Nothing but Blue Skies (19 page)

“What kind of fisherman was Grandpa?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“Not very good,” said Frank.

“That surprises me,” said Holly.

“He wasn’t very good, but nobody loved it more.”

“Because I remember him fishing constantly.”

“He did, when he had the time. But his approach was too direct. He tried to overpower trout, go straight at them. It was one of the many areas where fishing and life are not at all alike — or at least fishing and business. Your grandfather’s problem was that he didn’t trust anything or anyone but himself. He had to have a hold of things. A good trout fisherman has to understand a slack line. A slack line is everything. That was too much for Grandpa. If that line wasn’t tight, he believed it was out of control. I never knew him to catch a big fish. Big fish are caught on a slack line.”

“Well, what kind of a person was he?”

Frank thought for a moment. He’d never looked at it that way. “He was a pretty good fellow. The way he grew up, he got pretty trained to look straight ahead. I got the impression that people who grew up with him who hadn’t learned this hard, straight-ahead look were ground up, gone, blown away. He didn’t really understand or respect people who hadn’t come out of a Depression background.”

“You must have had trouble with this straight-ahead business?”

“I sure did. I can’t believe that’s a serious question.”

“Is that why you became a hippie?”

“Here we go.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know why I became a hippie. And maybe I wasn’t really one anyway. I never thought I was a hippie at the time. I liked the music. I’m still a child of rock and roll. Lots of us will never escape that. And when we’re old, we’ll probably let our hair grow out again, if there is any. Right now we’re in the swim of things. It’s not perfect but it is highly tangible, you know what I mean? We’re kind of running the store. Know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’re in your youth. You’re washed around from possibility
to possibility. God is telling you nothing matters but meeting the perfect partner, nothing. The world seems to be out ahead but nothing is real. It’s all ideas. You’re racing toward these balloons that the air currents move steady in another direction. But you get older and you catch up to some of those balloons. You get even with things and they’re not drifting away ahead of you. I know that I’ve settled into the limited possibilities of feeder cattle and rental property and grain sharecropping and the ridiculous limited characters of my friends and my own rather fascinating inadequacies. And all these things are so real! I can feel my limitations like the surface of marble a sculptor touches. And there’s only so much grass to be leased in the summer, and even subirrigated ground can only produce so many bushels of grain, and Budweiser and Coors are only going to accept so much malt barley, even if we do get it combined and delivered and past the tests for moisture content. The only things that undermine my happiness are things I can’t lay hands on.”

“Like what?” said Holly.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Just give me an example.”

“I can’t.”

“Is regret one of them?”

“Sure.”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

“Of course. That’s a bad one. It’s not like other things that strengthen you. Loneliness makes you weaker, makes you worse. I’m guessing that enough of it makes you cruel.”

“Two more pale morning duns and we can call it quits,” said Holly. She turned and looked at her father in thought. She smiled. He shrugged. She laughed, reached over and squeezed his nose. “Poor little friend,” she said.

The sun was just coming up. They could make out the light in the tops of cottonwoods. And dropping smoothly out of sight was the pale disc of the moon with its wonderful discolorations. It was like being in a big church in the middle of the week and the only light was in the high windows. They put their rods together and leaned them against the hood of the Buick. Frank opened the bag of doughnuts and set them out and Holly poured coffee from the steel thermos.

“It’s already warm,” she said. She screwed the lid back on the thermos and set it down decisively. The steam curled up from their cups. There was a dusting of powdered sugar from the doughnuts on the black paint of the hood.

“It was good we started early.”

Holly turned her head and listened. Then Frank heard it, a coyote insinuating a thin pure note that seemed to fade into the sky. He could almost feel himself carried with it into a pure blue place. “Are you going to take a net?” Holly asked. She still cocked her head in the direction of the coyote. She smiled to indicate that she had heard it. The little wolves had been here for thousands of years.

“I don’t think so. The lanyard always stretches in the brush and fires the damn thing into my kidneys. You know what, though?
Maybe I better. Think if we hooked a big one somewhere we couldn’t beach it.”

“Gosh this coffee is good. Didn’t that ’yote sound pretty?”

“Beautiful.”

“Beautiful … That’s right, beautiful.”

Frank went ahead and found a cow trail through the wild roses with their modest pink blossoms. The cottonwoods left off quickly and they were on a broad level place. Here and there were stands of cattails, water just out of sight. And while they threaded their way on a game trail through the brush, they could hear waterfowl chatting among themselves about their passage. When they were almost to the stream, they walked under a huge dead cottonwood, a splendid outreaching candelabra shape festooned with ravens who nervously strode their perches and croaked at the humans beneath them. One bird pirouetted from his branch and, falling like a black leaf, settled on the trail ahead of them. They stopped and Frank tossed his last piece of doughnut. The raven hopped up to it, picked it up in his beak, flew back with it to his roost. “This isn’t his first day on the job,” said Frank.

Before they reached the edge of the stream the sun was upon them. There was no bank as such, just the end of the wild roses and an uplifted ridge of thorn trees where magpies squawked at the intrusion. But they could hear the stream, which emanated not far away from a series of blue spring holes at a water temperature that stayed constant, winter and summer. Frank loved to arrive at a stream he knew as well as this one. You could strike it at any point and know where you were, like opening a favorite book at a random page.

They stopped at the edge and gazed upon the deep silky current. A pair of kingbirds fought noisily across the stream, and on its banks were intermittent pale purple stands of wild iris. Holly said, “Ah.” For some reason she looked as small as a child in her chest waders; whenever she stopped, she stood her fly rod next to her as a soldier would, while Frank flicked at the irises with the tip of his. He stared at the steady flow of water.

“Nothing moving,” Frank said. “Needs to warm up.”

“Where is the otter pool from here?”

“Well, right above us is the long riffle —”

“With the foam buildup in the corner?”

“Yup, and then the long ledge with the plunge in the middle of it.”

“Okay, I know where I am now. Otter pool right above that.”

“Holly! We’re a little foggy on details.”

“I’m a history major. The foreground erodes for history majors. We like an alpine perspective.”

They worked their way along the bank, blind casting to the undercut far side, hopscotching upstream until they could hear the shallow music of the riffle. Frank tried to watch Holly without making her self-conscious. She was an accurate close-range caster, her line a clean tight loop, and she had the ability to slow the line down, almost to the point of its falling when she was presenting the fly. She soon hooked a fish.

“What have you got on?” Frank asked as she fought the fish, her rod in a bow. The fish jumped high above the pool as they talked.

“Elk hair caddis. Just something that floats.” She hunkered next to the bank and slipped her hand under the fish, a nice trout of about a pound. She let it go, stood up and smiled at Frank while she cast the line back and forth to dry her fly.

At the broad ledge they were each able to take a side of the stream and fish at the same time, casting up into the bubbled seam beneath the rocks. Holly pointed to the plunge at the center and said to Frank, “After you, my boy.” Frank cast straight into the center of the plunge. The fly barely had time to land before he hooked a rainbow that blew end over end out into the shallows and held for a long time against the curve of his rod, a band of silver-pink ignited by the morning light. Soon Frank had it in hand, a hard cold shape, gazing down at the water while he freed the hook. Frank let it go and rinsed his hand. He looked upstream and said, “The otter pool.”

“You forgot to thank me for that fish.”

“Thank you, Holly.”

The sun was still too low, and so they waited quietly before they
started upstream. The tall sedges grew down so close to the bank that it was necessary for them to stay in the stream to get up to the otter pool. They waded in the center where the current had scrubbed the bottom down to firm sand. Frank was in over his hips and Holly was almost to the top of her waders. She held her rod up in the air and pressed the top of her waders to her chest with her free hand so that water couldn’t splash in. They made two great V’s in the current. “This is the moon,” said Holly, “and I’m on tiptoes.”

“Smell the cold air on the surface of the river.”

“Stop,” said Holly, peering closely at the water. They were on either side of the thread of current and mayflies were starting to appear, unfurling their tiny wings and struggling to float upright. Every few seconds one would come by, some still in their nymphal stage, the case just beginning to split and release the furled wing; others were sailing upright like pale yellow sloops.

“
Ephemerella infrequens
,” said Holly.

“Little sulphurs,” said Frank.

“Pale morning duns,” said Holly, “like I told you last night.”

Frank hung on to his old names for flies, had never learned the Latin of Holly’s generation of anglers. “Pale morning dun” was the compromise, reasonably objective compared to the sulphurs and yellow sallies and hellgrammites and blue-winged olives of Frank’s upbringing.

At the bend, the wild irises looked as if they would topple into the stream. The narrow band of mud at the base of the sedges revealed a well-used muskrat trail, and on this band stood a perfectly motionless blue heron, head back like the hammer of a gun. It flexed its legs slightly, croaked, sprang into wonderfully slow flight, a faint whistle of pinions, then disappeared over the top of the wall of grasses as though drawn down into its mass.

Around this bend was the otter pool, so called because, when Holly was twelve, she and Frank had watched a family of river otters, three of them, pursuing trout in its depths. Holly took the position that the otters were just like their family: one otter was Frank, one Holly, one Gracie. When the three seized the same
trout and rent it, Holly cried, “Oh, poor trout!” and sent the otters into panicked flight upstream.

They stopped quietly at the lower end of the pool, which was wide and deep and surrounded by aspens and cottonwoods. At the top of the pool was a rocky run that looked like a watery stairway. It enlivened a silvery chute of bubbles that didn’t disperse until a third of the way down the pool. The movement of water folded into a precise seam of current only at the end of the pool. All along the seam, trout were rising and sipping down the mayflies under a tapestry of reflected cottonwood leaves.

They stopped to watch. “Hm,” said Holly.

“An embarrassment of riches.”

As they watched, a fish rose about halfway up the pool, a quiet rise that displaced more water than the others, sending a tremor out toward the sides of the pool. Holly grabbed his arm.

“See that?” she asked.

“Mm-hm.”

The fish rose again and, in a minute, again.

“Has it got a feeding rhythm,” Holly asked, “or is it just taking them when they come?” The fish rose again, its dorsal making a slight thread against the surface.

“I think it’s on a rhythm. There’re just too many bugs coming off now. What kind of leader have you got on?”

“Twelve-footer, five-X,” Holly said. “You’re not going to make me cast to that thing, are you?”

“Didn’t I thank you for that last rainbow?”

“Can I get by with this tippet?”

“You’ll have to. I hate to take the time to change it now. I don’t know if you could hold this fish with anything lighter, assuming you make the cast.”

“Assuming I make the cast …”

A light breeze moved across the water and turned it from black to silver, a faint corrugation that obscured everything that was happening. “Right-hand wind,” Holly said gloomily. Then it went back to slick black. “Am I going to line those little fish, trying to reach him?”

“I think you’ve got to take that chance,” said Frank, easing over to the bank in a slight retreat to the ledge where the heron had stood. “If you think about them too much, it’ll throw you off.” The fish fed again. Even Frank had a nervous stomach. Holly stood and stared. Frank said, “I’m going to try to get up the bank where I can see this fish better. Why don’t you try to get in position?”

Frank left his rod at the side of the stream and pushed his way through grass as tall as his face until he got up onto the top of the bank. He worked his way back through the brush until he could look back and see the pool glinting through the branches. Then he got on all fours and crawled to the slight elevation alongside the pool. By the time he reached it, he was on his belly and perfectly concealed. He could see right into the middle of the pool. “Ready to call in the artillery,” he said.

“I can’t even see you,” said Holly.

“Nothing going on.”

“Do you think he’s gone?”

“No.”

Small fish continued making their splashy rises. Frank could see well enough to make out the insects. He rested his chin on the backs of his hands and didn’t have to wait long. He tracked a dun mayfly out of the bubbles at the head of the pool, then another, then another. When this one reached mid-pool, a shape arose, clarified into a male brown trout with a distinct hook to its lower jaw and sipped the fly off the surface. It was a startlingly big fish, leopard-spotted, with its prominent dorsal fin piercing the surface. The low pale curve of its belly appeared to grow out of the depths of the pool itself. It sank almost from sight, but even after it had fed, Frank could make out its observing presence deep in the pool, a kind of intelligence.