| western watershed romance |
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As autumn's beams separated and rayed out in my
bedroom while I dozed in the crisp air, I thought of autumn's Green
Valley during my late teens. High up, little Green Valley, about 7,000
feet, and after Labor Day, with fewer attractions than Arrowhead and
Big Bear, abandoned. Had the lake all to myself, had the trout all to
myself. Man, those 'bows - too many looked too fucking good to be
hatchery fish, intimating a Wild vestige persisting among the
truck-trout throng. No missing fins, no bent fins, picky, they didn't
behave like hatchery fish - PowerBait would yield you nothin'. I never
explored the feeder stream, little Green Valley Creek, but rainbows
don't need much, just some gravel and a little flow and water not too
hot, and they can do it. In falling light, stalking the shore, alone,
with a lone little tackle bag, pines and firs enshrouding, out went my
streamers on the only rod I owned, and in sprang so many magnificent
'bows, often a foot and a half, and I turned nearly all loose. When too
dark to see my casts, my flies, I was frozen, numb - cold those autumn
dusks, and I didn't know how to layer up to stay warm outdoors given
the suburban flatland upbringing that defiled my childhood. I always
cranked the heater to blazin' after getting back into my truck.
Then the slow, sinuous drive back down to Running Springs, to the
little studio apartment I rented for a paltry $100 from Judy - she was
very kind to me. Alone on that abandoned road, auburn leaves of black
oaks shading the spectrum of the pine and fir verdure. Raw, simple punk
rock was normally the soundtrack - Bad Religion's How Can Hell Be Any Worse
frequently rolled through the tape deck. Back down to the little
apartment, sparsely furnished - a couch, a small kitchen, and a tiny
pile of clothes and a handful of vinyl records and a turntable and my
little fishing bag and lone rod in an alcove to the right of the
kitchen. A fridge. It was Spartan relative to the wholly domesticated,
consumerist America I'd been raised in, but it was totally enough, it
all fit, it all seemed
harmonious - my living space, the music stomping out the speakers, the
gear I used to romance the rainbows. I recall a few moments,
breathtaking, slivered moments, of seeming transcendence, when the
cacophonous voices in my head evaporated, and that something
enveloped me, that deep-time echo, that greater vitality of life,
somehow facilitated by the way I was living hazily resembling a more
resonant life with Nature. Sure, I still couldn't cook fish properly
and so chowed fuckin' overly processed food such as Cocoa Puffs and
boxed macaroni and cheese, the punk rock I blasted devoured gobs of
electricity, and I only fished waterways where a low-clearance jalopy
could roll right up to shore, but, still, the simplicity with which I
tried surrounding my life, it echoed, albeit distantly, it echoed the
forms of a more elegant life with the greater world than I'd ever
experienced as a child in Lancaster. We were trying.