On warm summer days it all comes back to me, much like a dream.
When I was young – in my early twenties – I was often embarrassed to say that I was from New York. Almost no one not from New York really knew what it was like, or what its people were like. In Texas, we were damyankees (even the Presbyterian pastor in Brownwood called me one), and our state was nothing but a mess of high rises and traffic jams. In Alaska, we were thought of as a land of over-regulation, where you had to get a permit to park outside your condominium. In Montana, we were effete Easterners who’d never survive out in the land of the big sky. In the Wyoming mountains, we got taunts about our “little hills, no bigger’n pimples.” And in Ohio and West Virginia, they made no comment that we could hear, but pursed their lips as if they wanted to make one. We New Yorkers (or “Easterners”) couldn’t get any respect.
It was especially frustrating to me, mostly because I’d wrestled with those “pimples,” four dozen of them, winter and summer, through black flies and on snowshoes and skis, and come home many a time utterly spent. I knew that the high rises and traffic jams were confined to only a few big cities. The rest was either the wild forests of the northern part of the state, the protected Adirondacks, or wide open farm land. But there was no telling that to a Texan or Alaskan; and after spending some time with a few, I was kind of glad that none of them seemed to want to visit.
My old boss from Texas, a genial, sixtyish cowboy with both an A&M and a seminary degree, drove east to spend a week or two camping in New York, but went back home after two days. “I couldn’t see anything,” he complained. It didn’t seem like the moment to mention that some observers claim that one reason so many Yankees were inventors is that, being unable to see what was happening more than a few hundred yards away, they naturally developed their powers of imagination.
I spent my early childhood in the middle of urban Albany, only a couple of blocks from the spectacular state capitol. The only green anywhere near were the puny capitol lawn and Washington Park, also a couple of blocks away, which my sister and I visited about once a week with our sitter, our great-grandmother Lange.
Then, when I was eight, we moved to the south side of Syracuse, to what I’ve often referred to as “the edge of a green infinitude.” There was still a park – Onondaga this time – with another lake, Hiawatha, full of fish –sunfish, perch, suckers, and black bass. My mother no longer had to ask me to turn her compost pit; I kept it churning in my constant quest for fish worms. Darkness found me combing the yard with a flashlight and a can hunting nightcrawlers.
I didn’t know it at the time, but much of central New York is underlain by limestone. Among other things, this causes the streams flowing over and through it to be alkaline, ideal for invertebrate life. This in turn gave rise to thick populations of trout – in this case, mostly browns. When I caught my first one, from a dark swirl under a tangle of overhanging roots, I was baptized into a life’s enthusiastic pursuit.
Which is where the true state of New York comes in. Everywhere I looked there was a stream that probably held trout. I rode my bike to many, and took an interurban bus to those farther away, camping beside them overnight.
They were the days of dreams. The green pastures covered the hills all around. Elm trees (all gone now) stood like giant umbrellas to mark the borders. Herds of black-and-white cows sheltered in their shade, lying down or lazily swiping at flies. Distant crows called from somewhere. The chug of a tractor floated down the wind.
The ground underfoot beside the little streams was soft and yielding, creating vibrations from all but the lightest step. I could tell I’d trodden too heavily when the water or the thick beds of watercress humped up thirty feet ahead of me as a trout dashed for cover. I usually kept a couple for supper or breakfast. As soon as I caught them, I killed and cleaned them, stuffing the body cavities with fresh mint leaves. My little wicker creel held the aroma of mint for years afterward in my coat closet. It was a pre-pubescent idyll that had to end, which it did, all too soon. But to me New York will always be a cold stream full of trout in a sun-warm pasture.
