No matter how you get there, Lehman Road is at least two back, country roads away from any major macadamed artery in Halifax. Right before the its terminus, a T-section with Mountain Road, Lehman runs along Powell’s Creek, so close that a retaining wall—about 3 feet thick and 10 feet tall—has to hold back the road from crumbling into the stream. It is here that I still come in the spring to gauge the depth and clarity of the water, to see if this stream or the others in the area are suitable for fishing. It is here that I come to occasionally gauge my own depth and clarity.
I first came to the Wall with my grandpa when I was probably around 8 years old. We would come, park along the crumbling mudrock of the hill across the street from the Wall, and pull out nylon folding chairs to set up on the concrete “bank.” Perched ten feet above the creek itself, we’d toss hooks threaded with worms and corn to dumb stocked trout, yanking them from the currents to wriggle all the way up to our creels: plastic bags. I was too young to feel a connection to the creek, to the fish, but I felt closeness to grandpa—a shared place, shared memories.
As I grew into a teenager, I veered away from fishing. I was too concerned with school, sports, girls. I took for granted that the Wall and my grandpa would be there when I was ready to return. And I did return, to fishing a least. Learning the ways of streams. How fish hold in pocket water, conserving energy by letting the current bring food to them. How insects cling to the bottoms of rocks in their infancy. How they hide from trout, hope for life. How they finally cling to faith, shuck nymphal shells to breathe air, experience unbent light. How some make it. How some don’t.
I kept making plans with grandpa to go back to the Wall, but I spent too much time fishing bigger creeks and rivers in my new home in the northern tier of PA. Rivers that grandpa could never fish because the current was too strong for 90 year old legs and there were no walls to set up chairs on.
I finally did return to fish the Wall, but this time with the woman who would become my wife. We didn’t have chairs, but she carried on my grandfather’s tradition of baiting fish with corn. I was decked out with all of my new technical gear: waterproof, breathable waders, a chest pack filled with varieties of dry flies, nymphs, streamers, floatant gel, non-toxic split-shot, tippet the diameter of an infant’s hair. Yet, she was the only one to catch a fish—a horny-chub, named for the bumps on its forehead. I only caught rocks and twigs, which lead me to finally climbing down that wall, into the creek to feel the swell of the water around my legs.
I found the Wall to be not as stable and permanent as I thought, the creek eating away at it from underneath. A lip jutted out from the structure’s flat face, right around the common high water mark for spring, but it was broken off, like the edge of a graham cracker. Underneath, you could see the meat of it all: rebar skeleton, chunks of rock encased by the spongy-looking concrete. The Wall was taking in and letting go. It’s job could only be temporary. Like the road. Like the mudrock hillside beyond. Eventually the creek would consume everything.
After we got married, my wife and I moved back to my hometown of Halifax. My home, just two quick turns from the Wall. I would visit it often. I’d ask Brandy to come, but with our new baby, she couldn’t. I’d ask grandpa to come, but at 92, he finally admitted that he probably couldn’t even sit in a folding chair long enough to make it worth it. So I’d go by myself. I’d take more time working upstream and down. I’d climb down at the upper end of the wall, feel the mud give way as I’d slide step to the real bank of the stream. I’d learn that the substrata of this creek was a mix of silt eroded from farms upstream, naturally occurring cobble stone, and jutting bedrock that was the of the same origin as Peter’s Mountain to the south.
I wouldn’t always catch fish. The trout were still the same: dumb, stocked. They didn’t like to eat much of anything natural like mayfly larva or caddis pupa. So, I’d put on a San Juan Worm or yellow salmon egg imitations made out of yarn—the closest I could come to the bait of my youth. I thought this was cheating, but fished with them anyway—not seeing that I, too, was a mix of bedrock, pebbles, and silt.
A few months after my grandpa died suddenly at 93 due to complications from pneumonia, I was fishing at the Wall. I was alone, working the undercut of the concrete where I thought fish may be hiding from the stronger currents of the spring high water. I was alone, until a PA Fish and Boat truck pulled alongside the creek. From the top of the Wall, a Water Conservation Officer asked me a few survey questions, hoping to improve my experience in the future. I gave him my opinion: a lower creel limit, more special regulations waters with a catch-and-release stipulations, efforts to improve natural reproduction, fall stockings in waters where there was no extended season so the fish could learn the natural cycles of the streams.
Yet, even as I recited off these rehearsed lines that I’ve repeated to many others in discussions about conservation of PA streams, I knew that none of that would enhance my experience here at the Wall. I recognized Powell’s Creek couldn’t really hold over a large population of trout because of warming and siltation. It was made for put-and-take fisherman. It was a place for folding chairs, cans of corn, and plastic bags to take your fish home in. It was made for my grandpa, and that was the only experience I came to the Wall for.
Hardly an entry at all but a full and moving story, one that at once leaves me sad and wistful and nodding my head. I have few have places like this, with such powerful shared memories. But I cherish them as much as you clearly cherish the wall. Beautiful.
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