Remembering those great fishing holes

The Union Leader | 6/30/02 | JOHN HARRIGAN

[RJCogburn]

A HIGH SCHOOL teacher came into my office one day last week with a picture, taken back in the 1930s, of a boy and a big fish. It was a rainbow trout, weighing five and a half pounds and measuring 26 inches, almost as big as the boy struggling to hold it up for the camera.

He had caught it not far from his home, in one of the feeder streams that flow into Beaver Brook, the same brook that, a couple of generations later, I fished as a kid. It held occasional leviathans then and it holds them now.

I get a lot of enjoyment out of fly-fishing today, the same enjoyment I got out of worm-fishing in an alder-choked brook back then. That’s the beauty of fishing - the challenges and exhilaration are the same, it’s just the tools that change.

But things were a lot simpler in boyhood. I just dug some worms around the rhubarb patch out back, stuffed them into a Prince Albert tobacco can, stuck it in my back pocket, grabbed my pole, and took off.

Big fish will run up little rivers and streams, particularly in the spring when there’s plenty of water, and even later in the summer when they’re seeking cooler water. You just never know.

Beaver Brook, for instance, was home to a bountiful population of brook trout in the 8- to 10-inch range, and you’d occasionally snaffle onto a fish a foot long. But the only thing between the brook and the Connecticut River was a decaying sawmill dam. Hence anything that swam up the river could swim up the brook, and often did.

Now, an eel can scare the daylights out of a kid who’s never seen one. Evidently this particular two-foot specimen had chosen to explore, because when I responded to the tap on my line and yanked it skyward, out came a writhing snake-like thing that wrapped itself around the end of the rod. I dropped the whole thing like a hot-cake and ran home, which was permissible, I guess, because I was only 7.

In ensuing years I got to know every inch of the brook and every fold of the beaver dams and swamps, and experienced a Huck Finn kind of growing up enriched by rafts, trails, camps, endless fishing, a rich assortment of wildlife, and the smell and feel of mud.

So I had ranged far upstream one cool, overcast day and was stealthily reaching far over some alders to drop my worm into an otherwise unreachable pool when out from under the bank beneath my feet glided the biggest fish I had ever seen, a monster trout that had to be over two feet long. I held my breath as it glided out for a look with a flick of its fins, and then turned and glided effortlessly back into hiding.

I looked for that fish every time I went back, but never saw it again.

The other day I was driving across the bridge near the spot, and some kids were fishing. I pointed down toward the alders and said “There’s a nice hole in there,” and I almost added “and a big lunker, too,” but that probably would have been a crazy leap in time and logic.

[Mike Darancette]

Issak Walton said something like;

"The time spent fishing is not counted against a man's allotted time on this earth"

I would also think that remembering the fishing adventures of ones youth has a similar effect.