Solstice

He stood a moment and rested leaning in the doorjamb, looking down the hall to the kitchen. At this hour the threepaned backdoor was a stack of indigo with the palest orange stripe where the weak winter sunrise was trying itself above the ridge to the southeast.

He was still wavering when curiosity about the character of the sunrise got him moving down the hallway, trying not to shuffle.

He warmed with movement. His father always said, get going and move in order and soon it will be evening. That is true, he said aloud. Suddenly it’s evening.

He crossed the yard to the barn, enjoying the crunch of frosted grass and the expanding twinges of his stretching and opening knees. The knees were strong; the back was unreliable, a belt of black pain and weakness. It complained again, and the shoulder too, as he heaved up the garage door and started the car. The old hip boots, patches on patches, were easier than the neoprenes. He could drive in them and walk better. The confining layer of neoprene seemed to finish him off, compress him. It helped the knees but seemed to bind the back, make it worse, isolating it somehow. He rarely wore the neoprenes any more.

He’d left the kitchen door open, and he chuckled when he thought of his wife’s reaction to that. When he left early to work or fish or hunt, she would have to hear the lock or she couldn’t sleep. And when she’d been pregnant, Lord. He couldn’t even brew coffee; the smell’d wake her up puking. The coffee was done now, settling in the pot. He liked the new stainless thermos bottle; it kept coffee so hot it would burn the next day. He topped it and filled the travel cup, left them both by the door as he walked flappingly up the hallway--darker now that the sun was nearly up--and dressed.

Longjohn shirt, wool cable sweater. He considered the fleece Brian had given him last Christmas. It was warm, like a layer of air. He wore it around the house, but for some reason it didn’t fit today. The heavy wool sweater bound his casting arm but smelled right. Short jacket and the English hat, a gift from his wife. Thirty years old and the brim still held a good curve.

Back down the hall out to the car. The morning was somehow colder now, without the bed-warmth spilling off. His dad would have said he was making his own heat. Forty years in the orchards, he’d wear a single heavy flannel shirt, maybe a short jacket on the coldest days. Now the orchards were ninety acres of the same three houses over and over with sets of trees growing up between them through clean sod and bright-red mulch. Some of the new trees were pears and apples and cherries.

For someone with so many flyrods he was a one-trick pony, Brian said. Though Rick was the angler, Brian was the better giver of gifts, the noticer of things like that. The little 8 foot 3-weight was the rod of choice most days. The custom cane rods he’d had made in the fifties were his legacy to his sons. The 3, barely four years old, scuffed, dented, and twice repaired, was his working rod.

In the kitchen the red light blinked on the answering machine. The little light pushed his heart down.

The beep, then the voice, brisk and clear: “Dad--Rick. Sorry. Got to cancel. I know, I know, but it’s my job, it pays the bills. I’ll have Peg call you, or I’ll call from work. Mark will come by later, when he’s up, see how you’re doing. Listen, it’s slick up there, you shouldn’t go alone. Maybe Ted can hook up with you. I tried him already, he’s not open or he’s not answering the phone. Anyway, sorry. I’ll talk to you later.”

He leaned in the doorjamb, listening to his oldest son, wondering how a man could decide to work instead of fish, and knowing of course that he had, his father had, they all had. He thought of his own father, laboring up the hills without breath and faded at fifty by emphysema and lung cancer.

Mark would come by. Earnest, orderly Mark, careful of his reputation, careful of his grandfather, always so sure of himself, forgetting to be young. Mark was doing it already. He would go far.

He loved his grandchildren but he would rather have them sitting at the kitchen table chatting than mowing his lawn or calling him “sir”. Mark fished dutifully with his dad once a year or so, but he was an athlete and preferred August two-a-days to a day on the stream.

Back out to the car, warm now. Rods in the trunk, vest in the back, coffee up front, and a moment of reflection. As always he went from his toes to the top of his head, thinking of all the things he needed. After another pause, this time leaning on the garage doorframe, he clumped back into the house, turned out the lights. Another pause, then a handful of Advils in his pocket. Might mean another hour of casting. Locking the door he paused again, went back in, and took the small Bushmill’s from the liquor locker.

He had to lever himself slowly into the worn seats of the car, bending his back to fit the bucket. He missed the bench seats of the old pickup, slick vinyl that you’d ride back and forth, posting through ruts and sliding unseatbelted in the turns.

He didn’t always fish the same stream, just like he didn’t always fish the same rod. Whenever he went another way it was because his mind knew it was better to try new things, to do a variety of things; at least that was the advice he gave his sons. But that was young man’s advice. Old men should do the same thing, he thought. Do the same thing each time, at the same place, to savor seasons and to catalog the small changes. To catch the last few tendrils of variety, focus on shades of what you already know. Relearn the old lesson that there is more there than you knew. He shook his head. He was becoming a philosophical jackass. It was just a river.

At Randall Road he turned left into the sun. At the rise the oblique light made the road look wet where the wheels had polished it, a springtime look.

Then suddenly in the rise, mostly blinded with the rising sun, something went wrong with the shapes and angles. He was braking sharply, and as the light turned a small doe came out of it from the left verge, going to long fluid bounds in a moment. She was clear in another stride, but then veered back into the roadway, banking hard, hoofs pushing up little spurts of gravel. He felt the thump deep in the frame and saw a flicker of spun legs to the right. Under the sharp braking everything leaned forward and stuff in the back shifted. The car came loose, skittering right, before his life of driving moved arms and feet in short motions and he was stopped in the road.

He pulled off and sat in a deep breath. It was a draw, with hardwoods on each side of a little creek, field openness down a little way. It was an obvious crossing point, an obvious time of day and season. He had been careless.

The bumper was turned a bit, and the right quarter was grooved and creased. One headlight was cracked, but there was no other obvious damage. A bright dollop of blood slanted down the fender. In the headlight rim he found a neat bunch of white belly hair. It was thick winter hair, the strands perfect tubular tapers with wavered tips. It seemed a small price for a warm life.

He opened the trunk and took out the big knife, a Buck Fisherman his grandson Byron had given him last Christmas. He’d never used it.

The trail was spotty and tough to follow in the low morning light. He slogged along in his folded-down hippers. For forty yards he saw disordered leaves and scuffed frost in the shadows, then the animal had left less trace. A bit further he found a shady crease that held some old snow and a single scarlet drop. He stood a moment and let his eyes range over fifty yards of brown woods, then gave up.

Back to the road, almost weary. He’d left the door open, and a county police car stood behind his, lights flashing. The police were new. He’d grown up with sheriff’s deputies drinking coffee in the kitchen, taking home a bushel of apples. This was a brush-cut young man, beefy and strung with equipment. The cop twitched when he saw the knife.

“Some trouble?” the cop said.

“Hit a doe. Got her in the sun,” he replied.

The cop eased, nodded. He looked at the hip-boots with frank cop curiosity but didn’t speak. “Lotta them around now.”

“One less.” He opened the trunk and put the knife away. The cop peeked in, paused, backed a step.

“I got something to do about this? I followed a ways, but she’s not down yet. Not enough sign for my old eyes.”

The cop was looking at the front of the car with practiced eyes. “Naw,” he said. “It’s a matter between you and the insurance. Doesn’t look too bad.”

“Nope. Just glanced her. She was off the road, spooked back somehow. Deer and cars.”

“You’re lucky. Woman over Chester went into the trees last week, killed her and her daughter, dodging a deer. Too many deer, too many cars. You need any assistance?”

“Nope. Fine. Better off than that doe, anyway,” he said.

“OK,” the cop said. He wrote things down then was gone.

The parking area was empty. He pulled in to the north side so the car would be warmed by the sun all day. When he got back he would be cold.

The engine off, he heard a truck downshift on the highway, then the sound perspective expanded into the silence. He could hear some scuffling in the undergrowth downslope toward the creek, then a scatter of crowcalls over the ridge. The air seemed dense and still, weather air. The sky was clear hard blue. He smiled in anticipation even as he forced his back straight against the pain.

The drop trail switchbacked down the hillside. He’d walked it a thousand times, probably, and fallen half a dozen, including once last December in seep ice where he’d gone down so fast that he’d executed a perfect crackback block on Ted Schuster, dumped them both down the hill. Ted had smashed a 4-weight--not much loss to a man who owned a flyshop--but they were unhurt. After that Brian had made a big deal about him not going up alone. He did anyway, whenever he couldn’t find a companion. He ought to go alone, he thought walking. Less threat to the innocent.

The trail was dry today. His feet knew the way and he fell into a reverie about time with his father--on Big Pine, a spread of sandwiches streamside, creekcold beer, silence. His father hadn’t fished well, but he’d been an excellent companion. He’d had little patience for the mechanics of flyrods and the neat coils of knot, but he had loved the lounging time on creekbanks, watching his son, the nods and admiring that were the bones of experience to a young man.

Father had always liked the anticipation of it, and most enjoyed fishing when he was supposed to be doing something else. They would cut out without warning, just gone. One September on the Susquehanna, they’d dumped the canoe and it had been flattened in a chute opposite Liverpool, two hundred deepwater yards from shore but an easy wade from a wooded island. They’d hunkered there for two days, roasting catfish and eating raspberries, until a passing angler rowed them in. They could have swum for it, but being marooned was better. The sheriff had been out. People had been frantic.

At the fork he bore left, upstream, toward the dam. The big trout would be in the long runs looking for midday midges. He tracked along the hillside another two hundred yards before he shouldered the last wrinkle of ridge and saw the creek.

As always, he paused and leaned on the big silver maple at the gap in the trees, looking upstream. From forty feet up he could see a quarter mile of flatwater, almost black in the morning shadow with tendrils of mist curling off against the braiding current.

From here the sound was a low undercurrent, almost wind. When he canted his head he could hear a treble counterpoint from the riffle around the bend. Turned the other way, a baritone rush of water under the dam half a mile upstream. More crowcalls and a short hound bark from across the valley. His eyes were failing but his hearing was good.

He crossed to the south bank on a gravel bar. Two or three good corners against the north bank would hold fish first as the sun topped the ridge. The hatch wouldn’t last long this time of year, a bare month after the solstice. Steady risers were rare in the winter, and he didn’t want to have to kick through good holds before he even began looking for a reliable fish.

The path on the south bank was faint and overgrown. Most anglers used the other side, and pushed straight on through to the dam pool. The pool held only few trout because of the relative lack of forage at the beginning of the river; a few meat-eating brownies living on baitfish blown through the floodgates. Big ones, but not real fly-fish. Serious anglers on this creek aimed for the big rainbows that held in the flatwater runs midging and nymphing. They were cagy and liked a lot of clear water around them.

He sat on a mossy slump of topsoil that hung out over the gravel bank. The sun was tracking obliquely down the bank overgrown with laurel and sassafras, maybe twenty minutes from touching the water.

It took him a long time to tie on the fly. First the laborious poking of the tippet through the hook eye, which seemed microscopic. It didn’t make him angry. Once he had prodded the tippet through the hookeye, he had to make the knot. His first two attempts failed--once when he missed the last step of the knot, and the second time when he lost the dog end and the whole thing unraveled. He’d tied on extra tippet to allow for these failures.

He heard a heavy thump--as much as felt it--then a loud rustling in the duff behind him. More noise, and a gobble, astonishingly loud. He froze then couldn’t wait and looked back into the laurels. The hens exploded from an arc twenty feet across, four of them, and pumped across the stream and down, soaring once they were twenty feet high. A moment later downstream a big tom slashed suddenly into sunlight and across. It was lovely, enormous and unwieldy in the sun, with layered textures and an oily hint of color. He looked after it, charmed to silence. He’d lost his knot again.

The first two fish to show were small, rising in noisy turns along the cutbank. Then another brownie began to show sporadically above the first two, but a large hold was unmarked yet, ten empty feet of deep softwater with sun on it. He watched, but saw no rise yet.

It was surprisingly warm already. The sky had lost the sharp deep winter blue, taken on a hazier, paler shade. Creeping over the ridge came an even line of mare’s tails. Warm front, maybe, some change of weather. Such a sight would have stirred his father. The one thing an old orcharder feared above all was ice, and this was ice weather. But all their trees were long ago cut and chipped and smoldered in barbecues. He didn’t care about ice anymore.

He looked back to the hold. A big black snout appeared and sank, followed by a feather of tail. Within a few minutes the fish had settled into a steady rhythm.

It took twenty minutes for him to set up on the fish. By then the sun was holding halfway across the creek, and he was almost to the sun-line before he was ready to try.

His first few casts wouldn’t drift. Rick could have gotten a clean drift from that downstream angle with lovely long mends. Moving deliberately, he took another eight feet upstream and delivered again. This time the fly settled neatly through the pocket. When it was eighteen inches early the fish rose on a natural. He got a good look; a big fish and deep bodied beautiful winter chrome-black.

He stood knee deep in the creek and soaked it up, even the pains and the stiffness in his back, and sequenced again; a gentle roll-cast, then a soft little pickup, letting the fast rod gobble up the line and stroke a crisp sungilded loop. He settled this one with a gentle upstream wag of the rod tip, throwing a four-foot kink in the line, neatly crossing the avenue of faster water and giving him another foot of drift before the fly dragged. Rick wasn’t the only one with a few fancy touches. This time the trout drifted up and slurped at the right point, and a slow lift buried the hook.

The fish writhed in place, then zipped out of the pocket and across the current, dragging flyline audibly through the water. Midstream and thirty feet down she wobbled upward into a sluggish inelegant winter jump. Downstream the fish dogged back and forth several moments, then turned grudgingly. Through two or three stalemates he worked her closer. Ten feet out she turned and ran, further this time, then paused wallowing before coming in pump-and-reel. He made a pass with the long net--a gift from Brian’s stepdaughter May--and the fish ran again, not far. After another minute’s stalemate she slithered over the netframe and filled the bag. Seventeen inches, as good a fish as he’d caught in a year. Blunt-headed with a short slash of mouth, dullcolored flanks with just a few lovely spots and pastel streaks of rose and blue. A preposterously beautiful fish.

Along the hour he caught three small brownies then took a break. He was hungry, but hunger to him had become a secondary thing and he just considered it without caring. Enough to pull a frugal drink of coffee, two mouthfuls quickly cooled. His feet were cold so he sat on the bank in a patch of sun and watched shadows track across the leafless oaks. He followed the coffee with a dollop of Irish, a sweet burn behind his teeth.

Another hour, and the hatch went off. He shifted his focus to another riser along the bank and noticed that the bugs weren’t visible; the light had gone pewter in a cold breeze from downstream, confusing the current and pulling his casts flat. He looked up to find himself under a snow sky of flat thick grey cloud, no variation or break. He could taste the wind, moist and probing from the south.

At that moment he saw another rainbow flash in the flat light, nymphing in two feet of water fifteen feet in front of him. It seemed very large. Again it turned, and from then he could see its dark outlines against the bottom stones even in the dull light. He went into the flybox.

The midge came off a nymph best imitated by a #26 hook wrapped with a few courses of reddish brown thread and a single barb from a mallard hackle. He rigged it as a dropper from an elk-hair caddis.

The fish was still in place, still turning. He began running drifts, casting gingerly and keeping the loop open so as not to foul the dropper. Five drifts and he shifted the dry fly up six inches.

On the third cast the fish ate his nymph. He saw her turn and hesitated just as the dry fly hitched, ducked under, popped up. Mouthed it then dropped it again.

He gathered in the fly, patiently, waiting for some time to pass, and looked around the creek. He was shocked to see that it was almost dark, the oppressive dark of weather, not of nightfall. The shoreline melted and slid in sympathy with the flowing water and his movable mind. The sky was solid cloud now, with downwellings here and there like textured globes full and thick. The wind was steady with the tang of snow. He felt a curious hitch of excitement, like when he was a kid and snow threatened, even though for him a day of snow or ice was a day of cruel labor.

In an odd pause he shouldered through the logical fact that he should go now, that bad weather was coming; he pushed through it like he pushed through the now black water that purled around his knees. It wasn’t even a hope that he could linger, a few more minutes, a few more casts. It was a certainty, and he welcomed it, waded into it, tasted it as a powerful sense from that afternoon sixty years ago wading ashore on a slender Susquehanna island.

The reverie over, he clipped down the tail of the fly, frizzed the thread on the body with his nipper, and ran another drift. After a few, or more than a few, she took. Her first jump, a ragged clumsy flop, was all eager beauty against a shawl of tiny snowflakes.