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.
