Last Ghosts of the Penobscot
Atlantic salmon lived in my veins long before I ever met one personally. Growing up in West Yorkshire, England, I cast for trout in the dye-stained streams that flowed through the dark satanic mills of the dying textile industry, but salmon—those silver giants—lived in a dreamworld far out of my reach. Maybe it was the photos in Trout & Salmon, the gleam of fish on ice in the many fishmongers that lined Fish Street in Halifax, or Hugh Falkus whispering secrets via a grainy television. I couldn’t say. They just mattered.
In my 20s, I moved to New England. The land of cleaner rivers and colonial ghosts. I learned that salmon once ran thick up rivers like the Connecticut and Penobscot, so plentiful that mill workers had clauses in their contracts limiting how often they could be fed the stuff. That abundance vanished with dams and factories. Canada holds the last true runs now.
I dreamed of Gaspé and New Brunswick rivers, now only a drive away from my New Hampshire home. And then one day the phone rang.
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