Local Water

I would rather fish one hour alone in the log jam under General Lowe's or down at Jimmy Gray's than spend a week in Montana or Alaska. I am aware, that to certain observers, the log jam and pool sequence of the near channel of Gen. Lowe's island looks more like a swamp than a trout stream. I know there are steep mud banks on either side, dense bushes, and overhanging trees. I know that once I get down in there, I cannot see more than a few yards, and that I do not have vistas of mountains unfolding behind or in front of me. And I know that in all the guide catalogs and trouting magazines, I have never once seen a picture of a place like this. And I think I know why. Most anglers, and certainly most angling image merchants, would see this beat as a mudhole and would laugh out right, smile in pity, and speak in derision when they got back home among their cronies. I know that. In fact, I am glad of it because those people will never quite be capabale of the feat of imagination that would allow them to see these little pools as a trout stream at all.

I know that when you look at the jumble of vegetation, the mud banks and silt flows, the log jams twisted into the water every few yards, the trapped boards and shredded plastic from the flood, that this place does not look like a trout stream by most standards. I know it is impossible to make an ordinary cast, that nearly every cast is either sidearm or a roll cast with English, French, Italian, and a bit of Chinese on it just to punch the fly in between or under the overhanging bushes, that as soon as the fly hits the water the line has to be mended away from a snag, that the drift distance is seldom more than five or six feet, that a hooked fish is seldom more than two feet from the shelter of a log or the tangle of limbs or debris. I recognize these things. I do from time to time, and not with out touches of an occasional envy, look at the ads for the guided big western river trips where sky and horizon make backcasts of at least a mile possible. It is hard for me to imagine what it would be like to fish all day in a big open country and never have to think about my backcast. And I have seen pictures of people with long rods casting to steelhead from gravel bars bigger than this whole river I fish.

And, I suppose that if I lived there, I would cherish those places and write about them as tenderly and carefully as someone like Haig-Brown does. He fished the big waters of the west as local waters, and he loved them for their particularity to him. He fished them, but more important and far more interesting, is that he lived them in all their seasons, in all their conditions of flood and drought, of sparkling pristine waters and muddied logging runoff, of full, wild fishery and of commercially decimated rivers having to be supplemented by hatchery fish. He did not, however, measure these waters, and certainly not his enjoyment of them, by an external marketing standard suitable for publication in a tourist or guide leaflet. From Walton to Cotton to Haig-Brown it has ever been the same: to be an angler is to love a local water. To love it for the place that it is for itself and for what it is to you as your life becomes entwined with it--with the water, the fish the bugs, the brush, the silt, the erosion, the farms, the tractors, the houses, the trash, the people. To angle is to live the life of a stream in all of its sinuous, surging complexity as it weaves and loops across the land, as it turns back and again upon people and their work.

When I fish this swamp hole of a beat, a community surrounds me. I know that up that bank and across that field is the General's house. If I fire three measured shots he will come. I hear his tractor now. Up there, behind me is Parker Ake's new cabin flooded to the ceiling when they let out the dam. Parker and I stood ankle deep in the rain and mud when Jonathan Acklen drowned. Parker told me how he had seen Jonathan and his brothers and father duck hunting, heard one of their shots, and heard spent shot fall on his new tin roof. Parker had noticed the boat was showing only two inches of freeboard when they passed. Jonathan died here about five minutes later when the boat overturned. The Sheriff and I walked the bank down there just beyond the bridge looking for his body. The snag there at the turn just beyond the eddy hole is where we found him New Year's morning. Across the island and over the ridge there is Simpson's hollow where the General saw thirty-six turkeys last spring. Down the other side where the river doubles back is Wakefield Bend where Bill Ward lives. The Van Zants live on the other side. Mr. Eddy lives a little further downstream. These are the names that mark this place; some of the names have been on this land a hundred years or more.

I know here that if I want a cup of coffee, Mrs. Lowe or Emma Gray or Mrs. Ake would make it for me--and supper too. And if I were stuck or needed a ride twenty-five miles home Jimmy would come pull me out or drive me if I needed it. These are the people who turn to need as naturally as they know the river by the smell in the air. These are people who abandon their own work instantly in the country-born scale of values that puts any neighbor or stranger's pressing need ahead of personal convenience. Jimmy had dropped morning work the day Benson and I were separated by the river and had helped me search for him. General Lowe had been gathering floated off bridge planks in his field when the Acklen boat had overturned, and he heard the cries of the father and brothers. He ran red-faced like a young football player to try to head Jonathan off at the turn before he went under. That night in the driving rain and falling temperatures as we squinted at maps by flashlight and worked the boats in the dark, the local women brought more food than we could eat--breads, sandwiches, cakes, steaming pots of chili and soup. And they all stood the silent vigil by the father in the rain. This is where I fish. This is my water. These are my people. I know it is a mudhole. I know this little bend is lost in time and place, now almost pathetic to all but those who live its life. Nearly all of them are old now, and there are few young men to tend the land. Soon the suburbs will claim this bend too, and the grass will grow tall in the cemetery by the road. I know, I know. But this is where I fish.

There is another community here whose life is intertwined with the other. I suprised a mink just then as I turned past that snag. A wood duck flared as it flew upstream past me. In the field as I walked in, I crossed the fresh track of a deer. A great blue heron lifted without squawking as I crossed the bridge. Usually they squawk. Last week a little green heron flew across the head of the island as I walked up. On the bank above me, beyond the brush toward the edge of the fields are the dens of the woodchucks. Some days when the river is up, the General shoots them with his .270 from his dining room. The .270 shoots flat enough he says. The hunting here has always been good if the number of arrowheads in the fields is any indication. In the trees over Jimmy's snag pool the black vultures roost. They are hunters too. They wait for fish to be washed up on the gravel bars. The beavers are everywhere. Many of the snags that choke the pools are their work. They don't cut down the large trees, but they girdle them, and when the tree dies it will eventually tumble into the river. In the stream are sculpins, and hornyheads, and buffalo and bass and carp and probably walleye. When they let out the dam, Jimmy said you could see the coarse fish going through the flood gates. Many of them were left behind in the fields when the waters went down, but a lot of them ended up in the snag pools. There are also trout. Mostly they are stockers, little fish, dumped in by the hatchery truck at Garner's Ford and from the General's bridge. The great majority are rainbow; there are a few browns. Some fish carry over from year to year, but every angler knows that twelve-pound browns don't live in mudholes.