The Waiting Game
Every flyfisher knows there are two fishing seasons: the official one set by the fish and game department, and the richer, more fluid one set by your heart. In most northern states the first comes in mid-April, which is a joke for everyone except the worm fishermen, and with the streams so high and cloudy, not a particularly funny one even for them. The second starts—Well, take your pick. When the first tackle catalogs come in January, just when you’re at your weakest, so spending money on equipment seems a plausible substitute for actually fishing? Sometime after Christmas when, using that new vise Santa brought, you tie up your first pattern for the coming year? When brochures are sent for from Montana, Alaska, Argentina, or, better yet, when a deposit is actually mailed? Everyone picks their date, and for me, though I’ve tried every psychological trick there is, every coaxing, I’ve never been able to get the season of expectation to open any sooner than the first week of March.
January and February, the long weeks leading up to the equinox. These are strictly working months here, the time I earn my fishing time, literally put it in the bank—and not only a real bank, but that more complex lending institution that revolves around family goodwill. When I do go outdoors its usually to ski through the mixed softwoods that start behind our house, and the only thing this has to do with fishing is that occasionally I’ll catch that low, throaty surge of water as I cross a frozen stream—a sound no river lover can hear without sensing a matching pulse coursing through their blood. I’ll even try poking at the snow with my ski pole just to see if I can’t liberate some watery brightness; once, doing this on a day of extreme cold, I pulled back out a perfect popsicle, my pole frozen from the tip over the basket into a clear blue ball of ice.
Other than these little foretastes, there’s not much going on. The sun gets brighter, the days get longer, and if you wake up early enough you can see Vega and the summer constellations rising over the low mountains to our east like coming attractions scrolled over a dark orange screen. But when you live in northern New England as long as I have, you develop a little damper on your hope, try not to get excited. Another month until fishing is even a remote possibility; two months until I’ll actually venture out; three months until hatches start and conditions become halfway decent; four months until the glory days of June and early July. It’s simply too much hard time left in the sentence, so, like a prisoner facing freedom, I find its better not to think about it at all.
If I do give in to temptation, it’s still retrospectively; it’s last year’s fishing from remembering, getting out the pictures, glancing at my fishing calendar, taking solace from modest triumphs that have only been enhanced by the intervening months. I notice the same backward inclination in talking with my fishing partners. Meeting in January, we’re still talking about last summer on the Yellowstone, not next summer on the Androscoggin.
As I said, all this changes around March first when I start giving myself permission to think about the coming season. The winter seems endless at this stage, the storms we always get around town meeting day being among our most ferocious, and what robins or blackbirds manage to find their way up here are often blown right back to Massachusetts by the frigid northwest wind. But still, there’s something in the air now—a vague earthy scent, little trills and whispers from meltwater, a growing confidence in the sun—that at least enables you to pronounce the word spring, not like a remote, half-imagined abstraction, but as a reality, the appearance of which won’t be spooked by mentioning its name out loud.
In short, late winter is very much a waiting game, one every flyfisher has to play as best they can. There are time-honored means for doing so, of course, some of which I take part in, others I prefer to sit out. One of these is ice-fishing. Our local pond will have its little village of companionable shacks most winters, at least when the ice has a chance to thicken before being covered by an insulating blanket of snow. The fact I’ve never actually gotten up the energy to dig a hole, let a line down, hoist a flag shouldn’t obscure the fact I can understand perfectly the motives of those doing so. The hard crystalline beauty of a frozen pond in winter; the polar bear companionship of people who are as thickly booted, mitted, and hatted as you are yourself; the restorative dashes back to the shed for whatever is in the thermos or flask. Dig me a trench, get a hatch started, oil a fly line with antifreeze, and I’d be out there in a second.
Fly tying is another form of winter fishing, one I have all the respect for in the world, but don’t have the knack for and probably never shall. It’s an art and a demanding one; Carrie Stevens, Helen Shaw, Roy Steenrod, the Darbees: these are great and honored names, and rightly so, for the skill these tyers bring to their work, the combination of preciseness and flair, experience and imagination, can only be compared with the work of the great nature artists or the most skilled jewelers.
For me, those long hours hunched over a tying bench are a little too similar to the long hours hunched over a writing desk, a little too much for my back, eyes, and nerves to handle. But as something to tide you over between seasons, I don’t see how it can be beat.
Neither ice fisherman nor fly tyer, I’m left with a lot of winter hours to fill, or at least would be if it wasn’t for the fact there are plenty of other fishing surrogates, stopgaps, and pacifiers waiting on line. The following is a short list, both of the kinds of things I personally find helpful in waiting out March and suggestions for anyone faced with the same predicament.
I have this terrible habit I’m half-ashamed to admit: I’m the kind who keeps their New Year’s resolutions. Of course this is absurdly anal of me, priggish, straight-arrowish to a fault, and wins me more suspicion and disgust than it does approbation. So I’m always careful with my resolves, since, as with wishes, they very well may come true.
I think I’m on safe ground this year, at least with fishing. For I’ve formed two resolutions, one on the practical side, one on the practical-spiritual.
The first is never to lose a fish this season through a badly tied knot. Adding an extra half-hitch when you tie on your fly; sitting down out of the wind and concentrating as you fashion a blood knot; checking the breaking strength of your tippets. In theory, these are the easiest preventatives in the world—and yet how tedious and slow that extra care can seem when actually fishing. The trout are rising, your hands are shaking from excitement or cold, you realize it’s been a while since you last checked connections, but. . . . No, it’s simply one task too much, like getting back out of a warm, cozy bed to floss your teeth. Trout, of course, ask for nothing better, and will undo a bad knot with what always seems a particularly gleeful, tah-dah kind of flourish—trout as disappearing act, trout unbound.
The second resolution may be a little harder to keep, for all my self-discipline. Last year my friend Tom Ciardelli and I finished salmon season up in Maine, fishing the Rapid River for landlocks. What with logging roads going everywhere now, four-wheel drive and ATVs, the lower Rangeleys aren’t as remote as they once were, and we had more company than either of us would have liked. So, with no alternative open, we pretty much stayed on one pool, the one neglected pool, the entire day.
This was something of a precedent for a fisherman who, like a salmon himself, always forges relentlessly upstream. A revelation, too, since I discovered how rewarding it can be to concentrate on one small stretch of river and yet concentrate on this intensely, getting to know it in all its moods—the different ways the sunlight comes off the water at dawn, midday, and dusk; the movement offish within a pool, their feeding cycle so exuberantly on and so stubbornly off; insect emergence and how much life comes off the water if you have the patience to sit and watch. And narrowing the focus paid off in fish—we learned that too, sight-fishing for salmon who came up to small gray midges with interest, respect, and, finally, acceptance.
Hence my resolution. To slow it down this year, my fishing, my pace upstream. Not go chasing after the river, but, waiting patiently, to let the river come to me.
Conservation groups like to hold their annual banquets in March, the month when their members are unlikely to be off fishing and are most eager to hear a speaker wax informative on the subject. And while I’m not a banquet type of guy, I do try to send in money for raffle tickets, donate a book or two, help out where I can. If nothing else, the invitations that come in the mail are good reminders of something I think should become the off-season activity for all devoted flyfishers: working to make sure there is a trout stream to go back to when the snow disappears.
This winter several such campaigns have concerned me enough to warrant my involvement. Across the river in Vermont, trout fishers are fighting the ski industry again, this time over the industry’s plans to loot water from headwater streams to use in snowmaking, and to make snow from treated wastewater (conservationists, prompted by this last folly, have bumper stickers reading Effluent for the Affluent!).
I’ve departed from my usual shyness about such things to go to a meeting on the subject, give a talk. At the same time, I’m talking to people here in town about saving a remote pond at the base of our local mountain. Grunt work mostly, stuffing envelopes, writing appeals, asking for donations. There’s a land trust that owns it now, having obtained it in a complicated three-way trade, but they’re holding it only temporarily, and it’s up to the town to raise the funds to preserve it forever.
That’s locally. Nationally, I’m distressed to read about the gold mine planned on the Blackfoot in Montana and on other mountain streams, the poisonous leachings and what they would do. With less of a direct role open for me, I’ve ponied up the fifty dollars for membership in a coalition fighting the threats, trying via this modest but necessary means to lend my support. Again, it feels right to do so; when I wade into my own river this spring, I want to be able to look it in the eye.
Not quite the off-season activity it used to be for me, since with great effort I’ve gotten past the acquisitive, tackle-mania stage everyone goes through at least once in their fishing career. Between a back-to-basics mind-set, a longing to continually simplify, a bank account that is always challenged, skimming through fishing catalogs has become mostly a spectator sport for me. Still, I spend some time at it, since the mail carries them in on a springtime freshet of gloss, hype, and exaggeration, and I’m still not immune to being swept along.
If nothing else, they’re a good way to keep up with the state of the sport, what’s in and what’s out. Thus, going through this year’s batch, I see that the once humble fly reel has now been elevated to equal status with the fly rod, with prices to match (insane in my view); that saltwater fly fishing is exploding in popularity (good! spread everyone out!); that videos have shoved aside books (reading being an endangered activity); that fly-fishing luggage has become a serious status item (no one fishes at home anymore; the trout are always two thousand miles away); that the commercialization and deification of Norman Maclean proceeds apace a decade after his death (enough already!); that it’s getting harder to find flies with barbless hooks (bring them back, please); that women are being looked upon as the new frontier by the merchandisers (designer waders, special rods, vests with tampon pockets: male condescension at work here, or sensible adaptations?); and that whoever is writing catalog copy should in the name of truth and decency be hung.
A healthy corrective to all this and a far more interesting pastime is going back to look at fishing catalogs from an earlier era. Beside me as I write is something I’ve saved for thirty years: a catalog from Norm Thompson Inc. in Oregon back in the days when the company still sold fishing tackle.
A couple of things are at work here. First is the price of bamboo rods (pre-graphite days these), which sets my mouth watering with retrospective greed. A Winston eight-footer with two tips comes in at an even $100; an Orvis seven-footer at $67.50 (postpaid!). New fly lines are $11; a Hardy silk line is $19; a Hardy LRH reel, $27 (extra spools for $10). It only gets better as the pages go on. An assortment of dries tied by the famous Art Flick is $4.50 for ten; Muddlers tied by Don Gapen, their inventor are $6.50 each. The catalog is printed with a kind of modest, understated dignity; it includes, among other interesting pieces of advice, an excellent article on casting by the late great Jon Tarantino.
A golden age, surely, but in truth the prices were just as out of reach for me as a teenager as today’s are out of reach for me as an adult. I did manage to save $39 for a Hardy fiberglass rod, which has served me well ever since, but I don’t remember ever having enough for anything else.
Nowadays what I mostly order from catalogs are flies, since, as mentioned, I’m no tyer. This year I notice, scanning back over my list, that I’ve pretty well abandoned standard mayfly imitations altogether, except in their parachute versions, the rest of my dries trending toward caddis patterns, midges, and attractors. For nymphs, I favor Pheasant Tails, weighted mostly, a few with bead heads, most without. In streamers, Woolly Buggers have pretty much replaced traditional patterns for me, except for the Golden Demon (death on brookies up here) and the Muddler. The chief oddity on my list are wet flies; I’m one of the last to fish them with any frequency, and I have to scrounge around some before finding catalogs that stock them.
When I added up this year’s total it came to $253—a little too much, what with my daughter needing braces, my son wanting to go to soccer camp, various bills becoming due. I went back to the drawing board, crossed out ruthlessly. This time, I told myself, I would scrape it down to a bare-bones essential list, no vagaries, no experiments, no gambles, just the working everyday flies I absolutely needed. . . . Did so, added them back up, came to a grand total of $346.68.
Talking about trout fishing has always been a substitute for the actual act; some people are more adept at the former, some are good at both. I enjoy it under two circumstances: trading battle stories with old friends who share many memories; and talking with complete strangers, seeing how quickly we can find common ground in rivers, landscapes, and fish.
It’s a large and complex subject, conversational fishing, but here 111 say only this: how endearingly eager so many of my friends are to launch right into their latest fish stories, to the point where even the usual conversational staples—how’s the family? how goes work?—are skipped entirely. One of my friends, having returned from fishing in Argentina, called me up the other night with a full report, in the course of which it became clear that he had been home only seconds—that his very first act when the taxi dropped him off wasn’t playing with the kids or checking in with his wife, but calling a buddy with all the glorious details.
So, come March, I’m more than ready to go out to lunch with anyone who calls, knowing full well what the agenda will be, willing to do my share of listening, expecting some patience in return. There’s a lot of planning and scheming that goes on during these lunches. I’ve noticed the deeper in winter the date is, the wilder and crazier are our schemes (We’ll fish in Bosnia, take advantage of those brown trout streams no one’s fished in years), and that the closer to spring we get, the slightly more realistic they become (Hey, rainbows feed on walleye eggs, right? We tie off some egg imitations, head right down to Kenny Dam, and—bingo!).
But lunches can booby-trap you, too. Last week a friend who never steers me wrong called with an interesting proposition. He was sponsoring a Russian fishing guide who was in this country for a month-long internship at a tackle shop, the better to learn about the business end of fly fishing and acquire lessons he could apply to his budding capitalistic enterprise back on the salmon rivers of the Kola peninsula.
Would I have lunch with him? my friend wanted to know. He wouldn’t be able to stay more than a minute himself, but he was certain the two of us would hit it off.
All my fishing lunches are at the same venue: a large, friendly Chinese restaurant one town south of here. Two minutes after sitting down, my friend arrived with Andrey. He was a stocky man with a drooping mustache, dressed in a leisure suit of black denim. With a smile that was more of a grimace, he shook my hand—with his left hand, his right being stuck, like Napoleon’s, at a right angle into his jacket.
My friend grabbed a wonton and left, leaving Andrey and me alone.
“Have you enjoyed your stay here, Andrey?”
He scowled. “Of course,” he mumbled, with great sarcasm.
Whoops.
“Uh, it’s a shame you’re not here during the trout season. I could have taken you out.”
He shrugged. “On my river, we have salmon of fifteen pounds. The small ones.”
Whoops again. Time to order, try to get communication back on track . . . but we never did. For some reason, he and I started out on different wavelengths and never managed to find a common one. For him, this was one blind date that was obviously a bore, the only redeeming factor being the Chinese food or, better yet, the Chinese service, which amazed him with its attentiveness; he kept glancing at his water glass, amazed to find it was forever filled.
I did my best to carry the conversation along—English wasn’t the problem, since he spoke it perfectly—then we pretty much gave up and ate in silence. The situation was saved by the lucky intervention of my pal Tom C., who happened to come in and did somewhat better with Andrey than I had. We finally managed to learn something of Russian fly fishing; we were interested to hear that, according to Andrey, the same scoundrels who ruled things under the Communists now ruled things under democracy, and that the chances of his getting a fishing lodge established on his river without paying massive bribes was slim. Which explained his gloominess, I suppose.
After what seemed like hours, the waiter brought our check and the fortune cookies. We had to explain to Andrey what they were.
“My future, yes?” he said with the first real animation he had displayed. Breaking the cookie apart he read his, read it twice, then, with a snort of disgust, crumpled it up and threw it at the lo mein.
We usually get a big snowstorm the first week of March, and often we’ll get a second hard upon this, but by the last third of the month winter seems to have broken its back. The robins return for good, ditto the bluebirds; the sap is running, not only in trees, but in human beings, so it’s hard not to feel the anticipatory exhilaration of spring.
You’d have to be made of granite not to give in to this. The new lightness in the air seems to require an appropriate tribute, and one of mine is to stop off at our local country store, plunk my twenty dollars down for a fishing license.
“Early this year, aren’t you?” Tammy says, rustling behind the counter for the proper form.
I shrug. “Figure I’d nudge spring along.”
Tammy, speaking of spring, is very obviously pregnant, happy with it, excited, but a bit on edge as well. Since I’m the first one to buy a license this year, she has some trouble with the new form, and what’s worse, there’s suddenly a long line of customers, the phone is ringing, and there’s no one else to help.
“You want the cold-water species license?” she asks distractedly, searching the form for the right box to check off.
“Yep.”
“Hunting, too?”
“Just fishing.”
“Shellfishing?”
We both laugh.
Finishing, she pushes it across the counter for my signature, then hands it back with the little booklet listing the rules and regulations—and there, Wetherell is official once again.
“When’s the big day?” I ask, tucking it in my wallet.
She smiles at her stomach—a bit ruefully. “Tomorrow!”
Buying a license up here, while I fully support it, is something of a formality, since with the fish and game budget being so strapped, warders at a premium, I’m never checked. Thus, a month later, wading into the cold shallows of a favorite brook trout pond, I was more than a little amazed to see a green-jacketed warden emerge from the puckerbrush behind me. “Gotcha!” his expression seemed to say—or maybe it was just the quick flash of guilt that comes over you in these situations, innocent or not.
“How’s the fishing?” he asked. Then, a second later, “Can I see your license?”
I thought he looked at it with more than usual concentration, glancing up now and then to compare description and reality. Hmmmn. Red hair? Yep. One hundred and ninety pounds? Yep. Six foot three? Yep. That left only one thing.
“There aren’t any clams in this pond,” he said. “Lobster neither.”
Say what?
“Here,” he said, pointing to the upper corner of my license. “You’ve got yourself a shellfish license, mister.” He hesitated. “And I bet you have a story to go with it.”
One of the best fringe benefits of writing about fishing is that you get lots of mail from people telling you how much your book meant, far more letters than you receive when you publish a novel. Flyfishers tend to be literate folk, so enthusiastic about their passion their letters all but bubble over, and of course there’s that ancient and venerable swapping instinct at work as well; since I’ve told a story or two of my own, it’s only fitting that I share theirs.
Fair enough, especially since receiving such letters is one of the real highs March brings (and for whatever reason, late winter is when most of the mail comes in). I always answer each one. I’m pleasantly surprised by how many turn out to be from people who don’t fish at all, readers whose letters begin “Dear Mr. Wetherell, I’ve never fished in my life, but something made me pick up your book and I just want to tell you how much it meant.”
This is not to pat myself on the back, but to try and understand exactly who my readers are. That books are one of the oldest, most successful collaborations in the world—a collaboration between writer and reader—is perhaps so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning, but it’s a blind collaboration, between people who in most cases never set eyes on each other, their only meeting ground being those words.
The people who respond best to the ones I’m responsible for seem to be those who, in loving the natural world, rivers, lakes, and ponds, respond passionately to a note of celebration played even as wobbly and discordantly as mine. Dogmatic, know-it-all flyfisherman, pompous technocrats, the macho boys or jet-setters: I never get letters from these, and I suspect if they read me it’s with a mix of bewilderment, incomprehension, and anger . . . but now I am bragging, wearing their disapproval like a badge.
Give me readers of simple hearts and subtle minds! Readers who know what a river feels like full on the chest! Readers who see in trout the richness of the living world, and find in books something of the same wonder!
But here, let me quote from a handwritten letter I received just this week; see for yourself what I’m talking about.
Dear Mr. Wetherell,
My name is John Grienan. I’m 61 yrs. of age. And recently retired from my Sales job w/a Tool Co. after 32 years.
I have owned a camp on Sheckle Pond in Vermont for close to 27 yrs. My Wife of 38 yrs. & I purchased this Piece of Heaven when my 2 Sons were Young & Still at Home. Outside of my Wife, 2 Sons & 5 grandchildren it’s my most precious possession.
Your book is the first & only book I ever read. I’m not proud of that but it is a fact none the Less. I read Magazines, Short Stories & the paper cover to cover; but till your book I never finished a Book.
Mr. Wetherell I’m writing to you to tell you how you put on paper all that I thought & felt while walking my river. I’ve sat like you on the Bank or dreamed of someday putting into words all the feelings I have about my River; but you have said it all I guess I needn’t put mine on paper. I’ll just Read & Talk about yours.
If you ever want to Try my River; please contact me. I would be proud to Guide you through & maybe even catch a few Browns, Rainbows or Brookies to Boot & Introduce you to some of the wonderful People I have met on my river.
Thank you.
p.s. Please forward to Mr. Wetherell.
That’s a collaborator for you, my partner already, the two of us putting our backs to the words and together wrenching out some meaning, then some more, than still more, until finally we’ve built something where the words disappear—a riverine world in which we dwell simultaneously, if only for the space of a page. Thank you, Mr. Wetherell? No, it’s thank you, Mr. Grienan, for a high so unexpected and delightful it has brightened what is otherwise a cold dreary day here, lumined my spirits with it, so I feel like a man should feel heading into spring—alive and giddy, silly with sap, madcap, coltish, corny, ready to foxtrot, jitterbug, levitate, soar.
Hey, I’m a fishing writer! Drop me a line!
What’s important to remember about fishing stopgaps is that none of them work, not entirely, not for very long. Substitute fishing is substitute fishing; its pleasures, though real enough, are like solitary notes waiting for a melody to sweep them along. What they’re up against is not just the frustration of waiting for that oh-so-distant opening day, but the lingering regret from the season having ended the year before—for me, a real downer that colors my mood well into winter. Here for a six-month cycle fishing and all the joys that come with it has been woven into my everyday life, and then suddenly—just because the northern half of the planet happens to be tilting on its axis away from the sun—it isn’t, and the bittersweet emotion attendant upon this is not easily assuaged by anything but another year immersed in the same cycle.
And the weather doesn’t help. That first spell of warmth never lasts in these hills, nor does the second, and the storms seem to get fiercer and more perverse the further it gets into spring. Worse, each fair interval is more beautiful than the last, until anyone who is at all sensitive to fluctuations of the vernal mood feels like they’re being embraced by a skillful and experienced lover (there is no other analogy) who knows how to tease and stroke until you’re all but crying from desire . . . and yet the climax never seems to come, so the stroking, pleasant as it is, loses its point.
Spring, when it does arrive, with its chorus of bird calls, its high-pitched choir of peepers, the warmth that not only pours down from above but wells up from below, seems so new and overwhelming it demands an extravagant response. For my children, it’s going outside with a kite, or kicking through last year’s leaves in search of balls and Frisbees abandoned there in the fall; for our retriever, it’s kicking up her heels like a puppy, chasing her tail; for my wife, it’s digging in the top inches of soil, the miraculous inches, so warm, so particulate, so suggestive of bursting life. Kissing a pretty girl, driving with the top down, knocking out fungoes, painting the birdhouse, caulking a boat. Spring is response time, always the response.
Writers, too, even those most thickly ensconced behind impervious study walls, are asked for a springtime response. Often, this can take the form of starting a book. For this writer (for whom study walls tend to be more like drafty, permeable membranes), it can sometimes take the form of writing a book on fishing, a journey which—having made it twice before, seen what I wanted to see, shown my slides, written my postcards, paid my entry fees, left my tips, gotten home healthier, less wealthy, more wise—I never thought I would embark on again.
My determination to not write about fishing became, in the seven years I stuck with it, something like the ice that covers the Connecticut River near my home. Glacier-like, solid, seemingly immune to change, caring not a whit for the variations in warmth and light that create such longing in humans, it appears in March like something that will literally be there forever, having forgotten how to be anything but what it is: ice. And yet, even in the deepest recess of winter, there are other forces, less spectacular, less obvious, and by themselves less powerful, that work invisibly to erode and chip at it from all directions, until, between one day and the next, the ice is gone, and anyone staring at the blue, sparkling water where it had been could only with the greatest difficulty be able to imagine there ever having been ice there in the first place.
As in ice, so in writers, and the only thing left to do here is explain as best I can those little nudgings and chippings that have once again caused things to flow.
The first of these is that my fishing days have gotten into the habit of coalescing themselves around stories, and it’s a tendency I enjoy and approve of, to the point where I’m not sure I could call a halt to it even if I wanted to. Yes, I enjoy fly fishing, but I also enjoy thinking about myself fly fishing, and it’s just this added bit of refinement that gets my stories started. Or put it another way. I’ve a habit of noting things on rivers I wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t interested in getting them down on paper, sharing them, and I find that if I throttle this urge, I see less, notice less, enjoy less, even catch less . . . and so the selfish and unselfish motives are pretty well mixed.
And as a close corollary to the above, I feel I’m not quite done with sharing my adventures with my collaborators, feel their own interest quite strongly, and—again like that ice—find I’m not proof to it, not by a long shot. It’s not just those letters, the pleasure they bring, but the fact that I sense my readers so clearly, me who hardly ever meets any of them face to face. In writing novels, I’ve always found the dreaded creative isolation to be a real and painful fact, one that has to be struggled with constantly, and yet I feel none of that strain in writing about rivers and the natural world, and I’m just human enough to find this comforting.
And more experience is waiting on line, demanding to be described so as to come fully to life. This is another motive and a strong one. Trips to western rivers; new friends made fishing; watching my children learn to fish; a new river I’ve fallen head over heels in love with or, rather, a new portion of a river I’ve known for years. Runoff, current, sunshine . . . the ice starts to crack.
And there’s another nudge, a strictly personal one this time. Having written two books on fly fishing, I want to write a third partly because of the magic that resides in the number three. Troika, trio, triad, trilogy, trinity, trico. The first book on the left, exuberant and rambling, an unabashed love letter to my favorite stream; the second in the middle, more realistic and sober, an examination of the fishing motive and why it takes hold; the third here on the right, impelled by a reformer’s zeal this time, the feeling that the tremendous surge in popularity that fly fishing has undergone in the last ten years has seen much lost in terms of quietude and contentment, modesty and simplicity, solidarity and fellowship, and since these are the qualities at the very heart of my own love for fly fishing, I want to do what I can to preserve them, sing their virtues. A desire, that is, to steer fly fishing back to its roots, when Izaak Walton, in all tranquillity and fullness of heart, could describe fishing as “a rest to the mind, a cheerer of spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness that begats habits of peace and patience in those that profess’d and practis’d it.”
Thus, my intentions. What kind of book will it actually turn out to be? I honestly don’t know, not at this stage, not when the long season of commitment a book represents hasn’t properly started yet, other than these preliminary jottings, this slushy March of good intentions. Humble is the operative word here. Someone starting out to fish the Battenkill or the Madison would hardly say, “I’m going to catch three rainbows sixteen inches long, then top things off with a brace of twenty-inch browns”—not a fisherman I would care to know, at any rate. No, what he or she would say is, Til be fishing the river tonight, and my hopes are high, but it’s a funny game, fishing, so you never know, though at a minimum I bet I’ll catch a delightful helping of earth, water, and sky.”
It’s the attitude that motivates this book—to find words fit to match the beauty of the locales it inhabits. I want it to be a random, artless kind of book, not one that is shaped too deliberately; I want to give the writing a chance to wind (as fishing writers of an earlier age might phrase it) hither and yon, pooling up eddies when it needs to, forming broad slow oxbows that double back on themselves, sluicing off the rocks into wild, chaotic chutes, carving its way through a willing landscape of collaborative hearts.
This may involve being a cheerleader at times, celebrating the joys of rivers, lakes, bays, and ponds just for the sake of celebration; there will be other times when this is not possible, and the cheerleader in me will give way to the Cassandra, the Jeremiah. This is the writer’s double role now, since here at the millennium it’s impossible to write honestly about nature without confronting many hard things. Yes, a trout is the most beautiful example of sentient life I know, so perfect in its adaptation, so colorful, so strong, that merely to see one finning in the shallows, taking a mayfly with that delicate rise, tip, and fall is enough to anchor an entire book on; this same trout, scientists warn us, can contain enough poison in its tissue that a person concerned about their health should eat no more than two or three a year. No, celebration alone is impossible, but only the worst pessimist would be blind to the beauty of the natural world that still surrounds us, though we try so hard to spoil it, tame it, beat it back.
In angling terms, this book will stick to the middle ground. I’m neither expert nor duffer, but someone who is lucky enough to have made fishing a part of their everyday life. Hence, there will be many detours into other subjects, other ground; my best fishing days are often those where fishing barely fits, and I see no reason to change this pattern when it comes to writing about fishing.
So be it! Here is the source—my hands on this keyboard, this head full of memories, this surge of happy intention—and there out this window are the granite hills and limestone meadows down which all this will run. Where the current will cut deepest, whither it will lead, no man, least of all this one, can know.
And one more thing before starting, the answer to the question I didn’t quite solve at the chapters start. When exactly is that border when the fishing season in imagination becomes the fishing season in fact? In the quirky, stubborn state I live in you’re allowed to fish beginning January first, but this, in a personal-responsibility kind of way, only throws the decision back onto the individual, makes the answer an impressionistic one, having little to do with the calendar and everything to do with mood and feel.
I can’t give a precise opening day, but I can give a precise opening moment. Taking a break from writing around ten when the sun warms my study window, I wander out into our meadow where one last snow drift rises like a humpbacked island from the sea of flattened grass. Down the side of this island runs a rivulet of water, cutting a small bluish channel through the wood-flecked snow, fanning out when it touches earth, thinning to transparency, then collecting itself again, running down the all but imperceptible declination formed by our hill. I’ve watched this before, but now, straddling it, staring down, blinking in the sunny brightness, with a sudden intuitive knowing that must match an animal’s or bird’s, I realize there is no refreezing in store for this drift, no more storms waiting to add to its bulk, nothing in this landscape but a myriad of such trickles running down the hills in perpendicular interminglings, restoring to full and vibrant motion the brooks they fall into, the streams, the rivers, the life in the rivers, the life in whoever loves that life—and that it’s the wide and exhilarating sense of these contained in the trickle at my feet that, for this flyfisher at any rate, starts the season once again.