Trout Fishing With Louie Scarlotto, A Wellspring Poem by Dennis Ryan

Trout Fishing With Louie Scarlotto, A Wellspring



Tuesday, April 6,2021

As a boy growing up in the Allegheny foothills of southwestern New York state, I would go trout fishing during the spring and summer with a local barber named Louie Scarlotto who was a friend of the family. My hometown of Wellsville was located in the Genesee River Valley, and there were streams running nearby, far and near across the county, tributaries a plenty of the Genesee River flowing together through Island Park into the middle of town at the West State Street bridge. Needless to say, we didn't have to venture far to find a trout stream, the closest one a mere ten-minute walk from the front door of my boyhood home, a stream flowing up and over a tiny dam and down a decline into a wide pool that we also swam in during July and August each year. This particular stream was called Dyke Creek, and it ran for miles through small county towns and hamlets like Andover and Elm Valley, finally flowing into the Genesee River on its journey north to Rochester where it emptied into Lake Ontario. At one time, Dyke Creek flowed under six bridges in Wellsville before making its way to Belmont and then farther north, flowing through Letchworth Gorge on its way to the great lake. But that was a long time ago.

If memory serves me, five of those bridges are still in use today though they need constant maintenance. I should know. I was part of a work crew for two summers in the early 1970's who maintained them, removing rust and defects, then repainting some of these bridges Those bridges.

Louie and I would start early. On fine-weather days. It would be crisp and cold and dark outside on such mornings at 6 a.m. when we would eat breakfast at Willie's Diner on South Main Street while deciding where to go fishing. Louie always treated me to breakfast, which was the first highlight of the day. Then we would drive to different fishing spots depending upon the week and location: Crider Creek in Whitesville one week, Trapping Brook the next, Dyke Creek just west of Andover the week following that. I have vivid memories of every location, and there were certain places in these streams where I planted myself just because of the look, a certain composite look: the water sparkling and rippling over rocks, stones, the sunlight on the foliage, the trout just visible under the surface. They were bountiful, but they tested one's patience: they fed for a short time only, during the mornings and evenings. (One's opportunity to catch them was time-limited. If one didn't catch them then, it rarely happened.) I remember best fishing mornings. I would stand on a stream edge, at the Crider, and wouldn't get a bite for maybe a half hour. Then the first trout would strike, then another and another, such strikes easing off to none after a half hour to forty-five minutes. If I was lucky, I would catch one, two brook trout, a larger brown trout on occasion, and on the rarer occasion a rainbow. Catching trout was a boy's dream.

Later, I would dream of the trout, the streams, the locations. I still do: I would be following the stream wherever it led, around a bend, the trout jumping and swimming. Around the bend. The trout. Their sides flashing. The tops of their backs, darker, skimming along just beneath the surface. The streams and the trout had become the portals of my boyish imagination: reality had been transformed into fantasy.

In the process, the natural world, the stream, its environs, became home. (A second home. A wellspring. A source of comfort, peace and solace.) It still is. And I had been gifted this by the kindnesses of one man. And other kindnesses followed—though I was too young at the time to fully appreciate them for what they were, for Mr. Scarlotto for who he was. He had a daughter, but no son. Many years later. A winter night upstate. Married, I went out to dinner with my family. We ate at a hometown restaurant that in its previous life had served as a pharmacy. My father's. Hall's Drugstore. (I had worked in that pharmacy for five or six years before going off to university, and knew its every nook and cranny, its every corner and crack. The pharmacy had been housed in one of the oldest buildings in town, its attic a treasure trove of antiques: hand-blown prescription bottles, old top hats,19th Century weights and measures, complete collections of Dickens and Thackeray.) At the front entrance, at a corner table, in flickering light, I glimpsed Louie! What luck! As I approached his table, he didn't seem to recognize me. So I introduced myself, and he finally said, 'Denny, is that you? ' in a faltering voice. We spoke briefly as he was with friends.

Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Topic(s) of this poem: time,memory,kindness,fishing,fantasy,real life,places,home,friendship,imagination
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
As the speaker notes, this prose poem is about kindness, fishing, time, memory and imagination.
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Dennis Ryan

Dennis Ryan

Wellsville, New York
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