Brookshire Brookies

Todd Davis

The hayfield is half cut and catches June light at the edges. A sweet dust floats down over the farmhouse as I park the truck along a line of century-old sugar maples. I hear a tractor which I can't see because it’s hidden by a hillock while it makes a loop in the lower meadow. 

A woman steps around the corner of the barn; deep wrinkles trace her eyes and brow. I say the hay looks good this year. She nods, but I know she doesn’t recognize me, although she’s only a bit older than I am and for a while we went to the same church when we were children. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all worked this farm, sugaring in the spring, pasturing cows through the growing season, making hay and selling what they could to help feed their families.

The woman’s brother drives a rusted pickup along the field’s perimeter and comes to a stop near us. Soon the tractor I heard rolls up the side of the hill into view, a teenage girl riding its seat. The woman’s brother waves his arm out the truck window, motioning to the girl to turn off the tractor. “You’re done for the day,” he yells. 

My family owned the farm on the mountain eight miles south of here, before my parents sold it, but that was forty years ago. In the intervening decades, I’ve been back to visit a few times. On my honeymoon. When the boys were young so we could walk the ground their grandfather had loved. A decade later for a college visit with Noah. 

I don’t know if I believe in pilgrimages, but today I’m on one. I’m here to fish the small stream that runs along the north side of the hayfield. On my previous trips back. I’ve ended up elsewhere. In other woods, on other streams, guided by a friend or family member’s preference for deeper water or more wild forests. But over the past decade, in dreams, I’ve been tugged back to this overlooked creek A thin line I haven’t touched in nearly half a century. I doubt more than a handful of people have fished it since I last waded the cold ribbon. 

I ask if anyone still works the Kelley Boys’ place, a modest dairy operation where I bucked hay and mucked stalls when I was home from college. I remind them that Dickie Kelley dated my grandmother after my grandfather died. Dickie loved motorcycles and once took my grandmother on the back of his BMW R/50 for a fall weekend in New Hampshire, hugging the broad mountain curves and each other. They’ve both been dead more than thirty years. 

When I bring up the stream, asking if it still has brookies, I’m met with puzzled looks. The brother says, “Not much of any size in there.” I’m not worried about size. I simply want to hold the fish I remember chasing with a bucket and net as a boy. He shrugs, says I’m welcome to throw my line in. I thank him as he gets back in his truck. His sister smiles when I say I’d like to buy a gallon of their syrup. 

With boots in the water, I can’t see anything but sky interrupted by grassy seed heads. The creek is old and gnarled, snaking muddy banks where they’ve washed away in spring floods. From meadow floor to streambed the ground drops nearly three feet. The water’s clear and cold, with a small pulse of current where the land tilts a bit toward the valley. From my channel perspective, the hay’s as tall as I am. Tomorrow the tractor will make a close pass near the stream and this curtain will drop. I feel like a child hiding in secret under a bedsheet fort. It’s been wet but no measurable rain has fallen the past ten days. It looks like we’re headed for another dry summer. The last few years streams like this one have nearly vanished by the end of July, transformed into a series of puddles with little defense against the summer sun. I marvel at how the fish can find a place to hide from the heat. But trout travel, even in small water. There’s a pool formed by a glacial erratic a half mile from here, back in the forest shade. I’m betting that’s where these fish gather in August.

Today the water remains cold enough for sculpin and brookies to dart back and forth across the shallows. The springs that refresh this stream pull water from hundreds of feet beneath the granite. My legs fool me into thinking the earth is solid. My mind instinctively stretches underground toward the hidden aquifer. Distant water buoys this geology, suggesting porousness may be the true key to life: the necessary freedom of movement that helps us to recognize we’re part of a larger braiding, one thing merging with another. 

Childhood landscapes control so much of what we desire later in life. The bend this stream takes between the hayfield and the forest often comes to mind unannounced, causing me to lose my place while reading a book or working on a poem, sometimes while I’m in front of a class lecturing. When that happens, I remember how as a boy I desired to be in any streambed, regardless of its size. Water meant fish and frogs and turtles, meant cooling off or leaping from stone to stone. Without knowing it, I was being taught how to embrace the puzzle the glacier left, distinguishing patterns. A stream was a world without chores, without the confines of a classroom. Water has its own rules and obligations, necessary and right, not like the world of reports and forms to be filled out. 

Today I quickly realize if I’m to catch a fish I’ll need to crawl along the bank, a foot or two behind this screen of hay. Like all small water, what lives in it is skittish: survival built on a foundation of wariness. At a turn in the stream, where a bit of elevation is lost, eighteen inches of water runs, one of the deeper spots in this section. On my knees I prepare my short rod for a bow-and-arrow cast. I’ll only get one chance. The purple haze I’ve chosen is meant to imitate an ant fallen from a stalk of hay, a terrestrial struggling as it floats downstream. 

My fly lands just on the threshold of the soft current and swirls into an eddy. A simple count of one, then a vigorous splash. The brookie fins feverishly toward the bank, trusting that the invisible dark beneath the earth’s lip will save it. I tug and reel, scooping the six-inch fish into the net of my palm. 

Brook trout come costumed in different hues and shades for many reasons, including biological sex, the flush of the spawn, the genetic strain the fish descended from. The trout in the Pennsylvania waters of my home tend to be lighter in coloration. The spots splashed along their sides—reds and yellows and blues—appear that much more brilliant because of the pale canvas of our region. These Berkshire trout glisten like dew-drenched berries, dark and purple, spines nearly black. Their bellies swirl with a mixture of yellow, orange, and tan, colors you might expect on the western horizon minutes after the sun sets and dusk yawns. 

Next week, back home along the Allegheny Front, I’ll begin my annual rite of picking blackcap raspberries. While I like red raspberries—we’ve cultivated a patch of an everbearing variety for the past twenty years— my favorite fruit remains the blackcap, ripening the last week of June and continuing for two precious weeks before tapering to the occasional late berry, the drying and shriveling of what goes uneaten by birds and bear and deer. I schedule trips and work around the appearance of this fruit. In winter, when summer feels interminably far away, I imagine taking a handful of the sun-warmed globes and letting them fall where they will on top of a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, heat from their dark bodies melting the frozen cream into a white puddle that looks like a June cloud. 

I don’t remember when my father first showed me a blackcap raspberry. It must have been before memory took hold, maybe when I was two or three. Their purple canes grow in some of the worst soil, thorny locks draped down steep banks. After a few years, the brambles are overtaken by early successional plants and trees. Every year demands more scouting. Finding new ground to pick isn’t a choice, it’s a commandment of forest ecology. 

I open my hand and the purple berry of the brook trout’s body drifts slowly into the stream’s current. It doesn’t race off, and I wait, motionless, enjoying the sweet efficiency, the sway of stippled light on its back and sides. 

On the opposite bank a bouquet of bluets, a wildflower my grandmother called Quaker ladies, modestly announces the arrival of summer. For now, with the world so fecund, I lie down next to these blossoms and listen to the small water only inches away from my head. I consider the gentle sound of its movement and how long ago it made a song that carried me miles away and then brought me back home. 

Image © Europeana