by Tim Traver
The History Press, 2020
My approach to fish is strictly epicurean. The last fish I caught was unintentional; a smallmouth bass hooked itself while I untangled a line. I’ve never gone fly-fishing. And yet, I love a well-crafted fishing book, a book blending the lyrics of landscape with the foibles of human history, where an author’s adventures and musings support a strong narrative. Add a sprinkle of personal history, and the book elevates to a threshold of literature.
Tim Traver’s Fly Fishing & Conservation in Vermont: Stories of the Battenkill and Beyond is that sort of fishing book, a bouillabaisse of science, history, and the unbridled joy of a summer spent fishing. Of the legendary Battenkill, Traver has more to say about the pot-bellied fry he watches than of the trout he catches:…fry, thousands of tiny black squiggly lines moving together in the water of a small oxbow, where the translucence of the water and the bright light of the near-solstice sky lit the stones three feet down. The trout school was moving like a moving pointillism – a little living etching of black lines moving, nearly invisibly, toward some unknown shore.
Fly fishers belong to their own subculture long devoted to conservation. Traver introduces us to a few historic figures, including statesman George Perkins Marsh, who grew up on the Ottauquechee in Woodstock, which, coincidently, is Traver’s home river. While unspooling line, the author ponders Marsh, one of the first Anglo-Americans to grasp the ineluctable bond between a river and its woodland.
While wetting a line below the Taftsville Bridge, Traver imagines Marsh’s river revitalized, a river shaded by enormous old-growth silver maples…a river valley where humans get their energy from the sun; a river carrying loads of drowned wood…a river that can flow into its floodplains; a river whose parallel roads are repaired with natural processes in mind…a river where old railroad dikes are removed and redundant dams are ancient history.
Traver also introduces us to Charles F. Orvis, the fly-fishing entrepreneur who started the Orvis Company in Manchester in 1856, the oldest mail-order retailer in the United States; and to Thomas H. Chubb, founder of the T.H. Chubb Rod Company in Post Mills, once the world’s largest cane-rod builders. And then there are the contemporary figures, including bamboo rod maker David Ganley, owner of Gove Hill Rods in Thetford Center, and David and Sally Laughlin, whose efforts in 1970 to clean the Ottauquechee led to the formation of Vermont Institute of Natural Science and the Riverwatch Network.
With Traver as your guide, you visit a fish hatchery, a fish club, and a family fishing festival. You learn about shad runs in the lower Connecticut, bow fishing for carp, fly fishing for northern pike, and Vermont’s history of stocking non-native trout starting with rainbows in Lunenburg in 1886, followed by browns in Bennington County in 1892.
Traver knows where he’s headed. We fished…here and there. I’d tell you where precisely if I knew. Doug knew. If I lived here or fished here often I’d come to know. Fly fishing constructs in your head a map of a river that is a blend of geography, animal intelligence and obsession.… And the river knows where it’s going – to the sea.
After fishing Traver’s book, I know where I’m going: to the Hanover Co-op to buy the ingredients for broiled trout and hazelnut butter, listed in Appendix A, a most valuable appendix.