Fencerows: “A Bridge Less Travelled”
By John Luthens
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
– Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost was a crafty fisherman. Don’t bother listening to the literary critics preaching stanza and meter from their stuffy chairs and book-filled halls of higher learning. Frost didn’t take the road less traveled out of any poetic gesture. He snuck off the beaten path in search of a hidden spot of water and a stringer full of fish.
A bridge less travelled, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
I picture him sitting in a New England roadside inn, throwing back a few pints of ale with his buddies, slamming tankards on the bar and complaining about a century’s worth of our founding father’s fish management mistakes: “I tell ya, Bob, ever since day poisoned da carp out of Boston Harbor with them crates of tea, the fishing ‘aint never been the same!”
Frost took poetry to a new level when he cut out on his own, and he spelled it out in fancy riddles so his contemporaries couldn’t fish it out. “Take the road until you get to a stand of trees and go down the less travelled fork. Don’t worry if it’s the left or right path! It made all the difference to me, because I caught the fish! The color of the wood can be yellow or pink or polka dotted for all I care – the color is just a metaphor, which doesn’t make any difference to you, because you’ll never find it!”
I can’t claim much kinship with Robert Frost’s poetry. If it doesn’t rhyme, I usually don’t get it. What I do have is a poetic trail that diverges through Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The interstate path leading up is anything but less travelled and there aren’t any yellow woods along the way, but it winds straight onto the shores of Lake Winnebago where there is more than enough green water and bluegills to make up for it.
Fishing a sheltered bay on Lake Winnebago.
At the end of my trail, a wooden bridge crosses a deep channel. A tree-shrouded island with a magic little cove rests on the far side, surrounded by banks of spent zebra mussel shells and sheltered from the wind-tossed waves of the big lake. The water warms quickly in the late-spring sun and beckons schools of spawn-minded bluegills. It’s open enough to make for fine fly casting and scenic enough to sit on the shell banks in the late afternoon and watch mallard ducklings splashing about in the setting sun set if the fish won’t cooperate.
Mother Nature is a shrewd little poet herself. Earlier this year, she took a mind to create a solid week of late-winter gusts and heave ice onto the island shoreline in spectacular fashion. These windswept icebergs weren’t quite high enough to sink the Titanic, but they were more than up to the challenge of tilting the bridge off its pilings and leaving it uprooted like a twisted maze in a carnival funhouse.
I found myself pondering this bridge on a May afternoon. Swirls of rising bluegill danced in my head, but the bridge entryway was boarded up and spliced with yellow caution tape. So close, and yet so far; 20 yards of splintered wood with a deep channel beneath. I stood a long time, fly rod in hand, wondering whether or not I should chance it. One-hundred score of years and a half country removed; it seemed that a Lake Winnebago crossing was where my path and Robert Frost’s had finally collided.
A small but well-earned bluegill surrenders to a floating fly.
Visions of bluegill splendor were sinking like an anchor into the green water when a creative splash jumped into my mind. It made sense. I understood what Robert was driving at. Hurrying back to the car, I hauled a waterproof pack out of the trunk and stripped down to shorts. Stuffing gear in my pack, I held my fly rod high. I didn’t take the bridge less travelled. I swam under it.
I had the cove to myself. Crabapple blossoms drifted through the air like snow and redwing blackbirds called from the trees. Waves lapped gently at my feet and I fished until the sun hissed below the western shore. The poetry of fishing is a timeless classic.
As for the actual fish, the biggest bluegill I caught was 6 inches long. Was it worth it? I think Robert Frost might have put it this way: “If you have to ask, then you may have taken the wrong fork in the trail.”
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel,Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com