The fuming H2O, with a low-budget science-fiction movie’s disregard for natural laws, reached far into the wastes of space and plucked Bill Bob from his vehicle by the belt of his trousers, stood him upright on the lawn, confronted him with the mutilated fragment of II Chronicles, and demanded, “Was this your doing Willia—er, Bill Bob?” (He’d never stopped trying to convince himself his son’s name wasn’t what it was.)
“Yeth!” snapped Bill Bob, surly at this astronomical intrusion upon his epidermal anguish.
Mistaking the annoyance for a show of guilt, H2O thundered, “WHY?”
“Bood Gooky Boobob’s jeb gook,” said Bill Bob, offering what I thought a concise explanation of his activities with the Bible.
But H2O didn’t understand a syllable. Believing Bill Bob to have lapsed into baby talk to protect himself, he commenced the frequently delivered “This-is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-you” address. Meanwhile, believing he’d explained himself succinctly and was now being innocuously garbled at in adult talk, Bill Bob busied himself with licking the tasty space disease off his arms. Knowing what was about to happen, seeing Bill Bob’s poor chocolate face all calm and unsuspecting, being too afraid to speak up, knowing H2O hadn’t understood anything that transpired and that I’d started it by not waiting for Ma and by telling on Bill Bob when all he’d done was single-handedly figure out a way to glean sweet gifts from a book that was supposed to be a source of sweetness when his fishy old agnostic father could never have squeezed a drop from it himself, and then having to stand there listening to H2O appease his conscience before inflicting senseless pain upon a three-foot human being by inanely stating that what he was about to do would hurt his blunted old psyche and calloused meathook more than Bill Bob’s tender little butt… hells bells. It all saddened me so much I could have cried. And then, though he wasn’t concerned for himself or even aware of the danger he was in, Bill Bob did start to cry, out of sympathy for me.
But behold! Fresh from the bath and garbed in a brown robe, Ma came rushing toward us like a vision of Diana. “Sweet Jesus! What’s all this caterwaulin’ an’ blubberin’ about?” (Her speech was not Diana’s.)
Sensing his patriarchal power about to be shot full of arrows, H2O’s brow furrowed like a bloodhound’s. Snatching the ratty residue-of-a-Bible from Bill Bob’s pocket and holding it and the checks up to the Eye in the Sky, he thundered, “Our son here has destroyed a Bible, for what reason, God knows!” (His tone of voice implied that this meant he knew.)
Bill Bob’s Bood Gooky had grown mighty thin; he must have been drawing pretty heavily on his checking account lately. Ma snatched the Bible from Hen, scrutinized it, understood the situation, handed it back to Bill Bob, cackled, “Looks like you been on a spendin’ spree, boy!,” and brayed like a donkey at her own wit.
The sound of that bray reduced our Grand Inquisitor to the peevish paternal limey we knew so well. The situation lost its religious overtones, leaving H2O looking rather deflated and pitiable. (Ma knew perfectly well how frequently he read his own Bible.) Sensing our troubles were over, Bill Bob grinned at me with gucky brown teeth, scraped the chocolate from his face, sucked his fingernails like Havana cigars, looked up at H2O, snorted good-humoredly, and said, “Jeb gook!” holding up the shredded—and now chocolate-smeared—Bible.
“That’s right honeybunch,” said Ma. Then she glared at H2O. “Well Hen, so he ripped hell out of it. So what? What else did he do?”
H2O’s frown transcended the bloodhound stage and entered the realm of apple dolls. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough for what?” Ma snapped.
“Enough to warrant a sound spanking and a stern admonition not to destroy… books.” This was his last-ditch defense of Propriety.
“Why hell no it ain’t enough!” screeched Ma. “You were gonna whup lil’ Bill Bob fer playin’ sech a cute game and him findin’ the damned ol’ thing and thinkin’ up what to do with it all his ownself? Hell no it ain’t enough! Who the hell stuck the bee in your bonnet, Hen Orviston!”
At this point H2O’s fuse burnt entirely away and they exploded into one of the usual messy vociferations from which the wiry Ma would sooner or later emerge victorious. Bill Bob and I wandered off to play.
5a
The Great Izaak Walton Controversy: The Parental Version
H2O’s thesis:
O sir, doubt not angling is an art. Is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly?
—Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler
There is no activity so conducive to the health and happiness of a civilized man as angling with an artificial fly. As for the uncivilized, who would care to contemplate what writhing creatures their inchoate consciences allow them to skewer upon a hook?
—Henning Hale-Orviston, Summa Piscatoria
Ma’s antithesis:
The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.…
—Shakespeare, As You Like It
A fisherman stands on a projecting rock with a long rod, throws in ground bait to attract little fishes, drops in hook and line… and at last gets a bite and whips him out gasping.…
—Homer, The Odyssey
Following the Rogue River Fishing War my father was at his wit’s end as to how to convince his bride to take up the flyrod, but then the end of his wit was a place only inches away wherever Ma was concerned. Flyfishing is an art he takes so seriously that one may say it constitutes his religion—and religious men on the make for converts are notoriously witless. Perhaps H2O’s evangelic approach to flyfishing was fueled by genuine religious sentiment; perhaps he felt that in flyfishing he had discovered an unsullied form of worship, and so wanted to share his discovery with everyone he met—whether they wanted to share it or not. In any case, there is something admirable about such one-pointed devotion, and Henning Hale-Orviston is without question a much-admired man: few would argue with the angling publications that characterize him as “The King of the Troutists” and “The Bishop of Brooks”—and many’s the time that hardened old bait-slingers have been so moved by the sight of him working the riffles of some flickering river that they straightaway repented of their heretical ways and seated themselves at the “Bishop” ’s feet in hope of his sagacious instruction. Such conversions are H2O’s greatest joy in life.
Among the purists themselves my father is a legend. His Summa Piscatoria is said to be the most detailed, Attic-prosed manual of the flyfisher’s art in the world today (even Ma said of it, “Cripes, Hen! What a fat sucker! You write that all yer ownself?”), and men have journeyed literally thousands of miles to consult his illustrious mentations on nuances of dogma and lore. But woe is he: if there is a creature on this planet less appreciative of his prowess than is my mother, I have not yet met it. And he never stops mulling stratagems that might spark her conversion.
One day just before I was born he visited the Portland chapter of the Izaak Walton League—an angler’s organization whose various groups gather once or twice monthly to discuss matters of fishing, water politics, tackle technology, and conservation. After delivering a well-received lecture entitled “The Supremacy of the Sinking-tip in Nymph Fishing,” it suddenly occurred to him that the namesake of this excellent club might be the solution to the problem of his unsporting wife. Wasn’t Ma unaccountably fond of antiques? And wasn’t Izaak the dusty old father of flyfishermen everywhere? And wasn’t his famous book, The Compleat Angler, an antiquated yet alluring exposition of the fly-angler’s art as it was practiced of old? Upon returning home from the League meeting, H2O went straight to his library, extracted his first-edition heirloom copy, smiled fondly at its quaint appearance, pocket size, and price (1s. 6d.), then took it directly to Ma. He forgot one thing: he had never read it.…
Ma accepted the book on the basis of its being “old-fashionedy,” began to read it aloud in a flat, uncomprehending monotone, and in s
econds the first of thousands of Izaak Walton Controversies commenced: it will be known to most readers that very old English publications employed a script that fashioned its small “s” like our present-day “f”; somehow it didn’t bother Ma to take such s’s to be f’s, despite the hash it made of the words. H2O has always been a stickler about language, and Ma’s regional dialect has been a torment equaling her bait fishing at times. So when she commenced her lobotomized droning, he was soon gnawing at his lips. She began—
“‘The Com-pleee-at Angler…’ heh heh. Ol’ Izaak Walton don’t spell no better’n me, Hen. What’s this now?… ‘or the contemplative man’f recreation’ hmmmm. Man’f. That’s a new one on me.”
H2O said, “I believe it’s ‘man’s,’ dear.”
“Nope. It’s man’f. Plain as pie. An’ listen what comes next! ‘Being a Discourfe of,’ um, ‘Riverf,’ uh, ‘Fifhpondf Fifh and Fifhing…’ Haha! Lordy, Hen! I can’t read French!”
“It isn’t French, dear. It’s perfectly proper English, but you’re mistaking the s’s for f’s!”
“The hell I am! Bunchabloody Frog-talk’s what we got here! What’s next? Ha! Listen: ‘Simon Peter faid, “I go a-fifhing”: and they faid, “We alfo will go with thee.” ’ ALFO! Hahahahaha! Some kinda Frog dogfood, I reckon! I’m likin’ this book, Hen. I’m likin’ it a lot!”
At thif point my father wifely left Ma to her own devicef. Fortunately only the introductory pages employed the f-type s’s, so Ma was soon cruising along relatively smoothly. But to this day she speaks of what she calls the book’s “French subtitles,” and fondly refers to it as a “Difcourfe ’bout Fifh an’ Fifhin’.”
She finished the book in two days, slammed it shut, and stormed into H2O’s study as he hunched over a #22 Midge, arousing a violent start and unraveling of hackle that was the ruin of the fly. He whirled savagely—but spying The Compleat Angler clutched in her hands, managed a smile. This smile turned out to be one of a curious species indigenous to H2O’s face—a species Bill Bob would one day dub “The Overparked Winnebago.” Now the orthodox conception of smiles is not stringent or dogmatic; it allows for a wide array of permutations—smiles that signify joy, or hate; bewildered smiles; cynical smiles; knowing smiles; idiot smiles; condescending smiles; phony camera smiles. But all these types have a fundamental attribute: they visit the face for a moment or two and then depart, their purpose served. But the Overparked Winnebago is no orthodox smile; it is the Methuselah of smiles. H2O climbs into it, drives it onto his face, parks it, climbs out, and abandons it there; its purpose forgotten, it lingers on—a gigantic anachronism rusting and mildewing at the curb of his mouth. As Ma came closer, H2O perceived coffee stains on his heirloom volume; closer yet a broken binding came into view; then, as she pawed enthusiastically through the pages, he heard rending sounds, glimpsed underlinings, saw stars, “Whoopie”s, “Wow”s, and other spectacular marginalia applied by gaudy colored felt pens; his eyes grew watery, his knees grew weak, his stomach waxed acidic and cried out for Pepto-Bismol… but the abandoned Winnebago clung to his lips. Bubbling with dangerous excitement, Ma proposed an impromptu out-loud reading, commencing with—
1. The Otter Hunt, wherein Piscator (Walton’s genius) accompanies Venator (the straight man) and an entire army of armed and mounted hunters and sharp-fanged hounds in relentless pursuit of a single care-worn female otter upon which they all converge, gleefully watching as she is torn to pieces by a vicious brute of a dog dubbed “Sweetlips”! One of the conquering storm troop then perceives by her swollen teats, or what’s left of them, that the otter was the mother of a family—so away to her den they thunder, and there join hands in bludgeoning her helpless whelps to death.… “Come, let’s kill them all.… Now let’s go to an honest alehouse, where we may have a cup of good barley wine, and sing ‘Old Rose,’ and all of us rejoice together.” (H2O’s smile paid his clammy skin and queasy gut no heed; he muttered something about protecting trout from predators. Ma didn’t hear as she moved on to—)
2. Fishing for Chubs (a species the mere thought of which causes my father’s gorge to rise. He’d only recently spied one floating like a corpse on the Willamette, happily munching at some buoyant, orange-colored thing that looked very like a human turd), wherein the knowledgeable Piscator enthralls his disciple Venator by catching several corpulent chubs—not on a fly, but on live grasshoppers skewered on a bait-hook. To celebrate this feat they retire together to the inevitable alehouse, hand the squalid fish over to the proprietress with a curt order to cook them up pronto, seat themselves before frothy pints to await supper, and when the chubs are cooked and the inebriated pair are happily munching at the buoyant orange-colored flesh, Venator exclaims, “’Tis as good meat as ever I tasted!” (H2O said nothing, but poured himself a tall brandy the bulk of which he deftly threaded straight through the halves of his undying smile. Ma proceeded to the next Waltonian wonder—)
3. Fishing for Pike, a humorous chapter featuring Piscator’s penchant for anecdote, particularly anecdotes of bizarre atrocities in the English aquatic world. Take, for instance, the thirsty mule who wet its parched throat in a pike pond: no sooner had it gulped an innocent gulp than a huge pike shot from the water and fastened its fangs to the poor beast’s lips where it clung like a bulldog (or like H2O’s smile), affording all ale-swigging spectators paroxysms of laughter, and the mule a mandible mutilated for life. Also interesting are the pike who commit suicide by devouring venomous frogs, and, amazing to tell, the pike who get themselves straddled like saddle-broncs by a sinister species of cowboy-frog who ride ’em till they tire and die (whether of insanity or embarrassment Walton fails to say). Elsewhere Izaak happily assures us that a hungry pike will “bite at and devour a dog that swims in a pond” (Hawhawhaw!). But Ma’s favorite bit just had to be Piscator’s prankish instruction to bait hooks with live fish and frogs, tie these in turn to the “bodies or wings of a goose or a duck,” toss the helpless fowl into a pike-infested lake, then sit back with your tankard and take care not to split your sportsmanly belly as the blood and feathers fly! (H2O’s smile remained, but the teeth in the middle of it began to gnash against his brandy glass; Ma moved on to—)
4. Fishing for Trout (that species described in the Summa Piscatoria as “designed by the Universal Powers to render—via the flyrod—the most aesthetically perfect experience available to mortal man”), wherein the sagacious Piscator catches and kills a number of trout—employing the crudest, barley-buttedest kind of plunking available to mortal man, using grasshoppers, grubs, maggots, minnows, and worms. (H2O bit his glass, smashed it in the wastebasket, and commenced smashing himself, pouring brandy through the crack in his smile straight out of the receptacle the Christian Brothers shipped it in. The Brothers’ brandy, by the way, was Ma’s loathed brand, but H2O would gratefully have chugged cologne as Ma raced on to—)
5. Fishing for Trophy Trout, wherein Piscator reveals that the Highway to Hefty Trout is traversed through no matching of hatch, nor lengthening nor lightening of leader, nor perfection of presentation or imitation, nor naturalness of drift, but through fishing in the dead of night “with a strong line, and not a little hook; and let him have time to gorge your hook”; for a fish with bloody wounds in its vital organs will scarcely quarrel with you at all (as Ma illustrated when she set the treble-hooks to poor Nijinsky). Recommended for nighttime fishbait are such cunning materials as “a piece of cloth” and, even more interestingly, “a dead mouse”!
At the words “dead mouse” H2O garrotted the Christian Brothers and staggered out the door. Ma was not concerned: the sudden inexplicable craving men get for alcohol was nothing new to her; she rather approved of her over-cultivated husband behaving in down-home ranch-hand fashion for a change. Meanwhile, down at the neighborhood tavern, H2O was still grinning as he wished botches, itches, and emerods that can’t be healed upon the gentle father of modern angling.
But zealots are disgustingly indefatigable. After the evening with the Christia
n Brothers and subsequent night spent offering fluid gifts to the Porcelain Buddha (among these gifts the Winnebago smile), H2O happened to glance through The Compleat Angler before burning it, and was surprised to find the case far less hopeless than he’d feared. Ma’s selections had been highly colored; indeed, it seemed she’d ferreted out every gruesome and uncharacteristic passage in a subversive attempt to delude him into believing Izaak Walton a traitor to the fly-angler’s great cause. With increasing fervor and decreasing rationality he read and reread, taking copious notes, marking salient passages, and emerging after several days in his study with a lengthy thesis in which he claimed to account once and for all for Walton’s “apparent indiscrimination toward what species he fished for and what methods he employed.” In the article, “Izaak Walton: The Veiled Purist” (Angler’s Quarterly; Spring 1955, p. 154ff.), Henning Hale-Orviston wrote,
… yet surely the discerning reader intuits, in these more poetic and impassioned passages, Walton’s unfaltering commitment to the artificial fly and preference for trout and salmon. His unwillingness to express these priorities more openly is not the result of some Hindoo-like inability to perceive the superiority of the finer techniques and species over the coarse and crude; Walton is merely employing a literary convention characteristic of the Encyclopedists, and indeed of most late-Renaissance writers. To openly defend the fly and the salmonids, however much he longed to do so, would have opened his admirable study to unfounded accusations of bias and subjectivity. (Walton was writing, after all, in an England where residues of the Dark Ages still lingered in the lesser minds of the intelligentsia.) Piscator thus conceals somewhat his one-pointed devotion to flyfishing, Walton trusting that Venator’s good judgment and sensitivity (and the reader’s as well!) will pierce the flux of superficial and cavalier discoursings upon bait, chumming, night fishing, inferior species of fish, didactic Christian philosophy, irrelevant songs and poetry, meetings with Milkmaids, Gypsies and Country Rustics, absurd fish-tales, and all such extrania. The Compleat Angler was intended to be taken as a “Microcosm” (if you will) of the Angling World, wherein the reader and Venator must—just as we modern anglers must—fight their way through all distractions, superfluities, and inferior modes of fishing to discover the joys which only the committed fly-angler may know!
The River Why Page 4