Troutsmith (3 page)

I open to the frontispiece opposite the title page, which is a black-and-white illustration of a “Great Lakes Maskalonge,” a muskellunge, our Wisconsin state fish. I sip my coffee and page through the rest of the book, stopping here and there at a choice passage or illustration. I am struck by a remark on page 297, where the author begins a chapter on striped bass fishing in the Atlantic: “The fly will take them brilliantly, and at the end of three hundred yards of Salmon-line a twelve pound Bass will be found quite sufficient to keep even the most skilful angler's hands as full as he can possibly desire.” Modern anglers are often amazed to learn that in-shore fly fishing for marine species like striped bass and bluefish was common by 1850.

This points to one of the great truths about fishing: it's hard to be “first” at anything, except for technological firsts like graphite rods, fluorocarbon monofilament, or large-arbor reels. People have been fishing and innovating, and writing about it, for a
very
long time.

On the table nearest my desk is a little book from the Loeb Classical Library series: Aelian,
On Animals
, vol. 3, books 12–17. This is a translation of a Roman text written by Claudius Aelianus around the year AD 200. In book 15, chapter 1, Aelian writes, “I have heard tell of a way of catching fish in Macedonia,” and he goes on to describe what is, unmistakably, fly fishing for trout. There is a river wherein live “fishes of a speckled hue.” The fish “eat flies [that] settle on the stream,” and “so with the skill of anglers the men circumvent the fish by the following artful contrivance. They wrap the hook in scarlet wool, and to the wool they attach two feathers that grow beneath a cock's wattles and are the colour of wax.” A few lines later a trout rises to the fly and is caught. There is some debate among classical scholars about a few of the details in the translation, and much debate about the modern name and location of the stream Aelian called the Astraeus. But any angler who reads the passage today knows instinctively that Aelian was describing fly fishing. It has the ring of truth even after some eighteen centuries.

Outside the snow continues to fall and the white cedars are beginning to sag beneath the weight of it. To judge by his twitching paws and wrinkling nose, Onyx is dreaming of pheasants. Wisps of steam rise from my coffee as I massage Onyx's shoulders and reflect on the importance of place for writers and artists.

Wisconsin is well known among hunters, anglers, and conservationists not only for its fish and game opportunities but also for its outdoor writers. Gordon MacQuarrie, who was on the staff of the
Milwaukee Journal
during the 1940s and '50s, was perhaps the first truly professional outdoor writer. John Muir immigrated with his parents to a farm near Fountain Lake (now Ennis Lake) near Portage in 1849, and studied at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before traveling west to the Sierras and immortality. Aldo Leopold's
A Sand County Almanac
is almost required reading for anyone who truly cares about nature and wild country, and the complicated relationship between people, land, and water. The varied physical geography of the Badger State not only has drawn generations of people outdoors, it has inspired them to write about the outdoor experience.

Two old-time Wisconsin outdoor writers who are in danger of being forgotten are Dr. James Henshall, who lived and practiced medicine in Oconomowoc between 1880 and 1910, and Bert Claflin, whose
Blazed Trails for Anglers
appeared in 1949. I have a 1917 reprint of the 1904 revised edition of Henshall's
Book of the Black Bass
. In it, Henshall describes bass fishing with bait, lures, and flies but also includes a whole chapter on “The Philosophy of Angling.” Bass, especially smallmouth bass, are at the very top of Henshall's list: “I consider him, inch for inch and pound for pound, the gamest fish that swims. The royal salmon and the lordly trout must yield the palm to a black bass of equal weight.” Every summer I fight hordes of black flies to fish a section of the Oconomowoc River that was a favorite of Henshall's. The clear, swift-flowing Oconomowoc looks like a trout stream where it slides beneath a busy highway near the village of Stonebank, but the warm water is home to bluegill, crappie, largemouth and smallmouth bass, rock bass, and several other species that are great fun on a fly rod. Bert Clafflin was one of the first people to write about fly fishing for walleye between 1900 and 1920. The big pool below a dam near Milford, on southern Wisconsin's Crawfish River, was the setting for some of Claflin's happiest and saddest stories.

A sudden clattering in the kitchen tells Onyx that Teresa is up. It's time for him to rouse himself, ruffle-shake, and galumph over to a position where he can snaffle any food item that falls to the floor (or rests on the countertop at what he thinks is too close to the edge). A Lab's cerebral cortex is parceled out like this: ½ hunting, ¼ food, and ¼ sleeping and getting tummy rubs. As Onyx trots out of the room I set down my coffee and survey the rest of my sporting book collection.

When I started collecting fishing books, I searched for titles that I enjoyed reading when I was in my teens without much concern for things like condition, first editions, dust jackets, or authors' signatures. It was fun browsing the secondhand bookstores in university towns like Madison and Minneapolis–Saint Paul, and every so often I'd find something special. I still enjoy spending an occasional winter afternoon fishing around the dusty shelves of good secondhand bookstores on and off of State Street in Madison. State Street connects the University of Wisconsin on Bascom Hill to the state capitol on the isthmus, and it fairly seethes with intelligent, creative, interesting people all bustling around and bumping into each other like grist in a mill of ideas.

Renaissance Books is a fine store of used and antiquarian books in, of all places, General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee. Once, on a chance visit while waiting for a flight to Chicago, I found signed copy number 9 of Charles K. Fox's privately printed edition of the now classic
This Wonderful World of Trout
, which I bought for twenty dollars. On another occasion I chanced upon an 1888 printing of G. Brown Goode's
American Fishes
, intact in its original binding. When I saw the hand-colored illustration of an eastern brook trout on the frontispiece, I simply had to have it whatever the cost.

A few of my books are especially meaningful to me because they belonged to famous angler-authors that I worshiped as a boy. New York's Tony Lyons had family connections to several well-known fly fishers and was a trusted source for these titles. Art Flick was a legendary angler in the Catskill Mountains of the Empire State, and Flick's copy of Brian Clarke's
The Pursuit of Stillwater Trout
now graces my shelves next to an early printing of Flick's own
New Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations
. It was great fun telling Brian Clarke about this when we fished together on England's River Test in 2004.

Some fishing books I value because they stirred my imagination when I was a kid; Vlad Evanoff 's
The Freshwater Fisherman's Bible
and Ray Bergman's
Trout
fall into this category. Others I value for their illustrations as much as for their writing; Larry Koller's
The Treasury of Angling
, Joe Brooks's
Trout Fishing
, Robert Traver's
Anatomy of a Fisherman
, and my complete set of
American Sportsman
hardcover periodicals are examples. For writers, I prefer people like Harry Middleton, Howard T. Walden II, John McDonald, and Ernest Schwiebert. I think Schwiebert's short story “The Platforms of Despair,” which appeared in the March 1977 issue of
Fly Fisherman
magazine, ranks as the best fishing story ever written. As you can see, my tastes run to the classics, but I do have a number of fishing books by contemporary authors such as Brian Clarke, John Gierach, Paul Schullery, John Goddard, and James Prosek. The one book that best reflects my own philosophy about fishing and life would be
The Earth Is Enough
, by Harry Middleton.

The books I enjoy most are the ones that I keep coming back to, books full of stories that are almost as much fun to read the fiftieth time around as they were the first time. Of those, there are three that I carry in my truck at all times:
A Summer on the Test,
by John Waller Hills;
A River Never Sleeps
, by Roderick L. Haig-Brown; and
Where the Bright Waters Meet
, by Harry Plunket Greene. These authors assume that fishing is a burning passion for their readers, and they make no apologies for that. They write with humor and grace, and their words echo in my mind as I unhook the fly from the keeper and make the day's first cast.

The three most important things for people who love fishing are the same three things that make or break a real estate deal: location, location, and location. Accidents of physical geography, geology, and climate shape the natural resources of any landscape. The distribution of natural resources in turn shapes the human political and economic geography that develops on the land, and fisherfolk are an inescapable part of that political and economic geography. Most of us take occasional fishing trips to other places, but it is our everyday surroundings, our home waters, that mold and shape us into distinct regional types.

Eons of plate tectonics and continental drift have placed Wisconsin right in the middle of things. Wisconsin is halfway from the equator to the North Pole and halfway from the prime meridian to the International Date Line. Wisconsin was also right in the middle of the ice age that ended just ten thousand years ago. The Wisconsin glaciation pushed a lot of rock and dirt around to form the incredibly diverse natural landscape that we call Wisconsin today. Six connected fingers of ice a mile thick invaded the Badger State, from the Superior Lobe in the northwest to the Lake Michigan Lobe in the southeast. Although some very interesting landforms, such as eskers, kames, and drumlins, were built near the terminal moraines of the glaciers, their overall effect was to flatten the landscape. When the ice receded, Wisconsin was left with five distinct geographic regions.

The top third of the state from Highway 64 north to Lake Superior is characterized by a thick cover of forest. This is the region Wisconsinites call the North Country, and retreating to a cabin “up north” for vacations is a tradition for many Wisconsin families. The North Country lays claim to Wisconsin's famous trout and smallmouth bass waters, rivers like the Bois Brule, Peshtigo, Saint Croix, and Namekagon. Gordon MacQuarrie's
Stories of the Old Duck Hunters
immortalized these rivers during the middle years of the last century, and one can still hear wild browns slurping mayflies and caddis at night on the Namekagon or see leaping silver steelhead at Rainbow Bend on the Brule. When the dog days of August arrive and trout fishing slows, the smallmouth bass fishing on the Saint Croix and lower Peshtigo rivers reaches a seasonal peak. Northern Wisconsin is lake country too. For many anglers, the rolling boil of a forty-five-inch muskellunge engulfing a surface plug or spinnerbait puts trout fishing to shame. The shallow aquifers feed boiling springs wherever the water table intersects the land surface, which produces a higher density of spring ponds than anywhere else on earth. The increasing popularity of self-propelled pontoon boats and fishing kayaks has led to a trout fishing renaissance on the spring ponds of northern Wisconsin, and some of the best still-water trout anglers in the world live between Langlade and Rhinelander.

Central Wisconsin is a flat expanse of sandy soils that were deposited on the bed of Glacial Lake Wisconsin. This central sands region is trout country too, though increasing demands for drinking and irrigation water have depleted and even dried up several important trout streams in recent years. Sand country streams are typically spring fed and slow flowing. Most of the depth and fish-holding structure is found at the corner bends of rivers like the Pine, Mecan, and White. The western portion of the central sands is cranberry country, and Wisconsin's preferential “Cranberry Law” of 1867 signed the death warrant for several trout streams in this area. We call them cranberry bogs now.

Draw a diagonal line from Janesville northeast to Green Bay, and then widen it to a swath of country about forty miles across and you've encompassed the Rock Valley–Fox Valley corridor. Most Wisconsin residents live here or in Milwaukee County, and like most places the quality of the fishing is inversely proportional to the density of the human population. Several important fishing events take place here, however, including the annual walleye and white bass runs on the lower Wolf River.

Farthest east is the Lake Michigan drainage, where despite the proximity of Milwaukee there is some very good fishing. The Big Lake provides the centerpiece, of course. Four species of trout and two species of Pacific salmon are Lake Michigan's headliners, but there are small but dedicated communities of anglers who target smelt, perch, and other inshore species at certain times of the year. Carp fishing is also beginning to attract a following, especially during the winter months. Smallmouth bass are surprisingly abundant in the Milwaukee River, and there are even small, forgotten native brook trout streams folded secretly into narrow valleys and steep ravines that wend their way through densely populated areas.

So glaciers have made Wisconsin and its anglers what they are. The Superior, Chippewa, Wisconsin Valley, and Langlade Lobes of the ice sheet carved Lake Superior and the North Country, and their interlobate moraines set up the groundwater systems that feed the spring ponds. Glacial Lake Wisconsin gave us the central sands. The Green Bay Lobe shaped the Rock Valley–Fox Valley corridor, and the Lake Michigan Lobe scooped out the basin that became the great lake of the same name. Highway engineers found the level or gently rolling topography and the numerous gravel deposits were perfect for building roads, and all of Wisconsin's interstate highways are sited in glaciated areas.