Matthew Dickerson, Addison Independent, March 8, 2001 (reprinted by permission)
One of the strange things about this recent blizzard--at least in terms of my own psyche--is that just a week ago I was out wading in a river in North Carolina, fly-fishing in fifty-five degree weather.
By the way, for those who have been waiting anxiously since my last column, wondering if I succeeded in catching my first North Carolina trout while visiting my brother Ted, the answer is: Yes. In fact, I caught my first three. They were also my first fish every caught on a fly in the month of February. Other than being firsts in those two categories, there was nothing memorable about the fish themselves. None broke 10" in length. What I will probably remember about the trip were the rivers themselves. The first place we fished was a kayak course where last year's Olympic trials were held. Instead of worrying about catching my fly on an overhanging alder branch, I had to cast around kayak gates and worry about wrapping line around the support wires.
The second river flowed through a small Appalachian town and into a large reservoir. Supposedly some big rainbows were spawning up the river, but I didn't see any of them. What I saw were piles of trash: countless fast food containers, old appliances, and a couple abandon vehicles. Though the water itself was moderately clean, the banks had to have been the most trashed of any river I'd ever fished. Even if I had been catching fish, it would have been a very displeasing experience. My brother and I had a long conversation afterward about how it could have gotten so bad, and about the lack of any environmental ethic among those who lived there. Oddly enough, the last river we fished was only fifteen miles away on national forest land, and yet was one of the most pristine wild trout streams I'd ever fished without a shred of unsightly trash to be seen.
Speaking of trash in streams, my good friend Dave O'Hara was up visiting me this week. Throughout the 1990s, before he left for school in New Mexico and then Pennsylvania, the two of us spent a lot of hours fishing Vermont rivers together. Dave reminded me of a time on the Mad River in Waitsfield when he came upon an old marble-colored inflatable ball: the$2.99 variety you get from a department store bin. It was lying on a gravel bar midstream. Unhappy to find this unsightly trash in the midst of our trout stream, he gave it a vigorous kick. Only then did he discover that it was a bowling ball and not an inflatable kick ball. The resulting damaged toe was the third strangest fishing injury I've ever heard of.
The first two I heard about from Scot, the friend of my brother Ted who guided us out to those two rivers we fished. Scot was once retrieving a heavy lure from where he had snagged it in a branch across the river. He yanked it so hard that it came flying right back at him and embedded two of the three treble hooks into his chest, both of them past the barb. I think Scot is one-quarter Cherokee, which may explain his toughness: he simple grabbed the hook and ripped it out, barbs and all. He said it wasn't as bad as when a friend of his had a lure in his right hand and slapped a mosquito on his left arm. The hooks embedded in both the hand and the arm, leaving him in a rather awkward position.
Which brings us back to this blizzard: the largest single snowfall that I remember since 1978. By the time I had shoveled out of my driveway on Tuesday, it was too late to even bother going to work. Instead, I spent the day sledding with my boys who were home from school for the second day in a row. I did volunteer to head into town to get some milk since our refrigerator was running low, but my wife wouldn't let me go. She said the state police were recommending people stay off the roads unless it was absolutely necessary. But I couldn't imagine that going out for a drive in the snow could possibly be more dangerous than fishing.