EDITOR’S NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Gazette on Aug. 3, 1995.
NORTHAMPTON — We set sail against the current on our own power, under a westering sun. Slipping upriver, toward the Jared Banks.
That’s Jared as in Jared Fournier, who this afternoon was captaining our craft. I was pedaling the starboard side. He was game to show me his best fishing spots north of his family’s dock on Riverbank Road in Northampton. His mother, Melanie, and his grandmother, Pat Stone, bade us farewell – and then it was the two of us, Jared intently scanning the shallows on the west bank of the Connecticut River, just below the Coolidge Bridge.
The Stones have a long family history on this narrow street, and on the docks that reach out into the river. At the age of 8, Jared is casting this clan’s youngest and freshest eyes on the river, as taken with its qualities, no doubt, as his grandmother’s grandmother.
His voice is light and a little husky, his brown hair going golden under the sun. In summer, he logs hours on the river, fishing and swimming. He figures he fishes every day.
As he guided us north in the pedal boat, freed by my company to go beyond the neighboring dock, I quizzed him about his views of this place. He was showing me where an old rowboat had sunk.
The place seemed eerie to him. “What’s scary to you about the boat down there?” I asked. “That a person is still in there,” he said, “and may float up.”
We drifted on.
“Right here is my second-best fishing spot,” he says. “This is where I caught the bass this spring. It came up right here and just fell off. I was in this, the pedal boat. … Over here, there was like an eel, from here to here. (He holds his hands a yard apart.) The only thing about eels is that they tangle up your line. I’ve only caught one. You don’t want to grab an eel in the water, some eels you don’t, because they suck your blood. I found a morey dead with a big mouth, with real pointy teeth. You have to really squeeze it tight half way between the stomach and the head. They’re more scared of you, than you are of them.”
We swung out into the river to avoid a low gangplank. Jared avoids it because of the spiders that live underneath. Up and down this reach of the river, close to home, he normally catches bass and a lot of the fish called pumpkin seeds.
Looking upriver, as we spin on the current, he points out a place he’s seen shad. We come upon a sunken tire in three feet of water, surrounded by reeds.
Do you have a name for this part of the river? I ask. “No, I mostly call it my best fishing spot, or my second-best fishing spot. … Now there, there’s a barrel. If you cast in there, most likely you’ll catch one. There’s snapping turtles around here. My cousin caught one. It swallowed the hook and they cut the line.”
I ask if he knows the legend about snapping turtles: Once they snap down, they only let go in a full moon. He says he’ll believe it if it’s true. “I’d like to see that happen,” he says.
We pass what looks like another barrel. “The fish are hiding,” Jared says. “If you dropped like a worm like in that bank, most likely a bass or a pumpkin seed would go at it. They’ll nibble on it. It takes a minute to bite it, because their mouth muscles need energy to open their mouths.”
“That’s a piece of cement. I’ve casted right there, and I’ve got snagged. Right along here is a good spot too. Along the edges, from here down. You’ll see some carp right here, in the morning. Because it’s not as hot in the morning.”
I ask him if he gets frustrated when the fish he sees won’t bite.
“No I don’t. It’s not a contest. I just cast near it. Sometimes I just drop it in and wait a minute, and hold on, until a fish bites it. And then I tug back when that big bite’s still on, and then you’ve got it. I like catching them, but I also like looking at them, and seeing how big they are.”
We move on up, along the bank. “I’ve seen a fish right there. There are like five of them. They keep biting, but spit it out, because they’re older and have been caught. Every time they bite, they get smarter.”
He doesn’t like using bobbers on his line, because he thinks fish can see them. We pedal on up into shade under the bridge. Up ahead on a new dock, four women are climbing out of the river after skinny-dipping. Three teen-agers come scrambling down the slope under the abutment, in a rush to get a look. Jared is oblivious, scanning for fish.
He’s talking about sturgeon, the ones he said get as big as a school van, a handy frame of reference for a third-grader.
We get out and stretch our legs on a little spit of rocks near Elwell Island. He doesn’t mind that the bridge breaks up his view north from the dock at home, but mentions that teen-agers sometimes spit off of it. He admits that when he’s older, he’d like to range further up the river, past the bridge. “There’s bigger and better bass down there. I’ll have to be 10, at least.”
From his perch on a rock, he explains the phenomenon of casting toward a bank, and getting a drag on your line that mimics a fish.
I ask, If the river was a neighbor, what kind of neighbor would it be? “A good neighbor,” he says. “Good fish, and the water’s not as dumpy, not as polluted. … Hey, do you see that big bass?” He dangles a bare foot in the water, letting wavelets from a boat’s wake slap against his toes. Do you ever see people doing things on the river that you don’t like? I ask him.
“Yeah. They catch a fish, then just rip the line right out. I found one. It was half alive. We used it for catfish bait.”
I ask, what do you think you’d do with yourself if you didn’t have the river right here? “It’s kind of a hard question,” he says.