CELEBRATE THE SEASON:
September Days
by Rowland E.
Robinson
 A Year of Septembers
by W.D.
Wetherall
Dairy Farmers of the Year
by Gus How Johnson
Johnny Appleseed
by
Frank B. McAllister
A Bushel of Apple Recipes
GARDENING:
At Least a 40-Watt Bulb: Planting Spring Bulbs
INTO THE OUTDOORS:
Nature's Cycles
VERMONT WEATHERVANE BOOK NEWS:
Cider
Making, Using and Enjoying
Sweet and Hard Cider
Small House Design
Award-Winning, Architect-designed homes of 1,250 square feet or less.
GET OUT AND ABOUT:
Vermont Country Calendar
Statewide
Calendar of Events
EXPLORE OUR OTHER SEASONS:
 FALL
WINTER
SPRING
SUMMER
If you didn't pass through Rural, Vermont to get to this site you may want to make a small detour.
It's worth the trip!
Write Us:
weathervane
@ruralvermont.com
We welcome your
comments, suggestions, and questions.
or call: 802-645-9631
RD 1, Box 680
West
Pawlet, VT 05775
©1996-97 Vermont Weathervane
All rights
reserved. |
|
A Year of Septembers by
W.D. Wetherell
The best day of the year to go fishing is the first day of school.
Leaving early, you drive past children waiting by the road for the bus--newly
clothed, sneakers white, immaculate; skin scrubbed as shiny as pot bottoms, hair
glossy as palominos', obediently banged, ponytailed, shagged, whatevered; book
bags slack, empty, like deflated balloons; pencils stiletto sharpened, pens
bursting blue; voices raised, biceps pinched, races run, footballs tossed;
children, that is, with their lightly worn burden of crabby teacher, bossy coach,
unrepentant bully, unrequited love, pickled beets, algebra, condemned to spend
this fairest of days locked indoors, regretting summer, hatching plots, humming
revolutionary song ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the
school"), wishing more than anything to be outside. You pass all these, and you
head on toward the river to play with trout, unscrubbed, unshaven, nonimmaculate
but free.
* * * * *
In the valleys that run west from the
Connecticut, there is a direct correlation between wealth and no trespassing
signs. In the more affluent valleys they are everywhere, so thick it makes it
seem as if the owners of the land are trying to lock the rivers away in boxes,
each slat of which is another sign: VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL
EXTENT OF THE LAW!
Travel up to the poorer valleys that begin north of
the White River and you will see few such signs. The Vermonters who live there
are still too close to the old days to make much sense out of the kind of
miserliness that puts limits on the land's enjoyment. On the river, I can think
of only one no trespassing sign, but it's in a vital spot, and it involved me in
three seconds of moral dilemma.
Below the elementary school is a powerful
chute I had never fished before. On my third cast with a yellow Marabou, I hooked
a rainbow who immediately tore off downstream, right through the middle of a deep
pool.
I couldn't coax him back in the current, nor could I follow him
downstream through the pool -- it was well over my head. My only recourse was to
take to shore and follow him along the bank. I had started...I had gone about five
yards...when I ran smack into a big NO TRESPASSING sign and a rusty strand of
barbed wire.
I hesitated, both because I was surprised, and because that
black print was so intimidating. No Experience Allowed This Side of Me, the sign
seemed to say--No Enjoyment, No Wonder, No Curiosity, No Joy. I thought about it
for a second, then I thought about Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land, This
Land is My Land," and the last verse, the one they don't sing in the
easy-listening versions or teach the kids in school.
As I
was walking that dusty highway,
I saw a sign said Private Property,
But on
the other side, the sign said nothing,
That side was made for you and me!
And stepping over that barbed wire, I went in pursuit of my
trout.
* * * * *
There's a short story by V. S. Pritchett about a businessman
who's good at falling down. Whenever he's at a loss for words, bored, embarrassed
or surprised, down he goes. It's his only talent. He knows a dozen ways to do it;
when the story ends, he's showing off his latest tumble to his aghast business
associates at an important meeting.
It's a character I can relate to.
I've had some classic falls of my own this month, half of them caused by
impatience, half by my dislike for waders. I've been fishing in jeans and
sneakers since summer, and the cold water has finally caught up with me. I
clanked from pool to pool like a wind-up monster with rusty gears, an angling
Frankenstein.
There's a good lie near the cemetery that can only be
covered by casting from a rock in midstream. I was halfway up it when I slipped.
As falls go, it was only fair-say an 8.5 in difficulty, a 7.5 in execution.
Still, it was enough to drench me and I had to hurry back to the car for a dry
set of clothes. My waders are the cheapest kind you can get, slippery,
ill-fitting and porous. Wading wet, though, was out of the question, so I tugged
them on. What I gained in warmth, I lost in traction, and later in the afternoon
I took another spill, this one much more spectacular than the first.
I
was back in the Aquarium, stalking the big trout I had missed earlier in the
month. We'd had the usual heavy rain around the equinox, and the water was higher
than it had been the previous time-high enough to increase the force on my legs
and feet. About a foot to my left was a nice flat boulder that would allow me to
get above the worst of the pressure. I shuffled over to it and gingerly stepped
onto its middle.
False-casting about twenty yards of line out, I dropped
a big Spuddler a foot above the rock where the trout had struck. As the fly
landed, I shifted position slightly, just enough so that the tread under my
weight-bearing foot slid from the security of gritty granite to the peril of
slippery moss. It was a backwards somersault this time, a fall I had never pulled
off before, not even in school. What was remarkable about it was its slow-motion
qualityÜI had enough time and horizon left at the apogee to see a huge boil
beneath the fly. Upside down, I yanked back with my rod hand, but there was no
rod thereÜit was flying through the air behind me with the arc and thrust of a
javelin.
"I must prepare myself for this," I thought, but before I
could, I was splashing in the water, already past the icy shock of entry. I
grabbed for my sunglasses, but the current had them on the bottom, scurrying over
the rocks like a plastic crab. I started to chase after them, but the river was
in my waders, and the weight tumbled me over so that I was floating face-up. My
wallet, buoyed free of my pocket, bubbled dollar bills past my chest; my fly box,
sprung from my vest, bobbed like the coffin of the Pequod.
There was no
use fighting it. I gave myself up to my klutziness and let the current push me
over to a sandbar-a lump now, a sack of wet nothingness to be stripped clean and
flung disdainfully on the shore.
Somewhere in my passage from vertical
to horizontal to vertical again I managed to bump heads with a rock, resulting in
a concussion that laid me up for three days, giving me plenty of time to puzzle
out the moral of all this. Never underestimate the capacity of a river to
humiliate you, and always wear felt-bottomed soles.
* * * * *
And
just for the record, the foliage peaked at pre cisely 3:38 p.m. on Thursday,
September 29. I was there when it happened. I was fishing by the elementary
school, and had stopped to stare in awe at the trees. There were dark storm
clouds overhead, the wind would be stripping most of the leaves off by dusk, but
for now the black sky framed perfectly the bittersweet reds and yellows, giving
them a color so vibrant and urgent that their radiation was a tug on the heart.
As I watched, something remarkable happened. The sun found a hole in the
cloud just large enough for one crepuscular ray to leap through. It slanted
obliquely toward earth, catching a gold tree on the bank and casting its radiance
onto the surface of the river, spinning it gold. My fly rode on its shimmer for
the space of a yardÜfor that one fleeting moment I was fishing a golden fly for
golden trout on a golden river. Then the cloud clamped shut around the sun, and
the peak was passed.
I heard voices up on the bank. A boy and girl, each
about eight, were kicking through the leaves piled against the trees. Every few
yards they stooped to pick one up and put it in a plastic bag they jointly
carried.
They waved, and came over to watch me. As it turned out, the
leaves were for their oldest sister, in college out west. She was homesick for
Vermont's autumn, she had written; they were collecting a bagful of the yellowest
yellows and the reddest reds to send her to cheer her up.
"Here's one
for you," the girl said, handing me a maple leaf. "Thanks, I'll keep it on my
desk this winter. It will remind me of September." The boy saw his chance.
"September," he said, spreading his arms apart as if to embrace the
smells, the colors and light, "is my best favorite year."
Excerpted with permission of the publisher from "Vermont River" by W.D.
Wetherell, which describes a year in the life of a writer and a
fisherman. |
