22 Jan 14

Chapter 3

"ROAD TRIP 1958"

INTO NEW HAMPSHIRE

After a high school graduation trip to Maryland, it only seemed appropriate that two apprentice fishermen with a summer free before college take another “Road Trip.” This time we were on the loose without the pressures of a chaperon but with all the juvenile anticipation of the unknown.

My friend and high school chum, Frank “Abe” Bell, was so named because he was born on Lincoln’s birthday. At least that is as close as we can come to fathoming his parents reasoning for such a name. His grandmother had a place on Lake Winnipesauke in New Hampshire. I had a 1957 or 1956 Pontiac station wagon.  That is the car in the background of my senior prom photograph and we took that vehicle into places that only a four wheeler would be seen today.

The Road trip was on.

I don’t remember the dates but, suffice to say, it was sometime between high school graduation in June of 1958 and the September beginning of college at Colgate and Penn State. Abe would go on to become a dentist and it took me eight years to earn two degrees before becoming anything like a meaningful contributor to society.

We had the time to caddy for golfing members at Westfield’s Echo Lake Country Club. I think that we were paid something like $18 for each bag for 18 holes of golf. And if we were lucky, we could get two rounds a day. High cotton back then! Today I don’t think I could carry one bag for nine holes, which is probably why those guys hired us kids in the first place.

Had we the time to earn more dollars, we would probably have ended up in northern Saskatchewan on this trip. Only because I like the word Saskatchewan and the way it rolls off the tongue. Sort of like an Elmer Fudd word, no not Fudd. Daffy Duck, that was it! "Sufferin Suckatash" type word.

As it was we made it to the upper reaches of Maine where we visited a high school chum whose parents ran a summer camp. But that is another story altogether.

Bear in mind this was the latter part of the summer of the mid 50”s. The major highway north to south was U.S. Route One, which was and still is a road meandering through most major east coast towns. Just about every red light invented by mankind can be found along this road. Today major interstates make the of 337 mile trip about six hours from central Jersey to central New Hampshire. We had no cares with regard to time…one drove and the other navigated. I think that gasoline was somewhere around thirty cents a gallon and we were flush with all those caddying dollars.

We both felt as though we were accomplished hunters and fishermen, having mastered the use of shotguns, bows and arrows, spinning rods and fly rods. We were the definition of the typical "North woods man"! In our own minds at least.  Neither had fallen any meaningful big game with bow or gun, other than a few errant squirrels and maybe a rabbit or two. Remember, we had to do our big game hunting in a major residential town, with the stress on the word residential. Today we would be arrested on the spot as armed and dangerous criminals.   Probably suspected terrorists wandering armed through our neighbors backyards. I recall there was a large raccoon, which probably counted as our group’s big game trophy. I think I was the one to climb twenty feet up the tree to shoot it, while the other five guys circled the base of the tree shouting encouragement or at best good natured derisive ragging. Baying like a pack of hounds.

Fishing on the other hand was second, just behind dating, in terms of our personal hierarchy of importance. We were good at dating and thought that we knew just about everything there was to know about fresh water fishing. I was an accomplished Chesapeake Bay salt water fisherman by then, but that really did not apply to this trip. We were headed to the land of big small mouth bass, pickerel, and wild trout. Did I mention we were good at dating?

I think that we took more fishing equipment than clothes on that trip, but we were only seventeen years old and could easily live out of the back of a car. Both of us were budding fly fishermen and were severely hooked on that type of angling. We tied our own flies, read every “Outdoor Life”, “Field and Stream” and “Sports Afield” article ever written about fishing or hunting. We dreamed about the small native brook trout and huge brown trout of the northern wilderness, the famed cut throat of the west, and the sea run rainbow and brook trout of the Canadian provinces. I suppose about that time Bill Gates had not even been born, let alone dreamed of the computer programs that made him rich. All we knew was fishing, while he was building a fortune out of his garage.  But we were going to partake of some of the best fishing in the country on this trip. In fact, the topic of girls never even came up. Much!

As I recall the actual driving was an adventure in its own right, again remembering that we were both young, maybe adults of seventeen. The travel in New Jersey was mostly the Garden State Parkway north to the Tappen Zee bridge and across the Hudson River in New York. From there it was likely the Merritt Parkway, north through Connecticut, and probably State Rt. 66 before reaching the infamous Mass. Turnpike. I now can almost visualize every turn with my eyes closed after making that trip every year for over forty years. The roads have changed as have the route numbers, but from the Mass Pike one took U.S. Rt. 125 around Boston and then Rt. 3 north through Manchester and Concord, NH before turning northeast to Wolfeboro. When at Wolfeboro the camp was only a few miles, but this little town turned out to be the base of supplies and stories for years to come.