The Orioles Are Back

THE news was over, followed by the baseball scores, and now the brownie in my glove compartment said: "Some showers possibly tomorrow and tonight. But generally the weather will be seasonally mild; it looks right now as though we'll have a pleasant next two days."

I turned him off and pushed the pedal down a bit. Showers were the very thing this time of year to liven up the water, clear the air, and bring the mayfly hatches on. I'd chosen, luckily, the best of times for this brief mid-week holiday: Competing fisherman would not be out in force; the glass would rise; likewise the river's ample schools of husky, highly colored trout.

I arrived in Rockwood as the sun was sinking in a haze. Up the valley where the river had its source a sullen battery of leaden clouds was drawn up on the darkening hills and thunder muttered in the gloom.

"Oh well," I told myself, "it probably will go around; at any rate it won't last long."

I laid my tackle and my waders out for early morning use and went off to the local inn to gossip, have a drink or two, and dine.

No friends or fishermen I knew were at the bar, but there were two loquacious fellows from Vermont who asked if I were having any luck. When I introduced myself and said my folks, long years ago, had settled in the fourteenth state, they looked at one another and at me for quite a spell before the young one blurted out: "You must be one of them; there aren't too many fellers with that name."

The other spat his chaw of burley toward a brass spittoon.

"Ain't too many fishermen," he said, "that has a kind of monument longside a spring that's handy to his favorite pool. Ain't too many with a drinking cup that has a name on to it same as yours, a cup that's tethered to a ring set in a boulder by a chain no one has broke for 80 years."

"Where is the place; what stream?"

I slid my Haig and Haig along the bar toward these two gruff Green Mountain boys. The younger one was paying for their drinks. Close up, I saw he wasn't really young. The other drained his glass and set it down.

"If you don't know, the secret's going to die with us," he said. "Ain't many fellers left alive that knows. Ain't many places where a man can go and be alone these days."

The other turned and hitched his pants.

"You tell one guy and in a month his friends would skin the crick," he said. "But you ain't missing much by fishing somewheres else. Most all the trout that lays there now beside the spring is German browns; ain't hardly any speckles left."

The men went out. I asked the bar-keep who they were and where they lived.

"They just came in before you did," he said. "They'd heard about the river here and thought they'd like to stay a while. But when they learned they mostly couldn't kill the trout they caught and had to put 'em back alive, they changed their minds. Said they were going home where they could eat the fish they caught and show the big ones off. They didn't register or give their names. I don't know who they are or where they live."

I was thoughtful as I ate my steak. I went to bed and didn't dream, but now and then the thunder woke me up. The little fellow in the dash-board of my car had been all wrong in saying we might have a shower; the deluge lasted all night long.

When morning came the river was too high to fish. The sun was struggling through the mist but hours would elapse before the air was clear. The waters wouldn't crest 'til after I had gone back home. I left my tackle where it was, ate breakfast in the diner where the milk trucks parked, and drove up river toward the higher wooded hills.

Below the road that ran along the surging, overflowing stream, the cocoa-colored water boiled and heaved. Bizarre shaped sweepings of the flooded banks went by as steam from new-plowed furrows on the flats was rising toward the now emerging sun.

My thoughts that morning turned" again to my old namesake of the long ago.

HE must have been a man who shared his secrets with his neighbors and his brook trout catches with their wives. No one but fellow farmers, when their chores were done, had fished beside him on the stream, I thought, unless perhaps a barefoot sun-tanned boy or two. He must have fished the river every summer day. He must have died when he was old; no able bodied tiller of Vermont's reluctant soil could touch his fish pole 'til the fields were plowed, the weeds uprooted, and the hay brought in. No man of middle age went down along the river bank 'til troughs were filled with middlings for the pigs, the horses had their oats and corn, the hens were fed, the cows were milked, and stove wood filled the kitchen bin. The man I'd heard about was likely well past 80-odd; too old to work a crosscut saw, to hold the handles of a balky ox-drawn plow or swing an axe, but pert enough to use his squirrel gun when ruffed grouse fed on acorns out beyond the woodlot wall or when cotton-tails were nibbling on the fallen fruit beneath the orchard's apple trees. I wished I could have asked my father who he'd been, what kin I'd been to him. No matter what the answer I was happy. No matter what the answer I was proud.

When I came to Berry Brook, I stopped to pass the time of day with Anson Ames. Ans was busy hitching up a team and I had time to look around. In the elms that stood beside the house I heard short snatches of the clear sweet song I loved and saw a flash of orange now and then.

Anson Ames came up and shook my hand. "A shame your fishing's spoiled," he said. "Too bad you had to waste your holiday."

"Oh it's not wasted, Ans," I said. "I've had a chance to shake your hand; I've learned a lot I might have never known. And, Ans, the orioles are back."

Dana S. Lamb, a retired investment executive, frequently writes about anglingand hunting. Among his books are Bright Salmon and Brown Trout, On Trout Streams and Salmon Rivers, Some Silent Places Still, and Where the Pools Are Bright and Deep. He is shared by theclasses of 1921 at Dartmouth and 1923 atPrinceton, having tried out the fishing atboth schools. Eldridge Hardie's drawingsoriginally appeared in Where the Pools Are Bright and Deep, published in 1973 bythe Winchester Press.