The Cedar River Flow
I should have known that first reading about a fishing spot in a magazine—a fly fishing magazine at that—and proposing it as a destination for Brad and me to hike into (and even camp out in the back country there) would be a bad idea. Better might well have been just to rent row boats and venture out into the channel of Saratoga Lake, swinging by the tackle store to stock up on jointed Rapalas and Jitterbugs. But no, I was going to expose Brad to native trout fishing in the Adirondacks. I even had an extra set of waders for him, though I knew he had never waded in a river, that he preferred to do his fishing from a steady, dry bank or inside a water craft.
From the moment we stepped out of my old Plymouth Duster onto the Adirondack trail that would take us back to a lean-to campsite near the headwaters of the Cedar River Flow, I knew I had made a mistake. In none of our early fishing days had we carried heavy packs filled with food stuffs, sleeping bags, cookstove, water bottles, extra clothes…. In all our adventuring boyhood Galway days, our single, rusted tackle box dangling off one of our bicycle handlebars, our beater spinning rods, one of which had its tip section held together with duct tape, would suffice. Brad used my then-girlfriend-now-wife’s old frame backpack, and it, like the entirety of the situation, didn’t fit him well. He had never camped out in the backcountry.
So while I marveled at a hovering bald eagle and waxed poetic about the beauty of the stream we hiked alongside, Brad groused and griped. I wanted him to love it, too, to try casting a fly even (I brought an extra fly rod, but he wouldn’t even touch it).
Finally we arrived at the lean-to and set up camp. I helped him into my extra set of boot-foot waders. He looked ridiculous and knew it, especially because he refused to wear a belt on the outside to gather in the ballooning rubber material. “Why not just find places to cast from shore?” he asked, and did the following morning, refusing to step foot in the waders again, though I implored him that he would catch more fish, have far more opportunities if he got in the water.
There must have been recent rains, because I remember the water being freshet high, and the deer fly, those notorious head orbiters and fierce biters, were legion. Dousing our hats and bandanas with fly dope with maximum percentages of DEET did nothing to dissuade them. The wading was treacherous, so we had to stay very near the shore. And we caught precious few trout. I managed a few nice ones on my old faithful wooly bugger—that quick upstream mend to get it to sink a bit, a few fast strips, and if nothing strikes, take several steps down or upstream and try again. Brad managed a few dinks on his spinner, but he spent more time swatting at deer fly with a bundle of ferns clutched in his hand than casting, and we returned to camp exhausted and with only few trout to fry up for dinner.
Laying back in our bags in the lean-to that night, from out of nowhere and despite everything, came Brad’s signature laugh. “Look,” he said, pointing to the ceiling of the lean-to, and in the light cast by the dying fire I read out loud, “Tom and John, carried away by flies, 1978.” At the very depth of his discontent, he found something to spark a moment of joy, and suddenly we were laughing together again, shoulder to shoulder in the cold early summer night just enjoying each other’s company, together away from the rest of the world again, fishing.
The next day we fished a little, then hiked out. On a whim we stopped along the banks of the upper Hudson, just because it looked so much easier to fish and didn’t even bother with waders. We ended up both catching dozens of medium-sized, recently stocked rainbows. Brad cast his spinner out into the larger pools and hooked many more than I did with my delicate flies, as I had to negotiate tree limbs and limited back casts and finally gave up and waded wet, ruining a favorite pair of leather sandals in the process. But it was worth it to see him happy, to hear him making fun of me for using something as exotic and ineffective as a fly rod. I often drive back from my cabin in the Adirondacks now along this very stretch of river, trying to find the spot we fished that day, but so much has changed…. We returned to our mother’s house triumphant and cleaned and cooked up a mess of fresh-caught trout for supper.
Without being able to articulate it then, what I realize now was that a connection to Brad through fishing together would always remain and sustain our relationship even as we fished together less and less frequently over the years, even as I moved half a country away, started a family, had a range of teaching and writing jobs, immeasurable losses, hardships, like the loss of our mother, which, I’m convinced hastened his own demise. Through all of this, when we spoke, when we saw each other, we were always in some deep, essential way right back at some water’s edge, together, laughing, fishing.
The love you feel for Brad and the ache you feel for his absence are palpable in every sentence of this touching fraternal reminiscence . The last lines choked me up, as they will other readers.
I must say that I recognized myself in him more than in you when it came to his inability to transcend the horse fly swatting 😆 and join you in your ecstatic appreciation of your idyllic surroundings!