A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  Even allowing for the exaggerative power of recall, I don't believe I've been into a trout of such bulk again except perhaps in Alaska, and there I was fishing a ten-pound test, level leader. Of course, I don't fish a fraction as much as I did before any of my five kids was born, back when fishing seemed both to define and validate my very existence during the warmer months. I certainly hadn't tied into such a monster before.

  I've taken my share of fine ones since, but although for well over a quarter-century I have kept none, I've profoundly savored playing each before release. And in later years I have all but equally relished fighting fish that in the end broke or pulled off. To know the creature was there seems wonder enough, and pleasure.

  Things were different back then. Nothing remotely like pleasure informed my battle with this particular brown. I grimly chased him up-and downriver. Tippet material not what it is now, when, as my friend Landy Bartlett once quipped, you can practically tow a truck around with 6x, I took care not to let him get too tight on me, and I kept at my fatuous pagan prayer the whole while: Please, please, God!

  How much time ran by as I matched wits and strength with that dream fish? I haven't any idea, but a good deal, I'd bet. At last, he started coming my way. I still let him go when he wanted, but the runs were becoming less lordly.

  Traveling light, I'd brought along one of those nets you twist and fit into a holster on your belt. Holding the rod tip high with my right hand, I pulled the thing out, dipped it to open the bag, and gently lifted under Leviathan—who, too long and heavy for such a contraption, collapsed the frame and wallowed again at my feet.

  I made four or five further efforts with the flimsy net, terrified that each would mark the moment of escape. Then I looked downstream to those daunting rips. Just above them, a gravel beach sloped up at a gentle angle. To haul my trophy onto that beach seemed my only recourse, risky as it was, because once the brown made his way to the white water, he'd be gone.

  By now, I was nearly dragging the poor brute, a matter that didn't concern me as it would today. Indeed, I checked behind myself periodically to see if the trout had turned onto its side, so that I could just pinch him under the gill plates and carry him out.

  At last I backed two or three feet onto the sand, reeled the butt of my leader through the top guide, and lifted. Nada.

  I didn't know what to make of this until I noticed the brown sidling offshore to fin in the pebbled shallows. Its dorsal broke the surface. I saw the little pigtail at my tippet's end, which now trailed useless below me. I had obviously tied a bad knot with my frozen fingers.

  I dropped my rod on the beach, waded out to the trout's lie, and swiped at him like a grizzly bear. An inept bear at that: when the water cleared, I watched my trophy drift backwards ever so slowly. Then, with one flick of his tail, he disappeared.

  What swam to mind then was not another fish but that bottle of Gilbey's in my pack. This would become a more and more common response as I went on in life.

  The Wind River Mountains, however cloaked in mist and snow, provided a sight to make the hike back to my cabin worth the taking. Mule deer and antelope grazed in the meadows, breaths visible in the cold when they raised their heads. More than one golden eagle circled above. The sage showed the spectral green that would tax a Corot to replicate. But that foggy-glassed bottle of gin was the focus of my mind's eye.

  When I got indoors, the bottle's contents vanished, and a good deal faster than my trout had. So did the rest of that day and night as I drowned my defeat. But had I netted the trout, I'd have toasted my triumph to the limit and beyond. There was always some motive for that first belt, after which who knew what was coming?

  I woke up next morning to wonder where in hell I might be, and what in hell I'd been doing to take myself there. Having fallen asleep in my damp clothing, waders and all, and having left the radio on, I slowly recognized Hank Williams's "Your Cheatin' Heart," performed by someone who was no Hank Williams. I lolled and shivered.

  I pinch myself today to think that, memory finally prevailing, my failure on the Green soon led me to think that life had no value for me anymore, that nothing—nothing!—could ever again come right. I had not merely lost the best trout I'd ever had on a line; I'd lost the world. Insane, of course, but then addiction and insanity are close kin.

  Forehead in hands, elbows on knees, quaking like a whippet, I began to feel as though some poisonous worm were boring inside my skull. The pain in my head was largely hangover, but it seemed too that my worm had fangs, that I could all but watch it sink them into what remained of my brain.

  Too many years would pass before that worm, some avatar of conscience, I suppose, gnawed all the way through my pride, sat me flat on a floor in Vermont, and broke me but good. I would quit drinking or die. Things struck me just that simply and rightly. I thank God for the moment of clarity.

  Today, when my heart and soul are at peace, which is most of the time, I am open to quotidian miracles. I sometimes notice, say, a crab apple tree dripping exotic, resplendent foliage, which turns out to be a flock of waxwings. At other times, I'm struck by how the ramshackle veneer mill in the town just south of ours is inverted and beautified by the calm water of the mill stream below it. Crystals hovering in the subzero air as I snowshoe through an opening in woods can rob my breath. I don't mind platitude here: these are some things that feed what I now name my soul, lend it a measure of strength.

  At that moment by the Green, I had no means to imagine any of this, none to foresee how I'd thrive on family ties and treasured friendships and what, just half-jokingly, I now call "good, clean fun."

  It has taken every day I've lived to get me to where I am now.

  I'm nurtured as well, and more surprisingly, by what remains of that very trip to the Green, the one I believed such a botch. I can re-envision the haloed crimson spots along the flanks of my fabled fish, his deep but streamlined shape. Snowflakes hit the surface to vanish immediately. Stones glimmer on the river-bottom. I find poignant beauty in all such transitory things. And if in mind I lift my eyes to the hills, as I must after all have done back then, I see the whited coulees descend the Wind Rivers like angel-pale lava, wild grazing animals lit by the shine.

  It was my subconscious, or some other ineffable faculty, that stored up these gleanings until they could properly impress themselves on my spirit. And here they are, bright and compelling enough to be parts of this story's happy ending.

  Daybook, July

  I've recently been reading one of my favorite writers on the American West. Ted Leeson is a master of lyrical prose and perhaps above all of meditation on place. Today I came across an opinion in his superb Inventing Montana that struck me as vividly as when I first saw it.

  "Montana," Ted asserts, "is not a place. It is merely the name of a place, a convenience of language."

  That got me to thinking, scarcely for the first time, about the places in my own work. But not the places only. The experiences and events and above all the people with whom I've dealt both in my nonfiction and perhaps above all in my poetry, which tends toward the nonfictional too, are or were all real. No doubt about that in my mind. Once I've put them on the written page, or even spoken of them aloud, however, they become . . . what?

  I found myself wondering about something that so many of my hundreds and hundreds of students—usually in defense of their own poetry or fiction at its least cogent—often called Things That Really Happened. Were my work's components, human and otherwise, largely concocted? Did I impose an identity upon them and in that measure "invent" them? Were they what Ted calls conveniences of language?

  Anything other than truth, I believed, would be an insult to the cherished folks and locations I've meant to praise. But damned if truth isn't a troublesome issue.

  I recall reading the words of a Native American woman -Kiowa, I believe—who was called as a witness in a criminal trial. When asked to tell the whole truth, she replied, "I don't know the whole truth; I only know what
I know." The world would be the better for more of such modest knowledge, for even the notion of knowledge itself is a troublesome one.

  Not that I am particularly interested in all this as a philosophical issue. Fact is, I am often rather suspicious of philosophy, the more formal, the more suspicious. Of course much of my aversion must be based on my ineptitude at abstract thought.

  If I can't immediately integrate something with my personal experience, I'm not likely to understand it, or if I do, to retain it.

  I'm aware of the human tendency, from which I am scarcely immune, to present what one can do as an asset and what one can't as a defect. However all this may be, though, I long since decided that literature made a better vehicle for me to contemplate the world than what the philosophers could offer. Creative approaches (though I rather despise that adjective, especially as in the despicable recent coinage, creative nonfiction) seem more accurately to grapple with the complexity and the contradictoriness of my experience than other means.

  When handled by a master, which I don't claim to be, art can entertain a whole gaggle of ideas, despite the fact that, at least superficially, one of those ideas may run directly counter to another, that one to yet another, and so on.

  John Keats spoke of "Negative Capability," the capacity to be "in Mysteries, uncertainties and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." I have always taken this to mean that the verbal artist can, to choose the most radical and convenient example, simultaneously consider the world's horrors and the world's blessings, and, even more stunningly, can demonstrate how one is often an aspect of the other. Logic probably doesn't like all this multifariousness, but I don't believe the great universe gives a damn about logic's affections or disaffections. I know I don't.

  Outside my window now, I see two dapper kingfishers flitting at the edges of our pond, their feathers shocking light. Despite a morning fog, October's trees show equally bright. But my reader can't tell, as I testify to this, whether the birds and the trees shine in this way because they actually shine in this way or because just now I've imagined a break in the mist through which a sun is pouring, so sharp it could make you bleed.

  One day in 2009, seven lithe otters led me, my brother Jake, and our friend Landy downstream as we fished the mighty Missouri. That's a memory of Ted's Montana, a place either real or imaginary. Truth is, I think, it's both. The otters were there, right enough, and there were too many for them to be a mother animal and her brood. Still, that was the number, seven. I didn't have to come up with it.

  But I might have if I'd needed to.

  Seven, I'd recall, has often been a mystical number, which would seem more than handy, because the seven-ness of that crowd of otters seemed consistent, precisely, with the mystical aura they had. Or that I lent them. Or at least lend them now. They were, from what's maybe a clearer point of view, just water creatures, better suited to such a milieu than the three of us, casting our fabricated carbon-compound fly rods, moving downstream in our Kevlar boat.

  And I think of another water scene when I watched an eagle as he stooped on a Canada goose. It surely couldn't have been a figment. I'd been paddling a kayak north from my town in Vermont, cleaving close to the eastern, New Hampshire bank of the river, staying under the cottonwood and silver maple canopy, out of the hard sun. I was training for a race in August.

  Just as I rounded a bend, I watched the big raptor, with talons flared, hit the goose's neck, smack! That goose collapsed on the sand beach, as suddenly dead and motionless as if I'd shot it myself with the old Browning Lightning I carried back when I hunted near there for waterfowl.

  Didn't I hunt there? Of course I did.

  I intended to stop and watch the eagle, whose tail showed dark stripes, which meant a young bird. Or at least I prefer him young, though I'm not certain why, nor why I prefer him to be him. I meant to pause, to hell with the workout, with an eye to beholding another dive from the blighted elm, to which the predator had retreated on noticing me. Maybe it wasn't an elm, or even diseased, but again, I want this to be so. And I need the elm to lean at the proper angle.

  But no: these were actual observations.

  For the moment, a plan in mind, I kept on moving northward, amid a score or so of early fallen leaves, umber and mauve, that floated upriver, counter to nature. We were a long way from autumn, yet I'm sure those leaves floated there. I'm less sure that umber and mauve really correspond to the leaves' real colors. The words do sound lovely, however, even in my own ears—maybe there especially. It's a problem.

  You may imagine that I've also invented that illogical upriver drift of boat and leaf, but, trust me, I know this river like the proverbial back of my hand, spending some seventy or eighty days on it in the warmer months. I've even paddled here in February when the water stayed open. Things were moving upstream simply because right at that turn there's a big eddy. I was carried along by its backwash, just like those leaves.

  To be on the Connecticut River, at least the part that's handiest to where I live, constitutes more than a mere pleasure for me; it creates a certain state—not Vermont, not New Hampshire, not border. It is more, if you'll allow me, a state of mind, even if over there stand the irrefutable mountains, especially that genuine massif, Moosilauke. Those summits loom off eastward, though the river-course is so sinuous that Black Mountain, for example, seems to come at a paddler from a different angle in every minute, as if it really could change position.

  I planned to stay waterborne for as long as muscle and will prevailed, and I did, but first, as I say, I rode that eddy around the bend and upriver for fifty yards or so. Then, pulling even closer to the New Hampshire shore to avoid the backwash and to keep myself covered, I drifted down to spy on the eagle, which must have swooped back to his kill once I passed onward.

  But he hadn't. Or at least I don't think so. The goose lay there, great lump, looking as big, almost, as calf or burro. I squinted. That mound was the goose, no? I couldn't find its killer in tree or sky.

  I put my blades back in and pulled another three miles against the current before I turned around and followed it back. So it was more than an hour before I rode past the spot again. I drew my boat up on the sand and stepped across it.

  Nothing remained but a spine. Even the wings and scaly feet were gone.

  This, I reasoned, was a graphic illustration of wildlife economy, because it hadn't been the eagle alone to gorge on that corpse. Tracks of turtles and ravens and even tiny rodents also showed in the sand. But with only the remnant backbone to go on—a knobby column that might have been there for years, no sign of fresh blood upon it—could I prove, even, or especially, to myself, that the goose had ever existed, let alone that I'd witnessed its murder, so ugly and beautiful, so terrifying and graceful?

  I blinked at the chain of vertebrae. I blinked at the dead-standing tree to which the eagle had retreated. I blinked at the mountains. I felt a little light-headed. Maybe what I had seen was a phantasm, an aggregate of a hundred disparate memories on this stream.

  There are dogs I've treasured, quick and lost; there are horses and songs; there are people, living and gone, who have figured into my life, which has been, in so many ways, for all my physical and mental exertions among woods and waters, a life of words, an extended story.

  I have tried to portray living creatures and their environs and productions in an imaginative way, yes, but whatever I've talked about is fact. It has to be true. Otherwise, all I had were some maps. I had no places. It has to be true. Otherwise, I never knew old woodsmen and their tales. I merely read a few books, some of them my own. I had nothing. I never knew a soul, a thing.

  I can't tell you why, when I got back into my kayak, I decided to coast it upstream again for a spell, borne by the same eddy's current. I suppose I liked the feel of being borne north on south-flowing water. I liked sensing the river as it moved me—as some of my visions do, including those of Things that Really Happened—in a way that suggested my up could be my dow
n, my progress against a flow could be that fluent, that easy, at least for moments.

  Living with the Stories

  In August of 1993, his eighty-eighth on earth, I asked Earl Bonness down to my river camp and turned on a battery-powered tape recorder, old-fashioned even for the time, purchased when the camp itself was in 1968. I'd mentioned the man here and there in various writings, but I wanted to present him more fully. Earl was after all a living hero of mine, among the last of a certain upper New England kind; he needed his own chapter. There were countless reasons to turn to him, but one was that all the other heroes—at least the male ones—had about gone by the time of our conversation.

  Earl's chapter, I imagined, would be founded on that dialogue, but I would add to it a tribute, the best I could manage. When I played the tape back, however, it was as always Earl's own voice that moved me. His words blended with the steady rush of the river outdoors, so that at length I thought of that odd but majestic figure in Saint John's Revelation: the Ancient of Days. Who spoke with the voice of many waters. Who saw the beginning and the ending of a world. In these respects Earl, a river driver in the more fabulous period of lumberjacking, the time, precisely, of the waters, speaks apocalyptically too, and no author's testimony to his life and vision could improve on the one he provides on his own.

  If, therefore, I first decided to let the old man's voice simply flow (the verb is inevitable), I subsequently decided against impeding that fluidity, against imposing any shapeliness beyond the implicit, associative one contained in the musings that follow, unedited. In short, I deleted all of my trivial parts in the conversation.

  My chief regret is that the sonorities and rhythms of Earl's out-loud talk cannot be captured in print.