Trout Fishing

Albino Trout - a story

Albino Trout

Old snow lay on the ground like road kill. My wife Joan closed the blinds and turned on various lights, lit candles and burned very stinky incense, attempting to put the Mojo on winter's festering carcass but to no avail. To throw off the leaden mantle of ennui, Joan and our young Labrador Lana sallied forth on a Sunday drive. Lana dispelled the gloom in a nanosecond when she clambered aboard with her latest hodgepodge of bones, balls, toy squirrels and a mysterious piece of wet fiber.

The Hyundai's digital thermometer hovered just above freezing so I gave up on the idea of a few pre-opening day casts. We headed towards the main stem of the Delaware, about 40 minutes away by Egypt Road, a two lane black top snaking through the woodland hills. We passed the Blooming Grove state game lands.

“Is there any hunting open now,” Joan asked? She and Lana jog on this road, both equipped with blaze orange vests.

“No, you are safe until May 1st when Spring gobbler opens. Sunrise until High Noon. Just for a month.”

Shortly after wards we nearly tore the beard off of a suicidal Jake who tried to throw himself under our vehicle. “Could strut have started this early,” I mused aloud? When the trance of desire over takes them, wild turkeys throw caution to the wind. Blooming Grove creek danced through the woods along our route like a drunken conga line. For once I witnessed water in the Poconos that wasn't posted. I made a mental note to try that pool on the other side of – well hell, I am not telling you. We bowled along, through some eau de pole cat. At the intersection with State Route 6 there was an ugly looking concrete plant. Then a junk yard beyond the tree line.

“Ugh,” said Joan. “Nice”

“Not a junk yard, honey, automotive recycling, they call it now.”

As far as the eye could see, a huge gash had been ripped through the woodlands on a hillside. Power lines were stretched over its length like an instrument of torture. We both gave vent to spontaneous guttural sounds. Then a historic landmark sign for the Sylvania Colony.

“I'll look it up when I get home.” I did:

“In 1841, 'warm friends' ...banded together to form The Sylvania Association, ...whose members invested their labor, capital, and talent 'for the melioration of the condition of man....' Horace Greeley joined on as treasurer and promoted the venture in the pages of his New York Tribune. In April 1842, the Sylvania Association put down $1,000 towards the purchase of more than 32,000 !!!!!! (my emphasis) acres at the mouth of the Lackawaxen Creek in Pike County, PA.” Within ten years it had flopped. Greeley had fronted most of the dough and prudently held the deed. He quietly sold the land. What a preserve it would have made!

We arrived in Barryville, NY on the bank of the Delaware. There is a pizza place, a tackle shop and a B&B. We had been to the B&B's cafe before and had hoped for a modest repast but it was locked up tighter than a widow's purse. The tackle shop was open. My wife headed in first while I dug out the trash from the Sante Fe to deposit in the nearest bin. Naturally there wasn't one and she had locked the car. The boys tending the store ushered me in with smiles and disposed of my detritus. A propitious start.
I looked around the cavernous establishment: there was a wall of shotguns and rifles. A few shelves held such essential articles as white and orange training dummies in various sizes, a large selection of turkey calls, a display of elaborately painted paper targets with faces of such dignitaries represented on them as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the current reigning American President. They were too big for rifle targets. Ah, turkey season. They were for patterning shotguns. A 3 ½, 10 gauge magnum load covers a lot of territory.

The fishing section was discouraging in its lack of the religious icons of my faith. There was a wall dedicated to spinning lures and some spinning rods. I was ready to leave when the boys got to swapping yarns with me about hunting. I don't know how the topic strayed to fly fishing.

“Oh, you fly fish? Did you look in the back?” They turn on the lights in a room as big as the store in front with fly rods, fancy reels and a huge case of flies. “Tied here by the boss and his friend.”

“I suspect there must be some big browns a short way into the feeder streams up here. Is S Creek good,” I asked?

“You from the Pensie side,” the blonde boy asked. New York and Pennsylvania are brought together here by the river and you can fish the Delaware with a license from either state. I told him where we lived and he lived a few towns over. He commenced a running a catalog of his piscine conquests:

“My best was a 7 ½ pound brown on a rooster tail. Where the _____ creek flows through the _______, you know up 4**, well if you go past the post office and....that has been my best spot.”

“Many native fish?”

The creeks have a lot of natives. They don't stock above _______. And I have seen 2 big albino trout. One is huge. We got it to follow a night crawler once. It won't even look at a fly. There are some big fish there. Golden trout too. Big.”

He stretched his arms wide like a toddler. Joan came in at this point wearing the mask of the red death:

“The car won't start.” I went out and tried and it wouldn't turn over. It had power, the windows worked. I tried calling AAA but Verizon kept dropping the call. We headed across 97 to the pizza place.

“We can get a snack and call from in here.”

“Do you have a cappuccino machine, “ I asked the kid behind the counter.

“I don't think so. I think we have cappuccino.” he was vague and I feared the sugared mixture found in those machines in convenience stores. He came back, “yes we have the machine.”

I ordered one at the counter. A waitress rummaged around in what appeared to be a dining room and we established a command center in one of the booths.

“Honey, please order me the blood orange mascarpone cake."

There was no signal at all inside, worse than the parking lot of the tackle shop. I went outside. I would get as far as giving them my curriculum vitae and they would drop the call. After 10 minutes of struggle I came back inside. The waitress had been conspicuous by her absence the whole time and a line had formed at the counter of families waiting to pay and leave.

“Honey, get it to go, I will try to call from the tackle shop.”

I went crossed 97 and explained the problem. They let me use the phone and gave directions to the AAA dispatcher, who was located on Long Island. First, someone from the DNR (D&R) Towing place tried to jump start it. No go. Then they showed up with a flat bed, and got it running.

“Its the shifter,” mister DNR towing said, may need a cable.”

For the first time in my years of AAA membership, the guy wouldn't give us a ride home. I have the premium 200 mile towing membership and our repair shop was only 40 miles.

“They won't pay me,” he said.

“We don't offer that service,” said AAA, “you could rent a car or take a cab?” Neither of these were even remote options in Barryville. I sent the offending Hyundai and abominable towing man off into the sunset and Mike, our faithful carpenter came to pick us up.

I reminisced with Joan. “Honey, remember the time we snapped the crank in the Grand National and they drove us down this road from Callicoon all the way home?”

She turned to Mike, “When I first met David we were always coming home on a flatbed in one of his old cars. I remember when the '64 broke down in.....”

It had been more of an adventure than we expected and it was great to be home. I made porcini mushroom burgers with ground venison and Joan made an experimental Thaiesque cole slaw with purple cabbage.

Remember the awful recycling yard we passed? Today the repair shop called and said we needed the whole assembly of something or other and they could get it from the yard in a day. $400 with labor. Slower and much much more expensive with parts from the dealer so the automotive recycling center won.

Today we stayed home. New snow fell on the corpses of the previous day, a slow attack of effeminate white zombies massing on our lawn. Fishing those graceful streams we had traversed on the drive seemed far far away. Somewhere under a riverbank, lies a 30 pound brown trout. Sharing this luxurious watery residence is her consort, longer but more slender than she, with an enormous head. A sculptor would have modeled this countenance into a bust of the philosopher trout of trouts. The philosopher's lady is content to spawn in his shadow and sip the flies of paradise. To this hour they lounge in the slack water, dreaming of miles of mayflies, the heralds of another spring.
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David Bershtein
Blogger-in-Chief

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