Brook Trout and the Writing Life
The intermingling of fishing and writing in a novelist’s life
Craig Nova
Foreword by Ann Beattie
Published by Eno Publishers at Smashwords
Copyright © 1999, 2011 by Craig Nova
All rights reserved
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
A version of Chapter Seven was published in with, by Ken Ohara (Twin Palms Publishers, 2006). Versions of some of the chapters herein first appeared in a much-abbreviated first edition of Brook Trout, published by Lyons Press, 1999.
Eno Publishers
P.O. Box 158
Hillsborough, North Carolina 27278
ISBN-13: 978-0-9820771-8-4
For Howard Mosher
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
—Vladimir Nabokov
FOREWORD
by Ann Beattie
This amazing book is a memoir in miniature, equally suited to being read from behind the pulpit or tucked into the pocket of a fishing shirt. It’s like coming upon a footbridge just when you need to cross the river. The water below, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, always holds possibilities that are right there in front of you, while—in the hands of this magician writer—simultaneously escaping on the current of metaphor.
Brook Trout and the Writing Life is three books in one—a beautifully tied, totally convincing fly of a book, woven from several strands: marriage and fatherhood; being a writer; being a fisherman. I don’t fish and I’m not a parent; I love words for their ability to allow the writer to describe one thing, while conjuring up other levels of awareness. How precisely and evocatively language serves the writer’s cosmos of associations here: what he wants us to sense on the surface, and what information is conveyed deeper down. Writing about fishing: “The line made a lovely shape in the air, at once serpentine and hopeful.” We are reading about the fishing line, but it’s also a pun: Stories proceed by the extension of lines.
The combination of unexpectedly paired words (“serpentine” and “hopeful”) is obviously disjunctive. The reader conjures up the serpent in the Garden of Eden, with all that connotes; the person who loves paradox will delight in the idea that something snakelike can also bring hope. In spite of our tendency to recoil from a snake, this one is projected upon and humanized into being “hopeful.” Read the sentence as expressing the possibility that the snake, itself, is hopeful; read it, also, as a personal observation: Although my fishing line is like a snake, I, the perceiver, am hopeful. Either way, it’s an amazing sentence that expresses many possibilities, using so few words.
Midway through his beautiful and often quoted poem, “Epilogue,” Robert Lowell interrupts his eloquently stated thoughts and invokes some skepticism about himself: “Yet why not say what happened?” speaks to writers’ frustration at what they strive to do. (Even dystopian visions, their creators would fairly maintain, are “what happened.”) It comes so unexpectedly, though; it seems that in the moment of creating, Lowell could not in good conscience continue. When we read, we usually assume we are receiving—or about to receive—a revelation about something, not that that thing is being obscured or disguised. Yet what writer isn’t aware that poetry or prose is a mask: In bedazzling, the aesthetic veneer can also conveniently hide the writer. Writers do write to reveal, but also—quite subconsciously, sometimes—to protect themselves. Think of how many writers have said that if not for the act of writing, they would not have discovered—often, at considerable personal expense—previously unarticulated, sometimes painful truths.
It seems to me that Craig Nova, one of the most distinctive voices and visionaries in American fiction, works close to the bone, but never forgets to see things from afar. When he describes his process of tying a fly, our own fingers cramp with tension; when he casts his line, we become that line, flying over the water’s uncertain surface.
There is a lot of physicality about fishing, but lest fishing become fetishized, the writer tells us: “One of the things you learn is that some materials, like rabbit fur, when wet, have a movement that is lifelike and suggests anxiety, or at least the desire to get its business done quickly.” The writing is so immediate, activates so many of our senses, that smiling as we read the concluding words of the sentence comes as an extra bonus: Wait a minute; this guy’s got a sense of humor!
One of my favorite small stories within the text is about Craig’s awareness that as he’s fishing, a woman sits on her porch, without expression, shelling peas, involved in her own precise activity; eventually other people arrive and depart, fooled by Craig’s fishing a predictably bounteous stream with no bait; aware that he’s being observed, he doesn’t want them to discover his sure-thing fishing spot. It’s only when the ruse works, and they leave, that the woman waves to him.
That moment is so nice: It isn’t elaborated upon; no dialogue follows. She communicates by a signal, nonverbal shorthand for a lot of things she’s observed that have been going on. She becomes, in effect, interchangeable with a writer: This is exactly what writers do, when they come up with the perfect gesture to define or explain their character. In nonfiction, Joan Didion is one of the real masters. In fiction, Hemingway. We are so rarely solitary, even trekking through the woods, even fishing, let alone near enough to civilization that someone might acknowledge us, in her own good time, in her own equally valid reality, with a wave.
Still, privacy remains an integral part of Americans’ self-definition, in spite of the fact that we spend so much of our lives among others, whether it be in airport transport vans, or in the crowded pleasure-dome cafés of New York’s Upper West Side. Along with all the frantic markers for Having a Good Time, though, comes a predictable ebb tide that is the impulse toward solitude. From Natty Bumppo through Easy Rider, our guides slip the knot of acceptance that binds them to a notion of what a person is supposed to do. The romantic ideal of escaping society’s constraints is represented by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, speeding through all that empty land; we go on “retreats” to rethink our priorities; we visualize—and when we do, how often do we imagine joining some official or unofficial parade, as opposed to partaking of something more placid, such as sitting on the beach at sunset?
William James: “The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.” We write our own stories, retrospectively substituting intentionality for chance. When Craig Nova observes mountain peaks that have “a color like the tip of a soldering iron,” the description instantly sears our senses: vision; touch. We register pain. As with the snake, we draw back from danger, though this moment eventually devolves into a more neutral view. Yet once we’ve been branded, we know those peaks’ power, as well as their usual/unusual postcard colorfulness.
This way of making us observe says something about the way Craig Nova sees the world, and about the way he wishes to reveal it: At its most extreme, and also at its most lovely, the two states exist in constant tension with one another. As a writer, to have the dual impulse to stand back and consider the unexpected nimbus that surrounds the ordinary, as well as to transform that seemingly unremarkable observation convincingly through words and their qualities of ambiguity, allusion, and inherent poetry, is an amazing—even daring—accomplishment.
Ann Beattie is an award-winning short story writer and novelist. Her books include Chilly Scenes of Winter, Park City: New and Selected Stories, and, most recently, The New Yorker Stories, named one of the New York Times “Top Ten Books of 2010.” She is the recipient of the prestigious PEN/Malamud Award, an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She is Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Preface
It has been twelve years since Brook Trout and the Writing Life was originally published, and while I am reluctant to come out of the shadows where all writers exist in the books they write, I think it might be a good idea to make a couple of comments for this new edition. The first thing I want to face up to is what I left out of the original edition and have included here. For example, you’ll find the best fishing story I know which took place on the Williams River, where a woman was shelling peas on her front porch while I fished a pool in front of her house.
Of course, this book was never really about fishing. I meant it to be about people I cared about and about the passage of time. And surely, where time is concerned, I know more about that now and how it flows, or grinds, on everything, or just about everything and everyone. So, what have I learned in these twelve years? Or what is the essence of this thing, time, that we notice only by its effects?
I think the way to face this is to mention some of the things that have happened to the people mentioned in this book. One of them, a bush pilot, Jack McPhee, was killed, as I understand it, in an accident in his plane. I never felt more safe and more comfortable in an airplane than when I was flying with Jack, and I am sure, as I am sure of nothing else, that Jack did everything humanly possible to save the plane and himself and that he did so with the cool, precise, inspiring air that he used to do just about everything. So one of the things I have learned about the passage of time is that people you care about can disappear, and when they do, they leave a hole that is impossible to fill. For me, at least, when I am with a friend, I am a little different than I am with other people, and I only get to be this way when I am with this particular friend. It is a gift that someone you care about gives to you. These people let you be more the way you want to be, just by being with them. The hard lesson, as a Buddhist would say, is that when one of these friends dies he takes some of you with him, if only because you discover, with a sort of amazement, that the person you got to be when you were with the friend who died is gone.
This may sound elegiac, particularly where Jack is concerned, and I guess it is, but something else is lurking around in all this and it is a lesson that time teaches, which is living in the moment with people you care about is one of the keenest pleasures of life. I see this as a matter of letting go, of not planning or thinking ahead, but just forgetting the future and the past and being there in the moment. This is why, of course, fishing with friends is such a good thing to do. You are on the stream, and the water flows by. A fish rises. What did it take? Was that a caddisfly? A mayfly? What variety? Are the fish taking the fly just below the surface. Have you got an emerger to fish in the film? Well, when you are thinking this way, you don’t have time to worry about the usual barbed wire of life.
This is just part of the lesson of time, and I realize that among other omissions in this short book, one of them was the number of friends who exist in the shadows of Brook Trout and the Writing Life in the same way the author does, but I’d like to say that they were right there, and that without them the writing life and the fishing life, too, would have been vastly impoverished. For instance, John Irving is someone I have been able to depend on for thirty-five years, and when I was being threatened by an extortionist and was going around in a bullet-proof vest, John was the one I turned to.
Writers only have friends. Publishers and agents come and go, they blow hot and then they blow cold. When you are on your way up, publishers and agents are great friends, but when you are on the way down (which happens just as often as when you are on the way up . . . the entire operation has the shape of a sine curve), publishers and agents don’t know you as well and aren’t as friendly as when the New York Times has just given you a rave review. John has never been that way. You don’t meet many people like that, and so I wanted to say that he was in the background and helped me maintain the attitude, one of giving thanks, that went into this book in the first place.
And the same is true of Howard Mosher. In fact, one of the stories I left out is one that I heard from Howard. He was fishing a stream in northern Vermont. He had cast across and quartering downstream. The fly line was floating on the water. A trout took the fly and went straight down. It seemed like a big fish, and Howard was playing it carefully, but he couldn’t quite understand what was happening. He was holding the fly rod pretty high and not putting too much pressure on the leader, and as he did this the fish kept going down. It appeared that the fish had found a hole, in a Vermont trout stream, that was forty-five or fifty feet deep. Now, anyone who has fished a stream in Vermont knows that this is an unlikely possibility. Still, the fish kept right on sinking. Howard stood there and looked around. Could this be? He had seen a fair amount of odd things on a stream, so he wasn’t ready to dismiss this as some kind of delusion. He edged closer to the place where the line disappeared under the water and found that it had gone over a barely submerged log. And so while it looked as though the fish was going straight down, it was in fact just swimming away.
In the odd-things-on-the-stream-that-I-left-out department, I would like to add this. A fishing guide I know was once in central Vermont where he slowly worked his way upstream. He cast a fly to likely looking water and let it drift over a pool near some fast water, and he went about this in a sort of casual way, since he was fishing for fun, that is without a client. So, the fly drifted over a likely place, and as it did, a woman’s blouse came downstream. It was white, and barely floated. He picked it up, rung it out, and put it on the bank. He cast again, into that same spot, but a piece of women’s lingerie floated along, too. Then a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of women’s underwear. For each item, the guide picked it up, rung it out, and put it on the bank. He then noticed that a man’s shirt floated through the same run, then a pair of men’s blue jeans and some boxer shorts. He rung those out, too, and left them on the bank.
For a while, nothing more came downstream. The guide kept fishing, writing the entire thing off as another one of those unexplained items. He changed flies, waded slowly and quietly upstream, and came upon a man and a woman, at the edge of a field, engaged in, well, I will leave this to the reader’s imagination. And, of course, the guide was left in a dilemma. Should he tap them on the shoulder, perhaps with the tip of a fly rod, and say, “Excuse me. But your clothes are downstream?” Should he wait until they were done? But that seemed intrusive and too much like a voyeur. Should he just go upstream and leave these two, who would find themselves like Adam and Eve, just cast out of Eden? Well, the guide was a polite and practical man (most guides are practical, since they have to be to survive) and I am sure he found a way to help these two without embarrassing them. At least not too much.
I guess if I had been in those circumstances, if I had been the one who had found the clothes, I would have gone back to pick them up, and then thrown them over the bushes, without saying a word, in the same way that Diogenes, after a philosophical discussion that had defined man as a featherless biped, went to the market, bought a chicken, plucked it, and threw it over the wall where the discussion had taken place.
I left out another item, which I think I should mention here. I went to Austria to fish the Traun and the Steyer, and I stayed in a hotel in Gmunden. The Steyer is a stream in the mountains and is the color of crème de menthe, not to mention that it is stiff with trout and grayling. The hotel was one of those places where the people who work there gather mushrooms in the morning and then use them in the cooking for the evening’s dinner. But, one afternoon when I was at the hotel, a wedding reception took place in the garden. I looked down from my room at the bride and groom, who seemed to glow with a variety of hopefulness. They didn’t have a band, but they did play old American rock and roll. And so I sat, above the lovely garden, and listened to “In the Still of the Night,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Only You,” and other songs like these. My wife had been sick and hadn’t been able to make the trip. But the songs were associated with earlier times, and that first heat that rises between two kids who are dancing cheek to cheek. That moment of listening to these songs, which seems to be a lot of what this book is about—the passage of time, affection, a sense of being momentarily outside time—should be mentioned.
Of course, in the passage of time, I found other places, such as Montana, where the landscape has that rare quality of being precisely as one imagined it, and better, too, in an odd way, since its beauty is made all the more keen because of a harshness (rattlesnakes, the intensity of the winters, grizzly bears), and the fishing is different, more demanding but still gives that same sense of living in the moment. Bob DeMott, another old friend who I am going to bring out of the shadows, and I fished a spring creek there where the fish, one afternoon, seemed to be having just as much fun with us as we were with them.
This book was originally written to see what I could get out of compressing twenty years of writing books, having kids, and fishing into a few pages. As to what this did, well, I will leave that to the reader. But this treatment of time naturally leads me to the question I asked at the beginning of this short introduction. That is, What did I learn in the dozen or so years since this book was first published?
I guess it boils down to a couple of things which, while I am not absolutely certain about, seem to have enough staying power to be mentioned. The first is that being alive seems to be 99 percent anxiety and 1 percent fear. And by this I mean that almost everything we worry about doesn’t happen, aside from a very small proportion. The difficulty is to know which is which, that is, which is anxiety and which is fear. The items that require fear are, of course, so horrifying as to pack a wallop that is out of all proportion to their numbers.
The next thing is that writing a book is not a matter of what the writer does to the book, but what the book does to the writer, and once you know this, you realize that the book is going to inform you of a few things. So, in addition to the anxiety/fear coefficient, I learned that it is important to live in the moment, to realize that our gifts are finite while our aspirations are infinite, and to face the passage of time with as much courage as you can muster. And there is something I have discovered that helps: Publishers, agents, friends, hopes, triumphs, defeats may come and go, but brook trout seem to be a constant presence. And, if there is one thing we need to do, it is to protect the water where they live.
—Craig Nova
Hillsborough, North Carolina
Fall 2010
Chapter ONE
I
Often, the connection between things is not obvious to the eye, and even when it is, it can take years, if not decades, for me to see just what is associated with what. The events of my life and brook trout often meet at the line of demarcation between the world of the fish and the world of the fisherman, between the seen and the unseen. This division will be the surface of a stream, which I imagine, from the fish’s point of view, as a silvery horizon, but which I see as a green sheet. Still, the moment of illumination has often come here, with a trout taking a fly out of the boundary between its world and mine.
For instance, I caught my first brook trout not long after my father died. One of my earliest memories is of my mother and father looking around at the flowers and trees they had planted in the yard of the house where I grew up in Hollywood, California—lemon trees, boxwood, camellias, hibiscus, and sweet peas. My father had planted victory gardens during the Second World War, before I was born, and I remember, too, that he spent an enormous amount of time trying to force four saplings he had planted so as to grow into the shape of a chair, until, defeated by their contrariness, or their wildness, he gave up. He told me that one dawn, when he had been up early, he had seen the light from atomic explosions in Nevada, four hundred miles to the east. He was not a fisherman, and I think he hated the out-of-doors in the way that I enjoy it. For him, the natural world, while profoundly beautiful, was an adversary more than anything else. We shared a sense of beauty, but where he wanted to control, I wanted to participate. My father died when I was in my late twenties.
I caught my first brook trout because of a woman I met at a party in New York City. Like all chance meetings that turn out differently than one supposes, I almost did not go to this party. It was downtown, in SoHo, when it was illegal to live there, and the entire existence of many people had a furtive, almost hidden quality, as though they were doing something wrong. From time to time, people got put out on the street, but mostly they thrived, hidden from sight like trout lurking against a bank, or in the rubble of a stream.
The party was given by an illustrator who had run away from Arkansas, where he had grown up, to Chicago, where he got his start—if this is what one can call it—in a tattoo parlor. Often, people came into the tattoo parlor and looked over the ready-made designs without seeing one they wanted, and the illustrator’s first job was to be able to provide, on the spot, just what it was the customer wanted but didn’t see. One customer wanted to have Elmer Fudd tattooed on an exceedingly intimate spot. The illustrator used to tell this story with a smile and a shrug, as though this tattoo was a hint at how the ridiculous has its own insistence, and that fate has an instinct not only for wars and brutality, but for people sitting on wedding cakes, too.
Of course, memories come with varying intensity. A doctor once told me that a good question to ask, when trying to diagnose alcoholism, is this: “Can you remember your first drink?” A real drunk will be able to remember the moment with perfect clarity, the occasion, the clothes he wore, the smell of perfume, the time of day. In particular, he will remember the light. The real drunk will recall this moment with a sense of recognition. I have never had a problem with alcohol, and on those occasions years ago when I killed brook trout to eat, I liked to have them with new potatoes and a glass of dark beer. But I understand this sense of recognition, and it came at this party when I met the woman who was responsible for me catching my first brook trout.
At the time, she was working for television news. She was blond, about five feet five, and she was wearing a red sweater. She stood in a light that seemed bright and warm. We only talked for a couple of moments, which were awkward, since I had arrived at the wrong time at this party and in general it was somewhat trying. I went home early and forgot about it, although from time to time I recalled that light, that blond hair, and the red sweater. A smile and a kind of spunk, too. After all, she had started as an assistant cameraman, which back then was not an easy thing for a woman to do. I imagined her hanging out of a helicopter with a sixteen-millimeter camera over one shoulder.
In those days, I was living in New York, doing my best to live up to the idea of just what a young novelist did when he wasn’t writing, which, I found out, was a lot of the time, but this didn’t mean I was getting much fishing in. Every now and then I would go down Minetta Lane, under which or near which, or so I had heard, ran Minetta Brook. It is hard for me to say why the notion of a brook so haunted me, but it did, and not just because it was in Manhattan, but because of the promise the word brook always suggested.
The fishing I had gotten in, before coming to New York, was limited to California. I remember a fishing trip when four or five teenage boys, myself included, had gone into the Sierras. We weren’t great fishermen, and, in fact, I am not sure what the point of that trip was. We found a ranger who gave us a map with a wilderness section marked off, and in the middle of it there was a pond. The ranger pointed to the rectangle of wilderness and said, with an almost exquisite ignorance of adolescent boys, “Don’t go there.” As soon as he left, we started in that direction. The pond didn’t look so far away, but what did we know then about maps and distance?
We didn’t get there until it was almost dark, and by then we were good and lost, since we didn’t know for sure if the small lake we had found was the one we had wanted to go to. At six or seven thousand feet, it started to get cold as the sun went down.
One of us, but only one, had had the foresight to stick a can of tuna fish in his pocket, and the rest of us caught him where he had slinked off to eat it. We managed to get out in the morning, not quite as certain as we had been just a day or two before of how benign the natural world really was. This was a healthful shock, since until that moment all of us had the notion of the natural world as something out of a documentary about bears. None of us felt good about the experience, since up there, when we had been alone, it became apparent that we weren’t such good friends after all. I had to wait for real friends until I came east. Many of them are associated with brook trout.
The woman in the red sweater and I met again. She made me dinner in her apartment. When we were sitting in her living room she told me that when she had been growing up she spent summers on a lake in New Hampshire where there were loons, and to demonstrate what they sounded like, she put her hands together and made their call. I listened and thought, “This could be trouble.”
She said that she had a house in the country. Would I like to go sometime? She also told me that there was a stream on the land, too, and later I found out that it was called Fish Cabin. When I first heard this, I thought that surely this was a good sign, although years of bitter experience with the names of water like this have given me a more healthy skepticism than when I first heard the phrase “Fish Cabin.” But I was in my twenties then and had a lot to learn.
II
On the night we were supposed to go to this woman’s country place, we argued bitterly. We were going to leave on a Friday night, and she told me that she had something to do for work, and that this involved going to a party. I was supposed to rent a car and then park it in front of my apartment, where I would wait. She would call me, and then I would pick her up about ten in the evening. Then we would go to the place in the country, where there was a stream called Fish Cabin.
I rented the car. I parked it on the street, and then went to my apartment. An hour passed. Then two. At ten o’clock, the hour when we were supposed to leave, she called. I could hear the dance music in the background. She said it wouldn’t be more than an hour more. She would leave then. Fine, fine, I said. I paced around in my apartment, a small place on Sullivan Street above a candy store. My small bath was directly above the pay phone at which the loan shark who worked out of the store used to make his business calls, every word of which I could hear. I started the day shaving and listening to him go through his serial threatening, one after another, just like a carpenter driving nails. “You didn’t have it on Monday, and you didn’t have it on Tuesday, and this is Thursday. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
The phone rang an hour later.
“I’m going to be a little while longer,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Call me.”
“It can’t be too much longer,” she said.
“Why can’t you leave now?” I said. “It’s just a party. It’s not like you are shooting film, is it?”
“I’ll call you later,” she said. “Not more than an hour.”
“I’ll be here,” I said.
I hung up. I idly thought about the things that had happened to the people who hadn’t understood what the loan shark had been telling them. The clock showed one in the morning, then two. I looked out the window where I could see the car I had rented.
The phone rang.
“It can’t be too much longer,” she said. “Really. I mean it.”
“All right,” I said.
I waited another hour. She called again.
“I’m almost ready to go,” she said.
“Look,” I said. “I really have no business saying anything about what you do.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
Old rock and roll in the background. The Rolling Stones. Otis Redding.
“You know, it’s hard for me to hear,” she said. “The music is so loud.”
“I said that you can do whatever you want but don’t keep me waiting around while you do it,” I said. Right then I thought, That’s it. We don’t know each other well enough to argue like this. I glanced out the window at the car. Maybe if I took it right back they might give me a refund. That was about the best I could expect. Why couldn’t I just say nothing?
More rock and roll music.
“I think we should talk about this,” she said.
“When do you think we should talk about it?” I said. “In another hour?”
“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you. Listen. I’ll be at my apartment in an hour. All right?”
“Okay,” I said.
I hung up, took off my clothes, and got into bed. Screw it. If they start treating you like that in the beginning, what can you expect later? Isn’t this just a matter of reaching down and taking my courage with both hands, as they say in Spain? I sat there in the dark. Then I got up and dressed and took my bag.
She was waiting in front of her building. It must have been four in the morning, and since it was early summer, the sky in the east began to have that silky gray quality, like sheer underwear. She got in. I drove.
“You drive very well,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” she said.
We sat at a deserted intersection, the light against us. No cars. Damp streets. Manhattan before dawn. I was thinking of Minetta Brook, of the water that ran deeply concealed there, of the years I had spent in the city away from such things as brooks.
“So, are you coming with me or staying here?” she said.
I looked at the cold sheen of the street in front of us.
“Well?” she said.
“I’m coming. How do I get there?” I said.
She moved closer, sliding across the seat. It made a little sound.
“Take the tunnel,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
III
The land was about two hours away from New York, on the Delaware River above Port Jervis. We drove through New Jersey and over some low mountains and then down to the Delaware River, where I would catch a lot of fish, but I didn’t know that then. What I saw was the broad, gray expanse of the water, mirrorlike against the land at dawn. We drove along it for a while, passing a stream called the Mongaup, which ran under the road to the Delaware. This, I found out later, was great brook trout water, and even now I can remember the boulders at the head of the pool just behind where the trout hung in the evening, taking an endless supply of white mayflies. If you timed it right, you could stand there for an hour or so before dark and catch one brookie after another—good-sized ones, too, twelve inches. Through the clear water I often saw them finning, tailing as they pushed their noses through the rubble, looking for nymphs.
“Turn here,” she said.
The dirt road went up a hill and then flattened out, running between woods on one side and a field on the other. The field was surrounded by stone walls. We kept going, the road running through white oak and rock oak, although all I could see at the time were the shaggy shapes of trees emerging from the dark.