Ghost Fish (Part 2 of a Story for My Son)

A scene a couple of miles from
where my family had a farm near Sandy Creek,
New York, before they moved to Virginia.
Even though I try not to, every time I look
at this photo I still resent that I was
raised 600 miles south of Beaver Meadow,
instead of less than 2 miles south of it.

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

A couple of years after my family moved from Upstate New York to southwest Virginia, I was born. My first, most vivid memories of childhood were that something wasn’t right, that I didn’t fit. Summers were awful and winter was wonderful, the more snow the better; I was born in the South but I wasn’t of the South.
    On that first trip Upstate, at age 11, I found home. It was my mother’s first trip back since the move south; even at my young age I noticed her change, a sparkle came to her eye: she too was home. It was only for a week, but it changed us forever.
    We stayed at cottages owned by my cousins, beside Selkirk Lighthouse, where the Salmon River runs deep and strong into Lake Ontario. Fishing was awful, I was told, nothing like the “good old days.”
    I tested that premise: a Southern boy armed with a $3.00 Western Auto spinning rod, a Zebco Langley 777 open-face spinning reel with a broken anti-reverse, and a silver plastic minnow lure called the Rebel. Ignorance is bliss, or at least it is sometimes effective: I caught fish like no one had seen it done in years. I caught fish like I had never before caught fish, even though I used a wire leader—just in case I hooked a toothy northern pike—which should have spooked any lesser fish from my trusty Rebel lure.

Fishing success: a hefty stringer of
smallmouth bass taken with an imitation
minnow Rebel lure. This isn’t the photo
that went into the newspaper, and may not
even be the same stringer of fish, but it is
a noteworthy haul for an 11-year-old kid
with a $3.00 rod and a broken reel.

    Lost in time, in glorious black and white, there is a faded edition of the local paper with a front-page photo of a crew-cut, crooked-toothed kid holding up a stringer of smallmouth bass: five fish, the largest 6 pounds, 4 ounces; the smallest 3 pounds, 7 ounces. That is some fishing, even for a tournament pro, much less for an 11-year-old with a cheap rod and a broken reel.
    I caught that stringer of fish thanks to a summer camper named John Drozda; he saw me catching fish after fish from the bank and asked if I would like to ride along upriver in his boat, a 12-foot Grumman aluminum v-hull outfitted with a 6-horsepower Mercury outboard motor. My mother took one look at the tiny craft and said “No!” I begged, pleaded, probably threw a fit; when we returned with that epic stringer of smallmouth bass, you would have thought we had just come back with trophies from a safari in Africa.
    While everyone was intrigued by the story of the biggest stringer of fish landed in years; I was only thinking of the one that got away. Or in this case, the one I let go.
    The day that had happened, the sun was setting over the river as I landed yet another smallmouth, and then large white dots began bobbing on the surface all around us. Our fishing, or at least our catching, stopped dead, and even the mighty Rebel lure couldn’t attract a hit. Yet all around us, fish were smashing these mysterious fluffy white insects that were rising to the surface then taking flight.
    By age 11, I was already a self-taught fly-fisher, with a self-imposed disjointed casting stroke I still struggle with five decades later. In deference to the close quarters fishing amongst vacation cabins, I was forced to leave my fly-rod at home. But I had packed a few of my woeful hand-tied flies, a clear plastic “bubble” float, and a couple of my own prototype tapered leaders.
    Offered the proverbial ‘one last cast’ by my host, I tied on a dry fly—a size eight White Wulff I had crudely created with my own impatient fingers—attached the float, and flung the array toward a cluster of white dots under attack by aggressively feeding fish. The trick, I had learned, was to snub the line while the whole works was still in flight, which let the fly sail past the float as the leader uncoiled. The fly then dropped deftly on the water, far enough from the float and heavier line so as to not spook the fish. Sometimes it actually worked, most times it produced a cat’s cradle of a mess that took a while to untangle.
    On this wonderful evening, with a year’s worth of trophy fish already in the boat, I made only one cast. It was perfect.
    The dry fly landed lightly, spun upright, and sat still, floating high on the water as if a pro like Lee Wulff himself (who created the White Wulff fly pattern named after him) had tied and cast it, instead of a bumbling amateur. The ripples it made on impact had barely receded when a huge swirl of silver formed beneath the fly and the snout of a sizeable fish slapped at it. I was caught completely off guard and didn’t even think to react. By pure luck, I had done exactly the right thing.
    On instinct, I spun the reel handle just enough to move the fly, maybe an inch. Another flash of silver, this time followed by a vicious strike that nearly yanked the rod from my hands. In a matter of seconds the fish had ripped yards of line from the reel, circled the boat twice, and jumped and jumped and jumped—awesome, amazing leaps that sent it soaring well clear of the water—while I hung on and hoped.
    A year earlier I had hooked a 15-inch rainbow trout in a bathtub size pool in a tiny Virginia stream; it made several jumps and put on the greatest aerial show I had seen from a fish, until my brother-in-law, Harold, netted it. This creature circling the boat was huge compared to that fish, was leaping beyond belief, and the only thing I could do was take stress off the line and reel by occasionally spinning the handle backwards: the reel’s broken anti-reverse was saving the day.
    It was well after dark before I felt the momentum changing and began thinking I might actually land the fish. The battle probably took less than 30 minutes, but it seemed like hours later when John slipped the net under the fish and hoisted it into the boat.
    Examining it by flashlight, we were baffled. It looked much like the small-stream rainbow trout I had caught, but it was stouter, almost twice as long, and was a sparkling silver like I had never seen. Rainbow trout are silver, but this fish—this fish that fought like no other fish—was a whole different intensity of silver. Chrome, almost, by flashlight.
    Gingerly removing the hook from the corner of its mouth, watching it gasp for air, I looked closely at it, and I imagined I felt it looking closely at me. Reaching for the stringer, John said “we need to get back before people think we drowned. We can find out what it is tomorrow.”
    I looked again at the fish, again felt it looking at me, and heard my own words with a strange disbelief: “Can we let it go?”
    “What?” John asked. “That is a fantastic fish!”
    “Too fantastic to kill,” I said. “I want to remember it still swimming here, after I’m back home, stuck in Virginia.”
    “I guess we can try.”
    Catch-and-release was a concept I wouldn’t learn about until years later; I had been raised to catch what we can eat, and eat what we catch. I watched uncertainly as John slid the net back in the water; the fish lay still, as if dead. After some swirling of the net in the water, the fish splashed its tail, weakly once, then again, then a hard splash.
    “Are you sure?” John asked.
    “Uh huh. I think so.”
    He gently grasped the huge fish by its lower lip, and slid it out of the net. We watched it, motionless, wordless, eye to eye to eye in the beam of the flashlight, until it gave a strong slap with its tail, surged out of his grasp, and vanished into the night.
    I didn’t mention the fish to my mother, but I lay awake for hours thinking about it.

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark