Imagine – if you will – a February school day, waking up groggy to your mom shaking your shoulder, whispering, “No school today, go back to sleep!”
I wasn’t yet in middle school at the time, so I’d guess I was around 10. After peering out my window to see the blanket of white illuminating the yard, I pulled the warm covers up around my neck, rolled over and tried to find the pathway back to sleep. A snow day! I might as well have won the lottery! But not long after, I heard the back door creak, followed by the familiar rustle of someone clad in winter gear shaking off the cold, then the stomping of snowy boots. “You want coffee?” I heard my mother ask and the voice of my uncle crept through my bedroom door, “Is Dave awake?”
I sprung to my feet and appeared in the kitchen, squinting off the morning light, “I’m awake,” I insisted, brushing the sleep crust from my eyes. My uncle Jon always had a trick up his sleeve, and I would cancel any plan on the calendar to find out what he had cooking. It may have been a walk in the woods, exploring a new deer spot, heading to some cool place like Purgatory Chasm for the day or – my favorite – going fishing. It being February, I felt certain we wouldn’t be going fishing, but I was ‘all in’, regardless.
“Go get yourself dressed, and dress warm!” he said. My mom followed me into my bedroom to make sure I layered up adequately. When I emerged ready for adventure, he instructed me to get my rod. My excitement level peaked.
At that age, I was a bit of a chatterbox, as my grandfather once said, “David, you could talk a dog off a meat wagon!” And I’m sure I bent Jon’s ear until it broke as we rode from my house in Westboro, Massachusetts to Fin & Feather, a tackle shop in neighboring Upton. We bought some tiny hooks, a cup of mealworms and a dozen small earthworms. As we drove by Pratt Pond I saw anglers staked out on the ice and wondered how the heck we were going to fish!
Finally we pulled over at the edge of the snowy woods, I can picture it vividly, it was a windless day, and the snow hung like feathers on every branch, like something out of a Disney movie. But there was no water where we stopped, Jon grabbed his rod and the small bag of gear and motioned for me to follow him. Through the plow line and into the trees we went until we arrived at a trickling stream exiting a culvert that carried it under the road. We made a few drifts in the small pool outside the steel pipe, but there was no life in that spot.
Back in the truck we drove into the nearby neighborhoods, and stopped wherever that same brook flowed under the road. Each spot turned up nothing and I began to accept the fact that this was more about “making an attempt” than it was about actually catching fish. And in the times between, we just talked, about everything… music, girls, school… he really bridged that gap between kid and adult for me and I was always able to be my true self on those trips.
The stream meandered into the snowy woods and we found ourselves at one final road crossing before it tunneled into the brush. Here, there was a large pool, in my memory it looks to be about the size of an average in-ground swimming pool, probably smaller though. The dark water looked black against the fresh snow, and with the whole scene framed by snow-sugared branches, even at 10, I knew it was a kind of magical.
Jon seemed more confident here, a little more insistent that things go a certain way. That water rushed out from under our feet where two large culverts directed the current, one pushing it off to the right and close to some overhanging bushes. We fished the mealworms here and with no weight or float, the protocol was to drop the bait into the water and pin your eyes to the undulating yellowish worm as it drifted. I’m pretty sure my first flick of the worm found itself in an overhanging branch, which I’m sure tried Jon’s patience, but he hid it well.
Jon explained the perfect drift, letting the right-hand jet carry the bait as close as possible to the bush that hung out over the water. Doing my best to guide the drift, my mealworm rode the current out and disappeared in an instant. “Reel!” Jon shouted. And my frozen hands felt the pulses of life after hours of zeros. And after a few months without catching a fish, I found myself cradling an 8-inch native brook trout. We caught two more in that pool before heading home.
I suppose you could say I had two revelations that day, the first being that the fish are still there in the winter and, with perseverance, you can catch them. But, maybe the most valuable lesson I learned that day, was that you can go fishing and catch nothing, but still feel like you gained something. Because, even if we hadn’t found fish in that last pool, a snow day spent fishing with my uncle proved to be the best use of an unexpected day off that I could have imagined… and I’ll never forget it.
