March 28, 2003
JOURNEYS; On Opening Day, a Stream of Memories
By ERNEST SCHWIEBERT
OPENING Day is a votive act. Unlike the minister's sons in ''A River Runs Through It,'' who believed Christ's
disciples were fly fishermen at Galilee and that John must have been a dry-fly fisherman because he was the
favorite, we did not think of fly-fishing as religion in our family. But it was very close.
Before great throngs of people were enticed to fly-fishing by that 1992 film, the sport was more like the
cloistered rites of some medieval guild. Opening Day of trout season confirmed the ebbing of winter, and its
April rituals often seemed a bit like Christmas morning.
People who enjoyed fly-fishing were of the introspective sort, comfortable in their own company, and revered
its solitudes. The crosiers and thuribles of their worship were split-cane rods, and reels of precision and
elegance, bearing only the tiny hallmarks of their makers. (Garish trademarks emblazoned on fishing tackle
still lay in the future.) Our tapered silk lines required drying overnight and we dressed them at breakfast, using
tins of red stag fat from Scotland.
Terminal tackle was Spanish silkworm gut, with the breaking strain of a cobweb in its thinnest diameters. Dry
gut was brittle and frail, and required careful wetting between felt pads moistened with glycerine and distilled
water. Fishing vests and bug spray did not exist. Old-timers used citronella, and even memories of its smell
evoke a thousand echoes. British fly boxes had transparent spring-loaded lids on each compartment, and clips
for wet flies, filled with the magic of artisans who worked in fur, feathers and steel.
There were English pipes and the smell of expensive tobacco, and the anglers we knew were knowledgeable
about wines and spirits, and the pleasures of good cookery.
Most wore rumpled jackets of worn barleycorn Shetland, frayed herringbones from the Cheviot Hills and subtle
tweeds from the thatch-roofed crofter's cottages of Connemara, Ireland. Many insisted on wearing neckties,
because trout were gentlemen, and one dressed like a gentleman to enjoy the privilege of fishing.
Thinking back across more than 60 years of sport, I remember a cornucopia of rivers at the eve of Opening
Day. Most involve anglers no longer with us, and the ranks are getting thin. My good friend of 50 years, James
Cornwall Rikhoff, never begins a fishing trip without raising an old infantryman's glass in salute to our departed
colleagues.
''Absent comrades,'' he nods.
Bad weather is a common thread in recollections of Opening Day, and snow figures in a number of memories.
Good weather is so unlikely that one wonders about the wisdom of regulations that open the Croton and
Amawalk, in the shadow of Manhattan, on the same date fishing begins on the Oswegatchie and Great Chazy.
There might be flurries in the Catskills, on the Beaverkill and Willowemoc, but full-blown blizzards are likely in
the Adirondacks.
Fishing in wintry conditions is not a matter of Waltonian felicity. It is more like the furtive pilgrimages of
Penitentes in New Mexico, barefoot in the April snows of the Sangre de Cristos, with ritual crosses and crowns
of thorns. There is a measure of zealotry and self-denial and outright pain in rites of Opening Day.
My earliest memories include the Ontonagon in northern Michigan. I cannot remember much about its fishing,
other than the potbellied stove at Watersmeet, but I remember the storm that chased us back to Chicago.
There was another attempt to celebrate on the Boardman in lower Michigan. We were halted by drifts of snow
near Cadillac, and turned back to shiver in sleeping bags at the tiny park in White Cloud. There was corn snow
when we settled for the pea-gravel flats of the White River at Hesperia. We turned back at Newaygo, during a
subsequent attempt to celebrate Opening Day on the Pere Marquette, frustrated by another April blizzard, and
opened the season on the Dowagiac, only 75 miles from home in Indiana.
There are other echoes of Wisconsin where April storms come windmilling across Lake Superior. I once
started north to join Arthur Besse on the Namekagon, but was stopped by an ice storm near Baraboo. I should
have known better, on a later trip to fish the Bois Brule with Robert Buckmaster, when the farmsteads near
Lake Superior had sod-walled saunas, and the names on the mailboxes were Finnish.
My father and I once traveled north from Washington to open the season on the Battenkill in Vermont. It was
snowing hard at Arlington, much too cold to camp, and its handsome Arlington Inn stood shuttered and dark.
We withdrew to the Hotel Cambridge in New York, another pillared monument, which proclaims itself the
birthplace of ''pie à la mode.'' Freezing rain arrived at midnight, and the corridor of trees along the Battenkill
was sheathed in a glittering breakfast chrysalis of ice.
Many old-time fishing inns have been lost to fire or have been reduced to hollow-eyed derelicts, but I enjoy
happy memories of many of them. Henryville House, on the Broadhead in eastern Pennsylvania, is merely an
abandoned shell today. Its fishing heritage began shortly after the War of 1812. I can remember its boisterous
celebrations on Opening Eve, with James Rikhoff, Ed Zern, Arnold Gingrich, John Groth, Richard Wolters,
Gene Adkins Hill, Art Smith and John W. Randolph, who wrote the Wood, Field and Stream column for The
New York Times.
Arthur Flick operated one of the best fishing inns in the Catskills and was among the finest flymakers of the
Catskill School. Rikhoff, Wolters, Hill and I once traveled to his West Kill Tavern to celebrate Opening Day, and
found brittle windowpanes of ice in the shallows of the Schoharie. We stopped at Lexington with little to show
for our efforts. The old inn seemed empty. Rikhoff struck the reception bell sharply, until the innkeeper came
shuffling out.
''Been fishing?'' he groaned. ''You been out in this weather?''
''Irish coffee!'' Rikhoff sighed.
''Right!'' the man nodded. ''Only intelligent thing I've heard all morning.''
MY mother's people were frontier ranchers, and I have a scrapbook of Opening Day memories from Colorado.
There was one at the Frontier Lodge in Basalt, near the Seven Castles reach of the Frying Pan. The last time I
stopped there was on Valentine's Day, several years ago, and the dining room was filled with celebrating
couples. I was thinking about dessert when a shot was fired, there was a soap-opera scream and the spent
bullet ricocheted off the wall, before dribbling across the floor. One of the patrons had shot his girlfriend and
we were held as material witnesses until after midnight.
''Colorful night,'' the barkeep said.
''Got that right,'' I nodded. ''Guess the Old West still dies pretty hard.''
Weather still plagues our celebrations of Opening Day, and this year we have suffered an old-fashioned New
York winter for a change. There is plenty of snow in the Sourland Hills of New Jersey, and it almost seems
pointless to think of fishing.
The past urgencies of Opening Day have ebbed in recent seasons, given the fact that some tailwater fisheries
and no-kill areas stay open throughout the year. Opening Day has surrendered the wild excitement it once
embodied, just as the urgencies of Christmas seem diminished unless there are grandhildren in the house.
There is still plenty of snow on the steep hillsides, and few signs of spring are visible in the gray-trunked oaks
and beeches. Yelping geese are traveling north over the house at nightfall. Wintry creeks still trickle, as
opaque as Chinese ink, between melting cornices and runnels of ice, but I have seen freshly hatched
Allocapnia stoneflies and tiny Chimarra sedges in recent days. The secrets of the coming season are clearly
stirring in the bottom cobble.
I may succumb to fishing on Opening Day merely to make the pilgrimage and perform its old rituals. Mine
involve a century-old artifact crafted by the rodmaker F. E. Thomas after he left the workshop of H. L.
Leonard. Thomas had not enjoyed his exile at Central Valley, hated the cacophonies of Manhattan, and
returned to work beside the Penobscot River in Maine.
The rod is surprisingly delicate for its time, and takes a supple three-weight line of Kingfisher silk. It remains in
mint condition, although I worry about dry seams of century-old sturgeon bladder glue. I only fish this artifact of
history on Opening Day, and it is quickly returned to its poplin bag and case once I have released the first
trout of the season.
My favorite rivers are increasingly peopled with ghosts, and I will not risk the rod to foul weather. Opening Day
is more pilgrimage than fishing. It might prove a time to put a piece of seasoned hardwood on the fire, pour
three fingers of honest potstill whiskey, and raise a glass to absent comrades. I miss their company and fish
with them often in my mind.
Ernest Schwiebert is the author of, among other works, ''Trout,'' ''Death of a Riverkeeper'' and ''Matching the
Hatch.''