The road I took was an ordinary one, threading its way from our sub-division, through mansion land and on to Morristown. Every day I drove the length of it from home to train. There was a park on the town border that was frequently crammed with people and I had never once considered exploring it. To fish for trout, I always drove several hours to the Beaverkill, the Willow, the Upper Delaware.
My daughter Alice was not quite out of the terrible two’s and had a nanny named Eva. Eva brought home a local paper, and in it there was a story about the Whippany River and its trout fishing! All along it had been trilling its water music behind a deciduous curtain parallel to my path of daily drudge, unseen or noticed. In Whippanong the name meant “place of the willows.” Straightaway I bundled Alice, Eva, the dog and the usual tackle into the SUV and off we went.
Ten feet in from the parking lot we felt that cool, magic hush of the woods. It was a late morning in May and a choir of oaks and maples rustled like behemoth fish waiting for songbirds to pick them clean.
I strung up a light rod. There was a huge pool under a foot bridge that looked like a fisherman’s dream but was unresponsive. A big boy or two probably dwelled here in the stream’s heart of darkness, only coming out at night.
Alice was squirming in the Nanny’s arms. She wanted to hold the rod. I tied on a gold-ribbed hare’s ear and cast it across the riffle below the bridge into what must have been no more than six inches of water. Splash. A stream bred, wild brown trout. It was about four inches long, a minor miracle of pointillistic radiance.
“Hold it!” Alice shouted. I knew that this would be the end of the hapless fish and released it safely, without touching it.
“It went home to visit its Mommy and Daddy,” I said.
“No!” Toddlers do not grasp the principles of catch and release fishing. I tried to propound this theory in the pidjin English but Alice had begun crying and we called it a day.
Now that she is twelve and can cast with some grace, Alice and I will traverse the time divide, exchanging a paved road for a woodland millefleur carpet, and cross that old footbridge again.
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