Category: Northeast

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Connecticut River, New Hampshire, June 28, 2019.

If life were fair the border between Vermont and New Hampshire would run right down the middle of the Connecticut River. That’s how these things usually work, and there’s a justice to it. When a river splits two states, each side should get half, because, well, fairness! Life’s not fair though. When George II set the Vermont/New Hampshire boundary back in 1762, New Hampshire got all of the river, right up to the ordinary low water mark on the Vermont bank. Vermont was left out in the cold. For us this was great news: we didn’t have to worry if we were fishing the left side or the right side. Every fish we caught on the Connecticut was a New Hampshire fish.

We stayed in Pittsburg, New Hampshire, at the Cabins at Lopstick. Lopstick Inn? Lopstick Lodge? I never could quite get the name straight, except that whenever you type Lopstick spell check will automatically change it to Lipstick. Every time. Every damn time. Just try it.

We had driven to the Lipstick the day before, east from Manchester across Vermont, and then almost due north up the Connecticut River. We turned east again and skimmed the Canadian border into New Hampshire, and at that point we were certainly as far north as we’d ever been. We were further north than a good bit of Maine. As the guy in the one-gas pump country store said, you’ve gone about as far north as you can go. And it was a mechanical pump, by the way, none of this digital modernism, not in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. I figured that far north the silicon in a digital pump must freeze in the winter.

I expected something isolated, but the Lopstick Cabins are in the middle of a low-key New England north forest family playground. This was On Golden Pond territory, lake country, where people come year after year for a week or two in the summer, where the cabins evoke a weekly family Northwoods rental not because it’s something they aspire to but because that’s what they are. If Tiger Woods was at the Equinox in Vermont, we’d be more likely to see Smoky Joe Wood at the Lopstick.

We fished with Chuck DeGray who we’d booked through the Lopstick. DeGray is a dour, silent New Englander . . . Wait, no, that’s not right. DeGray is a gruff . . . Well, that’s not right either. Here’s the thing about our two days fishing with Chuck DeGray: the fishing was great, but I can’t remember ever having more fun on water. For some reason coming down the Connecticut it just worked out that way. Early the first day Kris asked what’s that bird chattering and I said that’s no bird it’s a wild Vermont monkey drunk on maple syrup and things went downhill from there. For two days Kris and I fished, Chuck guided, and the three of us laughed, and sometimes I think we laughed because, well, it had been 15 minutes since the last time we laughed. It was relaxed. It was great fishing. It was serious fishing. And everything, every bit of it, was funny.

The first day we fished the upper Connecticut, trout country, and Kris caught the best fish of the day, a big brookie that was the only brook trout caught. It should have been my brookie and I told her so, not that I was jealous. We both caught nice browns, we both caught rainbows, but Kris caught the only brookie. That gives her an Eastern grand slam. It should have been my brookie.

But Kris was on fire, both verbally and fishing. We passed a highway barrier barrel in the river and Chuck said teenagers must have thrown it in and without missing a beat Kris said wild Vermont monkeys and we laughed some more, for a long time. You had to be there. It was Vermont monkeys and New Hampshire chimpanzees and fish.

I asked Chuck if the presidential primary candidates would show up in Pittsburg and he said yes, a lot of them made it to the Buck Rub Tavern, and that they would come to Dixville Notch, whose residents are the first reported poll in the nation. They vote at midnight and then close the poll and count the votes. In the 2016 primary four Dixville Notchers voted for Bernie Sanders, three for John Kasich, and two for Donald Trump.

I asked Chuck what he did in the winter and he said he tied flies professionally, 500 dozen every winter, and manages snow mobile rentals. Plus he had his own shop, North Country Fly Shop and Guide Service. This April he’d gone south to Islamorada to fish tarpon. In the summer he guided almost every day.

Late in the day we were fishing dries and I was getting delicate presentations with long, perfect, drag-free drifts right down the river seam and was catching nothing, absolutely nothing. Meanwhile Kris was giving Chuck a master class on dry fly fishing. It’s all in her soon to be published how-to guide.

“First, you have to get the fish’s attention. Plop that fly down.” Plop. “Then immediately take it off the water. Give it a good pop when you take it off.” Pop. “Plop it and pop it a couple of more times.” Plop. Pop. Plop. “Then drag it under the surface.”

Chuck explained that he’d seen fish caught on a skated caddis, but never a skated mayfly and that’s about the time another fish would take Kris’s fly. My current perfect drift would just sit there. Perfect. Nothing. Kris hooked a rainbow and then another and then another. Kris hooked a chub and that was the best fish ever, because, well, chub.

These fish weren’t fooled. They’d been watching the new season of Stranger Things and thought they were fighting demons from the other dimension. And then we laughed some more because, well, chub.

Thanks Chuck.

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Walden Pond, Vermont, June 26, 2019

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.

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Waloomsac River, Vermont, June 25, 2019

“Waloomsac River, is a small stream, which is formed in Bennington by the union of several branches, which rise in Glastenbury, Woodford and Pownal. It takes a northwestern direction, leaves the state near the northwest corner of Bennington and unites with Hoosac river, nearly on the line between Washington and Rensalaer counties, N.Y. Between this stream and Hoosac river was fought the Bennington Battle. On the Waloomsac and its branches are many good mill privileges and some fine meadows.”

Zadock Thompson, A Gazetteer of the State of Vermont, 1824, Montpelier, Vermont, E.P. Walton, Printer.

We stayed two days in Manchester, Vermont. There is a famous river near Manchester. It’s famous because since at least the 1960s Orvis has sold a fine series of reels dubbed Battenkill, and also sold a high-dollar bamboo rod of the same name. The reels are pretty things, always made by somebody else and marketed by Orvis, and I have a couple from the early 90s when they were made in England. Bamboo rods are always pretty, and the Battenkill particularly so, and I don’t have one of the rods, dammit. If the reels are that good though, and the rods that pretty, then the river must be good too, right? So I had a vague notion heading to Vermont that the Batten Kill was the place to fish.

The Batten Kill though doesn’t get that great of reviews. Apparently it’s pretty, but has better name recognition than fish. Our guide, Christian Betit, with Taconic Guide Service, wanted us to fish the Waloomsac near Bennington, a tiny river that runs 16 miles from Vermont across the New York border where it joins the Hoosic. Part of its course takes it along the edge of Bennington, and for a bit the Waloomsac becomes an urban waterway in one of the least urban states in the Northeast.

Bennington was a mill town, and is now a town sans mills. It’s not a wasteland, but it’s not the Ritz either. Mills were built in Bennington in the 19th century in part because of water power, Waloomsac water power specifically, and a diversion dam ran much of the flow out of the Waloomsac proper through Bennington. The old mills died somewhere in the last century, and while some remain vacant or were torn down, others house small businesses such as the de rigueur craft brewery and a racing snowshoe manufacturer. We don’t have many showshoe races in Houston, so the existence of a racing snowshoe manufacturer was pretty remarkable.

“[The Waloomsac’s] a pretty little freestone stream that has suffered the same kinds of neglect as the area through which it flows, so it’s not odd to find an old car battery or lawn furniture half-buried in the gravel riverbed. But despite this evidence of man’s folly, the stream is home to beautiful trout —some wild, some stockers that have migrated from elsewhere in the system. I’d been introduced to the particular hidden stretch of water along Benmont by a couple of colleagues, who referred to the spot as ‘The Sh*thole'” 

Phil Monahan, The Trout Stream That No One Else Wanted, Orvis News, June 29, 2017.

If I’ve got the history right, the diversion dam was removed, and the Waloomsac flow was restored. The Bennington sewer plant ain’t the very thing and it discharges into the Waloomsac, but in 2017 the City voted $9.9 million in bonds to fix the plant. I figured if they started from the election it should take about a year to prepare plans, issue bonds, and bid construction contracts, and then another year or two to complete construction. This is why I tell my children: Always vote yes for bonds! Well that and because I’m a bond lawyer, and they should support their father in his dotage.

Vermont Fish & Wildlife began stocking the river in 2014 with trophy rainbows and browns, fish at least 14 inches long, so there are good fish. We didn’t fish Phil Monahan’s raggedy water behind the Taco Bell, so I don’t know if it too has been improved, but what we fished was lovely, with overhanging trees and clear water. We put in at the picturesque Henry Street Bridge and fished downstream towards the New York border. It was a Tuesday, and nobody else was on the water.

That largest dark blotch is a snapping turtle in the Waloomsac. In Texas, snapping turtles are an indicator species for good water quality. That’s a good thing.

Because of Christian and anglers like Christian the Waloomsac seems to be having its moment, and seems to be getting the attention it deserves. Vermont like a lot of states has a fishing season, and the Waloomsac is one of the few Vermont rivers Vermonters can fish year around. I gather that there are Vermont anglers who will in fact fish in the middle of a Vermont winter, and so a bunch of crazy people know and care about the Waloomsac.

“More than 20 volunteers worked to clean up a section of the Walloomsac River on Saturday morning. The volunteers pulled out bicycles, scrap metal, tires, wheels, and a propane tank from the Walloomsac, a popular recreation spot and cold water fish habitat.”

Edward Damon, Volunteers pitch in to clean up Walloomsac River, The Bennington Banner, August 1, 2016.

So I was on a nice river with an eager guide and my lovely fishing partner and notwithstanding all of that I was in a foul mood. It was raining. Okay, it was a light, pleasant rain and I knew it would be raining, but still it was wet and grey and a wee bit dreary. Launching the boat I slipped on a rock and fell down in the river. I wasn’t hurt except for that whole pride thing, and I didn’t get water in my waders. Still. That pride thing.

And I wasn’t catching any fish. For the first two hours I caught no fish. Kris caught fish. She hooked three fish while we were fishing at the boat launch. Not that I would let Kris’s good fortune ever blacken my mood. Oh no, not me. I’m surely above that. But dang, right at the launch?

Then I broke my rod. It was the new R.L. Winston 5 weight Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for perfect attendance, and I broke the rod tip when I slammed a weighted streamer into it on a forward cast. Now mind, I knew theoretically that sort of thing could happen, but in my earlier years I must have slammed a thousand woolly buggers into a thousand rod tips and come out fine. Now when I don’t do that sort of thing very often I finally break a rod tip. Worse still it was just after I’d finally hooked and lost a couple of fish. Poor Christian, he had an angler in a dark mood smashing rod tips and he had to loan him a rod to finish the day. I’m not sure I’d have done it.

But Christian loaned me a rod and he pulled out the day. At one point late in the morning–we were on a half-day float–Christian was pondering our final stretch, a nine-foot deep hole, and I watched him think through the alternatives and come up with an appropriate answer: an indicator high on the butt of the leader, a lot of weight, and a random buggy brown pheasant tail nymph variant–random to me, but presumably not to Christian. I’d fished much the same rig before, not that I would have thought of it, but with a different fly it’s the going concern on San Juan River drifts. Watching Christian think through his approach was a joy. He’d worked hard all morning and even with a cranky old guy in the back of his boat he was still working hard. And then I caught five nice rainbows in about 30 minutes. Not that my mood would brighten because I caught fish.

Oh no, not me. Man I love the Waloomsac.

*

We went to Manchester in the first place because Orvis is there, and there is both an outlet store (which is huge) and a separate flagship store (which is huger). American-made Orvis rods are also made in Manchester, though the corporate offices are in Sunderland on the way from Manchester to Bennington.

Manchester is decidedly upscale. We stayed in the Equinox Resort which dates back to a tavern founded before the Revolution, and it was pretty posh. Kris was convinced that Tiger Woods was in the resort with us, though the guy she thought was Woods was sitting behind a pillar in the dining room and I couldn’t get a good look. It might have been Tiger Woods. Woods wasn’t playing at the PGA Rocket Mortgage Classic, so he had to be somewhere, and the guy in the dining room was wearing a golf shirt, plus the Equinox is the kind of place where Tiger Woods might be staying. It could have been Tiger Woods.

Including the Equinox, I counted three pretty big resort hotels within a mile of each other on Main Street. There were good restaurants (though my duck breast glazed with maple syrup came off a bit like duck breast pancakes). Not even counting the Orvis stores, there were enough outlet shops–Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade, Vineyard Vines, and Brooks Brothers among others–to keep a shopper happy. The Orvis stores were enough for us, though we did find a great laundromat. The Orvis stores were magnificent temples to the fly fishing shopping gods, and there were great deals on Helios 2 rods in the outlet store. I went looking and found an Orvis bamboo rod in a glass case in the flagship store. It was one of the newer models, not a Battenkill, and I didn’t buy it this time either.

Instead I bought two size twelve brown drake flies, because that’s the sort of thing one has in one’s flybox in Vermont. You never know when you might need one. I wouldn’t anyway.

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The Beaverkill, The Catskills, New York, June 24, 2019.

At the Wulff School we’d cast fly rods most of the weekend, but we hadn’t fished, and before we left New York State we needed to catch a fish. We had a mile of private access to the Beaverkill, and Monday morning we’d booked Craig Buckbee as a guide. Saturday and Sunday we’d fished once or twice before or after class, but the class day was long, and the bar at the Beaverkill was very good, and practicing Bach on the porch with the guitar and a martini in the evening or the guitar and coffee in the morning was a lot easier than climbing into waders. Plus it’s hard to drink a martini while fly fishing. That’s where bait fishing has fly fishing beat cold.

Craig was one of the Wulff School instructors. He tournament casts, guides in New York and Pennsylvania, and teaches casting in Central Park. That last didn’t seem odd to me, but then I realized that most people may not as a matter of course practice casting in urban parks. Thinking about it later there aren’t many places it would be more fun to learn to fly cast than Central Park. I bet you could aim your casts at those little sailboats.

The manager at the Inn told us we’d done the school right, staying over that morning to fish. The Catskills have had their moments: 19th century fly fishing, Borscht Belt resorts, and the Hudson River School. I told her that a young colleague had mentioned that her husband wanted to go to the Catskills, and she said that the Catskills were again a hot outdoors destination, especially for young folk out of New York City. They come to camp and fish and mountain bike and kayak and Nordic ski and feed the ticks. I guess if I were 30 years old and in the City I’d be there as well. I guess come to think of it I was there. I’m such a hipster.

The locals told us that the Beaverkill Valley Inn and the surrounding area had once been owned by Larry. The locals we talked to all mentioned Larry. Larry turned out to be Laurance Rockefeller Jr., great grandson of John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil (and business partner of Henry Flagler). He’s a noted Republican environmentalist, which is a species that as a conservationist he couldn’t save from extinction. Mr. Rockefeller Jr. has spent big bucks on land preservation, both in New York and out West, and on the Upper Beaverkill he seems to have done smart things. He took acreage and resold it in 20 acre plots protected by conservation easements. He renovated and sold the Inn as a country club to the new residents. There’s no golf at the club, but there is croquet.

He also did about a zillion dollars of stream restoration, and Craig pointed out where huge granite blocks had been carefully arranged  in the river to preserve trout habitat. He did not, on the other hand, spend a zillion dollars on tick eradication, or on mosquito prevention, or, as my new discovery on this summer’s list of insect horrors, doing to death the black flies. Black flies love me. I am their new Man God, and they each want a piece of me as a remembrance. 

Maybe it was so even before all the work, but Mr. Rockefeller’s Beaverkill is as picturesque and inviting as a trout river can be. There was no covered bridge where we fished, and someone should point that out to Larry, but there was a mighty picturesque one just down the road. As a general matter trout live in pretty places, and this pretty place was all a trout could desire.

Meanwhile in this pretty place Craig had spent the past two days teaching us, and I worried getting out on the river that he would constantly remind me to relax my shoulder. He didn’t. He was low key and quietly humorous. He asked about Kris’s preferences, and I told him that Kris would be happiest if he gave her plenty of time to flail away on her own, and he did. He paid attention to her, but it wasn’t intrusive, and it was always just enough. Same for me. He didn’t correct my sloppy casts, even though I figured he ached to do so. This was about fishing, and he talked about the water and helped me fish.

He must have changed out my flies a half dozen times in that four hours. I vaguely remember fishing small streamers with a wet dropper down and across and on the swing. Did I do that? I think I did that, but at this point things blend and that may have happened two days later in Vermont. I think though that that’s how I caught my first small brown. It came off the hook at the net, and I didn’t get a picture, but I figured that if I caught nothing else that was good enough for me and New York.

I also vaguely remember fishing nymphs, and Craig pointing out a yellow Sallie. Mostly I remember how pretty everything was, including the yellow Sallie.

Kris caught a small wild brown on a purple bodied dry, and then another larger stocked brown, and after a while I was fishing with a purple bodied dry. This must be our year for purple. Speaking of Mississippi Craig said he’d gone to Houston’s Glassell School of Art, and had expected to be a children’s book illustrator. He had a particular interest in nature illustrations, and he and Kris talked birds. I wanted to ask if he knew Walter Anderson’s strange work, but never got around to it. I think if I were interested in nature illustrations I’d want to know Walter Anderson, but I never even asked Craig if he painted now. Next time.

We were close to the end, and Craig had told Kris she could cast 15 more times–he’d really sussed her out. It was both a hard number and a small enough number that she couldn’t say she’d lost count. We’d moved downstream towards the Inn and Craig told me where to cast in the softer water flowing past a rock shelf set into the bank and I caught a nice stocked brown on my last cast of the day. I really did. I caught a brown trout on a dry fly. There was no hatch of course, hatches being a hoax that Yankees perpetrate on gullible Houstonians, but at least I’m reasonably certain now that it can be done. I did it. I caught a trout on a dry fly.