We took the train to Lakewood.
There'd been fires in the old days, swept
the North Branch country,
but over the years we fished there
most of the land recovered itself
in second-growth popple and wild
cherry, scrub maple
and birch. Blackberry
and raspberry bushes got thicker every year
in the clearings, and in the shadow
of this scrub, here and there, you saw
seedlings of hemlock from the few
remaining stands, even a few
white pine that came
from god knows where. And fern, may apple, winter-
green, coral mushrooms, russula,
and everywhere you looked
stood the charred stumps of the old pines,
some of them too big for the two of us
to join hands around. Make you wonder
what it must have been like
before the fires and lumbermen. It was
hard country
around that river
killing frosts
by the middle of September, in October
snow began, lasted
six months, by the third week
of April you might see
a little grass again. When my brother
and I fished those rivers
we found a farmer let us sleep
in his hay barn, we'd pull together
a four-foot mound of hay
and sink into it, and get waked up
by the mice stirring in the hay
and know by that it was daylight
and time to get up. No rats, thank god,
big pine snakes underneath the barn,
saw them lots of times
sunning themselves on stumps. Used to be
that river was something, read once
in the files of the old Green Bay Advocate
of a party took seven hundred
and eleven trout in three days
of fishing. This was
at the end of August, 1871. Another time
some years later four hundred
and sixteen fish that ran
a quarter pound to two and a half. Nothing
like that anymore, of course, and of course
that's why. But I tell you
it was still a beautiful stream,
the North Branch, in the upper reaches
wild, but lower down
a river for swans, maybe
fourty feet wide, in places, and running deep
between the banks, and a powerful
current, so that even in the glides
it was punishing to wade
upstream, and then below the highway
it spread out in
a still water, but still
with lines of drift that went
past us quicker than we could wade
or walk the banks. We'd come
to the stream with the wet brush
in our faces, and sometimes we'd stand
on the meadow bank below
the oxbow and see
little grayish blobs of insect shapes
bobbing to the surface and fumbling
themselves airborne, and twenty feet out
the neb of a trout showing and gathering
one in, and then a hatch or spinner flight
filling the air, swallows by the dozen
hawking among them, cedar waxwings
coming out of the trees to take
one fly, and every square yard
of the stream with a feeding
trout. Black flies
could be bad, especially around
the pilings of the cattle bridges,
crawled down your collar, into
your ears, up your nose, your cuffs, bit
like a sunuvabitch, I used to think we'd maybe lose
a pound of meat apiece to them
some days. But we'd stay at it
no matter what, until almost sunset,
when the chill at last got to us,
and we'd come off the stream
shivering, bleeding, exultant.
In those days that was a river
where unless hot prairie winds were blowing in
from Kansas, or the Fox
had opened the reservation dam
and sent down a head of muddy water,
we felt we could take fish
somewhere along it - even
on the worst days we used to take
a lot of brookies in the riffles, small,
but by god they'd brighten the day! ~John Engels