Category: Stories

I woke to wind buffeting the camper. At least it would help keep the skeeters at bay, despite adding another layer of challenge to the fishing. I drank tea sitting on a bluff overlooking the river, flowing fast and turbid through a narrow canyon below.

Slowly the others stirred to life and joined me.

“I think we should go above the reservoir,” she said. “If anything, it looks murkier down here than yesterday.”

We nodded agreement. I’d fished above the reservoir once before, ten or more years ago. A return would be welcome.

“I think I’ll wet wade,” I said, preferring to tackle the trail in hiking garb rather than waders, and wanting to keep the weight in my pack to a minimum.

Dust devils swirled across the gravel as we drove higher into the mountains. We stopped to drag a fresh deadfall from the road. We slowed for several bike riders heading the opposite direction, looks of grim determination on their faces. After a half hour we gained our first glimpse of the reservoir, studded with white caps, rollers breaking against the dam wall. Snow-capped peaks framed the skyline to the west. I pulled into a turn out and grabbed my phone to take a photo and a surge in the wind caught me off balance, almost setting me on my chuff.

“If nothing else, it’ll be a pleasant walk out and back,” opined the Optimist among us. Spending a good portion of his days on a fishing boat off the Alaskan coast, he came well qualified as a judge of gales and rollers.

 

The road terminated and we took to the trail leading toward the snow capped peaks. Feeder streams still ran high, necessitating seeking out places to cross where deadfall provided a bridge. The first mile kept to the trees before the trail emerged into more open country where we looked down upon a meadow a half-mile across that tapered toward the mountains.

The river snaked at speed through the meadow, willow and alder growing along its banks. From our vantage point, gentle holding water for fish appeared sparse. While the others elected to fish streamers, taking the need for a dead drift out of the equation I, ever the tragic, elected to attempt to fish with a dry fly.

Despite the wind I managed multiple good drifts close to undercut banks, to no avail. The first time I set foot into the water I regretted not having waders, my lower extremities getting an instant ice-cream headache for my troubles. Standing in one place for longer than thirty seconds invited loosing feeling in one’s feet.

For several hours we leap-frogged upstream, one fish hooked but not landed the sum total of our combined efforts. We sat on a bluff and took a late lunch. Across the far side of the valley a waterfall cascaded out of a rock fissure like a giant white veil. Elsewhere, a second waterfall remained frozen in a shaded crevice high in a granite buttress. Closer to where we sat, movement in a patch of alder along the riverbank betrayed a bull moose, ambling and feeding with the insouciance of one who knows size does in fact matter. Overhead, a juvenile bald eagle battled the updrafts, wings clumsy and uncoordinated, like a teenager struggling with a growth spurt.

By now the lure of the beer cooler back at camp began to outweigh the draw of what lay further upstream. I recalled a place I’d fished earlier, where my inattention had spooked a nice fish from it’s lie.

“I’m going to give that place one more shot on the way down,” I said. “Maybe the fish has come back.”

This time I approached the lie from upstream, wading thigh-deep across a narrow channel to the head of a gravel bar with a few inches of water flowing across its surface. At the bottom end of the gravel bar two flows co-joined, and in that seam the fish had earlier sat.

As I made my first cast, landing the streamer off to one side and letting the current swing it into the lie, I realized my walking across the gravel bar had stirred up muddy sediment that drifted inexorably toward the lie. I had time for three or four more casts before any surprise would be ruined.

Two casts later the rod jumped in my hand in response to an aggressive take. Tip high, I stripped line hard, not wanting to let the fish get into the cut bank or any further downstream. Soon, I held a chunky brown in one hand and slipped the hook from its mouth, to the applause of the peanut gallery.

 

An hour later, back on the bluff at camp, we sat with cold beer replacing morning’s caffeine.

“Told you it was a great day for a stroll in the high country,” reminded the Optimist.

In that I could brook no argument.

We pushed the boats away from the beach and into the flow. For a time, river and interstate ran side by side—two worlds, one a monument to humankind’s rush toward the future, the other a testament to the virtues of patience and persistence. After a half mile the river turned south into a wide canyon, and we left behind the noise and bustle of that other world.

Here, time had whittled away the sharp edges of the landscape. Wind and water, its chief agents, had burnished the rock to a smooth, polished surface that glowed deep red and orange in the late afternoon sunlight. In silence we drifted past a cliff face, long and high as an ocean liner, its surface scarred and pitted. Birds had made themselves at home in some of the deeper recesses, streaks of white guano betraying their location, while elsewhere clusters of mud swallow nests clung like barnacles to the undersides of larger overhangs.

Up front of the raft, my daughter and her friend sat, feet dangling in the river, taking in the surroundings and occasionally commenting on some item of passing interest, while from the second boat a hundred yards downstream, snatches of conversation drifted lazily across the water.

I shipped the oars and opened a beer, letting the boat pirouette slowly at the whim of the breeze and current, drifting a quarter mile per rotation. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the natural inclination of the raft was to float with its bow quartered upstream, as if looking back over its shoulder, back from where we had come.

Twenty five years had passed since I’d first, and last, floated this part of the Colorado. Then thirty years old, all my worldly possessions fitted into a back pack. I had a six month visa stamped in my passport and a plane ticket on to London.

It appeared a strange, almost alien landscape to me then — parched, ancient and vast, requiring of its inhabitants a thick skin and a slow metabolism. The river itself was broader and more voluminous than I had previously encountered, and silty red. At night an endless sky would light up in flashes of dry lightning. Most striking of all however, once one sat quietly and listened beyond the murmur of the water and the song of the wren, the chirp of the crickets and the croak of the toads, was a great overarching silence that lay across the landscape like a soft blanket, a silence which, if one paid attention, made mockery of life’s strutting, sound and fury.

I looked again at my daughter, marveling at the miracle of her being, a creation in every measure as confounding and beautiful as that through which we floated. Her presence brought home to me the passage of my own time, the rounding of my own edges, the emergence of my own pits and scars. Mistakes had been made along the way, but looking at her, here and now, how could there be regret?

“Hey My Guy, is it OK if we jump in and swim along next to the boat?” she asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “I was planning on pushing you in at some stage anyway.”

Little by little, first feet then knees then thighs they lowered themselves into the water, finally releasing the raft and floating free, borne along separately, the subtleties of the current pushing each their own way.

Terry was from the Texas Panhandle. He never spoke in a rush, each vowel the length of a short story. He was a competent angler, so much so that I often wondered why he bothered to pay for a guide, except to have someone to laugh at his jokes and tie the occasional fly on for him.

Three or four times a season he’d load a couple of rods in his Suburban then head to the mountains, sometimes alone, sometimes with a buddy. One such buddy was Butch. Even in waders, Butch looked and walked like a cowboy, his calloused handshake as firm as his eye contact as we introduced ourselves.

“I’ve been trying to get him to turn his damn phone off since we left Amarilla,” Terry complained. “Damn thing rings every five minutes.”

“I warned you,” said Butch. “The ranch goes to hell in a hand basket without me.”

We headed to the river, and weren’t ten minutes into the float when Butch’s phone rang. Stifling a curse, he set down his rod and fumbled it from a pocket beneath his life jacket.

“He did what!!!!……….How in the………well……..tell him it’s coming out of his paycheck. Get the backhoe over there and do the best you can.”

Butch shook his head in resignation and took up his rod once more.

“I told you to turn the darn thing off. How’s me and him supposed to enjoy our day on the river?”

Terry nudged me in the back as he spoke before casting his line toward the bank, landing his hopper a couple of feet shy. He gave it a cursory twitch, waited a few seconds then picked up and cast again.

“Slow down Terry. A little patience goes a long way. Let it sit a bit, maybe twitch it a time or two more.”

“You wanna see the way he drives,” muttered Butch, reaching for his phone as it rang a second time.

“You’re kidding me……those things cost a hundred and fifty each. At this rate, he’s not going to have a paycheck left……”

Terry murmered in my ear. “Oh, did I mention Butch just had one of those defibrillator things put on his heart?”

“No Terry, you didn’t mention that.”

“Darn thing works too. Yesterday, we stopped on the way up to fish one of the creeks. The hike down was a little too much for him, I guess. Kinda lost his balance then it kicked in. He was right as rain in a few minutes, but you might want to keep your eye on him.”

Thanking Terry for the information, I made a mental note to not take what people wrote on their medical waver at face value in the future.

Butch’s phone fell silent. Perhaps peace had come to the cattle business at last, but more likely the cause was drifting into the canyon where cell service was slight to non-existent. Ignorance being the better part of bliss, I decided not to tell him, for two reasons. Firstly, his phone’s silence would hopefully imply the world would still manage to turn without him, and secondly, it would lessen the chance of that other marvel of modern technology, nestled next to his heart, having to work it magic.

“So Butch, how often do you get away from the ranch?” I asked.

Butch grunted. “Only when he drags me away.” He nodded in Terry’s direction. “And when the wife wants to visit the grandkids in Dallas.”

We floated deeper into the canyon. Free from distraction, Butch hooked and landed his first fish, a buttery brown with sparse, vivid spots.

“Now that’s pretty,” he remarked, inspecting the fish as it lay in the net before I released it.

“Damn right it is,” replied Terry. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

I scrambled up the lose rock of the bank, slipped off my pack and, sitting with my back against a sun-warmed boulder, looked out across the stream. The ground rose steeply beyond, striated rows of tussock interspersed with stands of bristlecone, aspen and spruce until, near its peak the mountainside sloped vertically to cliffs of decaying granite, squat like the battlements of some ancient fortress, sentinel to the valley it helped define.

Blotches of centuries-old lichen spread across the face of the boulder against which I sat, testament to both the tenacity of life, and the slow creep of time against which my presence that afternoon rated as little more than a transient insult.

Delving into the pack, I withdrew a tin of smoked oysters, a few crackers and a can of double chocolate stout. My back appreciated the support of the boulder behind and while my face and torso soaked up the sun’s warmth, a biting breeze nipped at any flesh left exposed.

The boulder rested on the east side of the stream just below a confluence where a fork flowed from the west, out of a narrow valley tapering toward distant mountains. Another watershed to be noted and saved for a later time.

My body ached gently from hiking and casting and sleeping in the back of my truck on an air mattress that once felt soft and plush, but these days seemed my enemy as much as my friend. For three days I hadn’t communicated with any soul but my own. What thoughts I had bounced around the confines of my head, save a few scribbled on paper, or curses, uttered aloud when outsmarted by a fish or foiled by an errant breeze or inaccurate cast.

I wondered why I did this, why come all this way to suffer discomfort and tie small pieces of feather and fir to the end of a gossamer line and cast it upon a body of water to see what might might be deceived by its presence. Was it the lure of uncertainty sprinkled with occasional confirmation? Some kind of retreat from reality, or a search for it? The sense of reassurance that accompanies the recognition of our own insignificance, or the acknowledgement of the folly of assuming on our shoulders the weight of a world too vast for us to comprehend, let alone attempt to carry?

Perhaps it was all and none of that. Perhaps the moment of quiet contemplation while sitting alongside a gentle stream, back against a boulder while eating oysters and crackers and sipping stout from a can was the point of it all, everything else merely window dressing, the means to this end.

Tempting as it was to stay there and nap against the boulder, the bite of the wind stirred me to action again. There was still two miles more to camp, and a stream to fish along the way.