The next smoke signal came from Eaton’s Landing. What it wasn’t was fun. What it was was they gaped at me like I was the Grim Reaper come to harvest. What it was was I gave them a couple of flies (knowing they didn’t flyfish), thanked them for helping with Abe, and split. I made another half-dozen stops—including the local grocery store, cafe, gas station, and library—and in trying to give away flies, fish, and fishing tips I got a free oil change, apple pie and coffee, pamphlets and books on Tamanawis Valley and county history, two quarts of pop and a huge bag of corn chips. I had found my people. And I had found that Thomas Bigeater, Piscator, and I weren’t the world’s only proponents of friendliness.
When I returned to my cabin it had undergone a subtle transformation: I’d left behind a solitary structure on a lonely river; I’d returned to the home of someone the locals called “Gus the Fisherman”—a home just up the road from Ernie and Emma’s, not far from the candle-makers, Crawdad Benson, Eaton’s Landing, the “Fogged Inn Cafe,” and all those folks that made the valley and town a valley and town full of folks. I had “saved the life o’ that corpse outta the river”; that corpse was me. And with my de-fished eyes I really saw my home: I couldn’t get over the sight and smell of it—the almost drinkable gold beams filtering through green glowing cedar, the thickness of the moss, the clarity of the river, the lupine, paintbrush, and daisies in the clearings, the songs of birds and chippiting of chipmunks, the sweet, watery fragrance of the glade.…
I spent the afternoon purging the place of the crasser vestiges of the dead me, introducing tin cans of wildflowers, Steve’s candles, Bill Bob’s rock and junk and dreefee collection, pinecones, water-sculpted sticks, and a bright red mushroom, in place of strewn fishing gear. As I worked I let the radio blare for the first time—and on a band Bill Bob had selected, where rock and roll from Seattle, baseball from Boise, Gospel from Medford, and static from the stratosphere battled for my ear.
At dusk I fed the fish and chipmunks, poured a mug of wine, and sat at the four-by-four window, sipping and pondering what further deeds of reconciliation with the world might be accomplished before dark. And there, before my face, hovered Sigrid the Small—longing as always for her beloved river. I fetched a bucket, filled it at the sink, then took the minnow net and moved it slowly toward her, explaining that I had to capture her in order to set her free. She seemed to grasp the paradox, for she stayed in the corner—fins beating like hummingbird wings—till the net enclosed her; only then did she struggle, but once in the bucket she again hovered patiently as I lectured on the dangers of mergansers, kingfishers, raccoons, mink, herons, big fish, and fishermen. By the time we reached the river I was frazzled with worry, but I recalled a knee-deep pool in the spring-creek my cabin water came from—the same water she’d lived in most of her life. There had never been fish in that tiny stream, so predators would exclude it from their rounds; she’d be safe until she moved down to the river. I waded in and immersed the bucket, but she stayed in it, hovering in the hummingbird pose, as if reluctant in the end to leave me. Bending over her, I noticed for the first time a greenish crescent on her back, almost a moon—probably a scar from the day Alfred went berserk. She never moved, so at last I drew the bucket away; she lingered a moment, then was gone. I scanned the pool, glad I couldn’t spot her because her enemies wouldn’t either. Just as I turned to leave she darted out of hiding, caught her first wild midge, and, after the splash, vanished.
It was a lonely walk back to the cabin; just a day among my people left me longing for more. Before coming to the Tamanawis I’d believed that solitude was a cure-all, a psychic panacea, an invisible knife certain to cut me clear of all the parental debates, the wasted time, the drivel of school, the unending parade of cars and machinery; I’d believed that solitude would free me and, alone and independent, I would make myself into the person I wanted to be. But solitude, I found, was no guarantee of anything. Day after day I stood alone on whispering streams, tranquility and beauty on all sides, not a city nor a suburb nor a soul within miles and Presto! a swarm of hobgoblins came scuffling into my skull, hunkered down like hobos under a bridge, and proceeded to yammer at the tops of their lungs! One voice would belt out some facile ditty from a TV commercial; a second would join in with obscene or idiotic scraps of doggerel, trying to drown out the first; the third was my critic, pitching me shit, calling me names, giving me grief over every treed fly, missed strike, stubbed toe, telling me I should be on another creek, using a different fly, wearing different clothes. This one had a brother, the Whiner: “I’m sleepy, I’m hungry, I’m tired, I’m bored, I’m lonely, I’m horny, My back hurts, My stomach aches, Why are we doing this, What are we doing here, When can we go home, When can we leave home?…” And most obnoxious of all, the Gloater: “HA! What a cast! I’m the greatest! H2O couldn’t have laid that fly in there if his Scotch depended on it. now… Haii! I got him! Who but ME could have hooked that fish under those conditions? Walton, Cotton, Gordon, Ritz, Brooks, GUS ORVISTON—the true greats!” I was free. I was alone. It was hell. The confusion, the misery, the stupidity—all of it followed me from Portland to the Tamanawis, and in the quiet grew fecund and multiplied. It came from nobody but me.
And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material—awesome, malleable, older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless—for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself. One needed either wisdom or tree-bark insensitivity to confront such a fearsome freedom. Realizing now that I lacked both, I let myself long for company. Unashamed, I let my heart ache for someone more substantial than my shadow, someone less hidden than the Queen, someone willing to share jokes and junk food… and I hadn’t reached my back door before I heard whispering, looked round the cabin, and there were the Doughnut Dairy kids with six ratty poles, six rusty reels with rotten line in bird’s nests, brown paper bags of popcorn and bottles of pop, wanting their first lesson in the ancient art of angling. We paraded inside, lit the new candles while taking turns attempting to say “tintinnabulatious,” scarfed munchies, fixed tackle, told tales, chortled, and learned till I took them home in the pickup long past the small ones’ bedtimes. For the second night running I slept peacefully, and the water noises came not from my head, but from the Tamanawis.
3
The Warble of the Water Owl
In our aquarium we may witness all the cruelties of an embittered struggle for existence.… Before the glorious male, the modestly garbed female lowers the flag… and, if she is unwilling to mate, flees immediately.… The male must never obtain so much as a glimpse of her flanks, otherwise he will immediately become… unchivalrous.
—Konrad Lorenz
I awoke before dawn. The morning star was twinkling through the same opening in the cedars and the world was too wide and lovely to leave unexplored. I jumped up, got dressed, dashed to the truck, and—empty-stomached, shivering, and the stars still out—started down Highway 101 with no particular destination.
After an amount of time I can’t disclose (lest it hint at the location of the Tamanawis) I pulled into Otis for a depth-charge breakfast of pancakes and coffee which I choked down in huge quantities for the inane reason that some loggers were sitting by me and I wanted to impress them. I think one was impressed; at least he gave me a crooked little smile as he stirred his piping-hot coffee—with his thumb! I was glad to find an early-opening grocery in Lincoln City: I bought ten pounds of oranges, figuring it would take at least that to flush the batter from my bowels. Then I headed up into the Coast Range to explore the Siletz River country.
By early afternoon I’d wandered well into the mountains. The sun was hot, the pickup dusty, and I was finally getting hungry, so I thought I’d eat oranges somewhere along the river, bake in the sun, then go for a skinny-dip. It is a strange fact that I had never deliberately been swimming in all my twenty years; I’d fallen in fishing, but I’d never gone swimming for swimming’s sake. Since I am, like most hermits, modest, I picked a place
where the river wound away from the road into a canyon. There were deserted places all along that hundred-mile river; there was nothing outstanding about this place: but this was, inexplicably, the place I picked.
A Digression: Inexplicabilities
There appear to be, generally speaking, two explanations for the inexplicable. One is logical, crediting the random operation of a principle known variously as Fate, Destiny, or Chance. Fate, Destiny, or Chance, in its extreme manifestations, is said to be capable of descending upon a room full of monkeys playing with typewriters and causing one monkey to type an entire Shakespeare play—provided the number of monkeys and the amount of time are sufficient to allow for those frustrating cases wherein a monkey types its way clear to the end of Hamlet, only to conclude, “… Take up the bodies: such a sight as this becomes the field but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers sh&$bznx¢¼grntnokyirt.”
The other explanation of inexplicabilities is mytho-logical, crediting (or blaming) various mischievous, machinating gods with names like Pan, Cupid, Kama, Khizr, Coyote, Raven, and even Narayana Himself for the stranger experiences we endure. I ask the reader to remember these two explanations, and to ask which of the two most plausibly accounts for my selecting that nondescript parking place on the Siletz.
end of digression
Lugging five of the ten pounds of oranges, I hiked down a hellish incline through firs, alders, salal, devil’s club, and cooties, and came out by a rapids. I’ve never liked lingering beside rapids: they’re noisy, you can’t catch fish in them, and if you fall in you die, so I wandered upstream till I came to a long, slow glide. Above the glide was a big quiet pool with a massive broken-topped alder hanging out over it and a number of moss-covered sunlit boulders just past, any of which would make an admirable picnic table for my oranges and me…
but before proceeding I happened to glance once more at the broken-topped alderand there was a person in that alder. Way up in the top. Way out over the river. I scrambled closer, hoping the person in the alder wouldn’t see me. Finding the five pounds of oranges inconducive to furtivity, I set them down, thinking to return for them soon after… but I returned for them neither soon nor ever after—and the reason I didn’t was up in the alder.
I stopped a spin-cast or so below that alder and looked again. The person in the tree hadn’t seen me. In fact, the person in the tree hadn’t moved a muscle. I didn’t know why the person was so motionless, but I did know this: it was no ordinary person up in that tree, way up in the top, way out over the pool, all alone in that desolate canyon. No. It was a girl up in that tree. A barefoot girl. A full-grown one. One who wore the top tenth or so of what had long ago been a pair of blue jeans. One who wore a short, skin-tight, sleeveless sky-colored t-shirt through which I could see the, which showed the, which revealed the shape of the… well, I really couldn’t see her very well through all those branches. Not as well as I wanted to. I crept closer, stopping a fly-cast or so below the broken alder. I looked again. What was that girl doing up there? Why didn’t she ever move? Why did she hold her golden right arm before her like Moses had done waging war against the Amalekites? My angle-ridden memory supplied me with a Biblical verse:
Thy rod, wherewith thou smotest the river,
take in thine hand, and go.
And I saw it—the dangling line, the rod in the extended hand… of course! The girl was fishing. I slunk closer, stopping a mere roll-cast below the broken alder: I could see her very clearly now. From where I stood it was impossible not to observe that there were no problems pertaining to her appearance. None at all. Because, well, she was fishing. It would, um, it would be, uh, interesting, yes, it would be interesting, I told myself, to unobtrusively observe the way the girl in the tree fished. A kind of research project. A study in fishing methods. Nothing voyeuristic about it. It would simply be best not to disturb her concentration and sense of privacy. Clearly, there was much to learn. Take, for instance, the innovative and utter lack of waders and vest and and every sort of cumbersome clothing. This interested me very much. More freedom of movement and so on. Something to consider. Very practical and so forth. I could hardly have been more interested.… Her fishing equipment was innovative also: she appeared to have no creel or equipage or container of any kind apart from her pole and line and whatever was on the end of it. There was the possibility of a few spare hooks or leaders in the pockets of the fraction of blue jeans, certainly, but given their fit, given the fact that from my excellent vantage point there were only anatomical contours discernible within their sparse confines, the spare-hooks-or-weights-or-baits theory grew tenuous. As to the possibility of fishing tackle concealed within the sky-colored t-shirt, this was even less likely. Nevertheless I considered the problem long and carefully, scanning every least curve of the thin material, reluctant to give up the search. All in all her angling costume was so thought-provoking, so fundamental yet satisfactory, that it was difficult to proceed to an examination of pole and line. There was something so pleasing to the eye about it. I wasn’t used to looking at such things, let alone in trees, let alone fishing, let alone slender and golden-skinned and young and blond and solitary and, um—the pole. It must be mentioned that the pole and the line and the whatever-was-tied-to-the-line were the only other tackle to be considered: there was no reel on the pole. I’d never seen anyone before without a reel like her in trees dressed like she was fishing up there ever ever before that way, for which reason I couldn’t help but feel she must be an extraordinary person, well worth watching, well worth meeting, well worth thinking about, an exceptional fisherman, and I was, what was I, I was learning, yes, learning: I was learning like crazy. I’d never learned so much so fast before, all sorts of new things about my sport, for instance how important it is to learn by watching others, how valuable it can be to meet other fishermen and share ideas, get to know them and so forth, after watching them for awhile up in the tree, fishing like that, in those clothes, with, um… the pole. I should describe it: it was a huge sucker. That’s not slang: that’s a literal fact. It was a huge hazelnut sucker, fourteen feet long, with the bark and even a few leaves still hanging on it. It had two wire guide-loops and a third loop attached at the tip, but there were no real guides. And there was no reel: what line wasn’t in the air or the water was coiled in her left hand, which also clasped a branch for balance while her right hand held the rod high. Which brings us to her posture. It was a superb fishing posture. Extremely alert. Among other things. Lots of other things. I could only see the edge of her face. Fishermen’s faces can tell an experienced observer a lot about the fishing and all, so I craned my neck to see it as clearly as possible. It was an excellent edge of a face—lips the color of silver salmon roe; long lashes curved like the hind legs of mayflies; a nose that gave you the same sort of feeling a baby cottontail rabbit’s nose gives you. Not that her nose looked like a baby cottontail rabbit’s nose. That would have looked ridiculous. Just like her nose would have looked ridiculous on a baby cottontail rabbit. I just meant the feeling. You know. How baby cottontail rabbit noses, the little fuzzy ones, make you feel? You know, how when they scrunch them up to smell something, how cute it looks and everything… Oh forget it.
Anyhow her nose was nice. A part complete unto itself. Which was the sort of parts all the parts of her were: you saw one part—just a nose, or a foot, or a t-shirt—and you’d no desire to look elsewhere. But you did look anyhow, because you didn’t want to miss anything going on up there. Those sorts of parts. To me, anyway.
But when I kept looking all over her not to miss anything, watching how she was getting along up there—the entire her, that is, apart from the parts—I realized something: there was something more going on, something on the wind, some impending thing impending. My native intelligence, enfeebled though it was by fractions and parts, still sensed it: something spectacular was afoot—
because she never once moved. She hadn’t budged since I first laid eyes on her. It was remembering Moses that
clued me in. I don’t know why I remembered Moses, but I did. I remembered how when the Israelites battled away against the Amalekites ol’ Moses held his arms extended so the Israelites would win, and his arms got “heavy as stones,” and Aaron and some other guy had to come hold his arms up for him. I always felt sorry for the Amalekites, whoever they were. Seemed like Moses should have had to hold his own dang arms up. Like the girl in the tree was doing with her arm. And with five or six pounds of hazelnut sucker at the end of it! Her poor arm must have been killing her, but you’d never guess it by the edge of her face. I could think of only one thing that would inspire such strength in a fisherman and put such a feeling in the wind: Big Fish. There had to be a big fish in the pool down there, and judging by the signs it must be watching her bait about as closely as I was watching her and she was watching it.…
The River Why Page 19