I wrote "Light Tackle Specialty: Native Brookies," about five years ago for The Fisherman, though the words that follow aren't that article. Since then, a state biologist wrote--I could tell before I read a word--an excellent piece on these fish for the same magazine. I still haven't read a word of it; the magazine issue got out of hand, but it's around here somewhere and I still mean to read that piece.
No, it's not just because she's a biologist that I could tell.
I don't know for certain if "Rip" in the name Rip Van Winkle means "rest in peace" though it seems obvious it does, and it happens on very rare occasion that someone all but dies to everyone he knows, yet makes the unexpected comeback. If I recall the Rip Van Winkle story rightly, they left him for dead.
I had a similar experience. People I know thought that in today's world, so highly dependent on credentials, there's no way to succeed without the supposed requisitions, and they walked away burying their memories of what we were together. And then, as I began to awaken, they slowly began to understand that their expectations for my life reduced to wage work obscurity and clueless disconnection, compared to the successful professional lives they had achieved, were not so objective after all.
I exchanged academic success in high school for fishing, about 250 days each of those years. Some would chalk it up to attention deficit. I didn't pay attention in class and scorned textbooks, which is why I wound up at St. John's College, Annapolis, reading classics, no textbooks in the curriculum. But nevertheless, my first college semester, at Lynchburg College, VA, proved I could pay attention if I worked at it. A 3.8 average for 21 credits there got me into St. John's, along with a great entrance essay on the philosophical question of natural law.
I didn't want to study in high school. So I did not. And to cut to the quick for the brevity of a blog post, fishing, hiking, camping, backpacking, birding, all this and more was just the start. I never graduated with a B.A. or B.S., though I enrolled at a total of eight schools. Instead, I set up my own commercial clamming endeavor on New Jersey's Long Beach Island and studied and wrote like mad during lengthy off hours, getting so far away from the people I began life with, that they, family especially, thought I had gone nuts.
They wrote me off as a loss and moved on. They couldn't have known that I was quite cognizant, having let go of the conventional social habits, and so for years could not quite communicate--though I wrote communicatively in journals.
I occupied a separate reality.
What is America? First and foremost, it's the land, and it's the water. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Henry David Thoreau. Long Beach Island may not technically be a wilderness out there in the bays, but it's close enough, even though fertilizers have all but destroyed the ecosystems since I worked the brine in wetsuits. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area with the purity of Dunnfield Creek and 70,000 wild acres is very much a wilderness, too.
Somehow or other I got the figure, I believe, from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Fish and Wildlife that 123 native brook trout streams grace New Jersey. That figure stuck in my head and I've web-searched it since to no avail. I'm particular about such figures--just not enough to have remembered exactly where I got that one. But a lot of statistics exist. Supposedly, about 50% of populations in the native range still exist in our Highlands and Ridge regions. Even a small native population in Burlington County. The Pinelands aquifer is as cold as any, I suppose, and in this isolated case the stream flows pure enough. The Pinelands were never full of brook trout, but one watershed did have some natives and still does apparently.
My son and I found a hole way upstream in Lewis Morris County Park, home to half a dozen adult seven-inch brook trout. We searched the tiny rill--a step-across stream--to the spring head a mile upstream without missing a foot of length. We found only two other brook trout, each about three inches long. Were these fish descendants of the Wisconsin glacial release about 12,000 years ago? It's known that many New Jersey natives are such descendants, because genetic studies are now advanced enough to tell. How many years have just a handful of trout (actually char) survived in this tiny waterway?
My son and I found a hole way upstream in Lewis Morris County Park, home to half a dozen adult seven-inch brook trout. We searched the tiny rill--a step-across stream--to the spring head a mile upstream without missing a foot of length. We found only two other brook trout, each about three inches long. Were these fish descendants of the Wisconsin glacial release about 12,000 years ago? It's known that many New Jersey natives are such descendants, because genetic studies are now advanced enough to tell. How many years have just a handful of trout (actually char) survived in this tiny waterway?
Those trout we left alone, too precious to make sport of.
But Warren County's Dunnfield Creek, for example, is fair sized with so much spring influx that the holes are a pure-toned aqua marine that makes you want to drink from them. I always do. I know a professional naturalist who told me not to do that. I could get an amoeba, he said, but I've done it since I was 17. Even though you supposedly get conservative about your health after age 40 or so, I feel only the slightest reservation, willing to recognize the water isn't really safe to drink, as I told myself at 17; it's risky to drink. Such is the nature of faith.
I could write poetry about drinking wild New Jersey water, but not right now. If anyone tried to sell bottled water from springs in New Jersey, they'd be laughed off the market.
Beaver Brook, Flanders Brook, Van Campen's Brook, Little Flatbrook, Big Flatbrook in some stretches are just a few names of places to try a two or three-weight fly rod or microlight spinning.
I used to catch many nine and ten-inch brookies in the Dunnfield on the smallest of shad darts. They were particularly effective when I angled a cast well ahead of me to fish that hadn't spooked. The holes are not the only spots that hold larger brook trout. I caught some in moving water hardly covering their backs. Two-pound test monofilament is the way to go. Nowadays, nothing beats a trout magnet brass headed jig, unless you limit the game to fly fishing.
Fast water brookies less wary in any case, you need to combine careful hiking with fishing. These fish are so special--our New Jersey State Fish designated by Governor James Florio in 1992--that they are protected by law and must be released. A very few might be taken in other states over the course of an angler's lifetime so that he gets to eat a true, native brook trout, very special table fare. I released brook trout I caught on the Dunnfield, back when it was legal to keep them, but I did eat one native brook trout from the Saco River in New Hampshire. Even at age 17, I felt that fishing them about twice a year was enough. It's a minor pilgrimage to fish a pure water trout stream, because this rite does in fact connect you with earth's ancient metaphysic. It does so maybe more than any other way of fishing, combining hiking and deep wilderness value.
I hiked alone all the way up the Dunnfield to the top of Kittatiny Ridge and beyond--where the stream is a step-across rill where I saw one brook trout about three inches long. I was about six miles from Interstate 80. This is nothing like Alberta, Canada. But the forests are deep in these many thousands of acres, and the great, wide open field on a sort of plateau at high elevation is a place where no trails led.
If you ever read "The Mental Traveler" by William Blake--a long, deep, deep, deeply mysterious poem among the signature pieces of genius of all time--you will get a feeling for the mystery of setting out and returning. The poem, of course, is much more about inner space than environmental technicalities and statistics. Each of us has profound wild nature within us. More so than any of us will ever chart.
Go to the Star Trek archives. I don't remember the name of the episode, but it's unmistakably the standout for me, about the guy who actually moves the Enterprise clear across the universe by his mental powers alone. That one made the impression on me as a boy, the Mental Traveler theme.
The Dunnfield experience all the way upstream near the original spring feed involved something exquisitely fundamental and elevated contacting me that afternoon tucked away in New Jersey, far from anyone else's presence, after I had bushwhacked along the Creek. But I've had many experiences beyond the everyday in my lifetime, just as any artist must. Somehow or other the memory of that place way up there on the Ridge where no one goes--wide open field--reminds me of the final scene of the movie Knowing. The girl and boy, the only people saved from Earth's doom, are running in a field...the Garden of Eden.
But Warren County's Dunnfield Creek, for example, is fair sized with so much spring influx that the holes are a pure-toned aqua marine that makes you want to drink from them. I always do. I know a professional naturalist who told me not to do that. I could get an amoeba, he said, but I've done it since I was 17. Even though you supposedly get conservative about your health after age 40 or so, I feel only the slightest reservation, willing to recognize the water isn't really safe to drink, as I told myself at 17; it's risky to drink. Such is the nature of faith.
I could write poetry about drinking wild New Jersey water, but not right now. If anyone tried to sell bottled water from springs in New Jersey, they'd be laughed off the market.
Beaver Brook, Flanders Brook, Van Campen's Brook, Little Flatbrook, Big Flatbrook in some stretches are just a few names of places to try a two or three-weight fly rod or microlight spinning.
I used to catch many nine and ten-inch brookies in the Dunnfield on the smallest of shad darts. They were particularly effective when I angled a cast well ahead of me to fish that hadn't spooked. The holes are not the only spots that hold larger brook trout. I caught some in moving water hardly covering their backs. Two-pound test monofilament is the way to go. Nowadays, nothing beats a trout magnet brass headed jig, unless you limit the game to fly fishing.
Fast water brookies less wary in any case, you need to combine careful hiking with fishing. These fish are so special--our New Jersey State Fish designated by Governor James Florio in 1992--that they are protected by law and must be released. A very few might be taken in other states over the course of an angler's lifetime so that he gets to eat a true, native brook trout, very special table fare. I released brook trout I caught on the Dunnfield, back when it was legal to keep them, but I did eat one native brook trout from the Saco River in New Hampshire. Even at age 17, I felt that fishing them about twice a year was enough. It's a minor pilgrimage to fish a pure water trout stream, because this rite does in fact connect you with earth's ancient metaphysic. It does so maybe more than any other way of fishing, combining hiking and deep wilderness value.
I hiked alone all the way up the Dunnfield to the top of Kittatiny Ridge and beyond--where the stream is a step-across rill where I saw one brook trout about three inches long. I was about six miles from Interstate 80. This is nothing like Alberta, Canada. But the forests are deep in these many thousands of acres, and the great, wide open field on a sort of plateau at high elevation is a place where no trails led.
If you ever read "The Mental Traveler" by William Blake--a long, deep, deep, deeply mysterious poem among the signature pieces of genius of all time--you will get a feeling for the mystery of setting out and returning. The poem, of course, is much more about inner space than environmental technicalities and statistics. Each of us has profound wild nature within us. More so than any of us will ever chart.
Go to the Star Trek archives. I don't remember the name of the episode, but it's unmistakably the standout for me, about the guy who actually moves the Enterprise clear across the universe by his mental powers alone. That one made the impression on me as a boy, the Mental Traveler theme.
The Dunnfield experience all the way upstream near the original spring feed involved something exquisitely fundamental and elevated contacting me that afternoon tucked away in New Jersey, far from anyone else's presence, after I had bushwhacked along the Creek. But I've had many experiences beyond the everyday in my lifetime, just as any artist must. Somehow or other the memory of that place way up there on the Ridge where no one goes--wide open field--reminds me of the final scene of the movie Knowing. The girl and boy, the only people saved from Earth's doom, are running in a field...the Garden of Eden.
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