Dusk at Monument Pool
I started shamefully saying “god save the queen” out loud after each eat and I still missed them
The ridge that makes Monument Pool special looks like a giant green pill capsule from above - it’s blanketed in forest, all the edges are smoothly rounded, and it’s about three times as long as it is wide. It is oriented on a line northwest-southeast - about a mile and a half long and a half mile wide. The top of the hill is over 1,600’ in elevation, the West Branch of the Delaware River at its north eastern base is under 1,000’. These six hundred feet of relief are gained rapidly in a steep, bulging incline that starts abruptly at the river’s edge. When you round the corner of the last bend of the river below Hale’s Eddy on a hot day you can see down into the shaded refuge of Monument Pool and you can feel the cool air whoosh upriver. The name is apparently from an old stone monument that marked the beginning of where this river decides the border between Pennsylvania and New York and it made me think of the perennial coolness of large rock formations, of marble monuments at cemeteries.
But you don’t come here to honor the dead. You come here to find rising trout. And rise they do, apparently every day. “There’s something special about this place, the fish are always here,” our guide Sean Witman of the Delaware River Club told us. My dad and I managed to meet last week for some fishing in Hancock NY and we had a great time. We used to fish together at least once every year, but it’s been a few years since we’ve been able to pull it off.
John Dunn was born in County Durham England in 1620. He moved to Middlesex County NJ and had a son Hugh in 1640. Hugh’s son Hugh was born in 1678 and had a son Jeremiah in 1712. Jeremiah’s son James, born 1745 in Piscataway NJ, was a lieutenant and captain in the New Jersey Militia and served during the Revolutionary War. He was given land in Crawford County PA near Meadville as part of his military pension and moved there in 1797 with his wife Piscilla née Langstaff and their seven children. His son Jeremiah, born 1781, had a son Simeon in 1816 who had a son John in 1859. At some point they moved east to Warren County PA. John died in a furniture factory fire in Jamestown NY in 1903 and was buried at Tidioute PA. John had a son Floyd in 1892 who lived in Kane PA and had a son Russel in 1922. Russ grew up in Ridgway PA and moved to Johnsonburg PA and had a son Daniel in 1946 who moved to West Chester PA and had a son Matt in 1978. Matt moved to Jamestown NY in 2012 and has no sons.
Floyd lost his job at a factory during the depression and my grandfather Russ and his five siblings grew up hard. Floyd spent his time growing a garden, shooting deer, and drinking. His son, Russ’ brother Emerson, was also an alcoholic and was known around town as “Alky Em.” Emerson had a son Eddy, my dad’s cousin, who died in a motorcycle crash. My dad couldn’t go to his funeral because he, “was in Vietnam killing commies for christ.” Russ’ brother Devere had severe epilepsy and lived in a charity home since he was a small boy.
My dad’s mom, Lilian née Zelechoski, did OK during the depression. Her dad Mike, born near Warsaw Poland in 1890, was a shoemaker by trade. He was always able to pick up a few shifts at the Johnsonburg paper mill and there was a brisk business in shoe repair at the time as no one could afford new shoes.
Russ and Lil were renting a house from Lil’s dad Mike when my dad was born. The house was on the flats behind the Johnsonburg football field very close to the confluence of the East and West Branches of the Clarion River. There were four or five steps up to the front porch and my dad remembers when the river flooded in 1950 or 1951 a neighbor floated a rowboat right onto the porch and Lil was holding my dad’s sister Kathy and crying and my dad was lifted into the boat and they rowed through the paper mill and across to Mike’s house that was up on the hill on the east side of town. After the flood Russ borrowed $5,000 from Mike and built a house on the hill above the flats on the west end on Willow Street. He did everything himself except the chimney and the plaster finish on the walls. He paid Mike $10 a month on the loan. Russ was a tailgunner in a B-25 in WWII in the China-Burma-India theater and after ten missions an officer walked into camp and asked if anyone could type, they needed a clerk. Russ could type. He eagerly volunteered and never went on a combat mission again.
Russ was a full time mechanic at the paper mill but for extra money in the 1950s he started taking all of his neighbors’ trash to the dump. He charged $1 a month. He got so busy he bought a dump truck and then he had to buy a real garbage truck to keep up. He started doing the businesses in town, too, and charged them $5 a month. The sign on the side of the truck read, “Help keep Johnsonburg clean, call RF Dunn - RO 5-4193.” My dad worked with him in the summer and he hated it. Kids would run behind the truck and tease him and his dad would say, “what’re you kids doing, looking for something to eat?” My dad claims that it wasn’t all bad, they did score some good stuff from the trash route like a slot machine, a player piano that played “Roll Out the Barrel”, and a few pairs of skis. His dad would walk in the kitchen on collection day and throw a hundred ones in the air and say “wahoo!” When my dad was eighteen years old Russ sold the business to Bill Lentz up the street. This led to a falling out with Russ’ sister June’s family because her husband Fritz wanted to buy the business and wanted a family discount and Russ wouldn’t give it to him.
My dad and I had breakfast at the Circle E Diner in Hancock every morning. Somehow it came up that Mormons think Jesus was in Missouri at some point.
“Missouri? You mean upstate New York.”
“No, Missouri for sure, that was Joseph Smith in New York.”
“Wait, I just googled it. They say it was the garden of Eden that was in Missouri.”
“The garden of Eden? Do they have any proof?”
“Like what, Adam and Eve’s DNA?”
In terms of fly fishing, the West Branch of the Delaware is said to be the “most western river in the east.” I’ve fished there a few times before and thought the comparison was dumb, and I still think it is in a lot of ways. But I started coming around to it on this trip. On the West Branch I was reminded of floating the Clark Fork upstream of Missoula or the “Bird Float” on the Yellowstone. Of course not how it looks, or the size of the fish, but the feeling of floating it in a drift boat, the speed and the rhythm of the river, the way it bends and riffles and of course the bugs and the rising fish. Sean said that he’ll guarantee hatches and rising fish every day pretty much April to September, but he won’t say when during the day it will happen. We put in around noon and took off after dark to make sure we were on the river when it did happen. I’ve seen good hatches and rising fish on plenty of rivers in the east and in Michigan, on Penns Creek and the Little J, on the Pere Marquette, but those rivers feel decidedly un-western.
My dad had the first crack at them when the fish started going in Monument Pool around 5pm. Sean and I both barked coaching at him as he struggled to get the right drift, as he fed three fish without a connection, maybe we gave him a little bit of a hard time, even, and then we whooped and hollered as he got hooked-up on the fourth eat and he landed a fine brown and we all high fived and it was awesome.
The bugs were everywhere, March Browns, Sulphurs, there were three or four fish going pretty steadily in front of us. As I stood up and started stripping line from the reel I thought “I’m going to slay them.” I got an eat on my first drift and set too fast. Missed him. I got another eat pretty quick and missed it, too. After a few more missed fish they were put down. Sean asked, “want to find some others? A big one?”
Sean was good at judging the size of the fish by its rise, at spotting rising fish that I couldn’t see. We anchored up on another group of fish, perfect boat position, about forty feet above and maybe fifteen feet off of them. I layed down a good drift and fed line and a large fish ate my fly. And I missed it. I missed the next five. “Not so easy, is it?” my dad quipped.
I started shamefully saying “god save the queen” out loud after the eat and I still missed them. I would set on “save”. After one eat I waited a full three seconds and came up empty, too. Sean laughed - “that was too long.” Sean set us up on a really nice fish, even I could tell that it was a nice one, and I got it to eat three times and on the third eat I waited the exact right amount of time and set the hook and did not connect. Sean said, “maybe they’re learning to not get hooked.”
I did ultimately connect with and even land a few fish, and it was great. The fishing was great. Sean was great. And it was great to fish with my dad.
