High Pool
Dave Motes
There was an old man in his riffle. All this way, from home to hotel to fly shop, then all the long way up the valley along the empty creek, and here, at the top of it all, there’s a guy in his riffle.
Carl sat back on the raised edge of the uphill side of the path. It was blanketed with a low plant that wasn’t poison ivy—May Apple, maybe—and it made a comfortable rest for Carl to watch the old man in his riffle.
The river was different here, as he’d been told it would be. The steep pocket valley leveled out briefly and the long pool was broad and slow. The three miles of river downstream were rushing, shifting, and steep, the bed of the river mainly bedrock, often shouldered up against the blue cliffs or through sharp slants of tilted ledge, with very little freestone or cover. The pools up here were well worth walking for, he’d been told. So he’d walked, and now that he’d arrived, he wasn’t alone.
At this point the path ran well above the water level, part of a looping detour that took it around a nearly vertical plunge. Just below, the river had gone completely out of sight under a chaos of grey-blue limestone boulders ranging in size from Tahoe to Winnebago. The rock took weird angular shapes, mostly flattened and laced with weathered cave formations. The stone was stacked and tumbled and the banks were vertical so the path dodged up into forested slope, into silence and sunlight.
The whole valley was a series of gigantic steps, same pattern repeated. The river would take a steep fall through a series of plunges and short, deep pools, and nearly disappear under the talus and debris from its own erosion through the bedrock. Then the flow would emerge and run through beds of smaller boulders, forming fast pocket water and good holds on the bank. Then a brief pool-and-riffle, where the valley had flattened and filled with the river’s leavings, and a novice fly angler could get a drift. Those long narrow pools were filled with the dark flickers of feeding trout. Then another plunge.
The man in the fly shop had been exact. He’d sold Carl half a dozen flashy orange Humpies, and a couple of blue-wing Olives to keep up hatch-matching appearances. He’d described the river’s cycle of plunge-and-run, and had said, like a trusted old coach, “Keep on going. It’s going to look tasty, all the way up, but the farther you go the better it will be. There’s some beautiful water up there right at the top, and no other way to get up there but the long haul.”
No cars in the lot, no prints on the path, three miles of steep humping, and there’s a guy in his riffle.
Carl thought the guy looked like a stork. Maybe a blue heron, he amended, since he hadn’t really ever seen a stork but blue herons were common. The old man took sudden deliberate steps, raised a leg straight up and then down again, then when it was set he’d make a slight swooping lean into the next step, foot coming straight up. It was odd but proper, even dignified. Carl settled himself to watch, waiting, feeling the buzzing fatigue from his legs and his heart drain into the cool soil.
Carl looked idly downstream. The fly-shop man hadn’t described everything. Something big had happened here. He hadn’t really understood it until he could look down from above.
He’d first noticed it driving up from town. In the valley below the dam the streambed was a flat broad waste of boulders and recent undergrowth. The bridge was brand new. Above the reservoir, the valley seemed especially open, even though the flanks of the mountains pressed sharply above it. On the mountain slopes above the stream, each small declivity was a broad open space, almost like a ski slope, and it had taken Carl a moment to realize what was different about those long streaks: no trees. Even the smallest tributary streams rose through a blank avenue of saplings and slash carved through the overgrowth of hickory and sweet birch. But the blankness wasn’t from logging. There were hundred-foot trees everywhere else. It didn’t make any sense.
And the rocks were wrong. The streambed was a vast field of stones of all sizes, probably filled and filtered with river sand and silt for thousands of years of runoff; but along the main watercourse even the largest of the rocks seemed jumbled, displaced, exposed. It took Carl a moment of tracing with fingers and mind to see it: the stones had watermarks and lines of soil and weathering traced above the native strata, and those lines were all wrong. He stood by a twenty foot boat of a stone, upended and jammed into the creekbed, and traced earthlines that aimed to the sky. Even the largest boulders were the same: shambled, jumbled, turned. It was chilling. Carl had grown up in the glacial zone, and he was used to signs of great passage on the landscape, but those were all old signs. This upheaval was recent.
The troubled river made it easier for him to follow the man’s advice and carry his rod instead of using it. He saw a few trout in the pools when he waded the creek, and once from above he watched splashy rises along the slash of foam and current push in a mirrored plunge pool. But he didn’t fish yet. The man in the fly shop had been exact: above the big cut, you can see the valley split, the long pools there are darker and the bottoms are gravel and rich silt, more bugs means more trout and bigger. Be patient, he had said. Few folks walk far enough.
The fly shop was the back half of a drugstore, though not exactly in back; the two flowed seamlessly together like a tradition. The proprietor was a tall, mild man with red hair going gray. The shop was mainly geared toward smallmouth bass, something Carl hadn’t anticipated, but understood immediately. He’d crossed the Shenandoah River half a dozen times on his drive down from the brown suburbs. By Edinburg it was a small, lovely river, and the trees were heavy and green already though it was only May. Carl had almost let the fly-shop man talk him into some smallmouth flies and a local spot, but the river was still a bit high and the smallies were probably too big and rowdy for the little four-weight. And a lonely mountain walk suited his mood. Still, the bristly crayfish imitations had appealed to him and he made a mental plan for another trip in July, when the river would be low and warm, wadable in boots and shorts.
The guy in the shop had a soft Shenandoah Valley voice and his friendly confidence led Carl to credit his advice immediately. Usually Carl liked to make his own plans, to find his own way, but the description of the river drew him. So Carl had lugged his pasty too-fat body up three miles of steep river path, swapping boots for waders every time he crossed the creek (seven times, so far) and passing up dozens of pools for a promise. And there was a heron-guy fishing it already. Maybe he was a heron, Carl thought. He hadn’t left any footprints, so maybe he’d flown up here, dropped into the creek in a flurry of big grey wings, skinny little legs outward.
Carl sat quietly on his little lip of soil, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was relaxed and satisfied.
The old man caught a small trout, and Carl had to suppress an impulse to bustle down and look at it. Probably give the old guy a stroke, jumping out of the greenery like that. The man played the fish briskly and scooped it up into the morning sun in a gemflicker shower of creek water.
Two hundred yards below Carl had walked out of the catastrophe zone. The trees had closed in and the streambed had become settled and stable. The difference was obvious: The light was leaf-filtered, and the air was closer, more intimate. The river ran through gravel, silt, soil, moss, the small gathers of leaf mold along the creekbank, little clusters of sticks compiled by the current, occasional trees down into the water. Those little signs of the constant interaction of forest and water and mountain had been absent below. Below, everything tenuous and temporary had been scoured away by a force capable of annihilating great trees and shifting even the most enormous stones. It took the fresh and undamaged stream to give Carl the dark vision of what must have been: an apocalyptic riot of tree trunks and rock and mud charging downslope under lightning and hail. From his vantage he could see down the canyon to where the first denuded slope began. Such terrible change amid this durable beauty made his own upheaval of spirit seem trifling and petty.
The old man caught another fish, a bigger one. It took a while to work in, fighting deeply, and from a hundred feet away Carl could see the deep moss and orange contrast as it lay from fingertips to wrist before the water took it back. Then more stork-steps along the tail of the pool, more sharp little motions and tight little curling casts.
Carl couldn’t work himself up to be mad, or even disappointed. The whole pilgrimmage had been pretty stupid anyway, a grand journey, a theoretical watershed of experience to help him become less bitter, to find himself, to resolve his midlife crisis. Like the new flyrod in his hand, the whole trip was a tad too scheduled and labeled and Oprah. It reeked of pop-psych self-help. It wasn’t the fishing; that seemed separate, settled. Carl definitely wanted to fish that lovely set of pools, and maybe catch his first brook trout. The fishing would keep, he thought. It was the purpose beneath the fishing that made him feel like a jackass. Fishing should be enough, alone. Next time, it would be.
The old man made another cast, and while the fly took drift he looked up at Carl, a sidelong casual glance devoid of surprise or even interest. He knows I’m here, doesn’t seem to care, Carl thought with a shock. The man didn’t look up again.
Carl held up his rod, looked at it a moment; fresh and unmarked, barely used. The perfect little orange Humpy poised against tension, hackles angled alertly forward. In the dappled sunlight Carl could clearly see the barb, crushed downward against the shank with a wasteful excess of force. He examined the knot, tiny coils and an exact tag end, and the exotic orange floss buried within the dun body of the fly.
Below, the old man took another precise step, took another precise cast, waited another precise pause while his fly settled and drifted back to him. Carl didn’t see how the cast came out. He was moving again, downhill, downstream, eyes probing the river for a rising fish.
For information on the Green County 500-year floods, see http://www.rapidancamps.org/rapidan/flood.asp and Moorman's River North Branch 1996