“Got’m.”
Anyone would have tended to agree. She sauntered over and warned, “Plug yer ears.” I plugged. She discharged the second barrel into the dog’s head.
I started to shake as if from cold, then threw up.
Ma stood me up, cleaned me off, hugged me, then—seeing my knees were mush—slung me over her shoulder like a big bag of dog chow and headed for the house. Jouncing along in the air I looked back at the scene of the showdown: in the street the cars I’d slipped between had been joined by a dozen others, and twenty or more wall-eyed Burbites stood gaping across H2O’s manicured lawn where the Doberman still twitched amid spattered brain, four strewn boxes of gore-flecked Christmas cards twittered jolly Xmases to the wind, and Ma strode easily away, a hundred pounds of guns and sons on her shoulders and in her belly.
While I watched Gadabout catch Canadian steelhead Ma threw the dead Doberman in her pickup, covered it with leaves, drove to the landfill and dumped it, picked up a bike rim at the repair shop, started for home, but was interrupted by a brainstorm: she turned around, drove to the dogpound, searched the kennels, and came out with a ratlike mongrel of the Mexican hairless/Chihuahua clan—eight inches tall, colored black. She took this sniveling creature to the poodle parlour, had its tail circumcised and its ears clipped Doberman style. Then she deposited it in the surgeon’s backyard.
When the black Oldsmobile hove into sight that night some neighbors who’d witnessed the afternoon’s gunplay concealed themselves in upstairs windows overlooking the infamous backyard. According to their reports, the surgeon entered his house bearing two brown bags of groceries, turned on the kitchen light, and began to put the groceries away; in one of the bags were two smaller bags, each containing a fifth of Bombay gin; in the other bag was an old newspaper wrapped around what proved to be an enormous bone covered with shreds of raw, bloody meat. The surgeon threw the bone onto the flood-lit back patio but didn’t wait to see his dog snatch it, knowing he might be out munching children. The neighbors peered hard at this bone, hoping it came from the butcher’s, not from the surgeon’s place of employment.
After pouring himself a cocktail which he downed at two gulps, the surgeon poured himself a second which he downed at three gulps, followed closely by a third which he downed at four gulps. One of the neighbors computed that at this rate the surgeon would require seventeen gulps to down his sixteenth cocktail; we needn’t argue with her mathematics, but must point out that one-seventeenth of a cocktail is scarcely a sip, let alone a gulp. Another neighbor conjectured that what the poor surgeon needed instead of a slough of cocktails was somebody to keep him company; this neighbor was a single woman in her late thirties who didn’t yet realize that Ma had provided for this lack.
During his fourth cocktail the surgeon glanced at the patio to see what his black Doberman thought of the dubious bone. When he perceived the bone wandering across the shadowy lawn toward the shrubs—apparently of its own accord—he threw a suspicious look at the cocktail, took a careful sip, shook his head, and stepped outside to investigate. Closer examination revealed the bone’s deviant migration to be effected by a Doberman rat—a fantastic yet unmistakable little creature he had not known to exist. Full of wonder (and gin), he dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling toward it. The Doberman rat let him get within arm’s length, then began to emit a soft, whirring sound something like a dentist’s drill. This was its growl. This was also a signal. It meant that the rat had staked claim to the bone. It meant, “Back off, Jack.” But being accustomed to his late Doberman’s vastly more blatant signals, the surgeon extended a foolhardy finger, intending to validate the dear little thing’s existence with a few gentle strokes. That finger promptly received four perforations that looked like this:
Hearing the surgeon cry out, the neighbors felt uniform fear for the little rat’s safety—but the neighbors had forgotten two things: one was the four cocktails, the other was the surgeon’s profession. Instead of growing angry he examined the wounds with expertise, awed by their perfect symmetry and the precision with which they’d been inflicted; his full-sized Doberman had certainly been incapable of any such performance. He finished his cocktail, sucked his finger, watched the Doberman rat chew, listened to it whir, and a lasting friendship was formed. He never inquired after the whereabouts of his child-mauler, and when he was forced by a malpractice scandal to change cities some years later, he took the Doberman rat with him.
Ma’s account of how she happened to be in the yard with her shotgun at the very moment the Doberman attacked was quite simple: she reasoned that since Gadabout Gaddis’s show had started I’d be hurrying, that in my hurry I might forget the Doberman, that hurrying children were its favorite prey, and that the world would be a better place without the Doberman; so she jumped up from the TV, grabbed the shotgun (it’s always loaded), heard the tires and me shrieking as she rounded the house, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. Given her martial skills, the rest was a foregone conclusion. Yet the fact that she could instantaneously assimilate and act upon these details implies a high degree of intelligence—an intelligence utterly belied by such deeds as her flunking out of high school, her inane piscatorial wrangling with H2O, and her inability to perceive that the wholesale slaughter of fish in the present must have some effect on the angling of the future. I think “native intelligence” is the best name for the type Ma possesses.
A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area—a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change. Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center of a little cosmos—or a big one, if his intelligence is vast—and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, what Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely the instant he caught a whiff of any city. But some have it in cities—like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crowd of London pockets; like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums. Sissy Hankshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Gandhi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home—like H2O in his tweeds at a hall full of fly-dabbling purists. But the high-grade stuff is, I think, found most often where the earth, air, fire, and water have been least bamboozled by men and machines. In the scrub desert of Eastern Oregon, or along any river, Ma’s got it. She may have it in coyote-raw form, but she’s got it for sure: I’ve seen her stand and watch for an approaching flight of geese long minutes before it came within range of ear or eye; I’ve seen her sneak up and goose muskrats with the toe of her hipboot; she predicts storms, deaths in the family, weddings, hard winters; she guesses who’ll get the next fish when the riverbank is choked with plunkers; she always spots the culprit when somebody farts in a crowd; she’s saved me twice from drowning; she once dawdled into the yard just as Bill Bob toddled into a car with some old Sicky who’d offered him candy and a fun ride, and before you could say “Henning-Hale-Orviston” she had Bill Bob in her arms and the candy-man taking a chunk of brick and a smashed back window for a ride instead. And she shucks these feats off, calling them “dumb luck.” I think “educated luck” is closer to the mark: I think by the time her native intelligence gets through with it, Ma’s luck has a PhD.
I don’t think you get native intelligence just by wanting it. But maybe through long intimacy with an intelligent native, or with y
our native world, you begin to catch it kind of like you catch a cold. It’s a cold worth catching.
To complete the picture of Ma the Parent I must point out one flagrant limitation. Ma exhibits two emotions; she calls them “orneriness” and “happiness.” She says that H2O exhibits the same two and no more, and she credits Bill Bob with no emotions at all—which is one reason he’s the apple of her eye. But me she credits with three: “happiness,” “orneriness,” and “glumness,” and she claims that for every hour I spend in the grip of the first two, I spend ten in the throes of the last. “Glum Gus” she calls me. I might be feeling pensive, preoccupied, mystified, fatigued, introspective, or any of a hundred ways resulting in what seems to me merely an expressionless expression—but to Ma these moods are all one: “Glum AGIN? Cheer up, boy! Always limpin’ around with a burr in yer ass! Smile, dammit!” I don’t think this is quite what Thoreau meant when he said, “Simplify.” When it comes to noting differences between two elk on a distant ridge, two vultures half a mile overhead, two trout, two fawns, two foals, two fools, or any two physical objects, Ma is capable of incredible subtlety. But when it comes to any sort of intellectual or emotional distinction—like recognizing differences between Hindus and Muslims, abject misery and petty sulking, Hamlet and A Comedy of Errors, philosophical verities and verbal quibblings, Rilke and Rod McKuen, and so on—you may as well talk to a rock as Ma. During puberty this didn’t just bother me: it tortured me. I even convinced myself I hated her for it. But eventually I came to see that what I really hated was Ma’s shoot-from-the-hip thinking style in me. In me it was an ugly, acquired thing. In Ma it was just an old habit. She didn’t mind if you told her she was full of beans; she knew she was full of beans; she enjoyed it. When it came to “gittin’ us brung up” full of know-how, good food, spunk, and savvy, there was never a better ma than Ma. As for matters such as What-Is-The-Meaning-Of-Life?, or how to seek it, or where, or why, she farted out such cornpone, cantankerous opinions that we were forced to plug our noses, bail out of the nest, and start looking for answers ourselves.
8
The “Ideal Schedule”
I believe that as long ago as 1930 a movement was started to make a standard list of gut sizes.… One word of caution if you wish to calibrate your own gut. Gut bruises easily and when it is bruised is really worse than broken because it is deceptive, not noticeable and yet weak.
—Ray Bergman, “Dry Fly Fundamentals,” Trout
In The Compleat Angler Izaak Walton writes,
O the gallant fisher’s life,
It is the best of any!
’Tis full of pleasure, void of strife,
And ’tis beloved by many.
But the fact is, Walton is only guessing. He was an ironmonger by trade, and spent most of his spare time at church or in scholarly pursuits; little wonder that an infrequent fishing trip would inspire ecstatic doggerel in a book-worming, pew-perching hardware peddler. The once-monthly fisherman adores his rare day on the river, imagining that ten times the trips would yield ten times the pleasure. But I have lived the gallant fisher’s life, and I learned that not fishing is crucial to the enjoyment of fishing: fishing is a good thing, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. I don’t know why the chronic candy-lover so quickly becomes the toothless hypoglycemic, the athletic champ the has-been chump, the dashing Don Juan the diseased lecher, but I know they do. And so does the constant angler become a water-brained, jibbering jerk-worshipper. But at nineteen I believed that Not-Fishing was the Bad, Fishing was the Good, everything else under sun and moon was the Indifferent, and “too much of the Good” was inconceivable. My one nonfisherman friend in the world was Bill Bob, who was only nine, and who moved through a dehydrated universe that only rarely overlapped mine. So even had I desired to explore other modes of existence, who could have showed them to me? H2O? Ma? No, my life was confused enough limited to its single interest with my rasslefrassing folks and the Great Izaak Walton Controversy around. As the G.I.W.C. raved on, all sorts of psychological -isms and -oids were undoubtedly wrought upon me; lacking psychiatric scratch, I resorted to homegrown remedies. The crucial one consisted of this:
Exposed since tadpolehood to my parents’ noisy irrationality, I embraced a compensatingly extreme rationality to prevent my soggy cosmos from lapsing into chaos. There was, I came to believe, no limit to what a Scientific Angler might accomplish through the relentless application of his Reason—no fish that couldn’t be caught, no fly that couldn’t be tied, no secret left undiscovered, no problem however unarithmetical and abstruse that could not, step by logical step, be solved. So it was that I applied my powers of ratiocination to the invention of a device called a “Life-Quality Balancing System,” or “L.Q.B.S.”
The L.Q.B.S. consisted of a scale (two pans of equal weight hanging in balance), 1,400 #8 medium-shank fishhooks (one for each minute of the day), and a meticulous list dividing my Standard Day into Neutral Minutes (N.M.’s), Unsatisfactory Minutes (U.M.’s), and Satisfactory Minutes (S.M.’s). For every U.M. I put a hook on the left scale-pan, for every S.M. I put one on the right, N.M. hooks I put in a neutral box. I then constructed a series of charts and graphs dealing with ways to turn U.M.’s and N.M.’s into S.M.’s, fully convinced that this simple scientific process would eventually allow me to attain a state called “Unending Satisfaction Actualization,” or “U.S.A.” I was thrilled with this program, and baffled that I hadn’t come up with it sooner. Nothing but unadulterated fishing went into the plus pan; I put Bill Bob-hooks in the neutral box—not because he wasn’t satisfactory, but because neutral is the way he prefers to be. Of course Ma- and H2O-hooks were piled high in the junk pan, along with school, yard work, Flyfishing Clubs, pimple-popping, constipation, and other nasty imbalances. The historian-type reader with his high tolerance for dull but factual material may be disappointed to learn that, though I still use the hooks, the lists and graphs were reduced to fluffy gray ash when “U.S.A.” failed to pan out. One fragment survived, however, and since it exemplifies the quasi-logical gymnastics my polarized brain was wont to perform, I include it:
The Ideal 24-Hour Schedule
1. sleep: 6 hrs.
2. food consumption: 30 min. (between casts or while plunking, if possible)
3. school: 0 hours!
4. bath, stool, etc.: 15 min. (unavoidable)
5. housework and miscellaneous chores: 30 min. (yards unnecessary; dust not unhealthy; utilitarian neatness easily accomplished)
6. nonangling conversation: 0 hrs.
7. transportation: 45 min. (live on good fishing river)
8. gear maintenance/fly-tying/rod building/log keeping, etc.: 1 hr. 30 min.
9. fishing time: 14½ hrs. per day!
Ways to Actualize Ideal Schedule
1. finish school; no college!
2. move alone to blue-ribbon fishing stream (preferably coastal)
3. avoid friendships, anglers not excepted (wastes time with gabbing)
4. experiment with caffeine, nicotine, to eliminate excess sleep
5. do all driving, shopping, gear preparation, research, etc., after dark, saving daylight for fishing only.
Result (allowing for unforeseeable interruptions):
4,000 actual fishing hrs. per year!!!
The strangest thing about this lunatic schedule is that it proved prophetic: having started school a year late and flunking away another year, I graduated from J. Edgar High in the spring of 1974 just after my twentieth birthday, my 2.3 G.P.A. earning me the distinction of finishing 205th in a class of 290. Through harrowing experimentation I arrived at a carefully staggered schedule of stimulant injections in the form of teas, coffee, and pipe tobacco, resulting in the desired six hours sleep per night. In the spring, just weeks before graduation, I obtained (unbeknownst to my parents, and by lying about my age) a year’s lease on a fisherman’s cabin overlooking a beautiful coastal stream; I junked my Buick, bought a ’65 Chevy pickup, and started smuggling my possessions t
o the coast whenever Ma and H2O were fishing. Through earnings from my custom-built rods and flies tied to order I had a sizeable savings account and means of support, so when H2O added a couple of G’s on graduation day (for college, he presumed, forgetting that the only institution my grades would get me into was the Oregon State Pen), I figured I was set for life. The only problem left was how to spring the news on Ma and H2O.
9
Voiding My Rheum
I am not very fond of living with fellows like that. There’s nothing to eat there but stinking fish and watery ale.
—Piers Plowman
On the day after graduation I went bass fishing in the suburbs of Portland. I returned home to find H2O just back from a disastrous expedition to the Madison in Montana: trying for rainbows and browns during the salmon-fly hatch, he was washed out by a freak monsoon after a single morning’s fishing. Already home and fixing dinner was a jubilant Ma, who in a three-hour jaunt to Sauvie Island had landed and killed 55 pounds of prime meat in the form of two June hogs; the salmon steak she plopped on H2O’s plate weighed three pounds easy—more than every trout caught on his Montana excursion put together. He eyed it like it was a turd.
The River Why Page 7
