“Pedro’s dad stayed up most of the next night, but the mouse never came. Pedro wanted to stay up, but he’d got in trouble for falling asleep in school, and he was too tired anyhow. Juan heard it one more time about a week later, but it never came back after that. But Maria made up a song about it in Mexican, and the middle part was supposed to be how the mouse sounded, and I heard that, and Pedro and his mom say that it is just how the mouse sounded. Maria’s real small for her age. She’s five and her hair goes clear to her bottom in the back even in a pigtail, except pigtails in real life are short and squiggly, but her hair is straight and thick and pretty, so after the mouse came she started calling it a mousetail. Nobody else was around when I heard her. She was swinging in the swing all alone, singing the singing mouse song, which told how Pedro heard it but nobody believed him and he got the strings and crumbs but they didn’t sing but the next night her and Juan and her mom heard so now everybody believed them, and her voice was real high and small, and when she got to the parts about how the mouse sounded it kind of went right through me. It was exactly the sort of song you’d make if you was the only mouse in the world who knew how to sing.…”
I asked Bill Bob if it was the singing mouse song he’d been whistling into the spotlight that night. He said it was. I told him it was very beautiful, because it was. He said he thought maybe when she got older Maria might be his girlfriend, like Eddy was mine. I said Eddy wasn’t mine, and that I doubted I’d see her again, but he said he didn’t believe it. I asked what reason he had for not believing it, and he said he didn’t have any reason except for the way I’d said I’d gone swimming with her. I said that that wasn’t a reason, but even as I said it I felt outrageous and unreasonable hope and believed that if a mouse could sing I just might see Eddy again. Then he taught me to whistle the singing mouse song, and when I’d learned it he went to sleep.
The following morning I set out again for the midpoint of U.S. Grant Creek, this time journeying downstream, bound for the mouth. The weather had cleared in the night, which meant that even more people would see me trespassing, but today I’d brought equipment to assist me: I had a bag of Ma’s freezer-burned beef ribs to keep the canines busy with something besides my calves; I wore a baseball cap, carried a Big Chief 500 tablet on a clipboard and had numerous pens and mechanical pencils clipped conspicuously in my shirt pocket, the idea being to come off as some kind of meter-reader or county official.
I covered the six miles quickly, including all the places I’d fished as a kid, and I saw beyond doubt that U.S. Grant had had it. There was scunge, car bodies, garbage, sewage, and shredded plastic everywhere; there were no kingfishers, ouzels, crawfish, not even any skippers. Not even any mosquito larvae. The water was strangely clear, but slick and greasy, nothing alive in or near it. Three hundred yards from where it scuzzed into the Willamette was a hole where I’d invariably taken a cutthroat or two in springtime—a short gravel run ending in a shallow pool created by a log and garbage jam, and in the center of the pool, an underwater spring. I snuck up on hands and knees, figuring if there was a fish left, this was the place. Where the spring rose was an area the size of a bathtub where healthy moss and algae still grew. And lo and behold, there hovered a solitary seven-inch cutthroat. The last trout in U.S. Grant Creek. The last living thing in it. I slipped up to watch how it lived.
It wasn’t up to much. It hardly swam at all—just finned in its bathtub oasis. God knew how it got there. There were 300 yards of deadly water between it and the Willamette and nine miles of poison creek-corpse confronting it upstream. It was trapped. It was alone. It was the last. Half-angry, half-brokenhearted, I watched, the singing mouse song singing itself interminably in my head. One trout, one mouse, one kid—they were all that was left of the world I’d grown up in. That Bill Bob and this trout had survived intact in their respective environments seemed to me a fact more miraculous than mice humming Beethoven.
Yet when a flying ant drifted over the oasis the last trout rose and took it with all the confidence of its Tamanawis cousins. Which gave me an idea. The idea was to perform euthanasia: this doomed trout was all that let me call the creek alive; given the state of the creek, its source, its foreseeable future, it seemed better to save the trout and kill the creek.
I found a gallon milk jug to put the fish in if I caught it. I pulled out the hand line and hook I carry in my wallet. But when I went foraging for bait there was nothing alive in the streamside garbage. All I found was a rotted, waterlogged navy-blue pea coat. Which gave me another idea. I sat on a tire, pulled a long thread from the coat, jammed my #10 bait-hook into a board, held the board between my knees, took up the thread, and tied a fly—a #10 Ant of sorts. A derelict ant, in a tiny pea coat.
My fly wouldn’t float, I’d no rod to cast with, and a direct cast would spook the fish anyway; so I got out my pocketknife, cut an elderberry twig, and whittled it into a little boat for my pea-coated fly to ride in—a three-inch canoe, with an outrigger. I readied my line, stowed the fly on board, slipped upstream, and sloughed the booby-trapped canoe down toward the trout in the oasis.…
Once upon a time on an afternoon dismal as any afternoon, the last trout in U.S. Grant Creek was treading water when it found itself confronted by a remarkable spectacle: a little elderberry outrigger canoe was floating down into its pool! This trout was a young trout, unacquainted with canoes. Nevertheless it was able to identify this one, through the operation of its Racial Memory. This trout was also a nervous trout. It had had no one to talk to for a year; its creek was filthy; it knew it might be dead by now if a rain hadn’t cleaned things up a bit. This trout was, in a word, a wreck. And now this—a canoe! When would it end?
The trout’s first reaction was to spook, but its second reaction was to recall that there was nowhere to spook to: last time it left its oasis it nearly suffocated before finding its way back. So it stayed where it was. Still, it didn’t like the idea of it—a three-inch outrigger canoe; a three-inch canoe dragging an anchor rope that ran so far astern you couldn’t see an end to it. It was a bad business, to the trout’s way of thinking. It was about to get worse:
When the canoe was dead overhead it capsized. An ant fell out. “I’ll be swiggered!” thought the trout. “I didn’t know ants could canoe!” The trout eyed the ant warily; the ant clung to the anchor rope; the canoe drifted away; the ant began to sink; it was sinking right in the trout’s face.… The trout’s mind began to race: it must be an exceptional ant that could teach itself the science of canoeing; should such an ant swim to safety, what would prevent it from teaching countless other ants how to canoe? and if other ants learned to canoe, what would prevent one of them from learning the closely related science of angling? and if one ant learned to angle, what would prevent it from teaching tens of thousands of other ants? “It’s a terrible drink of water!” thought the trout, and its Racial Memory pictured dominoes—hundreds of thousands of ominous black dominoes in a row, falling, falling, one after another—ant after ant after ant in canoe after canoe after canoe killing trout after trout after trout.… “I’ve got to stop it!” thought the trout. I’ve got to kill that ant!”
Deploying two troops of teeth, the trout clamped down viciously upon the ant, but just as it did so it perceived another bad business: the ant was wearing a navy-blue pea coat. “Judas Priest!” thought the trout. “The ant can sew!” The trout crunched the ant again and again, but as it did so there came a whole bevy of bad businesses: the trout was swimming down, but it was going up; this sort of thing should never happen. And there was a pain in its mouth which its Racial Memory identified as toothache, a malady the poor trout had believed itself immune to. Then the trout realized the anchor rope was fishing line, and that the ant had a hook; adding one and one together, the trout got three: “Holy Moses!” it thought, “the ant already has learned how to angle!”
I landed the last trout in U.S. Grant Creek—a feisty, confused-looking little scrapper less interested in escape than in snap
ping the pea-coated ant. I slipped the hook from its jaw, dumped it in the water-filled milk jug, and raced to the Willamette, noticing as I went a silhouette in a VW bus watching me from a parking lot; I supposed whoever it was would start fishing the creek-stiff after seeing me score—good luck to them! I went far enough upriver to escape the stream’s vile outflow and poured out the trout: when it found itself free it hesitated, darting back and forth near shore, but as its gills began to work, as it began to breathe the comparative purity of the river, as it sensed something of the vastness of its new home it hung near the surface for a long instant, then darted forward, disappearing like a thought in the marbled green depths.
I sat on a rock and watched the river lap and glide. The sun found an opening in the clouds and began to warm my back, and I smiled, feeling I’d never done a better morning’s fishing.… But the sun soon vanished. A cold gust and a shadow passed over me. And I was suddenly afraid, suddenly aware that I stood outside an open door. Back through the door was everything familiar to me—this creek, my parents’ house, the self-conjured fisherman’s world I’d grown up in. But here before me were the swirling greens and grays of a wide, unresting river, and beyond the river a wide and ancient and unknown world that I must now enter. The time had come to close the door—but the wind was gusting, the water was the shade of steel—
Yet the last trout had had no choice. And it, too, was a timid, creek-bred suburbanite. It might have liked its little oasis there in the dead creek. I didn’t ask: I forced it to go free. I saw then that I’d no choice either. There was nothing back through that door to sustain me. I stood up, reached into the air, and swung the door shut across the mouth of little dead Sisisicu and all that lay upstream. The silhouette in the VW bus was still watching, probably thinking I was crazy. I didn’t care: I reached again into the wind, locked the door, threw the invisible key into the river, walked to the highway without once looking back, and stuck out my thumb for the Tamanawis.
BOOK FOUR
THE LINE OF LIGHT
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry on a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in the stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossoms in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips, and take her hands,
And walk along long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”
1
Hemingway
… Furiously all up an downe doth swimme
Th’ insnared fish, til cleane wearied, underneath
A willow it lyes and pants.…
Wherewith the fisher… takes his line in hand,
And by degrees gets the fish to land.
—William Browne
In the weeks that followed, my life began to feel to me more like a toy in the hands of Heaven and Earth than a tangle of tissue and glands in the hands of an idiot named Gus. I quit gabbling at Rodney, forgot my garble-headed parents, wrote once weekly to Bill Bob, and—between visits from Titus and Descartes—read like a fiend, finding it a far more satisfying thing to sally self-effaced through a masterpiece than to mope along creeks all day pricking holes in fishmouths. Titus and I continued to trade fish-knowledge for philosophy, taking turns playing mentor and dunce (during our initial conclaves I accomplished in thought and speech what Titus accomplished in deed the day he ambuscaded his ear with the #10 Mosquito), but our dunce stints made each of us more tolerant mentors, and soon we hobbled toward some semblance of attainment. By mid-September there were rods, reels, and fly-tying equipment strewn about Titus’s flat, and pens, papers, and diverse heaps of literature swamping the desk at my river-view window. As Titus wrestled with backhanded and roll casts, I forged my way through Plato, Rumi, Valmiki, and Shakespeare; as I pondered Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Taoist mythology and scripture, he intrepidly pursued and finally subdued his first fall chinook, silver salmon, and winter steelhead. Scholar though he was, Titus was no academician: accuracy and intricacy of knowledge were to him not just secondary but twentysecondary to the love one felt for the things one studied, so whenever I was unable to love a book, even if I wanted to struggle with it, Titus whisked it away and proffered another. And when I challenged him on this he explained that philo meant “love” and sophia meant “wisdom,” that every book he gave me was full of wisdom, but that in order for my reading of them to be truly philosophic I must not just read but love them. It seemed to work: at least I soon found myself eyeing the covers of unknown books with the same sense of expectancy I felt when scrutinizing the waters of a new stream.
The same day I killed U.S. Grant Creek I had a little adventure that eventually won me something I never dreamed of seeking: notoriety. How I handled it is another story, but how I got it was like this:
From Portland to Highway 101 I rode with a speed-freaking sixteen-year-old in his stepfather’s Porsche; from 101 to Fog I rode in a milk truck—not the square white kind full of bottles and cottage cheese, but the tanker type that looks like a giant Lone Ranger silver bullet. From Fog I started hoofing it up the Tamanawis River Road for home, soaking in the sights and sounds and smells of the valley, marveling—after successive days among the tract houses and condos jammed along U.S.G.’s corpse—at the inexplicable scarcity of people. Which scarcity I took as empirical proof of the existence of some kind of God, because only the unseen but illimitable powers of a God could keep stacking people on top of each other in urb and burb pancake-housing when they could be living on little farms or in cabins or villages in the woods and fields and mountains; I figured God kept jamming them in there because He refused to turn them loose on the Tamanawises of the World until they learned a way of living that wouldn’t turn Tamanawises into U.S.G.’s. It was nice to find myself approving of God’s behavior for a change.
It was three miles to the cabin, and all of me was satisfied to trudge it except my arms, who had fourteen members of Titus’s library to tote. So I suppose it was my arms that started me down the trail toward Notoriety, since it was the pain they felt that inspired me to accept a ride from Ernie and Emma, and the relief they felt during that ride that inspired me to tell Ernie and Emma to send over their kids for a fishing lesson “anytime you like.” They “liked” in approximately 2½ minutes—the puniest “anytime” I’d ever encountered. I hadn’t finished my welcome-home beer when all six of them boiled like storm surf into the cabin along with the dogs, a gallon of homemade apple cider, two jars of pickled tomatoes, a jug of raw milk, a pound of fresh butter, and (for themselves) a six-pack of sixteen-ounce Cokes. There had been a brief period when the extravagance of Ernie and Emma’s potlatch gifts put me to shame, but a few afternoons spent tutoring the half-dozen flowers of their family tree had shown me the justice in their generosity. Today the warm weather had them awfully sped up: by the time they snorted down the Cokes the cabin was quaking. They’d brought their ratty poles and lost no time making it known that they wished to go fishing. When I refused they ignored me and chanted the demand louder and faster and faster and louder, explaining as they did so that this was an occult wish-fulfillment technique taught them by Arjuna and Rama, and that i
t was called a “mantra.”
The reason I’d never taken them fishing was not arcane: they simply didn’t know how to fish. And I knew that you don’t teach kids to fish by taking them fishing. To take ignorant kids fishing is to take nobody fishing: what it really is is to take yourself on a descent into a watery hell of kid-boogered pools, reels covered with monofilament Afros, heads voodooed full of hooks, and an Akashic Record full of “When-are-we-gonna-catch-one” ’s. To teach kids to fish you say, “OK. We’ll all go fishing as soon as you can all cast, reel, catch crawdads and caddis-fly larvae, bait a hook, rerig after a snag, and promise not to drown.” But this day they perjurously insisted that they’d mastered these fundamentals, and when I demanded proof by demonstration they demonstrated all right—with Hollywood Indian war dancing, anti-Gus slogans, and threats to mantracize my head with the empty Coke bottles. “You kids can’t intimidate me!” I roared… as I led them like a mother duck down to the nearest plunking pool to fish.
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