Category: Matt Dickerson

“It was dark. Very dark,” Isreal Dudley recalls, thinking back almost 10 years to his first visit to Vermont. He was 11 years old at the time, and it was his first real taste of the rural outdoors. Thanks to the Fresh Air Fund, Isreal, also called “Isszy,” had come to spend a couple weeks with our family that summer. It wasn’t his first time out of Brooklyn, the borough of New York City where he had grown up and lived his whole life. The previous year he had spent some time with a family in Pennsylvania, also through the FAF.

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I admit it felt crazy getting up at midnight to drive through the night in order to be fishing at dawn on the Salmon River, a tributary of Lake Ontario in western New York. But the opportunity to catch Great Lakes steelhead will do that to a person. And besides, if it was crazy, I was not alone in my craziness.

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I stood thigh deep in a favorite large pool on the New Haven River working the deep channel at the tail. Wes Butler stood on the far bank working the inlet and a swifter channel where the current undercut a steep bank.

Between us we covered the pool thoroughly with a mix of nymphs and black and white wooly buggers, drifting and bouncing along the bottom as well as stripping through the current. But nothing stirred. No flashes of silver, brown, or rainbow red to suggest anything hungry and tempted by our offer.

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Everywhere I go in Vermont I see turkeys. There was a time, not too many decades ago, that turkeys could not be found in the state. Hunting and loss of habitat had pushed them out. But the turkey reintroduction program begun in 1969 was wildly successful, and for the past few years they have been about as ubiquitous as squirrels.

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