The River Why Read online

  The cowgirl found a driftwood club an’ whacked ol’ Burrzinsky till one eyeball popped out. This she took as a sign that he was dead. She’d have liked to’ve sat an’ admired her fish awhile—but things weren’t so picturesque somehow with the one eye hangin’ down the cheek on a nerve string an’ the blue-devil din pourin’ nonstop outta the Slicker. So she turned to the rubble of a man on the rocks…

  an’ that strange, universal compassion women have fer any creature too wounded, sick, or crazy to care fer its ownself suddenly flooded her heart. Seein’ H. H. soaked to the gills, scraped an’ bloodied, rubbin’ his eyes’, huggin’ his knees, suckin’ his thumbs, howlin’ an’ howlin’, she gathered deadwood an’ scraps o’ nine-foot flyrod fer a fire. From the saddlebag she produced a flask o’ Redeye, took a stiff swig, poured a drop into ol’ Nijerkey’s toothy mouth, an’ passed it on to Hen—who left off his warwhoopin’ an’ downed half the bottle at a chug: a damned nice piece o’ drinkin’. As campfire an’ firewater dried his clothes an’ brains respectively, he finally seen the cowgirl was a pretty little thing an’ a differnt fire lit up an’ dried him out quicker’n what wood or whiskey could o’ done. Meanwhile she was hittin’ the Redeye pretty good herself, an’ feelin’ pretty bad ’bout bustin’ the Slicker’s 2x pippit an’ catchin’ the fish he’d pooped out for her; an’ it was mighty dark an’ lonely; an’ the coyotes sounded weird tonight; an’ the fire was cozy an’ the whiskey good, an’ the Slicker awful pitiful lookin’; an’ she’d’ve liked to’ve cheered him up, an’ she’d growed up watchin’ horses an’ bulls an’ chickens an’ her brothers; an’ the blind red passion was siftin’ through the air; an’ she judged Hen was quite a feller, even if she hadn’t figgered which kind he was quite a feller of.…

  So as the flyrod blazed an’ the juniper brands smoked off the evil spirits, as the river grumbled an’ the crickets sang loud, Henning Hale-Orviston an’ the cowgirl cuddled up an’ giggled—an’ damn if they didn’t fall in love, or leastways into what folks in those situations fall in. When the night grew cold the two grew warm by beddin’ down in the sand, an’—

  —just their luck: a child was conceived.

  One day the cowgirl would name that child Gus. But highfalutin’ Hen’d stick’m with Augusteen.

  That’s how Zeke tells it. And that’s more or less how it was. The cowgirl was Zeke’s little sister, Carolina Carper, my very own Ma.

  2

  The Rogue River Fishing War

  I’m a-goin’ fishin’, Mama’s goin’ fishin’

  An’ de baby’s goin’ fishin’ too.

  Bet yo’ life

  Yo’ sweet wife’s

  Gonna catch mo’ fish dan you.

  —Taj Mahal

  I am ashamed to report that back in ’53 my parents were not as scrupulous (nor as affluent) as they are now. Upon learning that their riverside romance had ignited an inexorable series of metabolic transformations in Ma’s belly, they drew up a secret pact: due to the incompatibility of Sears Roebuck fishing gear to endorsement money, they would proceed as if Nijinsky had been the conquest of H2O with his cremated cane rod, 2x tippet, and name-brand equipage, and Ma would forever hold her peace. Thus the steelhead’s gaping treble-hook wounds were described as evidence of an earlier run-in with a less-skilled angler, and the repeatedly fractured skull and popped eye were attributed to an overdose of adrenaline coursing through the veins of the conquering hero. Official photographs and measurements were taken, the corpse was mummified and hung over the fireplace, and H2O unabashedly cranked out one of his patented How-To-Land-A-Lunker stories full of useless tips for flyfishing rookies and ill-disguised hints that Nijinsky would never have met his demise were it not for SuchandSuch-brand rods and reels and lines and boots and hat and creels and undershorts. Within three months of the Deschutes River Episode they collected enough endorsement money to finance a hasty wedding and two-week winter steelheading honeymoon on the Rogue River—H2O’s idea being that the Rogue trip would soften Ma’s Desert-Ranch to Portland-Suburb culture shock, but might still wean her of her homespun ways; he could take some photos and dredge up a few articles if the fishing were any good—maybe something like “Flyfishing Bride” or “Love and Lunkers on the Rogue”—thereby allowing the trip to pay for itself; the only unforeseeable problem was the weather, and if it should sleet ceaselessly, so much the better for consummating the marriage ad infinitum beside a cozy fire in their suite at the lodge. Such was the plan. So much for plans.

  The “Rogue River Fishing War” at least served the traditional purpose of the honeymoon, for honeymoons are intended to seal the union of bride and groom till death does them part. But whereas we imagine the usual chemistry of such excursions to be a uniting through corporeal and spiritual familiarity—a sharing of meals, scenic wonders, wines and bathrooms, of kisses, caresses, and inane little foofoo names—my parents enjoyed no such chemistry. Their honeymoon was more fusion than union—the resulting bond not that of lovebirds, but of a tough metal alloy. The effete angler and the raucous cowgirl were the materia prima, the Rogue River the crucible, worms and flies the catalysts, angling the white-hot fire, and a marriage that has stood the tests of time, backbiting, frontbiting, hells, highwaters, and haymakers the resulting compound.

  Because of the extreme bias of the War’s two survivors, I can only list those events which they agree took place:

  1. H2O’s efforts to instruct Ma in the hallowed art of fly-angling met with the most invisible species of success, achieving a kind of catharsis when the instructee’s reluctant attempts at false-casting left a #4 Humptulips Hellion dangling from the lobe of the instructor’s ear.

  2. To atone for the ear, Ma chucked her flyfishing equipment (a costly wedding gift from H2O) far out into the roily waters of the Rogue and returned to the Sears Crane-and-Cable.

  3. Entrenched like European War troopers in their respective styles, my parents proceeded to grimly ply the waters while the honeymoon degenerated into a two-man Fishing Derby. H2O denies there having occurred a contest, but pictures of him in his 1954 Outdoor Life article, “Roguish Steelies Love Brightly Colored Flies,” reveal the face of a man strapped to a bullet-pocked wall—hollow eye sockets, stubbled beard, strained grin at the Kodak he adored. It was a contest all right. And H2O’s appearance was inspired by

  4. The Fishing Derby Results: Ma—thirteen fish landed; thirteen fish killed; four fish lost once hooked; largest fish seventeen pounds. H2O—three fish landed; zero fish killed; eight fish lost once hooked; largest fish nine pounds.

  5. H2O’s policy of releasing his catch after a quick photograph resulted in the ugliest altercation of all. It seems that two of his three prizes were identical seven-pound bucks that, though caught on successive days, were taken from the same hole. Pondering this, Ma waited till they sat sipping whiskies in the crowded lodge bar, then suddenly loudly accused him of catching a single seven-pounder, snapping its picture, burying it in the sand, digging it up and photographing it again the next day, throwing it away, and then shamelessly claiming to have released it unharmed! (I must point out here that apart from the Nijinsky fabrication—for which he paid in blood—I have never known my father to lie about his angling accomplishments, not even such typical fibs as the adding of inches and ounces to fish taken in the Long Ago.) H2O heard her out, threw his Scotch in her face, and walked away; just as he reached the door, Ma’s chair splintered against the wall over his head.

  6. At the lodge, anglers and employees viewed the fledgling marriage with rabid interest: bets were made and small fortunes won and lost as wagerers gambled on what date or hour the divorce would commence, who would murder whom, or what article of tackle, furniture, or anatomy would be destroyed next. H2O was considered the villain of the drama—unjustly I think, but Ma stacked the deck by giving steelhead steaks to everyone she saw. Soon a cavalcade of rumors marched in their wake, among them these: a) the famous Henning Hale-Orviston couldn’t catch his ass in a fish hatchery. b) the o
nly fly of Orviston’s that had ever hooked anything worth keeping was the one manufactured by Levi Strauss and Company. c) the increasingly wasted appearance of the groom as the war dragged on could signify but one thing: he was spawned out.

  7. The barroom outburst proved the first of a series of eruptions wherein the cultural, genetic, mental, and metaphysical makeup of bride and groom received simultaneous (and therefore, luckily, incomprehensible) slander. Being the less skilled rhetorician, Ma ended one argument by punctuating H2O in the nose. Whether he didn’t punch back because he’s a gentleman (as he maintains) or because he’d have been used as a floor mop (as Uncle Zeke maintains) is open to debate.

  8. Strangest of all were sudden truces called at unexpected hours of day or night wherein Derby contestants would schizophrenically and unconditionally disarm, disrobe, and engage in fiery embraces.

  Among the perceptible outcomes of the Rogue River Fishing War were these: never again would my parents employ anything resembling Reason in their discussions of the Art of Angling; never again would they go a-fishing together; never would their marriage vows waver or weaken—for Angling had formed for them a bond far stronger than the fickle ties of Romantics. Theirs was a bond of enemies at war, of mongoose and cobra, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham, Heresiarch and Inquisitor. But the Rogue River Fishing War had imperceptible outcomes as well. After all, I was there in the thick of it, finning in the River Ma, and insofar as fetuses can intuit the meaning of adult speech, I intuited a realm outside where nothing mattered half so much as the manner in which one engaged in a mysterious activity called “Fishing.” Thus it can be said that I was interested in this art not just from an early age, but from literally before any age at all: I felt the adrenaline rush as Ma set the hook to those steelhead, experienced her excitement as she played them, heard her satisfied grunts as she clubbed them, grew strong as she ate them. Before I ever saw the light of day, my fate was inextricably entwined in the fates of my fellow aquatic creatures, fish.

  It should surprise no one, then, that as a small child I became a “fishing prodigy” and am to this day not unjustly known as a “fishing genius.” It has been given to me to understand the way in which fish think; it is therefore as easy for me to catch fish as it is for a skilled huckster to swindle honest and innocent men. And anyone who thinks I brag in stating that I understand fish-thought is obviously ignorant of the way in which fish think. Believe me, it’s nothing to brag about.

  3a

  Concerning Statistics

  (The skate) was 6 ft. 8 in. from point of nose to end of tail, and 5 ft. 4 in. across.… Ten dogfish (12 lb. down) were caught on another handline. We also caught, on rods, one large crawfish, 14 pollack (4 lb. down), 30 pouting, 40 small breams, seven mackerel, two John Dorys, 4 gurnards, one whiting, and six scad.

  Yours faithfully, Stewart Thompson

  —London Fishing Gazette

  There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven pounds… perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds—I am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame.…

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Like gamblers, baseball fans, and television networks, fishermen are enamored of statistics. The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn’t resist backing their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not “a boatload” of fish, nor “about a hundred and a half,” nor “over a gross,” but precisely “an hundred and fifty and three.” This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that in the net there were “great fishes” numbering precisely “an hundred and fifty and three.” How was this digit discovered? Mustn’t it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…” all the way up to an hundred and fifty and three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman’s compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!

  Statistics are a tool upon which anglers rely so heavily that a fish story lacking numbers is just that: a Fish Story. A fish without an exact weight and length is a nonentity, whereas the sixteen-incher or the twelve-pounder leaps out of the imagination, splashing the brain with cold spray. The strange implication is that numbers are more tangible than flesh; fish without vital statistics are fish without being. And this digital fisherman-consciousness has seeped into most facets of life. One of the most telling examples is this: a human child at birth undergoes a ritual almost identical to that inflicted upon trophy trout at death, to wit 1) the fish is whacked on the head, thus putting it out of its misery; the infant is whacked on the behind, thus initiating it into its misery. 2) the fish is placed on a scale, weighed to the quarter ounce and measured to the quarter inch; the infant endures identical treatment. 3) the fish is stripped of the coating of slime that protected it in the water; the infant is purposelessly relieved of its equivalent coating. 4) the fish is placed in a cold rectangular receptacle to await the taxidermist who will stuff it, creating an illusion of healthy flesh on its lifeless body; the infant is placed in a warm rectangular receptacle to await the parents who will stuff it, hopefully creating genuine healthy flesh upon its living body.

  Further examples of fishlike human predicaments are too numerous to explore at length, but the disquieting analogies between students in public schools and smolts in rearing ponds, dancers in nightclubs and salmon on their spawning beds, suburbanites in housing tracts and hatchery trout in reservoirs, and industrialists who pollute and trash fish who like pollution, should be obvious to any angler.

  I was afflicted with as pernicious a case of the numerical lease on life as any I’ve encountered, but I had the good fortune to discover that the essential pleasures of fishing are as independent of statistics as are the joys of childbirth independent of little Bosco’s length in quarter inches. Most of us appear to be plagued by the notion that digits describe a thing (for instance an infant) more accurately than do the qualities the thing possesses (for instance the infant’s drooling smiles, watery eyes, redundant dimples, pathetic coiffure, tiered chins, and helpless unignorable outcries). Accuracy is a useful thing, certainly. A skyscraper designed by an architect with a head for nothing but drooly smiles and tiered chins is likely never to scrape the sky. But there are times and places to employ statistics and times and places not to—and the times-and-places-not-to comprised one of many lessons I was doomed to learn “the hard way.”

  Concerning those disciples huddled over the pile of fish, another possibility occurs to me: perhaps they paid the fish no heed. Perhaps they stood in a circle adoring their Lord while He, the All-Curious Son of His All-Knowing Dad, counted them all Himself!

  3b

  Some Biographical Statistics

  He sought with dry and lifeless hands… unmindful of what he was doing or not doing he felt his way… allured like an animal by water, hankering for what was still earthly, still living, still moving; with hanging head he crept.…

  —Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

  A fishing prodigy, like a musical prodigy, is perforce a solitary. Because of fishing I started school a year late; because of fishing I failed the fifth grade; because of fishing I was considered a kind
of mild-mannered freak by my schoolmates; because of fishing I grew up osprey-silent and trout-shy and developed early on an ability to slide through the Public School System as riverwater slides by the logjams, rockslides, and dams that bar its seaward journey. It wasn’t that I was antisocial; I simply suffered from that lopsidedness of character typical in prodigies. As young Mozart cared for nothing but keyboards, strings, and woodwinds, so I cared for nothing but lakes, rivers, streams, and their denizens. Years before I could have put it into words, I realized that my fate would lead me beside still waters, beside rough waters, beside blue, green, muddy, clear, and salt waters. From the beginning my mind and heart were so taken up with the liquid element that nearly every other thing on the earth’s bulbous face struck me as irrelevant, distracting, a waste of my time.

  A statistic: literally every weekend and school vacation of my boyhood was spent fishing in the company of H2O or Ma. If the weather were foul we’d spend the day tying flies, building rods, studying manuals, or reading books related to angling.

  Statistics: I caught my first steelhead, a ten-pounder, when I was four, on a worm. I caught my first steelhead on a fly at six. I caught my hundredth steelhead when I was eight, and roughly my nine-thousandth trout. (My parents’ fishing logs confirm these precocious figures. I began to keep my own log when I was nine.) Ma considered me an expert bait-fisherman at age six. H2O pronounced me an unsurpassed fly-angler, fly-tier, and rod-builder at fourteen, and still favors a nine-foot graphite I designed, despite its inability to earn him endorsement money. When I stopped keeping track I had completely worn out seventeen pairs of chest-waders, twelve landing nets, and five wicker creels.