As I prepare to do some traveling over the next few weeks, and may not get to post as often as usual, here is one of the first fly fishing essays I published (revised for my collection of essays, Two Thirds Water, still in search of a publisher).
Blindfold me and take me to a river I’ve known, a lake I’ve fished a lot. Set me down in some remote cove, on some quiet bend, I’ll know where I am. I’ll recognize something not easily described, the way you recognize the voice of a loved one. As a writer, the best analogy I can think of is the way good writers have something distinct about their style, something that makes a Hemingway or a Frost or a Dickinson…instantly recognizable—a unique voice. I remember a graduate course at the University of Massachusetts where I received my Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing called “What is Voice?”—a whole semester spent pondering this elusive facet of writing. The waters we fish also have voices, and like one’s writing voice, the forces that constitute them are myriad. I have been fortunate to come to know the voices of many different waters over the years: the lily pad thick shoreline of a south Michigan, ten-acre lake, a heron statue-still waiting on fingerling bass in the shallows, the morning mist levitating inches above the flat-calm surface…the frothy, dangerous rush of Penobscot’s West Branch in Northern Maine, Mount Katahdin’s knife edge far above and another fat landlocked salmon erupting into air…the Yucatan peninsula’s northern shore, a deep-red, rock reef set against the many blues of the Gulf, the heat in July something alive, a silver, frightened mass of baitfish exploding into air, and then the ladyfish cutting up through the boiling surface smacking my foam popper hard…the tannin-stained waters of a remote Adirondack lake, a bald eagle screeching out into the air, his call harmonizing with the haunting murmurs and calls of a pair of loons as I troll along in my pack canoe for brookies and lake trout in early spring, the black flies coming in steady, sometimes overwhelming waves….
I cover a lot of water when I fish someplace new these days, sometimes wading or paddling more than fishing, even when the fishing is good. It’s to try to learn the voice of the place. That’s why I told the guide in south Florida to take us deeper, deeper into the mangroves, even though jack crevalle and snook and ladyfish were everywhere. It was to hear the voice that spoke from the ibis balancing on the anchoring leg of a mangrove, the curious dolphins surfacing in the not ten-foot deep water, the enormous, gentle manatees hovering just below the surface near where mangrove swamp meets ocean.
And as with writing, the voice of a river, a lake, a mangrove swamp, a stretch of beach, is not easily described—and not discovered by just covering a lot of water. Put me on the Little Manistee in Michigan. Something about the rush of the current, the color of the water, the texture of the bottom, periodically sand and gravel and dark hole, the narrowness and thick vegetation pressing in on either side…will all tell me it’s not the Pere Marquette, nor the Betsie, nor the Platte, nor the Pine, all rivers within a 50 mile radius, all rivers that look a lot alike from the road or the banks. Put me on the brown-black water of Lake Lila in the Adirondacks after the long drive down a suspension-rattling dirt road, the half mile portage in, my small, feather-light Hornbeck canoe balanced on my shoulders that I launch off the white-sand beach…and I’ll know it’s not Bog Lake, a paddle and portage away, nor Little Tupper, Rock Pond, Round Lake—all bodies of water that might be mistaken as identical to people who don’t immerse themselves fully in them, who don’t fish them.
That’s the key here, I think—immersion—getting to know a place deeply, in a way that non-fishing observers can’t. I’ve seen a lot of country perched atop the seats of gravel or mountain bikes, or hiking along trails with a heavy pack on my back, but in none of these venues can I honestly say that I came into contact, on such a deep level, with the voice of a place. At that reef in Mexico, I stood practically in one spot for nearly three hours watching schools of baitfish jumping out of the water as ladyfish and sometimes barracuda cut into them. I noticed the gulls and pelicans landing or hovering impossibly in the breeze and looking downward for something to catch their hungry eyes. I noticed subtle differences in the sea’s coloration, indicating different depths or different sub-surface structure. In short, I came to know (to hear its voice) this one small section of reef in an intricate and complex way.
When fly fishing a mountain stream in the course of a day’s fishing, I may only have traveled a mile or less of stream. In that same time, I would have hiked, mountain or gravel biked many miles. What might simply be cataloged as “a fish rising” if I were hiking past a stream or lake becomes a brown trout feeding on the Stenonema canadense emerger, which requires a parachute Light Cahill fly with a trailing shuck fished dead drift in the surface film. To get the proper drift I will come to know the intricate subtleties of the river’s currents and back eddies….What looks from the trail like just another small, inland Adirondack pond becomes to me as I float upon it, cast out into it, a place of ledges and spawning beds and currents and forests of weeds whose edges are patrolled by hungry pike and bass. The difference is like browsing the shelves of a bookstore versus spending an entire day reading in your favorite chair.
And the deep familiarity is especially acute with waters we fish a lot, waters we come to know like a long-loved spouse. Years ago now, and much to my surprise, having only ever fished Northeast freestoners up to then, I realized that the Kalamazoo River in the depths of the Midwest became the voice I knew best—in all its polluted, patiently flowing, murky, smallmouth-rich beauty. I came to know its tricky slow currents, how the olive and white clousers would always bring them up from the depths, sometimes nearly 100 a day, that on certain days, a humpy or Madam-X or Sneaky Pete might work because they’re still in the shallows after spawning or because hoppers were drifting in from the fields and oak forests that would take turns lining the banks as I drifted by in my canoe.
Most recently, a small handful of Adirondack lakes and ponds have become the voices I turn to and have come to know well, deeply, intimately. One lake I shall not name that requires a very short portage and is small enough to fish every bay and dead log and lily pad patch in a long day on into night speaks to me through its weed-choked outlet that opens into deep cut banks, each turn holding a largemouth bass or two, through its vast, shallow north end reflecting the nearby mountains perfectly, where always at dusk the beaver whose den is far up in the weed-choked outlet will swim by silently or suddenly emerge near me and slap his big tail in warning.
The remarkable thing for me is that these voices don’t change. When you visit a stream or lake or ocean shoreline you haven’t fished in some time and step in and feel it take hold, it’s like opening the cover of a favorite book, reading that first, familiar line; it’s like a phone call from a friend whose voice you haven’t heard in years. It’s the same sentiment expressed at weddings (or funerals) ten, twenty year reunions, seeing someone you used to know, saying and really meaning it, “you haven’t changed at all.” Sure, they have aged visibly, hairlines falling back, middles protruding, wrinkled faces… But when we say this, we’re not talking about physical appearance alone. I can remember this sensation most strongly when I fished a certain bridge on the Big Hole river in Montana where three years earlier I had caught dozens of grayling and fat rainbows, brookies and whitefish on a size 12 Parachute Adams (much to the dismay of a few spin fisherman who had been casting lures to rises from the banks to no avail). The same two deep channels were there, weeds bending sideways with the strong current. I waded deep to the center, where I found the same shallow gravel bar and cast my fly up into the shadows of the bridge for rainbows, just behind them for grayling, and when nothing took upstream, chunky whitefish or small brookies snatched at my fly on the downstream swing. Tonally, emotionally, it was as if I had pulled tight on the reins of time and stepped into the past.
And perhaps that’s what I’m coming to realize—the recognition that as Henry Austin Dobson’s famous poem claims, “Time stays, we go…,” that certain things remain permanent and unchanging on this earth, while we are the ones who change, move on, “go”—at least in so far as we can tell in the the blink-of-an-an-eye lives we live like so many mayflies. The voices of rivers, of waters we have come to know deeply, like good friends, good books, music, paintings, mountains, favorite guitars…anchor us and help us to fashion our own, far less permanent voices.
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Thanks!
I loved this.