Every year just after Memorial Day, when the blackflies are at their cruelest, I take a Maine fishing trip with my brother Jake, his twin daughters, my two sons, and one of my daughters. It’s topwater angling for smallmouth bass, which, while they guard their spawning beds, turn as vicious as those blackflies. They doubtless strike our muddlers and poppers more out of anger than hunger.
We are short on canoes for such a company, so we need to hire a guide or two, one of whom I’ve known since I was more or less a kid. I’ve encountered hundreds of other professional outdoorsmen and -women over the decades, but none has equaled him for savvy. As my brother once remarked, “Every trip with him, land or water, is a nature lesson.” I cherish this man’s friendship.
I don’t thrill to the fight of the smallmouths as I once did, but the rest of the outing is dearer to me than ever in what is now undeniably my old age. Come March, I start looking forward to seeing that local friend and so many of our clan in one place. Even apart from the wonderful human connections, there is a lot to savor, like the craftsmanship that goes into the locally made motor canoes: their beautiful ash thwarts and ribs; their cedar hulls; their transoms, often wrought from exotic mahogany.
That’s not even to mention the lakes themselves. Very little water exists in North America or anywhere else these days that’s as clear as theirs. An equal marvel: we can drink from each. I daydream of their very offshore rocks, glacial erratics that provide good fish cover, and of their surroundings woods, which crowd the waters right down to the sand with softwood thick as dogs’ hair. The pickerelweed in the shallows, not yet quite in bloom, nonetheless shows a hint of the lavender to come. There are other splendors, of course: moose, deer, osprey, eagle, beaver, mink, otter – that list is also a long one. Our place in Vermont, so different topographically, is just as lovely in its different way, and yet my escapes to this other landscape, which I’ve made since 1953, always feel like blessings.
The spring of 2022, however, saw COVID spiking in that part of the world. The only medical facility anywhere nearby is a minuscule clinic. Jake and I, both hurtling toward 80 now, decided to call the trip off.
But soon all the kids reminded us that they’d made arrangements, some at great effort, to get time away from work, and, more important, that the family reunion is always more important than the bassing anyhow. So why not test for COVID before arrival, then go to our camp just for the company? After all, we’d be in a remote place, removed even from the very sparse local populace.
We did bring our rods...which stayed in their cases. Stories by the score were pulled out instead, many poking affectionate fun at one or more of our gang, especially its older members. Those anecdotes came as relentlessly as the laughter. We took turns preparing meals, and the food was superb as well. Above all, the sense of family continuity affected everyone, particularly us brothers, the tribal elders now, however sudden and shocking that seems to us both.
And again, it was more than merely significant that our gathering evolved in a place where the sunsets over the lake were as stunning as ever, where the freshness of the prevailing northwest wind and the air’s evergreen scent seemed tonic, where something like the dive of a fish hawk or the exuberant leap of a salmon proved a priceless spectacle. This list could likewise go on and on.
Now, I’m not at all some deluded back-to-the-Paleolithic type. Nor will I let myself wax too sentimental about nature’s “harmony,” as – perhaps overdosed on Disney films – some too easily do. (They must never have seen the likes of what I saw one spring from my turkey blind: a coyote eating a young snowshoe hare alive, the poor thing shrieking until it couldn’t.)
For all of that, our non-fishing trip did make me more vividly aware than ever that, beyond a world in which our significant encounters increasingly come by way of a screen, there lies a wider and more venerable one. Our gathering provided things that transcend the technologies: it revealed the importance of binding affections, and it did so in a place that reminded us how impoverished our distinction between capital-N Nature and human nature can be.