Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  And this was just for starters. There was more but I forgot to take it down.

  “Let me ask you, stranger. Are you a born-again?”

  I smiled at my inquisitor, whom I’ll wildly guess appeared a wee bit stranger to the citizens of Durango than I did. Would it ease his worry to know I was a practicing Episcopalian who loved transcendental poets and had slightly Buddhist sympathies?

  “As a matter of fact, I am. A born-again fly fisherman.”

  Emerson said we wear the gods we believe in on our faces. I could tell from his face that his god was most displeased with my response and he thought I was a total smart-ass, perhaps even mocking him. On the contrary, I was really telling him the gospel truth. Thanks to a little girl in love with a horse named Luke, I’d been reminded how much I loved fly-fishing—learned, too, perhaps for the first time or at least since my own childhood, how turning my cares loose in a beautiful winding river could pull my thoughts a lot closer to God than being grilled by some angry pulpiteer of the pavement.

  “You can joke if you like. But your government is pure evil and salvation’s no joking matter.”

  Neither is fishing, I said, and reminded him that Jesus lived in a difficult time and chose fishermen for his closest field associates. Man’s gotta have faith to fish, I countered. You cast your net wide and haul it in, never knowing what kind of crazy fish you’ll get. We could have gone on like this for a while, I suppose—him fuming righteously, me gently baiting him, one of the oldest games on earth—but time really was short and a dinner ride was about to happen out at Colorado Trails and I had a date with a little girl who dearly wanted a black hat. I put on my own white cowboy hat—proof I was a Good Guy after all—apologized for having to run, thanked him sincerely for his interest in my soul, wished him luck, and said good-bye. I backed Old Blue out into Main Street and waved and he stood there glaring at me as if I’d just plastered a Clinton-Gore ’96 bumper sticker on his holy war wagon.

  I felt sorry for him, he felt sorry for me. Perhaps we were both poor salesmen for our faiths. Or maybe one man’s Hell is simply another man’s Heaven. In any case, I couldn’t wait to see Saint Cecil’s cathedral of trout on the river San Juan.

  —

  I rose and dressed before dawn, then sat with my gear on the darkened porch of our A-frame cabin waiting for my ride. The cabin was called Mountain View and perched dramatically on the edge of a high ridge in a forest of silver spruce, overlooking the narrow valley. The air was chilly and to take my mind off that fact I sat there thinking about my conversation a few hours before with Silent Sam. I’d called him from the pay phone at the ranch’s trading post after supper, while the kids were off on a hayride.

  I learned he had checked out of the hospital and gone home and I found him there on my next call. He’d been out changing the filter on his swimming pool’s self-cleaning system and said something about all the jobs he’d been able to get done around the house. Maybe going nuts had a silver lining; at least his pool was now cleaner. Maybe he’d give up marine law and become a pool man.

  “How’s the fish safari?” he asked. “I’m living vicariously through your trip, by the way.”

  I said it was good but about to get a whole lot better because I was waiting for some fellas to drive down to the San Juan River in New Mexico. The trout there, I said, were something to write home about. He asked how Maggie liked being out West. I said she liked it fine but that fly-fishing had suddenly taken a backseat to a big brown-eyed lug named Luke. Luke was twelve, I said. All legs and whiskers.

  “I sure hope Luke is a horse. My daughter went out with a kid just like that. I’m beginning to think he caused this whole thing, in fact.”

  I asked what he meant.

  “She started seeing this kid from the day school. Your basic metalhead who lives out at the mall. We know his parents. Watching television is about the height of this kid’s life ambition. Maureen tells me it’s just a phase all girls go through, seeking out the biggest losers. Anyway, one afternoon after golf one of the guys I was playing with turns and asks me if I minded my daughter’s tattoo. His daughter is thinking of getting one and he can’t decide whether to say yes or put her little fanny in a nunnery. I told him he must have the wrong kid, my daughter didn’t have a tattoo because she’s not that kind of kid. If she had a tattoo, by God, I’d know it. He just gave me this sick little smile, like he let something big out of the bag.”

  “I assume she had a tattoo.”

  “Yeah. A nice little swastika with ivy on it. She claimed it was some kind of Celtic fertility symbol. It was on her ass. I tried to imagine what my father would have said and done. That’s when I lost it. I realized I had no control of anything. It was all a joke. Things sort of steamrolled after that.”

  I asked how he was feeling now.

  “Better. Still up and down. I’m serious about becoming a pool man. The work suits me. It still involves water.” He chuckled and explained he was still talking to the headshrinker—his word, not mine—and was finding it “sort of interesting” to roam around in his own head. God, there was so much in there…“junk” you could stumble over, feelings you never knew you had, fears and anger that just sat around gathering dust. He was surprised how good it made him feel to talk to somebody who understood what he was saying. He suggested I give it a try sometime, too; I didn’t bother telling him I had spent months talking to a family sociologist after my father’s death and when my marriage began to crumble. I hadn’t told Sam about the demise of my marriage. Considering all the stuff he was trying to sort through, he probably didn’t need or wish to hear my problems. Maybe a bit more accurately, I didn’t want to tell him yet. Telling the Mormon couple had been hard enough; at least I’d never see them again.

  “I’ve been reading,” Sam said, “how many people go through this sort of thing. You wouldn’t believe it.” He ticked off a list of famous names—presidents, movie stars, captains of industry, artists. “This only seems to happen to bright people.” The idea seemed to comfort him. “By the way, I read some of those books you suggested. I liked the essays but I have to say I hated the poetry. Knew I would. Those guys sound really depressed.”

  I admitted poetry wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea and decided not to ask how his search for God was going, though I did let it slip that I’d met a man on the street in Durango who said The End was near. “See?” I joked. “You can always find somebody who feels worse than you.”

  “Maybe his daughter has a tattoo on her ass,” Sam said, sounding a bit like his old self. I didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a worrisome one. “You don’t believe that garbage, do you?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “About the end being here.” He laughed nervously. “The jig being up.”

  I considered for a moment and said I thought the end was always near at hand for somebody. Just ask somebody in a cancer ward or a homeless shelter or a parent whose child has died. I didn’t say it to Sam but the night my marriage came apart felt a little like Armageddon, or at least the end of civilization as we knew it. I did admit to him that I wasn’t entirely sure what the Scriptures had in mind when they said it would all end in tribulation and fire, followed by the Second Coming. Was it something we should regard as advice on personal growth or was it a dire warning for the species? The jury was still out but if it helped, I said, one of my favorite poets, Edwin Robinson, a man who hailed from just up the road from me in Maine and who was Teddy Roosevelt’s personal poet laureate, wrote, We’ve each a darkening hill to climb; / and this is why from time to time / In Tilbury Town, we look beyond / Horizons for the man Flammonde. Some scholars thought Flammonde was Jesus. Did it really matter? The human race probably needed all the help it could get to save itself—saviors without and within. Then I remembered I was speaking to a man who was depressed enough without having more poetry thrown at him.

  I laughed and said: “It may be the end but I try and convince myself it’s really just a beginning in
disguise.”

  “You sound like your old man.”

  I hadn’t considered that possibility. I’d forgotten he’d known Opti the Mystic. Perhaps, good or bad, we become our fathers after all. I thanked him.

  “If you get bored,” he said, “call again.”

  —

  A car horn tooted softly in the darkness. My new fishing buddies were ready to roll. I went back in the cabin and kissed Maggie, who woke briefly enough to ask where I was going. I reminded her I was going fishing on the San Juan with several other papas and suggested she sleep for a while until the dining hall opened at seven. I said I hoped she had a nice day with Luke and she nodded sleepily, then dropped her head to the pillow again.

  It was just over two hours to the Navajo Dam. The sun crept up slowly through low desert hills and stone canyons, painting the scrubland lavender and then pink and then gold. Ted, who was driving, was a civil engineer from St. Louis, a quiet older man who’d been fly-fishing for thirty years. He didn’t have much gear but I got the impression he knew a great deal about fly-fishing. Chris was a New York adman. He had beautiful clothes and handsome equipment and no shortage of opinions about the morning news. He was certain Muslim fundamentalists had brought down the TWA jet with a Stinger missile and knew that was possible because he knew Long Island Sound like the back of his hand—there were plenty of places to launch a rocket from. Clinton was going to “smoke Bob Dole’s ass” in the general election and that would probably kill the bull market once and for all. He thought they ought to publicly hang the guy or guys who blew up the building in Oklahoma City. “Christ, the news never gets better. We’ve become Tabloid Nation. What would the media do if they didn’t have O. J. or some murdered cheerleader to exploit to pieces? Cronkite was lucky to get out when he did,” he said as if he’d personally known the anchorman, sipping his coffee, glancing at me as if it were all my fault.

  As someone who’d once made a living writing the very kinds of news stories he was so worked up about, perhaps I did share some of the blame for Tabloid Nation. News reporting, having evolved from the humble village pump gossip of the Middle Ages, is by nature selectively invasive, and he was right that standards of modern reporting had woefully declined since Walter Cronkite had abandoned his anchor chair while airing his concern that the news was in the hands of ratings-hungry accountants and was rapidly becoming a dangerous hybrid he called infotainment.

  On the other hand, we were a nation that worshipped NBA basketball players and MTV stars who beat their girlfriends. So what did Chris really expect? I was tempted to say these things to him, perhaps mix it up a bit in defense of my journalism colleagues, but then I remembered I was out of the reporting business, and weary of the news myself, and decided instead to be a proper guest and keep my mouth shut and think about trout.

  Michael ran a candy store in New Jersey. He asked why I’d only brought one rod, a light one at that, my old friend Pat’s four-weight Scott. Michael had three rods and four reels, a full neoprene wading ensemble, a vest jammed with various reels and types of line, and a small arsenal of wet nymphs and sinkers. For all I knew he had a loran fish finder and a couple depth charges in his bulging pockets. He was a new and enthusiastic fly angler, full of all sorts of arcane fly lingo I either had forgotten or never knew. I explained that I had a second reel in my vest and a nice batch of dry flies to try but that my overall strategy was to keep it simple because Saint Cecil would have wanted it that way.

  “Who’s Saint Cecil?”

  “Patron saint of worriers.”

  It was almost ten by the time we reached the river, which was wide at the base of the dam and narrowed as it wound down the limestone canyon through a series of scrub-crowned islands. A dozen trucks and cars were already parked in the gravel lot off the state road and I counted no fewer than a dozen fly fishermen already in the water, fanned out across the valley.

  “Looks like a fishing convention,” Michael grumbled, already wiggling into his chest waders. He wished me luck with my dry flies and I wished him luck with his sinkers. I draped my waders over my arm and set off down a steep, narrow trail toward the valley floor, wishing Amos and my favorite fishergirl were with me.

  I wandered along through the tall willows for a while and finally came to the river’s edge, where two men were standing waist-deep in the currents, thirty or so yards apart, studiously making casts. They both glanced over and gave me looks that said Do Not Enter, so I moved on downstream, walking perhaps half a mile farther, passing several more anglers until I saw no one else and found a small shrub-covered island where the river split and there was what amounted to a large protected pool with three or four entry channels overhung by brush. It looked like a trout cathedral to me so I set up shop. I placed my bag lunch on a nice large rock and then put on my waders. I checked my gear, released the drag on my reel, started stripping line, and stepped into the river. The water was beautiful and cold and the cobblestone rocks underfoot were silky with algae. Taking a confident step, I suddenly slipped and fell on my bottom, cold water flooding into my waders. For a moment I sort of floated and flailed my arms, cursing myself for not buying waders with felt bottoms instead of the cheaper rubber ones. This was the way fly fishermen often drowned, of course, dragged down by their own stupidity and water-filled britches. I swore softly and hauled myself out of the river, flopping down on the large rock to peel off my waders and start the whole process again.

  This time I took more care stepping into the river, feeling the rocks with my feet as I went. I waded across to the island and unhooked my fly and once more stripped several yards of line into the water running past my waist. I made a few overhead casts, lengthening the cast with each pass of the fly overhead, making a long lazy S and finally sending my fly shooting to a promising spot beneath some willows. My Hairwing Caddis snagged on an overhanging branch. I reeled in the excess line and tugged it gently, unable to make the fly shake free. I sighed with disgust and gave the fly a firmer yank. It popped free and flew toward me, nearly hooking my cheek. A moment later, I realized I’d hopelessly tangled my line in a mess of casting knots.

  I might have been embarrassed if I hadn’t been so damned annoyed with myself. Haste had made waste. Around me, middle-aged pilgrims were dispatching flawless casts into one of America’s most sacred trout streams, no doubt hauling in hogs they would remember on their deathbeds. And I couldn’t even manage to get my first cast in the water without knocking myself out of the game. I slogged out of the water again, stumbling and nearly pitching under a second time, and sat down on the rock to try and sort out the nightmare I’d created.

  I worked on the line for over an hour, snipping, twisting, retying tippet that proved to be a Gordian knot of hopelessness. I finally gave up and cut off the whole mess and took out my other reel and lengthened the tippet on it and tied on one of the new elk-hair midges. The air was still cool and my fingers were stiff from my premature dip; they refused to make a proper Duncan knot. Where was Maggie when I needed her? I finally resorted to a simple granny knot and hoped that would suffice. During this time, the wind picked up, turning the surface silver with wind wrinkles, making my tiny fly even more difficult to see.

  I fished the pool for at least an hour, working my way along the edges, drifting my fly for a rise that never occurred, poised for a strike that never came. I presented that pretty little midge decently over several promising submerged logs, holding spots where a big rainbow surely lay pondering the meaning of life. But no trout rose to my bait. I took to imagining I was fishing with Saint Cecil and tried to think what he would advise me to do—keep patiently working the same piece of water, no doubt, work being the prelude to salvation. Most anglers would have given up on the spot and moved on to find something more promising but I felt certain Cecil would have stayed put. Perhaps he’d even fished this very spot. Thinking of Cecil made me think of Haig-Brown and I remembered an essay in which he says few fishermen can recall a day when everything they did went right
. Everything on a river has its purpose. A smart fisherman remembers the good things, learns from the bad.

  I felt hungry and went and sat on my rock to eat my lunch. I took off my waders and dangled my feet off the rock. The sun was almost at its highest point now; I’d been fishing for three hours and the canyon floor and the surface of my rock had grown intensely warm. Much of the landscape around the river looked dry and unforgiving, a virtual mountain desert, yet the vegetation around the river was green and lush—like one of those Renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden. I took a bite of the sandwich. It was delicious. The water felt wonderful sliding silkily between my bare toes. I saw a large bird flying over the river but it was too distant to identify. I would remember these things.

  I would also remember what Sondra, the woman who ran the ranch’s trading post and made the sandwiches, had told me the evening before after my conversation with Silent Sam. I’d ordered one of her famous vanilla malts and we began chatting about how she enjoyed seeing the same families come back to the ranch year after year, watching the children grow older and more independent, wiser about horses and life. Ranch life was good for that, keeping families close and teaching kids good values. “I reckon that’s what makes this past year or so so difficult for me,” she confided, suddenly turning solemn. “It’s really shaken my faith.” I’d asked her what had shaken her faith.