FOLLOWING OLD TRAILS

After an overnight snow you’re out on the skis early before the freshness of the morning diminishes and before the new powder is disturbed by the afternoon winds. Dawn and the sun rising over an unmarked landscape veiled in snow. A renewal of sorts which is yet deceitful in that you’re led to believe that Mother Earth hasn’t eroded in any way since yesterday. Yourself included. If old man winter has a stratagem, it is founded in subterfuge and realized in his ability to mask old facades and blemishes with fresh applications of powder. The Bearded Ice Man as the Mary Kay cosmetics guy.

The old ski trail is covered yet you’re able to follow it with ease and stay in its track. Heading down hill with little resistance is a good way to start the day. A quiet, weightless acceleration that will lessen your tenuous hold onto terra firma if only momentarily. You’re propelled quickly with little effort from point A to point B as if on adolescent legs. You welcome the illusion but you‘re familiar with the scam and know what lies ahead on the uphill when those adolescent legs are replaced by the ones no longer under warranty. You begin to wish for longer downhill runs and blinding speeds knowing what you do about Einstein’s theories. If you can go fast enough long enough the less you’ll age.

In following old trails you’re susceptible to knowing that the last time you were here you owned more of your corporeal cells. You take a look at your back trail and postulate, There went a younger man. This is an affliction recently acquired but you rationalize with the assumption that some of your contemporaries may also be looking over their shoulders more often than they used to.

You enter the narrow lane through the thickets where the tracks of fox, grouse, deer and other animals crisscross. This is the same route you skied after an autumn snowfall. You had stopped to eat a trail bar and used your kerchief as a napkin. You dropped it there by mistake and found it days later, surrounded by bear tracks, ripped and chewed on, mouthed into an irregular shape frozen solid with the bear’s saliva. The indentation where the bear had laid in the snow was clearly visible. You wonder how soon after sampling the snack’s residue had the bear gone into hibernation and if it had denned-up nearby. It’s a late date in February. In a few weeks, come a warming trend, this bear and others, perhaps with new cubs, will be out looking for more snacks.

Weeks later you skied over the hill onto the old tree farm and followed paths through matured plots of blue spruce and scotch pine. You noticed multiple sets of coyote tracks leading to a small clearing and followed them there. You came upon a rough circle of trodden and compacted snow stained with blood. Centered within its perimeter were the remains of a large whitetail buck partially consumed by the hungry canines. Nearby is where your friend, Ray, the tree grower, had his deer stand. An antlered buck such as this would have caused his heart to skip a beat if he were on the lookout. It may have supplied him with a cache of food and another rack to hang above his reading chair. You ski farther on and stop below the tree stand, half fallen now and overgrown with brush. On any other day, while he was still alive, you would have skied all the way to the bottom of this hill to Ray’s and his late wife Pat’s house by the creek, put up your skis and knocked on their door. There’d be a fire in the stove, homemade cookies and either tea or a glass of Ray’s homemade wine to fuel-up on before you skied home.

Following old trails you’re aware of hazards including falls, sudden animal encounters or frostbite. Or, if you will, the bite of old memories frozen in time. A danger exists of becoming overcome with nostalgia if your direction leads you past too many sites where the heaviness of history outweighs the lightness of being you’ve set out to assume. With this in mind (although you do allow yourself small pangs of reminiscence) you mainly focus on the trail ahead and on making new tracks, perhaps down through the woods or across the way to the open meadow.

You take a circuitous route that follows the creek gully. Near the creek you examine the impression in the snow where a grouse has landed with its tracks leading into the brush. You’ve seen many such tracks this winter which gives you hope for a healthy population to carry through to spring and new broods. Another time you had startled a red tail hawk with its kill of a grouse and watched it take flight with some remnants in its talons. You collected a few of the remaining feathers of that grouse to add to your fly tying supplies.

Then comes spring, the trout are rising and you’re at the river one morning standing in the current with a hand made fly at the end of the line. You’ve recycled that grouse whose feather will be airborne once again when the fly line is looped behind you and then forward to settle, with a modicum of grace, upon the water. The grouse had enticed the hawk, although involuntarily. In its new job description, part of its remains will eventually entice a trout.

You stand still for a while taking stock of what’s around you. You feel the water flowing past and the subtle throb of its currents; the pulse of the upstream waters rushing to replenish whatever lies downstream. You wonder if a fisherman may be replenished similarly since you feel a revival of sorts whenever you’re here, whatever the significance of time and the river flowing. Moreover, you’re surrounded by the fecundity of springtime in bloom. Renewal is undeniable. You’re invigorated. When you make the cast and the line settles to float upon the water it assumes a serpentine form, and you think of the similarities between the curvaceous lines of fishing and ski tracks carved in the snow. But there are no old trails here, only the course of the river.

　

　

MAYFLIES ON GLASS

Nursing a cold and battling the shack nasties, I was couch-bound and reading a book about fly fishing in the northwest. It stirred up a concoction of memories of my trip to British Columbia last spring and fly fishing in its mountains. As good an elixir to lessen the ague of a head cold as any I had taken. Outside there were snow devils whirling across the yard; fresh powder of the overnight snowfall spiraling upward to reveal the glitter of ice crystals embedded upon the hard crust. The wind chill was calculated at negative fifteen degrees Fahrenheit; another frigid day in a long spell of arctic conditions preceded by a cycle of rain, sleet and ice. I was beginning to seriously ponder the onset of spring.

Broken clouds raced across the sky, sporadically revealing its blueness and letting the sun pour through the window where I sat propped to catch the warmth on my shoulders. It felt as good as that high mountain sun in the Canadian Rockies felt after fishing in the rain, when the roiling clouds and thunder had left in their wake an impossibly brilliant rainbow arching across the full extent of the blue sky. Author Thomas McGuane once wrote, “For such things are we placed upon this careening mudball.” Starved of sunshine here in the northeast for much of the winter, even a little dose of it through the panes can make you almost giddy.

Winter in its extremes can be an impediment to giddiness unless it’s maintained artificially by food or strong drink. I find my equilibrium by staying as active as I can in the outdoors, hiking and cross country skiing. I’ll avoid being trite by not recounting the ways in which winter ski trails can lead to euphoria. This day though, I’m stuck indoors with a good book and day dreaming: of mountains in bloom, clear lakes and rivers, wild trout rising to mayflies, a fly rod rigged and in hand as the morning sun cracks the dawn over the water and…well, there you go, it’s been said before. In a few weeks will come the vernal equinox and the winged harbingers of spring: the geese and the robins and the red-winged blackbirds, many of which will nest along familiar watercourses. There the trout will begin to shake off their sluggishness as the waters warm and the mayflies will begin their flights of fancy. Still, as one with a case of the doldrums, it seems like a long ways off.

And then as if I had wished for them out loud, there they were, not literally in front of my nose, but waiting to be discovered behind my back, etched upon the window pane by Jack Frost himself: a flight of mayflies as if recently hatched from the surface of the stream. No less exquisite made of ice crystals as they are organically and animated in spring time, and no less instilling in me that elated feeling when it’s time to cast that first fly. I wonder, What if I had been thinking of something other than fly fishing? Would the haphazard appearance of those frosted designs have resembled something else? Certainly philosophers and mathematicians have pondered theories of parallels and counterparts and random happenstance, submitting explanations for things such as “getting what you wish for.” Not to mention the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (my test being not ink blots but frost formations). No matter. I felt better for a while in seeing them, never mind the science.