by James Dodson
“Oklahoma City,” she said.
Slowly wiping the counter with her sponge, she explained that she had a close friend who knew someone who had died in the bomb blast that brought down the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. She knew another man from her church whose wife had been standing in the building when an entire wall just disappeared. She’d barely survived but couldn’t seem to put her life back together. Nobody touched by the tragedy could. The families torn asunder, the innocent blood spilt, the press swarming like vultures, the overwhelming grief just wouldn’t go away. “People can’t seem to accept that something that terrible could happen out here. If it didn’t make me so heartsick I reckon I would spit, it makes me so mad.”
I hadn’t known what to say to her so I simply drank my malt and listened while she quietly articulated her personal struggle to overcome the tragedy, vacillating between a desire for vengeance and her knowledge that she needed to forgive those who’d planted the bomb. A few minutes later, several children from the hayride burst through the door, demanding milk shakes for nightcaps. My daughter was among them, beaming and smacking the dust off her new black hat. Oklahoma City was the first news event she’d ever shown a continuing interest in, perhaps because prior to the tragedy she was simply too young to comprehend the meaning of such things, perhaps because the tragedy involved the incomprehensible murder of children and now unfortunately she was old enough to grasp that.
Now, as I ate my sandwich and let my feet float in the San Juan, I pictured Maggie in her dusty black hat, climbing a trail somewhere on Luke. Tomorrow was the weekly kids’ rodeo. She was thrilled about competing in it, perhaps winning a ribbon to take home and show Jack. These nice thoughts were interrupted by the sound of someone shouting, giving out a real rebel yell. A trophy had been landed somewhere up the lazy river. The legend had given up a trout.
It was then I realized I was also looking at a trout, one of the biggest I’d ever seen, in fact, hovering almost motionless in the slow currents, mere inches from the toes of my right foot. I swallowed my bite of sandwich and sat immobile, staring at the fish. I’d heard the trout in this part of the San Juan were so big and brassy they’d been known to actually bump your leg, secure in the knowledge that if you caught them, by law you’d have to toss them back. They had a kind of guaranteed immortality. Still, I couldn’t believe such a monster would swim right up and almost buss my pinkies.
I was tempted to slowly reach for my fly rod and try and drop an enticing fly in the water without scaring off the prey. Instead, I just sat there watching him, perhaps slightly mesmerized by his presence. He permitted me a good long look at him—a brown trout with flecks of gold who seemed to know exactly what he was doing and displayed no trace of concern. The water was almost up to my knees and I calculated he was maybe two feet below the surface and over two feet in length. The trout is an efficient eater who holds his wiggling prey with a series of small teeth until he can swallow the victim whole. Perhaps he was about to try and swallow my little toe. The thought gave me a small thrill. Could he do it? Would it hurt? A moment later, the big trout gave my baby toe the faintest investigative nip, apparently found it to be poor-quality fish food, and nonchalantly swam away.
I sprang out of the water and hauled on my waders, anxious to give chase. A few moments later, I was waist-deep in the stream again, angling off to where I thought my trophy had gone. I floated my fly all over the pool for the next hour but once again no trout rose to take the bait. I worked my way back toward one of the channels and fished some promising riffles that produced nothing to write home about. I went through my repertoire of fancy new dry flies and then sat down on the bank to try and decide if I should give up the pool and move on.
There was movement in the willows near the rock where I’d eaten my lunch; probably, I figured, another fly angler searching for the mother of all trout holes. Instead, the willows parted and a large doe warily stepped through, scenting the air. I sat dead still but couldn’t believe she didn’t see or smell me. After a few seconds, she dropped her head and began to drink from the river.
Seeing a deer in the wild always gives me pleasure. No animal moves as gracefully through the forest or seems more at home. No creature lives more by its wits and senses—God’s cattle, a neighbor lady friend of mine calls them. She’s a native Mainer who grew up hunting deer each autumn until she realized she really liked seeing them alive more than killing them. So far as I know she’s never been in a church in her life, yet she thinks of them as God’s cattle, and I know exactly what she means. Perhaps I moved or the wind carried my scent. The doe raised her head and stared at me. Her ears lifted delicately and she turned and hopped almost without a sound back into the brush.
Michael appeared around dusk. He’d followed the river past me and was looping back to join the others; we’d agreed to meet at the car come sunset. He was surprised to learn I’d been working the same pool the entire day. He was even more surprised when I said I hadn’t landed any trout but had seen some beauties. The pool at that moment seemed to be full of them, cruising along indifferently like the big “tame” trout you find in L. L. Bean’s indoor trout pond. The wind had died and there were rises all over the surface of the pool. Michael saw this, too, and must have thought only a fool couldn’t catch a trout here.
“How’d you do?” I asked conversationally—wanting him to keep his greedy behind on the bank and out of my hole.
“Awesome. Stopped counting at eleven. Want to try one of my sinkers?”
“No thanks. I’ll give this a last shot.”
I made another long cast, dropping a large homemade woolybugger on the water. It was the last unused fly in my vest, the gaudy Liberace number Maggie had tied at Bean. It actually plopped on the water and a moment later a large trout flashed up and took it to the bottom. My rod doubled over and I began to strip line and then realized I’d stripped too much because, minus the proper tension, the fish could easily spit the debarbed hook. I pinched the line with my left hand and began reeling in, finally achieving the proper tension and getting the fish under control. Michael was anxious to help. “Get your net ready,” he called over. “Keep your line firm.” I worked the trout to within a few yards and reached a hand back to unhook my net and realized it was floating in the water behind me. To complicate matters, I’d moved too far into the river and was losing footing in the deeper water. For a moment I comically scrambled backward, slithering on the slippery rocks, fighting to avoid going under and trying to hold the rod aloft. I could see Michael smiling. I backpedaled into shallower water and continued reeling in the fish and was finally able to work him to the edge of my net. I got him into the net and lifted triumphantly.
The trout flipped out of my net and splashed into the river.
As we walked back to meet the others, Michael said: “That was a really nice fish. I wish you could have landed him. I missed a couple big ones like that today, too.”
It was decent of him to say. But I didn’t feel as bad as he probably thought. True, it was possibly the biggest trout I’d ever hooked, and I would have loved to hold him in my hands and try to guess his weight, but I’d fought him to the net and managed a good inspection of him before his strength outmatched my skill and he returned himself to the river. You learn something every time out, Haig-Brown says—sometimes more on days when the fish don’t bite. You learn to see the river for its beauty, to absorb pleasure from the unexpected sight of a doe leaning to drink or a trout drifting up to smooch your toe. Next time I would come to this shrine of trout more prepared, or at least bearing fewer expectations that probably couldn’t be met. This was the lesson I seemed destined to have to repeatedly learn in every aspect of my life.
The others had done well for themselves. On the drive home, they talked giddily about their day’s adventures, reciting tales of straining gut that miraculously held and big ones that got away. They sounded like weekend footballers who’d been invited to play in the
Super Bowl and caught the winning touchdown pass. I sat there idly wondering if I was the only angler in the San Juan who hadn’t landed a trout that day.
Chris asked me if I was up for another crack at the river in the morning and I said I would love nothing better. Then I remembered that the kids’ rodeo was in the morning and I’d promised Maggie I would take an afternoon ride up the mountain to see something she wanted me to see. It was called the Cathedral of Aspens. I thanked Chris and said I would have to catch the San Juan another time.
—
Before breakfast the next morning, I slipped down to Durango and parked in the Kmart parking lot and waded into the Animas River directly behind the store and landed three brown trout and a nice-sized rainbow in less than an hour—a small redemption for yesterday’s performance. George, the ranch’s head wrangler, had told me it was the area’s best-kept secret, home to some of the hottest trout action in the valley and right smack in the middle of town, ten minutes from the ranch. The local guides kept this info to themselves, he said, safely tucked under their hats.
After breakfast, putting on my own new cowboy hat and boots, I sat on the corral bleachers and watched Maggie and Luke perform in the kids’ rodeo; they claimed a blue ribbon in the egg trot and tied for second in the apple bob race. As she went off for an afternoon swim with her riding group, Maggie was glowing like the golden girl of the West and visibly pleased that I would be spending the afternoon with Wendy, her favorite counselor, riding up to the aspens. “Be sure and keep your hands low and relaxed on the saddle horn,” she helpfully coached before agreeing to let me go off on my own. “Let your horse do the work, Dad. All right? Also, keep the reins loose and never use your heels.”
“Anything else?”
“Well…” She hesitated, then smiled shyly. “You could, like, ask Wendy or something if she, like, you know, really thinks I’m a good rider or something.”
I winked and promised I would get it straight from the horse instructor’s mouth.
Due to the drought, the trail up to the Cathedral of Aspens was very dusty. But the slow ascent on Poncho suited me just fine and a surprisingly intimate chat evolved with the three women on the ride. Sharon was a social worker from Seattle, a divorcée with two teenage sons, one of whom was dyslexic. Diane was from somewhere back East, a lapsed Catholic who’d discovered she was half Hopi Indian and had been on a three-week pilgrimage to find her roots. She’d already been to Arizona and looked up a distant cousin who introduced her to an elderly tribal medicine man who spent several days speaking to her about the “old ways” of her relatives. Her children were grown and thought she was flaking out and her husband repeatedly made jokes about her “going native” on him. But her little “vision quest,” she said, had been the closest thing she ever expected to have in the way of a true religious experience. She understood so much more about herself and the world.
Sharon told a bit of her story next. Her father had been one of the founders of the CIA. “Remember those photos of Ike boarding an airplane to South America, waving to groups of schoolchildren? Well, I was one of those children. My father was never around, which I guess was good. He was so angry—you could feel his anger. He drank a lot, too.” She smiled. “I must have loved him, though, because I grew up and married a man just like him.” Being a single parent was tough and trying to figure out how to raise boys these days, she said, was even tougher. “There’s so many conflicting images of what men are or are supposed to be. Our schools say one thing, our popular culture another. We want boys to be strong but not macho, sensitive but not wimps. The old rules are dead but the new rules haven’t been established. I see so many boys in the schools who seem to be just lost. No wonder they gravitate to gangs.” Recently, she added, she’d begun seeing a nice man who treated her and her sons very well. He had strength of character and an appealing openness but it was too early to tell if something good was evolving. In any case, she’d brought her sons to Colorado to have some time together before they decided they were too old to travel with their mother.
Someone asked Wendy about her family. I could see why Maggie had taken a shine to her. Wendy was a lovely honey-haired girl of eighteen, poised beyond her years—Maggie in another ten years, I thought hopefully. Her story was maybe the most surprising of all.
“My father and mother divorced when I was very young,” she began. “I had five older brothers. My mother was a waitress who gambled. I grew up learning to spit and cuss pretty good.” At thirteen, she’d found a job at a ranch and a woman who knew of her desperate situation took her in. “They were a large Mormon family. This woman took in a wild, swearing girl with painted toenails and called me her princess.” Ranch work and this fairy godmother had saved her, she felt certain, from a deeply unhappy life. Instead, she was about to begin studying drama at a community college and had a boyfriend doing missionary work for the Church of Latter-day Saints in Central America. Her dream was to own a ranch for troubled teens someday, to teach them to sing and dance and ride.
“When I saw how confidently Maggie rides,” she told me, “I totally thought of myself. She’s smart, she listens, but she definitely wants to do it herself. That was me to a tee.” I was pleased to hear this character assessment and knew a little girl who would be even more pleased to hear it.
A little bit later, Wendy gently reined her horse to a halt.
“Well,” she said, “we’re here.”
We were high up, probably close to seven thousand feet above sea level, sitting on our horses in a dense outcropping of quaking aspen trees that rose another hundred or so feet above us. The trees looked old, scarred by time. Sunlight filtered through the canopy and you could see why someone might think the trees recalled stained-glass windows. “There’s a belief that these trees are the oldest living things on earth,” Wendy explained, making me think of what Tom Hruska had said about Snake River cutthroats. “Their roots go extremely deep and intertwine. Most of the growth, they say, is beneath the surface.”
Diane smiled. “That’s sort of like what the medicine man said about people. Most of what we really are is invisible to the eye. He said the reason human beings have such difficulty in life is because we’re all essentially spirits trying to become human. The spirit state is our natural state; the human one a folly. We spend our lives forgetting that.” We sat gazing up at the trees for a few minutes and then I realized that the three women were looking at me.
I was the only one in our horseback encounter group who hadn’t shared his story, and to tell the truth I still wasn’t in any rush to blab my personal problems to a group of Muses on horseback. On the other hand, what better place to bare your soul and get used to the public consequences than a church of trees? I told them Maggie’s mother and I had decided to get an amicable divorce and I was a bit worried about the world we would soon return to back East; actually, I admitted, “a bit worried” didn’t quite cover it. Our story, I said, wasn’t terribly unique. We were two people who’d built a nice life and thought they were in love but turned out to be more in love with the nice life and their progeny than each other. At least that was the best explanation I could come up with.
“I think these things are always a mystery until one day it just becomes clear why it happened,” Sharon said. “The important thing is, you’re showing your daughter how much you care about her by taking the time to make this trip. You can’t imagine the impact that will have with her and, if she’s at all like me, you’ll never know how much she looks up to you. I tell you this from personal experience—you’ll be the yardstick she measures every man against till the day she dies. You have lots to teach your children.”
I thanked her but said it felt like I had more to learn from them.
“One of the problems with marriage these days,” Diane said, “is we were all raised to put our children’s interests first. For a lot of working couples, especially women, that involves a lot of guilt, and we become so child-centered in our family life we forget about
the original point of the marriage: two people making a lifetime commitment.”
The wind had suddenly come up; she tightened the leather thong that held her hat on her head. “My husband and I went through an awful time when our girls were about your daughter’s age. It really is the most dangerous time of life for a family, I’m convinced. Everyone is rushing here and there and basically you stay in a state of exhaustion. We were probably headed for divorce ourselves but luckily realized the reason our marriage had lost its spark was because we gave everything we had, too much probably, to the children. It may sound selfish but the best thing you can do for your children is make sure the person you married comes first.”
It didn’t sound selfish, I said. I told her my father had given me the same advice a few months before he died, but that maybe it had come a bit too late to save my marriage, that I hadn’t exactly dismissed his advice but that I hadn’t given it the consideration it probably deserved, either. His marriage was so different from mine, and his wife so different from mine, that I’d mistakenly decided his advice wasn’t particularly relevant. Then again, I admitted, I preferred to learn things the difficult way.
Diane smiled sympathetically and said, “The medicine man said to me that the answer to the riddle of who we are resides in our history, our personal trail into the past—seeing how those who preceded us dealt with the same trials. I hate to sound so corny but I think he was right. To go forward we have to remember where we’ve been, which includes honestly facing up to our mistakes.”
“You’re talking about getting rid of guilt and grief,” Sharon put in. “Two of the toughest stains on earth to get rid of.”
There was a distant rumble of thunder from beyond the mountain. Dry thunderstorms had been in the forecast but the one approaching us didn’t feel as if it would be dry. Wendy suggested that we start back and so we turned our mounts and started after her down the trail.
