Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  I took a rest on the bank. Late-afternoon sunshine was coming through the cedar branches. Suddenly, insects began to hatch. It was very exciting, because I could see them so clearly—orange caddis flies. I snapped a spool with a floating line into my reel and tied on an imitation caddis, size 18. There was some water that was already in shade, and I worked it first. I made short, delicate casts to cut down on mistakes. I knew that I was doing a good job of presenting the fly, but I was still surprised when a rainbow trout took it. I had so little line on the water that I landed the trout with no trouble. It was about thirteen inches long, stout and boxy, bearing the bright pinks and reds and silvers of a wild trout. Hatchery fish have the same colors, but they always seem muted, like bad reproductions of great art. When I gripped the trout to remove my hook, I could feel its flailing muscles, a tremendous focusing of power. Because the hook was barbless, it slipped out easily, leaving just a tiny tear in the trout’s lip. I released it into the creek and watched it dart into the depths. Nothing disappears as quickly as a trout redeemed.

  That evening, after dinner, I went to the lodge for a drink. No doubt I was looking for a chance to mention my trout, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with the four other angler-guests at the bar. They were fly-fishing bullies—the kind of guys who dress in unsoiled flannel, down, and khaki garments and spend thousands of dollars on tackle and far-flung vacations. These bullies are always yakking about their last trip to New Zealand or Patagonia, and it’s very depressing to listen to them, since by their insistence on the value of all the things in life that don’t matter, they violate the essence of the sport—which combines, as Izaak Walton noted, humility and a calmness of spirit. I only lasted through a single bourbon. Instead of going to my cabin, I walked to Eastman Lake and sat on the shore for a few minutes, just staring at the moonlight on the water. Moonlight never gets old.

  …

  The next morning, I left for the McCloud, using Mt. Shasta as my marker. “Shasta is a fire-mountain,” wrote the naturalist, John Muir, “an old volcano gradually accumulated and built up into the deep blue of the sky by successive eruptions of molten lava.” It dominates the southern Cascades—a dissected tableland of basaltic sheets, mudflows, and ash, capped by volcanic cones. The cone of Shasta is over fourteen thousand feet high. Its crater is still hot. Live glaciers still scour its sides (most of them are on the north slope), and they feed hundreds of streams, including the McCloud. The aboriginal residents of the region were Shastans, members of the Hokan family, who gathered acorns and manzanita berries, and killed salmon, bear, and deer. Another tribe—the Modocs—were the Shastans’ enemies. They were immortalized in a best-selling book that also lifted the mountain into the realm of popular myth—Joaquin Miller’s Life Among the Modocs, written in 1873. Miller was a bearded, boisterous man, a precursor of the modern author/self-publicist. He wore outrageous cowboy clothes even in polite society—they loved him in London, where he showed up in chaps to take tea—and he did his damndest to wring poetry from monumental stone. The poetry could be pretty unrelenting at times:

  Lonely as God, and white as a winter

  moon, Mount Shasta starts up sudden

  and solitary from the black forests of

  Northern California . . .

  Another poet who found inspiration in the country around Shasta was William Randolph Hearst. Hearst is not generally included in literary company, but—according to W. A. Swanberg, his biographer—he “always enjoyed scribbling verses.” Hearst had a five-story medieval manor house on 67,000 inland acres of virgin forest near the McCloud. The house was known as Wyntoon, except to Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, who hated the place and called it Spittoon. Ms. Davies spent most of her time there playing backgammon. During the Second World War, when Hearst developed a fear that the Japanese might shell San Simeon from boats on the Pacific, he moved to Wyntoon for two years. One of his poems—he had the nerve to print it in the New York Journal-American—was composed while he was in exile. It’s about the mystery of life, and it has even more overwrought metaphors per poetic square inch than Miller’s work.

  The name “McCloud” is a corruption of McLeod—Alexander McLeod, a trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company, who discovered the river, in 1829. It was a grand stream then. It had large annual runs of seagoing fish, like salmon and steelhead. The fish traveled inland from the ocean for almost two hundred miles to spawn. The rainbow trout now in the river are probably descendants of anadromous specimens who became landlocked through volcanic and seismic changes and lost their migratory urge. An egg-taking station was established on the river, in 1872, so that McCloud strains of salmon and rainbow trout could be distributed worldwide. The heyday of angling on the McCloud was in the early 1900s, when fishing clubs owned most of the stream. In the 1940s, Shasta Dam was built. It put an end to the anadromous runs and significantly altered the quality of trout-fishing.

  The soil along the McCloud is very rocky, much too thin to be farmed. Ranching has been a mainstay here since the 1850s, and so has lumbering. Almost all of the open conifer forest that grows on the mountain slopes has been logged over. (Hearst’s acreage was one of the last accessible virgin parcels to go.) The forest has Douglas firs, white firs, sugar pines, yellow pines, and ponderosa pines. The towns I passed through were all logging towns. McCloud had been a logging town, too. The McCloud Lumber Company incorporated it, in 1896, but they’d vanished from the scene, and now an investment company owned it. Apparently, the investment company was turning it into a retirement community—at least that’s what I gathered when I drove down the main street. There were septuagenarians everywhere. McCloud was absolutely jammed with them. They were buying papers and medications at the pharmacy, taking constitutionals in the clean mountain air, and keeping an eye out for the encroachment of crime in any of its multifarious forms. Quite a number of them were sitting in chairs and rockers on the porch of the McCloud Hotel—so many, in fact, that I had to drive around the block twice before I recognized Paul Deeds among them.

  Deeds has an ability to blend in with almost any group. The only time I ever saw him stand out was some years ago when I invited him to join me for dinner at a fancy restaurant. He came with his hair slicked down and his beard trimmed, and he was so uneasy throughout the evening that I knew I’d made an error in judgment. “Why in the hell do the put ice cubes on the carrots and celery?” he asked when our waiter brought a relish tray. He plucked the cubes off the veggies and surreptitiously dumped them under the table. During the evening, he perceived several other offenses against decency and freely commented on them. When the check arrived on a sterling platter, he seized it and laughed so loudly that the couple at the next table shot us killer glances. “This would have bought me ten meals at the Tip-Top Café,” Deeds said, weeping from the humor of it all. Such occasions make me wonder if Deeds and I would even be friends if it weren’t for fishing.

  Deeds was in his element on the hotel porch. A baseball cap on his head, he rocked in his rocker and paused every now and then to scratch himself. He looked to be half asleep, caught up in some rural fantasia, but this turned out to be a guise. He was actually mad at me for being late. I explained to him that my progress had been affected by the cows who kept wandering across the highway, and by the logging trucks that kept barreling around blind curves—often with fourteen of their eighteen wheels aloft.

  “We’re going to have a hard time getting set up before dark,” Deeds said. “I just want to be straight about who’s responsible.”

  We had another argument when I rebelled against the contents of Deeds’s cooler. All he had in there were eggs, bacon, potatoes, bread, coffee, a six-pack of Diet Dr Pepper, and about eight pounds of ground chuck. The absence of anything remotely green or leafy was appalling, and I insisted that he let me pick up some salad stuff at the market.

  “What are you afraid of?” Deeds asked. “Scurvy?”

  I wouldn’t answer him. He put his truck in gear, and we started out o
f town.

  The bad dirt hit us after we’d climbed a saddle of land, then dropped down to McCloud Reservoir. Pavement gave way to pocked and rutted ground that bore the deeply carved scars of flooding. Deeds had to proceed at a crawl so we wouldn’t snap our spines. It took us a while to reach the crest of the road. From there, we had a fine view of Shasta. We began our descent into the canyon. Black oaks and bigleaf maples were mixed in among the pines. We passed through some stands of virgin timber. There were Douglas firs three hundred feet tall. A pair of red-shafted flickers flew by, flashing their salmon-colored wings. Farther on, we spooked a black-tailed doe and her two fawns. They’d been browsing near some manzanita bushes. Unlike my porcupine pal, the deer stopped to look back once they’d put some yards between themselves and the truck—an impulse of the central nervous system, perhaps. Maybe it takes a dense, primitive, Pleistocene brain to simply plod on. As we got lower in the canyon, the air cooled off, and we seemed to be suspended in a mesh of alternating light and shade.

  There were plenty of vacancies at Ah-Di-Na Meadow campground, owing to the absence of any other campers. Deeds was overjoyed to have the place to himself. He sniffed around from campsite to campsite until he found one that satisfied him. It was close to the river. The river wasn’t visible, though. We could just hear it, distantly. Deeds pulled the tarp from the truck bed, and we got the tent and set it up. We worked fast, because the light in the canyon was fading. The clock in the truck read four.

  When we were done, and Deeds had hung the kerosene lantern from a branch, we suited up for fishing. The McCloud had a lot of water in it for so late in the season. The water was fairly opaque, a silty green. It wasn’t very wide at any point, because the sides of the canyon pinched it in, but it was still too deep for us to wade across. It had the classic configuration of a mountain trout stream. The fish would be in pockets behind boulders, in riffles, in sheltered pools, in slow stretches of water that echoed the serenity of Hat Creek. Once you’ve fished a few streams like the McCloud, you learn to skip quickly over the unproductive sections, just as you skip over slow passages in a book.

  Deeds and I split up. He stayed below the campground, trying to coax a trout from a pool. I walked toward another pool downstream. I saw a hillside trail above me, but I decided to keep to the river, climbing over the rocks, outcrops, and deadfall, and bushwhacking through alders and cottonwoods. Suddenly, I stepped on a pinecone, lost my footing, and fell forward. My shinbone cracked against a hunk of granite. The blow broke my skin and gave me an instant hobble. I limped ahead to the pool. Trout were feeding actively. I tied on a small Adams—it’s a good, all-purpose fly—and started casting. The casting was difficult, because the land behind me was a tangle of trees, bushes, and poison oak. The fish still came readily to the fly. They had none of the wariness of Hat Creek trout. They hadn’t been subjected to the same kind of pressure. Before dark, I’d caught and released seven trout—all rainbows between eight and twelve inches long. They were average fish for the McCloud.

  I wished I’d brought a flashlight for the walk back to the camp. I made some unnecessary detours before I found my way. Deeds was already cooking dinner. He had his two-burner butane stove set on a folding table. Spuds were boiling in one pot, and ground chuck was frying in the other.

  “Do any good?” Deeds asked.

  “I got quite a few. Nothing worth keeping.”

  “Same here.” Deeds flipped over a hamburger. It smelled terrific. I went over to warm my hands by the stove.

  “There’s only one burger in that pan,” I said.

  “I thought you were eating salad.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” I said.

  Deeds fashioned another beef big-boy from his stash of chuck, while I opened a beer and applied some ice from the cooler to my wound. The bruise was entering an Abstract Expressionist phase. It hurt. I pressed the beer can against it, hoping that I hadn’t also caught poison oak. Deeds saw that I was hurting, and he carried the plate of burger and boiled spuds over to me. We talked for a while about the valley and our mutual friends and how their grapes and prunes were doing. Deeds filled me in on deaths and births. I told him how hard it had been for me to move away, since the valley was where I’d learned to be at ease in nature. For a long time, the solitude was a distinct pleasure, but then, all at once, it had turned into isolation. He said that he understood; he still thought about selling his place when he was feeling low. “It’s romantic out there for a few years,” he said, slapping at a mosquito. “Then it just becomes regular life.” Deeds got up from his campstool and did the dishes. His sleeping bag was in the tent. He attended to it fastidiously, fluffing the down, smoothing out the corners. There wasn’t any noise, except for the breeze in the firs and the distant rumble of the river.

  …

  The highlight of our weekend in the canyon came on Saturday when Deeds caught a Dolly Varden on a caddis nymph he’d tied. Dolly Vardens are chars, not trout, but the resemblance is close. The fish have bright pink spots like the spots on the dress of their namesake, Dickens’s Dolly Varden, who appears in Barnaby Rudge. In California, Dolly Vardens are almost extinct. The McCloud is the only river in which they’ve been rediscovered, so Deeds was pumped up by the fact that he’d hooked something unique. He held the fish in the sun and admired it for a few seconds before letting it go.

  The best fishing we had was right where Deeds had predicted it would be—near the mouth of Ladybug Creek, just above the Nature Conservancy preserve. The conservancy is an organization whose sole purpose is to acquire and manage ecologically significant land. On the McCloud, it owns six-and-a-half miles of river frontage and 2,330 surrounding acres. Part of the preserve is open to the public, but we never visited it, because we had plenty of action in the less restricted wild trout water. Ladybug Creek—it’s not much more than a trickle in autumn—serves as a prime feeding station for trout. As the creek tumbles down the canyon walls, over moss- and lichen-covered rocks, it washes insects into the McCloud, and the fish gather for an easy meal. We took them on wet flies and dry flies, on nymphs and streamers. We kept four of them for our Saturday night dinner. Deeds rubbed them with wild sage he found growing by the river and fried them in his familiar pan. I contributed the much discussed salad, which Deeds—in a move so out of character that it alarmed me—ate with enthusiasm.

  Sunday morning I was awake before dawn. The throbbing in my shin had kept me from sleeping well. I heated some water for coffee and sat at the table just staring into space until I realized that I was cold. I put on a sweat shirt and warmed my hands in the steam that was billowing from the pot on the stove. The coffee Deeds had brought was freeze-dried. It tasted bitter to me, and I threw most of it on the ground. There was nothing to do but go fishing.

  On every fishing trip, I reach a point of mechanization when the routine of each day becomes automatic, much like the routine of a commuter who has a regular train to catch. I trudged forward on my bad leg, down a trail to the river. It looked black. Not a stitch of light had hit it yet. The boulders I touched were chilly and damp. I came at last to a tongue of rock that extended into the river for ten or twelve feet. I took a nymph from my fly box, but my fingers were so stiff from the cold that I dropped it into the water. I watched it vanish, sucked downstream into some rapids. The second nymph I managed to tie on right. I cast it toward an alder on the opposite bank, then let it drift into the middle of the McCloud, quartering my line.

  I must have been casting for twenty minutes before the sun finally rose. It struck me like a flame. In another twenty minutes, I was so warm that I stripped off my sweat shirt and tossed it on the rock. My casting fell into the hypnotic rhythm I’d been after at Hat Creek, obliterating consciousness, and I had one of those rare moments of epiphany that come when you’re entirely open to them. I lost any sense of the McCloud as a specific river. It began to recapitulate every other river I’d fished, to exist briefly as an absolute form. The water stopped being merely water and became i
nstead an adjunct of my body, so that I was joined to it in a steady flow. The moment didn’t last very long, but that was all right. That was fine.

  We broke camp late in the afternoon. Deeds judged the trip to be a success, even though he’d seen four other anglers during our stay. I enjoyed the canyon for its splendor and isolation, but I told Deeds that I wasn’t ready to give up on the trout of Hat Creek. I wanted another shot at them someday—crowd or no crowd.

  Our drive out was as rough as our drive in. We stopped at a bar in McCloud, and I bought Deeds a Diet Dr Pepper for the road. When the bartender asked if we’d been fishing or hunting, Deeds said, “Fishing,” and then added, in the manner of a boy who has tried but failed to contain his pride, “I caught a Dolly Varden.”

  Driving back to San Francisco, I was uncommonly aware of traffic, blinking lights, complexity. I got home just before midnight. The punk rocker who’d rented the dilapidated studio apartment in the garage of my building was practicing his drums again. I’d made it clear to him before that he had to quit the drumming before somebody strangled him, so I was surprised that I was able to speak to him without feeling my hands twitching toward his throat. Upstairs, I ran myself a hot bath. I had a scratchy throat and a runny nose. The bruise on my shin had turned the exact color of an eggplant. On my forearms, I had a rash of pimples that looked suspiciously like poison oak. None of the damage really bothered me, though. Flesh matters so little to a happy man.