The River Why

by David James Duncan

  Quick as it had come, my anger departed. I felt fuzzy-headed and weak and wasn’t sure what had happened. Bill Bob came and put his arm around me. There was no sound but the crackling flames. Then something strange happened. It started when I glanced at H2O and saw, beneath the print of my hand, quick twitches at the corner of his mouth. Then Ma looked at him, saw the twitches, and her mouth started twitching too. Pockets of preservative in the old fish cadaver caught and shot flames, and something inside it emitted eerie whines like shutters creaking open to free spooks from a haunted house. Then the thing caved in on itself. Nijinsky was no more.

  No one moved or spoke till H2O, still twitching, let out an involuntary little snort, like a horse saying hello. Ma followed, not with the usual mulish Carper guffaw, but with a genuine musical little-girl giggle. Then it was all over: she looked at H2O, he looked at her, and they exploded into real, relieved, belly-cramping, face-contorting, uncontrollable laughter—a kind I hadn’t heard in that house in all my life. Bill Bob joined in, and when amazement allowed it so did I. We stood there rocking and reeling and holding our stomachs while the tears streamed down our faces, and when the uproar finally died, H2O snickered, pointed at the fireplace, and it started all over again. It was ridiculous. It was bliss. Bill Bob disappeared, then reappeared with fifths of Glenfiddich, Christian Brothers, and a fistful of glasses. He frowned at Ma and H2O and demanded, “What’ll ya have?”

  “What’ll you have, Ma?” said H2O. “I’ll have that.”

  “Why then I’ll jus’ try that unblended swill o’ yours, by jorj!”

  “I’ll have the same,” I said.

  “Me too!” said Bill Bob, and he poured three ponderous snifters and one tiny pony glass to order. We clinked cups, H2O toasted All-for-one-and-one-for-all, we swigged a swash—and Bill Bob choked and bolted for the refrigerator and a huge orange-juice chaser. Then we just sat around sipping, grinning at Nijinsky’s ashes, whowhooing like loons on a lake in summertime, H2O and Ma beaming at me like they’d never been more proud and pleased, like they liked getting called Fascist and Weasel. And I think they did. And they loved seeing that accursed mummy annihilated at last. I apologized about fifty times for slapping H2O, but they said it was nothing. Ma said she was glad I had some fire in me. H2O said he’d had it coming. I told him no, no he didn’t have anything like that coming, but he kept filling my glass and saying forget-it forget-it, and by jorj, I forgot. Then I told them about my cabin at the coast and about being ready to leave and all, and they weren’t even surprised; they said they’d miss me, and that if things didn’t work out I could come back any time, and that they’d like to help me move. So when I departed the next morning, Bill Bob was on the seat beside me and Ma’s dingy camper and H2O’s Rover, both loaded with a hodgepodge of housewarming gifts and provisions, followed down the road. Three-fourths of us had hangovers, but our spirits were soaring.

  We got to the cabin and unloaded all the gear, then strolled down along the river—Bill Bob too, since none of us carried fishing poles. H2O expressed approval over a nice flyfishing drift right below my back door, and Ma commented favorably on a deep eddying pothole a little distance downstream. Bill Bob stood off by himself imitating the deep knee bends of a water ouzel on a rock in midriver. When they left they all hugged me, even H2O, and Bill Bob presented me with a huge stack of Lone Ranger comics, solemnly explaining that I, too, was now “lone.”

  Then they were gone, and I was surprised by my sadness. So much of my reason for coming here had been to escape them—but our last bizarre night seemed to have altered all that. Well, I knew one good cure for sadness: I took up my flyrod and turned to the river, and to a new life devoid of every obstacle between me and my beloved art of angling.

  BOOK TWO

  THE UNDOING OF A SCIENTIFIC ANGLER

  … when first

  I came among these hills… like a roe

  I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides

  Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,

  Wherever nature led: more like a man

  Flying from something that he dreads, than one

  Who sought the thing he loved.

  … I cannot paint

  What then I was. The sounding cataract

  Haunted me like a passion.

  —William Wordsworth

  1

  Where I Lived and What I Lived For

  I want to walk around in the woods, fish and drink.

  I’m going to be a child about it and I can’t help it, I was born this way and it makes me very happy to fish and drink.…

  Water will never leave earth and whiskey is good for the brain.

  What else am I supposed to do in these last days but fish and drink?

  —Jim Harrison

  South of the Columbia and north of California, scores of wild green rivers come tumbling down out of the evergreen, ever-wet forests of the Coast Range. These rivers are short—twenty to sixty miles, most of them—but they carry a lot of water. They like to run fast through the woods, roaring and raising hell during rainstorms and run-offs, knocking down streamside cedars and alders now and again to show they know who it is dumping trashy leaves and branches in them all the time. But when they get within a few miles of the ocean, they aren’t so brash. They get cautious down there, start sidling back and forth digging letters in their valleys—C’s, S’s, U’s, L’s, and others from their secret alphabet—and they quit roaring and start mumbling to themselves, making odd sounds like jittery orators clearing their throats before addressing a mighty audience. Or sometimes they say nothing at all but just slip along in sullen silence, as though they thought that if they snuck up on the Pacific softly enough it might not notice them, might not swallow them whole the way it usually does. But when they get to the estuaries they realize they’ve been kidding themselves: the Ocean is always hungry—and no Columbia, no Mississippi, no Orinoco or Ganges can curb its appetite.… So they panic: when they taste the first salt tides rising up to greet them they turn back toward their kingdoms in the hills. They don’t get far. When the overmastering tides return to the ocean, these once-brash rivers trail along behind like sad little dogs on leashes—past the marshes with their mallards, the mud flats with their clams, the shallow bays with their herons, over the sandbars with their screaming gulls and riptides, away into the oblivion of the sea.

  The river I lived on is on the northern half of the Oregon Coast. I promised friends there not to divulge its real name or location, so I’ll call it the “Tamanawis.” The cabin was situated at the feet of the last forested hills—the final brash rapids just upstream, the first cautious, curving letters just below. There were a few fishing cottages near mine, empty most of the time, and upstream nothing but rain, brush, trees, elk, ravens, and coyotes. A quarter mile downstream and across the river was a dairy farm, my nearest permanent neighbor. The farmer had 120 cows to take care of; he had it pretty easy. His wife had the farmer and their six kids to take care of; she had it tough. The farmer, wife, kids, and cows had an orange and purple and black house, two red and green and yellow barns, and a clearing of tree stumps where their yard should have been. (I used to thank Fathern Heaven for the trees that blocked that place from view. Something about those stumps and colors. Made me feel I’d been living on TV, Coca-Cola, and doughnuts.) Below the dairy the Tamanawis Valley got more populated—a few farms, sportsmen’s shanties, here and there one of those antennaed, yarn-floored boxes poor dumb suburbanites call “contemporary homes”; then a sawmill, a huge poultry farm, and a trailer court defacing the edge of a nice little town at river’s mouth. (We’ll call it “Fog.”) Highway 101 runs through Fog, and the chuckholed asphalted Tamanawis River Road takes off from one of the five intersections in town, running up past my cabin, turning into gravel upstream, then into mud, and dead-ending in a maze of logging and fire roads. The only people who use the River Road are fishermen, loggers, hunters, and an occasional mapless tourist trying to get back to the Willamette Va
lley by a “scenic route.” The latter folk drive by my cabin all shiny-autoed and smiley, and two or three hours later come spluttering back with mud and disgruntlement on their cars and faces, hell-bent for 101 and screw the scenery. The Coast Range Maze does that to people.

  Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut—hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs—products of what they call “Reforestation,” which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a “Reforest,” which makes an individual spindly fir a “Refir,” which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the earth’s face forever a “crop”—as if they’d planted the virgin forest! But I’m just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their strange nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

  The river side of the road had never been logged. There were a few tremendous spruces, small stands of alder, clumps of hazelnut, tree-sized ferns, fern-sized wildflowers, head-high salal, impenetrable thickets of devil’s club, and, surrounding my cabin, a dense grove of cedars—huge, solemn trees with long drooping branches and a sweet smell like solitude itself. The cabin was made of fir logs squared off Scandinavian-style and joined so tightly that I could light a cooking fire on a cold winter’s morning, fish all day, and find it still cozy when I came home at dark. There was only one room, but it was big—twenty-two by twenty-eight feet—with the kind of high beamed-and-jointed ceiling that made you want to just sit back and study the way it all fit together. The bedroom was an open loft above the kitchen; the kitchen was the table and chairs, stove, water heater, and sink; the refrigerator was a stone-walled cellar reached through a trap-door in the kitchen floor; the bathroom was a partitioned-off corner so small you had to stand in the shower to take aim at the toilet, and if you bumped the shower walls they boomed like a kettledrum—so I took to voiding my bladder in the devil’s club outside.

  The cabin was dark, thanks to the grove, but some gloom-oppressed occupant had cut one four-by-four window in the south wall overlooking the river: I set up my fly-tying desk next to it, partly for light, partly so if something swirled as I worked I could be out there with a loaded flyrod in seconds. I didn’t miss electricity at all—even preferred the absence of it—but H2O, convinced that I’d go blind tying flies by candlelight, left me three Coleman camp lanterns that blazed about as subtly as searchlights, and Ma, appalled by the lack of racket, bequeathed me a big battery-operated AM/FM radio: both earned an early retirement on a remote shelf. Bill Bob voiced no concern over lack of sound or light, but he seemed to have reservations about my proposed life of sheer solitary angling. Though he said nothing more than that I was “lone,” upon his return to Portland he borrowed H2O’s electric Remington and composed the first of an erratic flow of letters; it began,

  I will write and write you all the time Gus. Becase your not a lone by your slef before. So you wont get to lonesome, will you? Are you reading your Lone Rangers? Remember my friend at school? From Mexico, Pedro? He says in Mexican TONTO calls LONE RANGER kemo sabe because it means HE WHO NOBODY KNOWS. But I know you dont I. And dont forget it! And watch out for TONTO, becase Pedro says in Mexican TONTO means stupid or crazy so when your are too alone write me a letter and I will come stay with you. But I will keep writing anyway to keep you compnay.…

  The most outrageous housewarming gift was from H2O: a fifty-gallon aquarium. He keeps one of these monsters by his fly-tying vise and in his books recommends them to all serious fly-makers. The idea is to catch water bugs and larvae on fishing trips and stick them in your tank to use as living models; you can also test an imitation by tying it to a light leader, lowering it into the aquarium, and jerking it around among its live prototypes: if it is attacked or raped you may conclude it a sufficiently deceptive fly. I’ve always thought this more than a little extreme. Trout are not entomologists; they don’t care what your fly’s Latin name is. I’ve suckered summer steelhead, brookies, and bluebacks on a fly I call a “Bermuda Shorts”—an abstract imitation of a fat tourist on a golf course in a Caribbean travel brochure; my “Headless Hunchback” may one day be famous as a trout killer, and it imitates a thing that attacked me in a nightmare brought on by devouring half a box of Bill Bob’s Sugar Pops just before bed. H2O and his pals rigidly adhere to the Imitation of Natural Food School of Fly Tying, but the truth is, trout are like coyotes, goats, and people: they nibble, chew, and bite for all sorts of reasons; eating is only the most common one. Sometimes Northwest lakes and streams are so rich in feed that their bloated denizens would sooner bite an Alka-Seltzer than a natural imitation; sometimes a bored old whopper, like any decadent, affluent creature, prefers gaudy titillation to more of the mundane stonefly-mayfly-caddisfly crap. (Remember Walton’s “piece of cloth” and “dead mouse”?) Piscine ennui can arouse a taste for the bizarre that will skunk a Purist who insists on floating sacrosanct “name patterns” over his congregation all day. Bourgeois trout are like bourgeois people: after a week of three dull meals a day a man will empty his wallet and risk his life bombing belly and brain with rich restaurant food and eight or ten cocktails. The corresponding mood in trout is where the Bermuda Shorts comes in handy: of course it doesn’t look like food; neither does a Double Margarita; and trout don’t have to drive home afterward.

  For a time I stashed the tank with the lanterns and radio—but soon, as Bill Bob predicted, the unaccustomed solitude began giving me fits of melancholy. So I set up the aquarium by the south window, rigged hoses to keep a fresh flow of spring water moving through, filled it with gravel, algae, snails, sculpins, crawdads, periwinkles, the works; then I took an ultralight six-foot flyrod, tied on a barbless #28 Midge, and went fishing for the smallest fish I could catch. When I had fourteen or fifteen in a bucket I selected two silver salmon, two cutthroat trout, and two steelhead for my tank. I ended up watching this liquid zoo so much I gave the inmates names and soon had a favorite—Alfred the Great—a steelhead smolt of about three inches.

  The little salmon and trout were straightforward fish, behaving the hungry, swimmy, nervous way one would expect. But Alfred and the other steelhead, Sigrid the Small, were very unusual minnows. Sigrid was less than two inches long—the smallest fish I ever caught on a fly—and she was frail and quiet and beautiful. All she ever did was hover on the side of the tank overlooking the Tamanawis, watching the river slide by below: I don’t know if she really saw it or knew it for what it was, but her eyes were unwaveringly aimed toward the wild waters of her home—and in time the sight of her made my heart sink. She was so small, yet so full of longing. Somehow that two-inch creature made me ashamed, or maybe envious—for I, a seventy-two-inch creature, had no such discernible longing, and knew of no true home to long for. But I wouldn’t release her. Not yet. She was so pretty, and she was safe in the tank, so I kept her there against her tiny, unwavering will.

  As for Alfred, I’ve never encountered a more gregarious, high-spirited creature—ouzels, otters, and chickadees included—if you take into account that he’d only a finger-length, limbless body to express his exuberance. One might think friendship with a steelhead smolt awfully dull potatoes—maybe the sort of neurotic, one-sided thing some lonely old ladies have with their poodle-dogs. But my friendship with Alfred wasn’t that kind of thing at all. Ours was a relationship founded on the truth that a fish just doesn’t give a damn what you say to it and will never say anything back. It lives in the water; it has no voice box; it is encumbered with neither a large vocabulary nor a large brain, and should you shout at it loudly enough to vibrate its water, it is unlikely to take such utterance as a sign of friendship. Neither is it the kind of pet you can ride, take on walks, set on your lap, dress in a sweater, take pheasant hunting, or cuddle; it is not likely to lick your face, and if it did there are
teeth in its tongue. But its compensatory virtues are overwhelming: it keeps itself exceedingly clean; it won’t jump up on your Sunday suit; it won’t shed, won’t bark you into an asylum, won’t climb onto your roof and scream bloody murder all night as it engages parades of furry gentlemen in the carnal act; it will never roll in dead-salmon rot, never scratch you, never bite the neighbor’s toddler in the face; nor will it puke on your bedspread, piss in your shoes, or hump the leg of an important dinner guest. A fish maintains its silent, orderly existence within the confines of its tank. All you need to do to befriend it is discover some form of interaction that will create intimacy. Obviously, the key is food.