Dreaming …

Happy spring everybody! For sure you’ve been getting prepared for an upcoming fishing trip, getting your gear straightened out, and probably hitting some of your local waters when time allows. As we earnestly get ready for yet another fishing season in the north country, we inevitably think about some of the anglers that took early season trips to Tall Timber and Pittsburg. Many are no longer with us, but maybe they still are at times …

Our family has owned and operated Tall Timber for forty years now, and we’ve been fortunate to have become friends with many people that loved fishing the waters up here as much as we have. Whether it was trolling Back Lake for trout or the Connecticut Lakes for salmon, or maintaining your balance in the rushing waters of the Connecticut River in pursuit of smelt chasing landlocks, springtime was always a great time to be on the water to get the season off on the right foot.

It’s not always easy at this time of year, however. Frigid lake and river water temperatures, a freak May snowstorm, or even a May heatwave that brings the first swarm of black flies – all of these occurrences can contribute to a less-than-stellar day of angling in the early season. But when it’s right, it can be memorable, and one of our since passed guests that loved this time of year was R.K. Puttkamer – “Putt” as we all came to know him.

Putt would visit us throughout the season, but his primary place of angling residence was Grand Lake Stream in Maine for many years, where he pursued the local salmon and brook trout with abandon. In his later years, Putt moved west to harass the trout in Washington state, Montana and Idaho, and I’m sure there are places I’m not thinking of.

We received a nice remembrance of Putt recently from one of his longtime fishing and work brothers, Peter Mehegan. Peter’s reminiscence of his friend is something that many of us have probably experienced, and we thought it too good not to pass along to our readers that might recall similar things happening to them.

Naples, Florida.

I fished the Cape ponds with Putt last night.

How can that be those who knew him might ask? For Putt, Richard K Puttkamer, has been dead these ten years!

I pulled the trip off with Putt in a dream, those sometimes terrifying, occasionally magical interludes we have in sleep when occasionally departed loved ones appear to us again, if not in the flesh, in joltingly realistic form that can be sad or in this case,  the kind of fishing fun we had for decades.

Some in our TU chapter knew Putt, a long time television director of the news on WCVB,  Boston. He was the master of his electronic realm calling the shots for Cape Codder Tom Ellis and colleagues Natalie Jacobsen and Chet Curtis. 

That was his work life. But his true love was fly fishing and above all the sharing of the sport, introducing scores of colleagues including yours truly to the joys of hooking landlocked salmon on the Downeast rivers and lakes of Maine, and pursuing brook trout on the Cape when the autumn leaves were ablaze with color.

Putt was a wordsmith too, distributing a yearly spring journal for the sizeable band of followers he would bring to Maine every May in a run down deer camp in the remote village of Codyville.  It was a witty treasure trove of advice, from avoiding the moose on foggy Route 6 to packing flies that worked for salmon although he would admit “that most will be caught on the Black Ghost.”

On Grand Lake Stream, he was an effortless fly caster with an uncanny knack of finding fish when all around him were going fishless. When I landed my first salmon, fly line tangled all over me, Putt snapped a picture, a grin from ear to ear, prouder than I was myself. Some years later, we committed Putt’s ashes to that same swift running Maine waterway, his bier a raft of birch bark, floating out of sight toward the Atlantic.

And so this week our friend was heard from again, in that glorious dream, somewhere on the Cape, our merry band casting for trout, sharing smoked salmon and crackers on the shore, laughing, joking, as it had always been. I woke with a smile, my wife wondering what was so amusing?

 “Putt was back,” I told her, and so he was.

Peter Mehegan

Many thanks to Peter for sharing his beautiful remembrance of Putt. If only we were all so fortunate to have each of our friends and loved ones live on in our dreams from time to time.