I learned something this trip. In each of Vermont and New Hampshire a guide offered to take us someplace he liked, and each time it was a tentative offer with expressed reservations: the guide loved the place but it was hard to get to, or we wouldn’t catch big fish, or we might not catch any fish. Guides have one job: to put clients on fish. It makes them happy if you catch fish, lots o’ fish and big fish. To take somebody someplace else breaks the rule and leaves the guide vulnerable to our expectations. They don’t want to disappoint us.
Of course our line is that we never catch fish, and any fish we catch are lagniappe, but that’s disingenuous. Just ask Kris her opinion of Florida and you’ll hear pretty quick how indifferent we really are. We are out to catch a fish, at least one, and worse, the right color of fish, but in Vermont we’d had our fish from the first day, and for our second day with Christian Betit he proposed a trek for native brook trout.
I could tell you the name of the stream Christian took us to but I won’t. Christian asked me not to, and to tell the truth I just lied. I can’t tell you because I forgot the name three seconds after Christian told it to me. He told me a name I could say, Roaring Fork I think, but I like Walden Pond better.
To get to Christian’s place we hiked, not uncomfortably far but some. The day before Christian had told us a story about a personal tragedy. As a response to the tragedy he lived rough for a bit in the national forests around Bennington, and that’s how he found this place. He said he camped in the national forests and fished and tied flies and read Walden for part of a year. I found the Walden reference oddly endearing. I suspect Walden appeals to lots of young men, maybe young women too but I can’t speak with any certainty for young women, having never been one. Thoreau’s economic minimalism brings a certain comfort, an appealing if ultimately difficult alternative among the possibilities spread before the young. It certainly appealed to me when I was young, and every decade or so I pick Walden up and reread it, or at least parts of it.
Thoreau has his issues, both personal and philosophical, but who doesn’t? He is a Platonist, approaching the Divine through a higher level of experience, which for two years, two months, and two days was Life in the Woods. What’s easy to lose track of reading Thoreau is that he is not merely transcending from something, the mundane lives of quiet desperation in mid-19th century Concord, Ma., but also transcending to something.
There’s a Romantic lyricism in Thoreau’s writing that’s difficult to parse and I suspect is now a mostly foreign language. Whenever I read Walden I find myself skimming along waiting for the point of it all, but that’s a problem. As often as not the Romantic lyricism is the point of it all, and the point is missed if it’s skimmed. His obtuse description of the natural world is sometimes just that, description, but sometimes it’s his description of his elevated contemplation of Nature, and through his elevated contemplation of Nature his contemplation of the Divine.
Nature, with a capital N! That’s more than just plain old nature.
“In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh;—a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—this the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods, 1854, Project Gutenberg Edition, 1995.
Enough of that, back to fishing Walden Pond.
We hiked a bit, well away from the beaten path. I’ve spent some time off beaten paths, but being a West Texas boy they were rarely as lush or as pleasant as a sunny Vermont wood in early summer. Even after my years in Houston I’m more attuned to sparser, drier, browner wild places. We finally came to a river bend where we watched small brook trout rising. Christian stopped and we cast, but the casts were too difficult for me and I put the fish down fast and good.
We were fishing Christian’s three weights and our four weights, and I slowly fished back upstream toward the trail head. Behind me I heard Kris catch a small brookie, her only fish of the day, exactly where I’d put down the rising fish. Not that I’m jealous. Upstream from Kris and Christian I saw a fish rise in a pool under an overhanging tree and then caught it, a small 6-inch brookie, on some kind of dry fly. I stupidly have no idea what fly I was fishing. It was Christian’s fly, and I wasn’t paying attention to the fishing as much as to the place. There was no net and Christian was with Kris so I got the brookie back in the water quick. I didn’t take a picture.
We fished a beaver pond–I fished a beaver pond!–and then the day’s fishing was done. The small brookie was my only fish, Kris’s brookie her only fish. Christian discovered that he’d dropped a sweater and he said he would come back later to look for it, but we insisted that we’d wait in the woods while he went to find it. I sat on a log, Kris stood next to me, and I too provided transcendence to my adoring worshippers, the black flies. They had followed me from New York and swarmed by the hundreds while they left Kris completely alone. Completely. Alone. They swarmed me: the black flies’ man god. Jesus turned water into wine. I turned DEET into attractant.
So I sat in a New England wood thinking vaguely about Thoreau as I have vaguely thought about Thoreau from time to time for nearly 50 years, as often as not as a potential justification for whatever foolishness I might be considering, and swatted black flies with absolutely nothing else to do. I didn’t really mind the black flies, not to abstraction anyway. And I never mind thinking about Thoreau. It was the most luxurious hour I’ve spent in a long, long time.
Back at the cars Christian was apologetic that he’d dragged us off to the woods to catch two fish, but what else could we ask from a perfect day fishing?
*
That afternoon in Manchester we visited the American Museum of Fly Fishing, which is directly across the parking lot from the Orvis flagship store. Like everything we saw in Manchester, it’s a well-put-together space, in the sort of style of the house where your cardiologist lives (if like me you’re unlucky enough to have a cardiologist). It’s not big, only a bit bigger than the house where your cardiologist lives, but like I said, well-put-together.
The museum is part library, part permanent exhibit, part temporary exhibits, and part fly catalogue. We spent most of our time in the permanent exhibit. I suspect, just suspect, that if he’d thought about it Henry David Thoreau would not have admired my adoration of fly fishing gear. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity ain’t in it. Still, it’s beautiful stuff, and the museum does a good job tracing its development and its practitioners. Notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau might have said, it’s probably no accident that one of our great writers of Nature published his masterpiece two years before C.F. Orvis opened his first fly fishing shop in the Equinox House, in 1856. Orvis’s brother Franklin had opened the Equinox House the year before the publication of Walden. It was a trend. Nature! Everybody needs a place in the woods.
Unlike Mr. Thoreau most of us aren’t Kantian Platonists, but neither, hopefully, are we merely material girls living in a material world. The beauty of the craft, whether it’s a tied fly or a well-crafted rod is an enhancement of our experience, not the experience itself. Walking through a wood carrying a well-used rod and thinking about water and woods and sky and birds and small fish, and, well, Walden, and, well, black flies, may be one of the better approaches to the Divine that I can muster. I’ll be surprised if many things better come along.
