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Authors: David Adams Richards

Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fishing, #Sports & Recreation

Lines on the Water (6 page)

BOOK: Lines on the Water
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The river was quite full and flowed quickly, and was not as wide as I thought it would be. But then I remembered a past time long ago when, as a boy of twelve, Mr. Simms told me about this place, and how he took a salmon here, and I realized that he had described it exceptionally well to me. It was as if the salmon somehow still existed, and always would. That the river, this great Norwest Miramichi, proved to us that life was infinite and continuous.

I looked at the camp and thought the same thing. The patched walls inside, the faint smell of bark and charcoal, the scent of sun hitting the roof reminded me of the story Mr. Simms had told about his sawed-off cousins, and how they had stolen his camp, and how he got it back. I decided I would tell that story to Peter some day. The camp stood in silence at the edge of this world. The world about us was in bloom, with wild daisies and foot-high ferns, the buds sprouted out into early leaf.

“We’ll get fish here,” Peter told me, as I was thinking this and he was reading the water, “I guarantee it.”

Well, guarantee is good, I thought, but since I had only cast a fly rod once or twice before, I was a little uncertain about it.

I heard the rapids at the top of this fine pool as we walked up to it. And there is nothing more thrilling to a fisherman than that sound.

The river was still high, over the grassy path, the water swift and beer brown flowing over the boulders that dotted the river, leaving most of them submerged, their tips like icebergs.

As we approached the pool we could see some commotion. It was strange that the first person I would ever meet on the river was my wife’s first cousin, David Savage, and his dog, Blue. The little mutt was running back and forth on the shore, where Savage had his Norwest canoe pulled up, and at the lower part of the pool he was playing a fish. His rod was bent over, his line was tight in the water, as if it was hooked to a boulder. But now and again that line would move, as the fish moved, and the reel would sing. The fish had jumped a few times, but was now staying down, moving with the current and then turning into it. Then it would take long runs and Savage’s line would go out.

I sat down on the bank and watched him, and had as much fun doing that as fishing. After another ten minutes, David landed the fish, a female salmon about eight pounds. He had taken it on a Rusty Rat, a small dusty rust-coloured fly.

It seemed incomprehensible to a novice like myself that a fly that small could take a fish that large. Or that the invisible leader wouldn’t snap away. And I might have said this when he later showed the fly and leader to me. But it was a number 6 Rusty Rat and, consequently, was a big fly compared to some used later on in the summer. Also a ten-pound test would go down to a six-pound test as the water conditions got lower after June, and the summer went on.

Another thing I was bemused by was how this water could hide fish that size, even if it was heavy darkish water that day.

I suppose I could take a moment to think of Karen Blixen’s description of fish in her story collection
Antedote of Destiny
, and how they are perfect representatives of the best of God’s world. How they live in a kind of three-dimensional world of space and time, that there is no up or down for them, or sideways. They move as surely as any of God’s great creatures, and the salmon is one of the surest of all God’s fish. On the Miramichi, fish
means
salmon. So if you ask someone if they have seen any
fish
and they say, “No, but I got a few trout,” it is not at all a contradiction.

People I met that day, and in the months to come, I would meet for years, and get to know some of them well. But some
of them I would know only as others who haunted our rivers of grace. In the years to come, around a turn on a faraway branch, I would meet someone who I had not seen since the frost came the year before. There he or she was again, working their way through a pool, throwing a wonderful line unconscious of themselves. Or perhaps they would be offshore, in among the ferns, because they had spotted in the dew a patch of wild berries. You would become close to them by this aspect of humanity even though you may or may not have spoken to them very much.

Way up on the Norwest, where I fished for the first few years, I would often meet a man from Chatham, who came the same time as we did every year. Then as the year went along, we switched rivers—he going to a river some place else, and I wouldn’t see him again, until he reappeared early the next season, as if he had come out of the earth. I would look up and he’d be there, wearing the same waders and hat, giving us the same rough smile.

We would talk and have coffee, take turns moving through the pool. Once we boiled a fish on the side of the shore in an old bent aluminum pot on his Coleman stove, in the pouring rain. His wife had made him brown bread and molasses cookies, which we ate along with the freshly boiled grilse. He lazed on the beach staring at the hypnotic water and talked about
bringing his son with him. That he was going to teach his son how to fish as soon as he got a little older.

Then one year at that same time he did not come back. And we found out he had died of a heart attack sometime that winter at the age of thirty-eight. The shadows moved on the trees as we worked our way through the pool ourselves. I stared over my shoulder to the little rocky beach where we had boiled our grilse with such ceremonial laughter—I thought of his son.

Five

THE MIRAMICHI IS A
multiple of rivers and streams intertwined. There is no one place to go, there are literally hundreds of places. Although one place might remind you of another, all places are essentially different, have their own spirit attached to them. The Little Souwest is much different than the Norwest, and different kinds of fishermen travel these branches. But some people travel all rivers.

Peter McGrath often viewed this world of his, the Miramichi, as a continual kaleidoscope of possibilities.

Hunting or fishing, Peter is like this. For instance,
hunting: I’d be sitting near a rut mark, and Peter would walk up.

“Let’s go,” he’d say. “I’m compressed.”
(Compressed
rather than
depressed
because he believes it is a better adjective. And I have come to agree with him.)

“Why—why are you compressed? What is there to be compressed about? There is nothing in the world to be compressed about. There’s a buck right here. Where the hell are you thinking of now?”

Peter would point with his finger to some unknown space far away, around bends and denizens of the late-autumn forest, the sky like grey slate, and all about us the hushed whispers of tiny flakes of snow.

“Are you slightly hyperactive, Peter?” I asked him one day, up on the south branch of the Sevogle, after we’d just walked five miles upriver from where we had parked the truck.

“No, the fish are,” he said, pointing finally to four or five grilse in the bottom part of the pool we were just coming to. As I said, he answers always directly and with purpose.

So that first day, without throwing a line at Wilson’s Pool, we turned and walked three miles back to the Lada truck, because Peter didn’t feel we’d have luck where we were. And who was I to disagree, not knowing one pool from the other.

I had worn my waders for two hours and had yet to stand in the water. Suddenly it seemed as if I were not so much on a fishing expedition, but in the French Foreign Legion: March or die.

As a matter of fact, there was a large puddle on the Stickney Road I felt like sucking dry.

We headed upriver to the open pool on the stony brook stretch that early summer day, years ago, generations of fish ago, past the millions of leaves, on those hundreds of thousands of trees.

I was in no hurry to get out of the truck again. But at any rate I didn’t have to be in much of a hurry, for Peter was prepared to drive another thirty-five miles (or so it seemed to me) through the woods to get us to where he wanted us to go.

“We’ll get fish today—I guarantee it,” he said to keep my interest alive. The road got narrower and narrower; the trees closer; the rocks bigger.

When we finally came near the river Peter was again worried. And this was my first introduction to the guessing game he played with himself always.

That is, were those
fresh
tire tracks ahead of us, which meant that someone else, out of the dozen or so people who fished this area, was in before us.

But when we came to the end of the old road, there was
no other car in sight. We parked at the end of the road, got out of the truck in the June silence and got ready. I put the line through my rod and put on a Red Butt Butterfly, and headed down the long path over the steep bank with him, and then up along the shore about a quarter mile to B&L Pool, or Brandy Landing Pool.

The path we walked was wide enough to make us feel that we were at home somewhere. The sun came down on it through the trees, everything smelled of pine nettles, the ground itself was bathed in copper, and when we got about halfway down this path, I could see the rapids of the small falls on my lower left, and heard it as a constant rush. The water was still high, it being late spring, and over the bank. There was something (and this always struck me) completely self-absorbed about the woods, the trees and the water which allowed people to travel over or upon them, to walk through it or near it, but to rarely be a part of it.

“What river is this?” I asked.

“This is the same river—just a few miles up,” Peter said.

We walked up to the pool in silence.

Brandy Landing is a pool with a rocky bank on the far side, and set off at the top and bottom by rocks. The flow of water at the top is rough, it enters over a cascade of rock, and at the bottom it flows swiftly enough to entice fish on their
long journey from the ocean, to rest in the cool shade, when they come into it. A fly works well except at the top middle, where it has a tendency to bow your line, unless you fish it from the middle of the top rapid. From the top quarter of the pool down to the large rock on the far side fish lie. There are three or four major hot spots, though on a good day fish can be anywhere. It is part of the stony brook stretch of the Norwest Miramichi, and as such has been closed for a few years, now part of the Crown reserve. But anyone who is lucky enough to get to fish it is in for wonderful moments.

I let Peter go in ahead of me, and followed behind. He pointed to where I should start.

I cast my first cast (the line—all ten feet or so—went over my head and back to the water) and hooked a grilse.

“I think I got one on,” I said.

“What do you mean, you think you got one on,” Peter said suspiciously.

“I think I got something on,” I said, as the line bowed, and the fish tried to move out of the pool and upriver—which meant he was probably leaving the pool when it saw my fly skimming across the surface of the top rapid and took.

“My God, you got a fish on,” Peter said in amazement. “How did you do that?”

“I was born for this,” I said. “I was absolutely born for this. Now what do I do?”

“I was absolutely born for this” would come back to haunt the hell out of me over the next few years. It would haunt my aching feet and tired arms and the knots in my leader.

Peter came back and watched me play it. The fish, though only a grilse (a young salmon) and not a large one, was still incredibly strong. It was as strong as any mackerel I played. In fact, it was strong enough that when it took I thought for a moment that I had snagged a rock (except instinctively one knows they have something alive at the end of the line).

“Keep your rod up or you’ll lose it.” And when the fish took to the air he yelled.

“Lower your rod or you’ll snap your leader.”

This went on for about ten minutes, and the fish slowly tired. I managed to do enough to keep it on, but I’m not exactly sure what it was I did. Finally it turned and rolled on its belly.

I managed to drag the fish up over the small lip of the bank. And I thought I was a fisherman. (Well, I didn’t know I had just begun my quest.)

Later that week I went down to get some flies from David Savage. Though not a huge man he is very strong, with fingers that look too thick to tie the minute and wonderful flies he
ties. Like most men, he poles the river, standing in the back of his Norwest canoe built for him by Ralph Mullin. It takes little for him to manoeuvre this canoe over rapids or between boulders. The great thing about poling is that you have more control than a paddle, and can stop the canoe dead, and change its direction in a hair. You can also see the river with the advantage of height, and notice a fish in the pool quicker.

The Norwest canoe is a heavy canoe but takes little to manoeuvre on this kind of river, our Norwest River which is a relatively small and swift river, and reminds me of the Padapedia, the river that runs along the border between Quebec and New Brunswick—or, I should say, the Padapedia reminds me of the Norwest Miramichi. (Save for the fact that the Norwest Miramichi has three times the fly-fishing pressure and is four times as productive.)

You have larger canoes to navigate the main Souwest Miramichi and the rivers like the Restigouche; both of these rivers have long large pools, and you also need to cast a longer line to cover your water. But the Norwest canoe handles extremely well and would do well on any river.

At that time David lived in a mobile, home in Lower Newcastle, and had his fly-tying shop across the road. It was here he kept his fly-tying equipment and deer trophies, all kinds of purple and yellow and green feathers surrounded
him, along with the fur from groundhogs, deer, and bear. He tied for a dozen different stores. He would tie two hundred dozen flies a year. He can tell a pattern by quickly looking at a new fly out of the corner of his eye, when he is up on the river, and remember it.

That night, long ago now, he was tying up a mouse to fish some trout. He had cleaned a trout the year before and had found three tiny mice in its belly.

Most summer evenings after supper, David would take his car and travel up the Bartibog just at twilight, when other people were going home. This is always the best time for trout fishing. He would go down a path to the pools hidden by bends and cedar trees, and orange in the twilight, begin to fish for trout in the swift currents under the alders and sweeping about small jams and windfalls where you need dexterity and precision to cast. His favourite area is far up the Bartibog River, at places where it isn’t much wider than a stream, and has the colour of a cloudy beer. Great trout migrate there and are hidden in the evening shadows.

BOOK: Lines on the Water
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