Forgotten Trout

By Bob Romano

Looking up at the hemlocks, you would never guess that they are dying. These trees, many over seventy feet tall, are plagued by the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, an exotic pest infesting many stands throughout the northeast. I suppose one should be grateful that it has been a slow process, each season a few more trees falling to the forest floor, others losing their needles. The shade cast by this forest insures that the temperature of the little stream that runs through it remains cool.

The sound of the current grows louder as my wading boots leave indentations in the thick layer of moss that spreads across the bank of the brook. Even now, in early September, I can almost grab the humidity with my hand.

The last time these waters were stocked was in the nineteen-eighties. Since then, the descendants of those dull-witted, hatchery-bred fish have developed into a strain of cagey, wild brook trout, their sides a riot of blue-and-yellow circles, some with blood red dots in the center. Read more