Many Rivers

by FERRIS GREENSLET

1

PERHAPS the reason I have brought so eager a passion to the fishing of so many rivers is that I have never had enough of that sport. Three times in forty years I have taken a full month off just to fish — once in County Cork, once in the Cévennes, once on the far isle of Anticosti. Apart from those halcyon cycles of the moon, my fishing has always been over long week-ends or, at best, two week-ends with the week between; never so far away that telegrams, or the telephone plus swift-footed messenger, couldn’t catch up and keep me in touch with work.

On the other hand, as Lord Grey says in his Fly Fishing, “work, if it be of an interesting sort and not crushing in amount, is a fine preparation for the country. Such work is stimulating, and when we make our escape, we do it with faculties erect and active, with every sense alert and eager for sights and sounds and all joys which are not to be met with in cities.”

It was during the Dividend and Depression decades of the twenties and thirties that such escapes brought the most tingling pleasure. The truth is that, in those years, I seemed to have become a schizo personality, 50 per cent executive and factual, the other moiety literary and fanciful. There was a civil war in my innards for which I could negotiate no peace save when wading in the river with the fish, sharing their cold, sweet, silver life, becoming for bird and kinc and native passer-by merely a harmless “feller in the creek.”

Considering the temporal limitation, I am not ill content with the spatial expanse drained by the streams I have fished. If a catalogue of ships, why not one of rivers ?

In New York: the Upper Hudson, Gansevoort Creek, beloved of Herman Melville and his Pierre, and the Halfway Brook of my own first emprises; later the Ausable, the Esopus, Kinderhook Creek, the Willowemoc, the BeaverkifI, the Neversink with Edward Hewitt performing prodigies of rolling casts, the Callicoon with George La Branche darting upstream like a swallow, creating artificial hatches, taking plump pounders from the most unpromising places.

In Massachusetts: the Konkapot, the Swift, and the three branches of the Westfield, In Connecticut: the Blackberry and the Eight Mile River, rising in that Devil’s Hop Yard of Old Lyme where, in Colonial days, young men and maidens hopped in secret midnight dances, an American Witch Wood. In Rhode Island: Queens River, where Grant La Farge at seventy climbed to the top of a pine tree like a panther to detach his companion’s fly from a reluctant cone.

In Vermont, where in all the winding valleys rail and road and river are braided together and tied at their nodes by covered bridges: the Walloomsac, West River, White River, Otter Creek, the Barton, the Nulhegin, and the Baltcnkill,

Strong without rage, without e’er flowing full.

In New Hampshire: the Pine, the Smith, the Baker, the Saco, the Wildcat, the Glen Ellis; Connor’s River, where, on leaving the stream, I surprised an Arcadian idyl in full bloom under an apple tree; the stony Peabody, the terraced Connecticut, the loggy Androscoggin; the thin Mohawk, the Double Diamond, three Swifts, the Ammonoosuc, the Wild Ammonoosuc, the Upper Ammonoosuc, and the Beebe.

On the last, I had a part in the performance of a miracle of the fishes. One day a friend and I drove for five miles over the bumpy right of way of a lumher railroad in process of construction, into the secret heart of the Sandwich range. After some hours of bushy fishing, we brought to net an iridescent monstrosity of a rainbow trout. Only thirteen inches long, he must have weighed well towards two pounds. Anyone beholding him would have said, with the slightly elevated gentleman in Punch swaying before an enormous stuffed trout in a glass case, “The man that caught that fish is a liar!”

On our way out to the car we saw, by the side of the trail, a rusty motorcycle, complete with sidecar. Hanging from the handle bars was a small fish basket; no fisherman in sight. In the basket, which we were moved to investigate, was an emaciated little trout the size of your middle finger, a good two inches under the limit. Throwing this into the bushes, we forced leviathan into its place in the basket, completely filling it. Some unknown Brother of the Angle has a tale to tell.

2

IN MAINE, I have fished t he Cambridge, the Magalloway, the Cupsuptic, Rapid River (a fivepounder to the little Iron Blue), Sandy River, Dead River, Moose River, Miscre Stream (seventy-two in a week, averaging better than two pounds, all to the dry fly), Brassua Stream; the various branches of the Penobscot, the Sourdnahunk, the Narragaugus, the Machias, the Denys; most often and, with the Connecticut, best, loved of all, Kennebago Stream.

Along the twelve miles of that delightful water ran the abandoned line of a railway, over which a road bus with flanged wheels and miniature freight car behind for guides and rods and fish transported me in luxury, down in the morning, back at night. In the mid-thirties, the rails were taken up and sold to the Japanese, despite my warnings of their evil designs, to blow us up with. Thereafter, I have fished only as many of the thirty pools between the Falls and Indian Rock as 1 thought my legs would get me back from. The eighteenth pool, one of the loveliest, with the pyramid of Kennebago Mountain exactly on its upstream axis, is now called Drinkwater’s Bath, from what happened to that agreeable poet when, contrary to the most explicit instructions from a more cautious adventurer, he endeavored to lengthen his cast by mounting a large stone known to be of the type that gathers no moss.

In North Carolina; the Nantahala and Hazel Run, high in the Great Smokies, where the feller in the creek had intimate conversations with fellow fishermen, white and colored. Florida rivers hardly count, but the fly-taking bass and spotted weakfish of the St. Lucie, Anelote, and Homosassa are a pleasant memory.

In Ireland; the Blackwater, Awbeg, Araglin, North Bride, where Jim White, as tho water rose over his waders, chanted “Here comes the Bride,” and the Funshion, on which under the ruined walls of Glanworth, I, in a dinner jacket, having eaten and drunk deep of Irish hospitality, essayed to show a salmon fisher from home, who said he had never seen it done, how a trout was taken on a floating fly.

A bad mess I made of it, too, until dinner wore off; and between 11.00 and 11.15 P.M. in tho late northern twilight, the priest was put to a brace of good trout. A milo or two on any river in the truly emerald isle will teach you more of Irish history than all the books. At every bend is a ruined tower. There lived large Irish families, with all their cousins, descendants of ancient kings that made merry wars and sad songs, and developed the fiery individualism that is their charm and their undoing.

In France: the Truyere, the Haute Loire at Goudet, where I arrived after a twenty-mile drive from Puy-de-Dome with only one wader; and the green, translucent Tarn. In Canada, where also a fly is a mouche and the reel a moulin: the Batiscan, Riviere Noire, Jacques Cartier, Cassein, Riviere des Neiges, and Montmorency. In Anticosti, still in the same language, the Jupiter, the Becsie, the St. Marie, and the Canard.

En route to the last-named, I complained to the (jardien of the snail’s pace of the white stallion that was inching us along a boggy lumber road. Said the (jardicn, “\Tou don’t understand; this is the father of all the horses on the island.” Said I, “Pcut-etre il est mieux pour l’amour que pour le voyage (Perhaps he’s a great lover rather than a traveler)!” The steed laid his ears back and looked around with a mean expression. The injure rankled in his slow, equine mind. When we left the river with two satisfactory salmon and came to the ruined lumber camp where the conveyance had been left, there it was, but—no horse! Following the track of stately hoofprints, I walked the nine miles to Port Mcnier in waders and the rain, resolved in the future to try to guard my tongue.

In England, the fly fisherman’s terrestrial paradise, the fishing seems to get bet ter with the stocking and preserving of the years, though it was noted in a monastery record of the twelfth century that it wasn’t what it used to be. There t he roll of the rivers fished includes the Barle, the Exe, the Colne, the Dart, the Evenlode, the Windrush, the Wye with Rafael Sabatini, the Tees with Harry Morritt of Rokeby, the Tay with John Buchan; Highlands of Scotland and Water Meadows of Hampshire. There in weedy gin-clear waters, flowing over white beds of gravel, X saw that Shakespeare knew what he was talking about when he wrote, in Much Ado,

Of these fourscore rivers, I remember not only the pools and runs but the best methods of approaching them and the actual lie of the fish. On nights when care-charming sleep will not be wooed to my bed, I count no silly sheep, but fish a mile or two of selected river, downstream wet or upstream dry, as suits my mood. Always I drop off, and sometimes finish out the stretch in sleep. But the fish we hook in dreams rarely reach the net.

There are other streams that I have only daydreamed of fishing. Michigan’s Pere Marquette, Idaho’s Northwest Snake, Oregon’s Hogue, British Columbia’s Kamloops; the rivers of Princess Charlotte Island, stiff with great free-rising Pacific salmon; the Scotch-like waters of Tasmania; the angler’s paradise in the Chilean Andes; the Erste and Hex rivers of South Africa, advertised by John Buchan; New Zealand’s Tongariro, mouth-filling name, in accord with the net-filling rainbows it produces.

I had hoped when Anno Domini had done her work, and purely publishing adventures swung full circle, to cast a fly on some of these distant waters. My purpose still holds to sail beyond the sunset after the war, but South Africa and Tasmania begin lo look like Carcasonnes.

3

THE CHOICE of fishing companions is a deep matter. In camp, for bridge or dominoes in the evening, three are all right, but. on the water one is enough, and, unless rating at least 90 on a scale of 100, too many. A wife or daughter, or what you have, who takes an intelligent interest in the proceedings, who appreciates your merit without emulation, and is not bored when you expound it to her, who likes fish to eat, is an excellent fellow traveler. Of your own sex, the ideal is someone who is not«only keen and competent, but curious, reflective, well-read in the literature of the subject, who considers fishing not a competitive sport but a branch of philosophy, who takes as much pleasure in your fish as you do in his.

Of my own preferred companions, a majority have been surgeons or painters—neat-handed, individualistic, free-minded fellows, like Bob Greenough, beau joucur at every outdoor and indoor sport, lord of the Seigneurie of Pertuis in the Laurentians, who fought the battle of public health against the cancer foe till his own untimely death. Par excellence, I’d choose Leslie Thompson, distinguished painter and fishing philosopher, master of the useful art of camouflaging quick thinking behind slow speech. I have fished, or discoursed of fishing, with the chief angling authorities of our time — Lord Grey, Sheringham, Skues, Hewitt, La Branche — but have known no more knowledgeable head and cunning hand than Lett Thompson’s, no companion who so consistently doubles stream-side joys and halves the griefs.

Of guides and gillies, a book could be written. Two would deserve a chapter apiece: Jim O’Brien of the Kennebago, guide, philosopher, naturalist, stream strategist, friend; and Jack O’Brien of the Cork Blackwater, incomparable raconteur.

One day, during a mixed party of happy memory at Castle Hyde, near Fermoy, t he men went for the day to some hopeful salmon water downstream. There Jack O’Brien, octogenarian, tall, ruddycheeked, taciturn, took us in charge. From the stratospherical point of view, Ireland is but a green speck in the Atlantic Ocean. So it is, too, from the meteorological, and we were having that day quite a spot of Atlantic weather. We worked downstream — three casts, three steps forward, three more casts, three steps forward, and so on da capo. I did it in three-four time, to the melody of “Casev would waltz with the strawberry blonde.” At every step the rain in the back of my neck got colder. The seely salmon hugged the bottom where it was warm. It was a blank and chilling forenoon.

At lunchtime, the ladies of the party arrived on the dripping scene with a hamper. From it appeared a roast duck, a whole ham with fixings, two bottles of Burgundy, six of Bass, and one of John Jameson. As the last was handed out, I descried a dotted line straight to it from O’Brien’s faded eye: —

“Would you like a drink, O’Brien?”

“I would, sir!”

Taking a water tumbler, he filled it seven-eighths full of the creature, put it down the hatch in two gulps, and became suddenly loquacious: —

“Sure and it’s strange things that happen on this Blackwater River, and the strangest I ever seen was right by yon tree, in 1872, it was, in February. I was spinning for pike. I was casting it out and reeling it in, and casting it out and reeling it in, and of a sudden I heard the sound of the hunting horn. And I looked over there across the river, and round that little hill there I seen the fox coming, and after him the hounds, and the master, and the beautiful gentlemen and ladies on their big beautiful horses.

“And the fox he jumped in the river and started swimming this way, and the hounds after him, and the gentlemen and ladies wading their horses up there by the stickle.

“And the fox he got halfway across and then he sank from sight; and I said to mcself, ‘Alas, the fox, poor fellow, he’s drowned!’

“And just then I felt a big pull on me spinning rig. A great pike it was that weighed forty-three pounds, and I played him up and I played him down, and at last I got the gaff into him, and I pulled him out on the bank and hit, him three — no, ‘twas four times, on the head with me priest.

‘And I turned him over, and there was his belly bulging out like nothing you ever saw before. And I says to mcself, ‘Sure and it’s funny the way that pike’s belly sticks out,’ and I took out me knife and slit him up the belly.

“And out jumps the fox, and he ran three miles before they killed him.”

4

IT is a far cry from an Irish fish story to the poetry of Wordsworth, but each year in August or September, after a summer of heat and stale air in town, on the Connecticut or Kennebago Stream I enjoy an experience 1 hat is pure Wordsworth. Lord Grey had it, too, in pursuit of the sea trout in Scotland, and set it down in words too perfect for paraphrase: —

The difference is so great in August, after a few days of exercise in the air of the North, that there come times when the angler, who wanders alone after sea trout down glens and over moors, has a sense of physical energy and strength beyond all his experience in ordinary life. Often after walking a mile or two on the way to the river, at a brisk pace, there comes upon one a feeling of “fitness,” of being made of nothing but health and strength so perfect, that life need have no other end but to enjoy them. It is as though till that moment one had breathed with only a part of one’s lungs, and as though now for the first time the whole lungs were filling with air. The pure act of breathing at such times seems glorious. People talk of being a child of nature, and moments such as these are the times when it is possible to feel so; to know the full joy of animal life — to desire nothing beyond. There are times when I have stood still for joy of it all, on my way through the wild freedom of a Highland moor, and felt the wind, and looked upon the mountains and water and light and sky, till I felt conscious only of the strength of a mighty current of life, which swept away all consciousness of self, and made me a part of all that I beheld.

The mood of the actual fishing is the same everywhere. It is always a restrained and muted fierceness. It is in the casting of the fly, when a moment’s languor is fatal — in the striking and playing of the fish. It is the source of numberless acts of unrecorded heroism, as when rheumatic old men deliberately go over their waders to cover a rising fish without drag. It is a fire in the heart that drives us on to one more pool long after we are thoroughly exhausted and reprehensibly late for supper. The Indians knew it as they cast their buck tails on virgin waters, and my great-uncle Charles, God rest him, who caught, his death wading in the brook on his eightieth birthday, felt its propelling urge. In short, it is fishing.

And of fishing, the fly rod is the characteristic implement and perfect symbol. I have three, in especial, baptized in trout water with the names of the fathers and the mother of the church, Izaak, Sir Henry, Juliana. How their yielding resiliency typifies the character of the great men who have graced our annals, and of many a mute inglorious fisherman, too. What magical comfort comes on winter nights, when the world and its unreason have been too much with us, from the mere handling of their shining strength. When spring is not far behind and trout begin to cast an upward eye, and city-pent fishermen make strange passes with their walking sticks, it is my habit to set a bundle of three or four rods and a net handle in some conspicuous position where the eye will full frequently on it. That precious roll is the emblem of a gentler fascism than the sons of Caesar have represented by their bundle of stolid staves. It stands for direct action presently to come, for memories of vanished days, and for enduring friendship with kindred minds, companions along the rivers of home and by streams beyond the once estranging sea.

And what of the River of Life, the springs whence it comes and the sea where it goes?

An English friend, G. E. M. Skues, has written a classic fishing book, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream. Minor tactics have their place on the turbid stream of consciousness, too. It is the little things that make up the good day. The scent of a country morning; a catbird’s phrase; a line of verse or a page of prose; some small mirth-making incongruity, a happily found word for a quaint conceit; the warm presence of a friend, a responsive smile; the light of sun or moon or star; or, if the weather turns sour, the dash of rain in your face.

Nor is this the supine philosophy of a new beatitude. Minor tactics are active, not passive. They succeed only at the hands of the persistent and alert. As in fishing, languor is fatal.