June 4, 2010
Like just about everything else in the plant world this spring, the mountain laurel is blooming early, perhaps a week early. The delicate, cup-like blooms, white or pink, are just emerging and won’t peak for days, but the shrubs already are showy enough to grab your attention. I know this because I bushwhacked my way through a large colony of laurel Wednesday in the hills of northwestern Connecticut.
Laurel can be dense, and you don’t want to work your way through it any more than necessary. I wasn’t following a trail, and I wasn’t lost, but I made my way through much more laurel than I wanted to. Much more.

Dan Kupiec fishing a mountain brook in Connecticut for brook trout, a species native to the eastern U. S.
But I should start at the beginning.
Dan Kupiec, my neighbor and fishing buddy, called about noon. Did I want to fish for brook trout in the Litchfield Hills? A half-hour later we were traveling west on Route 44. Less than an hour after that we parked on a little roadside pull-over, put on our waders and headed up a mountain, following a brook.
It is not everybody’s cup of tea, but I discovered long ago that one of the great pleasures of fly-fishing is to ascend a mountain brook, flicking a fly into tiny pools, seeking native, wild brook trout. Brook trout in these streams are mostly small – sometimes but a few inches, often only 6- or 7-inches long – and consequently of little interest to many anglers. But they are beautiful fish, with fiery orange bellies and white at the tips of their lower fins. Among yellow and chartreuse dots on their sides are red dots surrounded by powder blue halos. Why evolution settled upon that exact pattern I can not be certain, but in the water they all but disappear and that likely is what it is all about. In any event, they are beautiful. To my mind brook trout are among the handsomest creatures in the animal kingdom. That they are found in mountain brooks only makes them more appealing; a beautiful creature in a beautiful setting. Winslow Homer painted scenes like this.
Dan and I fished and we fished, climbing steeply up the mountain toward a cascade with a big pool where we knew the fish might be bigger. But by the time we approached the pool, it was getting late. Worse, if we were to fish this pool we faced a tricky descent of about 200 feet down an extremely steep bank, then back up. Meanwhile, the trail had become indistinct. We decided to fish that pool another day. I was sure there was a better trail just south of us, so we decided to take that back to the car. It would be an easy downhill trek. We cut through the woods. But there was no trail where mister-know-it-all thought there was.
As I said, we were never lost. All we had to do was return to the brook and follow it back to the car, but that would be slow. Still, even if not lost, we were not, uhh, where I thought we would be either. We headed east, toward the car, blazing our own way, which, we discovered minutes later, was thick with laurel. What might have been a 15-minute walk became a half hour event pushing our way through thick shrubbery.
But we arrived at the car somehow unscratched, our water bottles empty. Dan had plenty of water in the car. Our laurel adventure notwithstanding, it had been a beautiful afternoon communing with the brook and its brook trout. We toasted the outing appropriately, sending mini-cascades of water tumbling down our throats.


