New book in the works

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been blogging more frequently, wonder no more.  I’ve been simply too busy: filling orders, conducting classes, traveling, writing, photographing, fishing, and–though I didn’t know it at the time–doing research for a new book. At the end of each day, despite my best intentions to write up a newsletter or even a blog, I was simply too tired to do anything more than flop into bed and dream about the day to come.

Some of my regular newsletter and blog readers may recall that back in May I began to re-read  my old fishing diaries, some going back to 1958, and to re-visit some of the streams and ponds and lakes that I knew and loved so well when I was young. Well, these nostalgic visitations became a bit of an obsession with me. And a revelation as well.

Fifty years is a long time and in that time many changes naturally occur, some for the worse, some for the better , some hardly noticeable.  And so it was with some of the places I re-visited fifty years or so later.  I found out, for example,that Fish Brook in Topsfield, one of my favorite small streams in 1958, is now only a shadowy trickle of its former self, all silted in and brush-grown and really unfishable over much of its rather short length. Same with Stony Brook in Weston, which I revisited just the other day. I almost couldn’t find it, it was so overgrown with brush in the stretches I used to fish and its water volume seemed to be about half what it was then, just a trickle; the meadow stretch where on June 5, 1959 I caught a beautiful rainbow trout on a Queen of the Waters wet fly now abuts a subdivision.

On a more positive note, Crystal Lake, a small pond really, in West Peabody, MA, changed hardly at all.  Except for  the fact that a shopping center sits now just across the road where there once were fields, the pond itself was much as I remembered it, with the same familiar trails, the same large down-fallen tree on its eastern shore where I once hooked into a large bass, the same trees lining the shore where I used to snag a lot of back-cast flies.  But the fishing was not the same; it was better–with more and larger bass than I had ever caught as a teenager. Same with Putnamville Reservoir in Danvers.  And with Baldpate Pond in Boxford. They were all pretty much as I remembered them. All great places to fish.

Some would say that it’s a bit foolhardy to re-visit the past, perhaps a sign of senility, but I’ve been finding it rather intoxicating, energizing really. While changes do take place, and there are the inevitable disappointments, there are also many pleasant surprises. Chief among these surprises is that in many instances I found myself actually feeling like the kid I once was; the years and all the intervening experiences seemed to disappear from my consciousness; I felt only the pure excitement and enthusiasm of youthful adventure. At times, too, lingering and reflexive thoughts and feelings would appear, surprising me and at times disquieting in their intensity . I remember actually thinking one time as I was fishing that I’d better make this my last cast or I’d be late home for supper and ma would be mad. And then I remembered that my mother had been dead for thirty years or more and if I wanted to I could fish for as long as I wanted. Another time, while walking along a familiar trail through the woods, I felt absolutely sure that a fishing buddy from fifty years ago would jump out from behind a tree and try to scare me and I paused for a few seconds before passing that tree–just in case. These are just a few examples that come to mind; there are so many more. Re-visiting the past can be an absolutely delicious, invigorating–and informing–experience and I recommend it wholeheartedly–not as a sop to senility but, approached creatively, as an antidote to aging.

While looking to the past can be educational, rejuvenating, and emotionally rewarding, it does have its limitations, chief among them is that it’s already happened; it is the past after all.  Nothing we can do will change it; we can only learn to live with it and savor it for what it was. Having done this, it’s time to move forward.

And moving forward is what I’ve been doing for much of the past five or six months. In addition to fishing the old remembered places I’ve been seeking out places I’ve never fished before. With the help of a street atlas of eastern Massachusetts, I began to look up other bodies of water–both fresh and salt water– in the vicinity of the already known places and set out to fish these lakes or ponds or rivers or stretches of shoreline that I had never before given much thought to. Along the way I found some real gems as well as some genuine duds but it didn’t matter on the whole because at the end of the day I went to bed feeling as if I’d learned something. And what a wonderful feeling it was, too. I could actually feel myself growing.  Every day promised a new adventure, a day full of exploration, discovery, and new experiences, a day full of optimism and hope. You couldn’t ask much more from a day than this. Not only that but it presented me with many opportunities for deepening my fishing experiences, balancing both fresh water and salt in a way that I’d neglected for some years now, especially on local or nearby waters.

It became addictive, really. I couldn’t stop myself from picking up the atlas each morning over coffee, turning to a particular town map, and wondering about the waters I’d never fished or thinking about the many mysterious and intriguing place names I’d find. Was Doleful Pond really a sad and forlorn bog? What was satanic about Devil’s Dishfull? Or heart-breaking about Breakheart Reservation? Only one thing to do–go and find out for myself. And so I did. Over time, though, I began to be a bit more methodical in my explorations–what with gas prices the way they are– and decided to simply pick a town within, say, a twenty-or thirty-mile radius of my home in Winthrop, and try to fish all the fishable water within that town and find out for myself what the local waters had to offer. At the end of the day, I would sit down and enter my findings and observations in my fishing log, as I’ve done ever since I was a kid.

In a matter of months I had visited dozens of towns, fished innumerable ponds, lakes, rivers and miles of shoreline and had compiled quite a compendium of nearby fishing opportunities for trout, bass, pickerel, stripers, and just about any other fish that anglers target. At some point I began to think that I should put my experiences and observations into a book–and that’s just what I’ve been doing. I don’t know when I’ll finish it–there’s a wealth of water out there– but I’ve made a strong start. I’ll let you know more as time goes on. A working title is Gartside’s Guide to Flyfishing Greater Boston. Subtitled: Flyfishing Adventures in Your Own Back Yard.