Prompt Blog #8: Reflections

Wow! I can’t believe that we are finished. It has been a long and winding road…through the woods! I feel reinforced and challenged now looking back on the past 15 weeks. A lot of my ideas about the genre, about my philosophical perceptions of the natural world, and in my spiritual relationship have been reinforced by the readings we’ve had, and the threads we’ve discussed together. Yet. I also feel that I have been challenged. Specifically, I think that I have been challenged by the scope of the genre. There’s so much more that I want to read and explore. I especially appreciate the text book and the posted readings, which I am going to delve into further and re-read as well.

Moreover, this course has provided me with a time in my hectic life to reconnect with the land and water that revitalizes me. With a new job, two young children, a wife who doesn’t work and needs me to relieve her of her rug-rat duties as much (or should I say as little) as I have the time to, I can’t really carve out the time to go outside. But this course has allowed me to do that, has given me the excuse. And for that…Mel, everyone…thank you!

This connection to the land…any land…it has always been a part of my writing and will continue to be. This class has fostered my ability to look at “nature” through new perspectives, which I feel has strengthened my writing as a whole.

That time has been extremely valuable beyond my writing, too. I really hadn’t made a connection with the land that is my new home, but the weekly place blogs have led me through a path to the land and back to the most important part of my home: my family, my girls.

Hopefully, though, I will get to spend a little bit more time with them after April 20, since I will not be taking six credits…for a little while at least.

Place Blog #8: The Other Side

This week I soaked my hands in blood, metaphorically and physically. I participated in all things sacrilege in my beliefs as a fly-fisherman…

I followed a stocking truck, dumped buckets of fish that were raised in raceways into Delaware Creek, a neighboring watershed to Lost Creek.

But I did it for my daughter.

We woke at 6 am, extremely early for my daughter. She did well, though, and got dressed quickly, letting me stuff her into these miniature neoprene waders my dad got her for Christmas, before she followed me into the misty morning. The air was damp and chilly as we stopped to get hot chocolate, egg sandwiches, and worms at a local gas station, but Clara didn’t flinch. She was excited; we were putting “trout-fish” in the creek.

I met my friend Zach Hosler on Zendt Hollow Road where the Juniata Stocking Club kept their pens. A small mountain spring, no bigger than a drainage ditch along a highway, fed this homegrown hatchery. The stream ran along the road, cutting through one of the club member’s farm, which--strangely enough--raised bison.

When we arrived, Zach was already standing in the bed of his truck, foot propped up on this huge white plastic tank. A black rubber tube, hooked up to a pump in the mountain stream, filled the tank while Zach’s dad and a number of other older guys ran around the pens with buckets and nets. When the tank filled to 180 gallons, the aerator pump kicked on and the old men started hauling up buckets of fish.

They brought the buckets up to Clara to see; it seemed as if there was more fish in the bucket than water. Sleek, marbled green backs, white-tipped fins of brook trout, golden bellies of brown trout, and jewel-sides of rainbows—they rolled over each other, slapping their tails, splashing Clara in the face with water. She laughed, and the old men laughed with her. Yet, they kept bringing each bucket for her to see…and to get splashed by.

I noticed that these fish were more colorful than most stocked fish and bigger than state bred trout, and asked Hosler about it.

“Fresh-water shrimp,” he explained, “this stream is full of them.”

I felt better knowing that these trout were somewhat educated, eating natural foods and not just trout pellets. Maybe I wasn’t just about to dump genetic Frankensteins into one of my new home creeks. These fish at least had experience that would lead them to hitting a fly.

After we filled the tank with about 400 fish, we headed down to the creek. We pulled out a few buckets at each bridge and road-side hole. Clara even got to put three buckets into the creek. Each time, she danced with joy, splashing in the shallows of the creek swollen over its banks from the past week’s rain.

Finally, we reached the public park where we emptied out the tank. When the last bucket of fish was carried off to the final hole, I broke out Clara’s Disney Princess rod so that we could try and catch some of the fish she just stocked in the creek. I place the bobber, tipped her hook with a wax worm, and helped her cast out into a nice current seam in the creek, right were the fast water eddied out into slack water along the far bank. It wasn’t long until we had our first fish, which she helped reel in. The fight wasn’t epic, the fish not huge. But Clara was so proud of catching her first trout ever (she had only caught sunfish before this), that she didn’t want to throw it back.

Normally, when Clara has gone fishing with me, we would reenact a catch-and-release ritual. I bring in the fish (sometimes with her help, sometimes not), unhook the fly or bait-hook from its mouth, extend it to her so that she can pet it with one finger on its head before she says “Ewww, it’s slimy; throw it back!”

Today, though, as I reached out the trout to her, she petted it on the head like normal but then said, “I wanna eat that fish; keep it!”

Shocked, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t carry a stringer because I didn’t usually keep fish. Moreover, when I have kept fish they usual have been big enough to make  a meal out of just that one fish…so it had to be 15 inches or greater. This fish was only 9 or 10 inches at best.

I begged some of the other fishermen that were in the park, and one of them gave me a plastic bag to keep the fish in, but I quickly realized that we would have to be mass murderers today. Within the next hour, we had three more fish of equal size in our plastic bag creel, while having thrown two others back just so we could keep fishing.

As we packed up our gear, a light drizzle swirling in the breeze that began to pick up, the last of our fish flopped in the plastic bag. It hurt me to watch that trout struggling, not because I minded killing a fish, but because I minded killing one so small, and killing so many. I was saddened because I knew that these fish would not be here in days to come to bring more times that Clara and I could bond and behold nature’s wealth.

When we got home, though, Clara holding the slick bag of slimy fish up to mommy, saying, “I am going to eat these fishies I caught,” I thought that maybe there was no foul today. We “paid” for those fish with our work. The stream in which we planted them would get too warm for trout later in the year anyway. Moreover, I didn’t just plant fish; I hopefully planted a fingerling of a tradition in my daughter’s memories. I’d like to start joining the club on more stocking trips. Probably the next one will be to Lost Creek. I’d like to fish more streams where Clara gets to catch trout that she placed there with her own hands. I want to share memories with her that I didn’t get to with my dad because of the confusion and hatred bred in divorce.

So, yeah….that’s right. All of my fly fishing friends…if you can find this blog in the overabundance of blogs on the internet: I have participated in a trout stocking; I have caught fish with bait; I killed those fish, took them home, and fried them up; and I liked it!

Prompt Blog #7: Brook Trout

I have hiked four miles on Black Forest Trail, off of Rt. 44, to get back into County Line Creek. It’s a narrow, shallow creek cutting down through the Alleghany plateau. Nothing seemingly special; not what one many would call a “destination” fishery. Its banks are choked with rhododendron and laurel, making it hard to cast a fly. The few fish I do catch are only promising to be a half-foot long; a ten-inch trout here is a real trophy.

Why go through so much effort? Because County Line, like hundreds of other nondescript runs, streams, and brooks in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains, is one of the last strongholds of the Brook Trout.

Often criticized for its small size and lackluster “fight” in angling circles, the brook trout gets a bum rap. These relatives of the mighty Arctic char and the long, sleek lake trout have the ability to get massive in size, as large as the largest brown trout or rainbow trout or salmon. However, these hillbilly trout have been pushed out of their native habitat into the last remaining pristine waters of the East, waters like County Line which don’t have the room or the food chain to support larger fish.

All up and down the spine of the Appalachians, brook trout survive: barely. They have been relegated to the fringe of humanity because we humans have made “humanity” incompatible with “nature.” Pristine might as well mean “without human” even though all of our pristine and damaged lands alike have always been affected by humans. However, our accentuated industrialism in the past 150 years has deforested our lands, heated and polluted our waters with factories and dams, and introduced foreign fish such as brown and rainbow trout, as well as small mouth bass, whose aggressive nature will outcompete trout parr in any watershed where they meet.

But it hasn’t always been this way; the upper reaches of the Susquehanna all contained brook trout, which thrived so well that early settlers recorded catching basket after basket of 16 + inch fish until they couldn’t carry the baskets home. Moreover, the supply seemed limitless, so they set no limit on the harvest. As our modern world replaced “nature,” though, it became very clear that the brook trout’s day was numbered, so brownies and rainbows were imported from all over the world to replace them.

“Unfortunately”, rainbows could never reproduce in the East very successfully and brown trout, while they could reproduce, did not do so with the same prolific abundance as the brook trout used to. Yet, even though they couldn’t reproduce, Americans kept (and still keep) on stocking these “more successful,” “more sporting” trout in the brook trout’s native habitat. Much more aggressive and territorial, browns and rainbow out competed brook trout and pushed them further and further up watersheds until they were only left the County Line Creeks of the East Coast.

So, all of this being said, why do I make this trek to places like County Line Creek? I don’t know. I guess I’m a romantic. I guess that a small native fish is more of a treasure than a large exotic to me. I guess that the brook trout seems to be the only connection someone like me has to a time they were born too late to witness first hand. I guess I’m trying to bear witness before the last native brook trout are gone or replaced with genetically similar hatchery trout.

Place Blog #7: Lost Again

Spring has sprung in PA for sure. The April showers are here and have been here, on and off, for a week. I stand on the bridge over the culvert where I have brought Clara to fish. I wouldn’t bring her here now; I don’t want to instill any kind of discomfort for her to associate with the outdoors…not yet.

I stand here, though, not because this assignment forces me to, but because I want to bring myself to the heart of nature; to the wet, muddy, fecal matter of nature.

The grey vagueness of day is slowly folding into the darkness, but the rain persists. It drips off of my ball cap in individual drips, beads up on my waterproofed jacket. Yet, it streaks, it runs, it flows back to the puddle at my feet first, then back to the stream below.

I, too, melt, flow back into the stream of unconsciousness. Seriously, nothing is going on in my head. It’s as vacant as the clouded, moonless night, silent but for the irregular, persistent beat of the rain.

I wish I could say that I was transported back to trips into the woods where I sat around with friends who I haven’t spoken to in years, that I remembered our conversations over a fire spitting and sputtering, defyingly staying lit in similar rains. I wish that I could say that memories of rain-soaked fishing trips with my father, where we’ve stared at each other through the beaded-curtain of rain, smiling through soaked beards, lifting heaving trout out of the river into the rain.

I wish I could, but that’s not where I am. I am here; I am in the rain; I am not a tree, nor a rock, or a blade of grass bending under the weight of rain. But I am something like that, though, I don’t know what.

A car stops behind me. Maybe confused by the long hair sticking out of my hat, maybe confused because I’m utterly soaked, the driver, an older man wearing a green and yellow trucker hat, spins down the window of his Ford pickup and asks (almost stereotypically), “You alright, son?”

There isn’t any condescending tone in his voice, but general concern, as if he is my father, as if he worries if I’m sick. “No, I’m fine,” I answer.

“Well, you just looked like you were lost starin’ out in space like that,” he said. “You gonna get hit or catch a cold out here.”

“No, no,” I lie, and thank him for his concern before walking back over to my Jeep. He nods goodbye as he passes. I wave back.

In the Jeep, I shake off the wet chill, crank the heat, locate myself again. I wish I could say that I didn’t know where that locale is, that my existence is as fluid and consubstantial as stream. But I am here, now, again, within the world of man’s creation.