Trout and Arbutus

Every year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.

“No use looking there,” I remark; “I keep my silks put away.”

“I want red, and as strong as there is.”

“I know what you want. Here.” and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole twist.

“Ah! Just right!” And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.

Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year’s trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.

But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season is, legislatively, “open.” Jonathan is “busy.” I am “busy.” We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods, all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish, it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.

Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. For it is the flower that, to our fathers and our grandfathers, and to their fathers and grandfathers, meant spring; and not spring in its prettiness and ease, appealing to the idler in us, nor spring in its melancholy, appealing to shall I say the poet in us? But spring in its blessedness of opportunity, its joyously triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us. Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle. But each race has its own symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is the arbutus.

This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it: “Arbutus? Yaas. The’s a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over beyond ’t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice” this in the apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness “guess you’ll find all you want.” I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which work specific harm or good, could I get such information.

To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father’s boyhood, only half acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city whose chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls was left behind, and we were “in the country.” It was a country excitingly different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth. Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England a fine penciling of red stems the cut-back maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. And everywhere in the woods, on fence-lines and roadsides, the white blossoms of the “shad-blow,” daintiest of spring trees, too slight for a tree, indeed, though too tall for a bush and looking less like a tree in blossom than like floating blossoms caught for a moment among the twigs. A moment only, for the first gust loosens them again and carpets the woods with their petals, but while they last their whiteness shimmers everywhere.

Such rare days were all blown through with the wonderful wind of spring. Spring wind is really different from any other. It is not a finished thing, like the mellow winds of summer and the cold blasts of winter. It is an imperfect blend of shivering reminiscence and eager promise. One moment it breathes sun and stirring earth, the next it reminds us of old snow in the hollows, and bleak northern slopes.

When, on these days, the wind blew to us, almost before we saw it, the first greeting of the arbutus, it always seemed that the day had found its complete and satisfying expression. Every one comes to realize, at some time in his life, the power of suggestion possessed by odors. Does not half the power of the Church lie in its incense? An odor, just because it is at once concrete and formless, can carry an appeal overwhelmingly strong and searching, superseding all other expression. This is the appeal made to me by the arbutus. It can never be quite precipitated into words, but it holds in solution all the things it has come to mean dear human tradition and beloved companionship, the poetry of the land and the miracle of new birth.

In late March or early April I am likely to see the first blossom on some friend’s table I try not to see it first in a florist’s display! To my startled question she gives reassuring answer, “Oh, no, not from around here. This came from Virginia.”

Days pass, and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass windows. “From York State,” they tell me. I grow restive.

“Jonathan,” I say, holding up a spray for him to smell, “we’ve got to go. You can’t resist that. We’ll take a day and go for it and trout, too.”

It is as well that arbutus comes in the trout season, for to take a day off just to pick a flower might seem a little absurd. But, coupled with trout all is well. Trout is food. One must eat. The search for food needs no defense, and yet, the curious fact is, that if you go for trout and don’t get any, it doesn’t make so much difference as you might suppose, but if you go for arbutus and don’t get any, it makes all the difference in the world. And so Jonathan knows that in choosing his brook for that particular day, he must have regard primarily to the arbutus it will give us and only secondarily to the trout.

Every one knows the kind of brook that is, for every one knows the kind of country arbutus loves hilly country, with slopes toward the north; bits of woodland, preferably with pine in it, to give shade, but not too deep shade; a scrub undergrowth of laurel and huckleberry and bay; and always, somewhere within sight or hearing, water. It is curious how arbutus, which never grows in wet places, yet seems to like the neighborhood of water. It loves the slopes above a brook or the shaggy hillsides overlooking a little pond or river.

Fortunately, there is such a brook, in just such country, on our list. There are not so many trout as in other brooks, but enough to justify our rods; and not so much arbutus as I could find elsewhere, but enough oh, enough!

To this brook we go. We tie Kit at the bridge, Jonathan slings on a fish-basket, to do for both, and I take a box or two for the flowers. But from this moment on our interests are somewhat at variance. The fact is, Jonathan cares a little more about the trout than about the arbutus, while I care a little more about the arbutus than about the trout. His eye is keenly on the brook, mine is, yearningly, on the ragged hillsides that roll up above it.

Jonathan feels this. “There isn’t any for two fields yet might as well stick to the brook.”

“I know. I thought perhaps I’d go on down and let you fish this part. Then I’d meet you beyond the second fence

“Oh, no, that won’t do at all. Why, there’s a rock just below here down by that wild cherry where I took out a beauty last year, and left another. I want you to go down and get him.”

“You get him. I don’t mind.”

“Oh, but I mind. Here, I’ve got it all planned: there’s a bit of brush-fishing just below

“No brush-fishing for me, please!”

“That’s what I’m saying, if you’ll only give me time. I’ll take that there are always two or three in there and when you’ve finished here you can go around me and fish the bend, under the hemlocks, and then the first arbutus is just beside that, and I’ll join you there.”

“Well” I assent grudgingly “only, really, I’d be just as happy if you’d fish the whole thing and let me go right on down

“No, you wouldn’t. Now, remember to sneak before you get to that rock. Drop in six feet above it and let the current do the rest. They’re awfully shy. I expect you to get at least one there, and two down at the bend.” He trudges off to his brush-fishing and leaves me bound in honor to extract a trout from under that rock. I deposit my boxes in the meadow above it, and “sneak” down. The sneak of a trout fisherman is like no other form of locomotion, and I am convinced that the human frame was not evolved with it in mind. But I resort to it in deference to Jonathan’s prejudices in deference, also, to the fact that when I do not the trout seldom bite. And Jonathan is so trustfully counting on my getting that trout!

I did get him. I dropped in my line, as per directions, and let the current do the rest; had the thrill of feeling the line suddenly caught and drawn under the rock, held, then wiggled slightly; I struck, felt the weight, drew back steadily, and in a few moments there was a flopping in the grass behind me.

So that was off my mind.

I strung him on a twig of wild cherry, gathered up my boxes, and wandered along the faint path, back of the patch of brush where, I knew, Jonathan was cheerfully threading his line through tangles of twig, briar, and vine, compared with which the needle’s eye is as a yawning barn door. Jonathan’s attitude toward brush-fishing is something which I respect without understanding. Down one long field I went, where the brook ran in shallow gayety, and there, ahead, was the bend, a sudden curve of water, deepening under the roots of an overhanging hemlock. I climbed the stone wall beside, glanced at the water very trouty water indeed glanced at the hill-pasture above very arbutusy indeed laid down my rod and my trout and my box, and ran up the low bank to a clump of bay and berry-bushes that I thought I remembered.... Yes! There it was! I had remembered! Ah! The dear things!

When you first find arbutus, there is only one thing to do: lie right down beside it. Its fragrance as it grows is different from what it is after it is picked, because with the sweetness of the blossoms is mingled the good smell of the earth and of the woody twigs and of the dried grass and leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is all very well to talk proudly about man’s walking with his head erect and his face to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman’s “sneak,” it is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only nibble now and then from “the other side” of Alice’s mushroom, what a new outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!

To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine, frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their pure, babyish color.

But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!

In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things flowers or anything else is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather, appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring. Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?

But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it. There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it gently, and, lo, it is many stems, which have crept their way under the tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be picked. It gets picked.

Yet sometimes its very beauty has stayed my hand. I shall never forget one clump I found, growing out of a bank of deep green moss, partly shaded by a great hemlock. The soft pink blossoms luxuriant leafy sprays of them were lying out on the moss in a pagan carelessness of beauty, as though some god had willed it there for his pleasure. I sat beside it a long time, and in the end I left it without picking it.

On this particular day, Jonathan being still lost in the brush patch, I had risen from my visit with the first-discovered blossoms and wandered on, from clump to clump, wherever the glimpse of a leaf attracted me, picking the choicest here and there and dropping them into my box. After I do not know how long, I was roused by Jonathan’s whistle. I was some distance up the hillside by this time, and he was beside the brook, at the bend.

“What luck?” he called.

“Good luck! I’ve found lots. Come up!”

He took a few steps up toward me, so that conversation could drop from shouting to speaking levels. “How many did you get?” he asked.

“How many?... Oh ... why ... Oh, I got one up there where you showed me under the rock, you know.”

“Good one?”

“Eight inches. He’s down there by the bars.”

“Good! And what about the bend?”

“The bend? Oh, I didn’t fish there look at these! Aren’t they beauties?” I came down the hill to hold my open box up to his face. But my casual word almost effaced the scent of the flowers.

“Ah yes delicious didn’t fish there? Why not? Did they see you?”

“Who? The trout? I don’t know. But I saw this. And I just had to pick it.”

“Well! You’re a great fisherman! And with that water right there beside you! Lord!”

“With the arbutus right here beside me! Lord!”

“But the arbutus would wait.”

“But the trout would wait. They’re waiting for you now, don’t you hear them? Go and fish there!”

“No. That’s your pool.” Jonathan has a way of bestowing a trout-pool on me as if it were a bouquet. To refuse its opportunities is almost like throwing his flowers back in his face.

“Well of course it’s a beautiful pool

“Best on the brook,” murmured Jonathan.

“But, truly, I’d enjoy it just as much to have you fish it.”

“Nobody can fish it now for a while. I thought you’d be there, of course, and I came stamping along down, close by the bank. They wouldn’t bite now not for half an hour, anyway.”

“Well, then, that’s just right. We’ll go on up the hillside for half an hour, and then come back and fish it. Set your rod up against the bayberry here, and come along look there! you’re almost stepping on some!”

Jonathan, gradually adjusting himself to the turn of things, stood his rod up against the bush with the meticulous care of the true sportsman. “Where did you leave yours?” he asked, with a suspiciousness born of a deep knowledge of my character.

“Oh, down by the bars.”

“Standing up or lying down?”

“Lying down, I think. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right if it’s lying down. Anything might trample on it.”

“For instance, what? birds or crickets?”

“For instance, people or cows.” He strode down the hill, and I saw him stoop. As he returned I could read disapproval in his gait. “Will you never learn how to treat a rod! It was lying just beyond the bars. I must have landed within two feet of it when I jumped over.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to go back. I know perfectly how to treat a rod. My trouble comes in knowing when to apply my knowledge.... Well, let’s go up there. Near those big hemlocks there’s some, I remember.” And we wandered on, separating a little to scan the ground more widely.

Once having pried his mind away from the trout, Jonathan was as keen for arbutus as I could wish, and soon I heard an exclamation, and saw him kneel. “Oh, come over!” he called; “you really ought to see this growing!”

“But there’s some I want, right here, that’s lovely

“Never mind. Come and see this oh, come!”

Of course I come, and of course I am glad I came, and of course soon I am obliged to call Jonathan to see some I have found “Jonathan, it is truly the loveliest yet! It’s the way it grows with the moss and all please come!” And of course he comes.

We had been on the hillside a long half-hour, much nearer an hour, when Jonathan began to grow restive. “Don’t you think you have enough?” he suggested several times. Finally, he spoke plainly of the trout.

“Oh, yes, of course,” I said, “you go down and I’ll follow just as soon as I’ve gone along that upper path.”

Not at all. That was not what was wanted. So I turned and we went down the hill, back to the bend, whose seductions I had been so puzzlingly able to resist. I am sure Jonathan has never yet quite understood how I could leave that bit of water at my left hand and turn away to the right.

“Now sneak!”

We sneaked, and I sank down just back of the edge of the bank. Jonathan crouched some feet behind, coaching me: “Now draw out a little more line not too much there and have some slack in your hand. Now, up-stream fifteen feet allow for the wind wait till that gust passes now! Good! First-rate! Now let her drift there what did I tell you? Give him line! Give him line! Now, feel of him careful! You’ll know when to strike ... there!... Oh! too bad!”

For as I struck, my line held fast.

“Snagged, by gummy! Can’t you pull clear?”

“Not without stirring up the whole pool. You’ll have to do the fishing, after all.”

“Oh! too bad! That’s hard luck!”

“Not a bit. I like to watch you do it.”

And so indeed I did. Once having realized that I was temporarily laid by, Jonathan put his whole mind on the pool, while I, being honorably released from all responsibility, except that of keeping my line taut, could put my whole mind on his performance. There is a little the same sort of pleasure in watching the skillful handling of a rod that there is in watching the bow-action of a violinist. Both things demand the utmost nicety of adjustment: body, arm, wrist, fingers uniting in an interplay of efficiency exactly adapted to the intricately shifting needs of each moment.

Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent, imperceptibly guided by the rod’s quivering tip; its slower drift toward deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of “feeling for him”; at last the strike ... and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him.

“Don’t get up. There’s probably another one,” he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked. “That’s all,” said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish of his gleaming body.

“Now I’ll get you clear,” said Jonathan, wading out into the water, and, with sleeves rolled high, feeling deep, deep down under the opposite bank. “He had you all right it’s wound round a root and then jabbed deep into it ... hard luck! I wanted you to get those fellows!” And to this day I am sure he remembers those trout with a tinge of regret.

I had intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking bits of water. And at the end, there was time to return along the upper path and visit my old friends, so both of us were satisfied.

On such days, however, there is always one person who is not satisfied, and that is, Kit the horse. Kit has borne with our vagaries for many years, but she has never come to understand them. She never fails to greet our return, as our voices come within the range of her pricked-up ears, by a prolonged and reproachful whinny, which says as plainly as is necessary, “Back? Well I should think it was time! I should think it was TIME!” Now and then we have thought it would be pleasant to have a little motor-car that could be tucked away at any roadside, without reference to a good hitching-place, but if we had it, I am sure we should miss that ungracious welcoming whinny. We should miss, too, the exasperated violence of Kit’s pace on the first bit of the home road a violence expressing in the most ostentatious manner her opinion of folks who keep a respectable horse hitched by the roadside, far from the delights of the dim, sweet stable and the dusty, sneezy, munchy hay.

But leaving out this little matter of Kit’s preference, and also the other little matter of the trout’s preference, I feel sure that an arbutus-trouting is peculiarly satisfying. It meets every human need the need of food and beauty, the need of feeling strong and skillful, the need of becoming deeply aware of nature as living and kind. Moreover, it is very satisfying afterwards. As we sat that evening, over a late supper, with a shallow dish of arbutus beside us, I remarked, “The advantage of getting arbutus is, that you bring the whole day home with you and have it at your elbow.”

“The advantage of getting trout,” remarked Jonathan dreamily, as if to himself, “is, that you bring your whole day home with you, and have it for breakfast.”