Holding Lies

by John Larison

  He helped her take a seat and positioned the cooler and rods and bags in the center of the boat; it was best not to have too much weight in the rear of a drift boat when running big water like this. Though it was the same river, the rapids here were different. The white water downstream, even those Class IVs burdened with treacherous rocks and troubling reputations, were really small rapids. They might be long and they might contain a deafening suck-hole or two, but ultimately the white water along the boater’s line remained below the forward gunwale. Pick the right line, stick to it, and you’d be fine. Here, the channel was often too narrow for the quantity of flow and the gradient too steep for eddies, which produced white water that often towered above the forward gunwale. Rapids like these provided a ride punctuated by blurring speed and breathless stalls. As the boat slipped down the face of one wave, it accelerated so precipitously the oarsman could fall backward off his seat. As the boat leveled in the trough and climbed the leading face, it slowed, slowed, slowed, until it just barely crested the next summit. If the boat lost momentum anywhere in the climb—say it skimmed a submerged rock or collided with the face of the leading wave or quartered slightly into the climb—it could stall out before cresting the next summit. At which point, the oarsman had failed, and no manner of panicked digging could save the boat from its sure fate: a slow slide back into the river’s open mouth, a broadsiding turn, and a swallowing flip.

  A few simple precautions would help keep the boat tracking straight and climbing strong. He moved the oarsman’s seat up three inches, then removed the anchor and secured it up front. “Lean into the waves as we climb,” he now told Annie. “And if for some reason we end up broadside, crouch against the upstream gunwale.”

  She repeated these advisories.

  “Standard advice,” he said.

  He pushed into the flow and the river swung the stern downstream, and they were off at a speed that surprised even Hank. His finger throbbed beneath its bandage but there wasn’t time for that now. The moves came quickly, long digs to ferry, short ones to straighten, then a drop and a quartering maneuver to surf the wall of the leading wave and circumvent a massive can opener of a ledge. It was fast, but it was as Hank remembered, and soon they splashed into their first pool.

  Annie shouted, “Holy shit, that was wild!”

  “Just wait,” he said. “The rapids get better toward the bottom.”

  This canyon had been considered unnavigable for as long as people had been running boats on the Ipsyniho. The canyon’s reputation kept all but the most aggressive kayakers from attempting it. It had been Walter’s idea to run it, about ten years back. The summer crowds had become impossible, and Walter was annoyed enough to consider drastic options. He and Hank had hiked the six miles around Wolf Mountain to the canyon rim, hoping they might find a way down to the bottom. They’d brought rods and high hopes. “Only these impossible places will have fishing as it’s supposed to be.” But in a full day of trying, they didn’t find a single entrance into the canyon that looked like it might also serve as an exit. But neither of them were ready to give up. Hank suggested they talk to Halis, the owner of Ipsyniho Mountaineering; maybe they could learn to rappel and ascend ropes. “Fuck that California shit,” Walter had said. “We’ll do this place Oregon-style.” It took a year and another scouting trip, but Walter eventually convinced Hank to give the canyon a go. They took two boats just in case, and weighted them for big water. The run had been hairy for sure, but they were surprised with how readily the canyon accepted a hard boat. In a way, the canyon’s narrow pinches seemed a better fit for a drift boat than the typically wider raft. They scouted every rapid and quickly came to see the patterns. A high bank on the outside usually meant a treacherous inside. A boulder slide along river-left usually meant a suck-hole in river-center. Soon they could predict the shape of the rapids from a quick analysis of the surrounding terrain. It was the final rapid that gave them the most grief, a serpentine chute bordered on either side by cliffs. It could be seen from Fifth Bridge, and had become known simply as the Falls, a Class V tourist eater. They didn’t fish much that first trip, but when they did, they rose chromers. The second trip came the next season, a three-day expedition during which Walter and Hank each landed a dozen fish. They’d sworn then never to mention the canyon to anyone; if they were to keep the place as pristine as it was, they needed to ensure its killer reputation remained intact. They hadn’t been back only because that winter Walter received his first diagnosis.

  Hank might have told Caroline about the place, or Danny, but then they’d want to see the canyon and its fishing for themselves, and he’d be obligated to guide them through it, a prospect he dreaded, for reasons he only partially understood. More than fishing the canyon, he cherished the secret knowledge that a place like this still remained in this overly trodden world, and taking people here, even his closest friends, would make the place feel public somehow. So why was it that he felt so compelled to bring Annie here?

  He was considering this question half an hour into the float as he oared the boat to shore where the river began a long westward turn. Annie was quick to jump onto land. The next quarter mile housed five prime fishing runs. None particularly long or wide but each three or four feet deep with knee-high boulders and a greasy surface—perfect dry-fly water.

  Annie was laughing as she took off her helmet. “This place is primal!” she said.

  “There’s definitely something about it.”

  Above them, the slopes were dressed in reds and yellows and chartreuses. The foxglove, which was long gone downstream, grew copiously along the water, and higher, Hank pointed to clusters of Indian paintbrush and columbine. A pika, which had been lounging on a ledge watching them, squeaked and dodged.

  In some places, bands of shale climbed a thousand feet upslope, winter’s avalanche chutes. There weren’t many trees here; the land was so fresh and new that soil hadn’t had time to accumulate. In this part of the watershed, the process of biological succession was a few million years behind. The river itself looked prehistoric, the rocks fifteen to thirty feet across and bone white, like the spinal column of some ancient creature.

  He handed her the six-weight switch. She shook her head. “I wanted to watch you fish.”

  “You wanted to learn why I fish,” he reminded her. “This is part of it.”

  “Well, you should fish first at least.”

  “River etiquette says you fish the first run. I’ll come down behind you.”

  “I go first because I’m a girl?”

  “No. Because we used my boat, so you’re my guest, so you fish it first.” He heard how definitive his voice might sound, and realized she might be misinterpreting his meaning. “No pressure, though. Sit and enjoy the view if you’d rather.”

  She swiped the rod. “I’ll fish.”

  He smoked a cigarette while she fished the first run, and then he stepped in above, throwing short casts into the pockets at the run’s head. The fly bounced and skated and he used the long rod to stall it over the pillows of slack water, but then he reeled in and hurried downstream to Annie’s side.

  “Will I throw you off if I walk down with you?” he called, as she was just about to make a cast.

  She nodded toward the bank behind her. “You’ll be taking your life in your hands. My casting sucks.”

  So he walked with her down the next two runs, because he wanted to be near his daughter. He explained not the technique of fishing, but what fishing teaches a person to see. “Each run has its own fingerprint of currents, there are no two just alike. Skating a fly like this maps it out. See how your fly just turned broadside there? That’s because of a microswirl in the flow, something you never would have seen otherwise. It’s a meditation really, skating flies, not on the fish but on the hydrology of the river.”

  He couldn’t tell if he was boring her or humoring her or what; he couldn’t tell if she was even hearing him. And her silence made him self-conscious. He shouldn’t have taken h
er fishing on her last day.

  She’d come here today on another charity mission, not because she wanted to fish but because she wanted to give her old man a few hours in which he could feel like he was teaching his daughter something important. This day was about him, he realized now, and that felt pitiful and empty.

  He started downstream to give her some space, but she stopped him with a question. “What did that movie say? Under the river is the language of God?”

  A River Runs Through It. “Maclean wrote that under the cobbles and boulders are the words of God.”

  “Is he right?”

  “Is he right. I don’t know. There’s ledge rock under there.”

  “So, no God?”

  That wasn’t a question that ever concerned him. God or not, what did it matter? It was the same world. “The ledge rock positions the boulders, which carve the flow into its currents. So it’s the ledge rock that creates the splashes and gurgles and roars. All a river’s words are formed by what’s beneath the perceptible.” Her fly was skating over a bulge in the meniscus, the swelling of a submerged boulder, submerged there because of the particular contour of the ledge rock. “The river really has no control over itself. It does what it always does and is what’s underneath it.”

  She seemed to be considering this. And he felt a tiny rush; maybe he’d engaged her philosophical side. She turned to him after her cast landed. “An argument against free will?”

  “Free will?”

  “Nevermind,” she said, turning back to the swing. “Old habits.”

  Old habits. Was that it? “Maybe it’s an argument for entwined wills. Or no wills at all, just forces.”

  “That sounds like a dodge of responsibility.”

  “Which might be another force.”

  She fell quiet and seemed to be focusing on fishing, and he felt some need to give her space. He climbed the bank and took a seat high above the pool, in the warmth of the dawn light. She needed freedom; that was the essence of fishing.

  But he also needed to get a grip. Waves of longing and desperation and regret had begun sweeping through him, each causing him to lose his train of thought, and some to lose his sense of balance. The first bad one had come on the drive up. The second as he watched her step into her waders. But since landing the boat, he’d had three more— each as disorienting as an epileptic event. He hadn’t slept but four hours in two days and she was leaving him at dark. God or not, she was leaving him. A force as predictable as the river itself.

  The river. From this angle, it had that liquid metal look, cellular undulations of blue and gold. Her fly sent broad wakes across the metallic surface, the neon fly line arcing toward shore, a force all its own. She would leave him tonight, and then what would this place be?

  God or not, she would stay gone too, he knew it. Because what could he offer her but a bridge to some distant past that she didn’t want? As a child, she had been part of his story, while he’d been the entirety of hers. Now, though, he realized the truth: He was only a tiny part of her story, and she was the entirety of his.

  He couldn’t go back to the way it had been, their connection reduced to the painful anonymity of the Internet image search. Their connection. There she was as a two-year-old, at the Rock Creek cabin, nestling into his neck, her long dream breaths like fluttering feathers against his skin. He couldn’t bear it, the gaping divide between that warm past and this stark new reality. A reality of half-truths and selective disclosures. Of stilted authenticity and charitable interest.

  What he wanted to give her, what he wanted in return—the soul-deep and simple connection they’d had in those years—wasn’t even a possibility anymore. So what was left? Ipsyniho was too slow for the woman she’d become, and the Eastern world was too fast for him. Maybe she could call him, maybe she could ask his advice and invite him for visits and send him pictures of her new life, maybe she could share herself, her raw and true self. But between here and there spanned a ravine of unspoken resentments.

  There was another memory from Rock Creek, little Riffle upset about Hank lifting the plate of cookies from her reach and putting them in a cabinet. She pounded on his leg with both her fists, wailing wildly, and then collapsed to the floor. Had he finally given her those cookies? Had she waited until he wasn’t looking and climbed up and gotten them herself? Or had she eventually acquiesced to the unfairness of it all and wandered off in search of something her own?

  She was nearing a prime bucket at the end of the pool, and Hank hurried down to be near her while he still could. “Just a smidge of technical advice,” he called, pointing to the seam where she should drop the fly. “You’ll need a downstream reach cast. As the line straightens, extend your arm like this.”

  She did as he said.

  But could she hear between his words and understand his intention? Did she know that this is how men say they’re sorry when they can’t find the proper words? They talk passionately about something else. “The fish will come up that rapid right there; it’s the obvious migration route. And they’ll slide into that holding lie to recover energy.”

  “Lie,” she said, throwing an excellent cast. “A lie.”

  A question? “Yeah, there are many kinds of lies: transition lies, staging lies, holding lies. Each is approached differently. A holding lie is a place where a fish dodges the main current, usually immediately above and below a substantial rapid.”

  “Holding lie,” she muttered. “How long does a fish hold its lie?”

  “Well,” he stumbled, “how long depends. An hour or a day. But if the water levels drop, the fish can be trapped there indefinitely.”

  “Indefinitely,” she said.

  He laughed, not knowing how else to handle this queer exchange. “But eventually all rivers rise.”

  *

  THEY FOUND THEIR first steelhead in the fifth run, a wild six-pounder that rose to Hank’s dry fly five times before finding the hook. He brought it quickly to the shallows and unpinned it, and Annie hovered over his shoulder as he let it go. Even now, forty-five years after landing his first one, the experience brought a rushing sense of euphoria: an intoxicating cocktail of gratitude, hope, and faith rewarded—the indelible reality of one little resolution in this world so dead-set against them.

  And for a moment, anything was possible. “I love you, Annie.”

  “What is it about steelhead?” she asked, maybe without hearing him. She had asked this question before, her first day after arriving.

  “They’re the sun,” he said. “Everything in this valley orbits them. Always has.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. There must be something,” she continued, “something about them that made this life of yours—of Caroline’s and Danny’s and everybody else’s around here—orbit them, as you say.”

  Hank rinsed the slime from his hands. “The river is washing the land’s nutrients downstream to the ocean; steelhead and other anadro-mous fish are the vehicle that returns those nutrients to the headwaters. Without them, the land withers and eventually dies.”

  She considered this, staring at the passing water, so calm here compared to above. “But why are you drawn to them? I get they play some important role in the watershed. That makes sense. But so do trees, and I don’t see you climbing a big fir every morning.” She wasn’t hiding the bite of these questions.

  He fumbled for an answer, finally settled on one. “The word the native Ipsynihians used for salmon meant ancestor.”

  “Danny says,” Annie surprised him, “that every population of steel-head is unique, that every stream has—or had, really—its own genetically distinct group. Big fish, small fish, red fish, green fish, fish that enter in spring, others that enter in fall. He says it’s the stream’s unique features, the power of its rapids and the length of its course and the temperatures and shit that make them what they are.”

  He thought of Danny as a fire-haired boy, pointing to a spawning redd in the tailout of a hidden tributary. The conclusive clan
k of grown-up Danny disappearing through the fly shop’s back door. “It’s true. Every generation, they become better at living in this world.”

  “But that’s my confusion,” Annie said. “That answer is really just another question: Doesn’t every species operate this way? So what’s the point? I mean, I’d understand if you were all addicted to gambling or something …” She trailed off, seemingly having thought better of this.

  “I don’t know what to say.” Rosemary had once called fishing “harvest gambling,” a “disease worthy of a twelve-step.”

  “So we’re back where we started,” Annie said. “What makes steelhead so special that you all would sacrifice your lives for them?”

  Sacrifice their lives? It was Rosemary’s logic, and he could have broken a rod over his knee.

  “Because,” he said instead with inflated confidence, “they’re the river and the river isn’t going anywhere.”

  But maybe, he realized now, it was because they were a safer fight to lose.

  *

  THE MORNING PASSED and they were four hours closer to her departure, and they’d all but stopped talking.

  She was exploring, he reminded himself, stepping on stones she’d never before walked. Maybe that was why she remained pensive, because she was so taken by this place.

  When he looked her way, when he saw her blue shirt stamped against the white rocks, he felt nothing but her absence. So many years had passed since little Riffle left, but the feeling remained like a smell that the deepest folds of memory can’t forget. Now, though, there was something else too. She wasn’t simply the tearful girl anymore—she was also the cold and confident grown-up driving her child self away.

  They had lunch on a sun-drenched slab of basalt, a hulking thing the size of an A-frame home. The river swirled below over a bottomless blue hole. Juvenile steelhead were rising freely in the eddy. Caddisflies, it looked like.

  He laid out the wraps and the lox and the flatbread and the pistachios and a bottle of pinot he’d brought as a surprise, but Annie wanted none of it. “I’m not hungry,” she said. He took a few bites, but burped fire and put the food down.