Imagine It

Gone Fishing, and such...

Imagine it.  An entire week.

…heaven, depending on your idea of that …only, well, more understated.  None of that streets-of-gold nonsense …or harps. Gravel and washboard. Rattles and clunks, and squeaks. Sagey grey-green scrub and eleven, nervous chukars running, Henny-Penny along the dry-grass edge. An explosion of wings, finally, the poetry that their escape has written. Ripening elderberries coated with basalt powder. An Osprey perched in a burned out tree, turning her attention from the river momentarily to observe my passing. 

None of that twaddle where everything gleams. No lions lying down with lambs. Harder. Flattened snakes in the gravel road and ants hauling them away in small feast pieces. Tougher. Rocks sharp enough to slash your tires. More real.

Dust and bugs and heat, heaven. Wind sometimes too. Wind strong enough to fuck with your casts, to put down the bugs …to rip off your hat. Thorns and sharp rocks heaven. Rattlesnakes. Refusals. Broken leaders and lost fish in the chill of a yet-dark morning. Spiraling Canyon Wren songs among the echoing cliffs.

That kind of heaven. Better than heaven, heaven. Attainable heaven. Right-now heaven. Real and wild …and heart-rending, heaven.

A week of nights on a canvas cot in a nylon tent beside a sandpaper-leafed tree in a BLM campground with the voice of the mighty Deschutes river ever present in the background and more caddis flies in the air than there are people in China.

Seven nights of fading light on canyon walls and sleeping elephants, of making out Rorshach shapes in the inky silhouette formed when undulating land touches magenta, cobalt sky and the taste of Talisker lingers soft on the tongue, where staccato winged bats, ravenous Rorshach blots in their own right, swoop and dive and begin to punctuate the awed silence, and agile clouds scud across a deepening sky toward places I cannot care about in that moment.

Seven nights of craned necks, looking and looking and looking, upward, into an infinite sky, stippled and black, a satellite, a streaking meteor, then another …the faint shudder of light evidencing some other world’s thunderstorm, over the horizon, so not my problem …but coming maybe. Should I put the rain-fly on? …the smear of star glow that is the Milky Way …breathing and breathing …bathing in cricket song, and newborn humility. Speaking ever so little. Running my weathered finger along the edges of reawakened wonder. Rebirth. Childhood.

I pinch myself. I am pinching myself …still.

Handfuls of warm, sweet blackberries. Sprigs of riverbank mint.

An entire week along a river that somehow has more direct, heart-rending emotional access to me than any of the great love songs that have moved me to tears or to near-tears over a lifetime of awkward, earnest loving …a river that has become a beloved and trusted friend …a repository of years of collected conversations, healing visits, wrestling matches.

There are fish in this place. Fish numerous enough to quiet the Jones …eventually. Fish powerful enough to race the heart, weary the arm, seduce the imagination …snap the tippet. Fish wiley enough to inflame the most devious corner of my imagination, and having outsmarted it, to incite the most hysterical, appreciative laughter.

There are birds here, too. Golden Eagles and Ospreys, Lazuli Buntings and Yellow Breasted Chats. Warblers and tanagers. Nighthawks and swifts. Turkeys. Vultures. Crows. Kingbirds and Shrikes. Mergansers and Herons.

This is a river that makes me want to be a better man.

…thankfully, each time I go to her, I feel as if, somehow I am.