A Trout Memory

I think I’m too young now to know what I’ll remember when I’m old. It would be foolish to suggest that at 34 I somehow know what memories I’ll cherish when I’m 74, just as it would be foolish to assume that I’ll have a chance to live that long. There are memories from my childhood that I have, memories shot in sepia’s, fragmented, disjointed but somehow still those snippet create a smooth trail of memory from a wonderful youth. But there are other memories from high school, memories that are old but not so old that they’re entirely foggy in the way that a memory from some day during your fifth year might be. Those high school memories can be about high school, or girls, or cars, and they are, but the memory from that era that I might cherish the most when I’m sitting my old bones in some old chair will involve trout.

Or the hope of a trout. There weren’t really any trout in these memories, because from here I haven’t yet become confused as to the reality of the memory. The memory has had no time to blur the edges between truth and exaggeration, or between exaggeration and outright lies. These memories are fresh, and there weren’t really any trout in them. In fact, there was a trout, maybe two, and those two trout have become as lasting as any memory that I have. I pursued those two trout for years, and on dark fall days like this one I can’t help but think about those trout and the nights I spent looking for them.

The first trout was the most important trout. It appeared out of no where, an unexpected introduction into my life that I welcomed at the time. I was riding my bike, heading West back from somewhere in the East, and I had just ridden over the wooden footbridge that spans the slow Southwick Creek in Williams Bay. You know, that bridge that everyone takes pictures of for some reason, and for some other unknown reason it’s the bridge that the Village of Williams Bay decided to paint on their hideous entrance signs. It had been raining that day, so the bridge was slick with leaves and slick with that fall rain, but I must have pedaled up to it and slowed to see what Mel Hansen was fishing for, or what he was catching. He stood on the bank, though in my memory he is sitting, and he cast his old fishing pole with his old lure, and he was patient.

Back behind me Mel had his truck, and while I remember now Mel driving his ambulance for years I think this was a truck and not the ambulance. How else would I have seen the giant trout that was to be the first and last large trout I had ever seen come from Geneva Lake? It was flopping in the bed of that truck, and had Mel not been close I would have clutched that trout in my arms and released it into the lake before anyone even noticed. But I didn’t do that, I just stood there, dumbfounded as a 12 year old, amazed at the size and make and brilliant color of that strange fish. I wheeled back to the bridge and watched Mel some more before peddling south past where Bay Shore was about to be built, and down along the shore path home.

That trout was seared into my memory, and the scenery from that day I can see just as clearly today. The lake was silver, and calm, and the stream was flowing a bit quicker than normal because of the recent rain. It was cold, but not so cold that ice was on that wooden bridge, and not so cold that any steam drifted up from the surface of the lake. I was too shy to replicate that fishing scenario right away, as it wouldn’t be respectful of me to fish in the same spot that Mel was fishing, and so I didn’t fish there for quite some time. Not until I was in high school, and Mel was too old to fish there any longer, then I’d find my way down to that stream and fish for those trout.

Mel would still sit in his ambulance and watch the October or November water from the first parking spot to the East of the stream. And I’d still drive down on fall nights after a fall rain and I’d cast Little Cleo’s or soak small bags of red spawn, and I’d wait for my trout. I’d fish where Mel fished, and I’d cast like Mel cast, and I’d wait like Mel waited. I did fish time and time again, night after night, year after year, my cars changed a few times, and my fishing poles did too, but I never, to this day found a way to catch a trout like I saw flipping and flopping in the back of Mel’s truck that day.

I hooked one once, and struggled against it for a few seconds, maybe more, but that was it. It had bit a spawn sack, and while I assumed then that it was a trout, it might have been a turtle or a carp or anything but a trout. I prefer to remember it as a trout. There was one other trout too, a trout that I found resting out of the current further up the stream one day around that time, and there’s a picture somewhere of my brother and I down in that stream. I’m holding a trout, a big one, but not so big as the one that Mel caught, and my brother and I are smiling and we’re acting like we had caught that fish when in fact we had picked it up with our hands. Fish can’t get away too quickly when they’re in a stream that barely flows with the pressure that releases from a kitchen faucet.

A day like today I’m thinking about Mel, and that truck and that trout. A night like tonight I’m going to go down and cast off that stream. Wish me luck.