Mining Bronze in Maine
©2005 by Tom Chandler
At a remote Maine fishing camp, my attention turned to smallies and the past...
Not every fishing trip works out like they do in the magazine articles, but then again, if polygraphs were administered to outdoor writers, the literary world might discover there is far more fiction talent out there than anyone imagined.
In early July, I drove, flew, flew, flew and drove to a remote part of Maine in search of a landlocked Atlantic Salmon. My wife -- the lovely and long-suffering Nancy -- has a family connection to a comfortingly rustic camp near Grand Lake Stream, a three-mile river that consumes the attention of a lot of fly fishers in Maine.
The stream connects two lakes best known for their smallmouth and lake trout fishing, but the stream itself holds landlocked Atlantic Salmon. It's a short stretch of moving water, it's well known, and you can easily end up timing your backcast so as not to tangle with that of the person standing on your shoulder.
Modern fly fishing isn't the solitary pursuit it may once have been, but on the Upper Sacramento -- where I break out in a rash whenever I see someone I didn't bring with me -- it's unheard of to have upwards of ten fishermen flogging a single, medium-sized pool.
Thank goodness for that.
While the locals interchangeably refer to the stream, the town on the stream, and the lake feeding the stream as "Grand Lake" --and sometimes it's not entirely clear to the tourists which they mean at the moment -- the“Grand Lake” name also applies to a specific style of wooden guide canoe that is painstakingly hand-crafted by only two people on the planet. One of these is a Grand Lake Stream guide named Chris Wheaton, who co-owns a lodge on the lake.
Chris is a real local in the sense that he was born and raised in Grand Lake Stream – a town of 120 year-round souls – and a real “Mainer” in that he says little more than is actually necessary, a tribute to brevity rarely seen in modern society.
After a while, you realize it also represents an absence of the need to impress with every other sentence, something that's also pretty damned refreshing in an age where “top” fishermen plaster themselves with logos, lionize themselves in articles, and aggressively promote themselves as if they were NASCAR drivers.
One of Chris' Grand Lake canoes can take your breath away before it ever leaves the dock, but as with other useful hand-built gear – like bamboo fly rods and violins -- the real art occurs when the object falls into the right hands. Watching the local Maine Guides deftly zip around rocks, docks and threading other metaphorical needles with a 20 foot canoe is impressive – especially given the Grand Laker's utility on big lakes where long distances are covered and the wind often blows up a staggering chop.
Tradition is a big part of the game in Grand Lake Stream, and even though I live in an area of Northern California that has a rich history of fly fishing, it's still a largely post-WWII history. By contrast, the cabin I stayed in was built in 1903, and I was guided by a gentleman who has more years of experience on this water than I have on the planet. Even his Grand Lake canoe was only a few years younger than I am. (It has acquired a rich, scuffed patina that all quality gear acquires through honest use, aging far more gracefully than I ever will).
Though the local lakes – and the lake trout and smallmouth in them -- lie at the center of Grand Lake's sporting tradition, every year the landlocked Atlantic Salmon run out of Big Lake's warming waters and hole up in the cooler waters of Grand Lake Stream.
These are the fish who draw the fly fishers from far away, though the first time I fished here several years ago I didn't know the place was famous. I caught a couple of the landlocks and at first glance, they looked like a skinny, greenish trout with a forked tail.
They were fast and liked to jump, but they didn't make me pine for them after I'd gone home to the native redband trout on the Upper Sacramento. Still, since discovering the place's fame, I wondered if I shouldn't be taking the landlocks a little more seriously, and this trip out saw me making a few advance phone calls, none of which brought good news.
You see, every river seems to have its own Malevolent Entity pulling the strings. In Tennessee, it's the TVA; in California it's a mixture of irrigation districts, the Corp of Engineers and the entire Southern Half of the State.
In Grand Lake Stream, it seems to be paper companies, and the Malevolent Entity controlling the water flowing through the dam from West Grand Lake had done the town of Grand Lake Stream dirty; they'd held water in the lake through a wet spring, then tried to release it all at once.
Local rumor had it the landlocks had entered the river, but instead of holding in the howling waters they had just kept going through the fishway and over the dam to West Grand Lake. The reports varied: there were no fish in the river; there were fish but damned few of them; it was going to be a year before the river returned to normal. The river – normally solidly packed with fishers – was largely deserted, and a local guide fished two anglers all day long for three days. Their total take was three fish.
Given the absence of any hatches to bring the few fish to the top, I was doomed to nymph, but even that exercise crashed hard. On a muggy day (apparently an ideal one for the billions of mosquitoes buzzing my ears), I forgot my bug dope, drove to the river in a camp truck which needed a separate key to unlock the doors (but only had one key on the key chain), fished for two hours, got nothing but mosquito bites, and when I broke and ran for the truck under clouds of god's most annoying creatures, I discovered I was locked out.
On the muggy, sweaty, bug-infested two-mile hike back to town (in waders), I remember seriously questioning my interest in Landlocked Atlantic Salmon. I remember questioning a few other things too, but rather than get into more grim detail than is healthy, let's leave it alone.
It was disappointing, but it was hard to get too worked up; since late October of 2004, I've largely enjoyed exceptional fishing – I told Chris Raine it felt like this was the year I'd paid my dues for all those other years – and some setbacks were inevitable and even desirable from the standpoint of keeping my considerable ego in check.
Besides, there was great smallmouth fishing to salve the wound, and one of my little secrets is that I like smallmouth a lot – enough that while I'm catching them I often wonder why I don't spend more time doing just that.
The local smallies were still looking up, so you could catch them on topwaters. Two of my fish stretched past the 16 inch mark etched into the top rail of a Grand Lake Canoe – and their smaller cousins weren't at all shy. Smallmouth are aggressive fish and racy fighters, and on a fly rod they're serious fun. Add their weirdly glowing red eyes and territorial nature to the mix and you've got a game fish that you ignore to your own detriment.
Easier to ignore are the pickerel, and though I caught my first ever, those sharp teeth suggest a less pleasant catch and release experience for both angler and fish, so in the future I'll likely steer clear of the weedy, muddy-bottomed Pickerel water.
Adding to the flavor of the trip is the considerable atmosphere surrounding the camp. On the water, there are the tragi-comedic loons and their eerie nighttime cries, and a spectacular lakescape where boulders the size of buses seem to rise from nowhere to almost touch the water's surface.
Add the occasional eagle, a lot of gently rolling but still-stunning landscapes, and the appearance that – unlike the “just produced” nature of Northern California's Upper Sacramento canyon – this place looks like it's been around a while and will probably not change much over the coming centuries.
The camp itself is a collection of cabins scattered around a small cove on a lake peninsula, and there's not an inch of it that doesn't ooze history – the kind of family history that is lost to most of us with our cookie-cutter ranch homes and mobile lifestyles.
Scattered throughout are old pictures of men in hats and coats with stringers of big fish, and slightly newer pictures of rough, hardworking types in flannel and boots with deer and slightly fewer, slightly smaller fish.
There is even a picture of Nancy's mother taken when she was about ten; she's a women of considerable energy and intellect, and the picture suggests those traits even at that very tender age. Appropriately, she's sitting in the bow of a Grand Lake Canoe – one that could easily be taking fishermen to where the smallmouths lie in wait, eyes glowing red.
