By mid-June, green covers the mountainside, paints it a thousand verdant shades, leaf upon leaf upon leaf. Mountain laurel blossoms. Blackcap raspberries ripen. Hidden in the dense woods, a towhee’s sharp whistle ascends the canopy, and an ovenbird shouts, teach-er, teach-er, teach-er.
Where I live, rain falls freely, its radical abundance fostering new growth that hides the scars of clearcutting and strip-mining. Over the past 150 years, at the crest of the Allegheny Plateau, the earth has been stripped. Old-growth and then second-growth cut and sent down mountain to sawmills or to the paper mill that polluted the river in the valley. Topsoil stolen, rock displaced and pulverized until seams of coal were exposed. The air dirtied as we burned the black rock to heat our homes and make electricity.
Entwined in this story of degradation and destruction is spring’s astonishing fecundity, which I long for during the gray months of January and February. The first blush of white and pink in April, spring ephemerals casting a spell that rejuvenates like an elixir of youth. The return of a little bounce to the step. A surer grip on the rock as I pull myself up the bank from water’s edge.
Spicebush’s small flowers carry a scent of hope, the possibility that something unexpected might happen. The only obligation: to breathe and look out over this strip-mining reclamation pond my boys and I fish, the water’s calm surface reflecting the sky’s late-day oranges and purples.
In the midst of this, time constantly rearranges itself.
I drift in memory’s boat. Seven years old, with my chores done, I fish the inlet off the river behind my family’s animal hospital, clutching a too-long cane pole in my small hands; coffee can propped at my feet, full of dark swamp dirt and writhing worms I’ve dug from the pet cemetery near the railroad tracks. I’m hoping for a big fish, the kind I gaze at with envy in the magazines at the barbershop while waiting for my turn with the clippers.
Instead, I haul sunfish after sunfish out of the water, elated by the plunge of the red-and-white bobber, tempted to think that this time it might be a bass or catfish, something to brag to my friends about at recess. The bright flags of pumpkinseeds and bluegill twirl at the end of my line, struck by the sun to flash gold and neon. I hear my father call from the back kennels that it’s time to go home for supper.
With the light fading I’m tugged nearly four decades into the future, now a father myself with two young boys, always searching for a new place to fish.
I stumbled upon this pond at the cusp of the plateau two months after my father died. Following a small stream in the state game lands to the west of our house, I noticed an opening in the woods that led to a man-made hole in the earth. Water a bit muddy. Cattails growing rampant on one side. No evidence that others had been here in a long time.
My father’s descent into pancreatic cancer, the way it withered his body and stole him from us in a matter of months, left a broken branch sticking out of my chest. Even now, whenever the wind blows, that branch quakes and the pain comes on again, a slow dull ache. One of the reasons I went to the woods during the early days after his death was so my family wouldn’t have to see me cry.
The pond doesn’t have a name on any map. No one at the barbershop or at a ball game ever mentioned it, or the other ponds that scatter to the west along an old mining road. The glaciers missed this area, so there are no natural ponds or lakes, just streams and rivers. These ponds are evidence of the damage we did. We dug them as an apology for the strip-mining that turned so many of the headwater streams rust-orange, killing the brook trout that had swum there for tens of thousands of years. We hoped these ponds would help filter the toxins that still oozed from the soil. This is what contrition looks like in coal country.
On the day I find the pond, I sit listening to red-winged blackbirds, noticing the rings of smaller fish dimpling the surface. A faint splash among the cattails at the far end of the pond. Then another splash, louder and more chaotic. The thrashing means there’s more than bluegill and sunnies here. Something big patrols the shallows. I walk to the far end and see bass swimming, larger than I could have hoped in a pond this size. That night at supper I tell my teenage sons Noah and Nathan we have a new place to fish.
We begin to imagine the bass through the year, discussing them at meals, wondering about how they survive winter when the shallow pond freezes over, dreaming about hoisting one of their bodies into the air so we can share for a moment the strength of a fish that can survive the poisons of our past.
In May, we watch them, territorial and ferocious, as they prepare spawning beds close to shore. If you lay a lure in front of them, it’s hard to say what they’ll do. Charge it, then turn away at the last second. Ignore it, faithful in their allegiance to the spawn. Engulf it in a terrifying act of consumption. After all, is there any better way to announce one’s dominance than by simply eating what annoys or threatens?
In June, we throw a worm or wiggle an imitation bluegill with some success. If we catch a small enough panfish, we hook it through the back and send it into the clay-colored water to tempt. That is, if the bass doesn’t engulf the panfish before we can even reel it to shore the first time. We’ve landed a few monsters this way – trying to retrieve a smaller fish that has taken our bait only to have that fish swallowed whole and alive by the larger predator. Most often the bass spits the smaller fish right before we land both of them. But, on rare occasions, one of us stands in the ankle-deep water close to shore and thrusts hands under bass-belly: predator snaring predator before prey is spewed.
In July, just as it grows dark, all of us tired but not wanting the day to end before one more cast, we switch from live bait to throw poppers, imitating the frogs that leap into the water and swim for the other side of the pond. In the dark you set the hook by ear rather than by eye. The sploosh of a massive tail and then the slash-splash of an oversized head shaking back and forth, attempting to free itself.
A largemouth never thinks it’s been caught, certainly not conquered. The moments the great fish rests in your hands are simply a ceasefire before the battle resumes with its release. The explosion of tail slapping water as the fish lunges away into the weeds. Its powerful strokes cause the pond’s surface to ripple outward in a V. The wake slowly vanishes, leaving you to wonder if that behemoth actually exists among the cattails and lily pads. Might it all have been a dream?
But today’s weight, gathered in my belly, in my arms and wrist, in my chest as I think of my father, is real. We’ve already caught a few modest bass and loads of hand-sized bluegill and pumpkinseeds, even two crappies. A good afternoon to be sure. Mosquitos have begun to whine around our ears. The boys relieve their boredom between casts by eating wild strawberries that spread in runners, part of the succession of species that will help this place recover. Noah has even put a strawberry on his hook and caught a fish with the allure of the crimson fruit.
We’ll head home soon, grab a pizza or hoagies at the local gas station in the valley. The boys will burst into the kitchen to tell their mom about the fish they caught, and she’ll tell them to wash up and get ready for bed. But like that boy behind the animal hospital, I still believe my next cast will bring a different result. Noah and Nathan complain that I never know when to call it quits, and I suppose imagination plays as large a role in fishing as what you put on the end of your line. Besides, the moon will be nearly full tonight.
And this time, on this cast, maybe the last before I would have said it was time to head home, a bass devours the green worm-rig as it wiggles seductively, irritatingly across the front of the cattails. Only a few feet from shore, a toilet-bowl swirl. The fish does all the work, and my rod tip bends hard toward the pond’s surface. A bass, strong and heavy, charges away from the bank. Waves push out, and Noah runs toward me hollering for Nathan to come, that we’ve got a big one on.
I try to keep the tension but know I can’t control this fish yet. Like most anglers, I simply hope I don’t lose it. The cliché that “the tug is the drug” holds a half-truth. Yes, the tug is exhilarating. A pull toward the wildness the fish possesses. The feeling that you are entering the fish’s world. Swimming as it swims. Wondering if you have caught the fish or if the fish has caught you. But if it were only about the “tug,” we’d be satisfied when the fish breaks off, slips the hook, and returns to its home without being touched by our hands.
I want to touch this fish. To see its flesh, mark its design. To be stunned by the immensity that such a creature lives, even thrives, in such small water, in such a hurt place.
I’m not disappointed.
Noah scoops the fish. Nathan takes the rod. And I hold the large-headed beauty that’s been secreted away just below ridgeline in a pond neglected by most. This is the fish I longed for at 7. Big and heavy, slabs of muscle shaking, the beautiful monstrosity of a predator. It gives me hope that some of the scarred waste in this place is getting a bit healthier.
With each year, snowmelt and spring rains help black birch, then maple and oak grow taller, their leaves rotting back, starting that long walk toward topsoil and the flowers that will follow. Maybe trillium and wood geranium, all the violets and spring beauties, wood sorrel and foam flower, eventually even ginseng again.
The bass I hold is clothed in all hues of green. Dark along the spine. Lime and pine crosshatching the middle. Cheeks colored like a rhododendron leaf. Ragged line across the side as if lightning had left a green trail, empowering this fish with an electric energy that erupts from the muscular tail fin.
Looking down into the maw makes me think of the ways we’ve torn open the earth, tunneled into the darkness. Our time in this space – my boys and me and the memory of my father – coalesce around the wreckage and ruin of the past century. It’s in places like this that we witness how life persists. In touching this great fish, we don’t need to be taught about the odds for survival or what we ought to do for the earth.
The pond is too warm and too full of heavy metals to eat from, so I lower the bass into the water, moving it back and forth so the gills are flush before it swims away.
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