“Quill Gordon! Come out from under there, you fool!” said my old friend, Milt Audette. “Hiding from Marge Feely again? Very unbecoming, you know. You’re in serious danger of compromising your standing with me, hiding under the porch from a seventy year-old woman.”
“Oh, yeah?” I countered. “Concealment is a dying art. It’s a manly art. Like that time you got burned, hiding behind your furnace at home.”
“I was hiding from my wife. That’s different. What has gotten into you?” Continue reading
My old friend, Dr. Marcus Feely, recently spent four days here at Fish in a Barrel Pond. He will be back in August, with his wife and family, and again in September, with some lucky young receptionist from his office. Last week, however, he was here by himself.
I hate to say it, but when he is alone he gets lonely and if I stopped to chat every time he wanted to talk I would never get anything done.
I don’t exactly hide, but I can be difficult to find and I don’t exactly skulk, but when Doc Feely is here I do tend to skirt the edges a bit more than usual. My stealthiness is tested during his visits, especially when he stays in the Cahill camp, which I must pass on my way to inspect our overflow spillway. I got out there just fine on Tuesday, crawling on my belly beneath the kitchen window while Doc sat on the front porch, listening to the Red Sox game, but coming back, as I drew near I heard ice in a glass and froze.
Doc Feely was making a drink in the kitchen and I had to think fast. I could stay right where I was and wait, sauntering past after he toddled back out to the porch or I could find an alternate route and be on my merry way. Instead, I panicked when I heard the kitchen screen door squeak open and slap shut, followed by the approaching tinkle of ice in a drink.
I don’t remember the lie I must have told when Doc Feely asked what I was doing 35 feet up a pine tree, but I remember a few of the lies I tried when he insisted I come sit on the porch with him. They weren’t very good ones and I finally climbed down, figuring that if I was going to spend the next part of the afternoon listening to Doc prattle on I might as well do it on the porch with a drink in my hand instead of halfway up a pine, getting covered with sap. Continue reading
JUNE XX, 20XX
4:07 a.m.: Fell asleep last night dreaming of fishing for trout. Every cast on the mark, every retrieve bringing another fish to net. Adoring throngs lined the shore, waving handkerchiefs and shouting, “Huzzah, Quill Gordon, huzzah! Working where others come to play, huzzah! Such fine fly fishing always so close at hand and fishing privileges to boot! Huzzah, Quill Gordon, Huzzah!”
My casts shot out true — back-hand, under-hand and behind my back — and each one hooked a trout. As I motored past the main dock (where twenty beautiful women wearing bikinis and waders went positively bonkers over my patented dipsy-doodle, backwards-between-the-legs triple haul) the cheers changed to whistles and I began to wake up.
The whistles in my dream were in reality the songs of birds, serenading the arrival of first light. Very few people get to experience a real dawn chorus of songbirds any more. Thrushes and warblers, finches and wrens, robins, cat birds, chats, flickers, phoebes and sparrows joining together with dozens and dozens of their neighbors to sing in the morning with what most people interpret as melodious joy. In reality, the songs of birds are more likely to be challenges and threats — territorial exclamations tossed into the dawn — and, when taken that way, it is more an early morning cacophony than lovely dawn chorus.
Stupid noisy birds. Continue reading
Other than the obvious absence of anglers, yours truly in particular, what is wrong with this picture? A quiet, gray, drizzly day, emerging insects and rising trout going about their business as they always have and (hopefully) always will; nothing at all wrong with that.
The third weekend of the season is here and laughter spills from the camps at night, mingling with the calls of the loons cutting through the thick evening air. Mornings, brimming with promise and the golden light of dawn are quiet and it truly is possible to find solitude without loneliness.
Time alone on the water, contemplating the ways of belly buttons and trout, is precious but so is time with friends old and new. From far and away or from just down the road they gather and a rainy afternoon becomes occasion for a feast.
Spring has returned and if I pretend the blackflies don’t bother me as they swarm my eyes, crawl up my nose and chew my scalp along the hairline, it’s kind of nice around here.
A man recently approached me, saying he had bad news. When I asked what the bad news was he said, “Geese. But wait, it gets worse! They’ve got babies!”
He told me I’d better do something right quick before they got out of hand and ruined the place, like they had at the country club where he plays golf, and he didn’t seem too happy when I told him I didn’t think there were enough geese around to get all bent out of shape about. I assured him I would keep an eye on them and act accordingly, which I will, but it wasn’t that long ago I watched as one pair took turns on the nest through a three-day snow storm.
That snow seems a distant memory now but this pair of geese made it through and the babies that man was worried about have made their first trek from the swamp to the open lake. I will never understand how someone can go on and on about “getting away from it all” and then get upset when they see wildlife.
People like that man are fortunately few and far between. Most folks are just happy to be here, at a place where rising trout nip at the heels of emerging mayflies drifting like faeries into the dusky eve; a place where loons still sound their ancient call and the night sounds are frogs, not sirens; a place where one can feel a part of something larger than themselves, dwarfed beneath a massive, starry sky; a place where lessons are learned through stillness, absorbed instead of forced.
Such places are not necessarily so far away.
Go.
Opening Day 1947
Opening Day 2011 dawned a tad bit cool and more than just a little breezy, and the members and guests of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society reacted accordingly. Some searched out sheltered spots to cast while others trolled streamers, slapping their way through the chop on the upwind leg of their circuit. By breakfast, most had touched enough trout to have no problem not going back out but a few anglers, suffering from the delusion that nothing matters but numbers, couldn’t be bothered to come in even for coffee. Continue reading
The ice is gone and, suddenly, it is almost as if this past winter never happened.
April 27, 2011 10:30 a.m.
Each year, the week before opening day, I take my list of things to be done around Fish in a Barrel Pond and make a little schedule. I carefully find a block of time for each of the 4,000 things to be done — an hour here for this job, two hours there for that, completing each task as quickly and efficiently as possible — and when I am done I feel like the most organized and disciplined man in the world.
I then take that schedule and tear it into tiny pieces before the gods of such things have a chance to laugh at my plans. They will find plenty to laugh at in the days ahead.
Fish in a Barrel Pond April 23, 2011
Winter is dead. Oh, sure, there will be a few snow squalls and maybe even a storm in the next three or four weeks but a few sickly patches of rotten snow are all that remain of the 10+ feet that fell over the course of the past seven months (some of those patches are still three feet thick). The edges are pulling back and the coltsfoot have begun to bloom in the bare spots along the roads.
Coltsfoot sends up leafless flower stalks as soon as the snow retreats. Early bees and other insects find coltsfoot a welcome source of nectar and within a few days the coltsfoot will be thoroughly pollenated and their bright yellow blooms will go to seed, looking like tiny dandelion heads. By June the leaves will be up, some a foot across, gathering energy for next April’s blooms. They may not be much to look at but the blooming of the coltsfoot is one of the surest signs of spring in these parts.
The members of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society are a curious bunch and I get at least one phone call a day from this member or that, asking me when the ice will go out. I’ve watched a lot of ice in my time and I do my best to give them the benefit of my vast experience, telling them that if I could predict that sort of thing I sure as heck wouldn’t be doing what I do, which lately has involved a lot of counting Band-Aids™ and rolls of paper towels.
The edges of Fish in a Barrel Pond have begun to melt and holes are opening up. Only three or four inches of lake ice remain, beneath what is left of this winter’s snow, and it is going fast. It better go fast; I’ve got 20 people showing up in two weeks and they are going to be eager to fish.
Fish in a Barrel Pond April 14, 2011
It is hard to think about fishing right now, when this is the best spring has come up with so far:
On the other hand, it is hard not to, with Opening Day here at Fish in a Barrel Pond a mere three and a half weeks away. I don’t know how you prepare for Opening Day in your neck of the woods, but I’m willing to bet I prepare a little differently than you do.
Today, for example, I counted spatulas and ordered 90 rolls of toilet paper.
It’s almost time to start digging out the roads, just as I do every year but, when it comes to the ice on the lake, there’s not much I can do but have faith it will go away on its own, just as it does every year, sometimes with only hours to spare.
Oh, look! A crack!
In the weeks to come, readers of this blog can look forward to more exciting preparation rituals like distributing itchy wool blankets, hitting up the linen service for cold sheets and starchy pillow cases, along with the unveiling of the new brooms (complete with instructions!). Water will flow through pipes and down drains, septic system pumps will be tested (graphic photos!), worn gasketing on wood stoves will be replaced, chimneys will be cleaned and critters will be rousted from their winter homes. There will be setbacks and surprises along the way, I’m sure (there always are) but, come the last Saturday in April, the ice will be off and fish will be on as the members of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society hit the water for the start of the 2011 season at Fish in a Barrel Pond.
Some anglers count themselves fortunate to have one Opening Day excursion to prepare for; Quill Gordon gets to prepare for dozens at once.
The end of the season is nigh, here at Fish and a Barrel Pond, but it ain’t over yet and I should have known better than to write like it was as I did a couple of weeks ago when I got all sentimental and gooey in my post “Mostly Photos, from Somewhere in Vermont“. A string of sunny days full of blue skies and brook trout interspersed with starry nights scented of bourbon and wood smoke can do that to a guy.
It’s been almost six months since the 2010 fishing season began for the members of the Neverwas Nonesuch Angling Society and it was nice to spend another Saturday night by the fire, sipping toddies and swapping stories with a swell bunch of fellows but on Sunday afternoon, as I stood in the road waving good-bye, a chill, northern breeze boxed my ears and tossed my hat in the ditch, reminding me it is the end of their season, not mine.
All week long that breeze blew. It took the sunshine away, replacing it with steady rain, and by Thursday afternoon the breeze was a flag-shredding gale and, after a brief lull, the rain became sleet.
You pay your money and you take your chances when you come to Fish in a Barrel Pond, especially in October. Some folks, with little apparent effort, have a fine time no matter the conditions, while others don’t try at all and are miserable, rain or shine. Continue reading
The View from Fish in a Barrel Pond 