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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Passaic River Trout and Snakes Scherman Hoffman Sanctuary

Today's outing--snakes at Sherman Hoffman Sanctuary, precisely our intent.

Matt's hope--milk snakes. But I took a patient course, knowing very well how difficult it is to fulfill such expectations. Milk snakes are one of the seven species of 17 New Jersey snake species total that Matt hasn't found to this date. 

Matt discovered two garter snakes today.

What amazed me is that the small garter snake I photographed him holding--perhaps 16 inches long--regurgetated a freshly consumed red salamander, fat bodied and over five inches long. For a moment it seemed as if the salamander remained alive, but my mind snapped immediately back into place the moment I found this surely couldn't be, fresh as killed the moment we arrived on the scene.

I'm reminded of poet Allen Ginsberg, and how he might lavish the find.

Red salamander! You are the world!

And on and on with his ravings to suggest taking the whole world into consciousness. And why not? This salamander very well preserved in my photographs, I know I could pass these photographs off on a lot of people as pictures of a live salamander.

These are Passaic River headwaters running through the sanctuary. Full of wild rainbow and brown trout, the Passaic flows pure. Down below, the river flowing through Newark's Ironbound District is about to be dredged. During the 1970''s the pollution was some of the worst in the world.

Oh, and the Passaic flows through Allen Ginsberg's hometown, Paterson.

Contrary to conventional assumption until fairly recent years, perhaps, the Passaic's pollution didn't intensify beyond hope during the 1970's. A friend of mine caught carp regularly in Passaic River, Paterson, during that decade.






Friday, June 29, 2012

Brown Trout Fly Fishing Paulinskill River and an Afternoon in the Mountains

 Didn't have as much time to fish as had hoped. Heat hung in the air by the time I arrived at the Paulinskill shortly after 10:30 a.m., but water temperature surely hadn't risen over 70. Trout had proven to be plentiful in this stretch. But last year at the end of July we observed more smallmouth bass than trout. Today I saw three smallmouths, one of them about 16 inches, and committed myself to trout with the little time I had.

Still a novice with a fly rod, my casting certainly has improved, but missing three trout strikes shows I am not a straight line to the fish yet. I began with a stonefly nymph and quickly reasoned that the trout, swimming in mid-column, might take a subtle wet fly, but not a bead head. So I tied on a size 18 ant pattern and did manage to catch an average-size brown trout in addition to getting those other visible strikes, the colors of this trout very striking. I quickly released it, rather than taking a photograph, because I feared its getting lactic acid poisoning.

Then I went on my way to Mohican Outdoor Center to retrieve my son, Matt. He opted out of fly fishing in advance, expecting to be tired. But as you can see by the photographs, we had quite an afternoon up in the mountains.

Swimming, by the way, was best. Catfish Lake has 80-foot depths and I felt if I could have swam underwater down into them, I would have. No, it wasn't rapture of the deep, because that is in fact an objective condition in just such a way, but water is salvation. And the Atlantic brine is full of salt, as I recall.







Adventure in the Underground Economy: When We Shelled it Out


From ages 14 through 18, I engaged more than 250 days of outings each year--fishing after school, sometimes before homeroom, weekends. At 19, I began a life of commercial shell fishing. Hardcore outdoor activity, especially considering the wetsuit work in January and February. My teens had been a life of incessant activity and little conflict between interests outdoors, social, and school, little conflict besides the gripes of grouchy Black Dog mornings and the usual sorts of uncertainties teenagers work out in the privacy of their minds. Absolutely no reason existed for why I couldn't succeed professionally. Offered a staff position on the Manahawkin Beacon/Beach Haven Times the same year I began clamming, however, I declined. I chose the bay because I wanted to be a literary writer. I knew the outdoors. I understood it would serve my writing, as my writing would serve it. Getting published on fishing at 16 in various magazines, I finished my last article for The New Jersey Fisherman at 19 and shoved off the mainland for Long Beach Island.

The following is from a piece I wrote for The Sandpaper's Memorial Day edition, 2010. I use the description "Underground Economy" in the post title and think of the spirit of the perennial American economic pursuit beyond the bounds of regularly defined employment, much as 18th and 19th century Rocky Mountain fur trappers are remembered as rugged individualists. And yet with spiritual abandon rather than limitation to basic economic pursuits, writers such Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Jack London and others too numerous to mention have fulfilled free lives outside convention to emerge in university reading material. We hope to inspire bold possibilities transforming our dark age so light and love may come to us all. Jack London committed suicide, but I do not judge his life a loss. Many would contest the notion that Kerouac fulfilled his life, since he drank himself to death. But no doubt exists in my mind that each of the three I've mentioned lived much fuller lives than conformists afraid to get up and go out. Every clammer I knew held a state license, which made us legit above any illegal underground economy operation, but to have embraced this way of life recalls what one of the band members of The Outlaws said, that each of us has some outlaw in him, and more than one of the clammers I've known loves "Green Grass and High Tides," the Outlaws' signature performance.

One of us parodied philosopher Rene DeCartes. "I clam, therefore I am," which struck me instantly as having nothing to do with DeCartes, but certainly existentialism and the ambition to achieve a genuine life. To have turned our backs and walked out of the formal economy required of us no small measure of daring and apprehension. We all knew that to be an Outsider is to embrace difficulty, and for me the difficulty has indeed been grave; while each of us in any walk of life may have some "outlaw" in him, perhaps virtually no one admits it because it isn't comfortable. Nevertheless, if we are to overcome the shadows, we cannot do it only by old established patterns, but by the brilliance of sunlight itself.


When We Shelled it Out

The temperature, I remember, held at 22 F. Wind drove 20 to 30 knots out of the northwest, and three layers of neoprene wetsuit insulated our bodies. A quarter-inch of neoprene hood wrapped each of our heads; a diver's facemask covered each of our faces; quarter-inch neoprene neoprene Brute boots with heavy nylon treads gave our feet the potential to work. I leapt over the gunwale into a rush of frigid water.

Barry and John were already treading.

"We know the spot's here when the ice melts," Barry said.

"Hope that's not too long," John said.

The bay would soon freeze solid. John had a mortgage to pay. A young family to support. It didn't matter to me how long the bay would stay frozen. I was 23 and family wanted me at college. My freedom mattered more. Good money made that possible. But neither money nor the ubiquitous beach bum image held me to Long Beach Island. I wrote. For someone who loved to pore through books and spend trackless hours exploring ideas by writing in notebook after notebook, clamming seemed the perfect life.

I owned nine boats in total--and some got totaled--over 13 years. I owned all of the equipment needed, license, and sold my catch daily to local seafood wholesalers. We worked low tides, self-employed. Clam treading is the method of jogging backward in water anywhere from knee deep to as deep as the nose, depending on tidal stage and spot. Stepped on, a clam feels like a golf ball. Any of us dipped or dunked, grabbed a clam, and tossed it in a bushel basket. It was in fact an aerobic workout--even though some of us smoked Marlboros. When we smoked, we lifted clams by toes instead of by hand until only the butt remained, although some of us preferred the method in general to dunking. When I paid off necessities, I sometimes worked no more than two hours a day for weeks running, but generally a day's work was four or five hours of low tide. Often I worked with friends; often I worked alone.

Sometimes I felt as if I had the whole bay and island to myself. I never met anyone else who combined treading, beach, going out and so on, with intense study, writing, and exploration of life, ideas, self, nature, and society. My explorations, informed by fertile intuition and chosen by conscious judgment, had advantages college couldn't offer me, and over the course of the 13 years I clammed, I enrolled at three schools for short periods. College is a program more and less imposed upon the student. Following my curiosity instead, I freely developed my mind. At that young age I studied philosophy--Alan Watts, Ayn Rand, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Jean Paul Sartre Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Plato, Aristotle--taking on the difficulty it presented with great vitality and concentration. When I first began reading Nietzsche at age 20, I was lost on him, but I read Watts with great ease. Nietzsche merely required my persistence, and a couple of years later, I understood him. I read dozens of novels, poetry, and my interest in psychology especially involved Carl G. Jung's work. 

A housemate read classic novels. With a propensity to grand vision and a yearning for freedom, George joined the Navy as a scuba diver, then came to Long Beach Island to clam. Mark, whom I introduced to treading when together we quit a side job, had a serious meditation discipline and studied psychology to finish postgraduate work at Rutgers. By the time I knew George and Mark, I was already along the way of my years at the shore, but before meeting these two men, I spent the summer of 1982 clamming and discussing the Great Books of Western Civilization with a friend, Scott, from St. John's College, Annapolis, MD, where I was enrolled and studied during the spring, 1982, semester. And during the summers of 1983, 1984, and 1985, my brother David and more than half a dozen or so of his friends--all them bright at the least--spent summers on Long Beach Island and clammed.

First introduced to treading in the summer of 1980, I saw that most clammers were college kids. But during the run on the Shelter Island clam beds in fall 1983, I learned that many clammers came from who knows where. Once I stood on the floorboard of my boat and gazed a long time in awe at about 300 other boats. We averaged about 350 clams per hour, and sometimes near 600. I usually worked two tides, spending seven or eight hours a day treading that fall. Paid nine cents a clam, we all did very well for what the economy was in 1983. I paid off my new Toyota pickup truck in six month's time. By January of 1984, 13 1/2 cents a clam kept the hardcore few, me included, working hard in freezing winds and brine, ice floes bumping us on at least one occasion.

Old time rakers also worked through winter. They used a long-handled raking device known as a Shinnecock, named after the Shinnecock Indian Nation on Long Island. Made of heavy aluminum with interchangeable handle parts, together measuring from 20 to 45 feet in length, it's a formidable device that I had the opportunity to try while working in Florida. The head of a Shinnecock is 30 inches wide with four-inch teeth and a basket scoop behind them. Rakers rarely pulled 200 necks or more in one boat drift. Generally, treaders tossed clams into their metal bushel baskets faster than rakers pulled them.

Littlenecks and topnecks are smaller and more marketable clams. Chowders can be five inches wide and tough to eat. But I used to break a chowder open on occasion while busy in the water. That's a fresh clam! I have in my private collection the chowder shell of all chowders, a two-million-year-old fossil Mercenaria mercenaria (hard clam of the bays) that measures 6 1/2 inches tip to shell tip. I bought it at a paleontological and geological market event in 2004 at the Morris Museum near Morristown, New Jersey, just up the road from George Washington's Revolutionary War Headquarters.

Unlike the brave soldiers at Jockey Hollow during the winter of 1777, rakers kept warm in the winter by propane heaters stationed in their garveys. They seemed to well-respect us treaders. A garvey is an open boat made of Pinelands cedar. The boats originated on Barnegat Bay during the 18th century. By contrast, treaders' fashionably colored surfing and diving wetsuits featured that 20th century neoprene I've mentioned. Modern fiberglass varieties served as our boats, which sturdily carried onion bags filled with clams.

During spring 1984, I made a short visit to St. John's College and desires arose afterwards to try another school, Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hampshire is not a school for the classics as is St. John's, but the school's motto is from the greatest of ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle: "To know is not enough." Founded in 1970, Hampshire has remained an unconventional school. I seemed to sense 20th century Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung waiting for me there before I had reviewed any course offerings.

"Hey, Junghog!" My friend Mark, who happened to be a student at Hampshire, introduced the moniker suddenly on a bright afternoon when I might have been headed to the beach. I had borrowed his copy of Jung's memoir for about two months a year or so before I enrolled. At the time, Mark drove an hour to LBI each day from Roosevelt near Hightstown, meeting me at dawn when that coincided with low tide. He was a dedicated clammer who earned more than $10,000.00 the summer before he began his graduate work at Rutgers. My girlfriend of 4 1/2 years lived in Philadelphia, frequently visiting me on the island. Alternatively I went to Philadelphia, and we traveled elsewhere besides. As deeply inward as I traveled--becoming more and more interfused with nature--with her and with friends, we kept culturally connected.

Most people, perhaps, believed that the city, and the whole of the nation, were secure as stone. But even with Reagan in office and the gathering entrepreneurial upswing of the 1980's, I believed that a future crash worse than that of 1929 was possible, although I was confident, more than confident--something absolute that could overcome any difficulty informed me--that relentless persistence will reward us with renewal of the human spirit's greatness.

I had always known that I would return to the mainland. I held my last commercial clamming license in 1993. By then clams had all but vanished. In 1992, a clam bed yielded 450 of them an hour, the very last of such numbers. Clammers by the hundreds and thousands had over the years depleted the clams. Much is said about pollution in the bay and I have got word that most of the eelgrass is gone. Eelgrass is necessary for clams to reproduce, but I know we clammed the bay out. Reproductive inhibition due to lack of eelgrass seems to have coincided with our take. Improving the bay's ecology is possible, because the pollution is a by-product of development near the bay shore.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

South Branch Raritan River Smallmouth Bass Break

 Without much time to fish, and certainly willfulness burned out today, I niether marched the trail well upstream the South Branch Raritan, nor explored the downstream stretch, appealing to me yet. Days like today the value of wholesome, good, rewarding outings hits the spot by abscence. Got me thinking of returning to Mount Hope Pond tomorrow--possible maybe.

Deep holes here by the Three Bridges overpass, but I've caught only a couple of smallmouths in these specifically. Today I set my goal on one bass. Last cast I caught it, quickly cut the line with my top incisor against a tooth beneath, and released it with a hook in its tissue, but no blood--good survival odds. Naturally, my mood fell by my mistake of allowing the bass to take the killie just a little too long. But a second later a train horm blew nearby. I felt energy transfer, hope lift, but my perception conveyed the sound to my awareness jarringly, although as I walked out and back to the car the train's roar felt magnificent, like an enormously great living creature. Way back in Alexander the Great's time, for one example, the closest event to the sound of a thundering train would have been a thundering army.

I still think the bass will live. No sacrifice.


Monday, June 25, 2012

Rockaway River and Peapack Brook Fishing to Explore or Exploring to Fish

 I don't think any of us learns every spot in New Jersey over the course of a lifetime, and even if any one of us exhauseted every coordinate, spots change over time. I remember in 2000 I parked at a service station with a large lot in Bedminster Township off Route 206, got out, looked around carefully to be sure no one noticed and took any offense, and took my drop net and bag of Wonder Bread into the woods a short distance to the Peapack Brook, where I figured a hole might exist relative to the railroad bridge. There I would net my own chubs and shiners to use wherever I headed to go fish. I like using chubs especially. 

Instead, I found a deep, clear hole with trout. This was July. Days later I showed up with my 3 1/2- foot salmon egg rod to catch and release five rainbows in 10 minutes. I went once more and caught one or two in August. The next year some Nor'easter or other completely filled the deep hole with big, chunky rocks.

As humble as that story is, it's a meaningful memory. All through our history--which certainly includes pre-civilized times--we have had a natural desire to explore, not only whole continents, but every little piece of the globe we can lay fingers and our microscope-aided eyesight upon, and once science established the possibility, outer space and the oceans became greatly desirable destinations for the bodily presence of intellect. 

For the first time, I visited the Rockaway River at Denville just off U.S. 46 with public parking. I didn't know this scene existed until last week, passing through. I managed to find some fishable water, and fulfilled my expectation of getting skunked. I have just enough experience on the Rockaway to not expect smallmouth bass fighting over a killie. I did lose a very small bass, so some are around in this stretch, or at least in the wider series of stretches. And a brown trout rose, flashed, and left a surface boil by my killie. Picky. I then figured the occasional few rises I saw in the same positions were indeed brownies. I would need my fly rod and to wade in ooze. Not exactly a desirable prospect. I kept my boots on the bank. I hope to have better places to visit. And there are some elsewhere on the Rockaway I haven't been to.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Delaware River Fallfish on Rapala Plug and Other Stories

Since we took Matt to NJ Audubon Ridge Walkers camp, Mohican Outdoor Center above Blairstown on the Kitatiny Ridge, I dropped into a sentimental mood somewhat, turning photo album pages for an idea to blog today. Driving home by more and less random directions for the sake of curiosity, my wife and I drove through Warren and Sussex counties after Stillwater, no fishing, just sight seeing and photography, lodging more routes and villages in memory. I had thought I would write on Great Egg Inlet at the end of Seven Bridges Road (reminiscent of the Eagles song) where a girlfriend and I once found loads of fresh, clean mussels, filling whole onion bags. Legally entitled to do this, however, since I had a commercial shellfish license, I'm not filled in on the laws as they exist now, nor do I really remember just what they were for mussels in 1985, but I collected less than my fill.

Since I have no photos and not much story (wow you can get mussels down the Seven Bridges Road), I let that idea fade but there it is in a nutshell anyhow.

In the photo above that's Matt, age six I think, with a fallfish caught on a #9 Rapala, Delaware River, fallfish a kind of minnow. This 14-incher socked that plug! Unexpected for a minnow.

I've used fallfish as musky bait. Had a 20-pounder take a fallfish electric trolled, right off the surface, years ago.

In the other photo he's five, fly fishing, very determined about trying. So I had taken him to the North Branch Raritan River flowing through Bedminster where we live. I wasn't fly fishing regularly at the time--in fact, not at all. I simply informed him of fly fishing. He wanted to know. 

I like how the light in the upper slight left of the picture spills down the rocks and zig-zags to come over the water as if Matt could walk right out the portal he came here from. Only supposing so. But I like to imagine things like this based on factual patterns in the world.

There you are. It's photographed. And you can be plain, ordinary, and prosaic about it. Or you can wonder if we don't go into a realm of light when we die--and return if we want to.



I call this photo The Gateway to Heaven. Notice how the light to the front and above of my son is like a walkway out.