by Ian Frazier
Or for variety I go to my second-favorite spot, which is a twenty-minute drive. The river here is broader, with brushy banks and shallow places favored by fishing birds. Sometimes just at last light I see the resident osprey laboring into the sky with a still-wriggling whitefish in his talons. Almost always I see a kingfisher, who polices the place with irritable authority. One evening a tall heron glided to the water about forty yards up from me and then stood by the bank so still I had to keep readjusting my eyes in the growing gloom to determine if he was there. The kingfisher came arrowing along the shoreline, saw the heron, and made a screeching halt in midair. Then he flew back and forth, chattering like mad around the larger bird, fluttering and scolding over the water until any fish in the neighborhood must have been scared off. For many minutes the heron continued not to move; then, realizing that there was no longer any point, he unfurled his capelike wings and flew away.
Certain kinds of insects, too, like the shallow, riffly water here. At full dark thousands of caddis flies start to move upstream, gusting in feathery hordes against my face and hands when I turn on my flashlight to change a fly. Bats swoop through this bonanza in a delirium of gluttony. In mid-August, large hatches of a nighttime mayfly called the pale evening dun begin to appear. When these chalk-white insects are on the water the trout will keep feeding even on the darkest nights. I caught one of my biggest after-dark fish at this spot late one night on a fly that imitates a pale evening dun. I was standing a few feet from the bank when I heard some rises near a log barely a rod’s length away. I cast blind, heard the sound again, lifted the rod tip, and the hooked rainbow trout came leaping through the air head over tail and almost down the front of my waders. Then he took off downstream, unwinding line like a kite disappearing in the sky. An unknown length of time later I scooped him into my net, which he stuck out of. I often let fish go, but this one I took home and sautéed in butter, lemon, pepper, and salt the next evening.
On one side of the river by this spot is a busy road. Just beyond the line of brush, pavement begins. Especially on weekend date-nights, many cars speed by with a heightened urgency, their stereo speakers throbbing like accelerated heartbeats. At about midnight, though, the cars become fewer, the heartbeats fade, and a general sense of deflation and too-lateness sets in. By now everyone who went out this evening, including me, has either gotten what they wanted or not. The fish have quit rising, and I stand in the river for a long time, not ever bothering to cast. An owl hoots a time or two. I turn on my flashlight to check my watch, and on the opposite bank a coyote immediately barks in surprise. I make one last try for a fish I heard rising earlier by a gravel bar, and the spark of my hook on a stone shows me how off target I am.
There’s an accumulation of mist in the alfalfa field across the river, and the faint turning fans of irrigation sprinklers. The last flight of the night, Northwest Airlines from Minneapolis-St. Paul, descends toward the airport to the west. I start thinking of distant friends I could not live without. The unromantically lonely hours of the night are up ahead, and I’m ready to go home.
(2000)
THE GREAT INDOORS
I used to have an idea of myself as a person who never came inside. I thought I was someone of no fixed address, at large, free—spiritual kin to Jim Bridger, the famous mountain man who was said to have gone seventeen years without once sleeping between sheets or tasting white bread. This was, of course, a fantasy. Actually, I spent a lot of time hanging out in basements listening to records like everybody else. I didn’t understand that my mostly indoor existence was defined by a hard law of nature, one I have only recently grasped. It is the law that says: Everyone who is outside eventually must come indoors. You have no choice and there are no exceptions; the indoor world will get us all. Jim Bridger himself spent his later years rocking by the fireplace in a community of other retired mountain men in Westport, Missouri. Furthermore—and I might have glimpsed this, too, if I had taken off the headphones and looked closely at the particular basement where I was sitting—the law says that when an outdoor guy, real or self-imagined, finally does come inside, the result, almost always, is household turmoil.
For many years I lived surrounded by such disorder that it made people seasick to look at it. Sometimes I wondered idly why I couldn’t seem to live any other way. Why, for example, were there always big black plastic sacks full of paint chips, relics of some abandoned renovation project, in a corner by my television? Why were there duck decoys on my bureau, and a pair of chest waders hanging from an overhead pipe like the lower part of a hanged man, and an old wooden bookcase with nothing in it but birdshot a friend and I fired into it one night with my 20-gauge, leaving it a sorry, shot-up hulk at the far end of the living room? The simple answer, which I did not know then, was that guys who think of themselves as Jim Bridger are always going to have dwellings that look like mine.
I kept that stuff around because deep down I liked it, uncomfortable and off-putting to guests though it was. I even became kind of a connoisseur of decorating schemes that brought the outdoors indoors—what you might call the Jim Bridger school of interior decor. Friends who visited my first apartment recall the shriveled dead bat that hung from the light pull in my bathroom, but that was really only a sketch of the form’s possibilities. Big items, especially those involving large animals and cars, made a stronger statement; I admired saddle blankets drying on a friend’s radiator, jars of Bag Balm and stacked-up cases of motor oil in someone’s dining room, carburetor parts soaking in plastic tubs of cleaning fluid on a neighbor’s kitchen counter. Not long ago, at the house of a friend who is far more Jim Bridger than I, I saw a design innovation that left me in awe. The mirror in this friend’s bathroom had come loose from the wall, and rather than trying to affix it again to the crumbling plaster, he had attached the clamps of a set of automobile jumper cables to each of the mirror’s top corners, and had nailed the cables to the ceiling with U-shaped fence staples. The mirror now hung level at its former position, swaying slightly, held by the bright copper of the jumper-cable clamps, the red cable leading upward on one side, the black cable on the other—a perfection of modern-day Jim Bridger design.
The reason turmoil follows outdoor guys when they come indoors is that the two worlds are deeply at odds. Indoors and outdoors are enemies that coexist, uneasily, but are never reconciled. Perhaps you’ve noticed that nowadays, regardless of the weather, many cars on the road have their windows rolled up all the way. Many people today live entirely in sealed-up, climate-controlled spaces, from home to work to gym to mall. Sometimes when I walk in the densely populated New Jersey suburb where I now live—on Christmas Day, for example, when everyone is inside playing with their new electronic toys—I feel as if the sky and the crows and the roadside weeds and I are part of an invisible, abstract dimension of no present use to man. The fact that the outdoors will always be so much bigger no matter how the indoors replicates itself adds a sense of desperation to our sealing-up and walling-in, as if at any little tear in the fabric the whole indoor enterprise will give way.
And when the tears in the fabric do appear, often they take the shape of a person coming indoors after weeks or months outside. The tears often have their own sound. It is the sound of the zipping and unzipping of zippers. Those high-pitched, insistent, drawn-out zi-i-i-ps cutting through the indoor quiet are the first warning signs. Then the zipping pauses, temporarily, because the person who is about to leave has finished packing; then the door opens and shuts, the lock clicks, and there follows a silence lasting a long while. Then the lock clicks, the door opens, the backpacks and duffel bags drop on the floor, and not long after that, you hear the zipping again. Zip! The musty sleeping bag is strewn open to air across the back of the sofa. Zip! The wet tent fly is spread from chair to chair. Zip! A whole bunch of miscellaneous gear—wet socks, too-large hunting knife in handmade wooden scabbard, extra bootlaces, plastic plates still covered with an orange film of spaghetti sauce that camp washing couldn’t
remove—rolls onto the linoleum. Suddenly those nubby little ends of pine branches that collect in the corners of tent floors are all over the place. Chaos has arrived.
Once, at a dinner whose circumstances were too fleeting and complicated to describe, I happened to sit next to the actor Dennis Hopper. Whatever my actual opinion of specific famous people may be, when I’m in their presence I always lose my head and say ridiculous things. Early in the conversation with Dennis Hopper I told him I was working on the script of a movie in which he would be perfect for the starring role—a complete lie that came out of my mouth with no assistance from me. I have blurred out the rest of what we talked about, except for two pieces of information Dennis Hopper conveyed to me. One, he told me that he was related somehow to Daniel Boone, the famous frontiersman; and two, he said that Daniel Boone, despite his outdoor image, was also a skilled carpenter who invented the built-in closet. Before Daniel Boone, Dennis Hopper said, built-in closets didn’t exist, and people kept their clothes in freestanding armoires.
I believed Dennis Hopper unquestioningly. Daniel Boone, inventor of the closet: it makes perfect sense. Of course America’s original outdoor guy would create that important piece of indoor architecture. Without closets, outdoor guys could never have come indoors at all. We’d have had to keep them and their stuff in some rude structure out in the yard by the corncrib and the barn. The guy himself, all smoky and tallow-smeared and unpresentable, is bad enough; far worse, from the point of view of proliferating chaos, is his stuff. What to do with the powder horn, jar of foul-smelling trap bait, bullet molds, inflatable India-rubber pillow, small foot-shaped stones ideal for heating and dropping inside wet boots, and on and on multiplied indefinitely? Into Mr. Boone’s convenient closet with it all! Dump all the stuff every which way, not even taking the old worms off the fishing hooks; then close the door and forget about it! Your descendants will thank you, Dan’l, and henceforth will honor this tradition always.
Once the stuff has been disposed of, the outdoor guy himself is easier to manage. A little hosing off, a quick dusting with louse powder, and civilization can go on. The sixshooter, dynamite, and carbon-steel railroad rails were important to settling the continent, it’s true; but without the closet, Euro-Americans would never have crossed the Alleghenies.
I know a few people the floor space of whose houses is about one-third closet, technically speaking. Often the closet area is an entire room of its own, perhaps a former pantry or sewing room convenient to a back or side door. This space may be called, a bit shamefacedly, the “mudroom,” perhaps to explain why a portion of it is devoted to sticks the dogs brought home. Usually I find this room more congenial and affecting than any other in the house. I have a weakness for the ambiguous, the neither-nor; this room is not outside, of course, but neither does it succeed as the kind of indoor space in which most people would actually want to be. Years ago I sometimes had fun in rooms like these, sitting on stacks of firewood and drinking shots of whiskey with friends. The comfort a mudroom offers, however, is hard to appreciate sober. Such a room is meant for passing through, not staying in. In the war between indoors and outdoors, rooms like this provide the buffer zone.
Houses that don’t have catchall closets or rooms in which the inhabitants can dump outdoor stuff always seem sinister to me. You see these houses more and more in movies nowadays, usually with Michael Douglas living in them, plotting hard-to-follow financial crimes. When I reflect that most of the kids I know would be happy to live forever in these houses watching TV and playing video games and fooling around on the computer, I fear for the world outside. Sure, the kids hear about the environment every other day in school, and they know polluters are bad, and their fruit-scented shampoo has pictures of endangered species printed on the bottle. But if the Everglades, say, disappeared under a giant parking lot tomorrow, are these kids really going to care?
Well, the Everglades themselves probably wouldn’t care either. They can afford to overlook such details, extending as they do so far beyond us in time. It’s a fact that while we can destroy plenty of beautiful and irreplaceable parts of nature, we can’t do much about its mess. Pave the unruly swamp, and it reappears as the brown water rising in your basement, the rare African virus borne by mosquitoes in the park. However we attack it, the outdoor world will always have the advantage of its messiness and its size. And no matter how high-tech and convenient and comfortable and wired our indoors becomes, the mess and the size out there will lure us, and we’ll keep tracking our muddy, unplanned boot prints across the floor.
(2001)
FIVE FISH
1
When we first moved to Montana, I sometimes took my daughter fishing with me. Cora was only six years old, but she liked exploring in the woods, and I thought she might find fishing interesting. As I cast, she stood on the bank and watched. Once she found a grasshopper fly I’d lost, snagged on a log. Sometimes she asked questions, or told me when she saw a fish jump. After an hour or so of dispassionate observation, she would announce that she wanted to go home.
On a trip to New York City at about that time, she got sick, and her mother and I took her to her former pediatrician in Manhattan. The doctor, making conversation, asked Cora how she liked Montana. Cora said she liked it. The doctor asked her what she did for fun in Montana, and Cora said she went fishing with her daddy sometimes. The doctor asked her what kind of fish she and her daddy caught. “Oh,” Cora said reprovingly, “we never catch anything.”
In Missoula in early fall the sky is a bright blue tinted with dust and car exhaust. The maples along the city streets and the cottonwoods in the river bottoms turn yellow, and as you walk among them each leaf is another small variation on that single ubiquitous yellow shade. Then, sometimes in just a couple of days, all the leaves fall, and the yellow that was at tree height moves to the ground. In early fall the weather is usually calm, the nights cool, and the rivers clear.
On a fall afternoon not long after we’d moved, I took my wife and kids out to the Bitterroot River. Self-denyingly, I didn’t fish; I thought instead I would fool around the bank and the shallows with the kids. Thomas, who was two, stood on a little gravel beach beneath a willow and threw stones into the water. Boys of that age, and some girls, can throw stones into water for an unlimited amount of time. My wife dangled her feet by him while Cora and I went off into some brambly shoreline underbrush. There were many vines, and she was the right size to scoot through them. Floodwater the previous spring had left a lot of sticks in heaps in the lower tree branches. Cora said they looked like a bunch of cockroach legs jumbled together. Far back in the thicket we found a bird’s nest made entirely of pieces of the thinnest tendrils of the vines.
Near where Thomas was playing was a level, grassy stretch of bank just a few inches above the water. You could lie there with your face tip-of-the-nose close to the surface of the river flowing by. I did that for a while. I’d been having almost no luck fishing recently and couldn’t understand why. Lying there, I observed the passing insect life, an irregular flotilla made up mostly of tiny mayflies. Some were duns, recently hatched and not yet able to fly, with damp, crumpled wings. They rode with their all-but-invisible legs pinching down the surface film like a person standing on a trampoline. Sometimes they fluttered their wings and tried to fly away, and sometimes they succeeded, becoming airborne in erratic lowaltitude courses. Others of the mayflies were spinners—insects in the adult phase whose mating and egg-laying flights had ended up, as many do, in the river. These were spent insects, not destined to fly away, affixed to the surface by their flat wings and writhing their small black thoraxes ineffectually. They were tiny, but not so tiny that I couldn’t imagine imitating them with an artificial. A few fish were hitting the surface—feeding on them, I was sure.
The kids waded, splashed, got wet, and soon were ready to leave. We walked to the car, and I took everybody home. In a second I dropped them off, made a plea to my wife, picked up my gear, and headed back to the riv
er. The afternoon had become winy and halcyon, with maple samaras helicoptering on the diagonal through the declining light. Suddenly I was in a near-panic of haste, afraid that someone would get to my favorite spot before I did. This spot existed, as far as I know, only that one year; floods the following spring straightened the shoreline and washed it away. It was a deep eddy at a bend where the river had piled up a quarter acre of bleached driftwood. Cora called it the tree dump. The biggest drift log in it was a monster of a cottonwood, completely without bark, that jutted out into the eddy on the downstream side. Standing on the log, an angler would be three feet above the water. The eddy turned with long swirls of insects and cottonwood catkins clustering on its surface in shapes like the Nike symbol. The water in the eddy was dark and fathomless, and when I waded in it sometimes I got too close to the really deep part, where the bottom angled off beneath my feet. Lots of big fish lived there and came out to feed nearby.
I parked at a pullout by the river and put on my waders, hands shaking with angling fever. Three or four cars were there already. I hurried down the shoreline trail, breaking into a jog, maneuvering my fishing rod among the brush. Through the leaves I saw the bleached expanse of the tree dump. I ducked under an alder branch and stepped out onto the driftwood. Success—nobody fishing there! Hopping from log to log, I made my way to the water. I stood at the edge and rigged my rod, keeping one eye on the eddy.