Joey at the Delaware Canal, Bucks County, PA Dad at Skowhegan, Maine May 2007 Fall 2006
Alexis at Pinchot Park, York, PA
One man’s life…
—Biographical paragraphs at random- from an autobiography in progress।
Summer comes none too soon when you are a teenager armed with a drivers license and a badly abused 1965 Mustang coupe। Vivid still the images, soul- echoes, sounds, and youthful freedom still are a longing in my now distant joy। That first summer I was 16 defined the next 20 years of my life, perhaps all of it. I was fortunate that my surviving parent, my mother, felt that total freedoms so that a child’s imagination and soul could soar were much more important than mindless autocratic discipline. I know now, she had been powerfully changed by my father’s death. Maybe it tugged hard as her Philadelphia politician congressman and Hatfield feud surviving father had left the family years before in a bitter marital conflict. Dad was 44.
We all watched, my mom, sister, and I as dad, a strapping WWII Army air corps veteran of the Philippines wasted away from terminal cancer। Mom stood by, tending to him, taking him diligently and always heroically to downtown Philadelphia’s Jefferson medical center for treatment. Only now do I know that I was destined to lead my life as if I would shortly die, at 1000 percent every moment, without abandon, because my dad died so young, and I was sure to follow. Not to miss a thing.
That experience made mom a soldier for us, my sister and me, mom insistently aiding me through college, buying me my first motorcycle and the mustang out of dad’s small life insurance payoff।
It was as if to say, here’s a car, go explore, be careful but don’t be so cautious that you miss life। It has been my code, the way I have lived since I can remember.
The mustang was well worn and we were poor। I had to learn from the corner mechanic, who had been robbing my mother in the repairs to my dad’s rambler, how to “do it myself”. So over time I became quite the expert in keeping a basket case running, eventually painting, rebuilding, and racing my V8 ‘stang. But that was later.
This summer of my junior year was meant for grabbing the old fishing map and a few dollars for gas and finding a stream, lake, river, or pond that could hold fish.
The fishing map had been my father’s.
The gas stations put out different theme maps। Dad found a Pennsylvania fishing map at the Chalfont Atlantic station in 1966 and it became almost an item of worship. This map was used for Dad to conjure various trips for our fishing and family road trips. Not that Dad was much of a fisherman. He grew up in south Philly, and only got to fish rarely as far as I know. He had a boat in Barnegat at the Jersey shore with an Uncle where they fished the bay and drank beer, but there was an argument when I was little and it ended.
The fishing map was used to find Yellow Breeches Creek and the North Branch of the Susquehanna River। Both became Mecca’s to us then and still today. Islands in the river are named for my children at Homet Ferry, and the Yellow Breeches at Huntsdale have hosted my friends and family during traditional trout and bass seasons for almost 40 years.
So we headed out from Doylestown in the leaky mustang on a mission of pure exploration। My fishing pal and high school buddy Joe riding shotgun. I had installed a tape player in my pony and we had one tape. It was an early Beatles tape, and as I write these words I can still hear odes to the Norwegian woods and the familiar voices of Paul and John.
My thrill was to explore extreme northwestern Pennsylvania। The map claimed big fish in wild sounding places like Kinzua, The Allegheny River, and the Clarion River. Wide areas were delineated as native brook trout country, and home of the Pike and Muskellunge, their fierce cousins up to 4 feet long, and both bristling with teeth.
When dad was alive, the annual trek to the Yellow Breeches south of Carlisle was our big trip.
That and a summer trip to Bradford County (Wyalusing) on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River। All year, months before these trips, I would clean and organize tackle, study the maps, dream of trout at the Breeches or sultry summer evenings along the then wild Susquehanna with a stringer of walleyes and smallmouth, to be carefully cleaned and cooked by my mother, either Breeches trout or Susquehanna fish were a sacred meal.
On our summer trips in high school, the few we took, or the many I took alone, I slept behind summer quiet schools on the bus loading platforms Sleeping bag on still warm summer concrete। I caught and ate fish, and begged and borrowed for gas money.
In my fishing-dream- heart I studied and memorized the special map dad brought home years before। Pennsylvania’s route 6 traverses the most Northern part of the state from the New York state line near Port Jervis, all the way to odd sounding places named Kane, Warren, Corry, Westline…or Tionesta. Images on the map showed trout and toothy pike, tiny towns were I imagined Indians still netted fish and carried babies on their backs.
My fishing friend and fellow high school junior Joe and I were now on the road. Joe was a big athletic blonde kid who the girls liked. In fact I was secretly in love with his cheerleader girl and my neighbour Leslie. I think she thought of me as a combination motor head and nerd.
I had just started to get serious with Carol, my neighbour and first serious girlfriend that summer of 1973 (and oh how serious it is at 17!) . Joe simply said, “I don’t want to hear about that chick on this trip, we are fishing.” I had already been ridiculed for taking Carol to a dance.
Our destination, revealed by the sacred fishing map was the Allegheny reservoir। It was to be by way of route 6, that magical path I had only dreamed about. Real rugged trout country. As the Beatles groaned, we finally made it to Renovo on route 120. A dark nearly abandoned railroad town, where people were playing baseball in the main street at 3 AM. It was an odd scene. Out of bravado we drove up over the top of our world on route 144. I hadn’t known the state was this remote, wild. Finally we arrived at route 6 and went west.
The parking area by the reservoir and Kinzua dam was a wild place। They had flooded the corn planter Indian reservation to make the lake, and it made me feel sad. The loud spillway and leaking gas from the mustang’s rusty gas tank kept us up most of the night. By sunrise, a few sleepy fishermen emerged. Out of one truck a bewhiskered scrawny old man emerged.
While busy at this early hour boiling camp coffee and breakfast of fried walleyes, we asked about the fishing। We became friends with old Bill, and he told us of Kinzua fish and fisherman. He said to go back into town across the old iron river bridge and make the first right. This would take us to the deep hole on the other side of the dam. We slowly drove up the road, as it became rough, boulder strewn. I swerved to avoid a rock and the right edge gave way and there we hung precariously above the trees and the roaring Allegheny below.
Joe said he noticed an old jeep parked at a shack back down the hill। We walked back and found a gray tarpaper shack with half a door, the place moonshine was made and bad things happened to “out a towners”. Joe knocked on the door and appeared a wizened old man, unshaven. He looked to be 100 years old and was in fact, quite toothless. We explained our plight and he yelled to someone in the shack (we thought he was alone) a filthy little boy appeared and was instructed by the old man to “go get the rope yea big around as your xxxxxx”. In only a few moments the boy appeared and the antique jeep pulled my mustang right back onto the “road”. Joe gave gums, as he has been later called, a dollar and the old man jumped for joy, -kicked up his heels. I had never seen someone kick up heels before. We felt as far from home as Mars, or even Arizona.
As a 10 year old living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, whose fishing exploits then, excited trips with dad to the Delaware Canal, river or Cooks Creek in Upper Bucks County, such places were odd and exotic as the Grand Canyon, or even the Desert and Cactus, or salmon streams in Atlantic Canada or Alaska.
So armed with my car and some gas, that old rusty camping stove I inherited from mom reluctantly (she still used it when the power was off), I ventured next out by myself to Huntsdale, where I had fished with dad since the spring of 1966.
This obscure little town, a right beautiful place as we” Canadians” say, is situated just below South Mountain, in a valley of limestone springs। The old map claimed, “Could be in old Scotland”.
I had no idea about that, but I now know, as with Cape Breton that single Scottish reference may have been enough to move dad to make the Yellow Breeches our private fishing and family place for the generations। Here was a trout hatchery where the pilgrimage is still made. I actually received a letter from the fish commission stating that my family had been signing the guest book at the Huntsdale fish cultural station longer than any other. This is devotion, a living tribute to a place and time past, still resurrected in real life, at a place of powerful genetic and visceral memories.
Perhaps dad loved the stream and South Mountain area for a different reason beyond a Scottish map reference. It may have been genetic. Dad would take us as kids to battlefield re-enactments at Antietam and Gettysburg. Later, this military interest would not only change my life, but also cause my young wife fits, hating my long periods away from home being of service to the nation.
I never knew then and neither did dad that our ancestor fought in these hills with the 17th New York Infantry, after getting here from fighting as a British officer in the Crimean War (2nd British Foreign Cavalry) It is very tough to live down the past, especially when among your ancestors, on both sides of the family are heroes, pioneers, or actual biographical historical figures. Perhaps I can use that as an excuse for my behaviours, but I doubt it.
In high school, after dad’s death, we, that is my high school crowd, and later the entourage I engendered as a successful businessman, ritualistically put our tent here, and fished the long fish, in hopes of touching the prior, the infinite।
This field of tradition just south of the hatchery my son has called since being very small the “thorn spot”. The connotation is obvious. But in this field, it was where my dad and I first drowned bait in the mid-१९६ओ's
Arriving back alone, years later, always puts a fist in my chest। Those days so long past, but not really. The sights, scents. Feelings-even trees now bigger but still where they belong belie the time past but still frozen. Waiting for that first cast, the first fish, the drive home to a familiar place, but still less important than the stream, the friends, and the father.
There is a curve along Pine Road where there was an old farm and an old dam. Probably a colonial mill dam, it was said to me once by a seedy from over the mountain that huge trout lay under the banks along that curve. Year’s prior, in High school, on a trip to pilgrimage here, my friend had said of the spot “I could eat that log”. Only a trout fisherman in love with small streams could fully gather that.
Beyond the bend in the stream are the railroad tracks. They are in the wood by a small tributary to the Yellow Breeches. I always imagined as a child huge trout that lay there, at the mouth of the spring-stream, under the railroad bridge, waiting for the life giving food and oxygen that the new water brings, cold, new, fresh. I have never fished there.
The road west was curvy, flat. I always anticipated my sign; it said “Bridle path”, by the horse farm just below the thorn spot.
There would be no camp this year. Camping was no longer permitted here on fish commission property. Just I, alone now years later in my rented car, Arizona and business long behind this day, mind full with fish and memories.
The sign marking the town of Huntsdale on the Eastern side is now long gone। Perhaps accident, flood or -just time. I parked in the same spot as 30 years ago, my big old tree still leaning, but without surrender, towards the creek.
The path to my spot of tradition was always wet. This is a valley of pure limestone springs. The stream literally pops out of the ground here, where rock and water meet, the upward pressure makes a spring, the springs the stream, and the home of trout and frog, and of the dreamers. Years ago, spring peepers cried and then would abruptly silence at the first step down my path. In those years the parking lot was full with campers, both over nighters and day-trippers. We all grew to know each other. After dad died in 1972, I came every year as a religion, a pilgrimage and introduced the stream and camping to everyone who was then, or later important in my life.
There were years that I came by myself। It seemed although my rituals stayed intact, at least as far as the fishing ritual, other people changed, and stopped the traditions of their youth. One spring I was camping along there at the spot on Pine Road, just below the hatchery. Most of the Friday night before opening day was spent drinking. Not so much by me, I usually had a case of traditional rolling rock (my dad’s brew, and the official brew of Pennsylvania‘s State related universities), and a small bottle of blackberry brandy. This was my mother’s primary cure-all, for all ailments. And who was I to argue, as my mom was both an Ivy League grad and a medical professional.
It brings to mind a bottle I found on the farm, in the barn in 1965. It was a liniment bottle, which I later found out was from the 1880’s. It still had contents, that smelled like pine tar (probably from Westline, read on), and the label listed that it would cure anything.” For man or beast”. I think my sister still has some of my bottles-this was my mother’s mantra, the brandy would cure anything, but if it didn’t at least you would feel better about it.
In the old days, one group of Yellow Breeches campers was lead by a fishing sage named Mr। Hamnell. He bellowed incoherently most of the April night. If it was raining, after drinking most of a case of Iron City, he would shout all night “come on rain”. I was never sure why. There had been plenty of opening days in a cold, pouring rain. It kept the shirkers away, and left the sacred breeches to her true followers, the real acolytes and sextons, and the holy men of the place. The Hamnels had asked me to eat with them in the camper that was always there, as long as I remembered, on opening weekend. We drank Iron City and ate venison. I love personally shot game-real food as God intended. I don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink a little and won’t enjoy a fresh trout or deer chop. It’s unmanly, disrespectful. After eating the trout, venison and swilling big returnable bottles of Pittsburgh’s finest beer, Mr. Hamnel’s countenance turned somber. We had talked that I worked for the State’s environmental program, then new. So did many in his family also work for the keystone state, the Fish Commission of all places.
They each had a fishing license numbered in the single digits-that’s clout। I can come off a little educated and pompous, I didn’t swear then, and was an intellectual. But Mr. Hamnel looked right at me. He was round, his face drawn and bright red from drink, slurring, he lectured. “Boy, I have been xxx’d and xxx’d every way you can imagine and many, boy that you can’t. You better do it while you can, Boy, because the day gonna come when you can’t no more and you will be sorry. You will be sorry you didn’t do it while you had the chance, boy”.
This is profound. Life Orders-my nature, my very proof of existence. Perry county wisdom spoken in Cumberland. Wisdom for a lifetime.
The following day afternoon, after a long cool morning of successful fishing, I was sitting in my truck daydreaming. A bunch of girls pulled up, beers open, in a green 1968 Chevy that looked like it was just towed out of a field. It was a pretty good night…caught some trout too.
The streams contact with my waders was cold. The sunset was now low above the trees and a few ducks left for the pond on the hatchery property just upstream. I was left only to hear the crystal flow of pure limestone water. The waters of my youthful soul. Now with a cast alongside my own island-yes, I had named islands in all my private places for my family, never for myself.
There were Joey and Alexis islands for my children in the Susquehanna, at the Homet Ferry crossing। Here there was dad’s island. Maybe it was mine now too as a dad. I had started fishing here that second Saturday of April for over 40 years. Only in recent years have I missed this sacred appointment. Being away in the West, all over the place with the military, or just too poor or love smitten with my young wife to clearly remember the importance of tradition, and of being a free man. Perhaps its time to return to important things, traditions that define a life and a family, its joys and tears, its love.
Here, each insect on the water, silent sound of riffle and play of heart that raises even the first trout and means to tell me that I am still alive। I am not a purest or snobby neophyte fly-fisherman; I fish what works, bait early and deep in murky water to bring up old, noble brown trout of this stream.
I’ll spin artificials later and the flicker of a simple gold or silver spinner will fool an aggressive rainbow, placed here and so far from its western mountain home. My cast of the dry fly, a match for what is emerging from the stream and falling to breed and when summer spinners, or mayflies, and all the field bugs become trout food. And I don’t release all my fish. We cook as ritual along the bank our fish. Only what is needed as food for the empty place in the soul. My son and I will cut the first trout of a trip, remove its heart, cut the small organ in two, and share it. In this way we are men, bonded to fish, each, and God. No wimps in my world, never again.
Walking down to the stream across the field is always a walk of time। With each step I walk with my dad, his agonies of death, and my friends and son, along on their individual separations from this place. The stream is shallow, the bottom created from the perfect round pebbles of pale quartz-rock, eroded from the surrounding hills.
Those stones were boulders on a long past sandy beach। In no where near time, my very bones would be the finest dust, fairy dust, on the wind when the ground I am buried in becomes dust of air at a time and place as real as the present, but as sad as the past.
Trout in this stream are either native or placed here। Long ago, all fish were native here. But time, farming, and ugliness have made some fine middle-Atlantic trout streams mediocre. I have to say that my Yellow Breeches, of my own father’s fame, is no longer my favourite stream of my youth. I fish around my island where long ago I hooked a brown too strong to hold. Or the long strait riffle where dad and I caught trout and suckers, just below the place of camping with my high school pals.
You see, dad and I never camped here. It was just a drive (2 hours from Doylestown) at first to that place on the fishing map that stated, “Could be in old Scotland, unbelievably beautiful trout”. And it even said “Huntsdale”. It became ritual; the polishing of hooks and plans for each spring. To actually transfer that feeling to total strangers later was amazing to me. Even before I founded my business and abandoned many of my youthful true passions, I had taken friends to Huntsdale in memoriam to my father and our trips there. And good were and are those that remain of the trout and the place of all
Somehow the catch was always far less important than the feelings involved, and the sights, the sound of peepers. Dad found a bar on the hill above the stream It was called the Pine Tree Tavern. It was on top of the hill and I had a root beer while dad drank rolling rock and contemplated life.
I understand now. Dad was a mechanical engineer and died an unrealized millionaire, with which even the best recordable tragedy of this family fails to compare. Much later, my young son, still new to fishing at his “thorn spot”, the spot of my youth, would drink root beer while I had rolling rock and shots of JD. My son still refers to the old tavern as the “root beer store”. Many years later, on a business trip, I diverted to have a burger and beer at the Pine Tree.
Well, all that was there was burned rubble. An icon of my youth, a place of dad and the Hamnels, my high school buddies-beer, booze, girls, lies and fish tales-a place of the fall hunter’s nudity ball.
The owner would bring Baltimore “ladies” up before antlered deer season, a de facto state holiday here, and have a party for the hunters. I asked him once why he didn’t do it on trout opener, and never got a good answer. Heck. It’s the same crowd.
My bar and place of worship was no more. I sat along the side of the mountain and cried. A sign stated here, in the 1930’s, “Were found 3 babes in the woods”. I cried with them. Life is all about loss. Everyone has heard that expression, about babes in the woods, but I never found out about the 3 babes, and the sign is long gone too. It chilled me thinking the water the flowed past their tiny abandoned bodies nourished the trout I had caught and consumed. The truth is that we all feed on death, even vegetarians. A new municipal building now disguises the place of the mountain tavern. It’s barren and meaningless.
I was really lucky that summer in 1980, before my first job with the state. The field camp in Canada was great, and I had a job before graduation in the so stated non-existent environmental field. Even then my peers hated me, as I would have worked for nothing. Mapping and visiting trout streams. My dream job. I would have worked for free. I could have made 60 grand on a North Sea drilling platform (a lot in 1980 for a fresh grad). I was in paradise with 8 bucks an hour and living weekdays at the Harrisburg YMCA, studying long familiar maps of my childhood; my fishing map was now my job. Wow.
I had an interview that summer of 1980 before the field course that we geologists must take, mine to be in Canada, not far from where I am writing this. On the state of Pennsylvania’s geologist trainee list a full year before, I had great grades in my major, so came up the list as people were hired off it. I was number one when I got my first, timely interview. This old guy in Harrisburg, with thick glasses named Carlisle. The staff made fun of him, as he had to exercise his weak eyes. He had been the state oil and gas geologist, and he was my first and biggest supporter.
Without Carlisle, and his staff fishing parties to his York farm to catch pan fish and deplete his farm pond of fecund bluegills, my life would be much different! As a young trainee in Harrisburg, Carlisle made me feel at home by suggesting I go fishing behind the old fire hall on route 15 at Perdix. I still fish there with my children today. As with everywhere, my son has named the Perdix fishing spot. He calls it the “mud spot”. The connotation, again, is obvious.
Off route US 6 if you happen to have an old Atlantic Fishing map is a place called Westline. There is the Westline Inn, a rustic motel and bar with a pretty good restaurant. Many years ago it was the office of a chemical company that made things like turpentine and medicines from Pine tar. The stream there, Kinzua creek was hopelessly polluted by the Pennsylvania oil industry, by salt brine and grease. Over the decades, the stream has been saved and the trout returned,
This is a place of my odd and extreme past, as long ago; I had attended a small car show here after a huge drive around with my high school girl, Carol in1973. Long after, in 1981, I took the job with the state as an environmental geologist. The only business trip we took in 1981, as part of the program I was in, involved a long trip to Bradford, PA and a dinner at Westline Inn- a meeting with oil industry officials who wanted to kill our program. -Bradford was where my boss and fellow fisherman Carlisle had worked in the oil patch, as we geologists say.
Years later, and by surprise, Kinzua Creek and fishing was good again here। Maybe we environmentalists had done some good after all. My son and I call a small tributary stream, behind the actual town of Westline, Thundershower Run, a tributary of Kinzua Creek or the “camping spot,” a special place. In Bradford I met those oil officials in 1981. Long ago I was here, this place is now home of my son’s fishing spot, or the camping spot.
It is sometimes called a convergence, that this out of the way place has been an unlikely center for so many disparate, good and bad, grand and sad events. A friend once told me that I created a “cone of coincidence” that everyone in my world got caught in. So my early years seemed. Now, sitting quietly on the sea here, I wish to start a new whirlwind.
My father had lost his defense contractor job in New Jersey with General Electric two years before। The house he had built for us in the jersey suburbs was his dream after growing up in a working class family in south Philly, going off to war, and then to Drexel to become an engineer. This had prepared dad to marry, raise kids, and pursue the new American dream of the 1950’s. It was not to last long, and I still think his disappointment eventually killed him.
Our New Jersey home was one of the first built in Kingston estates; it provided me with then wild surroundings, now unimaginable in that part of south jersey. As a small boy, I would wander the woods with my ever-pregnant dog ticky in search of frogs, fish, dead snakes to take home and study. There was soon much construction including the new interstate highway, I-295. The road ran only a mile from my home, thru the woods I wandered.
Much of it was marshy, and it was an ugly sight of environmental destruction, long before any rules। I still can see a small group of translucent fresh water clams violently trying to breath in a disappearing muddy puddle. So that part of my youth was transformed into a concrete horror, forever in my mind and heart.
One afternoon I simply walked away from my first grade class and went to the stream by my house। I found a dead black racer snake and dragged it home. Mom, unabashed and well rooted in science, showed me how to skin and salt the snakeskin, which I had for years. In fact it was draped on my ancestor’s sailing ship wheel that has bedecked my bedroom dresser for decades and still does.
Nothing was said as to my absence from school, which would be a lifetime of education with my parents। They thought little of public education, and preferred I study at home, just regurgitating enough 50’s B.S. to graduate and go to college. To them college was also suspect, but required for the entry into any job worth having. And make no mistake; I was to be a mechanical engineer like my dad, or a medical professional like mom. It was from my mother I learned about nature and animals, from my dad about fishing and later hunting and guns. Oh yes, lots of guns.
We had moved to the Bucks County farm that fall of 1965. It was October and I recall it well as I started writing in my first diary then. I kept that tradition for almost 35 years, rarely missing a day. I think after our summer experience at the cabin, we were all sick of the city. I had pneumonia several times and the air was awful. I did enjoy walking to the sporting goods store and buying fishing tackle. And I had friends in 4th grade. One, my first or second girlfriend depending on who is asked was one tall brunette, Anastasia Ott. She openly wept on my last day of school. It was a friendly place. But once again we were on the move to a new horizon.
Our place in Bucks County was a real farm, with acres and a pond, a barn and a fruit orchard and a stream। It was a colonial manor far from the city. The road was partially dirt, and I could have as many pets as I wanted. I opted for a calf, a goat and geese. My mom wanted chickens and cats. My sister grew pumpkins she sold at a little farm market in the nearest town Chalfont; we picked out my Shepard collie, Ollie from the animal shelter.
He was to become my best friend। I would soon first shoot the guns and hunt the farm for Thanksgiving pheasant. Ollie would be my hunting dog and the most loyal friend I ever had, other than my own parents.
This is about stone end farm on Curley Mill Road। This is about the best years of life of my family, and how issues and man and the environment, then poorly defined and hazy set my path in life.
More than anything is my memory of my times exploring our 88 acres with Ollie and/or my sister। The rear of the farm was an open field of green lawn, flowers and dogwoods and cherry trees. Beyond was a 20-acre cornfield rented to our dairy farmer neighbour, Mr. Lewis. Beyond that were swampy woods, more fields and ancient colonial structures begging for investigation. Across the road was the rest of our place. A swampy field, a, stream that had small fish and a dense thicket of a wood, brimming with black raspberries, black berries and stickers that coated Ollie and us.
Far in the Northwestern corner of the land was a pond. It had been excavated long ago. The original part of our home had been a colonial mill and icehouse. The pond was dug and the house built when Bucks County was still a British colony. Spring fed and loaded with clear water, colourful water plants and lots of salamanders, frogs, spring peepers and toads, I had my first laboratory. I read every book on pond life and amphibians, and plants that I could.
Dad and I also hunted almost each weekend and I went out each nice day with Ollie in the fall after school. We had pheasants and deer all around; we would shoot pheasants and have spectacular meals mom would prepare of the finest stuffed and roasted bird. The brightly coloured feathers as well as those of my bantam roosters I used in fly tying.
Ollie would always gently bring the bird to us, that wonderful mutt, often embarrassing some neighbours who hunted with us with purebred spaniels that were dumber than bait। Sometimes we had rabbit too. Mom disapproved of hurting the animals, but knew how to make hasenpfeffer.
We never took any big game on our place। Dad and I would suit up and go to Broad Mountain in Carbon County for opening Monday of antlered deer it is always the Monday after Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, and almost no one outside Philly goes to school or work, for days. Trout season, the second Saturday in April as it was in those days is similar, a de facto state holiday. My birthday is November 25 and I was born the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 1956. We could always hunt and celebrate my birthday.
Years after dad died, I would go on pretty rugged winter deer season campouts with some of the same high school buddies from trout season। Except Joe of Kinzua and Gums fame who didn’t approve of hunting.
। Dad bought me a model 94 Winchester for my twelfth birthday that I inexplicably later put a scope on. I loved that powerful 32 special lever action gun. Those trips with dad hunting in the Pocono’s, our breakfasts at Steve’s diner in Jim Thorpe, the cold, the camaraderie. Are the he best memories of my life along with the fishing trips. But I turned 12 in 1968, the age to be legal to hunt off our land. And I already had been fishing for years with dad (and mom and my sister, who went and watched only or painted). Dad died 4 years after he bought me my Winchester, and being too sick to go in the fall of 1971, we really only went deer hunting to the Pocono’s a few times, maybe 4 in all over just two seasons. I have only been hunting with my son once, at the Monroeton house in 2003 before the divorce. That’s 5 years counting this coming season. He has asked to go hunting time and again, as he has the family guns now.
It’s been too long since that snowy Bradford County at the house soon to be our hunting and fishing place। I had a Browning 7 MM Remington magnum A-bolt then. I had bought the canon for Arizona Elk hunting that never materialized due to illness and divorce in 2004. Some guns survived packed away in storage for me when I returned the next fall.
That summer of 1965 we packed up most of the pets, my cousin Dave (who was a pure city boy) and we wound our way to the place on dad’s fishing map was labeled “Wild River”, near Towanda, and a place then called Wyalusing Rocks in Bradford County।
It was late June, school out, and very balmy. The area where the river flowed was farmland. Once, Marie Antoinette had been scheduled to relocate here to avoid the issues of the French Revolution. She didn’t make it, but plenty of other French settled here, including one Charles Homet. He is important here as we asked a local farmer, an ancient Mr. Smith with a still out back where we might rent a summer cabin and maybe a rowboat. Well he happened to have a tiny yellow cabin with a big antique wooden radio and a wood-burning stove at the old Homet’s Ferry crossing,
The back road ended there at the river, but the road obviously continued along the other side. So while my mom and sister painted the mountains, round-pebbled beaches we would, my cousin, dad, and I fish the river.
The river was swift and clean with 2 islands just above the old ferry road. Downstream, the river turned sharply east, moved by an ancient Appalachian mountain I have come to call Joe’s mountain, for all the Joe’s of this tale.
My cousin Dave was a skinny, blonde, tall boy of 12. This was his first trip to the country and he was staying close to dad, his own father driven off by his greedy and downright nasty mother. I had rowed the little aluminum boat that went with our cabin out and shoved the bow onto an island.
Moments later, in the late morning sunlight, I heard my cousin yell in a nasal, shrill voice “Uncle Joe! Uncle Joe! A muskellunge-the first I had ever seen had taken Dave’s red and white spoon and rocketed straight out of the river not 30 feet from me It dwarfed tiny Dave, shaking its head to disgorge the dangling spoon, its dark vertical bars on a greenish background. I had never seen a fish that large. One splash, silent, line broken.
From that day forward, even at that time with 5 years of fishing under my little belt, I was a fisherman. And this spot at Homet’s Ferry is a sacred place of real spirits, ghosts of dad and that fish, that summer of fresh wood-stove cooked walleyes, the smell of manure from the dairy farm, and the smell of a clean, fished filled rural paradise.
We also drove around the area in our green and white rambler wagon looking for other fishing spots. We left the ladies to drive to Terrytown on the other side of the river. The fishing map did show roads along the river course there. We found a spot with a steep bank and caught an almost incredible number and variety of fish. Mostly on the small side, bass, pike, and walleyes, a member of the perch family. We had dinner for sure. Mom would clean, roll in cornmeal and fry them up in nice smelly bacon fat. Imagine these days living thru that to tell about it.
We were getting ready to leave Terrytown to cross back to the cabin when someone drove by in an old truck and yelled. I didn’t hear it, still elated with our catch, but dad said “short pants”. Dad usually wore shorts fishing on warm summer days. Apparently this was a taboo in Appalachia, and the two farmers in the pick up had yelled, “faggot, short pants “, at dad. This was unwise of them.
Very calmly, saying nothing dad took off with Dave and me in the rambler. He reached under the seat and pulled out a metal hand axe that we used for camp wood, at least we had. Dad, driving madly in the passing lane, left hand draped on the wheel, his right chopping with the axe yelled, “you lousy bastards, I am gonna hack your f’ing faces to bits”. There was abject terror on the farmer’s faces, who went off the road into the ditch. My heart was pounding. Dad put his axe away quietly and we calmly went back to the Homet Ferry cabin and ate a fish dinner.
Another odd thing occurred that trip। My mom’s parakeet “Peekie” had developed some sort of a bird “cold”. Mom sent me to the chicken farm up the hill from the river with two missions, buy a little fresh vegetable to go with our pike and see if they had any bird medicine. Peekie had been an important part of my life as long as I remembered. I would feed him bits of egg and bread at breakfast in the morning, and he would cheerily chirp. Well on approaching the farm I saw a very gaunt elderly man stiffly standing with a rusty hoe.
He was wearing striped bib overalls and a cap, like a painting। He was tending yellow wax beans. I asked him how much for the beans, and he gave me a big paper sack full of fresh yellow wax beans for a quarter. Quarters were silver then. As for medicine, he gave me a small bag of red powder and said follow the instructions. He seemed overjoyed to talk with a young person on the subjects of birds and beans. Well our parakeet survived many more years along with my dog Ticky and our cats Mildred and Herman, the other pets that came with us on that trip to the little yellow cabin.
There are three surviving watercolors my mom painted on that trip। One is of the fishing spot at the ferry crossing-near the axe incident। The other is the Homet Ferry store, which still stands but is no longer a store, a short walk from the old cabin। Mom painted another watercolor of me and my sister sitting along route 6 at the Wyalusing Rocks overlook. The river and islands are seen down below in the summer-green valley mists. I go there when I am sad for my son, dad, mom, or my sister who was my first teacher of reading and math. I shall return and maybe stake a claim here again with my children, Shel (second wife) has also been here, as with everyone else important in my life. How they react to the beauty of the river valley here, nostalgia of Yellow Breeches, speaks of their character. These are the places that define who I am.
River Thoughts
So I wanted to tell of a time still vivid of a Pennsylvania river.
It’s not that good of a place to go but it is a fishing story. A time when I caught my mother.
The clean waters of the Juniata are legend among anyone who has fished in the East. My memory is of Mexico and Matawana, places along this river. These are places that my dad had found on the fishing map, places where my daughter caught her first fish and the place I had first seen a wild small mouth bass.
This river, which finds its outlet to the Susquehanna at Clarks Ferry, derives from truly wonderful mountain trout streams west and North of the places I have named। My dad, always with the fishing map in tow, led us here long ago, in the 1960’s. We came the first time in the old rambler to find a place different and yet rural…a place we could visit in a single day out, unlike Wyalusing and Homet ferry. Here, there was a wild river too. The banks here and there were dotted with small campsites and plenty of river access. It was only the old map that suggested a place for bass.
The shore fishing near Matawana was unknown to us, untested। Then to a small boy, it seemed liked a raging torrent, muddy and wide, in the mountains, a great accompaniment to the upper Susquehanna, but closer to home.
As a child, I did not know that the backcast could be dangerous.
I cast back and caught my mother, who was sketching, in the face. There was no harang, my dad, the always battlefield soldier packed my mom off to the hospital in Lewistown, some 20 mile distant. I recall this in great detail. Not for that moment so much, but when I caught a big salmon years later south of Anchorage, Alaska, when a hook flew out of a snagged pink or “humpy” salmon, among the natives and scavenging bears, I found a treble in my face and was taken to the hospital. The hook missed my eyeball by only fractions as it had with mom. The laughing doctor said welcome to Alaska, and removed the hook It was 1983, and 1966 all again.
So trout season 2008 has come and past here both on the Island and in Pennsylvania। Not able to go fishing, I noticed the season here because the local radio said fishing was on, and although not the big day it once was, many older folk still kept the tradition. For me, an off-islander, it came and went only as a thought of my times past with dad and later friends at the yellow breeches.
Here, April 15 is set in stone as opening day, as the second Saturday in April of my youth। But here, mid-April sun is hollowed by a cold, ice-driven sea breeze. I picture sluggish trout of the sea as reluctant as I am to wander to a place to call a fishing spot. The sea run trout, both brook and browns really don’t start moving until next month.
There is the Lilac run, and the Strawberry run of sea trout into the Dunk River। The Atlantic salmon are there too. Last year a Potato farmer spread pesticides just before a big rain and there was a massive fish kill. You want to cry? Go see dead 3-5 pound sea run trout and salmon. Fishing is open for catch and release in the Dunk this year-Ill go when it gets above freezing and the ice is out.
I saw old folk, at a town hall I cannot name, meeting ritualistically at a time and place accorded, to eat a meal prior to casting a line, now alone। No young ones were there. This is the traditional pre season breakfast, which goes on all night before trout season here. It reminded me of a retirement home social event.
It was as if an old tradition, slowly dying was being played out. It was on the local TV. It made me feel sad, as if this day I should have been at yellow breeches with my children. Even then the fishing would not be as good, and there would be no way to tell anyone why it was different. Here a cold, icy, ocean breeze swept across the street by my home.
is only a few miles to where the old stalwart fisherman, only a few years ahead of me, cast the line on this opening day. I bet each one at the traditional opening breakfast had more memories in their hearts that cannot be told and that of lost friends, fish, and loves. But they really wanted to go out cold and face the sunrise. Memories and stiff, old joints do that. But the warm glow of memory, even on the cast or dreams made for long lost memories will push to the stream banks.
Dad was so excited। Here, along the muddy bank at the Juniata, my father caught his first small mouth, It seemed we could do nothing wrong. He cast a small plug, a rocky junior I think, and in seconds caught an angry small mouth right along the bank of the snow-melted high river. The fish was golden yellow bronze, and about 2 pounds. I asked dad if we could keep him, as I also hooked a smaller fish at the same time. We felt the sacred connection to take the fish and make a meal as in Wyalusing, but the season was closed.
My dad was strict on rules, and in a lonely place where only we were, we released our catches until the law and God allowed another encounter. Perhaps until that time I never knew how honourable my father was. On his deathbed, I recounted this. He was weak and pale from cancer, the day before the end. He said, “Luke, I am a fighter. But I may not make it.” I was at his bedside. “Take care of your mother and sister”. I told him that if I were half the man he was I would be a success.
The next day they took his withered wan form out in a black bag। My sister had announced, “He’s dead”. I was 10 feet across the hall. My mom said she saw a thin black smoke arise, the angel of death.
I was 15. I grew up that day. It was the second day of the New Year, 1972.
The past is history। The future has not happened, All we have is the present-the present is our only eternity. To recount life through fishing is a vision that you may not appreciate. But fishing, or the thoughts of fishing are the vehicle, which makes meaning for me. What makes meaning in the chaos for you is your own affair. It’s totally personal. Perhaps, in this, you may find your own meaning….
Arizona
Moving to Phoenix in 1994 was good. It’s actually Glendale, just west of 43rd Avenue. A tough mixed place, but we had a community pool and later I would be VP of our condo association. These were the best of years. This is an idyll. My children are east, only later as we will discuss did my son visit my Arizona home and the rim with me for many summers, and we would take trout by bucketfuls at places like Big Lake, Luna Lake, and in the Utah Dixie.
Arizona has some of the finest high country trout fishing in the states; the exotic Gila and Golden trout are beautiful and plentiful now. But a long hike or a horse is needed for the best places. There we were with the Elk, Lion, Eagles and Bear. At nearly almost 10000 feet above sea level, Big Lake near Alpine is easily accessible and has a very reasonable boat rental. The lake is loaded with nice stocked rainbows-it was where my son first got excited about fishing. We always had a blast.
Luna Lake on the New Mexico border just east of Alpine is great fishing when the snow melts। (Yes, Virginia, it can snow a lot in Arizona’s high country). The San Francisco River runs southeast into New Mexico. It is a tough hike as nearly all is remote mountain wilderness with great fly-fishing water and wild rainbows and Gila trout. The little motel in Alpine called the “Sportsman’s Lodge” is reasonable and friendly. It is run by Frank and Phyllis Barnes, dear old friends of mine.
Unlike my eastern homes, our home in Glendale was a simple two-story town home. But,
Arizona was to me paradise-a new life with my girl, a new start. There were the palm trees, and we had a pool out back-but most of all, I was with my girl. My wife, constantly decorating the place, made it paradise.
We would Sunday’s go to the West of Glendale together romantically to seek the orchards। It was much, now, as I think, a bit like grave robbing. But then I didn’t know what I know now. We drove out to the end of the paved roads in West valley , east on Bethany Home। If you are from Arizona, you know where the roads stop, and farm land starts-cotton, broccoli, cut flowers-and citrus of every kind.
The access road was partially blocked by equipment, a big front-end loader and dump trucks। As a military ordnance contractor, I had been on the area before to secure the former air base areas and to make way for the new stadium. That was how I found the orchards. I remember cleaning and offering various 50 caliber rounds to local officials after digging up the unexploded chain gun ammunition that was used on the P-51 Mustangs that flew 1000’s of training missions here at the Luke AFB auxiliary airfields.
These are clearly seen on topographic maps of the area as triangles in the desert.
The military would pack-up old ammo and put it on wooden pallets in a pit dug in the ground। This is called in my trade OB/OD, or ordnance burn, ordnance disposal. Then it was doused with fuel and set on fire, then run like hell. I can picture the young army air corps guys, soon off to fight the Japs in the pacific, burning old ammo then sitting at a bar Dad would have worn the same uniform as those kids-but he never trained at Luke. He was in Mississippi and Utah before shipping out to the pacific just after the bomb was dropped.
When I worked for the Army we would just go, as I said all was to be demo’ed, to get oranges and grapefruits before the trees would be cut to make way for the endless ticky-tacky homes and malls, sports complexes, and never ending golf courses that sucked the life out of the place। In the midst of it would be the out of place ranch house, usually 1920’s or 30’s vintage, sometimes older. Our little townhouse development had been a pecan ranch up until 1960. The ranch house was small and out of place on 43rd Avenue, now an office, swallowed now by 40 years of building the swelling city. But the pecan trees were still here, several kinds. I would pick buckets full and Shel would make cookies in the fall.
Our trips to the farmland in the west valley were best on Sunday’s। There was less construction traffic and we could watch the jets at Luke AFB. Most all of the farmland now was being cleared for development except a few patches, islands of proud old fruit trees ready to be sacrificed, to provide glorious fresh food no more. In most places beyond the loop 101, they had cut off the water and 70-year-old citrus trees were dying for a drink.
My wife and I took a few bushels of fruits and filled our little pick-up truck with what was fresh There were navel oranges, juice oranges, white and red grapefruits, and lemons. I never realized how dead and tasteless store-bought fruit back east was until I had a freshly picked grapefruits or oranges. We would eat them as we picked. Sometimes I would turn the irrigation valve on and sometimes water would flow. This, I thought would give us maybe another weekend or two of fruit picking before the place was demolished.
Posts
