Over the next two days I went up and down the creek like a purse seiner.
My total take was two small fish, and Cousin Edna was arriving on the following day. I had become a nine-year-old existentialist, abandoning all faith and hope, driving myself on armed only with simple defiance of despair.
First the fish had abandoned me, then God, and now, on the final day, even the sun had slipped behind the mountains, no doubt sniggering to itself.
Before me lay the bleakest, shallowest, most sterile part of the creek.
Never in my whole life had I caught a fish there, mostly because it would have been pointless to even try. The water rippled over a bed of white gravel without a single place of concealment for even the smallest trout. Well, possibly there was one place. A small log was buried in the gravel diagonally to the current, and I noticed that at the downstream tip of the log there appeared to be a slight pooling of water. I eased into the stream and crept up to the butt end of the log, whereupon I perceived that the gravel had been washed from under it to form a narrow trough of dark, still water. I lowered my last worm, a pale, haggard, well-traveled fellow, into this trough and let it drift along the log, bumping over gravel, into limbs and knots, until it stopped.
"Snagged!" I thought. Furious, I hauled back. My rod doubled over but the hook didn't come loose. Instead, the line began to cut a slow arc through the water, picked up speed, and then, exploding out onto the gravel bar, came what seemed to be a monstrous brook trout.
I cannot tell you how long the ensuing battle lasted because at my first glimpse of the fish, time ceased to exist, and the trout and I became a single pulsating spirit suspended in infinity. When at last we emerged into our separate identities, it was as victor and vanquished. In the dying light, the trout lay clamped between my aching knees on a white gravel beach, and I killed him with a sharp blow of a rock to the back of the head.
As he quivered into stillness, I was filled with unknown joy, unfamiliar sorrow. And I knew. I knew. Without the slightest doubt, I knew that under that same log, waiting in that watery darkness, was is twin.
Gently, I removed the hook from those great jaws, repairing the tatters of the heroic worm, threading them as best I could onto the hook, and made my way back to the log for a repeat performance. When you have a miracle going for you, you never want to waste any of it.
The dinner for Cousin Edna was a great success. When it was over and everyone had had his fill, there were still large sections of fried trout on the platter, which I suppose I need not tell you, was the humble fish plate.
"My heavens!" exclaimed Cousin Edna. "I just don't know when I've had a finer meal!"
"It's not over yet," said Gram. And then she served Cousin Edna a heaping bowl of wild strawberries that my sister had picked with her own little troll fingers.
The wild strawberries made Cousin Edna's eyes roll back in her head, they were so good. "Why, I hope you're not giving me all the strawberries," she said suddenly, noting our attentiveness.
"Land sakes," Gram said, "we have them so often we're tired of the little beggars." I looked at Gram in disbelief. It was the first time I'd ever heard her lie.
"We thought we would have some nice pudding instead," my mother said, passing around some bowls. I looked into mine.
"Hey," I said. "This looks like this smells like ..."
"Hush, dear," my mother said, her voice edged with granite. "And eat your pudding."
The Backpacker
Strange, the things that suddenly become fashionable. Take backpacking for instance.
I know people who five years ago had never climbed anything higher than a tall barstool. Now you can scarcely name a mountain within three hundred miles they haven't hoofed up in their Swiss-made waffle-stompers.
They used to complain about the hie price of sirloin steak. Now they complain about the price of beef jerky (which is about three times that of Maine lobster in Idaho).
Their backpacking is a refined sport, noted for lightness. The gear consists of such things as Silk packs, magnesium frames, dainty camp stoves.
Their sleeping bags are filled with the down Of unborn goose, their tents made of waterproof smoke. They carry two little packets from which they can spread out a nine course meal. One packet contains the food and the other a freeze-dried French chef.
Well, it wasn't like that back in the old days, before backpacking became fashionable. These late-corners don't know what real backpacking was like.
The rule of thumb for the old backpacking was that the weight of your pack should equal the weight of yourself and the kitchen range combined. just a casual glance at a full pack sitting on the floor could give you a double hernia and fuse four vertebrae. After carrying the pack all day, you had to remember to tie one leg to a tree before you dropped it. Otherwise, you would float off into space. The pack eliminated the need for any special kind of ground-gripping shoes, because your feet would sink a foot and a half into hard-packed earth, two inches into solid rock. Some of the new breed of backpackers occasionally wonder what caused a swath of fallen trees on the side of a mountain. That is where one of the old backpackers slipped off a trail with a full pack.
My packboard alone met the minimum weight requirement. It was a canvas and plywood model, surplus from the Second World War. These packboards apparently were designed with the idea that a number of them could be hooked together to make an emergency bridge for Sherman tanks. The first time you picked one up you thought maybe someone had forgotten to re move his tank.
My sleeping bag looked like a rolled-up mattress salvaged from a fire in a skid row hotel. Its filling was sawdust, horsehair, and No. 6 bird shot.
Some of today's backpackers tell me their sleeping bags are so light they scarcely know they're there. The only time I scarcely knew my sleeping bag was there was when I was in it at 2 A.m. on a cold night.
It was freckled from one end to the other with spark holes, a result of my efforts to stay close enough to the fire to keep warm. The only time I was halfway comfortable was when it was ablaze. It was the only sleeping bag I ever heard of which you could climb into in the evening with scarcely a mark on you and wake up in the morning bruised from head to toe. That was because two or three times a night my companions would take it upon themselves to jump up and stomp out my sleeping-bag fires-in their haste neglecting to first evacuate the occupant. Since I was the camp cook, I never knew whether they were attempting to save me from immolation or getting in a few last licks for what they thought might be terminal indigestion.
Our provisions were not distinguished by variety. Dehydrated foods were considered effeminate. A man could ruin his reputation for life by getting caught on a pack trip with a dried apple. if you wanted apples, brother, you carried them with the water still in them. No one could afford such delicacies as commercial beef jerky. What you carried was a huge slab of bacon. It was so big that if the butcher had left on the legs, it could have walked behind you on a leash.
A typical meal consisted of fried bacon, potatoes and onions fried in bacon grease, a pan of beans heated in bacon grease, bacon grease gravy, some bread fried in bacon grease, and cowboy coffee (made by boiling an old cowboy in bacon grease). After meals, indigestion went through our camp like a sow grizzly with a toothache. During the night coyotes sat in nervous silence on surrounding hills and listened to the mournful wailing from our camp.
There were a few bad things, too, about backpacking in the old style, but I loved all of it. I probably would never have thought of quitting if it hadn't been for all those geophysical changes that took place in the Western Hemisphere a few years ago.
The first thing I noticed was a distinct hardening of the earth. This occurred wherever I happened to spread out my sleeping bag so I knew that the condition was widespread. (Interestinglly enough, my children, lacking their father's scientific training, were unable to detect the phenomenon.) A short while later it became apparent to me that the nights in the mountains had become much
colder than any I could remember in the past.
The chill would sink its fangs into my bones in the pre-dawn hours and hang on like a terrier until the sun was high. I thought possibly that the drop in temperature was heralding a new ice age.
Well, I could put up with the hard and the cold but then the air started getting thinner. The only way you could get sufficient oxygen to lift a pack the size of an adolescent pachyderm was by gasping and wheezing. (Some of my wheezes were sufficient to strip small pine trees bare of their needles.) My trail speed became so slow it posed a dangerous threat to my person. If we were in fact at the onset of a new ice age, there was a good chance I might be overtaken and crushed by a glacier.
The final straw was the discovery that a trail I had traveled easily and often in my youth had undergone a remarkable transformation. In the intervening years since I had last hiked it, the damn thing had nearly doubled in length. I must admit that I was puzzled, since I didn't know that trails could stretch or grow. The fact that it now took me twice as long to hike it, however, simply did not allow for any other explanation. I asked a couple of older friends about it, and they said that they had seen the same thing happen. They said probably the earth shifted on its axis every once in a while and caused trails to stretch. I suggested that maybe that was also the cause for the ground getting harder, the nights colder, and the air thinner.
They said that sounded like a plausible theory to them. (My wife had another theory, but it was so wild and farfetched that I won't embarrass her by mentioning it here.) Anyway, one day last fall while I was sitting at home fretting about the environment, a couple of friends telephoned and invited me along on a pack trip they were taking into the Cascades. Both of them are of the new school of backpacking, and I thought I owed it to them to go along. They could profit considerably by watching an old trail hand in action.
When I saw the packs R. B. and Charley showed up with I almost had to laugh. Neither pack was large enough to carry much more than a cheese sandwich. I carried more bicarbonate of soda than they had food. I didn't know what they planned to sleep in, but it certainly couldn't be in those tidy little tote bags they had perched on top of their packs.
Anyway, I didn't say anything. I just smiled and got out my winch and they each got a pry pole and before you knew it we had my pack out of the car and on my shoulders. As we headed up the trail I knew it was going to be a rough trip. Already a few flakes of snow had fallen on my eyeballs.
The environment on that trip was even harsher than I had remembered.
The trails were steeper, the air thinner, the ground harder, the nights colder.
Even my trail speed was slower. Several porcupines shot past me like I was standing still.
R. B. and Charley showed obvious signs of relief when I made it into camp that first night.
"You probably thought I wouldn't make it with all the food," I chided them.
"No," R. B. said. "It was just that for a moment there we didn't recognize you. We thought we were being attacked by a giant snail."
I explained to them that we old-time backpackers made a practice of traveling the last mile or so on our hands and knees in order to give our feet a rest.
It was disgusting to see them sitting there so relaxed and cheerful after a hard day's hike. They didn't seem to have any notion at all what backpacking was about. I could hardly stand it when they whipped out a little stove and boiled up some dried chunks of leather and sponge for supper. It probably would have hurt their feelings if I had got out the slab of bacon, so I didn't mention it. I just smiled and ate their food--four helpings in fact--just to make my act convincing.
I never told them, but the Roast Baron of Beef was not quite rare enough for my taste and they had forgotten the cream sauce for the asparagus tips. And I have certainly tasted better Baked Alaska in my day, too.
Well, they can have their fashionable new-school backpacking if they want it. I'm sticking with the old way. Oh, I'm making a few concessions to a harsher environment, but that's all. When I got back from that trip, I did order a new pack frame. It was designed by nine aeronautical engineers, three metallurgists, and a witch doctor, and weighs slightly less than the down of a small thistle. My new sleeping bag weighs nine ounces, including the thermostatic controls. If I want to sleep in, my new cook kit gets up and puts on the coffee. Then I bought a few boxes of that dried leather and sponge. But that's all.
I'm certainly not going to be swept along on the tides of fashion.
Great Outdoor Gadgets Nobody Ever Invented
Thousands of anglers no doubt consider the electronic fish-finder one of the top five achievements of the twentieth century, probably just behind the spinning reel and Einstein's theory of relativity.
Personally, I feel the fish-finder is a nice enough gadget, but it is not high on my list of priorities for inventions needed to ease the lot of outdoorspersons. For some unknown reason, inventors specializing in hunting and fishing gadgets have never unleashed their ingenuity on the really tough problems plaguing men, women, and children who participate in outdoor sports.
After some thirty years of research on the subject, I now offer up to the inventors, without any hope or desire for recompense, my own list of inventions that nobody has yet invented.
There are any number of finders much more important than fish-finders, but I will mention only a couple of the more significant ones here.
Take the hunting-partner-finder, for instance. This would be used in situations where you have told your hunting partner, "I'll meet you at the top of that draw in an hour," and with malice aforethought, he immediately contrives to vanish from the face of the earth for the rest of the day. I have two ideas for this invention. One is simply a red balloon, attached to a quarter-mile length of string, that floats along above him. The other is a peanut-butter-seeking mechanical dog that will track him down and clamp a set of iron jaws on that portion of his anatomy adjacent to and slightly below the sack lunch he is carrying in his game pocket. Because you would merely have to stroll leisurely in the direction of the sound emanating from your hunting partner, this finder probably could be considered a sonar device.
Right at the top of my list of invention priorities is the mean-cow-finder. It would be used in this way. Say you want to fish a stream that winds through a cow pasture, which, as almost everyone knows, is the natural habitat of cows. A herd of the beasts will have taken up a good tactical position in the center of the pasture, enabling them to control all access routes to the stream and, more important, shut off the avenues of escape.
Now your average cow is a decent sort of animal, and I can put up with their mooing advice over my shoulder on how to improve my casting technique and choice of fly. I can even ignore their rather casual habits of personal hygiene, at least as long as they conduct their various indiscretions at a reasonable distance from where I am fishing.
The problem is that it is almost impossible to distinguish a peace-loving cow from a mean cow, the kind who would swim Lake Erie to get a shot at you. What I have in mind is a simple little electronic gadget that would beep or flash a red light if a herd contained a mean cow. The more elaborate models might have a needle that would point out the malicious beast and maybe even indicate her aggression quotient and rate of acceleration from a standing start. I and a thousand anglers like me would trade in our fish-finders for a mean-cow-finder in a second, or sooner, I bet.
There are numerous gadgets and concoctions on the market for attracting game. What I need is something to repel game. just last summer, for example, I could have made good use of a bear repellent. My wife and I were asleep in our tent in a remote area of Idaho when suddenly I awoke to the sound of the lid being ripped off our aluminum camp cooler.
"I think a bear just ripped the lid off our camp cooler," I hissed to my wife.
"I heard that," she replied sleepily. "I thought it was you in a hurry to find your pain-killer."
"Very funny," I said, hopping around in the da
rk in an effort to get my pants on. "Hand me the flashlight. I'm going out there and run the beggar off."
I unzipped the tent flap and switched on the flashlight. There in the beam stood a bear approximately the size of a boxcar; he was making a sandwich out of the camp cooler and appeared somewhat displeased at the interruption.
A Fine & Pleasant Misery Page 8