Trout season opened recently in most of the Northeast, and in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share a fishing story in this week’s blog that I wrote in 2006. Good luck to all you fishermen and women out there — ED
I never needed an excuse to go trout fishing as a boy; it was always just part of the everyday fabric of life. I fished like I ate or slept. As I get older I find that fishing, like cooking heart-healthy meals, is something I aspire to do more of, even while I never manage to do it nearly enough.
With this in mind I hit the woods last Friday night for fishing camp, a formerly annual occurrence celebrating the opening of trout season.
As a boy fishing camp meant a pop-up tent next to a swollen river and a camp fire: the old rugged. Me and Harwood, or Watson, or Crosier would start fishing at midnight on Opening Day. I can still taste the flashlight in my mouth; feel my frozen fingers as I played line into the river’s depths. After we’d all snarled our reels in the darkness, we’d head back to the tent to have a bonfire and tell boastful stories and maybe get sick on Skoal.
These days fishing camp is a log cabin in the woods, nowhere near a river or pond. It’s new rugged: a woodstove, propane lights, lemon meringue pie for Christ’s sake. It’s a suitable base of operations, though, somewhere away from it all, where the boys can still gather to tell fish stories before heading out and making new ones.
The opener this year fell on a chill, gray day.The sun fought the clouds gamely for a while in the morning, poking through now and then before being completely overwhelmed. It wasn’t raining, though, or snowing, or both, which lately seems all we can ask for.
Brian and I loaded spinning rods into his ‘76 Land Cruiser that morning. Our first stop was Lake Paren where we fished for dole rainbows, the two of us sprawled leisurely on a wooden dock. Brian regarded his bulging tackle box like it was a time capsule. Remember the Gray Hackle? he asked, picking through receipts from the now defunct sporting goods store. He had licenses that stretched back to the early nineties and enough lead sinkers that we wondered if perhaps he could get his tackle box classified as a superfund site.
We fished until two trout made fatal mistakes, then, with lunch flopping in our creels, we took the cruiser out into the Hollow to fish the early stages of White Creek. The stream there had a greenish limestone tint. Snow cover was still uniform and perhaps a few inches deep.
At one point in our travels we tracked a wandering coon who’d come down out of a yellow birch to fish the creek before us; smiled at his little human-looking tracks. In a half mile or so we saw no evidence of success, so we gutted the trout and left the fish heads and viscera on a bed of moss for him, figuring that when he found them he’d fancy this his lucky day.
In all the fishing was pretty slow, although we were fortunate enough to pull a few feisty brook trout out of one honey hole. The trout were holding under the bank and were provoked with a small spinner. After, we marveled at their butter-colored bellies and the tattoo work along their glistening flanks.
We took the ride home at a crawl, stopping at one point near Blueberry Hill to watch a fisher lope from the outskirts of a pasture into the edge beyond. It was a simple day. A good day. Wild turkeys were gleaning grain and corn in the soggy fields. Brian said: “We’ve gotta do this more often.” The air felt clean as it washed through the Land Cruiser’s open cab. At camp we build a warm fire and had a big trout lunch. It was a beautiful, simple day.
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