by Ron Carlson
La played the piano and sang a long song about wind and vistas. I liked being reminded of these larger distances, the broad basin of eastern Utah, the Uinta Mountains, the only range in the United States of America that runs east and west, a genuine Continental Divide spoiler. The only thing about La’s song that nagged at me was the reference to the future in every chorus. The future; life goes on and we get an opportunity to make the same mistakes twice.
When Eldon and I rose to leave, it was dark. Nighthorse came out to the car and handed Eldon and me white envelopes. There were four flies in each. They looked like pheasant feathers. “Thanks,” he said. He sealed my fingers shut again with his handshake.
Eldon put his helmet back on. We’ll see you at the races. We’ll be the men with the moustaches in number eighty-eight.”
43
Like any stock car, Eldon’s Valiant high-centered three times on the high switch-backs of the logging road that led us finally into a clearing about midnight. On the way up we listened to a radio drama which was about marriage and embezzlement, and to the news of circus animals biting people in the Denver airport. It is hard to believe there are no more circus trains to derail, allowing people to run from lions in the streets of their neighborhoods. Now it all happens at airports. It was fitting that we should high-center; we were cruising around the Uinta Mountains at about twelve thousand feet. I’d get out and rock the car while Eldon gunned it on the forward tilt, and the Valiant would slough off the center hump in the old road leaving a scar and a smear of oil.
Finally Eldon stopped the car in an opening in the trees. The clearing was an old log-loading station. A tremendous ancient scaffold leaned to the moon, and the whole area was cushioned by sawdust. The trees here were all new, about seven-feet tall. Eldon built one of his small fires—“Not enough light to get shot by, hell, this is Indian country”—and we had a camp. I erected a clothesline, and hung a towel on it. It looked good hanging there in firelight. The air was cold as stars, but I knew I had to sit up awhile and read the papers and have vermouth. Some things have to be done right.
I selected the latest, the top of the stack, the Duchesne Register, and sat near the fire, bottle by the neck, reading the set type of yesterday’s news. Eldon was in his bag. He turned over and leaned against his helmet as a pillow.
I read the rodeo standings. A guy named Regan Vanderwoeden was in all around first. His calf-roping time was 7.1 seconds which I recognized as exactly how long coitus lasts between undergraduates. There was a photo of Vanderwoeden flipping a pained calf. This is when the goddamned paper caught fire, the fire surprising me with its large orange bites, and I hopped up, spilling the vermouth, and bunched the paper in a still-burning wad. Vanderwoeden and calf were smoke now, and I threw the whole bunch on the fire as I backed away. The flare woke Eldon who turned, his face white in the light, and said, “Oh, arson, now eh?”
Christ, you can’t even read the papers. I climbed into the sleeping bag … And in my old sleeping bag, a good sleeping bag of canvas with a flannel liner adorned with a wallpaper pattern of bears and turkeys not a speck of down or nylon near me, I felt pretty good. The air was sharp, but the smell of sawdust soft, and the brook fell beneath me. I thought I’d seen Vanderwoeden before. I think he worked with Panghurst in plates at the prison.
44
In the still, cold of the morning, I opened my eyes and between two trees caught the aerial photograph of the Great Basin sweeping purple and green in first light to the horizon and the first little steps of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. There was one cloud in a holding pattern over the tiny cluster of Roosevelt.
I sat up in the sleeping bag and righted the picture. Eldon was boiling coffee to a brown foam in a dented tin pan. I would catch fish today, and things, if not resolved, would at least be better. Eldon fried some eggs and Spam which we ate, sopping the grease with hard rolls.
“Our appointment with Nicky and the law is tomorrow at noon, so let’s get going. It isn’t a whole lot of solace, but it beats going to the dentist.”
“I’m ready, I’m ready.”
“Don’t you want me to pan fry a few flapjacks so you can construct onion sandwiches and fold them in your shirt pockets for lunch?”
“Enough Eldon. I’m ready to catch three fish to your one. We may have read the same books, but I can see we came away with different things.” I set the last section in the pole he loaned me, lined it, tied the hook on, and snagged it back through onto the reel. We had belt cans for worms and I had Nighthorse’s flies in my pocket.
“Okay, Young Boosinger. The fishing is up and over from here.” He pointed. “Don’t go out of the timber. The two streams run fairly parallel.” He went on with his plans and verbal mappery, and we made arrangements to meet at a mythical spot he described on the far stream where three trees had fallen across. As I nodded “Yeah, okay,” I knew I wouldn’t be able to find it.
Eldon cut across then to intersect and fish up the Iron Fork. I walked around the camp for a while, savoring our little household in the forest, the sleeping bags, the rocks ringing the ashes, the clothesline, the empty cans. I drank the rest of the coffee, cold, right out of the pan, slopping a stripe down the front of my shirt, and began hiking straight up, saving the stream as long as I could.
Over the knoll above our camp, I entered the lost dead forest where the loggers had harvested every stick to timberline years ago, and I dodged the stumps in the gray land for about a mile, gradually ascending. It was eerie and good, and if it weren’t for the massive wreckage, I would have sworn no men had ever been there before. In front of me ten miles I could see the bald noggin of Mount Gilbert bossing the other mountains around.
Colorado shimmered for me every time I turned around. Breathing became a campaign issue. I stopped and sat on one of the dry stumps, and took the packet of flies out of my pocket and examined them. They appeared the same, but looking closer I could see Nighthorse had made the eyes different colors. Maybe he was an Indian after all.
Finally, a breath for every step, I moved into the glowing forest, shade bright as air, floor soft as sawdust. I began climbing to my right through the widely spaced pines and rose up over a hummock. It was good to be the first man in the world again, and as I walked through each new room in the forest my reserves swelled.
Beside a boulder the size of a semitrailer on the hilltop I could see my stream drawing the silver line for its little valley. Walking, sliding, down the slope, the needles four thousand deep and golden under my feet, cushioning each footfall, the air slanted up now into my head, and I walked easily by the ninety-ton boulders, the furniture of the high woods. I passed through one grove of high pines and boulders, the trees not branching for seventy feet, the gray solemn rocks all square as houses, their shadows the size of European countries.
45
I first learned the value of being lost in the woods from my father near Spirit Lake on the other side of the Uinta Primitive Area. When I was eight we’d tour the lake in a rowboat, hunched in huge coats, sucking on lemon drops and fishing. He used two hooks and would catch one trout then wait to say anything until he had the second one swimming on the line and then say “Oh, oh.” That was his signal, a soft: “Oh, oh, Larry.” And he’d bring two amazed trout up to my amazed net. “You’re not kidding anybody by only using one hook.”
We’d limit early in the afternoon; he always let me catch my own fish. Then after cleaning them, we’d hike to one of the small upper lakes. It would rain every day at four as the new shipment of clouds ran aground on mountains higher than they’d anticipated, and my father and I would hunker in the pines looking at our pocket knives.
One year there was a sheepherder on the last meadow on the top of the upper rivulet of the Black’s Fork, and we spent the rainstorms with him in his tiny wagon which smelled of blankets. He talked the whole time it rained about the Jolly Roger in Evanston, an odd hotel. When we left, we hiked for two hours along the stream, teasing the small native trout
with worms larger than themselves. Finally my father said not to worry about the sheepherder, that he was only lonely, and we walked out onto the last lake plateau, above the clouds. There was not a fish in the lake, and we walked around it slowly looking at the magnified rocks in the bottom, so recently released from ice. There was rock snow at the upper end, not a tree within a mile and the vast rocky talus amphitheatre of Mount Warren, not a single fan in the four million seats.
He always made sure we were “lost” on the way down, leaving the stream to follow a ridge that became two as the trees thickened, then two more, multiplying into a dozen alluvial toes. “Oh, oh, Larry,” he’d say, “we’re lost.” The sun would be behind Warren now, two hours of daylight remaining. “I’ll follow you out.” Then I’d take him up and down the ridges, surprising the small deer asleep beside damp logs, once in a while noting an eagle gliding below us, until we came to where the stream should have been. It would’ve moved by then, and that is when I was lost. My mistake would seem ominous. My father would walk us down the vale fifty yards to a trail, finding an Old Timer pocket knife once, and in three minutes we’d be walking down the safe, known corridor of the stream, pausing at the pools to argue about which side to fish since it was twilight and shadows were not a factor. We’d debate for three minutes and then he’d drop a line in his side and pull a flipping fingerling right out. It was always as if he had a deal in advance with the little fish. Once in a while I’d step on the grassy bank only to find my foot falling right through the overhang into the water. We’d walk into camp at the stroke of dark; I was always wet to the waist. He’d hang my trousers on the clothesline, fry the trout which I’d eat with my fingers, the oil healing every scratch on my hands.
46
I stepped up to this stream as it flowed across a meadow full of wild iris spears and skunk cabbage. It was wide and even here, rocky and shallow, so I moved up along the soft bank to a rock the size of a taxi-cab which was parked strategically enough to send the water back and around, forming a small pool.
I quickly hooked two ten-inch Rainbows out of the pond now, and placed them in my creel. The bottom of my creel was still lined with paper clips and ball-point pens. Red ones. The residue of my scrape with teaching. I’d given marks with those pens. I tapped the final shudder out of each fish with the side of my Forest Master pocket knife and laid them in the creel with three wet iris leaves. I wasted twenty more minutes at the pond being toyed with by some creature who left only minute teeth marks on the worm.
Upstream the ponds were spaced every thirty yards or so, knots in the rope of the river, a dozen trout tied up in each. I had six when I came to a larger pool which faced against one sheer rock cliff, and caught Sammy’s young nephew napping in the shade. When I saw the two-pounder, I knew his father had to be right above. The stream, however, moved into the walls of rock forty feet tall, and I had to back down and hike around and above almost a mile where it entered this canyon. It was dark in there and I wanted those fish. I crossed the stream four times trying to wish my way in. Finally I stood on a skull-size rock in the center of the stream and peered into the cave which narrowed at its top to about the wingspan of a crow.
The sun was speaking directly to all concerned from its perch in October, and I could feel the hair on my arms blonding. This is life on earth, I thought, for which I have perhaps too great an affection. In a month in the city a haze which will want to become frost will halo every streetlamp above the heads of football players as they walk home in the dusk. Now at 10:00 A.M. on the edge of the world, it was hot. I rolled my sleeves another turn. Wearing clothes, khakis dried to their righteous stiffness on the line, oxford cloth shirts, walking around the planet, avoiding prison in its deadly mediocrity by keeping good company and commiting simple deeds that reside between the legal margins: I want these things.
I was climbing above the narrow chasm through which the water streamed. When I reached the top and caught my wispy breath, I could again see the United States flying over the edge to the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Most of the abyss, that opened on the stream fifty or sixty feet below, was narrow enough to jump across. I was on a broad shadeless rock shelf. Following the edge I came to a point where it opened. I looked down at the stream. It widened, too, in the pool I’d been searching, an apartment house for big trout. I lay on my stomach and stared down through the smooth water to four shadows on the bottom. I always see the shadows, but can never see the fish. Riddel had taught me a name for this phenomena in philosophy. It was one of the fideists’ central proofs for the existence of God. You can see the shadow and not the thing. Watching the immobile shadows, each the size and shape of the football that rested now behind the seat of my truck, it was proof enough for me. The sun clipped only half the pool, so I knew there must be about twelve fish sleeping below me.
I tied on a size larger hook, and threaded a fat worm over the barb, crimped a two-ounce sinker two feet up the line, above the leader, and lowered the line fifty feet and eased it into the water. I measured the depth as best I could to be about five or six feet, and watched the sinker raise a dash of sand off the bottom. The worm swam up, off the bottom, and began mingling with the shadows. I hoped they were fish. Philosophy only tells us that they might be.
I baked for a while lying on the rock shelf, staring down. Time to angle, I thought. I am now going to angle. I drew the pole a foot upstream and saw the sinker drag up a little sand on the bottom, and then without seeing a thing, I felt the pole buckle in an arc which should have snapped it. The shadows were gone, which according to philosophy means “fish on!” The line ripped its razor rip around the pool once and then I did see a tail tap the surface and splash downstream. I stretched my neck over the edge watching the line move to forty-five degrees as the fish carried the hook down, until I felt myself slipping, both arms paddling air. Whoa! I grabbed the pole again and moved back by knee-power.
I jumped up then and walked the tense pole down the crevice, feeling all the while the strong, even pressure of the fish as he took line off the drag release. It was too big a fish to go very far in this stream. Like people in cities who eat themselves into their apartments, becoming too large to ever exit again, these fish had come upstream in their younger, leaner days, had eaten eighty billion mosquitoes, and now they lived leisurely lives of retired gentlefish grazing in the two or three pools large enough for them.
This particular monster dragged me down the rocky steps with a force that made me question his age. I clambered down, following the pole, like a man carrying a safe; the choices were not mine. When I reached the last rock and stepped again into the woods above the meadow, I felt the confusing slackness, and reeled in until the pressure took line again, this time upstream. Climbing up again was nasty acrobatics. I tried to keep the pole over the stream and the line away from the sharp rock wall. He toured me, as I knew he would, right back to the hole where he had bit the hook, but I still couldn’t see him. He continued upstream a ways as far as I can tell, because just as the line began to slant that way, I felt the electricity go off, and my line tailed up to me like a strand of hair.
It had sawed off on the rocks.
Examining it closely did not make me feel like an expert, nor did it make me feel any better. I looked back down at the water. The sun had moved and more of the ravine was in darkness, but I could see three shadows returned to their niches, like gems in a setting, fixed on the bottom.
“Wait here,” I said straight down to them.
To seal the promise I knelt and laid one of Nighthorse’s flies on the rock shelf; I would be back.
I walked up the rock sidewalk. At the first convenient spot, a place where the stream came out of another brief meadow, I collapsed on the bank and lowered my face to the water’s surface. I drew two long draughts of the cold water, then dunked my whole head and drank off the bottom. It was headache cold, and revived my competitive spirit. I would live.
Glancing again at the sun, that mad traveler, I noted that
I had time to net three more before climbing the hill that separated Eldon’s endeavors from my own. I stood up, reconsidered, and knelt to drink again.
The water cycle, like all cycles, amazes me, and I was glad to my arteries that this water had evaporated from San Francisco Bay, sailed east, fallen as snow during the Viet Nam war, and now an eon of melting later, filtered through these woods right into my mouth. It helped.
I fished two more holes above the meadow, not fooling around, setting the hook hard and taking the fish five or ten seconds after the strike right out of the water and introducing them to air, bright ungillable air. They were the same size as the others I’d caught below, and I laid them in the creel. When I had the second one, I wet my hair again, and crossed the stream, and climbed the hill hoping to catch sight of Eldon’s red hat.
From the ridge I saw nothing. I climbed the next, sweating now in light that suddenly became slanted into afternoon. The third ridge revealed the Iron Fork. Upstream half a mile I found the unmistakable landmark of the three fallen trees that formed a substantial bridge. I couldn’t see Eldon, but when I tied my creel to a limb under the bridge so it would depend into the water, I saw his gill line. There were six fish on it; we’d tied. Knowing then that Eldon had to be watching me, I remounted the bridge, sat down and lit a cigarette.
“Come out of the woods whenever you find it convenient, you wonderful, wily, sneaky Indianlike veteran. My blood deep sixth sense tells me you’re lost in your own primitive metaphors.”
“You mean you want lunch, right?” Eldon called down from his platform hideaway in a tree. It took me a full minute to spot him.
“Trees,” I said.
“Right this way, bub.” He jumped down and led me to a shady grassy part of the bank above the bridge where a miniscule fire was about to go out. He stoked it and fried the two fish he’d been hiding, the two that put him ahead of me. When they began to fall apart on the flat tin he used as a pan, he handed me one on a pine slab, and I sliced two thick pieces of cheese.