood, “That’s a wrap,” and then as I turned to climb up onto the bank a brown trout tugged on my trailing Muddler, re-creating for the time he was on the hope I had already given up. But what was odd, as careful as I handled things, it hardly seemed like I was playing him in the present tense at all, but off in the future somewhere—that beautiful as he was, he was pulling at me from April of the coming year, so at last, when I landed him on the rocks, knelt down, and released him, I was faced the right way for winter, with the right spirit, with just enough hope to pamper toward spring.