Chapter 8

8

One year later

The river glittered in the sunny, breezy, cool October morning and out from the rolling countryside hills, autumn leaves were pouring down like golden rain.

Jogging across the deck of an old bridge, I stopped in my tracks midspan to watch the glowing red and orange and yellow leaves twinkle as they twisted and spun and flip-flopped into the shimmering bend of the water. Then I bounded the rest of the way across the bridge into a little wooded neighborhood of nineteenth-century clapboard houses that ran alongside the river, picking up my pace.

Looking up at the windswept baby blue sky over the water as I ran, I suddenly remembered the first and only poem I had ever written. It was for an in-class assignment when I was in sixth grade and it was called, "What a Day."

What a day to be alive

What a day to wish

What a day to cast a line

What a day to fish

Mrs. Lynch had loved it so much she had read it out to the rest of the class, completely mortifying me. But in the decades since, I had actually come to be proud of it.

Well, a little at least.

Write what you know , I thought, smiling out at the river.

It was called the Farmington and its headwaters originated from the base of the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts before it flowed on a fifty-mile meandering journey over the border into Connecticut and then through Litchfield and Hartford Counties into the Connecticut River.

The sparsely populated area around it was mostly known for a huge pine forested state park and a small ski resort and a minor Ivy League college.

But I wasn't here for the peace and quiet or to hit the books.

The Farmington just happened to be one of the greatest trout fishing rivers on planet Earth.

How I had missed the existence of it until now was a mystery to me. It was my son, Declan, who had discovered it. Declan had been in an antique store in Montana with his now fiancée, Stephanie Barber, when he had seen an old coffee table book from the 1960s entitled, The Farmington: Fishing the Greatest Trout Stream in New England .

Knowing how nuts I am about fly-fishing, my favorite (and only) son had immediately picked up the book for me. And exactly one week after I had turned the last page of this amazing book, I was headed east with my rubber waders and fly rod.

It was definitely an impulsive fishing vacation move of the highest order, but the book had said that the fall was the best time to experience the Farmington in all its glory, so I didn't want to miss out or wait another year.

It was a good thing, too, because the book hadn't been lying one bit. I'd thought since the book was published in 1963 that by now the river might be lined with condos or something, but the great Bob Ross himself couldn't have painted a more bucolic landscape.

And not only were there Field & Stream cover shots in every direction you looked, the trout that the river was stocked with were even more fabulous than the book had described.

There were browns and rainbows and beautiful red-bellied brooks, which were my all-time favorite. I hadn't caught anything truly trophy-sized yet in the two weeks I'd been here, but the day before I'd netted a rainbow that was about twenty inches and ten pounds of dripping speckled gleaming awesomeness. And I still had one more day of fishing to go.

"So many trout. So little time. What can I doo-ooo," I sang to myself as I ran alongside the peacefully flowing waters.

I slowed again about a mile and a half from where I entered the path. To my left a majestic, man-made, sheer thirty-foot waterfall bisected the wide river. That would have been delightful enough but on the stone lip of the falls facing the flow of the water were several large dark birds with long necks and beaks.

There were three of them this morning. They were standing with their wings spread out at their sides, their hooked beaks down as they stared into the flow of the water. They were cormorants, a species of aquatic bird that knew how to fish so well that samurai warlords of ancient Japan would actually train them to fish for them.

"Hey, guys, not fair!" I called out to them with a laugh. "Save some for the rest of us!"

I smiled as I looked at the birds, at the flowing parade of glittering water along the banks, at the morning sun lighting up the tops of the happy little trees in the distance.

Beyond the cormorants on the opposite bank, I saw there was an abandoned mill from the 1800s maybe and on its faded brick the words LOVE LIFE had been spray-painted in six-foot-high white-and-blue letters by some local teens perhaps.

Oh, believe me , I thought. I'm all over it.

"I'm coming, fish," I said as I started running again, picking up my pace under the red, yellow and orange boughs of the New England autumn trees.

"Don't worry, my pretties," I said. "Right after his coffee, Papa Gannon will be among you very, very soon."