and reel was a major investment, and who damn well intended to eat what they caught. My long rod blank drew stares of disbelief. I tried to be inconspicuous. It wasn't until the third trip to the shop, when the winter flounder run was underway, that I heard the word "striper" mentioned. When the shop was empty I ventured a question. "Any stripers around here?" "Stripers? No, not yet. Too early." Silence. "Can one catch them around here,...........later?" "Oh hell yes, lots. But not for another two months. Won't see any stripers until April 15th. All over then." I went to the heart of it. "Is there someplace around here I would have a chance of catching one on a fly rod,...then?" "Well, I don't know anything about the fly rod business, but the guys get lots of schoolies right at the railroad bridge in Saugus come April 15th, using plugs." He held up a five inch blue and white bucktailed plug with dangling treble hooks. "Think they would hit a streamer?" He shrugged noncomittally, but did surrender the details of the location. We were talking about a spot not ten miles from the center of downtown Boston. You could reach it with public transportation. In fact, the commuter train serving the north shore communities WAS the "railroad bridge". Naturally I had to see the place, so the first nice day I drove over the Mystic bridge and up the parkway, paralleling the commuter route, turned off at the identified light, crossed the tracks, parked the car in the now slush covered impropmtu parking lot, and walked the tracks the 1/4 mile out onto marshflats to "the bridge". This was the place, huh? The Saugus river, namesake to the community of Saugus, now a borough of Boston proper, is a trickle barely recordable on maps, swallowed up by the industrial revolution and a hundred more years of development. Saugus itself had attracted and then entrapped Irish and Polish immigrants to cluster about the the clunking factories in inbred, ethnic ghettos for which Boston was famous. For many of the locals, high school graduation would be the high point of their public lives, and they would live and die within blocks of their birthplaces, tied to the factory and family. But, the rivers effluvial reality demanded
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