Fishless Days

Fever dreams, hallucinations, and curses.

It’s early May or the middle of June or the last week in September. Really any day thick with promise and a favorable forecast. The requisite figuring is done and thoughts roll downhill until they become stone, granite, headed for the valley, the river, home, the feeling of losing yourself in the way the rod bends when it loads before shooting the line out again in jetstream. Life is best lived half submerged with the sun behind the mountains. 

I sometimes wonder if anglers have a unique brain chemistry, some genomic malformation that predisposes them to finding wonder in the simple act of catching a fish. What is this thing that unspools itself in us? Maybe it is some ancient spell, a curse cast upon us by enemies long lost to time. Perhaps it's the madness of addiction caught like the sleeve of your shirt on a finish nail you missed when you were renovating the upstairs room. It’s not severe enough to be worth shouting over, you tell yourself, but you won’t take the time to stitch up the hole. The fiber, once compromised, is ruined and reborn into a new practicality. It’s my work shirt, you say. The hole is how you know and why it is. 

At some point we stop fighting it, whatever it is. We entertain. It’s contrived logic like lines on a mountain road. There is no reason for it to exist, no reason for us to follow. But the curve it cuts makes us feel more connected and soon you’re whiteknuckled into every corner, a madman who’s seen the green light. Gravity pulls through open windows, cicada buzz in chartreuse. The fix hits. It’s the crack of a wooden bat that beats the crowd breathless and then sends them rushing back, whitecaps on coral and sand. Home run. In the secret chamber of the heart, the place untilled by words, we are moved to become or die trying. Molecules vibrating in the great expanse of waiting. A root. Water from an ancient well. 

Down in the valley there is much to be loved. Maybe yours is cathedral, sycamore or willow in breezes that ruffle dark pools. Here they can be anywhere, underfoot and shooting off away like kites with broken strings. In this game of light and shadow, life is lived in full view, peril on all sides that makes fine, wily fish. 

Some valleys are dark with rivers crumpled up between shoulders and forced to jump Olympic over rocks and trees on their way. There are no fairways of green grasses to lay in here, just dappled moments that disappear downstream, fractions, and the roar of gravity splitting stone. The ones that call this maelstrom home are fierce, hot branded, mouths full of teeth, muscular. They work hard for their supper. 

The mind grows wide with these places, stored in tightly wound proteins and ignited by the cool electrical spark that sings all life into existence. Worlds within worlds. Fever dream floodwaters coursing through the streets, tumbling over door jambs and pooling in the corners of the basement you swore you’d finish before the snow flies. The river has grown mighty, unruly. It refuses to be channeled for another day.

But everything seems shambolic. What is this jumble of rods, hooks rusting in the cool dampness of the garage? Gear grows a beard of mold, sour in its neglect and wanting you to know it. A spider has commandeered your right boot. Layers of web stretch rudely from one side to the other, a home with thick curtains drawn and a sign in the window that reads: trespassers will be shot. I am tempted to tickle the fibers with my finger, poke this squatter away and demolish her hard work. But who am I to deal in such absolutes?

Forbearance is foolishness. I should be up north, flicking away ash and mosquitos in two day old socks that have lost the will to insulate. At twilight I would lay up under a spruce and wait, jittered and blood-pumped for a glimpse of the broodfish, her plump sides reflecting back millennia of starlight.

When she emerges, tantalizing, her monstrous beauty is slick with the fading light. She is the dream, the nightmare, the ambition-splitting conspirator that until now has evaded a horny human gaze. She shows, prehistoric and pectoral as she glides on the plush pillow of the stream showing more and more of herself in a hypnotic burlesque which feeds the very soul of the river.  

And I’d sleep, oh how I’d sleep! The air bittersweet with autumn like trimmed pieces of chalk in a cardboard box, drying paint. A cold cast iron and its belly of fat gone white and firm in the night. This is repose, the lost ancient art of dying slow. The bone, once fixed and firm, floats in a wad of tissue and nerves, vestigial but clinging as if to remind us that if we just lived hard again it too might return. So much lost and hidden and out of sight in the forest of the night. The forest of our ancient brain. The forest of our slacklung souls pressed into sad little boxes. 

Now I am sure that it is a curse. Longing is the death of being. I am the ghost of a haunted mansion bulldozed to make room for a high efficiency housing project, forced to wander the halls and wail, who’s house is this? Where is my room? The residents all fear me. The outbursts are unpredictable, magmatic. I pass through walls and mutter broken lines in search of the antidote. Blind moth searching for a light that’s long gone. Fizzled. Misfit. Meat and potatoes and lists of things to do. 

Somewhere they swim, nosed up to sweet springs, bathed in the boundless breath of the earth. An eternity is nothing when you are the heir of time. And we’ll meet again, in this dream, or the next.  

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