The sounds of the Waits River in Bradford, VT, sound soft and low like they were being muted and filtered by a muffler made by nature, soft grassy banks overhanging the river, smooth sand banks and the heavy green foliage of trees, all serving to create the symphony of sound that many outdoorsman crave as an anesthetic and balm to sometimes hectic lives.
And ears are not the only sense lulled by the river, as the eyes take in the wind rippling along the grassy banks, and turning the leaves over on the trees so you can see the duller colored green on the bottom of them. The eyes see the lay of the water, the currents, the slow or dead spots in the water, the way the sun glints off the water and makes little diamonds of pure light where the water is broken up by rocks and snags.
And underneath the water is another dimension altogether, underwater beaches of fine grained sand tossed and filtered by the current, rocks forming stonewalls and cliffs and ledges, with wavy fluid lawns of algae and water plants completing the underwater landscaping of the river.
There is life here also, in sometimes startling densities, but not like life on the surface, with birds and countless insects and various mammals. Life here is alien to most people, but fly fishermen and biologist and entomologists know them well, to these people they are as common as cats or dogs or chickadees.
I have always been fascinated from earliest childhood by the outdoors, and, I think like most humans, the water in particular. As a child my siblings and I spent days out afield in the swamps by the power line near where we grew up pursuing frogs and snakes and tadpoles. One of the most interesting creatures I discovered on the power line was a carnivorous plant called the sundew.
These curious plants usually grown in wet acidic soil lacking in nitrogen. To supplement their diets and get the nitrogen they need to grow they have developed a unique approach to this problem. Native to Vermont and New Hampshire the leaves of the sundew are rounded and covered with fine red tentacles each having a drop of sweet, sticky fluid on top of it.
Insects are attracted to the fluid and become stuck in it and the tentacles slowly close entombing the insect and then the plant gradually digests it. As a kid there was a small patch of these plants in a very boggy wet section of the power line and I recall being fascinated by all the insects trapped in the fluid, and how the plant enclosed them and ate them.
Nature always plays out these little dramas, usually unseen by human eyes. But if you fish or hunt, often you get to see these acts unfold, and I think these are the things I remember most of my outdoor experiences. I described the Waits River in my opening paragraphs, and made it seem like a lazy, idyllic place where life was slow and easy.
But looking under the surface, so to speak, of anything may give you a totally different picture then what you see on the surface. I was fly fishing one nice sunny morning in the exact place I described above, and had barely eased my way out in the water and was standing there looking over a big pool I was in.
The pool had an inside current hitting a bank of big, granite boulders, and a quieter center pool area with a sandbar and smack in the middle of the pool was a big chunk or rock. As I was standing there looking at the water, right in front of my feet on the sandbar was a small school of minnows swimming n swaying and holding their place in the mild current.
I was watching the minnows and all of a sudden a huge rainbow trout blasted out from under the rock in the middle of the pool and plowed into the minnows in front of my feet so forcefully he beached slightly and splashed water on my hip boots.
I saw the trout smash a minnow into the gravel stream bed hard, which crippled it, and then the trout circled back and picked up the minnow and swam back under the big rock. I was frozen in place when this little drama took place, but as soon as the trout was under the boulder I immediately plotted to get him.
I clipped off my dry fly and tied on a weighted muddler minnow and eased it on by the rock several times with no results so I switched over to a sculpin pattern with the same results. After trying for the good part of 2 hours I conceded to the trout.
I was vindicated though because in the next pool up there was a trout rising vigorously in a pool with a big log anchored in it. and my lifelong friend Stanley was plying the water hard with no results as I watched. After having no success he motioned me to give it a shot so I whipped out a cast and drifted it down by the end of the log and instantly had a tight line and a fighting fish on.
Even though Stanley was standing 25 feet away and watching I made sure he knew I had the fish by yelling loudly, "FISH ON!". It was about 10 years ago when I got that fish and now whenever I start telling the story and Stan is there he moans and says, " oh no, not again". Another close encounter I had with a fish was when I was in high school.
I skipped school with my buddy Dennis and we went down to Wells River, VT, to fish for walleyes where the Wells River runs into the Connecticut River. Neither of us had ever caught a walleye but we figured it was time we did plus we skipped school and Dennis had lifted a 12 pack of beer, Schlitz I think, from his dad so we were good to go. We parked the car and walked down to the confluence of the rivers and put the beer in the water on a nice sand bar to cool off and also in case the game warden showed up as we were both only 16.
I remember the water was pretty high and discolored and I didn't really know much about walleye fishing so I was casting and retrieving a big mepps spinner with a rubber minnow on the spinner. We fished for about 2 hours with no success and on top of that the current had undercut the sand bar where our beer was and it got washed away unbeknownst to us.
Right about when we were getting ready to call it quits I was reeling my spinner in and right in the water off the bank in front of me I saw a big fish come out from under the bank and slam at my lure and miss then spin around again and grab it.
There were no thoughts of setting the hook or playing the fish here, I reared back hard on the pole like one of the old time tuna fishermen when they use to pole them aboard the commercial fishing boats. This resulted in one big, wet, slippery walleye landing on the bank.
Having never caught a walleye before I dropped my pole and pounced on the fish and grabbed him with both hands which resulted in me getting severely fin spiked in the hand. I can tell you from that experience, DON'T GRAB A WALLEYE!, my hand was sore and swollen for a week. Kind of reminds me of the time my new-to-fishing city boy buddy caught a northern pike and tried to lip it like he had seen me do with bass, haha.
Speaking of the dangers of the wild, what rookie fishermen hasn't been spiked by a horned pout?. Have you ever noticed when something like that happens people will wait until it happens and then gravely tell the new fisherman, "don't grab them pout like that they got spikes"?. That would be part of my theory on "outdoor" laws which means the laws of nature are not the laws of man or even reason.
So the next time your out hunting or fishing, take a moment to stop and look in, around, and under the water, tip over a rock, look at the life under it and imagine what a 300 pound dragonfly nymph would be like, or picture that 6 inch brook trout as an apex predator in his tiny brook, the proportionate equivalent to a 20 foot great white shark in the open ocean.
Or look at a beautiful pool your about to fish and stop for a few minutes and look at it and imagine it as an oil painting, and file it away in your memory, so you can look at it over and over in your mind no matter where you are.
A good combination of imagination and curiosity can turn any fishing ,hunting or outdoor experience into an interesting, poignant, or very funny memory. Too early to think about Spring?.

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