Recently, I was in search of trout, but my search resulted in more than just fish.
I’ve been a fly fisherman for over a decade, but when I moved to Wisconsin a few years back, I lost easy access to my favorite haunts. So I was searching for a new stretch of untouched waters to fish near my home, a journey that led me through the winding backroads of the coulees in my area, as the evening summer sun soaked the little fields in liquid bronze and made the tree line glisten. I headed to a stream a few valleys over from my own.
I’d been through the quiet recesses of this valley before, seen many of the farmsteads from the road as I drove past, but I didn’t know who lived in them. I didn’t know many people in my area, apart from those living on the dead-end road I call home.
The decision to talk to the natives was partly one of self-preservation. In Wisconsin, you can legally fish any navigable waterway as long as you enter at a public access point and keep your feet wet. Still, I’m reticent to assume that all my neighbors know this law. I’d hate to end up on the wrong end of a shotgun of some backwoodser with hair sprouting from his nose and ears, faded baseball cap cocked atop his ragged hair, glaring with wild eyes at the presence of an intruder on his land. I thought I’d better get permission from the landowners before venturing into the creek to avoid such an encounter.
In reality, of course, everyone I spoke to was nothing like my imaginary backwoodsman. They were all well-shaven, friendly, remarkably helpful, and deeply interested in identifying our mutual acquaintances (of which there turned out to be more than I expected). Somehow, the fact that most of them knew the people on my road better than I did made me feel more at home.
In a flash, my own lane and the people on it was not some isolated rural outpost, but rather a place and a people familiar to a wide network of families living in the area. And, conversely, this new valley I was exploring suddenly took on a little of the flavor of home, for there were old bonds of friendship and shared history between my immediate neighbors and my new acquaintances, some of whom seemed as permanent as the hills themselves.
The folks I talked to knew the exact house I lived in, which they referred to affectionately as “Robinsons’ place.” Of course, my home does not belong to the Robinsons and hasn’t for some time. But in those valleys, memory and tradition hold strong, and my presence of two years hardly amounts to more than a pit stop in the eyes of the locals. Somehow, I know that the acreage I call home won’t truly be “the Larsons’ place” for many years to come, not until generations of us have lived and died here. We haven’t earned that designation yet.
One of the men I talked to–a thin, leathery fellow with a weather-worn face–drew me a verbal map of the valley and the interwoven streams and tributaries that flow through and around it, like veins on the back of a hand.
“I used to trap mink and rats all up through there,” he said, eyes fastened on the distant ridges, or maybe on the distant past.
I had a confused image flash through my mind of enormous mousetraps out in the marshes and woods. Who would go to the trouble of trapping a rat? Can there really be that much skin on a rat? And who would buy a rat pelt? Gross.
Then it dawned on me. “Muskrats?” I asked, innocently.
“Muskrats, yeah,” he said, turning to me with a puzzled look, as though there were no other kinds of rats in existence. “I’d get 30 or 40 rats through the valley, but they’re all gone now. I don’t know what happened.”
Another woman I spoke with told me how she’d lived in the same house for 33 years, there beside the creek. I looked at the house–an old white one, a little dirty and worn, but solid-looking–and thought of how many scenes of one family’s joys and sorrows its walls had witnessed.
The woman (we’ll call her Harriet) had spoken a little briskly to me at first, when she wasn’t yet sure who I was or what I wanted, but she soon softened, and her warmth was as palpable as that of the muggy, summer evening. She had an odd habit of ending almost every sentence with, “And that,” or sometimes, “and that. So.” (“We’ve lived here for 33 years, and that. So.”) It was as if every item of conversation were added to some imaginary list of all the things that are. It made each remark somehow homey and also more significant. This quirk in her speech made the next thing she said more poignant than it otherwise would have been:
“You know Dane? On your road?” Harriet asked.
“Yeah, I’ve met him.”
“He passed away.”
I hadn’t known this until a half hour before, when the muskrat trapper told me.
“I just heard that.”
“He was one of our best friends. A groomsman in our wedding, and that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know him well. He seemed like a really good guy.” He had plowed my driveway once in the winter, refusing any payment except my promise to visit him sometime.
“Yeah, he was an amazing guy.”
“Cancer, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, cancer, and that. So.”
Half an hour later, as I stood in the shimmering water, cold as a Wisconsin winter, staring at the bejeweled back of a brook trout, I knew that in my fishing trip I had caught something more than the shadowy, elusive fish who own these little pools and little riffles under the canopied banks, where the drowsy summer flies buzz and the many-voiced water sings an endless song–I’d snatched a little scrap of human connection, of old stories and relationships, of history unique to the valleys where I live, that I didn’t have before, that I didn’t even know existed. It had been there long before my arrival and, no doubt, will continue long after I’m gone. Of course, the pressures of modern technology, transportation, economics, political divides, and the general fragmentation of society threaten this scrap of old-fashioned human community. But I was gratified to know it still exists in some places.
The realization didn’t come without regret, however. If I had been more integrated into the local community, if I’d met more of my neighbors sooner, I might have known the ordeal my next-door neighbor was undergoing. I didn’t even know he was sick, let alone that he had died, until I talked to other people in my area. What breakdown of local culture must have occurred so that a man living right next to me had gone through his final days, died, and been buried, and I’d known nothing of it, driven past his house every day none the wiser? If I had known, perhaps I could have done something for him.
At the very least, I could have fulfilled my promise to visit him in payment for his plowing my driveway.
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