Beneath the Willow Tree
Mine is a landscape of little fish. Not few fish, not by any means. Little fish, each set in miniature against a palette of unremarkable features.
I live in the center of New England, where land and people describe themselves in muted tones, and we, like our fish, live in close proximity.
The water here is the color of English tea, and it slips off hillsides that go from green to gray in a disconcerting splash of color each fall. The water seeps through soils where pastures blend into woodland, creased here and there by stone walls laid dry and straight by Puritan ancestors. Our politics and prayers flow as slow and sticky as the maple syrup we make each spring, and our fish, our native fish, are small.
There are brook trout here in our streams with wormlike streaks on moss-green backs. They emerge from the tannic water and slash dry flies because that is what brook trout are good at doing. They are both easy and bold, innocent of the very confidence that threatens them; we catch them the year over. The singular challenge they pose is the angler’s conviction of their very presence, for it grows harder every year to believe that they persist in the trickles where they do.
But they do persist, and we catch them, cradling them in wet palms to reveal vivid blue-white haloes on tiny flanks. A good one spans the hand and a whopper might barely fill a hotdog roll, should a man possess the indelicacy to nestle one in such a place. They are so finely camouflaged against their lies that only in a painter’s oils can their likeness be recreated. They are beautiful, perhaps more so, for their tininess.
*
On the fringes of Boston, I worked for a spell on a farm passed gingerly through the generations by a family whose wealth was banked in development potential that would never be realized. Without the means or the energy to fight, the family watched as the state highway and water authority shaved the old place to a sliver and stifled the whisper of returning barn swallows beneath a flow of commuter traffic.
Rising from the alders behind the big house, a spring-fed seep swelled into a pond and gurgled through the property to the west. It flowed under a town road in its first hundred yards, and under a farm road in its second, in each place enveloped by a monolithic arch of New Hampshire granite. The slabs made a mockery of the tiny stream, but they protected it, too, from rumbling cars and curious boys who might, as I did, inquire after its inhabitants.
The tomatoes were ripe before Julie, whose name was on the mailbox, let slip that there were brookies living in there—brookies, she said, whose population her father had supplemented until his death some years earlier.
Julie and I wiped tomatoes of their flyspecks and set them in boxes, and then we walked over the pasture edge to the brook. The hay was tall in the pasture, nearly ready for a second cut, and Julie parted the stems in front of her and bent to swipe a grasshopper that clung, swinging, wings too dewy to fly.
“Proof” she said, smiling and cupping the wriggling hopper in her hand.
We made our way to the brook. It wasn’t much to look at where it compressed behind the barn, and the upstream flat held only an undulating mat of watercress. On the downstream side, though, Julie and I kneeled and crawled to the last granite slab and lay on our bellies looking into a small pool. Every feature of the bottom was coppery clear, as in an old photo, and each swaying strand of algae I imagined to be a tiny trout.
“See anyone?” asked Jule, and I shook my head no, reluctant to believe her implication.
“This is where we poured my father’s ashes,” she said, and I looked over to see how she meant it.
Her chin was propped on her hands and tomato sap had stained her fingertips black. She looked as she must have as a girl, staring through the pool and downstream, near enough to a daydream to believe there was magic somewhere beneath the surface.
A strand of gold-silver hair lay beside her chin on the granite. She flicked the hopper over the edge, and he splotched onto the pool then quick-kicked upstream on folded legs, toward the darkness under the bridge.
I was considering the splay of his legs on the water when the pool came to life in a kaleidoscope of darting shadow. A slashing rise, and another shadow, far too big for a pool this small, bulged the surface. The hopper rose on a pedestal of water, and in a flash was reduced to silent rings. The dark bolts then stilled to tarnished bronze spear points, sinking back to their lies against the shadows.
There below us, the victor and his kin heaved gently against the bottom, only a moment ago invisible and now plainly in sight.
“See what I mean?” said Julie, easing back from the edge and onto her knees, and wiping her hands on her shorts.
I did, and I wanted badly to catch those fish.
In the ensuing weeks I fished there daily, often at sunset, laying out choppy casts and swimming unweighted nymphs across the surface. The takes were heartbreaking in their sincerity, and the fly line would convulse out and away, disappearing into dusk with a dip of the leader.
The trout themselves were so far outsized for the place as to be almost absurd—12, 13, 14 inches, and deep through the glorious secret white of the belly. Fish like that, in a pond I could cast across with ease, in a brook I easily stepped across to gain a better angle, and all of it lined with marl that rose within feet of the water’s surface.
My father, laying out an awkward roll cast, once pulled an honest 16-inch trout from the spring pool. He held the fish in both hands and lifted it for me. He could have been in Labrador, had he not been framed against the Boston skyline.
I fished the brook last with my daughter. We’d returned to the place to live for a year, having traveled in the north and the west.
In those places, the fish were painted with rainbow streaks over shining silver slabs, and their brilliance winked against skies of thin-air blue reflected up through rushing water.
The land was big and the fish were bigger, and I returned to Julie and our suburban stream and saw it for the fragile thing it was. The spring hole, the pond, swallowed by weeds and reclaimed by that sucking marl, were almost gone, and the top layers of watercress had faded to brown.
But my daughter, sneaking along as Julie and I had done, was possessed of a child’s conviction, and we crept to the downstream bridge for a peek. One angry hopper and an eruption of shadow, a splash, and a hovering blade of darkness once more retreated to the bottom, lying there against the algae.
My daughter had believed in what I couldn’t, and she had come prepared, a stick and a length of gossamer tippet to which I’d tied the only fly I’d been able to scrounge: a horrific purple streamer fully the size of my daughter’s thumb.
She flicked it out and was fast to the resolute progeny of the fish I’d caught all those years before. She horsed the trout in, as yet unaware of delicacy. But she learned a thing or two about it as she gently traced blue-white haloes on heaving flanks there in the shallow water.
We released the fish and saw him disappear into a pool he could not escape, couldn’t even hide in. But he disappeared and was gone to us, and we never fished the brook again.
*
Mine is a landscape of little fish. It remains so, perhaps, because to dream of anything else requires a faith I don’t yet have, a faith in freckled children and women who see through copper water.
Cool waters rise on the edges of cities, and our places endure, and are loved even as they recede into memories.
Somewhere in twilight, under the tree-root cutbanks, big things linger on, long after the belief in big things has grown dim.
First published in Gray’s Sporting Journal
