Trout Pond Family
Northern Maine pond at sunset.
One spring day many decades ago, Dad’s youngest brother and his fiancee came over from Edmundston, New Brunswick, to catch a mess of fish in our manmade pond.
We were a little anxious as this was the first time we were meeting Lorna—a dark-haired receptionist who worked in an optometrist office. As a city girl who spoke fluent French, would she fit in with our fish-loving family? Would she bait her own hook with a live worm or even like being on a potato farm?
Lorna, a few years after her fishing initiation.
Why keep a pond?
Dad had his pond dug some years before in the event of a fire breaking out in his 100-year-old connected barns. With no hydrants nearby, pond water could be easily pumped to the barns or any of the other nearby wooden buildings.
The Fred and Iris Russell farm, viewed from the pond.
No fires had required the assistance of the pond so far, but Dad had found another reason for keeping it. He called it his one and only hobby.
Fed by a spring and located in a cow pasture next to the woods, the pond was the perfect spot to maintain and fish speckled brook trout. Even though a pond was not good for spawning, young trout bought from a hatchery could grow and survive there with the right food and environment.
There were always a few wild trout in the brook nearby, but the conditions for catching them were sometimes primitive: mucky terrain that sucked at your boots and legs, thick brush to walk through, cedar roots ready to trip you into the muck, and clouds of bugs: black flies in spring and, later on, mosquitoes. In addition, a fisherman was not guaranteed he or she would catch enough brookies in several hours to feed a hungry family.
Eastern Brook Trout.
Where the pond was located, a breeze kept most bugs away, the ground was dry, and the hike from the pond to the farmhouse kitchen was relatively short.
Feeding his pets
Sometimes during work days when Dad had a few minutes to spare, he’d measure into a paper bag a pound or so of store-bought fish food pellets he kept in the garage. With the bag in one arm, he’d saunter across the field that ran parallel between the garage and the pasture. Standing on the pond’s bank, he’d grab a fistful of pellets and wing them across the water until scores of trout popped up, mouths open for the food, as their wiggling bodies sent frantic ripples and splashes and bubbles across the surface.
Iris Russell using two poles to hurry things up; a few trout eating pellets, lower right.
There was also another use for the food: luring trout to the bank. When we wanted to catch trout in a hurry, we’d throw handfuls of pellets out so that, whatever direction the wind was blowing, the food would float towards us. The trout, especially the younger ones, would follow the food near the shore near our baited hooks.
The initiation begins
With our fishing poles in hand, a bait box full of worms, and an empty, woven fish basket, Mom and Dad, David, Lorna, and I began our short hike to the pond. As we reached the pasture fence, Dad started pulling out a few boards so we could pass through. All of a sudden, Lorna ran ahead, placed one hand on top of the fence, and bolted over in one graceful move.
We cheered, and David smiled and laughed at his soon-to-be bride. It seemed like she wanted to prove that she could easily take on country life as well as the city.
Sunlight on the water.
Around the egg-shaped pond, sparkling in the sunlight like diamonds in a bowl, we each chose our spots so as not to entangle our lines. I stayed next to the woods, while Lorna and David went to the opposite shore, and my parents spread out in between.
Old enough to fish on my own, I took out one worm and threaded it onto my hook, pulled out some line, and cast it out as far as I could into the choppy waters filled with jumping fish.
Soon I felt a timid tug. I waited and then a second tug came with such urgency that I yanked the line, hook, and trout onto the bank beside me.
Lessons learned
I grabbed the slippery body, pulled out a small knife, and cut into the backbone right behind the head. Mom had taught me that killing them this way was quick…only she used her thumb, instead of a knife, and reached inside by the fish gills, snapping the spine.
A common pole and reel.
She also taught me how to save my bait. After catching a fish with a worm, I could take my thumb and place it under one of the now dead fish eyes, popping it out of the head and placing it onto my hook.
“Trout are like cannibals,” Mom said. “They love eating fish eyes even more than worms.”
Mom had caught brook trout since she was four or five. She would take a long stick, tie some string on one end and either a bent straight pin or a safety pin at the other end. She’d walk down the hill from her parents’ farm to Hacker Brook—the same brook that wandered around our farm—where the wild trout liked to hide under rocks or tree roots sticking out along the banks.
Fishing was ingrained in our DNA, I guess. It was just something we did, like breathing or eating. And we did love eating a good mess of trout.
Canada geese and various ducks also used the pond.
The rewards
Meanwhile, across the pond from my spot, Lorna laughed and chatted and caught several beauties—bigger than mine—with little effort. She wasn’t a bit squeamish taking them off the hook. She even used a worm as bait.
No wonder David loved her.
A mess of pond trout caught in the winter.
After catching enough for each person to eat at least two or more trout, ranging from 7 to 14 inches long, we walked back to the house with a full basket.
In the kitchen, Dad used a pair of scissors to gut the trout and cut off their heads. Their flesh was either pale white or salmon color. He said that the salmon color meant they were eating snails that lived on the bottom of the pond.
Grandson Fred Russell II and his catch.
Then Mom made two or three slits with a paring knife into the backbone of each trout. Because they were so fresh, if you tried to fry them normally, their tails and backs would curl up in the pan so they’d be harder to cook. If the spines were cut in several places, curling was less likely.
I dried off the washed fish with paper towels and then rolled them in corn meal and salt, making sure the inside parts were covered too. Placed in a fry pan sizzling with butter, a fish was done if you could easily flake the flesh on both sides with a fork—usually two or so minutes per side.
Green salad and baking soda biscuits rounded out the simple meal that night, with apple cobbler topped with whipped cream for dessert.
Lorna ate, with total enjoyment, as many fish as the men, and as much or more of the cobbler. She was not bashful about food, and she loved eating trout.
“There’s nothing wrong with her appetite,” David laughed.
Sunrise over New Brunswick hills and a frozen Maine pond.
So every year after that, David and Lorna, and eventually their little daughter, came over to fish the pond, catching a mess for supper. Like some other relatives and friends, and some of Dad’s potato customers, Lorna became part of the trout pond family.
It seemed like she was born for it.