Camouflage

For a long time, I never understood how fish could live in that creek in the first place. It measured barely six feet across in most spots, and except for the rare place where a pool had developed, it never seemed deeper than a half-foot. My grandfather first stood me on the sandy bank across from our cabin when I was five. He put a salmon egg on my hook, locked a lead shot into place with his teeth a short way up the line, and showed me how to drop the bait gently into the flow and allow it to sink partway to the creek bed. The speed of the water would keep it from snagging in the rocks below. I should hold a small slack of line with my left hand between my thumb and index finger, waiting for the slightest nibbling of a trout to let it be pulled away and, as the slack tightened, set the hook in the fish’s mouth. I should not cast—high grass and sage and willow branches waited eagerly to snag my hook. I should not jerk the end of my rod if I felt a strike. If I did everything right, the trout would nibble, the slack would set the hook, I would keep the tip of the rod slightly in the water as it bent and danced and I reeled in my line slowly and evenly, and then before the lead shot reached the first eyelet I would carefully lift the rod-tip while backing away from the bank so that the fish would, in a swinging motion, be brought over dry earth, where it was free to flop off the hook and flail in the dirt until I pinned it down with foot or hand. These were my instructions every spring we returned to Rock Creek. Each spring the routine felt more familiar, something a long winter could never wipe away.

I added my own variations as I got older, one a kind of underhand cast used for sending a line downstream around obstructions, another a different way to bring a fish to shore. As I got older, my grandfather strayed farther away from where he had stationed me, first one fishing hole away, then two, until I moved from hole to hole myself with only a vague rendezvous point in mind. By the time I was 12, we were rising early in the morning to fish up the gorge from the cabins, where native Loch Levens might wait for us, where, hours later and two miles upstream, the highway would have wrapped around the mountain to meet the gorge again and my grandmother might sit in our car with sandwiches. My grandfather and I would lose each other along the way, then find each other again, as if an invisible tether had tightened and then relaxed between us. No matter how long it had been since I last saw him, I felt no danger in that V of high rock slopes with its narrow ribbon of water and shrub running below. In that area of the country, the desert side of the California Sierras, you always watched for rattlesnakes, but I never found anything more on the trail than a sloughed skin. Most personal histories of fishing include not so much the size and types of catches as what someone has added to those first basic instructions, how far someone has moved beyond that first sandy bank into different, sometimes more dangerous, terrain. In my forties, I spent a night in one of those cabins again, and I fished a little that evening from that first fishing hole a few yards away. Early the next morning, I moved up the gorge, having some luck here and there, rediscovering the pleasure of a native trout’s strike over any other, but I didn’t make it all the way to the highway. Halfway there, on the trail from one hole to the next, I came around a willow to find myself less than twenty feet from a cougar. We stared at each other. I had just enough time to wonder if staring at a cougar or looking away was the right thing to do—I couldn’t remember. The animal didn’t seem eager to attack me. Then I turned around slowly and walked back in the direction from where I’d come.

When did it happen, that first spring or later, that I actually saw the back of a trout hovering above the smooth stones? Until then, it had been all abstract: the soft rush of creek, the song it made, the background noise of magpie and hawk, the smell in the air of sage and turpentine. I put the line in the water and waited, and if I was lucky a fish would find my bait and I would bring it tumbling just under the surface to shore. But when did it happen that I recognized the natural camouflage, that I saw the one trout idling under its low-hanging branch or deep in its eddy? And then the next, and the next? When did admiration become a separate pleasure from pursuit? Maybe the day I stood on the sandy bank near the cabin, the day the hatchery truck arrived and parked along the highway across the creek and just upstream from where I watched. The truck looked no different than a milk truck, steel gleaming in the sun, a wide hatch at the top. The driver got out and pulled himself up to the catwalk along the side of the tank. He flipped open the hatch and dug deep into its darkness with a long-handled net.

It was sunny, it was noon, it was the first time I ever saw what I found out later to be a monthly ceremony. Out of the dark came fifty rainbows at a time, a riot in their net, emptied across the surface of the creek in one sweeping motion, glittering on their way down. The driver dug into the tank at least twenty times, and each time the full net coming out of darkness, the dripping sweep through air, the silver raining miraculous. It didn’t take long for some to rush for their rods and drop lines downstream from where fish were landing in the creek. Some caught their limit in no time. I don’t remember how old I was that day, and I don’t remember if I kept my line in the water, if trying to catch hatchery trout seemed too much of a distraction from the magic in front of me. What I do remember is noticing is how easily all those hundreds of fish disappeared under the wavering surface. How I would look down and see only rocky creek bed, wavering, even though I knew the creek to be jammed. When did it happen, how old was I when I could finally see the back of a trout hovering above the creek bed? How much later did I realize that was the fish you rarely caught, that you should not even try to catch? You saw it for a different reason, just for a moment, then it disappeared.

Postcard

I couldn’t guess how many times I saw my father before moving away from southern California to go to graduate school, but the number must fewer than ten. I can’t even remember those times. I conjure a front yard or a curbside where he might be approaching me. He has just gotten out of a pickup truck, and he has jeans and a white T-shirt on, as in the two or three photos my mother has kept of him. He wears the awkward smile, the one I know because it’s mine. But I don’t hear any words, and I don’t see him finally reaching me, and patting my head, or hugging me clumsily. The scenes don’t fill out because they probably never happened. During my undergraduate years, I must have had some encounters, probably coinciding with gatherings at an older sister’s house. Both re-established contact with him after they became adults, which made sense, since they had at least spent some years living with him. It may be that the most times I saw my father, though, were in those early days when I was still a newborn, when my parents may have still entertained the thought of patching things up. But as for birthdays, First Communion, elementary and high school graduation—times I might remember—nothing.

Not that I minded, really. When my mother left my father, I was still inside her. The two of us moved with my two older sisters to my grandparents’ house, where we all continued to live—much more comfortably than we could have ever lived otherwise—until the children left for college or its alternative. My mother never gave up staying with them. I remember my grandfather’s anger on the day of my high school graduation after receiving a phone call that my dad would not be attending. He had had a motorcycle accident that left him in a cast. I accepted the explanation, but my grandfather, who generally gave others the benefit of the doubt in such matters, would have none of it. Unforgivable, he said.

In the months before I left California for graduate school, I was sitting in on a few classes at the university. I had graduated in December, but I wanted to maintain the momentum I’d gained during fall term learning Chinese, and I wanted to take additional advantage of a religious studies professor who was teaching two classes, one on ways of spiritual transformation and one called The Oracular Tradition. So I sat in on the three courses while waiting for my life to move on. To make up for the work-study salary I wasn’t getting paid anymore, each day I delivered hundreds of Los Angeles Times in the middle of the night over a long, winding route through San Diego neighborhoods. By early spring, a cat started coming around to my front doorstep, a cat I started feeding canned fish and milk to and that I named Ch’ien, after the first hexagram in The Book of Changes. It was my first cat. To have been chosen by it, rather than the other way around, felt somehow mystical. It met me at the steps when I returned from my deliveries at 5:00 a.m., and it sat on one edge of my desk as I wrote through sleep deprivation and the weird in-betweenness of my life during those days.

Finally in June, it was time to leave San Diego and move to Montana. Miraculously, everything I owned fit inside, or on top of, or over the back bumper of my Toyota Corolla. I planned to leave early afternoon to beat the traffic and so as to head into the desert by dusk. I’d left a small space near the stick shift for Ch’ien. At my sisters’ suggestion, I would stop at my dad’s place of work in an industrial section of Los Angeles to say goodbye.

He had always driven a truck for a living, and now, in his fifties, he worked dispatch and did some short hauls for TRW, a big aerospace concern with facilities all over California and Nevada. I parked in the middle of a lot the size of ten football fields. Maybe fifteen cars were scattered across the asphalt. I found my dad inside the dispatch office, and after some awkward introductions to his co-workers, we went outside, where we leaned against the building to talk. I remember him lighting his first Pall Mall.

Even today, our conversations have an awkwardness about them. I think we both realize we’re strangers, even though we have some obvious common bonds, including my sisters and, now, his grandsons. Back then, though, there was no shared memory to speak of. I certainly didn’t harbor any resentment toward him in loyalty to my mother. It was just that I didn’t know him that well, and these types of meetings we had felt obligatory. Two introverted strangers, straining to chat.

Still, it might have been the opportunity to share with him any hopes I had for my new life. I was heading off to graduate school, trying to get better at something I loved. I was moving to Montana, a place I loved. Instead, we marveled at how stuffed the car was with my belongings. We talked about the Pendleton Roundup in Oregon—only, I think, because it was the closest he had ever been to Montana. He asked about my sisters, who were fine. Eventually we came around to the subject of my cat, who by now had hopped out of an open window and disappeared.

We spent the next fifteen minutes looking for her. It was too hot for her to have wanted to crawl under a car and up onto a manifold, but still we looked in the wheel wells and now and then got down on our knees to look under the cars and in all directions at ground level. We couldn’t understand how she could get lost in such a huge lot with so few places to hide. After a while Dad had to go back to work, and I told him I would check in with him before I left. An hour later, nothing. Only the suspicion that Ch’ien had found her way to the end of the lot, where some short weeds grew and a set of railroad tracks led under the interstate to a new urban wilderness beyond it.


I left her somewhere in that lot. It was near the time when traffic would start to lock up. I went into the dispatch office and told my father I was leaving. We shook hands. He asked me to send him a postcard from my new state. I wanted to get beyond the city and cross the desert in dark through what would pass as cool weather. If I could make the Utah border by midnight, I could get a little sleep in the turnout alongside the river. I could sleep before it began heating up again.