Fly in the water

Photo: Dave Merwin

The town I called home as a child is not the same. Forty years ago, there were still open fields, and you could bushwhack through the New England forests exploring streams and ponds that are now fenced in and surrounded by private property. Thirty years ago, you could still camp overnight in the forests and cut across the fields to get to where you wanted to go.

My Grandfather and I would walk these forests together. It was our family's old dairy land. He taught me where the paths were. And the paths along the river were my favorite. He would teach me about fishing and, incidentally, about life too. But it took me years to figure that out.

I learned to fly fish when I was ten. I was a skinny kid with a thick flop of black hair and had the ever-present optimism that seems to ooze out of every pore of my father's family. Torn jeans, torn knees, and imagination bending reality into something I was more able to understand.

We passed through the old stone gates onto the railroad path. There used to be a spur line here, from the Danbury line branch of Metro North. It’s a wide gravel park trail with maples and oaks overshadowing the path and a thick line of sky between them.  Through the undergrowth, you can see the Norwalk River, narrow, overgrown, winding its way across the valley floor. Her water is a light copper color from the tannins that leach into the river from the hardwoods that grow on her banks.

I follow my Grandfather down the path. I'm a half step behind him, and I listen as he tells me stories that range from our family's history in this valley to the fish in the pools to the ecology we pass through. He seems to know everything. And aside from my occasional questions, he can fill the time. The conversation from the house to the dam this evening spans half a mile. I'm excited to fish the deeper waters with him.

My Grandfather was impossibly tall. Thin, strong and wiry. An avid outdoorsman. A gardener and a professional photographer. He seemed impossibly talented to me and could squeeze a stone and find water. He was a descendent of Elder Brewster on the Mayflower. As long as I knew him, he had a horseshoe of white hair and a shiny bald head. As a kid of the 70s, his hair reminded me of a Star Wars helmet.

Evenings in the summer in New England were special. They were quiet. Almost reverent. It felt as if the flora and fauna knew that this was a sacred time. The colors were somehow more saturated, but the edges were blurred. Trees blended into forests, rivers, merged with their banks. Everything became a rich impression of what it was.

The path crunched under our feet. The gravel was a particular blue-gray except where a seep crossed our path and turned the stone black—covered with small moss if the water came from a spring in the hill and didn't dry up all summer. The trees created a tunnel as we walked further.. There were occasional openings in the cover that showed the river through the leaves. Paths were worn through the underbrush that led to the banks by our family and friends. I don't recall ever seeing someone fish that river that I didn't know.

My Grandfather was telling me stories about my father when he was my age. When my father was a boy, this area was farmland. This town in the 1950s and 60s was transitioning from rural isolation to a suburb of New York. My Grandfather told me stories of my father making the rounds to all the neighbor’s homes after school, enjoying donuts at each. Stories about my uncles as 12-year-old boys, driving cars across the remaining farmlands. And stories of fish caught in magical lands like Maine and Oregon. 

My Grandfather was the king of this place. From the Congregational Church to the middle school and from the Metro North line to route 33. The river that flowed through his kingdom was his most precious resource. He had fished this river his entire life. He knew every pool, bank, rock, and log and had named most of them. His wire-rim glasses had looked down at his hands for decades as he tied on a fly. When he told me something, it was gospel. He was everything to me, especially in this place.

We turned the big corner where the spur line curved right and moved towards the old train stop. When I was a kid, you could still see the foundation and the remnant boards and debris that had yet to be salvaged. It looked sad to me: chipped red paint and weathered gray boards were lying as if dropped in a giant game of pickup sticks across massive granite foundation stones. We were forbidden to walk across the floor joists since falling through would mean a broken leg or, worse, tetanus. My grandmother, a nurse, was always able to describe in detail what the consequences of our foolishness would be. Lockjaw sounded terrifying.

Above the dam was a large pool full of cruising trout, the occasional bass, and so many sunfish. About the size of a tea saucer, they were New England piranha. They would eat anything they could get in their mouths. When I was even smaller and still fished with a stick and a bit of fishing line, I would toss a worm on a hook into the pool, and the sunfish would attack it while the large trout below cruised back and forth. I knew that there were some very large fish in that water.

The dam was wide and concrete, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s. It was named Dana's Dam after Charles Dana, a local business owner. I didn't find this out till many years later, but it was also called Merwin's dam. We never called it that.  We fished both sides of the dam, but usually just the left side as you faced the dam, as we would this evening. Below the dam's spillover was a wide, deep, and short pool. The main current was focused in the middle, as the water spilled over the rim. The water was deep and the current was powerful. Teenage boys would drown there in a few summers during the high spring water.

As a boy, I didn't own waders and understood that it was a privilege to be earned. I had to shiver and feel the water before I could have the protection of waders and be desensitized to the movement of the cold around my legs. But in July, in Connecticut, wet wading was a welcome excuse not to be hot.

We took the lower pool trail to the end of the pool. The rocks were black and slick from the spray of the spillover and the humidity. We picked our way out and my Grandfather coached me into a spot that would put my short cast over a pool deep enough to hold trout. He moved off into the current slightly so he could watch me as he cast further into the main pool.

You could catch trout anywhere, but the seam, where the slow eddy and the main current met, was where you knew that the trout were feeding. On the left as you faced the dam, away from the current, was relatively calm water where a trout could hold in the water and not be forced to move a great deal. On the right was the column of current that rushed by. A trout could dip in and out of the current to grab minnows and bugs that were being tossed around topsy turvy by the current, as if a restaurant passed food by where you sat, and you just moved your head slightly to take a bite of something delicious. Think sushi restaurant, but with bugs.

My Grandfather’s casts were always perfect.

He would move his arm up and back quickly, with a slight snap of the wrist at the end to power the line forward. It was poetry. His line shot straight and parallel to the water, a tight loop rolling out over the seam that slowed and rolled over at the end to gently land on the water. He would watch and concentrate on his fly. Slowly bringing in the slack. Waiting for a trout to rise and take his fly.

I wanted that perfection. And I worked hard at it. I concentrated and moved the rod between 10 and 2 on an imagined clock above my head. I focused on my loops. I practiced powering the line through the rod by pulling down on the line as I moved the rod forward. I wanted to be beautiful to behold. If I could look like my dad, or-- was it even possible?-- my Grandfather, then I would know I was fishing.

My Grandfather caught a few trout. On this river a few trout was the equivalent of dozens on a western river. Mostly Browns and very smart, the trout would rise to only the most precise presentation. Half the time he would catch and release these fish without me ever even knowing. There was no, "Fish on" or, "Dave, look". Just a simple stoop over, pop the hook, and let it go.

I didn't catch anything with my perfect casts.

It was dusk and time to head home. We could hardly see the fly on the water with the remaining light that came from the opening in the canopy above the pool. We worked our way back through the lower pool trail onto the main gravel trail. It was quiet, and now all was blue and black, the trail just barely visible in front of us lit from above by the last light of the day—a bright contrast against the darkening forest around us.

Into that quiet, my Grandfather said, "You can't catch any trout if you don't keep the fly in the water. You had a huge trout follow your Gray Ghost, but you ripped away from him before he could strike it. Keep your fly in the water."

I was dumbfounded.

I felt two things at the same time. The first was that I was doing something right if a huge trout would follow my fly! The second was, "Why didn't he say something when I was in the river!"

I’m in my late 40s now. Since fishing with my Grandfather I’ve built a somewhat successful career out of code and digital things that don’t really exist. And it doesn't matter how much money I make or how cool the work I am doing is, I will always find a  way to get anxious about it. I will see things that aren't there, I will find people who don’t like me, I will look for reasons why I am terrible at what I am doing. For someone who doesn't give a shit about what others think, I care a lot about what others think.

That one statement, "keep your fly in the water," has sat with me for decades. It is a reminder that the art of having just a great cast serves no purpose in fishing or in life. It is simply a part of a process whose goal is to catch a fish. When I try to compare myself to others or fret about what my life looks like from the outside I completely miss the point.  I focus on the wrong thing.

Peace comes in the doing of the thing fully. The whole thing. Fully investing in what is in front of me. My wife, my kids, my friends, my work, my fishing or woodworking. Giving my full attention to what is in front of me will catch me the fish. Trying to impress others might look good, but trout don't live in the trees. They live in the water.

Keep your fly in the water.