In state hatcheries the steelhead smolts are kept in huge concrete pools and fed pellets by the bucketful. This is a necessity born of their great numbers, but it is also a great aesthetic waste—for a steelhead smolt is an artist as it feeds. Anybody who enjoys basketball knows that there are dull ways and awesome ways of putting the ball through the hoop. Alfred the Great knew that the same was true for ways of putting fish pellets in his gullet. I won’t go so far as to call him the Doctor J of pellet swallowing, but it should be remembered that Doctor J has a hundred or so moveable joints to work with, and that Alfred’s “hands” are his mouth: fasten Doctor J’s hands to his mouth and how many points will he score in a season?
The surface of the aquarium was nine square feet. If a pellet hit in any of eight of them, Alfred beat the trout and salmon to it every time; only in Sigrid’s little corner would he concede—and perhaps this was chivalry. He could see food approaching while it was still in the air; he learned to react to hand-fakes I’d make high above the surface; sometimes he’d take a floating pellet and his upward momentum would carry him six inches into the air; sometimes he’d charge one that floated next to the glass, tucking at the last second like an Olympic swimmer on a turn, thumping the wall with his tail and vanishing in a blur to reappear motionless in the center of the tank; sometimes he faked the other fish so fast so often they began gliding around in baffled little circles; sometimes he jived them so bad they swam smack into the glass. Watching Alfred eat was a joy. He had the kind of moves that cried out for instant replays.
It took some time to get settled in the cabin: a day to stash gear, a day to build a fish-smoker, a day to set up and stock the aquarium, a day to clean, and salt in supplies, two days to cut three cords of wood. But on June ninth I hung the Ideal Schedule on the wall by my bed and began to live it: I proceeded to fish all day, every day, first light to last. All my life I’d longed for such a marathon—
and I haven’t one happy memory of it. All I recall is stream after stream, fish after fish, cast after cast, and nothing in my head but the low cunning required to hoodwink my mindless quarry. Each night my Log entries read like tax tables or grocery receipts, describing not a dream come true, but a drudgery of double shifts on a creekside assembly line.
After two weeks of “ideal” six-hour nights and sixteen-hour days I got an incurable case of insomnia. It hardly mattered: sleeping I dreamt of fishing and waking I fished till there was one, undivided, sleeplike state. There was fishing. There was nothing else. A Kiluhiturmiut Eskimo song tells of a man like me—
Glorious was life when standing at my fishing hole
on the ice. But did standing at my fishing hole ever
bring me joy? No!
Ever was I so anxious for my little fishhook
if it should not get a bite, Ayi, yai ya.…
Like the Eskimo, my last thought before going fishing was “Won’t it be glorious!” And like the Eskimo I then stood by the water, a needy, nervous wretch too anxious to wonder how “glory” could be so dismal. Ayi, yai ya!
In mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July my family showed up. I invited them in and made a lunch, but Bill Bob, knowing the inevitable topic about to arise, took his food, radios, and crayons and disappeared in the cedars. H2O, Ma, and I settled over coffees, and though H2O included the phrase “How are you” in his greeting, we all knew he meant “How’s the Fishing?” So I started to tell them—and discovered that a month of solitude had raised havoc with my ability to speak: I muttered and stuttered, repeating short, meaningless phrases, my trains of thought uncoupling in mid-sentence. I was so startled by my performance that I lapsed into grunts and handed over my Log to serve as a surrogate voice. The Log so fascinated them that they seemed not to notice my handicap, and soon they were happily mucking around in a typically tedious Izaak Walton Controversy.
They left after supper, but Bill Bob stayed on. He turned in early, and once he started snoring (like a logger) I lit a lamp and made the following entry in my Log:
July 4; 9:30 p.m.—after one month of Id. Sched. have caught roughly 1400 fish, 90% native cutthroat, largest 16 inches, average 7 inches, 60% on flies, 40% on bait (mustn’t tell Ma this). have read 8 fishing books, 2 manuals, built one 8' flyrod, tied 29 flies. was unaware till today of certain unexpected results, however: one, find it difficult to speak; another, find it difficult to think; another, am constantly hearing and seeing water, for instance NOW, I shut my eyes—water. I plug my ears—water. don’t think I quite like this. Bill Bob brought up some nonangling topics today; could think of no reply or comment; couldn’t respond at all; hoped he wouldn’t notice; he noticed; don’t think he quite liked it.
—12:30 a.m.—another Id. Sched. result: insomnia. positive I don’t like this! and tonight Bill Bob asked Are you happy, Gus? and I didn’t know, didn’t think so, couldn’t say. not sure of relationship between fishing and happiness; not sure of much of anything; must consider further.…
—3 a.m.—still can’t sleep. still seeing and hearing water, even with pillows on head. beginning to feel illogical distress. read three Lone Ranger comics, tried to relax, got drowsy over and over but jerked awake—keep thinking I have a bite. Bill Bob woke and saw me do it, asked What’s the matter? said nothing; said felt like reading, said flea bit me. perhaps should experiment with alcoholic beverages.…
I faded just as it grew light. I didn’t wake up till 10:30—five hours later than I’d slept since coming to the Tamanawis. I got dressed and went to find Bill Bob.
He was sitting on a stump by the woodpile behind the cabin, a bag of peanuts in his lap, a transistor plug in either ear, staring at the cordwood like it was a television. I thought he was getting pretty spacy till I saw heads poking out of his TV screen: chipmunks. Funny I hadn’t noticed them before. I sat in the sun and watched: Bill Bob was putting nuts on his knee and the munks were taking turns climbing his leg and grabbing them. I supposed I should consider the scene cute, but they were nothing like fish. I had a headache. I was bored. Bill Bob finally spotted me, took one look at my face and threw me his canteen. Orange juice. I drained it dry—and was suddenly able to see that there is no reason on earth why chipmunks should be like fish, which brilliant insight enabled me to see that what they were like was pudgy people in gaudy furs at a close-out sale, using their cheeks for shopping bags. One particularly saucy shopper hopped out of the TV, climbed Bill Bob’s leg, grabbed the peanut, stuffed it in his face, sat down on his haunches, and demanded another; Bill Bob complied—and it wanted another; so he kept handing it nuts and it kept stuffing its cheeks till it looked like its head would explode; with three unshelled nuts in each half of its face it even satisfied my obsession by beginning to resemble a fish: a blowfish. Somehow it grabbed a seventh nut and shelled, chewed, and swallowed it. Then it vanished.… Its cohorts in the TV were first stunned, then frantic. Five at once shot up Bill Bob’s leg, clawing him, raising hell, lambasting my headache—but my brother just smiled benignly, dishing out his prasad till the bag was empty, the music of two worlds swirling through his head.
After breakfast we set out for Tamanawis Mountain—a five-hundred-foot ridge reached by crossing Coke and Doughnut Dairy. We wore backpacks. Mine had the lunch. Bill Bob’s had dud firecrackers, bent silverware, a cheesecloth butterfly net, a magnet, a compass ruined by the magnet, a watch ruined by the magnet, rusty pliers stuck to the magnet, orange juice, drawing pad, crayons, and the two radios. I felt all disoriented as we started out: it was weird to walk slowly after a month of maniacal barging from hole to hole and creek to creek, and my right hand felt naked without Rodney (thus had I dubbed my favorite flyrod); but mostly I felt odd because I walked beside a person who loved me yet took absolutely no interest in anything I’d done for a month, and would be certain to ignore me should I mention any of it. It made me feel as if my recent past and my likely future were illusory—because for Bill Bob they didn’t exist. I began to get used to the present, though. The further we walked t
he quieter the hallucinatory water got, the better I could talk, the less my head ached; I even began to understand Bill Bob—who jumps from topic to topic like a squirrel from branch to branch.… At first we were Edmund Hillary climbing Everest, then we were Mountainy Men climbing up to our secret cave-house; then he said that if he was a Mountainy Man he’d live year-round in his Giant-Round-Glass-Hut and wear a pair of ancient glasses that let him see every direction at once; then he said there used to be a race of peoples who had a ring around their heads like the ring around Saturn, only this ring was their eyeball, only it wasn’t a ball because it was a ring. I interrupted to point out that a Giant-Round-Glass was hardly a hut either, but he ignored me and said that the ring-eyed peoples could see every direction at once, including inside out, because the pupils of their eyes weren’t just little holes in the iris like our pupils: they were black bands running all the way around the rings. I said they must have been powerfully intelligent folks with such efficient vision, but he said nope, they weren’t, they were idiotic as could be, because the trouble with the ring-eyed peoples was that their ring-eyes weren’t connected to their heads, so even though they could see everything they didn’t know it because there wasn’t a single connecting nerve to clue their brains in. I asked how a ring-eye stayed in place if nothing held it there and he said it just spun round and round like a hula-hoop held up by its own speed. He said the ring-eyed peoples eventually grew so stupid that God had to change them by connecting their ring-eyes to their heads, but then they were always getting poked in the eye because their eyes were so big, and sometimes, since there was nothing but eye material connecting the top halfs of their skulls to the bottom halfs, the whole tops of their heads would get jarred off and smashed like a lid falling off a teapot. I said it was hard to imagine what a ring-eyed person looked like. He said the Space Needle in Seattle was modeled after them. Then he said that when he was a baby he didn’t know he had eyes or a head and believed he was whatever he was looking at. He said he could remember looking at me and thinking he was me, and he couldn’t figure out how come I could walk out of the room when he didn’t want me to, since he was me; he remembered wondering what good it was to be a thing at all if the thing you were could just wander off some place where you couldn’t even see it or know what it was up to. He said he finally figured out he wasn’t the thing he was looking at on the day H2O hung a fish mobile over his crib. He said that fish mobile terrified him. It made him think he was underwater. I told him I could remember how he’d cried and cried when we hung the mobile there, and kept on crying till we took it down, which is true. He said he remembered, too, and the reason it scared him was because once he lived in a big city that got covered with water and everybody drowned. I asked him if he’d heard of Atlantis. He said yes, the Yankees burned it down during the Civil War. And so we walked and talked on up Tamanawis Mountain.
As we walked I noticed some things about the way I was feeling: for the first time in a long time the peacefulness and greenness of things was pleasing, and the lack of a rushing stream was a balm to my nerves, ears, and eyes. I saw and heard and felt all sorts of things I’d missed all summer thanks to the Ayi-yai-ya’s—the paintbrush and fireweed, raven calls and cricketsong, light on meadows and wind in trees. But most of all I noticed this: for the first time since leaving home I felt sort of happy.
We reached the top at noon. There was a wonderful view of the river valley up there, and a soft wind to cool us down. I sat on a log, ate an orange, and soaked up the view. Bill Bob got quiet and businesslike with his crayons and pad, drawing maps of the four directions; when he finished them he taped them together end-to-end and said that now we at least had a picture of the sort of view that ring-eyed peoples used to get. The maps weren’t much for detail, but they were accurate in depicting the lay of the land. I particularly liked the one facing south since it had my cabin and the river in it; nothing was scale-size, but every bend of the Tamanawis was right where it should be.
When we got back home I obeyed an urge to take down the Ideal Schedule and put Bill Bob’s four maps in its place. He seemed inordinately pleased—so pleased that I got the feeling he didn’t think much of my Schedule. He even said he liked the Tamanawis River, especially the way it was shaped. This was something he’d never said about any stream, puddle, or glass of water before. I asked him why. He laughed and said that that was exactly what the river was asking me. I’d no idea what he was talking about.
We spent the evening at the seashore, watching waves and sunset, talking, roasting weenies, taking a walk after dark to watch the wet sand phosphoresce. That night I slept soundly for the first time in weeks. I took Bill Bob to the bus depot in Fog early in the morning. When the bus drove away I felt all hollow inside; there was a lump in my throat, and the idea of going fishing was repugnant. Before driving home I stopped by the local grocery and, hiding my age behind my beard, scored a couple half-gallon jugs of tawny port. If insomnia should revisit, I vowed to at least bung up my wakefulness.
A Digression
excerpted from the monograph What Is Water?
by Titus Irving Gerrard
Human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
—Tom Robbins
Life and water are inseparable: 70 to 95 percent of all fresh fruits and vegetables are composed of water, 80 percent of all human beings, and the chemical reactions that sustain the lives of every organism take place in aqueous solution, most involving water as a reactant—photosynthesis constituting but a single example. Eighty percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, its total amount being estimated as 1.33 × 1024 kg—5 percent of the planet’s total mass.
Water is a thing so familiar to us all that we fail to appreciate its remarkable properties. To a massive extent it is the eccentricities of water that make the earth inhabitable. On the moon, temperatures vary from 120 degrees Centigrade at noon to negative 150 degrees at midnight, but on earth, water’s high specific heat prevents such drastic deviations of surface temperature, because oceans and lakes absorb solar heat throughout the day and release it into the atmosphere at night. Water’s boiling point is some 260 degrees higher than that of methane, though both compounds sport comparable molecular weights; and water’s vaporization point is, on a cal/g basis, greater than that of any other liquid: as a result, one-third of the solar energy that strikes the globe is dissipated by vaporizing water from oceans, lakes, and ice fields, thereby keeping the earth’s temperature relatively constant. The same mechanism keeps the temperature of the bodies of humans, plants, and animals within astoundingly narrow limits—because much of the heat generated by metabolism is consumed by the vaporization of water through the pores of skin or leaf, or by panting. If water had the same vaporization point as n-heptane (another molecularly analogous liquid), we would have to consume seven times as much of it to keep from stewing in our juices on a summer’s day.
Another mystery: water is one of the few substances whose solid form, ice, is less dense than its liquid. If it were otherwise, ice would form on the bottoms of lakes in winter, would melt incompletely in summer, and our planet would soon enter a permanent—and fatal—ice age. Nor would a bourbon on the rocks tinkle so pleasingly.
Even more bizarre is the volumetric behavior of liquid water, which contracts when heated above freezing, reaching a maximum density at 4 degrees Centigrade! No structural analyst, no physicist, no scientist of any kind has ever been able to account for this conundrum. It thumbs a runny nose at every known physical law. And to those scientists who pride themselves on their gray matter it is an unpleasant reminder that the brain is 92 percent H2O, and that therefore a frozen scientist’s brain is less dense than the same scientist’s brain at 4 degrees Centigrade!
Water consists of two units of hydrogen per single unit of oxygen, glued together by what is called a “hydrogen bond.” This much we know. Yet no scientist, ancient or mo
dern, has ever managed a quantitative description of the thermodynamics of water, nor indeed of any liquid. Not that they haven’t tried. Water is to the structural analyst what Waterloo was to Bonaparte. For many years analytically bent souls believed that liquid water consisted of H2O molecules with a geometry identical to that of a small portion of ice crystal. But in time more astute scientists pointed out that if water consisted of “microcrystals” of ice and vapor, how was it possible that pure water could be cooled to minus 40 degrees Centigrade without freezing? Stubborn proponents of the ice-crystal theory took to calling water’s structure merely “ice-crystallish” or “icelike,” but among those scientists unsatisfied with this semantic sophistry a second school of thought arose:
This second, most recent, and most widely accepted account of water’s “structure” involves what is called a “Flickering Cluster.” Poetically dubbed doodads, “flickering clusters” are said to be “open clusters of H2O molecules” united by hydrogen bonds and “swimming in a sea of relatively ‘free’ water molecules,” like fish. These clusters come in an infinity of shapes and sizes, and each cluster is constantly disintegrating, metamorphosing, forming new alliances, falling to pieces—hence “flickering.” Indeed, they “flicker” so fast that the analysts say their average life span is one-tenth-of-one-billionth-of-a-second!
This is hardly enlightening. If the next-door neighbor should solemnly announce to us that once an hour on the hour he is, for one-tenth-of-one-billionth-of-a-second, transformed into a kumquat, we shall—with our eyeballs and wristwatches—be unable to refute him. Nevertheless it would be reasonable, if not scientific, to tell him that what goes on during a-tenth-of-a-billionth-of-a-second is of little moment. We must say the same to our structural analysts—whose flickering clusters are in fact an expensive, necromantic way of saying what man has always known: water has no structure. For tens of thousands of years our wise forebears shared myths wherein water was said to be the primal, chaotic substance from which all life-forms proceed. It is clear that our forefathers have not been refuted, clarified, or improved upon.
The River Why Page 10