My Own Little Wilderness
By Steve Grant
I love bigger rivers. They have presence, even grandeur, and their own literature that you can dive into with when you can't play on them. And they have big fish.
What then am I doing fishing in brooks?
I often fish little brooks, little out-of-the-way brooks that most people ignore. Even the people who stock the streams with trout ignore many of the brooks I fish.
Well, there are times when I want a little elbow room, like early spring, when everybody is out. If I'm going to fish -- and I maintain that if you fish you are consciously or unconsciously searching for scenery last seen in the U. S in, say, 1600 -- I prefer a sense of wilderness. People are fine; I just don't want them disturbing my fantasy every few minutes.
Brooks are my make-believe wilderness, especially in the too- populated East.
They are nature's unfettered, honest-to-goodness, free-flowing, joyful little exuberances. Water falls from the sky, soaks into the forest floor, seeps out on some hillside. A rill or two joins in, then another seep, another rill. Now it's a rivulet, next it's a brook, tumbling down a hillside overhung with fallen, moss- covered limbs, working its way among boulders and ledges this way and that, chattering rhythmically all the while as if playing percussion to the flute-like songs of the thrushes nearby. A brook can be that simple and nice.
Even the wildest rivers in America, certainly in the continental U.S., can seem almost suburban on a summer afternoon when canoe, kayak and rafting parties are clustered every few miles. But even today there are brooks in Connecticut and New England where you can fish all day and see hardly another soul.
Dams? Not many, and usually falling apart if you come upon one. Old brick factories? Very rare. Bridges? Rickety wooden ones, mostly.
Brooks are honest. The brooks I fish have brook trout and shiners and not much else. Fussbudget or not, I much prefer it if the trout have not been stocked; fishing ought not to be an Easter egg hunt. Nor should it be a trip to the zoo. Too often the fish in the big rivers are alien creatures brought in to enhance a fishery. I don't want the northern pike in the Connecticut River any more than I want giraffes in our forests. They never bothered putting bass or pike in brooks, or if they did, it didn't work, thank goodness. Brooks are what they are.
I say that brooks are a make-believe wilderness, though, because almost every brook I can think of in New England was once part of a farm, even some pretty remote brooks in northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. But many of those farms were long ago abandoned, and now, in the woods that grew up in their place, we have these near-wild brooks. Often you see a stone wall nearby, or the overgrown remains of an orchard, but mostly there are wild trees, rocks, water and sunlight that filters through the leaves in golden shafts.
A few years ago my son, Scott, and I were paddling our canoe on the Aroostook River in remote northern Maine, occasionally wetting a line in pursuit of brook trout, though not with any real confidence or commitment. It was August, the river was low and getting warm, and the trout were stressed and sulking. Where a brook entered the Aroostook -- where brooks meet rivers is always a good spot to fish - - Scott made a cast and, surprising both of us, tied into a brookie of perhaps 10 inches that I netted but clumsily dropped into the river before he even got a good look at it.
What redeemed the moment was that it drew our attention to the brook; Farm Camp Brook, according to the topographic map. You can jump across Farm Camp Brook, and I think it safe to say most people paddling the Aroostook, a handful of people to begin with, ignore it.
We, on the other hand, treated it like we had discovered the Missouri meeting the Mississippi. Out of the canoe we came, up the brook we went. We had a great time, out of the sun, dodging branches and mosquitoes, fishing tiny pockets of water with tiny hooks and tiny pieces of worm. I had a fly rod along but didn't dare attempt to launch a fly in the tangle of alders that shaded and cooled this trickle of water.
You don't need waders on brooks like these; you need a pair of Tevas and reduced expectations. One July day near Jackman, Maine, we fished a brook perhaps 8 feet wide, and as we worked our way downstream came to a ledge with a cascade of something like 10 feet. For an hour it was our Niagara Falls, without the commercial distractions. A brook rushing through shoulder-high walls of granite is the Grand Canyon without the crowds.
We caught a dozen trout in Farm Camp Brook in no time, and returned them all to the water. The biggest fish was not much bigger than my index finger, but more importantly they were healthy, perfect, beautiful, colorful, vigorous fish. Native fish. They belonged there as surely as the maples and the spruces. Look at them: on the sides, red dots surrounded by sky-blue halos, mixed with yellow dots; the lower fins a deep orange, tipped in white; backs with an intricate, worm-like pattern.
How many generations of trout had that little brook produced, I wondered? Must be thousands. Part of the joy of a brook is to puzzle through its history, hinted at by those stone walls and the tiny rock dams long ago breached by nature. Is that a farm foundation over there? You can do this along a river, too, but here the scale is manageable. You can come away in an afternoon thinking you know a brook, a satisfaction of its own.
You poke along, exploring one pool then another, taking in the smells of damp moss and leaves, the song of the vireos, the dusty rose flowers of Joe Pye weed. Climb over the trunk of a tree that fell across the brook years ago, and admire the lichens on the big boulders. Listen to the gurgling sounds. It is the water that is the point of it all, and it lives up to its cameo status. Find a brook anywhere removed from the hustle-bustle, and it will be sparkling, as clear and as inviting as water gets. Good thing there is no prohibition on touching it, because that would be impossible.
On a sunny summer day, a 4-foot-deep, sandy pool is a dilemma; do you fish it or jump in? Both.
This essay originally appeared in Northeast magazine.