with friendly discretion whenever it seemed appropriate. I tried to avoid making it sound like a lecture. I don’t know if I ever convinced a single angler to change his ways – to give up bait for artificial lures or flies, to leave his creel at home as a decorative vessel for dried flowers, and to practice catch-and-release fishing – but I tried a few times. I tried it with Pierre on Father’s Day Creek, but he was closer to my father and father-in-law in age and generational experience. He was a successful gardener who enjoyed harvesting the fruits of his labors, a chef who, like my father-in-law, took pride in preparing and serving good meals. The trout that he caught in Father’s Day Creek, whether wild or stocked, were part of his hunter-gatherer mindset, and as long as the state put trout in the river for the taking, Pierre would take them. And he would serve them, if you please, panned-fried in butter, with red potatoes and asparagus, and a glass of chablis.
The invasion of the hatchery-born rainbows was harmful to Father’s Day Creek. Dozens of fishermen, armed with lures and worms and little balls of Velveeta, came to its banks and caught them all in a matter of weeks. But here’s the thing: Like Pierre and Roger, these anglers made no distinction between the hatchery rainbows and the wild brown trout. They caught everything and took it all, stripping away the population of wild trout whose presence made the river so special. In 1993, I concluded sadly that, without protection by the Commonwealth, the creek would never be restored to its historic best. It would always be a marginal trout stream. It wasn’t sewage or erosion that harmed the river. It was short-sighted fisheries management and an indiscriminate harvest.
– 6:15 am
I usually fished the creek on weekends, and always made a point of being there on Father’s Day. I prepared by following the same fastidious ritual each time. I parked my car on a grassy spot near the old, one-lane bridge, pleased that no one else had the same idea. I stood outside the car and assembled my two-piece, 4-weight Scott rod and attached the Pfleuger reel. I ran the fly line through the eyes of the rod and checked the last section of the leader, the tippet, to see if it needed to be replaced or lengthened, or at least straighted. If the latter, I squeezed the line through a flat, bell-shaped leather line-straightener attached to my fishing vest. I placed the rod on the roof of my car while I finished setting it up. I attached to the leader about 18 inches of 5X tippet and, to that, an all-purpose fly, a size 16 Adams parachute, and secured it on the hook tender of the rod. Then I dressed for the occasion – chest waders and wading boots, the tan fishing vest that over the years had become way too heavy from acessorizing, with a net attached to a D ring below the soft collar. Then I checked to make sure my car key was in a zippered pocket, and I did this four times. It’s a strange habit but a good one; it guarantees I will not lock the key inside my car and spoil a day of fishing waiting for road service. Key secured, I headed for the trail down to the river. I’m a happy man when the trail appears overgrown with bushes and weeds. That means no one else has fished the creek for a good while. It was just that way on Father’s Day 2000.
I hope you can understand this feeling of being possessive of a place, of developing a sense of responsibility for it. Ownership is all in my head and my heart. I feel protective of the place, though I live 152 miles away from it and no longer visit as often as I once did. Father’s Day Creek is not simply a favorite fishing hole. It is a place I retreat to, in a pilgrimage of the mind, when there’s too much sad and bad news in the world, and especially in Baltimore, my adopted hometown. So one of my most valuable possessions is something I do not own. With the East Coast feeling more and more overcrowded and with rural vistas disappearing, I covet a spot that seems isolated and undisturbed, and I hope you know of such a place, or will seek one soon.
Of course, if I gave you the exact location of Father’s Day Creek, you could find it on a Google Map and see plenty of houses nearby – including Pierre’s and my in-laws’ – and a gas station and town center within a couple of miles. In fact, the area has become overdeveloped, with scattered housing and a strip of commercial clutter and grotesque suburbia in the midst of what was all farm country three decades ago.
The land around the creek has not been wilderness for going on 400 years. The trees are descendants of ancestors that fell to the logger’s ax long ago. The stream-bred brown trout – what I refer to as “wild trout” – are not a native species. They were introduced after the original inhabitants had been wiped out. The same is true of the small rainbows I sometimes catch; they were introduced to the stream, adapted to it and managed to reproduce. In fact, the only trout that could be considered native are the little brookies; those that swim in Father’s Day Creek today are likely the cold-blooded descendants of the brook trout that have survived the intrusions of settlers, loggers, farmers and hunter-gatherers.
I believe this because it fits with a wishful but informed perception of the creek – a stretch of private waters that seemed capable of a robust rebirth if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would only stop stocking it with trout, thereby discouraging human visitors. The potential reward seemed great for minimal effort, or no effort at all: If humans would stay away, the stream could be restored and the wild trout could grow in numbers and size. It’s what I believed. So I did my part. I stopped fishing in Father’s Day Creek. I left it alone. I wanted no part of the pillaging that took place each spring. I fished in other streams designated for catch-and-release fishing, and only with artificial lures and flies. This is one of the things you learn when you take up fly fishing. I do not know a single angler who fishes with a fly rod and kills trout. I am sure there are some out there, but I’ve yet to meet one. The reason is simple: If everyone who caught trout killed trout there would be no trout left, and every river would have to be stocked with fish from the hatcheries.
My father, of course, would never have understood this. He had been brought up too poor to understand it, and he had lived through a time when fish of all kinds appeared in endless abundance. In 1971, he caught a 36-pound cod off the coast of Massachusetts. That was not a grand-looking fish that deserved to be photographed, then quickly returned to the over-harvested Georges Bank to procreate. To my father, that cod represented a week’s worth of baked fish, Portuguese chowder and a pile of fish cakes. My father would not have bothered to fish Father’s Day Creek – small water and “dinky fish” – and he would have wondered why I spent so much time there, with so little to show for it.
This idea of claiming a piece of river that does not belong to you comes from boyhood fantasies. I had places I considered my own when I was growing up in a small Massachusetts town south of Boston. One was a fishing hole about 20-feet wide on the downstream side of a small bridge no more than 300 yards from my home. It was on a foul little brook that flowed from Forge Pond, north of the center of town, through woods and past an aluminum foundry owned by a neighborhood family, the Santillis. Years later, I discovered the stream on a map, and with a deceptively bucolic name, Meadow Brook. The place I recall was a backwater, and a good bit of it had been used as a dumping ground by the townspeople. My favorite pool was more like a small pond because the water was mostly stagnant; it flowed, ever so slowly, into a reedy marsh from where one of our neighbors, an adventurous scavenger and hunter named Secondo Mola, harvested large snapping turtles (for the eggs, and the meat for soup) and muskrat (for the pelts).
However unlovely, the little pool was mine, and that’s where I caught my first fish, a sunfish, on a yellow-and-green fiberglass pole that had been a birthday present from my uncle and godfather, Ralph Ortenzi, when I turned six.
I spent a lot of time around that homely pool in summer, watching turtles and frogs, and catching an occasional sunny.
I fantasized about setting up camp or building a little cabin beside the pool and keeping watch over it. I was not familiar with the term “riverkeeper” until I was 40 years old and visited Montana and, on a chilly day besides DePuy Spring Creek, smelled wood burning and stepped into a warming hut. That’s when I learned that some people are actually paid to manage fisheries; it stems from the British tradition of hiring “riverkeepers” to maintain and
