| western watershed romance |
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With a ten-day-long respiratory infection
clotting my life, coupled with a face-tearing daylong hay fever nested
in that period, I was feeling pretty fuckin' wrecked. Was stumbling at
a snail's pace at work. Cooking healthy, full meals at home just
required energy I'd been lacking, so the eatery frequency, what with
the undoubtedly higher-calorie food and unquestionably bigger pecuniary
output per lunch or dinner, subsequently rose. Didn't lift weights or
hike or do a goddamn fuckin' thing physically with my body since the
Bug hit. Pushed forward just a nanometer amount on my slew of essays
and diatribes and surreal prose, the shit that's supposed to define me.
'Bout the only thing I accomplished with even a modicum of elegance was
a few hours with carp, a few hours where I rekindled an old
relationship with some grace, some savvy, and that despite a cough and
a wheeze and a desultory head.
But that carpy action
with the rod was a week past, an eon away, and so the time came around
again for me, on my self-appointed Thursday off, to exercise that skill
that I've poured so much time and effort and thought and money into.
I'd originally planned another, and probably final, winter steelie trek
to the lower American, but with my breathing apparatus still a mess, I
just felt short of the requisite juice for a brutal, day-long steelie
hunt in fast-flowing water surging over algae-snotted cobbles. So my
thoughts drifted higher in the watershed, up into the conifers, in part
because mountain air has so often been such a bountiful salve for my
valley-spring-abhorring physiology. Too, forecasted cloudy skies and
intermittent showers in late winter did not bode well for
lower-elevation warm-water fishes such as bass or carp but looked
favorable for salmonids. Sugar Pine Reservoir, what with its
accessibility, its elevation, and the time of year, seemed ripe for a
mellow pre-spawn 'bow hunt in pine-filtered air.
So I went, albeit later in the morning than had I been healthy.
Arriving at mid-morning, amid raven squaks and a brief photo shoot with
a picturesque Sierra newt I rescued from the asphalt road, I felt
promise in the cool, still air, promise of restoration. When I ambled
down to the reservoir's edge and submerged my thermometer, the promise
of fish rose: 48°F, and that in gin-clear water. I slowly walked to the
first constriction in a big feeder stream's arm, flung out some bait,
and sat down, inhaling the Sierran air as if it were a narcotic haze
flowing from a glass pipe. I sat, and the thoughts flowed among the
screaming stillness of a late-winter mountain day.
One was of death - my death. Imagined it from
the perspective of other people, such as lost friends or
ex-girlfriends, and how they'd comment on my life, my legacy. In a
sense, it was a method of setting life goals given where I am now and
what I've accomplished. Of course fish were a part of the scene, with
respect kicked down to my vacated form for all the novel ways I
skillfully caught myriad species. More than that was the recognition of
my words, of this, and how
they strived to elucidate and extrapolate and resolve the dichotomies
between primitive and civilized life, between society and solitude,
between professional and private, and in trying to make sense of these
seemingly opposing forces, forces that always threaten to tear me
apart. Allied to that was that I was an accomplished naturalist that
appreciated Nature in all her forms - not just the fucking pristine
untouched wilderness that serves as the ideal for so many in my
profession, but also the Wild within the encroachment of civilization,
such as the wild carp in the canal ensconced in a matrix of
agricultural fields and managed wetlands, such as the striped bass in
dirty sloughs edged and shielded by waving tules, such as the mountain
reservoir with holdover and wild 'bows and glistening conifers and
provocative botanical diversity. And I thought, too, and finally, of a
wife, a daughter, what I could be for them - some scary shit.
The screaming mountain silence promises that - lots of scary shit to enter the mind.
After a few hours of neither seeing nor catching any trout despite good
bait-fishing sets and damn pretty jig presentations (God, I really
should have been shotting the marabou jigs with the 1/8-oz
Adjust-a-Bubble years ago - damn near flawless turnover and subsequent
lack of leader-mainline twisting), I donned my pack and headed to the
other, bigger inlet. It wasn't an easy jaunt, despite the level ground
- unlike previous snotty times, my throat and nose and chest were not
clearing, rendering my pace sloth-like, plodding. But the stunning
silence, the statuesque pines and firs, the portentous lead-colored
sky, that scene combined to strike some deeper understanding and
realization in me, some higher-level consciousness, but, as has
happened so many times, I could never quite reach that nirvana. That
scene, that scene of grey and green and glass water and emptiness of
sound and absence of other people, it somehow reached back, it tapped
into a thread winding back to ancient time, akin to what Rains Wallace
writes about when crossing paths with fresh bear shit in The Klamath Knot (fittingly,
I passed several piles of bear poo, albeit poo deposited well before my
arrival). It almost seemed like a racial memory, a human-race memory,
that electrified when certain elements, elements seen and felt and
smelled and tasted through walking and viewing and touching and
breathing, combined. It was like the trigger of an ancient, instinctual
mental engram getting pulled by such an environment, reaching across
and integrating the myriad minds that comprise the human brain. It was
like one of the templates of complete sensuous experience that resides
deep in the genes finally having its button pressed, sending forth an
energy to fill and match and reflect all the facets of that trigger.
I didn't catch any trout over at the second
trib, either, not that I was expecting much at 1 PM and in such
transparent water. In fact, I didn't catch anything the entire day, and
that included a few hours dragging plastic worms for bass on big,
crunchy rock, and that despite my technique, especially given my
illness becoming worse through the day, being exceptional: the bait rig
turned over and fished well; my jiggin' was methodical and efficient,
with no time wasted untangling leaders; and my wormin', while breaking
off two worm rigs and bird's-nesting once, both events of which
frustrated me but likely wouldn't have occurred had I felt better, was
really slow and appropriate and would've garnered a bass in better
conditions. It admittedly bummed me out that I didn't feel any fish
flesh in the hand that day, especially since the inlet streams, the
reservoir, the newt and a bullfrog and the Mountain Chickadees and
Common Ravens and Buffleheads, Common Mergansers, gobblers, Doug firs,
sugar pines, ponder pines, white firs, mock orange, manzanita and
madrone, black oaks, alders and mountain misery and Him blackberry and
incense cedar and CA bay, they all would've been complemented so
completely had a 15-inch 'bows slurped my jig and posed for a picture.
While I felt like garbage on the drive home, unable to really corral my
thoughts down roads that might lead to somewhere, now, as I lounge on
the futon, angry raindrops bashing my windows, I've no doubt I would've
felt worse had I not visited the fishless reservoir and enmeshed myself
in it for a while. The reservoir, the Nature, reminded me of those
greater things to which I aspire, and the great things that inform that
aspiration.
The mountain does that sometimes.