How I Found Religion
Photos by Trish Romano.
In the spring of 1951, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. During the ceremony, the priest asked if I would forsake sin. I had no understanding of this, and did not reply, having been rudely pulled from my mother’s womb a short six months earlier. After my family agreed on my behalf, I wailed with displeasure when water was poured over my head.
Sometime in 1968, I picked up a copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Soon thereafter, I purchased a seven-foot, six-inch fiberglass rod built by the Fenwick Company. With many of the most prolific hatches occurring during Sunday services, I became a lapsed Catholic, my attendance dwindling to those Sundays before the start of trout season, beginning again after the season ended.
It wasn’t long before I reduced my church-going to Easter Sunday and Christmas, using the off-season for tying flies, mending waders, and pondering such metaphysical issues as whether to abandon fiberglass for bamboo and the wisdom of switching from saddle hackle to marabou, all the while brooding over those existential decisions involving additions to the plethora of paraphernalia necessary for fooling fish with pea-sized brains.
After reading Gary Snyder’s poems, I developed a passing interest in Buddhism. My interest heightened upon discovering the seventeenth-century, Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. His “Narrow Road to the Deep North” led me to the Buddhist monk, Han Shan. The name this Chinese poet gave to himself means Cold Mountain, which is where he spent the majority of his adult life, writing poems on rocks and leaves, many I’m sure, by the sides of free-flowing rills, the kind containing wild trout.
But unlike Paul, who found salvation on that now-famous road to Damascus, I discovered religion on Bonnie Brook, a small mountain stream where brook trout live secret lives in dark runs and bend pools, under fallen trees, and along undercut banks. By then, I’d read Harry Middleton’s The Earth is Enough, as well as his other autobiographical novels.
It was while reading On the Spine of Time, the late author’s ode to the Smoky Mountains that I learned of Arby Mulligan. As he’s described in the book, Arby had four teeth on top and two on the bottom. His green eyes were weak, requiring thick glasses. At least a week’s worth of beard swept across the Appalachian’s weathered face, his blond hair slicked straight back on a small head. According to Middleton, Arby Mulligan handed out cards to those he converted, welcoming them into his Church of Universal Harmony, but only after pouring an unsolicited tin cup of mountain water over their heads. Printed on the cards were the following words:
Arby G. Mulligan
Preaching Friar & Pulpiter & Dr. of Phrenology
Hang Dog Creek, N.C.
A man’s whole life is foretold upon the head’s terrain
Middleton wrote how Arby Mulligan was a bona fide phrenologist, known throughout the Ozarks for his ability to decode the lumps on his patients’ heads. In doing so, he was able to diagnose an ailment and at times provide a cure. This was all very interesting, but the Church of Universal Harmony is what really caught my attention.
Although Arby Mulligan retained a fly rod and a few flies, like the great prophets gone before him, he’d shed his other worldly possessions by the time Harry Middleton had met him.
According to Harry, Arby’s church’s motto was: “Everything Comes and Goes. It All Comes and Goes.” Members need only be doused with water from a mountain stream and “believe in doing man and earth as little harm as possible.”
Mulligan had explained to Middleton that he “couldn’t see the point of a religion in which you have to up and die before you get a chance to live. . . .” He said he differed with the minister of his local church with respect to “such issues as dancing, drinking, cussing, passion, trout fishing, harmless lying and such.” That’s when he decided to start his own church where “everything goes as long as it don’t harm anyone. And everyone is included.”
When Harry asked which way to heaven, Arby replied, “Follow the trail and keep close to the stream.”
I thought, Now, that’s a religion I can believe in!
In his book, Harry Middleton provides many selections from the gospel according to Arby Mulligan. Set forth below are a few of the more profound:
“Blessed be this cold mountain water. Taste it with thy lips. . . .”
“Come, brother, empty yourself until you’re as loose as a potato sack, then fill your skin with these mountains.”
“Give life the benefit of the doubt, and try not to cause any harm.”
One morning, not long after I read these passages, I decided to head over to Bonnie Brook. I slipped a small tin containing a few flies into the breast pocket of a lightweight shirt. From the corner by our front door, I grabbed the aluminum tube containing what by then had become my favorite fly rod, one constructed of cane by the late George Maurer, the same model the Pennsylvania rod maker built for Harry Middleton, and the one described in another of the author’s books, The Bright Country.
It was the last day of September, the water level quite low. Although the maples had yet to turn, creeping up the base of a tree, the leaves of a Virginia Creeper were burnt scarlet. The air was breathless as if waiting for the first storms of autumn to wash away the ennui. As I approached the brook, its current appeared reluctant to break the silence; the only sound was the tick of the occasional leaf fluttering listlessly toward the ground.
I spooked a trout in a long, narrow slough created when beavers dammed a bend in the narrow streamlet. Afterward, I spent the better part of that morning watching shadows streak upstream and down, failing to entice a single trout to the size 18 Black Ant pattern knotted to my 6X tippet.
I soon became discouraged, deciding to turn back toward my vehicle after only two hours. On the way downstream, I spied a rise and cast the ant. Bent forward in anticipation of a strike, I watched the pattern’s calftail post as the little ant drifted gently on the meager current. When the fish sucked it down, I set the hook, pulling back quickly. In doing so, I lost my balance. Afraid to put undue pressure on my bad knee, I fell forward. It was one of those slow-motion falls, the kind that only harms the ego. My body rolled on its side, hippers filling with water. The only article of clothing that remained dry was my wide-brimmed hat.
Raising one arm to protect the cane rod, I realized the fish was still on. I reeled in to discover a bewildered chub at the end of my line. Seated on a round rock, I detached the hook and slipped the fat-lipped fish back into the stream. Having been “doused with water from a mountain stream,” I expected to hear Arby Mulligan’s drawl, his few remaining teeth flashing a subversive grin. But the only sound came from a catbird tucked into the prickly branches of a barberry as it performed an aria of tweets, chirps, meows, clucks, and squawks, with a few musical notes mixed in for good measure.
Since that morning, I’ve tried to “follow the trail and keep close to the stream” while “doing man and earth as little harm as possible.” That’s all it takes to become a member of the Church of Universal Harmony.
“The Lord’s eye on it,” as Arby Mulligan might say.
Bob Romano’s latest book, River Flowers, is a collection of short stories about wild fish, the places they’re found, and the men and women who seek them out. For more information about his writing, visit his website, Forgotten Trout. This article first appeared in The Drake.
