The River Why

by David James Duncan

  I made it from the Carp to my loft with Titus’s help, but how or when he took his leave I can’t say: I slept before my head ever touched the pillow.

  5

  I Reckon

  Notice how, no matter how much you think you hate emptiness,

  You keep inhaling it into your lungs, making it part of you?

  Notice how, if you don’t keep making it part of you, you’ll die?

  —Thomas Soames

  When I awoke my Timex was still ticking, but the 8:45 on its face was of negligible value since I didn’t know whether it was A.M. or P.M. The same morbid fog wrapped the cedars in murk so thick I couldn’t see the river, and the cabin was danker, darker, and more desolate than I’d ever known it. I got lanterns and a fire going, fed the fish, and started breakfast, but it took a ridiculous amount of effort. My throat was sore, my bones, my joints, even my teeth and hair ached, and when I sat down to eat the day grew dark: I’d slept twenty-some hours and cooked the wrong meal. I downed it anyway, but had just climbed into bed when it came back out: I filled a handy creel with used-trout-and-eggs which dribbled through the wicker all the way to the bathroom. Then I spent an eventful hour kneeling in the tympanic shower stall, uneating every last bite.

  I crawled back in bed, my throat raw, my head on fire; I stayed there for three days. I guess I was delirious—at least there was water rushing around everywhere and Abe’s corpse bobbed in the gray air of the room whether I woke or slept. I tossed and writhed like a worm on a hook, inhabiting a region that couldn’t have been far from that locale my great-grandmother called “The Bad Place.”

  Finally the fever broke and I settled into a comparably pleasant exhaustion. But the fog remained without, and the ghastly fisherman within, and the stronger I got the more aware I grew of a blackness filling me—a depression so rancid and vast I wanted to stay delirious rather than face it. But I always was a resilient bastard. Try as I would, I got well.

  On what I guessed must be one of the last days of July I kept down my first meal. To celebrate, I bundled on winter clothes and waders and crept to the Tamanawis with Rodney. After a few half-assed casts I realized I was too weak to fish, but the fresh air was welcome—except for that damned fog—so I hunkered down on a boulder at water’s edge to watch what world there was to watch.

  In the world I watched there wasn’t much to see: little waves lapped at my rock and boots, the fog lay gray upon green water and trees, and moss lay green upon gray logs and rocks. That was outside my head. Inside my head, gray-faced Abe kept lolling by in a flow of imaginary green water, and I envisioned myself, green-faced from flu, in green waders and gray coat on the green moss of the gray boulder. Appalled by the present, I scanned the future for encouragement: I saw I had a day, a week, a month, a year, maybe even sixty years to live before my green face turned gray and died. Green and gray people grubbing around in a gray and green world. That was all there was. Monotonous, meaningless, dog-pound depressing—but so very simple. “Simplify,” said Henry Greenjeans Thoreau. “OK,” said I: “Life is a lot of green crap inexorably turning gray. The examined life ain’t worth chub.”

  The cold from the rock was seeping up my spine. It was a terrible sensation, but I didn’t move. At least cold wasn’t green or gray. I reckoned that when it reached my head I’d become a rock, too: there’d be flashy newspaper headlines (“Metamorphic Angler Unearthed on Oregon Coast”/“Lot’s Wife Drama Reenacted”/“Son of Famed Fisherman Found Permanently Stoned”) and an extensive scientific investigation. Then H2O would want to bury me, but of course Ma wouldn’t hear of it: “Waste not, want not,” she’d say as she set me out in the front yard to scare off Avon and Amway pushers. So there I’d sit in the suburbs, season after season, living the slow, thoughtful, lifeless life of granite as they all died and rotted and disappeared. When you’re going to hold a pose for a few thousand years you tend to get a little vain: I combed my hair and straightened my beard a bit with already numbed fingers, held up Rodney in a good casting posture, knit my brows toward the river as if spotting a nice rise. While waiting to petrify I fell to calculating how many centuries would pass before moss and algae reduced me to grains of grit; I supposed my upraised arms would drop off first, like on Greek and Roman statues; if they left me on the river maybe deer hunters would blast my nose off like Napoleon’s troops did to the Sphinx’s; if they took me home to the suburbs no doubt vandals would scrawl a few obscenities on me somewhere; little green plants would start creeping from my crevices.… I got to thinking about how green things are always eating gray things. Then I got to thinking about how a food chain could be constructed based on color: I made it as far as “gray rock gets eaten by green moss gets eaten by black snail gets eaten by red crawdad gets eaten by silver fish gets eaten by blue heron.…” Then I got stuck. Nobody eats herons but mangy coyotes—which are gray—or marsh Arabs—who are brown—or starved maniacs—who come in assorted colors; then I remembered how red mergansers eat silver fish and black crows eat baby bluebirds and Americans and goats are multihued and eat any damned thing and my whole food chain went to hell like every other thing in my life had done. That was the thing about Nature: make one lousy rule to describe it and it’ll contradict you even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do it. And so what? If anybody grew wise enough to grasp the real immutable laws of Nature, Nature’d only rear back and strike ’em dead before they got anybody to understand them. Maybe Abe knew. Maybe Abe had just figured the whole world out and was about to tell me as I floated past, but God caught wind of it, stuck out His invisible foot, tripped and drowned him. Abe.… blast him! If the fool had only known how to swim there wouldn’t be any of this seething in my brain—this What-is-death/What-is-life/Why-am-I-here/What-am-I-for stuff. What use were such questions? Hobgoblins—that’s all they were—noisy abstract swill good for nothing but scaring and depressing the hell out of everybody they occurred to.…

  But a fisherman was dead. Everyone I knew would one day be dead. This was no abstraction. What could it mean? What should I do about it? Was there equipment to purchase to protect myself from it? Was there reference material to peruse that would make it comprehensible? Pills to pop to make it bearable? Calisthenics to make it fun? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about anything. Everything in my head came from fishing magazines, fishing manuals, fishing novels. And what did these works have to say about the meaning of Life and Death? I perused my semiphotographic memory: I recalled sentimental paragraphs wherein authors bootlessly lament departed fisher friends; I recalled adventures wherein some angler meets his death by some unfortunate outdoors accident, or, more frequently, adventures wherein some angler hears of another angler who heard of an angler who met his death by some unfortunate outdoors accident, thus keeping the Grim Reaper at a pleasant distance while we readers, like overstuffed cattle in the slaughterhouse corral, ruminate the cudlike morals Death’s victims leave as their legacies to Angledom—pithy maxims like: “Don’t make Fred’s mistake: wear a life jacket” or “Don’t pull the fatal boner Arnold pulled: carry that compass in the woods at all times” or “Don’t be risky like the late Ronald: put felt soles on those hipboots today.” Who hasn’t heard—particularly from flyfishermen, who flaunt their literacy more than their bait-fishing counterparts—references to anglers as the most meditative of sportsmen? We feather-daubers love to echo Izaak Walton’s characterization of our pastime as “the contemplative man’s recreation,” yet in none of the thousands of pages of modern fishing prose I’d ingested had I encountered even the most rudimentary philosophical speculations. It seemed that scarcely an angler since Walton’s time gave a thought to what the death of an old fishing buddy might mean. Suddenly it hit me what a pathetic lot we fishermen were. We sneaked, pursued, teased, deceived, tormented, and often murdered the objects of our obscure lust; we compounded our crimes by gloating over them; and we committed them so mindlessly and so often that as soon as we’d done gloating we commenc
ed grumbling and griping and cursing the luck till the moment we managed to commit them again. What were our “contemplations” but odes to fish-lust, scientific explications, more unnatural technologies and more convoluted techniques to help us sneak, pursue, tease, deceive, torment, or kill more effectively? And when one of us great rishis dies, what rites do the survivors perform? With sacerdotal solemnity we pass the jug till we can’t see it and console one another with aphorisms such as “Old fishermen never die. They just smell that way.”

  Racking my brains on that cold foggy rock, I recollected at last the two most contemplative responses to the Angler’s Doom that I had encountered in any angling prose penned since 1900. They were these:

  1. We went into the bar at the lodge for the usual round of Opening Day Eve drinks, but among the countless calls for martinis, bourbon, and scotch there was one voice missing: Big Jake’s solitary bellow for rye whiskey. Nobody could stomach the stuff but Jake. “Gimme a shot o’ Ol’ Overshoes!” he’d cry in a voice like a Yukon wind. But Big Jake was no longer with us that season, and the rye whiskey sat untouched behind the bar. I thought of ordering a shot myself—just to remember him by. But then it didn’t seem right somehow. Seemed like Jake might be there watching. If he was, he’d want that rye for himself. Nobody could stomach the stuff but Jake, God bless his hide!

  2. I drove up to Three-fingered Johnny’s to pick up a few extra dry flies. But Johnny’s little cabin was all boarded up. There were weeds among his prized dahlias; there was no Nipper or Blue barking to announce my arrival. Johnny had lost the Big Fight. His opponent was a fella named Mr. Cancer. Not many enter the ring with that gentleman and come back to tell the story: he’s no clean fighter! Poor Three-fingered Johnny. But what a fly-tier he was! And not even the stub of a thumb or pointer-finger on his right hand! I still had a couple of bucktails I’d bought from him last season; I took them gently from my fly box and stuck them in my hat to remember him by. Old Johnny. Now that he’d crossed that Other River, the boys and me couldn’t help believing he still wore the same patched-up old pair of black waders and was busy catching trout on the Other Side.

  There were no references to death or dying in the Summa Piscatoria or any other of my father’s works; seldom were there even references to killing fish—except in the form of admonitions not to. One might expect in such a pacifistic angler some “contemplative” motivation—perhaps a Gandhian reverence for nonviolence, or a secret membership in the Vedanta Society. But H2O took pains to point out that his freeing of fish was “inspired by no soft-headed mysticism of any kind”; he released fish for just one reason: “A dead fish will never strike a fly.” By restoring fish to the river and advising others to do likewise, H2O was doing his best to immortalize the ancient art; the immortality or mortality of the artist was of no moment to him or his friends. Life and Death were, according to H2O, “abstractions to be viewed in a scientific light,” and he published more than one caustic review of books by angler-authors who allowed themselves such “tear-jerking liberties” as the two quoted above. He once drew me aside to explain the Scientific View of Life and Death:

  “Life,” he began, “evolved from certain obscure enzymes in the Primordial Days. Competing for food, for mates, for favorable habitat and so forth, these minute slimy substances grew incredibly complex after aeons of evolution, and Humanity resulted! You see, Augustine, the thing we call life is, in any individual creature, nothing more than a unit of Energy borrowed from the Sum Total. This Borrowed Unit remains in the creature until such time as its body becomes an unfit container for life energy, at which time ‘death’—which is really nothing more than the moment when the borrowed unit is sucked back into the Sum Total—occurs. This Sum Total goes on progressing and improving and getting more sophisticated, while dead units only decay till there is nothing left of them but inorganic material that will eventually be reconstituted, by the Sum, into a new creature. Now, this Sum Total is precisely what primitive and superstitious people call ‘God,’ and though you and I will cease to exist when our borrowed energy units are returned to this ‘God,’ we may console ourselves somewhat with the thought that Angling will very likely continue to exist as long as ‘God’ does. So, through the art of Angling you and I can, in a way, partake of eternity!” He stopped here, apparently too moved by his explication to go on.

  I’d found this Sum Total business incredibly depressing at the time he explained it, and on my riverside rock it was worse: why should the first piddling enzyme bother to exist in the first place when its destiny was nonexistence? Why should the bloody Sum Total give a hoot whether it “progressed” or not? What’s the difference between an undeveloped Sum Total and a developed one? And why throw back fish if Death refused to throw us back once he caught us up out of the Stream of Life? If H2O was right, then the whole blasted creation was a ridiculous ado about nothing. But I’d seen this the day he delivered the Sum Total Sermon. I didn’t try to refute him then, and felt no need to refute him later. I had confidence in H2O. I was glad this was the philosophy he’d picked out of all possible philosophies—because H2O had an unerring knack for being dead-ass wrong about anything that really counted. I confidently rejected the Sum Total Theory without giving it another thought.

  Ma’s ideas about Life and Death were interesting. She claimed to have no Philosophy of Life at all and insisted that there was nothing anybody could know about death until they died, at which point it was too late to share one’s discoveries. One might expect a person with such indefinite opinions to take little interest in the metaphysical speculations of others, but this was just where Ma got interesting: she believed there was nothing to know, so there was nothing to say, therefore she could not bear to hear anybody, however learned or qualified, advancing theories of life and death. The Scientific View, the Christian View, the Existentialist View, the Oriental View—they were all one to her: Hogwash. I once heard her say that “talk ’bout croakin’ is fer preachers in churches, an’ preachers in churches are fer idiots with nothin’ more constructive t’do but set an’ listen to somebody ’at don’t know nothin’ standin’ in a podlium talkin’ ’bout somethin’ nobody don’t know nothin’ about. Why Izaak Walton hisself says on the very last page o’ The Angler: ‘t’beget mortification we should frequent churches.’ Now what the hell’d a sane person wanna waste time gettin’ hisself mortified fer?”

  The day H2O endowed me with his Sum Total Theory, Ma had been doing laundry in the basement—yet through the din of washer and dryer, she sensed Croakin’ Talk on the wind. Springing into the study just as H2O concluded his dissertation, she commenced ranting and shouting that his theory was “a commie plot t’turn healthy kids into mixed-up zombies in food-stamp lines thinkin’ their great-grand-kin was nothin’ but talkin’ wads o’ snot in a stinkin’ swamp somewheres, an’ ever’one an’ ever’thing is headed fer a big black basket in the middle o’ no-goddam-where!” H2O protested, insisting that his were merely the most advanced scientific postulates and that he labored not to disillusion but to enlighten—but to this Ma replied, “An’ what are yer scientists these days but a bunch o’ undersexed communistic heaps o’ shit with teeth? All they do is set around cookin’ up bombs an’ nerve gas an’ giant Trojan Erections t’wipe us all abso-damn-lutely off the face o’ the friggin’ world ferever!” (The last weapon in her list was a reference to the Trojan Nuclear Plant on the lower Columbia River; named after the popular prophylactics, its cooling tower was designed by bawdy-witted engineers to look like a decapitated male member.) H2O always had difficulty replying to rejoinders of this sort; he retreated without comment.

  Ma made two exceptions to her No Philosophy Allowed maxim: she let GG rattle on about Heaven, The Bad Place, and the Second Coming (“’cause GG’s old, an’ anyhow she don’t mean nothin’ by it”), and she let Bill Bob, who was the apple of her eye, say anything he liked about anything at all: unfortunately she never understood him.

  Maybe Knickerbocker and his saints an
d scriptures knew something worth knowing about death—he had calmed Abe’s friend down. But I didn’t even know Knicker, so I couldn’t know what he knew. My personal comprehension of this enigma called “dying” consisted of one fact: someday I’d do it.…

  So on the rock in the fog I went fishing: I fished my head and heart for the least shred of a wise or consoling notion about death. I cast about in all the eight directions—and all I reeled in were enzymes, Big Jakes, and Three-fingered Johnnies while the unstoppable, unanswerable, unbearable questions kept lapping, lapping, lapping at my brain like the green waves lapping at the gray rock. My angling craft had smashed upon the reefs of incomprehension. I was marooned.