Tag: Vermont

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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire Packing List, Part Two

Range Rovers

I’ve been looking at new cars. Mine is starting to cost real money to hold together, and its reliability worries me. If price and global warming weren’t a problem, I’d go buy a Land Cruiser and be done. I want a Land Cruiser, but the current model is 10 years old, gets a combined mileage of 15 mpg, and costs north of $80,000. Eighty thousand dollars would pay for a lot of fishing. Plus the Land Cruiser is just too big. The 4Runner is cheaper and smaller but just as old and nearly as guzzly, and their sister cars, the Lexus GX and LX, are old and guzzly and expensive and worse, they’re ugly. The best thing about driving a Lexus SUV is that you don’t have to look at that horrific grill. Is there an uglier grill on the road than a Lexus SUV?

I’ve driven a mid-sized Mercedes SUV since 1998, two of them anyway, but the new GLE has four different interfaces to communicate with your car’s electronic brain: voice, touch screen, a rotary controller, and not one but two steering wheel touch-pads. That gives you just all kinds of useless ways to turn on the radio. Meantime newer electronic safety features and adaptive cruise control are all extra added costs, and the dealer tells me hybrids are only available in California. Apparently Texans don’t care about global warming.

I want a car that will tow the skiff, has some off-road capability, has at least AWD for boat ramps. and has a reasonable array of cutting-edge safety stuff. I think I want a hybrid, and I know I want a car that I can drive home when there’s a foot of water on University Boulevard. This is, after all, Houston, and the streets in our neighborhood flood on a whim.

Which is a long way around to the half-day we didn’t fish in Vermont, when we spent a morning driving the Range Rover Sport on an off road course at the Equinox. The Land Rover Off-Road Driving Experience! I am experienced!

Driving around the course I got to tip the Sport down radical inclines and through mud and over humps and through gullies and whatnot, and I got to drive a car that I’d been thinking about test driving, though we were admonished that Land Rover did not consider the Experience! a test drive. Range Rover Sports are expensive, and I worry that they wouldn’t be easily repaired on the Alaska Highway or in the far-off wilds of Nebraska, but the gas mileage is reasonable, and this fall’s new plug-in hybrids would be great for my daily commutes. Plus how the car managed itself safely down a 12-foot bluff was great fun.

And Range Rovers always look good, and they balance really well on three legs.

Leaves

My experience of fall color is pretty limited. Coming down the Connecticut River, Chuck said more than once that we should see this when the leaves change. I wish we had.

Knots

I have tied my own leaders for a long time, especially for salt water. I’m really good at blood knots, which may be one of the strangest accomplishments anyone can lay claim to. “I,” I say with a swagger, “am a master at blood knottery!”

For some reason I had it in my head that a blood knot was the very thing for attaching two dissimilar pieces of leader material, like flouro to nylon, or if you wanted to make a big jump in tippet diameter. After the Joan Wulff school I now understand that I was wrong, which I rarely am and in any case I never like hearing. I guess what I originally heard was that blood knots were better than surgeon’s knots for attaching larger diameter bits of leader, and I translated that into something different. Now I have to learn a new knot, or at least re-learn how to tie surgeons knots. I hate tying them, and I hate how they put a bit of a bend in a leader. I’m sure that fish hate them too.

Books

I skimmed a history of New Hampshire, Morison and Morison’s New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. New Hampshire’s first commerce was providing 100-foot mast timbers for the British navy. Harvesting and transporting 100-foot timbers was brutal business, but neither Horatio Hornblower nor Jack Aubrey could have captained British warships without New Hampshire.

I listened to Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, and Absurd Road to the White House. I’m a sucker for a good political story, and this is one. I actually ended up oddly happy that the first presidential primary is in New Hampshire. I also started The Hotel New Hampshire but never finished it. I ran out of time. I’ll finish it up next time.

I listened to a bunch of Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther mystery novels, maybe a half-dozen, enough that I ended up feeling guilty: these are perfectly good entertainment but not the sort of thing one reads for self-improvement. The first novels are set in Battleboro, Vermont, but then they range further afield to greater Vermont. I liked listening to them on my morning runs and commutes. I also read some Robert Frost poems and some Hart Crane poems. I could never decide where exactly Frost was from, but New England I reckon. I failed to re-read Walt Whitman, and I’m sorry for that.

Image result for natty bumppo

Driving we tried to listen to The Deerslayer, which is set in the area that would be Cooperstown. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Last of the Mohicans, since a high school English teacher pointed out to us that in both Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Scott’s Ivanhoe the dark-haired girl had to die for her ethnic transgressions, while in each case the blonde girl lives. I think the teacher was pointing out something about the 19th century, and letting us know that part of the authors’ message was that we could empathize with those dark-haired heroines and certainly with Chingachgook, but growing up in the South one never knows. Maybe she was warning us about the inevitable outcome of ethnic transgressions. We never made it all the way through Deerslayer, and I suspect Mark Twain was right. I got mighty weary of Natty Bumppo’s virtues during the long wind ups to some bit of actual business.

I read and listened to Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which is magnificent, both as to size, over 1400 pages, and content. Economics, social mores, riots, battles, politics, sanitation, wampum, slavery, disease, immigration; through the 19th century the book covers New York City history with granular particularity, but even when it overwhelmed me it never bored me. The book weaves New York through the national story and then tells the story of both the city and the nation. It’s a fine history.

Playlist

New York

There’s too much music on my New York playlist. I don’t think I ever got through it all, and I’m still listening to it. Big Picture? There’s New Wave and Punk, Brill Building, Gershwin and Bernstein and Copland. There’s Be-Bop. There’s Tin-Pan Alley. There’s 60s folk music and all those interchangeable current bands that could come from no place but Brooklyn. There’s Bennie Goodman and Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Was there ever a musician tied more closely to a city than Paul Simon? Ok, maybe Leonard Bernstein? Ok, maybe Duke Ellington?

I carried the small travel guitar and played Gershwin transcriptions. When I got back to Houston, a friend pointed out that Gershwin died when he was only 38. I’m still working on the transcriptions, and wishing there were more, at least 40 years more.

George Gershwin, Carl Van Vechten, 1937, Library of Congress.

New Hampshire

Bill Morrisey, Mandy Moore, and Aerosmith. I liked Ray Montagne, who I’d never listened to before.

Vermont.

Vermont’s music comes off better than New Hampshire’s. If nothing else you can always cue up Moonlight in Vermont. l must have downloaded 27 versions, including Billie Holiday and Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Phish hasn’t recorded it, but I’d never listened to Phish, and I’m glad I did. Apparently jam bands are a thing in Vermont, and I’d take Phish any day over Aerosmith. I also came across a young woman named Caroline Rose on a list of ten Vermont bands I was supposed to listen to now, and decided in fact she was someone I needed to listen to now.

There was also a Bing Crosby/Peggy Lee version of Snow from White Christmas.

Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel (“Astor Motel”) while touring in Florida, Charlotte Brooks, 1955, Library of Congress.
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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire Packing List, Part One

Mount Equinox overlook, Manchester, Vermont

Rods, Reels, Waders

We took five rods, two 9′ five weights, a new Winston Pure and an Orvis Helios 3D; an 8’6″ four weight Orvis T3; a Scott 8′ four weight STS; and a Winston 9′ six weight boron IIIx. We never used the six weight, but being a Winston it looked good in our luggage. the Winston Pure unhappily broke when I slammed a weighted streamer into its tip, but I’ve broken rods before and will break them again. It’s off at Winston getting repaired. I think the repair cost is $75.

The broken Winston Pure is the rod Trout Unlimited sent me for my work as chair of our Houston Mayor’s Commission for Preservation of Bayou Salmonids. Restoring brook trout to Houston’s bayous is a real priority of mine.

Our reels were a mixed lot, all click and pawl, some older Abels and Orvis Battenkills and a newer Hardy. In Vermont on the Waloomsac River the combination of largish trout and current made a disk drag useful, and it’s the only time I’ve ever wanted a disk drag for trout. All of our lines were coldwater floating lines.

For pike we used Chuck DeGray’s eight weights with Orvis Mirage reels and 250 grain Depth Charge lines. I used the Recon and Kris got the Helios 3. Go figure. The Mirages are great, powerful reels, and I’d fish with Recons any day.

We took waders and boots. The hardest thing about air travel with wading boots is that post-wading they’re ten pounds heavier, and it’s usually enough to take our luggage over the weight limit. To dry them I’ve tied them to car roof crossbars, stuffed them with newspaper, perched them on air conditioning vents, and used a motel room hair drier.

By happenstance this trip I found the perfect answer: we didn’t wade the last two days fishing. Where we fished the Connecticut isn’t a wadeable river, so we stayed in the boat. That meant by the time we got to the airport the boots had dried. If I can help it I’ll never wade on the last day of a trip again. And I’ll try to get a rental car with rooftop crossbars just in case.

Chuck had two specialized bits of gear for pike fishing. To land fish he used a cradle net. It seemed harder to manage than a normal landing net, but it worked well for pike. He also used a jaw spreader to keep a pike’s mouth open for hook removal, which reminded me of a tool my dentist might use when I was being uncooperative.

Luggage

For years I’ve had a rolling FishPond rod case. It looks great, long and thin and stylish like a lot of FishPond stuff, with a lot of serious looking pockets and such for reels and fly boxes. It’s big enough for four rods, a vest, waders and boots, plus the other miscellany necessary for a fly fishing trip. The problem is that every time I drag it behind me through an airport it flips, and when I wrestle it back upright it immediately flips again. If I lean it against something, say an airport check-in counter, it immediately slides down onto the floor. It will not stand upright and it will not lean. I put up with it out of a certain earned fondness from familiarity, and it’s problems are no more than an annoyance and its virtues many, but Kris, who is a woman of strong opinions, passionately dislikes that case.

She bought an Orvis Safe Passage rolling bag a few year’s back. It’s pretty, but it has it’s peculiarities. It has these two three-quarter inch aluminum tubes inside that seem to go nowhere and do nothing, and for the life of me I can’t figure out their purpose. Still, it’s big enough for waders and boots and vests plus a goodly number of clothes. It’s got one real problem: It’s not big enough for rods.

So for Father’s Day this year Kris bought me a different FishPond bag, the Grand Teton, which rolls without flipping, at least some of the time stands without falling over, and is long enough for rods. In the old bag the hard bottom let me carry rods in Neoprene socks without tubes, which saved both weight and space, but I don’t trust rods in the new bag without tubes. Stuff is piled right on top of them. It does stand upright in an airport, and it doesn’t immediately flip over when I roll it along behind me. So far so good.

Rental Car

We usually rent mid-sized SUVs because we can load rods inside the car without breaking them down, but for some reason the cost of an SUV out of New York City was ridiculous. Instead of the SUV we got a full-sized Chevy Malibu. I guess it’s not really amusing to most people, but driving a Chevy Malibu around America sure amused me. It just seemed so 1960s, like a living television commercial during the Sunday night Bonanza episode.

Manchester, Vermont

We picked our New York hotel because it was close to a National car rental pick-up near Washington Square. There’s a premium paid for picking a car up in NYC, keeping it a week, and then dropping it off in Manchester, NH. I don’t know if we also paid a premium because the car was a Malibu.

Hotels

We had great luck everyplace we stayed, the Washington Square Hotel in NYC, the Beaverkill Valley Inn, the Equinox in Vermont, and the Lopstick Lodge in New Hampshire. I’d stay at any of them again.

Donuts

I’ve already mentioned our New York City donuts, and we didn’t look for bakeries in the Catskills. Manchester, Vermont, however, is a donut rich environment. I had read that the Equinox Resort had the best donuts in town, and the cider donuts are very good, warm, and dusted with sugar. The problem is that donuts are only available in the dining room at breakfast, and two of our three mornings we were gone before the dining room opened.

Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts, Manchester, Vermont.

Our second Manchester morning though we made it to Mrs. Murphy’s donuts. They were already open and full of morning coffee drinkers at six when we got there. The guys at the counter had ceramic mugs, so high marks for Mrs. Murphy.

When we looked for donut shops in New Hampshire all the offerings we found were Dunkin Donuts. This didn’t surprise me. Getting ready for New Hampshire I’d read Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die, about the 2016 New Hampshire primary. It prepared us for New Hampshire’s fondness for Dunkin Donuts. I don’t have a strong opinion about Dunkin Donuts, it’s a chain that’s not that common in Texas, but years ago when I read the Spencer detective novels Spencer always ate their corn muffins. I buy one whenever I’m in a Dunkin, but as someone who grew up on cornbread I think they could be better. Don’t tell Spencer.

What We Didn’t Do

In New York we didn’t explore the Catskill rivers, other than one small bit of the Beaverkill. There is also river fishing further north, and winter steelheading is a thing in the far New York north. There are a lifetime of rivers there, and I’d love to have seen more.

We’d been to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown before, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art many times. I’ve heard there’s not much else to do in New York.

In Vermont we didn’t visit Robert Todd Lincoln’s home, or fish the Batten Kill. There are lots of streams we could have explored but didn’t. We did stop at a farmhouse to buy maple syrup, so that’s off our list.

I really wanted to rent one of these tiny boats in New Hampshire. Puttering around the lake in the marine equivalent of a go cart just looked unimaginably fun to me. I had worked out a plan for fishing the lake from one of those boats rigged like we fished Pyramid lake in Nevada, with a balanced leech and a dropper nymph on a long leader under a bobber. I think I could have spent at least a day drifting and watching the bobber, but I never rented the boat.

In New Hampshire I also never got to shake the hand of a presidential candidate, or eat at the Buck Rub Tavern. I could have probably crossed both thoseoff my list in one trip to the Buck Rub. I’m pretty sure there’s always at least one presidential candidate shaking hands and busing tables at the Buck Rub.

We didn’t actually drive into Canada. We took our passports, but just couldn’t bring ourselves to put up with the bureaucratic brouhaha of getting over and then immediately turning around and coming back. I kept looking for the wall between us and Canada but couldn’t find it. Build the Wall!

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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.