| western watershed romance |
| about | episodes | musings | voyeur room |
It's behind a chain-link
fence, weeping willows and other sullen, droopy domesticated trees
ringing its blue-stoned water. Still, they persevere, throwing long
limbs laden with heavy leaves over the pond's surface, bestowing shade
and the errant broken branches to the water. A grate shielding a water
control device of some sort provides additional cover. I'm there,
albeit apprehensive about being caught, but I bust out a cast or two,
and, in the fog of false memory, do believe a bluegill I held. But the
apprehension, it overwhelms me, and I escape through a hole in the
fence back to the safe world, the safe world where I look back
longingly at the off-limits pond, where some fucking rich bitch in
bright-white pantaloons and a tawdry teal blouse lazes around the pond,
like some imperious regent surveying her inherited, unearned lands.
Hot, a sere, flat landscape,
the diamond heat
blurring and smoothing the transition between land and atmosphere. In
contrast, a few dark ponds, looking like the handiwork of man, square,
but with tenacious Nature that refuses to bow down to civilization's
pressures. Willows and tules and cattails and cottonwoods claim the
ponds' margins for their own, and claiming the water, too - they rain
down sticks and branches and stumps and whole tree trunks, from which
snake milfoil and pondweed, gifting the ponds' lives secrecy and
intrigue. I walk down a dirt road fringed with sallow weeds of early
autumn, weeds done their time in life's cycle, and I feel just a bit
too late. Robust bluegill beckon, that I know, but I can never reach
the ponds, and the road, the ponds, the dying light of fall's falling
golden evening, evaporate.
The sun set, and I
rush to it, some little speck of water surrounded by the epitome of
suburban America: neat tract homes, all hued a bland white; tarry black
road colored garish by brand-new yellow ordering lines; a fringing
lawn, the omnipresent fringing lawn, through which threads a concrete
path for power-walkers and for octogenarians clod-hopping their
walkers. And the pond, like the others, fecund and rebellious in its
unbridled plant and animal life: scummy algae, the stubborn cattails,
the croaking big bullfrogs, and, again, bluegill, rust-breasted brutes
of misplaced non-native but wild animal force. A lavender sky shading
to vacuum black, vermillion streaks of clouds heralding day's death,
and, again, I arrive too late, and all, myself included, dissolve into
the black-hole death of an entangled engram of fantasy and reality.
A
cobble wall of ancient stones, clothed with embracing vines, scented
sweetly by thorny roses beckoning in innocent lust. Inside, rolling
hummocks of velvety emerald grass, the flowing interrupted by either
stark, intrusive golf-course obstacles or decayed headstones of lives
long lost. It's near the northeast corner - don't know how I know, but
I do. A little cove pokes north, with steeply sloped banks, cattail
patches waving in the dusk wind speaking ghostly whispers. Fucking late
again. Turquoise water, stained by man's poisons, houses, of all
things, smallmouth bass. I catch one, a good fish, and we vanish.
I'm in a watercraft,
poking in and out of weedy pockets of a clear-water pond, a pond
sandwiched on two sides by boundless drones of car-clogged freeways. A
bridge spans overhead, and the sun's abandoned the water. A slight flow
speeds me too quickly past good holding water, and, frustrated, I
paddle back up-flow irately. Finally in a decent position, the dusk
light favorable, and I throw a good cast and come up tight, tight to a
bountiful half-foot green sunfish, a great fish. I remember
equivocation, however - bass may have been the target, relegating the
illustrious sunnie to by-catch status. I slip the little warrior back
into the water, and all - the fish, the water, me - dissipates.
A country road
through humid, hazy atmosphere, a blue sky stroked with flittering
wisps of clouds, and there, along the cracked road split by faded
lines, a pond, oblong, fringed with senesced rushes, enveloped by a
well-tended park-like sliver of lawn, with old, bony benches at set
intervals. I drive west by the pond, neck craned to its roily, brown
waters, waters ruffled by a biting breeze. I thought to myself that I'd
return with rod in hand to extend the reach and caress a carp, but I
never did - I just kept driving, on and on and on into the unknown
ether of a surrealist horizon.
Why the fuck here, of all
places?
Fucking high-rise slate-colored monstrosities, goddamn business
conventions overflowing with infestations of suit-clad automatons,
domesticated ducks adding an apocalyptic clatter to the humanoid
blather, a fountain spurting alien water into a concrete-lined pond
with a few nodding, sad trees that can't touch the shading potential of
the skyscrapers. And yet, here I am, for the carp are, too. I somehow
get my lines in the water, but some bitch tangles 'em and fumbles my
quest.
Two of 'em this time, and,
yeah, like the others, their smooth outlines seemingly crafted by the
earth-moving of man. They run south of the road, but beyond, further
south, big cottonwoods and walnut trees, in collusion with crumpled
thickets, cloak a much wilder world. The two ponds - one's big, long,
lined with the omnipresent tules and cattails, and it ain't spring or
summer since the marsh plants are all jaundiced. The other's smaller,
less excluded by waving walls of vegetation, and a bare bank on the
west end allows enough room to run a few rods, and, serendipitously, by
the fish-attracting corners. This time, I'm on time - I nab three carp
quickly, then head to the car, stow my gear, and leave, driving east on
the road, an arctic wind blowing, the sagging winter sun shunting
meekly through naked hardwood limbs. I can't stop looking at the bigger
pond.
A revealing full moon casts cobalt light on the stony architecture that frames this slot of water. This one differs: smooth, polished, giant jade slabs of rock adorn the waterway's banks rather than the more common greenery of lawns, of trees, of marsh plants. It's warm but not hot - a sweetly soothing summery night breeze softly brushes the canyon that cradles this pond, and despite the endless anxiety that haunts my every second, the setting somehow caresses and calms my tumultuous mind. I've the rod and my gear, but the sidling air, the kind moonlight, they, for an instant, bequeath a contentedness that's so rare in my life that I can't leave. I hold fast, breath still, a statue, and space and time slide off to infinity.