western watershed romance |
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Okay, fuck, man, I admit it -
when instances of soul-crushing weakness bash into my consciousness,
when daggers of painful past memories slash my mind into ribbons, when
I curl into the fetal position and stare glassy-eyed at the foreign
reality right in front of my face but light-years away from me, that's
when my hand wanders to my computer's mouse, I tap a few clicks, and on
my computer screen alights some video depicting some assholes casting
for fish, all in an effort to senselessly keep me somewhat grounded, to
keep at least a part of my identity - that of a fish Romanticist - stable
by vicariously living through someone else's film while my mind swirls
in a random vortex. But nearly without exception, I always slam the
computer's hinged screen shut in disgust after viewing these Internet
snippets because these fuckers that plaster the cyber world with their
angling adventures just bear no fucking resemblance to what I do, what
I am. The
assholes, at least those that slap together a reasonably coherent
segment without astronomical amounts of camera shake, without all
sounds being muffled by a blasting wind or grinding two-stroke
outboard, without shitty lighting and horrendous image quality,
generally come in two fecal flavors: (1) the fly-guys, decked out in
all the latest overpriced Simms and Sage gear, with, of course, the
stylish buff, damn near always chasing fucking brown and rainbow trout,
and, of course, epitomizing the hypocritical limousine-liberal
lifestyle by promoting river conservation while jet-setting all over
the world chasing fucking introduced brownies and 'bows; and (2) the
bass guys, the status-seeking bass guys, the suckers that sink all
their money into lures most marketed by tackle companies and pro-bass
fishermen, the dickless pussies that have to boat-bounce their bass to
feel like men, the automatons that just have to adorn themselves in all
the trendy clothing with, of course, a boutique tackle manufacturer's
logo plastered all over it - the buff, the flat-brimmed cap, the
laughable tackle-logo-adorned tee shirt with a design knocked-off from
fucking metal-band concert shirts. And fittingly, these mainstream
fuckers, one group comprised of the status-flaunting middle/upper-class
big-man-on-campus white guys, the other consisting of
lower/middle-class fucks who, given their somewhat lower social
ranking, need even more so to display their garish, overpriced gear on
their over-equipped boat, they lace their consumer-focused videos with
the most vile fucking soundtracks imaginable. The wanna-be bass pros
couple their deck-bouncing, jaw-leverin' offensiveness with fucking
soulless nu-metal or grunge - commercialized, packaged rebellion for
scared little bitches. And the fly-guys? Jesus, man, the mellowest,
beat-less, sexless, most innocuous, fucking gentle-sounding fucking
shitty-ass country-rock-folk pseudo-ethereal shit ever - fucking Steve
Miller, the Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, wispy country
finger-pickin', eh.
I recall a drive into the lovely
Deadfall Lakes area in northern California with some middle/upper-class
white people many moons ago who likely had more stable home lives than
me, whose financial worries were more along the lines of where to
invest their disposable income rather than worrying if they'd have
enough money to pay next month's rent, who went to yoga classes and ate
leafy greens and paid attention to politics and rarely cursed. They
were nice people, let there be no doubt, but they also weren't my
people - they fucking might've well as been Martians to me. I'd no
fucking idea on how they were able to conduct such lives. Likewise, I
had no fucking idea how they could stomach, let alone enjoy, let alone own, a CD, a disc
that never left the CD player for several hours, mind you, by some
fucking motherfucker named Jack Johnson. That tuneless, feathery,
thump-less, passionless music was the most pointless fucking listening
experience I may have ever had outside of elevator Muzak. It was just
so starched clean and gentle - I can only surmise that the reason these
well-adjusted, financially secure clowns I was with were so into it was
because they were able to actualize all their aggression and hate and
anger - all emotions everyone has, to varying degrees - in the board
room, in the lecture hall, in the posh furniture boutique where they
could exercise their elevated social class with choice purchases,
leaving little room for expression of emotional contentment. They had
no need for thrashing hardcore punk rock or misanthropic industrial to
vicariously get their shit outta 'em. Further, that bland motherfucker
Jack Johnson served as the aural backdrop and priming for hiking into
and fishing a lovely little wilderness area in the Klamath Mountains.
To them,
the Johnson banality was consistent with what I'm assuming was their
view of Nature: calm, gentle, ethereal, pure...real fuckin' similar to
the fly-guys, which is no surprise given that the histories of the two
groups ain't too different.
Well, fuck 'em. Fuck
their white-bread fucking well-adjusted attitudes, fuck their
hypocritical lifestyles, fuck their goddamn perception of Nature as
some peaceful, beneficent love goddess, and, perhaps more than
anything, fuck their shitty goddamn music. Look, Nature's not some
soft, pacifistic bastion of innocence - anyone who holds such an
ignorant view is fucking dissociated from reality, with eyes, ears,
nose, mouth, mind all closed. Nature is one passionate fucking bitch -
oh, sure, there are times when she's bountiful and kind and generous,
but frequently she's a fucking killer, a murderer, brutal, causing war,
relishing
war, rising life up only to slam it down, cracking mountains and
smothering forests, frying all life to a crisp in a raging wildfire,
pitting groups of life against each other to kill and maim and connive
and contrive. She's multifaceted, a sadomasochistic dominatrix on one
hand and a voluptuous, pouty, sweet and sultry lover on the other.
And She's rarely, if ever, complacent
like a fucking Jack Johnson song. Consequently, Nature needs an
accompanying soundtrack that's a bit more resonant with her wild rages
and passions, especially when a hunter hunting his prey, a primal,
fucking ball-busting relationship, is the mode of human-Nature
interaction.
While fishing has been the strongest,
most continuous thread stringing together my fractured, misanthropic
life, music's been a close second. Though cliché to state, fuck, man,
music really kept me from blowing my brains out in those awful
high-school years when I was a faint fucking sand grain frequently
being cast ashore by the mainstream's angry waters. But it wasn't music
in general
that made me not feel totally worthless, certainly not self-satisfied
tripe along the lines of Jack Johnson, but it was fucked-up, angry,
hateful, fucking suicidally depressed, sexually heady tunes that
suggested I wasn't alone. Siouxsie's baleful wail in "Rhapsody" on the Peepshow record.
The mournful "Who Killed Mr. Moonlight?" by Bauhaus mirrored the sorrow
of my own pathetic soul. Thrashings of Minor Threat and Crass and the
Misfits' Earth AD
records elicited my own rage and vicariously released the anger via
pounding the fuck out of my speakers. The twisted lust of the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and Come on Pilgrim
albums beat in time to my own unusual sexuality. The sum was that these
alternative music forms (and though alternative has
hipster connotations these days that make me retch, it is an
appropriate descriptor) - hardcore punk rock, goth or death rock, indie
rock (for lack of a better term) - provided me with a substitute
twisted fucking society that I could relate to, and, as a consequence,
crystallized part of my identity.
And that part of my identity was most
definitely not mainstream
- it wasn't fucking hair metal, it wasn't fucking pop-rap such as MC
Hammer and BBD, it wasn't fucking toothless progressive rock the likes
of R.E.M. or Jesus Jones or, God forbid, the fucking hypocrisy and
sanctimony of U2. It was peripheral music, music on the edge, shit you
didn't have bombed at you every time you flipped on MTV or tuned into a
radio station.
After high school died its much-deserved
death, my tastes still veered from those of the usual American clown.
When grunge hit with Nirvana and the always-awful Pearl Jam, I was
balls-deep in the hardest of hardcore punk rock - early Agnostic Front,
7 Seconds' Committed
for Life, and DRI's first record. When the sanitized,
overproduced sounds of weeny punk rock such as the Offspring and Green
Day made it big, I began imbibing the unmistakably hard-assed,
tough-motherfucker stomp of rockabilly. When Nine Inch Nails became all
the rage, my head was being pummeled by Godflesh. By my late 20s and
early 30s, when that retarded genre coined nu-metal captured the charts
and the deadened hearts of clueless, mindless jocks, I was digging into
the depths of my soul by exploring obscure, stripped-down country. And
now? Fuck, man, I'm an anachronism when it comes to music - old swing
and ancient rockabilly and slivers of simple, straight-up, fairly new
country occupy the choice spot on my turntable. However, I'm so fucking
out of touch with the music scene that I don't even know if the sounds
that accompany and help give rhythm and structure to my daily life are
also listened to by the masses - I lack even a mainstream reference
point now.
And this musical thread that's wound
through my life, a thread comprised of on-the-edge bands, has been
paralleled by how I fucking fling a lure at fish. While bass guys
lobbed endless varieties and senseless colors of lures from 15
gazillion rods and only
while standing on the deck of their well-carpeted boat, all with the
dream of hooking fucking ugly double-digit biggies, I surgically snaked
my way through rock and trees and brush with two light-power rods, a
few plastic worms, and a few plugs - and caught far more fish, and
decent-sized fish - 2-4 pounders - than they did. While drunk dildoes
plopped down lawn chairs on the most accessible plot of bare land at
the local waterhole and chucked chicken livers out on fucking giant
surf gear for 18-inch channel catfish, I drifted fresh shad under
slip-floats with steelhead rods in boxed-in ephemeral tributaries and
with senses kept sharp and attuned to the environment by not touching
booze - and I caught more, and bigger, channels. While fat, lazy fucks
dragged their electronic-overburdened North River to drag huge plugs on
downriggers to only drag up a few two-foot lake trout with their
swimbladders blasting guts out their mouths and all but dead, I wrapped
myself in layers, waded out into cold, angry water in a raging storm,
and caught lake trout on every other cast on crawdad-imitating tube
jigs tossed on medium-power spinning gear in a mere few feet of water.
Thus a symmetry has existed between my
music and my fishing, with both being askew from the mainstream. The
extension of that idea is just how these two facets of experience are
related. Given that both - the alternative forms of music, which tend
to be more primal, and my fishing style, which also veers towards being
more guttural and visceral - are more actualizations of subconscious,
non-intellectual processes than writing a fucking scientific paper or
teasing out musical structures of symphony music, one conclusion's that
they should be collaborating simultaneously, with accompanying thrash
enhancing a fish hunt. But actually, such corroboration's just not very
sound - when chasing fish, all senses, including hearing, need to be
tuned to the environment to pick up on slight cues that could rise
exponentially the probability of hooking fish. No, music and fishing
aren't collaborative, but they are complementary. Music evokes specific
emotions and mental images, both of which prime one for a forthcoming
hunt, sharpening senses, providing a paradigm in the mind very likely
to match up to that found in Nature, increasing the chance of an
exhilarating achievement of a fish in hand. And since fish predation
occurs in such an incredible variety of weather conditions and habitat
types, so too does the ideal priming music concomitantly vary.
Some songs reflect certain types of
fishing so closely in my mind that they are just uncanny...and they
ain't fucking Limp Bizkit banalities or goddamn Joan Baez flights of
fancy. To wit:
Two Sides of
Passion's Coin: Channels and "So What?"
In clear-water reservoirs
during new moons from late spring to early autumn, a magical time's
birthed and killed within an ephemeral two hours or so. It's an edge,
these few hours, an edge between the blasting light of day and the
black-hole blindness of a new-moon night. It's dusk, a time when light
slowly suffocates, when all rocks and trees and animals previously
revealed by the day's blazing sun slowly and inexorably haze and then
fade in the dying light. And it's just when the light's about to
extinguish, when discerning images more than 10, 20 feet away from you
plummets, when the daytime's critters are exchanged for mysterious
nocturnal animals, that the most powerful of the water's denizens of
darkness causes a nuclear blast and, if you've played your cards right,
buries your lighted slip float with a demonic rage - channel catfish.
It's the transition that's so tangible
during these channel hunts. The warm, treacly day giving way to the
hot, sweaty, obsidian night, with several channel catfish as the finest
evidence of that flow. And it's a startling flow, too, because nothing,
not salmonids on spoons, not stripers on rattlebaits, not bass on
buzzbaits, not squaws on jerks, not even white bass on Pointers, can
reach the sheer power and violence with which a good-sized adult
channel catfish will slam a shad and shred line from a reel. I've
glanced away from my slip-float for a second, only to have a channel
grab my bait, bury my float, and run so hard and fast in that mere
second that it broke the line before I could even loosen the reel's
drag. I've had channels annihilate set-rigged shad so rapidly that they
backlashed my baitcasting reel, and that with the clicker on. I've had
channels burn off 30 feet on line on a set-rigged rod before I could
even pick the damn thing up and lay into the fish. Fucking violent, these
amazingly powerful fish are.
Kind of like Ministry's "So What." I
think I first picked up The
Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste during summer of '91,
after the second shitty fucking year of high school thankfully
extinguished, and as whatever security I felt I might get with my old
man - or any other family, for that matter - continued to disintegrate.
Too, the inability for me to forge any relationships with any people
during that first year on the mountain further cemented my isolation,
fed my frustration, my alienation, and, as a consequence, primed me for
an affinity with fucking misanthropic, violent music. Ministry's record
and I, shit, we fell in love in that lonely fucking summer, and no song
resonated with my suicidal soul more strongly than "So What." A song
about parental neglect leading to children's violence. A song bathing
in the twisted joy of killing motherfuckers. A song swinging between a
danceable, smooth set of verses and a raging, snare-bashing,
bone-crushing chorus. A brash, nihilistically proud misanthropy. God, I
remember my fucking pathetic old man picking me up from my ego-wrecking
McDonald's job, me popping Mind
into the cassette player, and forcing the old fucker to hear "So What"
over and over and over again. That's likely the closest I ever came to
punching the fuckface, which he kind of deserved.
Thus "So What" is the aural mirror of a
dusk channel hunt. The transition from the verse to the chorus...the
transition from the lazy day to the tension-saturated night. The
summertime introduction to Ministry and the best season for battling a
channel. The glorying in killing people in "So What" to the glory I can
certainly imagine a big channel feels when it crushes a shad. And
perhaps more than anything - the vicarious release of all this fucking
rage through this amazing industrial song, the elation of feeling the
power of hate and anger and rage funnel through the ugly aural
landscape of Ministry's making, the fucking passion, it's
mirrored on the other end by feeling
it when the hook point drives home in a pissed-off channel's jaw, and
that same power, of rage and hate and anger that needs no words, that
travels up the line, to the rod, through the aching arm and to the
reeling mind, the passion.
The flip side, when the gorgeous, streamlined, muscle-bulging power of
a tailed 10-lbs channel catfish is gently unhooked, when her strength
returns after the brutal battle, when she bursts out my hand with even
more piss and vinegar than before I sunk a hook into her, is that that
passion, colored as hate when shunted through "So What," turns into
love as the channel vanishes from view back to her blackened aquatic
lair.
Daydreaming
Squaws
Man, those late
teenage years - what a maelstrom of emotions and experiences. Delving
into booze and drugs, with the resultant drunkenness and highs - what a
shift in sensations relative to all that had come before in life. The
first fucks, overwhelming with just the novelty of the actualization of
all this new psychological and physical machinery. The hate, the rage,
the misanthropy, the nascent realization of a difference between
mainstream society and I. And the tribe, our group - never before, and
probably never again, was, and will I ever so strongly linked in such a
tight human circle as that created by Rouseburger and Rob and Marcus
and Cara and McMullen and Skippy and even Berg. It was the
crystallization of first love and first hate.
A purity existed in all those
experiences and emotions - time and the grind of life had yet to embed
the intellectual ruts, the filters, by which the energy fueling those
wildly alive late-teenage years were to eventually be dampened. Even
the hate and rage and violence - its combined vicarious expression
through music and writing, whether blasting Bad Religion's No Control and the
Misfits' Earth AD
records at sonic-boom volume levels or slamming in a circle pit at the
local hardcore show or pounding the keyboard with my first few essays
of sheer human hatred, was fucking exhilarating, fresh, pristine.
My first experience with any fish
species is always searing, given its novelty, given its social meaning,
given its evidence of success. Even now, at this stage of the game, I'm
still overcome by wonder when I land the first of a
never-before-Teejay-caught species - my first king and first white
sturg of last year left me woozy, delirious, elated. But the euphoria
is damn near always greatest with either rough fish or less popular
sport fish - my first real Sacramento sucker, my first pink salmon, my
first real carp, they all left me damn near breathless. And of them
all, of all those generally loathed but absolutely priceless trash
fish, none stunned me more when I first experienced 'em than Sacramento
squawfish.
The irony - the first time I felt the
surge of power of a big squaw on the line - this was when I was 20
years old - I didn't catch one. I was somewhere in the Yuba River
drainage with Cara and Rob, some spot that Cara knew about and that
now, 20 years later, I've been unable to relocate. She dragged us down
there - it was about a 30-minute hike to the river through private,
posted land - mainly to just hang by the river, to swim, to cliff-jump,
to talk shit. Of course, I brought a rod, and I charged off on my own
with a small spinner after we had our fill of jumpin' and dunkin'.
Little annoying smallmouth, fucking elementary-school six-to-eight
inchers, immediately jumped on my spinner with nearly every cast. I
continually moved downstream in search of larger fish, and, fuck me,
when I rolled into this big, deep pool with a chute of bubbly water at
its head, I found 'em - but they weren't of the spiny-finned variety.
No, these were torpedo-shaped, metallic, two-and-a-half-foot-long
squaws, native squaws, that grabbed onto the pesky baby smallies stuck
to my spinner's treble hooks and gave me damn near a heart attack in
the process. With an ultralight stick and tiny trout lures, not only
did I lack the ability to tempt one of those big ol' minnows with an
appropriately sized lure, but I certainly didn't have enough beef in
the stick to corral and bring to heel one of those beasts. So the
closest I got to holding one of those missiles was when one of 'em
grabbed my smallie and would not give it up for several seconds, after
which she spit the smallie and left two scale-less arcs about mid-body
on the little bass.
Roughly concurrent with that dazzling
experience on the Yuba, certainly present through much of my late
high-school years and thus part of the coalescing of my identity, was
the emanation from my speakers of Ride, who, along with My Bloody
Valentine, was the vanguard of the shoegazing scene. Ride recorded two
records I've dug - Smile
and Nowhere.
Their third record I remember eagerly awaiting to only be resolutely
disappointed - the pedestrian Going
Blank Again was just fucking weak college rock aiming for
bigger audiences, bigger bucks, and hence definitely not people such as
I. But those first two records - man, the music. The drumming is dense,
busy, beautiful, really. The wall of melodic noise created by the two
guitars is really enveloping, especially on the song "Like a Daydream."
And, given that the main songwriters were the same age as I was when I
experienced my first squaw, the lyrics are frequently fucking awful -
juvenile portraits of hungover romance using cliche imagery of cars and
chains and certainly a limited vocabulary. But given their age, kind of
as it's supposed to be - wild, irrational, and unlearned.
Pristine.
And goddamn if "Like a Daydream" doesn't
inspire sleek, silvery squaws in my mind, although it wasn't until
banging out this article that the reason for the link broached my
consciousness: purity. While squaws can still be found throughout the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Watershed, they're by far most abundant in
undisturbed, relatively cool rivers that, compared to the lower
American and lower Feather and Sac rivers still open to anadromous
fish, bear far more resemblance to what this drainage looked like
before humans dammed and diked and diverted it. Where big squaws, and,
not surprisingly, their more sensitive relative hardhead, rule the
roost are not easily accessible, such as that reach of the Yuba that I
still can't find, and thus the evidence of humanity is less evident.
The real squaw
rivers are more wild, man, just like the youthful jams of Ride. And
while Ride's lyrics are frequently adolescent portraits of love, the
subject matter just resonates with the romance exchanged between me,
some fucking off-his-rocker old punk rocker, and the squaws, the
beautiful beasts still finning in the purest of our remaining rivers.
It's a surreal, sweet reverberation
among the squaws, their glistening waters and lush foliage, and I -
like a daydream.
Goldens and Two
Bouts of Black
Ed Abbey writes in Desert Solitaire that
some thing,
some essence, in the desert draws him, he feels some innate synergy
with the stark openness of the desert. I feel a gravitation to a
landscape, too, one that ol' Ed opined as being a more commonly sought
vista: mountains. While I also host a fondness for bleak and desolate
landscapes such as Panamint Valley or the Arizona deserts, such
environments are likely permanently tarnished in my mind given the
fusion of the Mojave Desert with the suburban blandness and hideousness
of Lancaster in my early years. But my ideal, the vacuum force of
mountains for me is probably a bit different than for others, and no
doubt fired by nostalgia for Arrowhead - rather than the stately,
forbidding granite spires drooled over by mountaineers, I feel most
realized in the more lush, verdant mixed-coniferous forests of, for
example, the Sierra Nevada's mid-elevations. Nevertheless, all mountains cause
me to crane my neck: I remember daydreaming about climbing the
hardwood-shrouded mountains around Cuyamaca Reservoir; I felt home in
the pinyon-pine-peppered Panamint Mountains; traipsing along trails
among oaks and digger pines and a dying sun in Pope Canyon strummed my
soul; and, yeah, a resonance bounced back and forth between the alpine
Sierra Nevada and I.
And, of course, the main piscine prey
housed in those mountains' waters is salmonids. In the case of the
Sierra Nevada, the crown jewel is the most jeweled, the most gilded -
golden trout. In my early 20s, above the tree line, with the towering
peak of Conness supervising the little life progressing and evolving
below her baleful stare, I held my first-ever golden in hand, a little
five-incher that chewed a small hare's ear nymph in Hidden Lake. The
air was ancient, pure, gaseous crystal. The pristine water felt out of
time, out of place, anachronistic, transported from the Permian to the
Holocene. The stunted pines and boggy meadows and leering glaciers and
paradoxically warm summer breeze bequeathed an airiness, a lightness to
the landscape, the feel
of the place. It was otherworldly.
Twenty years later, and those emotions,
that setting, that fish, they haunt me. I've caught a lot of fucking
fishes since then, in myriad waters, in myriad conditions, with endless
lure combinations and states of minds and swelling and ebbing of
atavistic power. Given the repetition of such interactions, such
relationships, the fires between many fishes and I have faded - black
bass and I, for example, know each other too intimately and are now
like bitter old octogenarians hitched at the hip. But goldens, golden
trout, and the remarkable world they eke out a living in, still
enthrall me, especially now since my relationship with Nature has
matured and diversified - not only do I want to hold her cold-blooded
aquatic citizens in hand, but I want to feel my muscles burn when
climbing Her ridges, I want my eyes blazed by the brilliant light
glancing off high-elevation wildflowers, I yearn for the icicle wind
biting my face when I cuddle up in my layered clothing and bag and
miniscule tent as a storm rages. A goldie hunt is one that really gets
my juices flowing, man.
And a guy named Frank Black, AKA Charles
Thompson, and his song "Old Black Dawning" always sears into my mind an
alpine lake and a fat golden trout. Similar to "So What" and channels
being temporally tied by experiencing both predominantly in summer, so,
too, is the link between goldies and "Old Black Dawning": I purchased
Frank Black's eponymous album around the time I rolled up to the Twenty
Lakes Basin and held my first goldie. But, of course, it's more than
that. Some congruence exists between the song and the high Sierra. "Old
Black Dawning" is kind of about Biosphere 2, where oxygen levels got
down to about the point they hover at on a normal high Sierra day; the
Tower of Babel's some altitude, similar to the Sierra; and Frank sings
of the transitory time in Tuscon, similar to what a human's restricted
to in the high Sierra given the gnarly weather from late autumn through
spring. Nevertheless, when the song and the alpine granite mated in my
mind, I didn't give a fuck about the lyrics - it was the sound that
just matched the spiky landscape. The thick rhythmic acoustic guitar;
the sparse, surf-inflected leads; the uncommon
three-measures-per-phrase verse; and the frequency of minor chords in a
major-key song just fit the world of golden trout - otherworldly.
When I get back to the goldies, you can
bet your fucking ass the last note I'll hear before hoofing it onto the
trail will be that big, final E chord at the end of "OBD."
Of Lakers and
Love and Dreams
From the mid-90s to the
mid-2000s, a sparser, more atmospheric, more intimate musical style ate
up a larger proportion of the alt-music scene. Some coined the music
type as post-rock, which encompassed bands such as Mogwai and Califone.
To me, Morphine, though considered a low-rock band,
elicited the same emotions as the post-rockers if just with more
standard song structures and more prominent vocals. Of course,
consistent with me just being offset from mainstream society, or, Hell,
even non-mainstream societies, I didn't imbibe these more somber, more
introspective bands until the late 2000s, mainly because I was only
introduced to 'em by an ex-girlfriend well after their popularity
peaks.
One post-rock, sullen, somber
band I always hated was Arab Strap, which was just another item in the
litany my ex-girlfriend and I could argue about (hence the ex-) since she
loved 'em. Arab Strap, though fucking depressed and drunk and sparse,
are just too fucking dragging for me to resonate with - they really
just lumber along without any threatening edge, a spikiness I seem to
require in my music. Morphine, in contrast, in such songs as "Mary
Won't You Call My Name" and "Hanging on a Curtain," have some bite to
'em despite also being depressed and bummed out...I mean, their fucking
name is Morphine.
But one Arab Strap song, man, the fucker
just throbs my soul at the dead-set perfect frequency: "Dream
Sequence." Simple minor-key progressions, halfway-decent lyrics, a
repeated piano motif, and a little bit of speed, and it just fits. Maybe it's
because Arab Strap hailed from the cool, moist, somber climes of
Scotland; maybe because the song's lyrics play with dream themes, and
dreams occur while sleeping, and most sleeping happens under covers to
shield cool night air; or maybe it's because the song's echo-enshrouded
ending sounds like being enveloped by a blizzard before freezing to
death; regardless, "Dream Sequence" has always sounded cold to me, but
it's been a comforting cold.
Like shallow-water lake trout.
As far as salmonids go, I've always
found the most popular species to be the least alluring to me. In the
anadromous realm, silver salmon and springers commanded less desire
than lowly chums and pinks. On cold-water rivers, rather than joining
with masses in venerating wild 'bows as the ultimate game fish, I opted
for and felt more enthralled by the glittering mountain whitefish. And
in frigid, austere lakes, it wasn't big, steely 'bows or haughty browns
that tugged my soul but lake trout, mackinaw, those denizens of the
very deep.
Well, supposedly very
deep. Fascinated by lakers and always wanting to hold one, I was
dejected by the fisherman literature that stated you could only catch
'em down-rigging giant minnow-shaped plugs abyss deep from a big boat -
all features of fishing that just didn't jive with my minimalist
philosophy. However, I was suspicious of the fishing lit for several
reasons: (1) most production in lake-trout-housing lakes occurs in the
littoral zone (read: shallow); (2) fishermen are, in my experience,
some of the dumbest, most illogical morons on the face of this here
Earth; and (3) that lakers only inhabited deep water and inhaled
eight-inch fish was not backed up in scientific literature. Instead,
the average adult lake trout, a fish running around four pounds or so,
was pretty damn shallow from autumn through spring and primarily ate
benthic critters such as crawdads, sculpins, and suckers, whether in
Flaming Gorge or Fallen Leaf or Lake Tahoe. Combined with the
lake-trout preference for low-light conditions, it seemed highly
probable that on overcast and/or windy days when the water was
comparatively cold, I could catch lakers from shore near complex
littoral habitats with benthic-organism-imitating lures (e.g., tube
jigs).
And I did, so much so, so well, so
frequently, and in such abundance that, in 2014, I considered my
California lake-trout career complete and took 'em off the glory list.
Those truly epic laker days were some of
the hardest still-water endeavors I've ever undertaken. Freezing-cold
water, two-foot swells, all stinging through myriad clothing layers and
waders, bashing 30-MPH winds, horizontal rain and sleet and snow
obscuring vision, and the novelty of inshore lake trout slamming spoons
and slurping lures in water frequently only a foot deeper or two than
that in which I was wading. It was fucking cold, a thick cold,
from the cold water that compressed my waders to the heavy snow I
trudged through to the lake - cold.
But a warmth, a fire, a glowing comfort prohibited the polar rage from
icing me all the way into my soul - a fire ignited by catching damn
near limitless, gorgeous, elegantly emerald mackinaw, with fins tinged
fire-orange, totally contradictory to everything the idiot fishermen
thought was required to tangle with a laker. That, that giant fuck-you
represented by a supposed denizen of the deep in my hand in two feet of
water garnered from a dude in waders casting from shore, that was the
covers shielding the cold air, the cold water. And that's why the
paradoxically cold warmth of "Dream Sequence" always elicits the images
of the freezing heat of catching lake trout from shore.
The Remainder
Y'know, I could write damn near
endlessly about other songs and episodes of fish romance that are two
sides of the same coin, where both are comprised of the same hues,
tones, temperatures, volumes, but I won't - I don't need to. The point
is that the primer, the ritual, the Pavlovian preparation for chasing a
fish the Teejay
way - just like "Here Comes the Bride" draws all eyes on the whore in
the white dress, just as the rooty-toot-toot of martial music fires the
boys up for a battlefield bloodbath, just as the organ-grinding in
Christ's churches readies the congregation for a touch of God - is
music. The novelty, the blessing, is that I've still so many fish and
waterways and trees and rocks and crazy fucking human-empty places to
actualize my twisted art, and perfect, twisted songs exist somewhere to
complement and complete and nurture the experience, aside from
integrating these two parallel lines of my life.
And those tunes ain't played by you,
Jack Johnson - fuck you.