Who needs orchids anyway?

    

… Or roses, for that matter.  Beautiful, yes.  But as for the thing itself, only bad things can happen.  

   Give me the violet that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the back yard.  An unexpected gift.  

   Or the blossoms on the cherry tomato plant in the little herb garden behind the house, which will transform completely.  You wait for the first one of the season, which will be so good you eat it with your eyes closed. 

At Reading Terminal Market

     In a quiet corner of the Reading Terminal Market, away from the crowded main corridors, an Amish girl takes her lunch break from selling pies and jams.  A small sandwich is on the table in front of her.  Her head is bowed, her hands in her lap.  I wonder - briefly, stupidly - how it is that this Amish girl could be texting on a smartphone.  Then I realize she is saying a brief prayer before she takes her meal.  I take my coffee - just milk, no sugar, no grace - and move along.

Grist Mill

    On a weekend trip to Rutland to watch E run the Crowley, I stop to fish in Chester on the way both up and down.  Up, I've just got time enough to try the upper Williams River around the Grist Mill, where Route 103 bears left into the Stone Village.  In other words, a few hundred yards from the house where I grew up.  Back in the day, before flooding knocked it out, a sizable dam was here, and you could reliably catch nice trout in the deep pools just below.  Above the dam were bullheads and suckers that you could always see looking down from the bridge.  

     The mill itself, a big red building with an old water wheel still attached, has been there a long time.  It's where Clarence Adams's long string of burglaries finally came to an end.  He was, by all appearances, a leading citizen:  state representative, town selectman, church deacon, incorporator of the Chester Savings Bank.  But for nearly 16 years he burglarizing numerous homes and every store on Main Street at least once, some as many as six times.  He sympathized with the victims for their losses; suggested plans to capture the thief; and  offered money for a reward for the thief's capture.  He finally was caught in 1902 when Charles Waterman, who owned the mill, rigged a window with a shotgun that would blast anyone trying to break in.  Adams was wounded, caught, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison, although he escaped and fled to Canada.  Far and away the biggest drama that Chester has seen.

   There was an art gallery in the mill when I lived in town.    My mother sent me there for art lessons one summer when I was very young.  She believed, as mothers will do, that her children all had some artistic talent that only needed to be found and released.  Speaking for myself, this was not true, like a lot of things about me that turned out to be untrue.  

   There was, in any event, no particular drama at the grist mill on this fine summer afternoon.  Nor any trout that would rise to my flies.  

Meccawe

     I have made my fly-fishing debut, at an historic - if little-known - private fishing club, no less:  the  Meccawe Club, on Meccawe Pond, in the hills above Bridgewater, Vermont.  The first members hauled the lodge house up the hills to the lake with oxen over a hundred years ago.  Calvin Coolidge, from down the road in Plymouth, was a member.  One of his fishing hats hangs on a nail in the great room of the lodge.  One of my partners, John Houlihan, is a member and has been kind enough to invite me up to visit on a day when I can attend a free clinic with the head of LL Bean's fly-fishing school.  I do not make a fool of myself at the clinic, and after, with John rowing us about the lake, I catch three beautiful trout on my new fly rod, all with a small wet fly - a black one with just a touch of red at the butt end.  Two rainbows, about 11 inches each, which would have been stocked this spring.  And a fine brook trout, at 10 inches or so, which John assures me is a native fish.    

     The last fish - the bigger of the rainbows - swallows the fly.  Even though I pluck it out quickly, with just a speck of blood, the fish goes belly up and can't be revived.  And so, along with some terrific memories of a first day with the fly rod, I come home with Sunday's lunch.  

Evolution

   

      We fished with worms.  The way our father taught us.  First with small, cheap, bait-casting reels, the kind that sat on top of your rod with the line spooling in and out of a plastic dome, which your father would have to unscrew in order to tease apart the tangle of line that formed inside, asking you how in the world you had done this and reminding you to keep some tension on the line and then this won’t happen, as he hands it back to you. 

   Later we graduated to somewhat longer rods and open-faced spinning reels, which seemed so much more sophisticated, more technical.  But still we fished with worms.  The way our father taught us.  Tying a barbed Eagle hook on the end of the line, then adding a split-shot sinker about six inches above that.  Walking the streams we fished with plastic containers of worms we had dug from the garden and night crawlers we caught in the wet grass with a flashlight, a careful step, quick hands, and a strong, determined pull if they got any part of themselves back in their hole.  Between outings we kept the bait in a five-gallon bucket in a cool corner of the barn, the bucket full of dirt and old leaves and sometimes some coffee grounds.  You took it out onto the packed dirt driveway to tilt in its side, poke around for worms on the new surface you had exposed, then rotate the bucket and do it again.

   We did not fly fish.  We did not know the first thing about it.  And could not have begun to afford the tackle.  And besides, it was not something people like us did.  It was something flatlanders did.  Rich people.  People with fancy waders and vests and hats, who kept their rods in cases in the backs of their expensive cars.  There is wrong with worms, we thought.  We caught our share of trout.   And besides, there was no room to cast a fly on just about any of the streams we fished, with their overhanging branches and brush.  Especially if you didn’t have the waders that would let you walk out into the middle of the stream.

     As time went on we finally did what men do, given enough time to think things through, and one kind of hunger or another – we evolved.  We bought waders and canoes and ventured off the shore and out into ponds and lakes, actual lakes, and big rivers like the West and the Connecticut, where we caught not trout but bass, actual bass.  

And yellow perch and panfish of all kinds, and then pickerel and the occasional walleye and catfish and even a bowfin on southern Lake Champlain.  Some of this with worms, but also shiners and lures – spinners and crank-baits and even, finally, ironically, artificial worms.

     And then, finally, after turning the far corner of fifty, I walked into the Kittery Trading Post and put myself in the hands of a friendly young Mainer who helped me buy my first fly rod and reel combo, along with the new waders and wading boots that I should have bought years ago.  And then he picked out a handful of woolly buggers to get me started and out the door I went.  Smiling broadly.  Happily tucking my new gear into the back of my car.  Wishing, once again, it didn’t have those flatlander plates.