David Adams Richards - Lines on the Water: A Fly Fishermans Life on the Miramichi

Copyright 1998 David Adams Richards
Anchor Canada edition 2001

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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Richards, David Adams, 1950
Lines on the water : a fishermans life on the Miramichi
eISBN: 978-0-307-36382-4
I. Fly fishing New Brunswick Miramichi River Anecdotes.
I. Title.
SH572.N4R525 2001 799.120971521 C2001-930657-1

Miramichi map by Robbie Cooke-Voteary

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v3.1

To Peter McGrath and David Savage

Thanks to my editor, Maya Mavjee, and my agent, Jan Whitford. And, as always, my wife, Peg, and children, John Thomas and Anton.

I love my river. I can tell you that. Each year there are days when the Miramichi shows its greatnessits true greatnessonce again. And each year on the river, once or twice, I will meet men and women with afire of generosity in them, of love for others that God required old prophets to have.

AS A BOY, I DREAMED OF fishing before I went, and went fishing before I caught anything, and knew fishermen before I became one. As a child, I dreamed of finding remarkable fish so close to me that they would be easy to catch. And no one, in my dreams, had ever found these fish before me.

I remember the water as dark and clear at the same timeand by clear I suppose I mean clean. Sometimes it looked like gold or copper, and at dusk the eddies splashed silver-toned, and babbled like all the musical instruments of the world. I still think of it this way now, years later.

As a child I had the idea that trout were golden, or green, in deep pools hidden away under the moss of a riverbank. And that some day I would walk in the right direction, take all the right paths to the river and find them there.

In fact, trout, I learned, were far more textured and a better colour than just golds and greens. They were the colour of nature itselfas naturally outfitted in their coat of thin slime as God could manage. They were hidden around bends and in the deep shaded pools of my youth.

I had the impression from those Mother Goose stories that all fish could talk. I still do.

My first fishing foray was along the bank of a small brook to the northwest of Newcastle, on the Miramichi. A sparkling old brook that Lord Beaverbrook took his name from.

My older brother and a friend took me along with them, on a cool blowy day. We had small cane rods and old manual reels, with hooks and sinkers and worms, the kind all kids used. The kind my wife used as a child on the Bartibog River thirteen miles downriver from my town of Newcastle, and her brothers used also, at the same time that I was trudging with my brother.

It was a Saturday in May of 1955 and I was not yet five years of age. Fishing even then could take me out of myself, far away from the worry of my life, such as it was, and into another life, better and more complete.

We had packed a lunch and had got to the brook about ten in the morning. Just as we entered the woods, I saw the brook, which seemed to be no deeper in places than my shoe. In we went (a certain distance) until the sounds of the town below us were left behind.

Leaning across the brook was a maple, with its branches dipping into the water. At the upper end of the tree, the current swept about a boulder, and gently tailed away into a deep pocket about a foot from the branches. The place was shaded, and sunlight filtered through the trees on the water beyond us. The boys were in a hurry and moved on to that place where all the fish really are. And I lagged behind. I was never any good at keeping up, having a lame left side, so most of the time my older brother made auxiliary rules for merules that by and large excluded me.

You can fish there, he said.

I nodded. Where?

There, see. Lookright there. Water. Fish. Go at her. Well be back.

I nodded.

I sat down on the moss and looked about, and could see that my brother and his friend were going away from me. I was alone. So I took out my sandwich and ate it. (It was in one pocket, my worms were in the other. My brother doled the worms out to me a few at a time.)

I was not supposed to be, from our mothers instructions, alone.

For Mary in heavens sake, dont leave your little brother alone in those woods. I could hear her words.

I could also hear my brother and our friend moving away, and leaving me where I was. In this little place we were out of sight of one another after about twenty feet.

I had not yet learned to tie my sneakers; they had been tied for me by my brother in a hurry, for the second time, at the railway track, and here again they were loose. So I took them off. And then I rolled up my pants.

I had four worms in my pocket. They smelled of the dark earth near my grandmothers back garden where they had come from, and all worms smell of earth, and therefore all earth smells of trout.

I spiked a worm on my small hook the best I could. I had a plug-shot sinker about six inches up my line, which my father had squeezed for me the night before. But my line was kinked and old, and probably half-rotted, from years laid away.

I grabbed the rod in one hand, the line in the other, and tossed it at the boulder. It hit the boulder and slid underneath the water. I could see it roll one time on the pebbled bottom, and then it was lost to my sight under the brown cool current. The sun was at my back splaying down through the trees. I was standing on the mossy bank. There was a young twisted maple on my right.

Almost immediately I felt a tug on the line. Suddenly it all came to methis is what fish dothis was their age-old secret.

The line tightened, the old rod bent, and a troutthe first trout of my lifecame splashing and rolling to the top of the water. It was a trout about eight inches long, with a plump belly.

I got it, I whispered. I got it. I got it.

But no one heard me: I got it, I got it.

For one moment I looked at the trout, and the trout looked at me. It seemed to be telling me something. I wasnt sure what. It is something I have been trying to hear ever since.

When I lifted it over the bank, and around the maple, it spit the hook, but it was safe in my possession a foot or two from the water.

For a moment no one came, and I was left to stare at it. The worm had changed colour in the water. The trout was wet and it had the most beautiful glimmering orange speckles I ever saw. It reminded me, or was to remind me as I got older, of spring, of Easter Sunday, of the smell of snow being warmed away by the sun.

My brothers friend came back. He looked at it, amazed that I had actually caught something. Picking up a stick, and hunching over it he shouted, Get out of the wayIll kill it.