“Consciousness of Stream”

 

He knew the shock of mountain runoff and the way it could burn the legs. He liked it.  He would look out the window any chance he got while traveling and hope to see a ribbon cutting through a ditch.  These things reminded him of who he used to be.

Days he would think on ways to find a gathering of granite somewhere or happen upon a shining pool while walking around the bend of somebody’s pasture.

There hadn’t been a day in his younger years he hadn’t thought of this kind of water, and what it was like to find it.  In mundane moments of everyday situations his mind would flash to his dad wearing suspenders and getting a rod from the trunk.  The father had changed at these times and would be not as tame.  He would get more irritable here but in a passionate way no one could blame him for.  He was looking for the water.

This version of his father rolled over in his mind for years.  From this he had learned that a man is always looking for something and when he feels like he’s close to finding it he is at his best in life and closer to any purpose he’s ever been.

He had been born by mountains.  Clovis in the ‘70s was still ranches and clustered communities butted against meadows that flared out from the Sierras a few miles away.  He only knew this place from photographs of his mother leading horses through heavy metal gates.

They said he had risen early some mornings and ridden the rams in the pasture with bailing twine around their necks.  Whenever they reminded him of this, he had smirked and looked at the ground. He was not embarrassed, but he wanted to be the child again and wake that latent history.

These stories defined him and he saw the West in his whole youth.  He remembered the Snake River and his dad getting on water.  With trout in the tent or not, there was always the search for them in places hard to reach and cold in all seasons.  He couldn’t always remember exactly what he did himself in these times.  There had been the natural bouts of boredom and merciful stints of discovering dangerous places to climb or interesting pieces of tackle to touch at camp. The river and his dad on it had always seemed farther away than it was, and muted. A man’s back against a rolling river looks like a wall that opens and closes windows that show the past and future to anyone patient enough to stand and look.

There had been times after the cancer that he felt a residual paternity. Lessons were learned without the old man there and the unsolved problems he had left behind became new and endearing challenges.  The acceptance came one night when he had cast for bass and landed one.  He spoke to his father as he drove home and the fish gave him and his mother something to talk about.

They were teachers, most of them.  His parents had grown up in the scattered hills of southwestern Iowa and not known each other.  The father had worked construction between college and spent a summer in Montana on a Libby fire tower.  The mother had studied education and moved to Littleton with her sister.  Colorado brought them together, as the West calls those looking for answers.  They spent time getting on water in the hills and washed some of the past away.  The water shows the true version of who someone is.

 

As he stood on the banks of White Pines Lake and cast his first fly between the reeds, there had been a solemnity.  There is no quiet like the prince nymph plopping through the surface and silently coursing, searching the entombed bottom for life.  Thinking of this had made him more silent, but more understanding of what his life was like.  He had come up to Arnold with his friends and his wife, old tackle from his mom’s garage dusty and waiting to be shaken to life after many years.  They all went higher up the mountains into the Big Trees later on to try Beaver Creek for Rainbow.

The water had bubbled over the pebbles and reminded him of many things from before.  He had cast all afternoon when he saw a dark hole under a fallen tree on the opposite bank.  The friends had dropped lures in there but nothing had happened.  He rolled the line over that surface and the Rainbow hit.  He had practiced rolling his cast and asked the friend, “like this?” when the strike came.

“Yeah, that’ll work.”

 

The water crackled on downstream and allowed him to see it pull its way across logs and rocks and push around a bend in a continuous wash.  In the car he slowed down while crossing the Stanislaus River and he could only respond to his wife that he thought of his dad.  This had been his first Rainbow on the fly.  There had been a previous hook, lodged deep inside, which couldn’t be removed, and he felt as if the trout knew him a bit more than he knew himself and understood.

Back at camp they had wine.  The friends had left after awhile and he and his wife ate the Rainbow and drank the red down.  The fire popped and made everything an orange shade.  He thought that the fire made things at night look like things at dawn.  There didn’t need to be much talking, the wife grinning into and across the fire and he looking at the dark wine in the cup.  A fire means many things to many people, but this was theirs.  It had cooked the trout and it simmered like a silent friend, sitting with him and his wife.

A week later the wife lay on the couch, tired.  He had gone in town to meet friends and see some music and when he came back she didn’t know he had gone.

“Where did you go?”

“To see Ben play.  I told you I was going.”

“I didn’t hear you.  I think I might be pregnant.”

“Why?” he leaned back and looked at her, “how do you feel?”

They had thought about children and wanted them.  When they moved to the Central Valley they had forgotten about it.  This made him think of many things.

That summer he went to the mountains to get in cold streams.  Something deeper stirred him this time and called him to the water.  “Will I have a son or daughter? Will I be a good father, like dad?”  There is a fear that accompanies these things.  This fear is not danger, but a fluid tension that rubs and sometimes perforates the soul.  Some things are true, but cannot be seen in the clear.  But the things wait to be known and want to be known. He could only figure these things in the moments between laying the line on the water and stripping it back in.

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