Furnace Brook

   Furnace Brook falls sharply down a narrow valley, between great boulders, through deep, cold woods, until it relaxes into the fields of old farms in the meadows outside Proctor.  The brook is named for an old iron furnace, the ruins of which are settling slowly under fallen trees and brush and creeping vegetation at the edge of the woods, across the road from the old Ironmasters Inn.

   In the fall of 1990, my older brother and I went fishing together every day for four days, three of them on Furnace Brook.  My brother said it was teeming with trout, some of them “lunkers.”  On the morning of the last day, before he drove me into Rutland to catch the bus to Boston, my brother caught a trophy brown trout – a beautiful fish of 18 inches, truly a prize for a stream like this these days.  A thrilling, completely pure and satisfying moment that we shared. 

   After three days of mild, frustrating rain, it had become a beautiful fall afternoon.  Golden leaves showered down around us in the stirring wind. 

   As we hiked up through the forest to the road, I thought about how timeless was the fishing that we do, in the old simple way, with worms from the earth, not fussing with our casting or our tackle, only searching for the trout that hide deep in the clear, cold water, hunkered down behind worn rocks, waiting for what food the surging water would bring tumbling into the pool.

It felt as though we could have been two brothers in 1890 or 1790 in this moment, in the woods along Furnace Brook.