In the summer of 1985, my wife and I followed Route 16 across the New Hampshire border into Maine. Not long afterward, we passed over the little bridge that spans the Magalloway River. I stopped to watch water spray off an angler’s backcast, the drops sparkling like tiny prisms when the sun emerged from a bank of clouds.
Shortly after that, we turned off the macadam, catching glimpses of the wind-swept surface of Aziscohos Lake through breaks in the stands of spruce and balsam growing tightly along the dirt-and-grit logging road.
I recall stopping once for a snowshoe hare and another time for a grouse with her parade of squealers scrambling behind her. Twenty minutes later, Trish and I pulled into Bosebuck Mountain Camps, a traditional Maine sporting lodge at the head of the westernmost lake in the Rangeley Lakes Region.
A fly fisherman, I was in search of brook trout, the char native to the region, a fish some still call speckled trout while others prefer squaretails.
Two years later, with our infant daughter nestled in the back seat, we drove down a logging road along the eastern shoreline of that same lake for the first time, turning into our newly purchased camp.
Forty years have passed since then. During that time, we’ve spent countless hours paddling over ponds, motoring across lakes and wading through rivers and backwoods streams.
Although we’ve hiked well-marked trails, more often than not we chose to bushwhack through the forest just to see what we could see.
Along the way, my beard has faded from black to gray and my hairline has steadily retreated while my wife remains the young woman with long blond hair and eyes the color of robin’s eggs. She still prefers to tramp through forest and field rather than stand at the stove, favoring jeans over dresses and hiking boots over heels.
Until her first year at the Maryland Institute College of Art, our daughter spent summers at our cabin where there was no landline, internet or cell service. Electricity came from a Honda generator that allowed us to pump water from the lake. This may be why she once referred to her parents as hobbit-like, writing on Facebook that leaving for college was like departing the Shire.
Today, Emily Rose is the creative director for a major advertising agency in Texas, returning to our lakeside cabin whenever work permits.
The forest surrounding our cabin is a raucous tangle of life. Most mornings, the air is filled with birdsong and the chatter of chipmunks and red squirrels. A pair of loons return each season to a nest in a secluded cove. On an island in sight of our cabin, a pair of eagles raise their young in a messy assemblage of branches atop the tallest white pines.
Mallards and wood ducks occasionally visit and there is always a merganser with a string of as many as 20 chicks following like schoolchildren behind their teacher. Grouse, woodcock and most recently turkey graze through the forest duff.
We share the surrounding woodland with deer, fox and black bear as well as the occasional coyote and secretive lynx and, of course, the moose, those bemused creatures Thoreau described as “God’s own horses.”
An easy walk from camp leads to a well-known river where each spring anglers converge to cast flies of fur and feather. A smaller stream slips unnoticed under the shadows cast by balsam, spruce, pine and arborvitae.
In reading my essays, you might think this little rivulet is magical, where time stands still and wild trout attain Nirvana. It is real enough and, yes, dear reader, I know better than to share its true name.
It is this swirling hodgepodge of bracken and bone that beckons me while I sit at the laptop. How can I remain still while the white-throated sparrow calls out for Mr. Peabody or when I hear the haunting call of a pileated woodpecker echoing across the forest?
Can you blame me for tramping to the shed to spy upon the beady-eyed field mouse that resides in the drawer of a table where my tools are scattered? Would you have me remain at my desk when wild rose or autumn clematis fill the banks of the brook with perfume? Am I at fault for gathering my gear when trout as wild as a day in June leap through the surface at a well-cast fly?
It is here, among trout lilies and trilliums, lady’s slippers and bloodroot, that I feel most at home.
I suppose I’m a bit of a loner, happiest tramping over hills and through fields or following a forest trail, especially if it leads to a stream or river. Above all else, I am an angler.
I have been since my father taught me how to cast a fiberglass rod and crank a Zebco reel he liberated from the boxes of nails and screws in the local hardware store. While in college, I read Richard Brautigan’s Fly Fishing in America and a few months later purchased my first fly rod, a six-and-a-half-foot model from the Cortland Company.
If fishing were prose, fly-fishing would be poetry. Casting a fly allows me to spend time on the water for much the same reason John Voelker, known by readers as Robert Traver, wrote in his Testament of a Fisherman: “Because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion.”
Many of the people I meet in the field or on the water are interested in the “where” and “how” of things, which is fine to a point. But I find myself returning to the “why” of it all.
I respect the teachings of the great prophets and saints but I agree with the writings of our country’s original free thinkers, the quirky transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that as free-thinking men and women we can discover meaning in our lives without the need for formal institutions.
The great naturalist Sigurd Olson believed the universe is an extension of God. If so, what better way to be in touch with the Almighty than to spend time casting a fly upon a backwoods trout stream or pond?
What some conservationists and environmentalists seek in the great silence found only in the most wild and distant places, I have seen in the clear, clean current of small mountain brooks and learned from the resilience of the wild fish there.
Whether this world is a reflection of the Creator or a part of nature’s grand scheme, I hope reading my essays encourages you to find your way to your own little stream or perhaps a bit of woodland or a garden path, where you may discover your own truth and perhaps even encounter a brook trout or two along the way.
