The Birthday Trout

There are two types of old men in this world: Those with the patient, gentle-breathing tranquility and perspective only years of experience and perseverance can bring, and those too impatient to look behind them when they’re backing out of their driveways, blaming the kid who put his now-flattened bike beneath the grump’s Buick in the first place.
And it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the older I get, the more I am in the former camp, but still have the tendencies of the latter.
Fortunately, though, and for the record, I am neither, simply because I’m a mere 43. I seem to be, however, at sort of a crossroads deciding which direction to take.
I know this because when Jerry and I made plans a month ago to fish on West Canada Creek, I had to hold back from telling him that I wanted to be on the river bank before the sky even considered graduating from coal black to that steely silver, you know, were you have to squint really hard to see where the land ends and the water begins.
“OK,” was all he said when I called when I got into town and asked if he wanted to pick me up at 6. It’s not that he didn’t flinch. It’s that he paused a second to calculate from 6 a.m. just when he’d have to wake up.
See, Jerry lives about a half hour from my Mom’s house in Rome, New York. That’s where I was staying along with my two sleepy kids and an even sleepier wife.
(Generally, when my fishing alarm goes off, the dog wakes up, which sets into motion a cadre of dog noises: the dog-collar jingle when she shakes off, grunts, groans and scraping her nails on the hardwood as she stretches, and the flit-flit-flit-flit-flit-flit of her scratching an itch on her belly. All of this, of course, wakes the baby, who begins to coo, kick and flail and, without fail, cry. Which wakes up the toddler, who roles over, asks for Mama or Dada’s hands, and when he doesn’t get them, moans, then cries, then sits up. Which means Mama is up with two crying boys and an itchy dog, and Dada is scooting out the door trying not to make eye contact with his bride.)
So Jerry had to get up earlier than I did, and, as unwritten home-rule protocol suggests, he had to stop at the coffee shop for both of us and also fill the Thermos with coffee for the rest of the morning. I do the same when he fishes my home waters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It’s a good system. All told, my guess is that Jerry had to get up at least 45 minutes before I did.
But, what I wanted to say on the phone the day before as we made plans was, “How’s 5 o’clock sound? (Or 4:30?)
I’m freakish that way. And it’s not as though I don’t enjoy sleeping. I do. Hell, I’m tired right now. And with a baby and a toddler, well, sleep is often hard to come by as it is, never mind waking up in the middle of the night to get to the river before anyone else steps foot in it or to get that extra hour in or just to have something to talk about in the off event that you didn’t catch a fish that day. Something along the lines of, “Oh, but you should have seen that osprey nest up there on the far bank. The chicks just hatched and were chirping up a storm.”
So I was patient as I waited in the driveway, gear in hand, for Jerry. And we drove the 20 or so minutes up into Trenton Falls to a place just up river from where the Cincinnati Creek tributary intersects with West Canada Creek.
And even as we drove by the dam, the Cincinnati and a few choice parking areas, I breathed easy. I knew we’d be on the river shortly. Even during these longest days of summer, when the sun rises at 5:30 and already it’s at a 30-degree arc. Soon, I thought. Soon.
So when we pulled up to a little-used trailhead outside of the trophy water section, I thought, “There are bound to be fish here, too. After all, we’re only a mile or two downstream from the dam and a mile from the tributary. We grabbed our gear and made our way down the trail to the river. Greeting us was a wide expanse that was nearly glass smooth and too deep to wade across. Upriver, though, there were plenty of riffles and some boulders placed by God himself. Good feeding channels. Problem was we’d have to huff it nearly a quarter mile along the rocky banks.
More time ticking off the clock.
But there is a correlation between fishing the right spot and catching fish, so the effort would more likely give us a greater return on investment if we could avoid spooking the fish and getting below them.
I should mention that it was my 43rd birthday, and Jerry let me wade in a few yards above him. I picked a good cut, got in to the top of my hip waders and began casting a No. 16 pale morning dun that I guessed would hold me over till I could better study the river’s bugs and, hopefully, hatches.
There were a few PMDs floating by, but more light drakes than anything else, so I retied the same size in that pattern and just like that, I had an 8-inch brown trout in the net.
Some of the fish on West Canada are stocked, and they have tags affixed to them. You’re supposed to write down the number and call the game warden to let him know how Fish No. 423785 is doing, length, weight, spunkiness, etc. This one didn’t have tags. The New York State Department of Environmental Control stocks the creek pretty hefty, which brings throngs of fishermen nearer to the dam upstream. We’ll call the untagged fish the “real” fish and feel a little better if it isn’t in the 12-inch range.
West Canada Creek starts in the southern Adirondack Mountain foothills and weaves its way to Herkimer, New York, where it empties into the Mohawk River At one point, a dam in Trenton Falls creates the Hinckley Reservoir, where camps and homes line the picturesque water body. If memory serves me, there’s even a beach. Interestingly, folks seem to think the West Canada Creek begins or somehow has a connection to the country to the north. Not so. “Kanata” means “settlement” in Mohawk Indian speak.
Though all that thinking, though, I realized that an hour had passed, and the fish were probably going to slow as occasional shower bursts let go from the low clouds that brought with them a steady 10 mile an hour wind and a few short bursts that squelched any ideas of fishing like a gentleman, into the current.
So I got just below and to the side of a nice-sized boulder and made my cast. The current was pretty strong, and the rain was steady, so I figured the fish wouldn’t notice me even if it wasn’t a great presentation.
Turned out it was good enough. Funny thing, though, the line went tight once it all was a good distance behind me, and I was just thinking of pulling it out to cast again. It felt good to have a little more heft on the end of the 3X tippet and the No. 16 Cahill. I felt as if this was a fair fight. I’d never fished this river before, I couldn’t get in any deeper without tea-bagging or, worse, drowning (you always hear about the poor guy who drowned on his birthday, or his honeymoon, or some repeating holiday that makes the untimely death all that more ironic or, at the very least, more sexy for the newspaper headlines). I also didn’t know what was in that deep green water that was muted by the overcast sky and rain. Might just as well have closed my eyes.
He did surface a couple of times, enough for me to see his head, brown belly and tail, all in that order, and after a minute or so of getting him close enough to the net, he was tired out, all but flipping futile just to see who was handling him.
We only kept him out of the water a matter of seconds to snap a few pics. I thought he was a foot long, but Jerry said 14 inches, and he’s a better judge of distance because he’s an investigator and I’m a writer, so I’ll give him that.
I set the trout back in quietly, pushed the currents into his gills and eventually scooted him away from the bank and into the current where he swam away, albeit dazed.
No tag, either.
After a coffee break and a bit of time to admire the irises along the bank, we fished another hour, which was largely unproductive. Another 6-inch untagged brownie, and we called it a day.
I wonder what another hour or two in the river would have gotten us. Probably just more soaking wet.
Then again, you never know, do you?
Still, on the ride back, there’s the usual reliving of the morning, the details, which we compared to how far you got with your prom date in high school. If you’re lucky, you have them, and if you’re really living right, there are a few swigs of coffee left in the Thermos.
Thing is, there are never any regrets. Sure, you could do this all day long, and you make plans, as we did, for the next time. Maybe in a canoe. Maybe back down in Pennsylvania. Maybe a fishing weekend, camping out, fishing the morning and the evening hatches.
Maybe, hopefully, all of the above.
Life is finite; it isn’t there forever. And you can’t depress yourself counting how many potential fishing weekends there are left in your life (believe me, I’ve done this. Tally up your life expectancy foregoing any accidents, such as drowning in a trout stream, figure out how many possible fishing weekends or Saturdays there are in a normal year, subtracting the winter months, of course, and time spent with family, at weddings, with the crud or watching Penn State play, and add it all together).
But you know there’ll be a few more, and although an hour here and an hour there may add up to a few days and a few fish, the important thing is that you enjoy the company and the time. And coming to grips that time isn’t really a unit of measure after all, but that it’s ethereal, and it allows us only a place to connect, and go in and come out of green-gray rivers, and fish among untagged brown trout.
At that crossroads, I prefer the gentle calm of that silver morning. So I think I’m heading in the right direction.