Down memory lane

By the time this column is published, there will be only 48 days to the official opening day of the trout season. With any luck, Ed Van Put will be in the crowd at Junction Pool on that day.

In approximately 69 days, Barb and I will return to our cabin in Stalker, PA. She recently spent eight frightening days in Baylor Hospital when her carotid artery operation went awry. Thank the Lord she is home now and is becoming feistier with each passing day. The trout in her favorite pool on the Willowemoc had better not become careless in their feeding habits once the third week in April has passed. I know spring is coming, for I am hearing the yelping, high in the sky, of transient geese heading north.

To pass the time, I occasionally take down one of the 28 looseleaf binders that contain the notes of every one of our fishing adventures going back to 1947. When I turn these pages, memories lost in the fog of time are instantly recalled. It is as if 1953 or 1962 were only yesterday. I find myself staring in wonder at the pretty young woman holding up a trout for the camera to admire. How lucky I had been to snare her in my net. Then again, perhaps it was the other way around. Barb sometimes complains that virtually every picture of our children as they grew up has a trout stream in the background. So, why is that a bad thing?

Look, here is Robert, age 11, baseball cap, Polaroid glasses, wearing his fishing vest that was lovingly sewn by Barb’s mother. The vest sports a button declaring him to be a member of the Putnam County Fish & Game Association. The net attached to the vest hangs nearly to the ground. The hip boots are a tad too large. The grin on his face indicates we are about to go fishing. Sure enough, just behind him flows the Roetiff Jensen Kill.

In the year book of 1969, I find a picture of Susan Elizabeth, nine years old, knee deep in the Salmon River below the town of Malone, NY. The white Shakespeare fiberglass fly rod in her hand is bent in a tight arc as she plays a rainbow trout to the net. Susan had learned to cast a fly at a younger age than any of our other children. The next photo shows Peter, age five, splashing out into the shallows in order to touch Susan’s trout. I have to admit there may be some justification for Barb’s complaint.

Though I own a great many books by real writers, which I frequently reread, these looseleafs, filled with photos and hundreds of scribbled notes, give me the greatest possible pleasure when I turn to them. I sometimes begrudged the time it took to write down these notes after every fishing outing. I have come to realize that it was time well spent. In these pages I can see us changing from fishers who once killed every legal trout that came to hand. It has now been a great many years since we killed our last trout. A fellow by the name of Gervase Markham once wrote, “That which is worth millions to my contentment can be purchased by another for a few dollars in the fish market.”

Whether you agree or disagree with our President, you might reflect on the following quotation. “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” These are not the words of some right-wing zealot. They were uttered in his inaugural address by John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As Casey Stengel loved to say, “You could look it up.”

- Clem Fullerton