Brook Trouting Through Armageddon

Finding beauty in all the ugliness

Brook Trout, courtesy of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department

At the risk of discoloring your impression of me as a model citizen, a humanitarian, a forceful yet sensitive lover, a highly-decorated veteran (of the War on Illiteracy), and a thought leader/influencer right up there with Jesus, Andrew Tate, and Gary Vee, I probably ought to disclose – in the interest of transparency – that I live in a cesspool.

Not a physical one, mind you. My physical environs are pleasant enough. I live in a nice, middle-class house in a nice middle-class exurb, with a nice middle-class dog who loiters with me on my nice middle-class porch.  I have nice middle-class neighbors who forego neck tattoos and brushes with the law and who never hit each other with lawn ornaments  - who know enough to know that it’s tacky to even have lawn ornaments (no kissing frogs ‘neath an umbrella, no Mother Mary statuary).  On the rare occasions I see them, they wave and nod politely while serving as anodyne extras in my own personal Truman Show.

But rather, I live in a cesspool of the mind. Also known as the news stream. Which I feel, for professional reasons, it is my daily duty to dip into, even if it is a toxic soup littered with used hypodermic needles and fecal floaters and decomposing bodies, outright fabrications and funhouse-mirror distortions and God only knows what other crimes against truth. Being “well informed” is overrated, because the costs of knowing things is that you then know them. Ignorance is no longer a shield or anesthetic.  When you see through the looking glass, and keep looking, Ecclesiastes lays it bare: For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseath sorrow.

It’s enough to make a guy need to regularly scour his soul in the River Jordan, or at least in a small, tumbling stream in the easternmost ridge of Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Appalachian foothills that hold beautiful, wild brook trout.  So me and my youngest son, Dean, went there last week to get some (then let them go). Brook trout tend to only live in cool, clean, well-oxygenated water, and so, by way of fishing for them, you become cleaner by extension.  When you’re crusted over by all the grime, sometimes it helps to rub up against real beauty for the contact high, just to remind yourself of the possibilities that our flawed world still holds.

According to Indian legend, these speckled beauties were not always so.  As told by Nick Karas in his book Brook Trout, the definitive work on the subject:

“Once long, long ago,” said old Jesse Logan, of the Cornplanter Reservation in Warren County, Pennsylvania, the last (in 1928) of the Shikellemus tribe, “when Manitou visited the land of the Iroquois to lead His lost children back to  the Happy Hunting Ground in the Far East, He grew weak with hunger and cold on his long quest. Toward night He stopped beside a pool in the Seneca country {New York} which was overshadowed by colossal white pines and hemlocks. Noticing that it was full of handsome trout, as black as ebony, He reached in His hand and easily caught the largest of the superb fish. Looking at it He was struck by its beauty and agile grace, and decided to control His hunger and let it live, so He dropped it back into the deep pool. The trout went its way, but instantly its sides took on a silvery hue where the fingers of the Great Spirit had held it, and all of its kind became marked with the same silvery sheen and many colored spots and halos, as a token of their having been handled by the kindly Manitou. For that reason, the Seneca Indians and others of the Six Nations would not eat brook trout. Brook trout were sacred to the highest instincts of their race. But what the redman spared,” said Logan, “white men destroyed by the millions.”

Talk like that could probably get Karas’s book banned by Meatball Ron in Florida right now. But you get the point: brook trout, to many, including me, aren’t just fish, but sacred totems.

On the two-hour ride up (the undisclosed location is not far from Camp David), I was still feeling unsettled from information overload.  Too much news of threatened violence and callous disregard for rule of law, of sociopathy and hush money paid to porn stars and contempt for character and objective reality and truth. (And those are just the stories involving our recent ex-president and current GOP primary frontrunner, not the news at large, with all its bank failures and World War III practice cuts, etc.) Those latter three things I just mentioned  - character and objective reality and truth - being those which I thought my side used to stand for when they were still “my side,” before they became whatever they are now:  anarchists, shills, ideological hookers and the Johns who will unapologetically pay for them. Even now, eight years gone by, it still makes me kind of sick and sad that the world I used to know has been divvied up by a tangelo-flavored, twice-impeached, reality-show hustler - a narcissism disorder in calfskin oxfords - who tried to overturn an election that he lost with violence, and who is such a living, breathing caricature of a shitheel, that he once speculated on his chances of scoring with Princess Di – two months after she died in a car crash. “"I would have loved to have had a shot to date her," he told NBC’s Stone Phillips, "because she was an absolutely wonderful woman." "Do you think you would have had a shot?" asked Phillips. "I think so, yeah," responded The Donald, "I always have a shot." Such a charmer.

But as the miles drift by, the XM Radio gets turned down, and then becomes completely unavailable. I don’t really need to know what Fox or MSNBC or CNN are saying. And I can’t hear anyway, after drifting out of satellite range. Which is just fine by me, on this day. My breathing eases. My blood pressure lowers. All the trouble in the world will be here when I get back, but I have no stomach for it right now. My son, who I haven’t fished with in a long time, falls into all our old conversational rhythms. A pleasant patter of meaningful meaninglessness. Deep talk, disguised as small talk.  We speak of girls and college (he’s a college sophomore) and what the rest of his life might look like, depending on the decisions he makes now. His reflections are like opening a photo album, back when people used to still make photo albums. I flash back to when I was his age - 20 years old. It felt like all the time in the world, and like time was running out. Lackadaisical urgency. Everything feeling possible and impossible at once.

When we get to the stream, we pull off in a log cabin village just outside of Frederick, Md. The place the late legendary fly fisher Lefty Kreh hailed from, where he used to fish as a boy before setting off to fish around the world. Lefty – who was pretty much the Michael Jordan of fly fishing -  caught just about every species imaginable - 126 species on the fly, on every continent but Antarctica. He'd have probably scored there, too, if it weren't for the fact, as he told Angler's Journal, that there "ain't nothing to catch on Antarctica but penguins." And yet he once crowned brook trout, the fish that pervaded his own back yard, as “the aristocrats of North American trout. Their beauty, fighting spirit, and elusive nature make them the ultimate prize for any angler.” 

Who knows if he actually said it? I got that quote off ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that I don’t trust.  And yet, I do trust in Lefty, and brook trout. Which are indeed a cut above other fish. Every time I bring one to hand, I quiver a little. With their vermiculated golds and blues and reds, it is precisely the same as  holding a work of art in your palm. Or a precious gem – a fire opal with adipose fins.  The hardest part, for me, of catching them, is letting them go. I just want to hold them and take them in forever. (To which they’d likely say, “Hey a-hole, glad you like us and all, but put me back, I can’t breathe.”) They make me feel close to God, who I can’t always sense during less immediate encounters

“One Last Look” - Bob White

Dino and I both changed into our waders. I lent him a parachute Adams, while I tied a black gnat onto my fiberglass short stick, a 7-foot job that I deliberately fish up here to minimize getting hung up in the tight canopy that shades the river. No streamers or nymphs today. We’d only be fishing with dries, like men, watching takes on the water’s surface. This place where I go for brookie-soul restoration, I have nicknamed “Satan’s Creek.”  Due to the historic tonnage of litter I have found in this pristine environment over the years from the local Frednecks, who have dumped everything, in my experience, from washing machines to toilets to a suitcase full of girls’ panties (I called the local authorities after stumbling over that one. No missing persons had been reported. Maybe it was just Sam Brinton, Joe Biden’s ex-nuclear waste chief, trying to ditch the evidence.)

I ain’t gonna lie – it’s troubling, when you enter Eden, only to find people have trashed it.  And yet, it feels kind of appropriate. The ridiculous and the sublime, sitting together side by side, as they so often do.  And yet today, the stream was clean. No litter. The Frednecks must have still been in winter hibernation.

Dino hadn’t been up here with me in years, so I set about pointing out all my choice slots, the places I know from experience where fish lay up. Now is a good time of year to fish this place – right before shad season (Hickory and American shad running up our local rivers in spring being our must-fish event of the year around these parts). And also, before all the flora blooms, when the nettlesome branches overhanging the best holes make them even more difficult to fish as your flies are no longer eaten by brook trout, but more likely by Shagbark Hickory and Red Maple and common Milkweed sprouts which booby-trap the entire stream.

Dean – a talented caster with a highly attuned fish radar  – sets about catching all of the fish I would’ve caught if I hadn’t set him loose. When I put him on one of my choice spots – “try that, there’s usually a fish right up against those rocks” -  he catches three before I even untangle my line. Which stings me a little. Together, we catch eight on the day. By which I really mean he caught seven, and I caught one. I was so happy to see mine after dodging the skunk, that I  kissed that beautiful brookie, then set it free.  It was a seven-incher, which is about four inches shy of a trophy around here, where the fish come small, but are no less awe-inspiring for their smallness.

I’m a competitive fisherman – which is why I  usually prefer to fish alone, to mute that tendency in myself  – but I can’t help but be overjoyed when I fish with my sons, and they succeed, even when I don’t.  Since their success is mine, too. Watching them get a piece of what brings me peace…….well, only a monster could begrudge that.  As Dean and I adjourn for Mexican food afterwards,  I look at this “kid,” who just a few years ago, I was double-knotting his wading boots and clinch-knotting his flies so they didn’t come off when the branches ate them, and he now has a full beard, and employs words like “nihilistic” correctly, and he downs a tall Modelo draft over enchiladas before I’m halfway done with mine. And he outfished me 7-to-1. And I somehow feel complete.  Like I have something more important than a son. I have a fishing buddy for life, who will know when and how the world needs escaping, the same as I do.

And it will keep needing escaping, especially if you have to write about it for a living. As the great John Gierach wrote in Still Life With Brook Trout:

Still, there are days when fishing feels like a job because it’s hard and because it seems necessary, even if it’s not always clear why. And anyway, it’s good for a writer to have something physical to do that’s away from the desk and seems important. As Larry McMurtry said, writing itself is a sedentary profession ‘in which one gets up in the morning and then sits right back down.’

Bonus Track:  Since I name-checked the River Jordan upstairs, I might as well play my favorite song off of Mandolin Orange’s 2013 This Side of Jordan album. (Even if the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, folk duo has sadly since changed their name to Watchhouse – they’re still Mandolin Orange to me.) This is a live version of them doing “Turtle Dove and the Crow” with all kinds of lovely fiddle and harmonies on it.