yardstick and as deep as a Dutch oven.
Hearing Vicky move up behind me, I whispered, “That sore-tail you saw isn’t the fish I have on. It’s trailing my fish, which is one humongous hog of a steelie, putting on some spawning moves.”
“Sure it is,” Vicky said.
I worked the steelhead a few feet closer, telling Vicky without turning my head, “Step up easy and see for yourself.”
Vicky stepped up easy, very easy, but not easy enough.
The riffle was about fifty yards wide. With the power of a nitro-fueled dragster, the steelie crossed it in one second flat, leaving me blinded by the mist sprayed from the spool mingled with smoke from the drag. Struck dumber than usual, I simply stood there as the whopper steelie made a sharp right at the opposite shore and streaked downstream. I watched the line melting from the spool. I felt like my nervous system was being stripped from my body through my solar plexus, a rush beyond sensation toward something as clean and empty as my spool was about to be if I didn’t stop the fish. But I didn’t want to stop the fish. I didn’t want the feeling to end.
The spool was almost down to the backing when the steelie abruptly swung back into the heavy current and dove to the bottom, slowly lashing its head.
I wanted to tell Vicky to go home and pack some grub because I was going to be there all night, but when I finally got my slack jaw working I discovered I couldn’t utter the few words I could remember.
Train wreck in the cerebellum. Synaptic bridges collapsed.
I concentrated on the basic sounds, managing something close to “Biffeegaaaagh.”
Vicky cocked her head. “You what?”
“Big,” I gasped. “Godzilla.”
At the moment, though, it felt more like I was hooked to Godzilla’s heart, thirty pounds of pure throbbing force, the rainbowed rod pulsing steadily as the fish hung in the current, gathering power for another slashing run.
Then the hook pulled out.
I felt like a lover had just hung up the phone after telling me, “I’m sorry, but it’s over.”
Like I do when the Dream Joker whispers, “You won 100 million in tonight’s lottery,” and I wake up broke as usual.
Unplugged a heartbeat short of Divinity, a nanosecond shy of Solid Full Circuit. Lost. Looted and left behind. Mentally exhausted, emotionally gutted, spiritually bereft.
Vicky helped me back to the car.
But as I fell asleep that night, I remembered the wild power of the steelhead’s cross-river run, remembered it from my bones out, in nerve-meat and blood, that rush of glory as I emptied into the connection, joined for a moment, each other’s ghost, then blown away like mist on the wind. And my gratitude for that moment’s nexus overwhelmed the despair of its loss–as if one can truly possess or lose anything, or the connection ever break.
In fishing, as the moment of experience enters the future as memory, it’s prey to seizures of enlargement and general embellishing. I feel sure, however, that that steelhead weighed close to twenty-eight pounds. It’s possible–and, given a few more years of voluptuous recollection, almost certain–that the fish would have tipped the Toledoes at over thirty, making it easily conceivable that I’d hooked what would have been a new state-record steelie. But even taking the distortions of time and memory into account, ruthlessly pruning any possibility of exaggeration, carefully considering the Parallax Effect, the Water Magnification Variable, the Wishful Thinking Influence, and the El Feces del Toro Predilection, I would lay even money in the real world that that steelhead weighed at least twenty-six pounds, and would gladly wager a new car of your choice against a soggy cornflake that it was twenty-four minimum.
In that spirit, I trust you will understand that I offer a blessing when I wish for our coming years that a big one always gets away.
The way is
The way it is
Because that’s the way
It is,
And why.
ODE
Loins and breath.
Moonlight melting
In the throat of a calla lily.
Thickets of young maple
Just breaking bud.
All you have to be
Is who you are,
Naked beyond the body,
A touch at a time.
PALINODE
All you have to be
Is who you are?
What could have I possibly
Meant by that
If part of you
Is who you dream you could be
If you weren’t the piddling little dimwit
You actually are,
As if the “real you”
Is the one who sits around wondering who
The real you is–
Or if you’ve ever wished you were
Someone else, anybody–
An accountant in Coronado,
A dishwasher in a second-rate Omaha steakhouse–
Or if you can follow this,
Or still care,
You’re probably really screwed up
Or close enough
To be welcomed as a friend.
It exacts the strictest discipline
To truly take it easy
Yet still retain the minimal
