EDITOR’S NOTE: For a farewell three-part series beginning today, former Editor Larry Parnass returned to a few of the places featured in his Gazetteer columns in the 1990s.
One afternoon years ago, while out looking for a story to tell, I caught sight of a boy with a fishing pole on Riverbank Road.
The fish were safe for a few more minutes, but I was hooked.
This boy’s grandmother, Pat Stone, was not far off, keeping an eye on him for her daughter Melanie.
Stone’s house commanded a view east across the Connecticut River just south of the Coolidge Bridge. The riverbank is steep here. The Stone family uses a flight of cobbled-together stairs, edged today by a tether of thick blue rope, to reach the water.
That’s where this boy was heading. I introduced myself to Stone. She didn’t think it ridiculous that a newspaper editor wanted to interview a young fisherman.
“Take him out on the paddle boat and he’ll tell you everything,” she said of her grandson.
Jared Fournier, 8, and I untied the boat. With him as skipper, me as mate, we headed upriver.
Over the next hour, I got Jared’s view of everything, just as his grandmother promised – the wiles of fish and ways to outwit them, hidden navigational hazards, ugly places where spiders lurk. How far he was allowed to roam alone.
“It’s not a contest,” young Jared told me then, after I asked if it frustrated him when a fish didn’t bite. “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.”
That day’s journey stayed with me. When I was Jared’s age, I pulled catfish out of the St. Joseph River in southwestern Michigan. I love the sound of running water and was lucky enough to live for a time beside a rural reach of the Naugatuck River in Connecticut. My grandfather’s favorite book had been “Huckleberry Finn.”
This fall, more than 20 years after my trip with Jared, I went back to Riverbank Road hoping to find him. I knocked at the door of the home behind where Pat and Richard Stone lived. Melanie Fournier greeted me. Though her parents are dead, most everyone’s still here, she told me, including a new generation. Jared was about to turn 30. He and his wife, Crystal Baldwin, have two children, a son and daughter, and are expecting their third. Jared was at work. She wrote his phone number in my notebook, and his address.
That address was within hollering distance. Jared and Crystal returned to the neighborhood four years ago after buying a house just across Crosspath Road from the backyard where Jared learned to swim in his grandmother’s house, and where their own children play in summer.
***
When I headed back toward the river a few days later, skirting the north end of the Northampton Airport runway, I could see that the street in front of Jared’s house was teeming with children. Two were lofting a basketball at a hoop at the end of the driveway.
It was warm enough for the kids to be in shorts, some barefoot, all free-ranging.
Today, Melanie helps keep an eye on them, just as her mother did for her own children back when I set sail with her son Jared. I met Caiden and Caylee, Jared’s kids, and Reynaldo, Jaden and Jaxsen, their cousins, the children of Melanie’s daughter Jade, who also still lives here.
This little-traveled and little-known corner of Northampton, perched above the wild Meadows and beside the Connecticut, still incubates childhood memory.
“I always felt so wonderful knowing that my mother had the children,” Melanie told me that afternoon, sitting on the gate of a pickup in her son’s driveway. “Children need to play in the mud and ride their bikes and go fishing. It makes a completely different child.”
Across the street, her dogs, Patches and Frank Sinatra, prowled the big fenced-in yard where children have been playing for generations.
“This was just my playground, this area,” she said. “We would just roam the fields. When the street light came on you knew it was time to go home.”
She and her siblings wandered, then their own kids did. And now their kids’ kids.
Boy versus river remains a recipe for adventure and personal growth.
Caiden, Jared’s son, is now 6, close to the same age his dad was when I spotted him on his way to a river trip. He too, I was to witness, has a mania for fishing. “A switch turned on,” his dad says. “That’s all he wants to do now.” Last year, Caiden took third place in a catfish derby.
***
Jared and I looked over a poster of family photos his mom had arranged on a board inside his garage. Then we trailed Caiden down Crosspath toward the river, around the corner to the right and over to the steps leading down to the water. The floating dock was out for the season, so Caiden set up by rocks on the edge of the river and started to bait and cast. His dad and I sat the top of the stairs to get caught up.
“I still spend a lot of time right here,” he said.
The river remains the treasure chest it was when he was a boy.
While he recently bought a fish finder, Jared still goes by what he can see for himself. He knows pools from sandbars, rocks from weeds. “I go a lot by that – the places that never let me down before. I still have my secret spots in the river. I love the thrill of catching … trying to get a bigger fish than the last one.”
Now it’s catfish at night, sometimes, out on a pontoon boat. He describes how catfish shake their heads after hitting a line. And how carp strike. “The carp is probably the best fighting fish in the river. They hit light and take off like a lightning bolt.”
Winters, he’ll head down to the Oxbow for ice fishing. The fish that come out of the river then can be different – mostly pike. But the routine is familiar. “A lot of waiting. The same with any kind of fishing, I believe,” Jared said.
Summer, he likes to motor upriver toward Hatfield, where it’s less busy.
Years after we first talked, he’s more aware of the abuse the river takes from people. “I’ve seen them driving too fast and when they’re drunk they throw their trash in the river, ruining it for everyone else. On holidays, this place is a madhouse. Driving a boat isn’t as easy as it looks. You can hit a sandbar and not even see it coming. I’m surprised there aren’t more accidents.”
He’s a catch-and-release fisherman, except for trout. He believes in “pack it in, pack it out” and removes trash others leave behind.
Jared remembers the care his grandparents took with the property, and their sense of responsibility for the river and to this family land. Recently, a relative has improved the bank by the stairs, adding fill and landscaping. Erosion is a frequent foe. Jared says he absorbed this lesson from them: “Always keep it. Never let it diminish. It will always be in the family as long as everyone takes care of it.”
***
In the more than two decades since we’d visited, Jared had watched the long project to widen the Coolidge Bridge, as he slipped under the scaffolding on family boats. He was a young teen on Sept. 11, 2001.
In time, he graduated to power boats. After finishing Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School, Jared worked briefly as a carpenter for a construction company, then with Leader Home Centers in South Deerfield and Greenfield, and finally signed on, nine years ago, with Tiger Press, first as a helper and now as a press operator.
“I was never really one to not have a job,” he said.
And he wasn’t one to turn his back on the place that meant so much to his parents and grandparents. After living for a time with Crystal’s mother in Whately, Jared jumped at a chance to come back to the river and be near his mother and his father, David.
As they fixed up their house, one of the first things he did was install a large aquarium. The other day, a catfish lolled about inside.
“It was good to come back and have this in my backyard,” Jared said, sitting at the top of the steps, the river before him and Caiden below, working his line.
I went down to see whether he’d had any action. No, but Caiden freely offered tips on his technique. “You hold it,” the 6-year-old said of the rod. “And when you feel a bite, you reel it in and you tug.”
He brings the line back in, then looks at his father.
“Dad, look at how small my worm is. Put a bigger worm on there.”
The next morning, Jared and Caiden drove into the hills to try their luck at Ashfield Lake. I found them working some of the lake’s deeper pools, below a steep ridge near the far end, away from the dam.
It was early. No signs of fish.
They’d have better luck later, but hadn’t given up on their first spot.
Caiden was casting with elbows cramped to his sides, trying to avoid catching his line in the trees.
Like his dad years ago, Caiden kept an eagle eye out for bugs.
“Why are there so many spider webs over here?” he asked.
“I put them here this morning,” I told him.
“Spider webs? No, you didn’t!”
The lake was still. The three of us stood on a thin strand, backpacks, gear and a bag of Pirate Booty on the ground.
I asked Jared what he thought makes for a good boyhood. Fishing leaves time for conversation, after all. “Trying to do the right things, and growing up seeing the right stuff from older adults,” he said.
He said he hoped his kids would like to do things he did when young. Caiden is that way, and his third child, he and Crystal know, will be a boy. “We have a lot of stuff in common.”
I ask him how boys should become men. “You’ve got to learn from your mistakes, obviously. That’s part of growing up and being a man. Admitting you’re wrong, or sticking up for what you believe in.” Then he applies that lesson to himself. “This is probably the first time I’ve been in the newspaper that it wasn’t a police report. But it’s been a long time since I was in trouble.”
Caiden reels in and offers some Pirate Booty around. The strength of its smell rivals the globs of PowerBait on the lines. We eat.
“Good sharing,” his dad says.
Back when you were a kid, I ask Jared, what frightened you?
“Other than the big spiders?”
He says he managed to come through his river years without sinking a boat or getting seriously hurt.
Getting hooked in the hand doesn’t count.
Today, as a dad, it’s different. “My scariest would be one of these guys falling in.”
Caiden, listening, mentions a time his dad, a strong swimmer, went far out in the ocean.
“Don’t mess around in the water in the ocean,” Caiden says. “I’m still a little tiny for the ocean.”
Jared watches Caiden cast. “Everyone says he’s so much like me. I’m starting to see more of the quirky stuff that I would do, or I did. You know, it’s just good to see him interacting.”
Caiden starts listing aloud every fish he can think of. He finishes.
“That’s all the fish I know. Is that all the fish in the river?” he asks his dad.
“No, there’s probably more,” Jared says.
I ask Jared whether you can distill life lessons out of moments like this, away from your life standing with a fishing rod beside a body of water.
“You don’t always catch the fish,” he said. “I like to just think that it’s being outside, not so much trying to catch the fish. Sometimes it’s OK not to catch them. Just enjoy every day and be happy that we’re still being able to fish.”
His son is pulling at his line. A moment of resistance raises hopes. But just a moment. Jared asks his son: “We got weeds?
Caiden reels. “Yup, weeds.”
Larry Parnass can be reached at lawrence.parnass@gmail.com.