The turkey hunt with Henry (“Turkeys in Trees,” “Yelp, Purr, Gobble, Repeat,” and “Transvestite Toms”) was just the beginning of a season of firsts for me that year. I was like a child getting through kindergarten—everything was new, fun, exciting all the time. My eyes were wide open.
I’d had a ball turkey hunting, had found the whole thing to be pretty interesting, but after bearing witness to the stink that is turkey guts, decided one gobbler a season was enough for me. However, I discovered that I could still have a ball turkey hunting even without pulling the trigger, and so I gladly traipsed along with Henry over several more weekends as he went about filling his tags.
I liked those early spring mornings, the hush and the slow crescendo of woods and wildlife coming alive. I’d wander off someplace with my own shotgun—carried just in case—plunk down against some tree that afforded me a view of the pretty little house where we parked and its stream far below, and nod off until the sun rose enough to make me hot. I’d wake slowly, carefully stretching the crick in my neck that came from dozing with my chin on my chest, and let the hum of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains coming to life work to wake me more fully.
Once awake, I’d sit quietly. Mostly I didn’t want to jack up a potential turkey kill for Henry, but I liked the peace I found in pretending I was merely so much moss. Too, I discovered that, while I slept, the forest life would come nearer me. Salamanders, beetles, and bugs of all descriptions crept along bare spots between long-fallen leaves and over the toes of my boots. I saw insects with delicate wings and translucent bodies in fascinating shades of electric yellow, celadon, pearl, and coffee brown, and realized I was seeing the menu the trout in the surrounding hillside streams ate. Squirrels and chipmunks and sparrows and chickadees, all searching for breakfast, dared to come close enough so that I could see the separation of hairs and feathers; I marveled at how even these usually common creatures were so well camouflaged when not at my backyard feeder. It was if I was really seeing them for the first time.
When Henry was done turkey hunting for the morning, he’d come find me and
take me on a new kind of hunt, one for morels. Now, you can grow up knowing that there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms out in the wild, but no one ever tells you which ones are which. Henry did, explaining that this was the one time of year the savory morel rose above ground, a natural accompaniment to the turkey hunting season. Henry might as well have been a French-raised truffle pig, for the bounty of the delectable fungus he always found. I, on the other hand, was nearly worthless at this kind of hunting, so on the rare occasion I did spot one, I was as thrilled as a kid on an Easter egg hunt. At the end of the morning, we’d pool our take, Henry’s many dozens to my handful, and take them home, sauté them in butter and pepper, and eat them alongside parts of the turkey I’d killed, marinated, and cooked on the grill—my first wild game dinner.
With turkey season done and over, Henry finally relented and took me fly fishing. The fishing spot he wanted was hours from where we lived. It required a long drive through the Shenandoah Valley, and even after living in Virginia for, at that time, more than a decade, it seemed like I was seeing the state for the first time. Rich farmlands washed the valley floors between mountain rises. Redbuds and dogwoods in new plumage added soft splashes of pastels to the green buds and green grasses and green crops springing forth (who knew there were so many shades of green?) Barns were bright red, farm houses wore bleached-white clapboard, and the pavement we drove along were as black and perfect as they are in new car commercials.
We finally pulled to the side of the road, somewhere in the mountains. Nothing marked the place as a parking location, nor was there any indication we were near water, but the pull-off was subtly worn, and a small footpath in a cleft in the hillside that banked the road shot up and away from it. Henry had told me not many anglers knew about this place. I looked around, as we uncased rods and tugged on vests, waders, wading boots, and gravel guards, and believed him.
Up the footpath we went. And up, and up. Finally, and somewhat abruptly, we crested onto a flat and into a shaft of sunlight streaming through the budding trees, where we took a couple deep breaths, shucked off a layer of clothing, and hooked down into the forest, following what looked to me to be no more than a little-used deer trail in the fresh ferny understory. We hiked quietly for maybe twenty minutes, and I thought we might actually be back on road level but deep in the forest, when the path leveled out and took a left. Henry stopped.
Thump. Thump. Thump—thump—thump—thump-thump-thump-thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
“That’s a grouse,” Henry whispered to me. “He’s drumming, trying to attract a mate.”
I didn’t have time to ask what “drumming” meant, before it came again, Thump. Thump. Thump—thump—thump—thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump, like a muffled lawnmower slowly catching and almost making it to life. And then I saw it,
the brown bird on the brown log, fluffing his wings three last times softly against his side before relaxing his proud posture to look around for a response, and I didn’t have to ask what “drumming” was anymore.
The rest of the day was no less a cornucopia of firsts. I saw streams glinting in sunshine as if they were diamond plated. The cool stream trickled at ankle depth, then calf depth (what an oddly sensual feeling to have the stream wash into my wading boots and still have my feet dry behind the waders inside them!), then ankle depth again before we’d walk into a pool that went to the knee. We’d follow the stream for a mile, cut out and into the woods to walk around a deadfall of tangled, gigantic trees, only to come around the other side and find a waist-deep pool of water so clear, so turquoise, it was almost impossible in its purity. Postcards had come to life.
Henry would cast, lightly, delicately, periodically. I watched where he aimed his line, to the calm spots that appeared to not be moving at all, and I was fascinated that the flowing water could have such infinite texture. One cast, two cast, and he’d lay the line down. He’d let the fly drift for some predetermined amount of time, as if a metronome was in his head, and then, just before the fly hit a trickle bleeding off the pool to which he’d cast, he’d pick it up. Droplets of water on the tippet flew off to sequin the air. One cast, two cast, and the line would touch the water softly as a feather again, and this time a bright fish would magnetically attach to the tiny fly coasting on the water. Henry would walk boldly through the rocky stream to the pool where his line descended, his right arm holding the rod high in the air to keep the tension. He’d motion me to come up to him, then, and when I did, he’d flick the tiny barbless hook out the fish’s mouth without touching so much as a fin.
He was good to me that day, Henry was, leapfrogging me ahead of him after each fish he caught. He coached me through my timid and unskilled casting, wait patiently nearby as I untied my first wind knot and then my first caught tree. He watched me, again with saintly patience, tie on my first fly, then clip the end of the line too close and have to tie on a second. And then he watched me catch my first Virginia brook trout.
As with the aqua pool and the diamond waters and the Norman Rockwell drive
before that, I was stunned, mesmerized, by the depth and richness of the colors on the six-inch fish at the end—miraculously—of my own line. Olive straight from an Italian olive tree darkened into inky black to serve as the fish’s main body color. But then, oh! the traffic-light red and yellow that speckled its sides. Its belly, too, was fantastic, yellow-orange like the yolk from a backyard chicken’s egg. Baby’s-mouth pink flooded the trout’s rhythmically bellowing gills, as I carefully lifted it out of the water.
“It’s okay to take a close look, it’s your first one, but don’t leave him out long and don’t handle him too much,” Henry said quietly to me. I nodded, turned the fish so the sunlight splashed its glossy sides, then carefully slid the hook and fly from its hard little lip. I lowered my cupped hand into the water, pointed his head into the flow of the stream on Henry’s instruction, and watched the fish re-oxygenate for a couple seconds before it turned tail and dashed, with stupendous speed, downstream and out of sight into a dark spot of water untouched by the sun.
Henry threw a few more casts, looked back at me to come ahead of him and do the same, but I just shook my head and broke down my rod. My boyfriend then looked up through the trees, noted the angle of the shifting sunlight and did the same with his own rod, kissing me on the forehead as he passed back by me to lead us on the way back to the truck. I don’t think we said a word in the hour it took us to get back, said nothing more, as we sat on the tailgate removing gravel guards and wading shoes and waders and pulling back on the upper layers we’d shed that morning. We still didn’t say anything, as we got in the truck and Henry reached into the back seat to pull two icy beers from the cooler there. He popped the tops, the bottles hissing slightly and clinking together. He handed me one, clinked the necks together in a silent toast. We each took a long pull before Henry started the engine.
“Quite a day for you. All sorts of firsts,” he said before throwing the truck’s gear shifter into reverse. I said not a word, just smiled and touched my beer bottle’s neck back to his. Then I settled back on the Ford’s wide bench seat and let the adrenaline of the day recede from my gut and brain out into my toes and fingers and onto the truck’s floor boards and out the cracked window, enjoying the warmth and buzz it left behind and knowing that it was truly was adrenaline and not the cold beer that left me so awash in that chemical pleasure just then.
All sorts of firsts, all sorts of firsts, indeed.
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