On the ride into the trailhead Rich pointed out small streams and talked of each one intimately. Some of them were less than shoulder width, some six or seven feet across. Some held just a trickle of water, some looked to be waist deep. All of them held his stories. Boyhood tales of boundless exploration. The intense study in high school years of each stream from the source to the mouth and all the pools and riffles along the trunk. Entomology, seasonal water flow and fly selection through trial and error specific to each stream. Trips to these waters now and how each one has changed. A living history.
At the heart of each story: native brook trout.
We parked the truck and geared up for the walk in. Six-foot-six three weight rods, a box of dry flies and water bottles. The hike-in on the trail was easy. As we walked, he told me of following the blue lines of streams on maps in the early years and drawing in the ones that were not shown as he found and explored them. He said by the time he left for college, some of the pages looked like a first-grade art project. We laughed because I had done the same thing in an old copy of the Maine Atlas and Gazzatteer my grandfather had given me.
About a mile into the woods, we left the trail and descended into a ravine that held one of the most amazing pieces of water I have ever seen. We bottomed out at the foot of a small waterfall cascading into a wide pool of water so clear it takes your breath away. I stopped for a few minutes to absorb everything around me. The birds singing above the sound of the water crashing, the smell of wet moss and damp soil, the touch of cool air rising off the stream to meet the heat of the day rushing down from where we had just been. It had been a long time since I had stood in such a place. I was speechless.
Rich took the right side of the pool and I, the left. We took turns dropping flies at the base of the waterfall. A few casts in a brookie rose from nowhere and hit Rich's fly. As I watched him release it a thought that would continue to build over the course of the morning crept into my mind: how did these fish get into this stream halfway up a mountain?
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While he doped his fly, I kept casting and missed a small fish on the set. I made another cast to the right of the waterfall into a shadowy corner in the rock face behind it. I watched the fly float into a small eddy and seemingly stop in the water. Just as it did, a dark form came up from below and inhaled it. It was not small. I panicked for a moment thinking I was going to do something wrong and lose it. I wanted to see this wild creature. I brought it to hand and Rich said that fish was as close to a "trophy" as one could hope for on such a stream. All the hero shot bullshit aside, that question began to build in my head...where do these fish come from and how the hell do they live long enough in this little stream to get that big?
We took turns leapfrogging down the stream waterfall to waterfall and fishing each pool as we went. Some of these pools were large and gravel bottomed, some were literally carved into the rock and the size of a kitchen sink. Each one seemed ancient. Most held a brookie or two.
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Several times we had to climb up the sides of the ravine through scrub brush to navigate hundreds of yards around deadfall and blowdown. My legs burned, my lungs cried for air, I tasted copper. I felt my age while also feeling like a kid again. The effort put forth to do something, whether it be fishing, climbing a mountain or mowing the lawn, is something that seems to get lost in translation, something that gets left out of the story. Rich and I will remember a few of those fish, the memories of them will fade with time as others come and go. That "day we hiked that ravine" won't be forgotten because getting into that place was the story.
In the last section we fished I set up on a pool while Rich went twenty yards downstream to another. Knowing the morning was coming to an end I just stood and stared into the water. The clouds gave way to the sun and the pool lit up. I could see everything. And in the back corner, just behind and to the side of the whitewater was the outline of a brookie laid up in what was just seconds before a shadow. I made a cast just to the right of it and watched the fish move to the fly and then stop. Two more went unnoticed. On the third, I watched the fish creep up under the fly, almost stand on its tail and sip the fly. It was a beautiful way to end the day.
We hiked up out of the ravine toward the trail back to the truck. As we slogged our way through the brush, fallen trees and mud I kept running possibilities as to how these fish had made their way up this stream, through waterfalls, some twenty feet in height and found refuge in the pools. By the time we made it back to the trail and I had caught my breath, I had to ask. So, I did. He laughed and said he wondered when I was going to ask that. He had theories but no definitive answer. He left me with, "It's a mystery. Which is why this place is so magical."
A fitting answer I thought as we passed the waterfall we had started at. Recalling a class called "The Natural History of New England" in college, I remembered the ice over this area at the end of the Pleistocene epoch had melted and receded somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago. Looking down on it from above I could see the thousands of years the water had carved out of the rock as it passed through the valley below. I wondered if the DNA in the fish we had caught could be dated that far back. Regardless, it was clear to me that this place was now part of my brother's DNA.
As we drove down the mountain I thought of the morning, the stream cutting through the rock and the native brook trout that have somehow survived in it. Staring in the side mirror I found an answer in the last passage of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing that could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
I hope the blue lines that lead to these places remain a mystery, that the magic survives.
Littles Pond
14 July 2023
