demanded an outlet, which, with the addition of the infinitely greater tidal flow penetrating its watershed, created a wide, brown, rich, oozy tide marsh and estuary that split the factories and tenements to the limit of sight inland to the east. The whole flow was channeled through and under a low, piling supported, commuter railroad bridge, surging both ways with the tide, then wide again seaward, turning northward in an S curve to dump into the north reaches of Cape Cod Bay. That day in February when I first saw it, the outflowing tide carrying ice floes churned and swirled between the supporting pilings, then slowed into circling backeddies around mud and sandbars. Even in the frozen air, it smelled rich and alive. I could imagine fish lurking under and below the pilings, crashing baitfish drained through the emptying estuary. It was both an anomalie and a find. I sat down and just watched the water for awhile, my mind taking flights of fishing fancy. One could, in the same thought, envision the Saugus river, within a mile of where I sat, channeled through culverts and chemically sterilized, and alternately, 300 years ago, supporting its own modest run of atlantic salmon, and even 100 years ago, perhaps some salters, a sea-run brook trout similar in lifestyle to a sea-run cutthroat. The longer reaches of the Boston and Maine Railroad, which thundered across the bridge behind me, carried to Portland and eventually Bangor, Maine, and was THE access route for the movers and shakers of America from the 1920's until the war, bankers and railroad barons and Wall Street dons, travelling north in style to the salmon camps of Maine and New Brunswick. The authors of nearly all the classic american books on atlantic salmon fishing had probably crossed over this bridge. I was, depending on the fish, either 300 years or 100 years too late or two months too early. Timing is, in the final analysis, everything. Through the rest of the winter and early spring, I found myself drawn back to that bridge on a near weekly basis. Obsessions are, after all, best realized in the eddy of the mind. As soon as the ice floes melted, I brought my new rod with a shooting head and tested the depth and swing of the channel below the bridge, or alternately, the bay above if the tide was coming in. After all, as the best books noted, there are always a few stripers that simply do not conform, that hole up and winter over in northern rivers and estuaries rather than migrate back down to the Hudson river or Chesapeake Bay. Surely there COULD be a few here, I rationalized each trip over the Mystic bridge. If any did stay in the Saugus, I never saw them. But by April 1st I had explored every fishable inch of the estuary up and down from the bridge, tested the depth of the channels during all stages of both ingoing and outgoing tides, categorized the baitfish which were present, balanced my leaders and shooting heads, and tied many representative streamers. If one has only one or two senses turned on, one's time is never
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