The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass reel,
and the other luxuries for which a true angler would willingly exchange
the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in the boy’s career. At the
uplifting of that wand, as if it had been in the hand of another Moses,
the waters of infancy rolled back, and the way was opened into the
promised land, whither the tyrant nurses, with all their proud array of
baby-chariots, could not follow. The way was open, but not by any means
dry. One of the first events in the dispensation of the rod was the
purchase of a pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of
modern infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell, and
began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of complete
angling.
But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs were
short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his boots, the
father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade along carefully
through the perilous places—which are often, in this world, the very
places one longs to fish in. So, in your remembrance, you can see the
little rubber boots sticking out under the father’s arms, and the rod
projecting over his head, and the bait dangling down unsteadily into the
deep holes, and the delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his
trout high in the air. How many of our best catches in life are made
from some one else’s shoulders!
From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, “a land of streams.” In school-days and in
town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and irresistible
forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles at another, and
kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to play mumble-the-peg at
the due time more certainly than the stars are bound to their orbits.
But when vacation came, with its annual exodus from the city, there was
only one sign in the zodiac, and that was Pisces.
No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with what
curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make him
familiar!
There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called Lycoming
Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a decadent inn, kept by
a tremulous landlord who was always sitting on the steps of the porch,
and whose most memorable remark was that he had “a misery in his
stomach.” This form of speech amused the boy, but he did not in the
least comprehend it. It was the description of an unimaginable
experience in a region which was as yet known to him only as the seat of
pleasure. He did not understand how any one could be miserable when he
could catch trout from his own dooryard.
The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the valley, its
hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still reaches in the
“sugar-bottom,” where the maple-trees grew as if in an orchard, and the
superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat and dainty, was too wide
to fit the boy. But nature keeps all sizes in her stock, and a smaller
stream, called Rocky Run, came tumbling down opposite the inn, as if
made to order for juvenile use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling sluice,
into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The water, except
just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass—old-fashioned
window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a tinge of green in it,
like the air in a grove of young birches. Twelve feet down in the narrow
chasm below the falls, where the water is full of tiny bubbles, like
Apollinaris, you can see the trout poised, with their heads up-stream,
motionless, but quivering a little, as if they were strung on wires.
The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here and
there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of loose
stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great boulders have been
rolled down the alleyway and left where they chanced to stick; the
stream must get around them or under them as best it can. But there are
other places where everything has been swept clean; nothing remains but
the primitive strata, and the flowing water merrily tickles the bare
ribs of mother earth. Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut
well-holes in the rock, as round and even as if they had been made with
a drill, and sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well
lying at the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through
which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into which
the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring it very
steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away without a
ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which shelves down from
the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.
The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor. The
water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope seems very
even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising. Only one step
more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his feet begin to
slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the rod held high above
his head, as if it must on no account get wet, he glides forward up to
his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with amazement. There have been
other and more serious situations in life into which, unless I am
mistaken, you have made an equally unwilling and embarrassed entrance,
and in which you have been surprised to find yourself not only up to
your neck, but over,—and you are a lucky man if you have had the
presence of mind to stand still for a moment, before wading out, and
make sure at least of the fish that tempted you into your predicament.
But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by miners
out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy water-power
to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only in the valley of
remembrance that its current still flows like liquid air; and only in
that country that you can still see the famous men who came and went
along the banks of the Lycoming when the boy was there.
There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at “daping, dapping, or
dibbling” with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of trout
which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house in a line
of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had this Collins
also, and could sing, “Larboard Watch, Ahoy!” “Down in a Coal-Mine,” and
other profound ditties in a way to make all the glasses on the table
jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather a fishy character, and
undeserving of the unqualified respect which the boy had for him. And
there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical, kindly, a skilful though
reluctant physician, who regarded it as a personal injury if any one in
the party fell sick in summer time; and a passionately unsuccessful
hunter, who would sit all night in the crotch of a tree beside an
alleged deer-lick, and come home perfectly satisfied if he had heard a
hedgehog grunt. It was he who called attention to the discrepancy
between the boy’s appetite and his size by saying loudly at a picnic, “I
wouldn’t grudge you what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that it
did you any good,”—which remark was not forgiven until the doctor
redeemed his reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before
a council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy to
get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired moment.
And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere company was an
education in good manners, and who could eat eight hard-boiled eggs for
supper without ruffling his equanimity; and the tall, thin, grinning
Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once described as “like a comb, all back
and teeth;” and many more were the comrades of the boy’s father, all of
whom he admired, (and followed when they would let him,) but none so
much as the father himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and
merriest of all that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of
the earth and beyond.
Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the
Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout for
the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost
forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very
showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave below
Haines’s Falls, and, pulling _The Old Curiosity Shop_ out of his pocket,
read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down the cheeks of
reader and listener—the smoke was so thick, you know: and the Neversink,
which flows through John Burroughs’s country, and past one house in
particular, perched on a high bluff, where a very dreadful old woman
come out and throws stones at “city fellers fishin’ through her land”
(as if any one wanted to touch her land! It was the water that ran over
it, you see, that carried the fish with it, and they were not hers at
all): and the stream at Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains,
where the medicinal waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without
injuring the health of the trout in the least, and where the only
drawback to the angler’s happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes—but
a boy does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were
immortal. Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a
trail through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first
acquaintance with navigable rivers,—that is to say, rivers which are
traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by
steamboats,—and slept, or rather lay awake, for the first time on a bed
of balsam-boughs in a tent.