Mysteries Internal

Rod Wrapping: Take Two; or, Life's Support System.

2012-02-29T05:00:00.001-07:00

Friday, February 24, 2012 - 5:15 a.m.

It’s been two days since it last snowed -- and I’ve yet to shovel it. A confession of the kind I’ve only ever heard about in whispers from my childhood friend Meg, still yet in her plaid jumper and mary jane’s, fresh from school and church…they were one and the same from what I could tell, Monday through Friday. I was always somewhat jealous – she looked professional in her uniform – although I remained confused as to why it was of importance for school, or church for that matter. God answered bedtime prayers too, I was told, when we were all in pajamas...and so clothes must not matter that much. At least that’s what I hoped in my flannel shirt and dirty feet. And so now, here twenty some odd years later, I confess in my pajamas and once again somewhat dirty feet, resolving I will not let it sit again, to double in size and weight like old friends from high school, wondering what happened, until I notice: married with children.

There have been one hundred mile per hour winds this week. Three days in a row. Giving the snow a crème brûlée crust, extra hard, as if my sister has been the one to sprinkle the sugar and hold the torch. Walking out to the truck, I break through to the cream.

Jay drives up to Estes with me today out of curiosity, he says, some jealousy too...and along the way we get onto the subject of world politics -- one of those things that even if you have the time to go into, it doesn’t always mean you should. Even if you agree with each other, it’s just so depressing...and well, it’s complicated, as Meryl Streep says. But we learn, we grow, we fail, and sometimes, even, we are birthed and die by complications. That also, is how we love. It’s complicated. And that, is what keeps things interesting and our minds and hearts alive. Settling into easy explanations -- into complacency that you know -- is the death of Being...in anything.

And so we live because of complications.

8:58 a.m.

My rod in still life, three pieces on a coffee table; butt and one tip upside down on soda-pop cans, the other tip laying on a canvas sock. Back at the shop in Longmont, there have been two Diet Pepsi cans sitting upside down by the drying cabinet, and for the past two months I’ve wondered why. I could tell they were meant for something -- intended for some purpose -- you can tell when things are, even if you don’t understand the intention...all the while believing that in the end you will. At least that’s what you tell yourself. And so I didn’t ask, upon the belief that if I needed to know, I would. And I did -- it turns out they hold the rods up to dry after varnish has been applied to the wraps. “Works perfectly” Franks says, doing a job for which they weren’t made, but perfectly cut out for all the same.

I know what’s to be done today. I know what to expect. But even so, what went before is not always what’s ahead. And knowing that, I get right to work.

Light bright, glaringly clean winter, washed free from preoccupations of summer days – dirt, bugs, barefeet and snakes -- streams through lofted windows. Snow comes off Mount Lady Washington’s lodgepoles like the smoke of hot spots, curling up and disappearing into thin air, as mountaineers sometimes do – as one did, in fact, for thankfully only a night the day after I stood atop her. He had passed me on the trail, going on, up to Longs. The next morning in The Denver Post, I read he was brought down, carried by rangers like a corpse through late spring drifts. No wildflowers yet; the earth wasn’t ready for him to be taken. You think about things when you are alone: life, but mostly death. The What Ifs – sounding like characters in a Dr. Suess or Norton Juster book. They’re dark questions. The things you wouldn’t dare admit aloud were people around; or if they were, you certainly would be hesitant to let them gestate, even in mere thought. What if I jumped off this sheer face? What would it feel like to spread my arms, wings like a bird, unattached, if only for a few seconds? What if I never come back…what if I get lost...what if I am never found? Would that solve my problems? No. No child, it would only create more. I remember my mother telling me that…and I listened.

The doorbell rings, startling me to the realization that I’ve not heard a doorbell ring in years. Years. I don’t have one, and I suppose that tells you something of my social life and visiting schedule – I’m becoming the hermit my sister warned me about and feared -- don’t get too weird up here, she had said. Her boyfriend already called me eccentric (the polite way of saying weird, I gather).

It’s Hal and Terry at the door, both of whom I’ve met before down at the workshop in Longmont, when they’d just drop in to say hi. That, the liberty of those who have retired from the workaday world, dropping in. Although by definition, they seem to have not taken their retirement very seriously, namely: to withdraw, step back, retreat into the boredom which produces nit-picky rants and perfectly edged lawns. Rather, Hal has been busy building a new drying and dipping cabinet for Frank. It’s gorgeous when I go up later to view (they had the heavy lifting all under control, of course) – and it looks like a shrine, hallowed by hands taking time. I can hear their conversation from down where I’m wrapping – now I’ve blunted these edges; and here I’ve cut so it will lay flush against the wall. Details. Thought. Reminding me of things my father has built for me -- a fly tying cabinet for Christmas – extra dowels here, for thread, angled so they don’t hit the cork padded door...you see? I do. And those random looking scallops on the top? They’re the peaks of the Front Range. I recognize them; I love him.

I keep on wrapping.

Hal and Terry say goodbye. The Cheesy Lee’s pizza delivery man comes and leaves minutes later. And minutes after that, Frank’s son Tim arrives, visiting from Walden, “Good timing” he says.

After pizza, Frank installs fluorescents for his new cabinets, and Tim digs through boxes of tying material. Frank, somehow, knows all the while what’s being looked at. “That hackle is off a rooster Gierach showed me how to skin…in his front yard.”

And “Ah…Aunt Lydia’s Rug Yarn…good stuff,” He says next.

“Aunt who? Have I met her?”

I burst out in laughter -- I can’t help it, imagining the great Lost Aunt Lydia (with some dark family secret, for sure) – and so do Frank and Tim.

I keep on wrapping.

Jay pecks behind me on his computer, like a chicken at grit and gravel, fed for digestion -- editing photos and writing. It’s a comforting sound, that of writing. But I know better than to think it’s a comforting thing to actually do. Rather, it’s only comforting once it’s out – once you’ve thrown it up and are sipping ginger ale.

He looks over my shoulder and asks, “Can I put it together -- the other two pieces…and…and just pretend?”

“Sure.”

And under vaulted ceilings, I watch him gently push the ferrules together and false cast.
“Small….but powerful – this is going to be a good casting rod” he grins – he, who taught me to cast and tie and fly fish in the first place. I like watching him cast.

“She’s gonna let me fish it!” Jay says, Tim coming down the stairs. I will, “until you catch a trout,” and you better not doddle, I think…“but no one else…it’s my mothering instinct finally kicking in…and over bamboo...” I chuckle.

And still, I wrap -- through comings and goings and conversations. Through a Davy Wotton soft hackle DVD and a sunset – the thread through the day. And I think while at my spot off to the side of things, about one of my favorite bits of writing by Stephen King, that "Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.” These threads of art, these threads of passion -- of writing, of painting, of music, tying, casting, and of rod making – they support our everydays. Our everydays, however, laugh at our art...spit on our dreams. Telling us to stop, to give up, to go to bed early. You’re too tired, you’re wearing yourself out, and spreading yourself too thin. So just go eat some fruit and relax, they say. Okay? And I may listen, for awhile. But when I was a little girl, I wanted to be remembered after I died. And I knew that I would die someday, my father worked in a funeral home. My mother used urns, chipped or broken during shipping, as flower vases, and I remembered that verse about beauty for ashes -- wanting to leave something behind besides flesh and blood...besides ashes. Something in stone, or paper, wood, or bamboo. Something beautiful. And so I cannot rest.

Art supports me...

...as I lean back, looking at the last wrap which takes me, in the end, four tries before I get it right, calling Jay over, “Do you think those look even?”

“Yeah…they do.”

But my eyes doubt, and so I pick off the thread and do it again. Once more, Norman, half as long…

And then finally, long after the elk have passed by the deck window, the sun has set, and dinnertime has come and gone…I finish, liberally coating varnish over the wraps.

As Jay and I pull out of the side street, “Coyote!” I point. Straight ahead. Just leaving the beams of the headlights. Houselights are on and I can see people, watching their TV, blissfully ignorant of the coyote watching them, and Jay and I watching the coyote -- an optical food chain of which we’re the alpha.

“Good eyes, as my dad would say.”

“Thanks” my eyes wrinkle up, “I like your dad.”

Darkness brings silence. And heaviness, as my sister called it when she was young and when she was tired. For it does feel as if everything in you -- your eyes, your arms and legs, your heart -- is being pushed down, forced to rest whether you want to or not. Whether you think you are done with the day or not; it, is done with you.

“Hey, do you really like my rod…how it casts?” I say heavily.

“Yes. Absolutely…I do.”

“I will let you fish it, you know, for more than just one trout...and not just for saying you like it, either.”

Jay grins, “Well thanks.”

And as we near Boulder, a star shoots overhead slow enough we both see it, but quick enough I don’t have time to make a wish. But then again, perhaps I don’t need to.

Listen to the story:

Rod Wrapping.

2012-02-22T06:00:00.002-07:00

Saturday, February 11, 2012 – 5:12 a.m.

Plows scrape time off my night’s sleep before the alarm can get to it. Slow going up the grade, mounds of snow against gravity take their toll on the mailbox -- hundreds of pounds storm after storm, bending its sides in with a microcosmic example of glacial power. The mailbox door no longer closes, but it can’t be replaced, not yet -- until spring thaw which will come around late May if we’re lucky. But then again, it snowed the evening of Memorial Day last year, so you just never know.

Looking out a torn screen window, fog veils the moon waiting for another night to shine -- patience in these things, patience (the virtue you are told to have, often by a person in the midst of losing theirs) -- and I turn on the deck light to see what I’ll be dealing with. Only a small bit…four inches, maybe. No big deal. Funny, how living up here has changed my perspective of what is and what is not “a snow.” Less than five inches barely warrants shoveling the driveway. And with no laws enforcing snow removal deadlines – there are no sidewalks up here -- I can do as I please as long as I can get out. And that, is why I have an all wheel drive. With enough speed, it’s all downhill from here.

The snow has fallen evenly in no wind, as if a dump truck cloud has parked over the opening of pines above the cabin and evenly distributed its contents. A blanket on a bed with no lumps. No forgotten books, socks, or stocking hats. Smoothly pressed, tucked and trimmed as a bed always should be and mine never is.

Standing sentinel in my fortress, eyeing for marks of night visitors -- this morning, I see evidence. Snow, as the CSI blue light of the natural world, makes prints visible. Revealing who went where, and when, and sometimes why -- to eat, court, to fight, mate, and die in the end as we all do. Things become clear upon this background of white. Snow on snow falls, holding and compressing evidence until spring -- when all will be forgiven and melt away. But right now I see them, the paw prints of a fox. Coming down the game trail leading through the draw, straight to the front door, down the stairs, and off and back up behind the woodpile -- bypassing the neighbor’s house entirely. I wonder if these tracks are the vixen’s I hear from time to time, calling for her mate in hoarse desperateness that makes my heart ache.

As I leave for the day, I notice a yellow spot in the snow at the foundation of the cabin. I’ve been marked. Set apart. Viewed and sniffed out. Accepted into the forest, marked as its own -- having at last passed a test I knew all the while I was taking, while remaining unsure of whether it was multiple choice or essay. I guess, maybe, it was the latter. Perhaps some people wouldn’t view fox urine on their home as a good thing, but I do -- feeling that now, my house is not a home, but rather a den.

Snow packed roads lead north to Estes Park, where I’ll begin wrapping my rod at Frank’s condo – warmer and lighter than the back of the fly shop. I get studs put on my tires every winter for precisely this reason – assurance. Yet still I go slowly, following behind a sand truck until the climbs after Lyons, when I’m more confident than the plow driver to go over 15 mph, and so I pass.

8:57 a.m.

Holding my rod (still, feeling pretty alright) while mentally checking that I have remembered the guides and thread (although at this point, it’s too late to do anything have I not), I stand outside ringing the doorbell – looking at the Twin Sisters ridgeline.

Soon I hear footsteps. And a familiar voice, “Come on in…”

At the kitchen table, wooden wrapping frames are set; but first, we go out to the garage to mark spacing of the guides. This, of course, involves math, and so I check and double check my work. Numbers and their derivatives have never come easily for me, and even when they do come, they leave me confused. I am not, nor ever have been, left-brained. During my schooling, math textbooks ended the year salty and tear stained; and I deemed memorizing multiplication tables to be one of the hardest things I had yet done in life. At the time, I prayed for an act of nature, even should it cause me harm -- to be kicked by a horse, knocked into a coma, and then miraculously woken up years later having learned the sums by osmosis. This, was my daily plea; not one of bread, debts, trespasses and redemption; no, rather, mine was of being put out of my mathematical misery by a hind hoof. Although nowhere could I find it in books of prayers --common or un, and so remained skeptical of its power to work; yet kept on praying, even so. Eventually, my father found my weakness: green olives. There was no punishment worse. It was a genius fix, really. For every wrong answer…pop! In went a green olive. “And you have to chew!” That was the rule -- swallowing whole was cheating, and my dad would have none of that. Thus I learned my multiplication tables, and only in the last few years have been able to stomach green olives again.

Garrison, however, was numerically sound and extremely precise (I do wonder now, had he taste for green olives?); and despite my math skills, I am trying to be precise too.

“Done?” Frank asks.

I lay down a white grease pencil, “Yes.”

Now, it is a truth widely acknowledged and universally demonstrated, that hype builds up around firsts -- rides without training wheels, kisses, weddings, casts. You will be scared, you will be scarred, and it will be difficult, you’re told. And at some point, all of that anticipatory tension, all of that adrenaline that’s been sustaining you, will crash -- and then yes – yes, you will fail. Failing though, while proving in the end that you were giving your all for whatever you’ve gotten back – scraped knees, forty dollars at a pawn shop, or a five inch rainbow. But still, there are treasures to be found (remember, they are always buried under dirt in children’s tales); there are things to learn. And so if you aren’t digging through dirt, if you aren’t failing, if you don’t need to practice…you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. For that, is how we grow -- in matters physical, and of the heart.

If there was anything I’d heard about rod making, it was that wrapping is dreadful. A horrible, tedious, monotonous business. But so are most things which are beautiful in the end. As I’ve come to see it, life is made up of singular, spaced moments of beauty, strung together by continuance of cooking, working, and dirty dishes. We live – I live – for those moments out of line.

And so as I stand at the table, looking over Frank’s shoulder as he wraps the first guide foot on, listening -- cross the thread over on the apex, keep it taught, watch the end, make both sides even…and use this ruler – I’m nervous. Nervous to begin. Nervous to fail. All the while knowing I’m in one of those moments out of line.

Frank turns around in his chair, “Ready?”

“Yeah…”

I take the thread out from the holding coil and immediately it springs back, out of my pinch. “No big deal…” Frank says, showing me how to re-thread the series of eyelets maintaining tension on the thread – he has a way of making you feel that even had you’d just broken off the tip, it’s ok…it’s fixable. And why’s that, you may ask? Well, because it’s handmade…and thus can be made again.

“There you go, now…all set.”

I begin again, this time with a firmer grip on the small things.

Firm, perhaps, but not fast. Yet even so, after a few wraps I feel more confident, and the thread begins lying down line after line until there is no separation, looking almost as though I’ve painted it on, making me feel like an artist. I smile, having always wanted to be one -- one whose medium is pencil, paints, pastels, or ink. My mother is an artist, my uncle is an artist, my sister is an artist. I, however, am not. I realized this one sunny afternoon in early high school. The basswoods, cottonwoods and willows were just beginning to bud with early spring green you could almost see growing, and clouds piled up into what was sure to be the evening’s thunderstorm. In the back of our ’74 Ford, we had art class. It was goldenrod yellow, that truck, the color my mother always called goat kid poop – pure, healthy, beautiful milk fed, she’d say -- also taking the time to remark that breast fed babies are the same way, and that my sister and I once had beautiful poop too. I always sensed she took pride in that. But there, sitting in the back of that goat-kid-poop pick-up truck, sketching the Nishnabotna River flood plain which had been turned into soybean and cornfields, alternated year-by-year by by Farmer Hopp, I realized: I am not an artist...and there is no hope that I ever will be. My proportions are all off, my colors clumpy like they've been mixed in a dying blender, and my detail leaves much to the imagination. And that, is only a good thing when intentional. My art is of the kind people look at and think "At least she isn't just sitting around watching TV." or, "Well bless her heart at least she's trying." It’s the kind of art that my grandmother hangs in the bathroom; not, the living room.

When I was living in San Francisco, there were artists and easels tucked into every eucalyptus grove nook in City Park, right along with the homeless, the picnickers, the dead, and the couples doing what God knows and unfortunately, what you see. Lots of things are partaken of, made, and created in parks.

My roommate Val and I would, on occasion, lug our instruments down 19th St. by bus (the 28 or 28L if we were lucky), or if we had the time, would walk the less busy 18th Street to find a grove of our own – to study, to practice, and to lay beached in the sun layered up, pretending we were warm. However, when you're playing guitar or violin, everyone knows where you are and what you're doing. And that kind of takes away the fun of being in a grove, now doesn’t it. Sounds wafted out above the foliage partitioned rooms....Bartok's Romanian folk dances, Leisner's Dances in the Madhouse, Christmas carols, hymns, and bluegrass. As a musician, one can never truly be alone. I envied the artists their silence.

And so now, illogically, I write every thought I have out loud. But somehow that's different in my mind, because I don't see the heads turn or the eyes reading. I don't see gaits slow down and linger until the last measure is played, or the last sentence typed. I don't always make sense but I know why I don't, and that, is a large part of the battle.

And so I write in my own little chair in my own little room of the eucalyptus grove.

It smells divine.

Sitting opposite me, Frank watches, and waits – coming in and out of the garage where he’s working on sanding a blank. “You know…I’ve never wrapped a rod on this table before...” he interjects between munching on almonds. “No...no wait, I have. My first.”

Fitting.

While I am not a superstitious person, for some reason, that makes me feel good. “You’ll see people stand the tips up side-by-side on their ends....like this,” Frank demonstrates, warning, “they’re looking for the wraps to be even with one another.” I look down to the pile of tools I’ve amassed for the ruler. “But there’s only one person I know who can really get it perfect…Kathy at Mike Clark’s shop…..everyone else’s are only just about.”

I stop for a blink – exaggerated, like theatre makeup – lingering in their close. Finally wetted and ready for the next act, I look up, and out to Twin Sisters. “Sometimes,” Frank says, watching my eye’s-path, pointing to the long windows above -- “I close the patio door curtains…so you only see that panorama up there.” It’s perfect, I think. As if he has measured, matted, and framed the ridge. I climbed it a few years ago, while in a much different state of mind and body than my current contented 120 lbs. wrapping a rod. And I look at them, those places I’ve been -- now as if they’re a dream, dimly remembered in the minutes before I woke.

We talk of maple syrup, craiglist, and foam bugs; and futons, parking tickets, and tapers. “What’s your favorite,” I ask.

Frank pauses and looks down, placing his hand on the finished butt section of my rod – “One just like this…..for small streams.”

I smile and blink my dry eyes again, long enough I can almost see those streams, “My favorite kind of fishing…”

“Mine too.”

It’s late when I finish wrapping for the day – the butt and one tip section completed -- and as I walk to the door, I smile to myself – a smile that might actually be visible through the back of my head…I don’t know. But I do know that my eyes are bloodshot, and that I’ve pushed myself hard; I know that today was one of those moments of beauty, and that there will once again be dishes to do in the morning; and I know that I’m tired. So even though it’s well below freezing I keep the heater turned down, and Dylan turned up. And when I pull up the driveway pushing midnight, the porch light is on and there is popcorn warm and waiting in the den.

Listen to the story:

Aesthetic Arrangments.

2012-02-15T06:12:00.001-07:00

Friday, February 10, 2012 - 5:12 a.m.

Light of February’s waning Snow Moon streams through icicles hanging off the gutter, barring my bedroom window -- under house arrest. The moon is enough that I don’t turn on any lights. Not yet. Walking around the house, window to window, I peer out. Looking for breathing shadows. Nothing. Banjo cracks one eye from the couch, sighing, knowing that me being up this early means I’m leaving. Out you go, boy, I whisper. Opening the back door, icicles break like wine glasses. A man once told me he buys all of his wine glasses at the Dollar Store - their sundae cups, he said, they never break -- swearing even his heavy-handed sister couldn’t do them in. Perhaps it was really just a hint that I should buy some Dollar Store wine glasses -- a warning, or else he might break mine too. If, that is, I was ever to ask him over for dinner.

As I close the door, I hear a few more glasses break. Aftershocks. So much for trying to be quiet.

Coffee percolates light inside and out by not so much its caffeine, but rather its warmth. Pouring my first cup, I’m reminded, I need to find socks, by the kitchen’s cold wood floor. Dark eyed juncos are out early this morning, getting their fair share of breakfast before the jays wake. Landing on snowbanks, they make angels like children, imprinting their faith in flight.

Driving north, Longs Peak hangs up clouds from last night’s snow. You can tell they want to leave, but can’t -- for her words, kind or un, make them linger. Using them as pawns, she blocks our view in, and hers out. Tired of being looked at all day -- of being climbed and photographed and placed on cheap postcards. Fame can take its toll, even on a mountain. This morning, she pulls the curtain and only shows her buttresses of mottled tundra grey. The scene is static, with movement implied -- as if in a painting by Monet or Degas or Niemeyer. Swirls of white, grey into curls as the gusts age. They’ve a short lifespan, wind-gusts, but also one curiously long. For who knows where they go, after they blow. On. Somewhere. Taking and holding the answers, The Poet sings, to all of the questions we ask generation after generation...they’re there, but they’re blowing in the wind. So good luck. And despite my distance of warm car comfortable silence, I know that on that mountain right now, it’s a blizzard of a shouting match.

But so it goes that things often aren’t how they appear from a distance. And it’s not until you step close enough to the museum wall, making the guard sufficiently nervous, that you can see the details...and the meanings hidden therein. For a short while, at least, until the guard sternly bellows “ma’am, please step away from the painting.” But for a bit of time -- for one of those wrinkles -- you can see the swirls.

8:52 a.m.

Today is going to be a day of decision making. I was warned, prepared for it to be so. Wood and thread and guides. I loved the splitting and sanding, and the planing. But now comes the “interior decorating” aspect of rod making, Frank describes, “Most people’s favorite part...”

“All these little decisions?”

“Yep.”

“Huh. I think my favorite part is the planing.”

“Yeah, mine too....”

The excitement of moving in has come and gone. The satisfaction of nesting is complete. The U-Haul truck has been driven back cleaned out and emptied of its life, delivered. And now, busted tile work before the fireplace needs replaced, bathroom cabinets need handles, and paint chips off the spare bedroom’s walls need to be taken to the hardware store to see if they can mix a match.

Yes, of course you bought a fixer-uper.

Frank brings out a cardboard box full of reel seat wood -- some factory ready, some needing turned. “This one here, Mike Clark gave me.....and here’s some walnut...that might be good. Pistachio. Madrone. Oh, and here’s crabapple. Spaulted crabapple. I’ve really been liking that lately. Looks like those old world maps....you know?”

“Yeah, I love those kind...”

“Ah and here’s some olive tree...from Israel! I even have the papers to prove it.” Frank laughs with the strange satisfaction of being able to prove something you probably never will have to.....yet still, it’s nice to have the backing should you need it.

I stare at the pieces of wood, and remember my grandmother’s yard in front of the big white house on Charles St., homing a small crabapple tree. Every year it blossomed white just in time for Easter, and before it, generations through photos passed. There, I am documented from infant in dress and bonnet, to teenager in flannel and boots (there came a time when I refused to wear dresses...even, to grandma’s Easter dinner. My mother calls me difficult). A few years ago, it had to be cut down, the crabapple. Due to disease, I think. But that tree in my grandmother’s front yard on Charles St., grew alongside a family...and as it died, its other branches fell away too.

I take the smaller piece of crabapple to start. Frank assures that I can turn more than one -- because sometimes, he says, when they’re turned, the wood ends up looking drastically different -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. You just never know how it will go...especially in worse. And so you turn and keep on...chipping down to its core, to see what’s inside.

In a way, this all reminds me of my childhood fascination with rocks. I was sure that inside, they all held something interesting, something special. Hollowed cores of color like the gems at Natural History Museums. They weren’t pretty on the outside either, and so it seemed to me a pretty logical possibility that there might be such beauty in my own backyard, too; thus, I took it upon myself (enlisting the help of my sister, of course), to sort through and hammer open all the rocks I could from our backyard -- and a few others pilfered from the neighbors as well. They were childless and enjoyed these shenanigans. Or at least, that’s how I justified it. We only got scolded once for leaving the hammers in the driveway -- not for splitting open the rocks as you might think. And so, we kept on searching for the special ones. There were a few, and I kept the unique ones on shelves in my room, covering up mason jars of water beetles I didn’t want my mother to find. Although eventually, she did -- and made me promptly march them all back to the Hanscom Park pond.

Frank shows me how to work the lathe, and how and when to adjust the blade. “And go slowly” he warns, “too fast leaves lines.” So I sing a song in my head. A slow ballad hymn to keep time -- to keep me even.

The lathe is hypnotic -- its blade creeping with a line like stain...eating down the wood to something different than we saw, but what was still there all along -- whether we saw it or not. Everything blurs, and I concentrate on moving slowly and evenly.

I keep singing to myself.

Stopping the lathe to check on progress and measure diameters, Frank points to the dark lines “That’s the spalting....the disease. Ironic, huh...that’s what makes it interesting.”

“And what makes it beautiful...” my voice trails off, the lathe starting again.

I turn another piece, this time walnut. And when I’ve finished, holding them both up next to my rod, there’s just something about the diseased one...it fits. “Hey! Look, it’s a mountain range!” I notice excitedly, holding the crabapple up for Frank to see.

“Yeah! Yeah, you’re right...it is....and those smaller spault lines coming down...those could be streams, you know?”

They could be. “This is the one!”

Perhaps sensing the emanating relief of a decision made, Dick steps back into the shop.

“The mountains!” I say, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, “they’re in my reel seat!”

Dick puts on his glasses “well..sure enough...they are!” The glasses ride up his nose as he grins, “that’s cool.”

Next, I sand down the cork grip, watching Frank do one for another rod first -- paying attention to how he moves his hands, where he places the sandpaper, and for how long. Soon, I begin on mine. The cork molds down, looking malleable, like clay on a wheel. After awhile, the sandpaper gets hot from friction, and I stop to check the shape and diameter. “Go ahead and put your hand on it....see how it fits.” Frank urges.

Almost perfect. Just a little more off the middle. And...there...

Now Frank pulls out cigar boxes of thread. “These change color quite a bit under a coat of varnish...” he notes, placing a goldenrod yellow spool on the table, then a brown “that’ll turn ox-blood,” a tan, and another golden. Under where the cork grip will later be glued, Frank wraps samples of each thread, and then applies some varnish. Like looking at paint sample strips, I bend down and squint. Eye level. Then lengthwise. Standing up again, Frank suggests “let’s go outside...natural light helps a bit.”

I grab the reel seat.

Gutters drip melting snow. Spring will come.

Holding the rod and reel seat together, two colors immediately get crossed off. Judiciously letting my eyes make the final vote, I let them wander on the rod. Side to side. Up and down. And back. Where do they want to go? To the darker brown...yeah, that’s it. Frank nods in agreement. Then after another round of wrapping and varnishing I decide on black trim wraps, picking up the spaulting.

That done, we glue on the cork and tip tops, and fit the ferrules together. “Ferrules are worth taking your time on,” Frank says. So I file slowly, with a cautiously scared hand. Finally with some effort, they push together and pull back out with a delightful and ready pop.

And finally, we blue them. “The females are always the most difficult...” Frank comments off hand.

“They always are...right?” I laugh.

“Well, I didn’t want to say that...”

“I know...but I did.”

Darkness presses against the glass window, sneaking through cracks from an old bullet hole, reminding us of Time. Frank slides the three parts of my rod into a sleeve and then a tube. “Take this home with you tonight...but make sure to bring it back with you to Estes in the morning so you can start wrapping.”

“I’ll be sure...”

There is silence. And shadows. I glance up at the culms of cane stored above, overhead the workbench, which gives the shop a feel as if you’re in a south pacific hut with Iowa barn doors - those doors, a two part invention of gate and friendly window -- the kind Mr. Ed’s head used to talk from on Sunday nights...but only those Sunday nights I spent at my grandparent’s house with cable. I remember Frank telling me how someone once told him that he should cover those doors up. “But they’re the best part of this place!” he replied. And so he didn’t. And I’m glad.

As I glance up, I think about those culms, and how they’ve been split and sanded, and planed and glued, and sanded again; and how now, they’re fitted with ferrules, tip tops, and a cork grip. And standing here with view of beginning and nearly end, it really shouldn't be possible. But then again, many things in life are that way, unbelievable when you look back and see how far you’ve come.

“This is my rod...in this tube....” I say, looking back down...

“Yeah it is...and it feels alright, doesn’t it....” Frank smiles.

“Yep...pretty alright.”

Listen to the story:

Blizzards and Beetles: or, Days Like Molasses.

2012-02-08T06:43:00.005-07:00

Friday, February 3, 2012 – 4:50 a.m.

In the darkness of morning -- which is always lighter than the darkness of evening for some reason or another…perhaps it’s just knowing that light is coming soon...and that there is an end to the tunnel -- I push open the back door against a snow drift to let Banjo out. He doesn’t go far, and when I let him back in there’s a yellow spot in the snow on the deck. I can’t blame him though, the snow is taller than he is.

Thirty inches, overnight.

I walk to the front door and turn on the porch light, assessing the possibility of making it up to Longmont to work on my rod today. And while there’s the possibility, the probability is low. A plow goes by, its lights flashing like strobes, morphing the dark canyon road into a dance club. My partner, a shovel. And our efforts are lost – the snow -- the beat, it's coming too fast and we can’t keep up. Big, exaggerated flakes make my world dizzyingly existent in a disco-ball-snow-globe. Banjo sits sulking by the cabin door, and after awhile, I walk back from the end of the driveway to let him inside and wake up Jay. I’ll need an extra hand -- well, two -- with this.

The canyon’s plows, part of the Jefferson County Road & Bridge division of public works, do an outstanding job. They have to. If the snow isn’t properly plowed with every storm, the pile up would be immense, and despite the usual teasings of not getting out ‘til spring, in that case, in all seriousness we probably wouldn’t.

However, all of that snow they do such a wonderful job of removing from the road, must end up somewhere. And for my stretch of road, that just so happens to wind up being the foot of my driveway -- like the law of trajectory for buttered toast. It’ll be two days before I can find my mailbox again. I go back to working on the end of the driveway; Jay starts at the beginning. And in the light of the moon’s reflection off the snow, one can get a very real feel for what existence would be like in black and white.

Finally, we meet in the middle around 7:30.

“Do you think I should go?” I ask.

Jay has to go down into town to shovel out and open up the fly shop today, bad roads or not. He’s the only one scheduled, and that’s one of the drawbacks to a small two-man operation: it doesn’t afford the luxury of sick or snow days.

“No…well, I’d stay tucked in here if I was you.”

It’s snowing harder again, and as much as I want to risk the roads – bamboo’s song being something of a siren – a day at home with the woodstove roaring inside and a blizzard roaring out, has a pull of its own – and it, as well as cautionary words last night emailed from my mother, tether me back. I worry her enough in life, I think, and send her an email: Staying home today. Plus, there’s time yet for my rod. Plenty of time. And it feels only right, true to its spirit, to not be rushed. But then again, maybe that’s just my tired rationale for staying home and nearby a roaring fire all day. Maybe. Yet these kinds of things we have to tell ourselves sometimes, we who tend to push ourselves a little too hard -- they are needed -- and I’m told you can justify anything -- yet some people are much better at this than others.

Quickly, I email Frank that I won’t be making the drive up, and set to making more coffee. After a few minutes, I pour it into a mug made by a New Mexican potter that my sister gave me for Christmas one year, and head back to my desk to tie some flies. I take black dyed elk hair, improvise, and end up with beetles. Beetles….of all things. I don’t often fish terrestrials for some reason. Why did I just tie these? Maybe it’s cabin fever, dreaming of backcountry summer streams where the trout are more than willing – where it’s quite easy for a fisherman to feel as though he’s being flirted with. No deep nymphing and no cold split shot. In that place, at that time, the trout come freely and warmly, and misses are the fisherman’s fault entirely -- like not picking up on an obvious green flag. Yes, she’s interested. The misses almost seem to come without price up in high country stream, without the pain of losing a fish, because you know there will always be another. Just like I surmise the good looking people in college know there will always be another. But I wouldn’t know about that. What I do know about, however, what I have learned, is that there very well might not always be another – and you shouldn’t plan on it (yet even so, that shouldn’t stop you from leaving). And in the same way, we can’t plan on those backcountry streams always having plenty -- always having another – at least, that is, if we continue thinking there is no price.

That type of backcountry small stream fishing -- while it doesn’t sound too difficult -- really is. Perhaps even more so than “technical” fishing -- for while wading a freestone stream cradled in a cirque which thousands of feet up is still covered with snow in late July, it is difficult to pay attention to your fly. Beauty in any form is often confusing, and distracting, and is almost always consuming.

Getting frustrated with my randomness, damn beetles, I move back near the woodstove, settling into my rocking chair to watch the birds out the big picture window which looks up a draw. A few are out, puffed up against the snow. I know it’s for warmth, but it looks as though they are trying to intimidate the storm to a halt. Dark eyed juncos huddle beneath pine boughs, and when the snow lets up from time to time, white breasted nuthatches venture out for nibbles of suet on the feeders hanging underneath the eaves over the deck. The bully mountain jays and magpies though, aren’t as tough as they appear – I don’t see any of them until the snow stops completely and the sun breaks out.

Sunday, February 5, 2012 – 9:32 p.m.

Tonight, I write after two days of snow. Constant and grave in her charge of “storm,” leaving behind 41 inches. And tonight as I sit, hugged in the warmth of my woodstove, my muscles remembering why wet articles of clothing are draped on chairs and over the fire screen, I think about my rod. And I almost wish I had taken the chance on the roads. Almost. But then I think about watching birds feed and snow fall, savoring the slowness of it all -- like molasses being poured into batter. I haven’t left my house for three days now, and my mother was right, as always, the night before the blizzard hit when she said, “sometimes, you just need a day at home.” And sometimes, you just need a few...poured out like molasses.

Listen to the story:

Cork and Ferrules; or, On Having Big Ears.

2012-02-02T06:00:00.013-07:00

Saturday, January 28, 2012 -- 7:45 a.m.

Mule deer blend easily into the ditch canvas of grass, yucca, and red-hipped briers. My eyes are caught only by the rim of white and black on their ears, attending to the distance -- optical nerve tension stretches their necks to the southwest. They keep on eating though, so it mustn't be too dangerous; yet between snoutings around in the grass, they look up in the same direction. Just to make sure. In observation, they’re different than the whitetails of my Midwest youth -- they’re the bigger boned, larger eared cousins. Methodic in action (a nice way of saying, “lacking in grace”), they seem to take their time in life, and are proven wise by doing so -- very rarely do I see one hit on the canyon highway, unlike how I remember Iowa’s roadways -- a deer a mile. But perhaps that was corn-fed overpopulation to blame. And while I’m really not sure to what exactly this should be attributed, there’s certainly behavioral differences between the two.

There is a small population of whitetails living along South Boulder Creek just out of town, on the stretch flattening out of Eldorado Springs. My canyon once homed them too, old timers say. But they left when Gross dam was being built in the 50's. The construction and its traffic took the antelope and half the black bear population with it too. And now, there’s an expansion proposed, struggling to pass through legislation. I wonder if it does get approved, what else will be taken this time around...

8:50 a.m.

A plastic bag of cork rings sits on the workbench. Frank shows me what to look for: no cracks and few holes, making sure to look on both sides. “See this one? Punky.” And it makes me think about some of the cord wood I have stacked, scavenged from my back mountain. When you’re gathering your own wood, off your own land, you can’t be choosy -- taking what you can get, and what is already dead and felled. But all wood burns. And thus all wood warms...just some not as long as others.

“Be picky,” Frank says....“take the best.”

I try to be. Though it’s against my nature -- I’m used to taking what makes sense, not necessarily what is considered best or appeals to my sensibilities (Yes, I’m Austen's Elinor). Although in this case, they’re one and the same --> what makes sense is what’s best. And in that duality, lies peace of mind. I try to look over them all, both sides, judging them against each other -- and after changing my mind a few times, I start organizing different piles. The nos, maybes, and for sures. I think about the two mason jars on my kitchen counter at home, overflowing with wine bottle corks, and how (at particularly round ‘pops’) Jay always says, “pity that wasn’t used on a rod.”

Frank looks at my sorting and chimes, “...the champagne industry takes all the really good stuff.” Hmm. I’ve never liked champagne anyway...

After a bit more shuffling around of piles, whittling away and down, I’m left with twelve rings of cork. Then with a rattail file, I push through their started center, going only halfway up the file on the rings farther up the grip, and then fitting them all onto the butt section of the rod, imprinting the taper. Putting my right hand on the uneven grip feels good, and already familiar, almost -- I’ve known the cane for awhile now, but this is the first time I’ve held it like a rod. But only for a few seconds -- there is work yet to do. Taking the cork rings off the rod, I slide them onto a metal dowel to glue the rings together, layer after layer, like icing a cake -- with caramel frosting.

And now, we fit the ferrules. Frank puts the butt piece in the lathe, and starts it spinning.

“This is good. Do you see....how it’s spinning straight through the length?” he asks. “No wobbles....yeah, this is very good.”

I think back to how I planed slowly, incrementally working in the taper. You can plane down to final dimensions right off the bat, Frank told me, but it gives you more time and room to correct mistakes and bends in the cane if you go slowly. Measuring. And remeasuring. Taking time with each node and split -- the long way around at some points. The “scenic way” as my mother would say when she wants an excuse to drive into the country.....when she misses our farm. I do the same thing. The scenic way is where memories live, and the long way is how you see and learn things in life...and in love, too. Even, when you get lost trying to get back home. Yet in that place, in the unknown of what is bound to be a dirt road, the words of Lemony Snicket’s Violet prove true....there is always something.

Always.

And I remember yesterday, as we were marking out the final length -- measuring and remeasuring -- Frank took caliper measurements around the flats at three or four places on each piece -- the first measurement was off a slight bit. My stomach sank. “It’s okay,” Frank said as I looked over his shoulder (my dismay must have been obvious), “within a thousandth of an inch is the goal....and you’ve got that.” Moving down the cane, he read the next measurement aloud: “0.167, 0.167, 0.167.” He looked up. “That doesn’t happen often....good work.” A few more measurements and it happened again: “0.204, 0.204, 0.204.” Frank glanced up.

I smiled.

And now, I see that the phrase I’ve been hearing him repeat to himself, and in turn which I’ve repeated to myself : “I want it to be done; no, I want it to be done right.” has paid off. I have listened, closely...with big ears like a mule. Come to think of it, that was my nickname as a kid: big ears. I could hear anything. From any distance. Big Ears -- it was a running joke. Although, I don’t remember actually trying to hear conversations...I just did. And I think that’s why I started writing -- to make sense of all the stories I heard -- to make sense of my thoughts. I can’t just tune them out, and unless I do something with them, unless I write them out, they haunt. I guess you could say that writing is an exorcism of sorts.

Back in the shop, I listen to what Frank is saying whether he is actually talking to me or not -- sort of like those things parents say, and children overhear. Sometimes this is good, but sometimes it results in awkward moments after a four-year-old cusses at grandma’s Christmas dinner table. In this instance, it was the former -- none of my pieces needed straightening before I glued on the ferrules (and I do try not to cuss in front of my grandmother).

I grew up with mules, riding and training them, and now again I'm reminded that listening and working like one is a prudent practice. And you know, maybe that Proverb about going to the ant really should be changed to going to the mule. They know how to work.

They know how to listen.

Work on the rod goes quickly today, and on the drive back there is still light; although shadows have begun to lengthen...as have the days. And I decide to take the long way home -- just because...there’s always something.

Listen to the story:

Sanding.

2012-01-31T06:30:00.001-07:00

Friday, January 27, 2012 -- 7:55 a.m.

Driving down the canyon after a bit of snow the night before, it’s easy to place where people cased in the cars around me live -- by altitude. I carry only a dusting from around 7,800 ft., but the car in front of me has two inches or so....down from at least 8,500 ft. I’d say.

Down in Boulder they’ve gotten nothing, and I am marked -- standing out -- obviously, from somewhere else. I think back to one evening after work when I stopped for some groceries at Alfalfa’s Market, where all the cheese is dairy free, or so they say. Except, I had extra sharp raw-milk goat cheddar in my cart. The slogan lies. It hadn’t been too cold in Boulder that day, but I was bundled up -- hat, gloves in my coat pocket, heavy leather boots. I knew that when I got home and had to unpack and carry in all the groceries from car to cabin, it would be cold. Possibly falling 20 degrees or so. The woman at the register looked at me, “You’re from up in the mountains, aren’t you.” It wasn’t even a question, really -- but rather as if she was simply telling me she noticed -- you’re not of this place.

Sun spots glaze the foothills in the distance -- rending clouds -- opening, and closing again within seconds. There’s a break ahead, an end to the gray, but I just don’t know how long it will take to get there. Turns out in this case, it’s about 45 minutes away yet, at the intersection of Highway 66 and Main.

8:54 a.m.

“How was your week?” Frank greets, laying out my bound strips on the workbench.

“Long...very long.” I say, thinking about my dad’s theory --> that my work week wouldn’t seem so long if I didn’t do exciting things on my days off. He’s got a point. I anticipate working on my rod each day I’m not, and in the summers dream through to Friday when I can find myself in the highcountry -- like a child counting down to birthdays or summer holiday.

The strips are just as I’d left. I sigh with relief. I’d had nightmares, nerves, and good natured ribbing, about the glue not setting right and everything going to hell in a handbag. Which, I’ve always thought, is an appropriate place for handbags to go, however odd the saying. I guess I was still having trouble believing that all of those splits would really stay together as a whole. But facts are facts, however believable -- and the fact is, the glue worked.

Frank takes a razor blade and shows me how to cut the string ends on the bound cane, pulling them off in one direction and then the other. Deceptively, the string remains -- haunting in glue lines. I unbind the remaining pieces. And then suddenly, it’s an actual a rod -- well at least a blank -- standing on its own.

Frank hands me two blocks of wood covered in P220 sandpaper. “Each block is good for about three sides...then we need to change the paper out...ok?”

Push forward, not down...just like in planing, I repeat to myself.

Starting with the butt section, my block slips off the end a few times before my muscles learn the motion -- and the cane sings -- vibrations of a distinct note which I’m sure could be identified by one of my perfect-pitched friends from conservatory who figured out that the ambient hum of the school’s air conditioner was a B♭. After air conditioners, I’d think bamboo would be easy -- it’s used to make instruments after all, and I like that -- feeling nearer to an art I once had mastered. George Black wrote in his book “Casting a Spell,” that H.L. Leonard used to say, no man who does not love music and who can not play at least one musical instrument can make a good fishing rod. It’s not so much that I agree, but it does give me a bit of confidence in the promise of the instrument here before me.

The glue and cane sands off, mixing together, looking like I’ve spilled a jar of ground ginger. Smelling just as good. Out the window, lost snowflakes amble by, looking in. Or perhaps they’re not lost after all but just wandering, as Tolkein would say. Those two are very hard to tell apart sometimes -- but you aren’t lost unless you know exactly where you should be. And what with that being very rare, I think most of us are simply wandering. It's comforting to have others in the same boat with you; especially if you've lost the anchor.

I finish the butt section with P400 sandpaper and move on to the tips. “Sand up just as far as you feel comfortable...on all sides....then move up, inch-by-inch to the tips. You don’t want a 5-sided -- or, even worse, round, tip -- take your time," Frank says, "We want it done, but we want it done right.” The string’s glue lines angle, disorienting my eyes. Like one of those optical illusions which asks whether you see a duck or a rabbit, infectiously passed around on the Internet, the great magician of our age. Nearing the tip-top, the apex disappears mottled between sides. I bend in closer, squinting my eyes like adjusting binoculars, right above the cane. But all is well -- still six sides. And while I’m sure “sanding” isn’t usually associated with adrenaline rushes, I’m here to tell you it should be.
Clouds move in, covering the east.

Music plays.

And now, for the first time I can actually feel the taper. I knew it was there. Heck, I trained it in. But running my hands up and down the split, I couldn’t feel it -- that is until now, sanding -- feeling each dimensional change, diminishing towards the tip, swelling towards the butt. I ponder the physics of this all, why each measurement is where it is, and why this makes for a beautiful and powerful casting tool. I don’t understand all the mechanics, but I love the precision, and even the mathematics that turns split cane into grace. And as Maclean wrote of these things which elude us: one can love completely without complete understanding -- working hard on the latter in the meantime.

“Nice grooves!” Dick echoes back from the front desk of the shop, thankfully breaking the silently loud dialog in my head.

“What would you call this type of music, anyway?” Frank wonders aloud, planing behind me.

“I don’t know...beach music...? Definitely should be listened to in bare-feet I think.” It reminds me of the music a surfer friend of mine in San Francisco used to listen to. He rode his bike all the way out from a small town in Missouri in the 70’s -- and never rode it back. “Optimistic music, for sure...”

“Yeah...like, if-you-didn’t-get-everything-done-today, there’s-always-tomorrow kind of music.” Frank adds. And it’s true, because you never will, and there always is. And that, is why we listen -- for these reminders that we’re not alone in our shortcomings, achievements, and our idealism that there always will be another tomorrow.

We need that.

Darkness falls upon me still sanding, and Frank still planing. James Taylor goes to Carolina, and takes some of my thoughts with him -- but most, remain here in concentration upon keeping six sides. And I do, somehow. As I finish up the last tip, Frank, sensing that I'm almost done, comes over to check my work -- looking at each piece through magnifying lenses, running his bare fingers up and down the sides which for at one time, we had to wear gloves. “Nice...very nice.”

I smile, content at a good day, and proud of its work.

A cloud bank lingers over the mountains, following the shape of the peaks, raising each one at least a few thousand feet; and as I cross underneath the railroad bridge at the mouth of the canyon, snow begins to dusts the ground like powdered sugar on Saturday morning pancakes my grandmother makes (always, with a squeeze of lemon juice on top). And here, I enter back into my range -- knowing where I am, and more importantly, where I should be. Found again -- at the end of the day.

Rooster Baby.

2012-01-30T06:12:00.001-07:00

A spring pike streamer courtesy of Banjo, my constant companion who shares a love of the high country.

Rooster Baby.
Hook: Gamakatsu SC15, 2/0.
Thread: Danville's 3/0, black.
Tail: Banjo's tail hair.
Body: Banjo's body hair, some dyed black with Rit dye.
Eyes: Hareline Dubbin, 1/4" oval pupil 3D eyes.

Gluing.

2012-01-26T06:07:00.004-07:00

January 21, 2012 - 8:32 a.m.

Prairie dogs stand tall and straight by their dens, like gnomen on a sundial. Worshipping the sun -- perhaps, asking of it a favor for the day. The request, between them and their god. It’s said that there are no bigger issues in the West than water and wolves. But here and now, I’ll add prairie dogs. In Boulder County they’re an issue, to say the least and say it kindly. Yet this morning, I like that they are here -- a reminder of a time when we too, worshipped the sun. And although we still rely upon it, as children of privilege we lack responsibility enough to pay our respect. So driving north, I glance east with thanks.

8:55 a.m.

Jake (an entire welcoming committee and then some) hears the shop door open and runs, skidding on the laminate floor to a stop before me. Throw this bone? Please? So I do. “Now you’ve started something, ya know?” Mike says. I know. So I throw the bone again.

I have tips to finish up this morning, and my vision triangulates: where is the cane, where is my hand, and where are both going. In my world at this moment, there is nothing else.

I’ve heard it described as meditative, planing -- yet until this moment I haven’t been able to fathom it that way, being too concerned with the physical process to let my mind wander. Plus, I’ve always struggled with meditation, however it’s defined (as an emptying of thought, or a concentration upon one); but right now, I think I’ve come the closest I ever have to understanding it --as a filling, and as an absorption -- unable to get my mind off the cane, I give in, wholeheartedly. Eagerly, even. And although a deeply rooted concentration, it’s an open one too, and growing -- multifaceted --of senses, thoughts, analysis, and imagination. And so perhaps it is not a specific time, or place, or thought -- but rather, meditation is the consistency of life...

…..an absorption in living.

My eyes smart, and I realize that I haven’t blinked in god knows how long. Like when fishing and I don’t want to take my eyes off anything. Things can happen when you blink, you know. In fact, that’s when they usually do.

And just like in fishing, in planing, time at once stands still and speeds up -- life held back and pushed forward, suspended. Come late afternoon, it seems like I’ve just begun, yet have been planing forever -- and I finish the last strip of the butt section.

Frank begins rounding up the gluing supplies: wax and painting paper, tape, buckets of water, cloths, and toothbrushes. And of course, the bottle of glue. The magic. I vacuum, trying to make sure I get any dust or shavings that could get in between the splits and prevent the pieces from rolling evenly. Frank shows me how to cut and lay out four strips of tape, and then carefully place each strip of cane down, double checking that the node pattern is correct. Precisely, and reverently-- almost as if performing a religious rite. They’re beautiful, all laid out. Waiting. I try to remember the strips in this way -- my rod in this way -- as separate beings, before joined again into a whole -- into something they could never be all on their own. I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned from this for a fiercely independent soul such as myself. However, I choose not to think about that right now.

Frank zig-zaggs glue across the first set of tip strips, reminding me of frosting Christmas cookies as a kid for some reason. Probably, the wax paper. “Well, that’s how it’s done” he says, and with a satisfied look, hands me a toothbrush. “Make sure everything is covered....all the corners and between each strip.” And I do.

Then he picks up the strips, still taped together at their back. “Now, this is where that little leap of faith part comes in,” he winks, knowing the outcome. Knowing that it has worked before and it will work again. Perhaps not every time -- but yes, again. Deep snow-packs, long run-offs, and abundant wildflowers won’t come this year. But they did last, and I know they will again. And that, I believe, is faith.

The strips roll perfectly, like they’re remembering this place -- a home-coming of sorts, and I feel myself sigh. I’ve been holding my breath. Something is complete. Not finished, but complete -- those being two separate things entirely. The former, a sadness...growth's mourning; the latter, encouragement that you can go on...and you will.

Darkness has come, later than it did but only a few weeks ago. Lights are low, casting shadows off the cane, and it seems a right setting for alchemy such as this.

I glue up the next tip and butt, and Frank shows be how to run them through the binder, helping knot it in tightly. Then I roll them out on a sheet of waxed paper, making sure everything is pressed together tightly, and getting off excess glue. “In all actuality, more might come off on your hands than the paper.....that’s what another student once told me,” Frank notes. But either way, it serves its purpose.

“Look straight?”

I squint one of my eyes, scoping down the bound cane.

“Yep.”

“Cool.”

Now they dry, appropriately hung by clothespins -- “high tech” says Frank --and these creations I’ve shaped into birth hold my eyes, as I remember a line of Ansel Adams about children, and how they are “not only of flesh and blood” but also “ideas, thoughts, emotions." And maybe, I think, even bamboo fly rods.

I smile and clap my hands. Frank’s eyes sparkle, as if he too is seeing this all for the first time...and perhaps, each time he is.

On the drive home as I enter the canyon, flurries fly from a clear night sky, and I wonder how that can be. But then again, I suppose it’s just another one of those things in life that requires a little leap of faith to believe it can actually happen.

Final Planing.

2012-01-23T17:02:00.003-07:00

Friday, January 20 -- 5:14 a.m.

Sipping coffee, I can see my breath -- for few seconds suspended in time -- reminding me that I am, indeed, alive (although the coffee has yet to kick in); and that I've left a bedroom window as I always do. It isn’t economical, I know, but I like hearing night howls, morning songs, and breathing fresh air. Like tent-camping, every night.

But during last, all I could hear was the wind -- again -- now resonating down the chimney flue -- sounding like a giant blowing tunes over a bottle top -- ash from last night’s fire puffing against the mallards and cattails on the Lopi’s glass front. I take a few more sips of coffee. Even without the fire, I can’t look away.....it’s my (the original) TV.

8:48 a.m.

“Keepin’ your feet on the ground?” Frank greets, unpacking a large canvas tote of his day’s work.

“Barely...just barely.” A friend living in the canyon south of me had emailed logged gusts up to 110 mph that morning.

Today, I’ll sand the tips down to their final dimensions, “Usually I do the butts first...but, why not do it different this time...” Frank explains. I like his logic, and encourage this divergence from the usual, being somewhat nervous about the tips, and anxious about getting them done safely. Last week, while I was sanding down the nodes, Mike came back to say hi and check in on my progress. “Hey, and watch when you get to planing...when it came to final planing on my tips, my sleeve caught the end of one and snapped off. Roll up your sleeves! Man, you should have heard the obscenities.” Frank nods and laughs in agreement...

.....yes, I should have heard it.

In red, I mark off 5 inch increments over pins in the plane, and then the corresponding decimal dimensions underneath. Setting the plane this time is easier -- well a bit -- but I still manage to get the calibrator so off over one pin, that even Frank gets confused trying to get it back aligned. One screw pulls in, one pushes out. It doesn’t seem confusing in writing. I go back over each marking, running my left hand down to keep my eyes in the right place, cross-checking with the numbers on the sheet of paper in my right. All good.

“Cool,” says Frank.

I flip the form upside down, planing incrementally on the larger side first to work in the taper slowly. Measuring each split with a caliper, running my fingers along the edges for grooves, and looking for red markings I’d noted trouble spots with after the last planing -- all helping to determine which side needs more correction. However, when these indicators contradict each other (and they often do) -- dimensions are larger enamel side away until the third node, then it’s enamel side towards, but there’s a red mark on enamel side away (kind of makes your head spin, doesn’t it) --I use Frank as Judge when my jury is still out.

I’ve come to realize this process, planing, as an education of sorts. Not only for me, but also for my rod. A shaping of its character, directing how it will act and respond. Preparing it for life, and for the hard work I plan on putting it to. Over many years of studying music and training horses, I know that this type of thing is best done over time -- and I take it, planing and measuring, flipping the strip over, and inching up on the form. One doesn’t play Bach suites without practice -- without training -- and it seems only right that un-planed cane should be given the same courtesy in regards to tapers.

The thing of it is though, I’m teaching before I barely know the subject myself -- a dangerous combination sometimes, but also often a good one. Some people swear that a “green” horse paired with a green rider, is just asking for trouble. And then some swear that it’s a good thing because they learn and grow together. Same thing goes for love too, I suppose. Sometimes young inexperience learns and grows together. But sometimes it doesn’t, and you learn -- that piece of cane won’t make an 8ft. 6 wt. rod, no matter how hard you try, or how much it looked like, or told you it would. And, it’s best to accept that fact and move on. For so life goes.

By mid-afternoon, the strips of the two tips are ready for final planing. The form is flipped back over to the side with the dimensions written out, and Frank, perhaps noticing my that’s-tiny-there’ll-be-nothing-left-after-I’m-done wide-eyed look, grins, “We’ll get there.....don’t worry, we’ll get there....”

Two finaling planes sit waiting. Taunting. And when I run my thumb carefully along the bottom, I can barely feel the blade. The shavings curl off tighter nearing the powerfibers. It's getting stronger here. I take one shaving and, pulling on each end, it doesn't break easily.

Again, I train the taper, teaching here at a higher level. PhD stuff now. Frank stops working on his rod, directing a watchful eye and gentle words towards me and my tips. “Remember what Mike said?”

I roll up my sleeves.

Make sure the plane clears the tip, push forward more than press down, hand in back of the plane to keep the cane in the form, don’t buckle it, don’t pull up, make the planing stroke follow through...

My head is full, nerves aren’t steel, and the tip’s tops are toothpick thin. My pace slows and the rhythm dies, making every movement deliberate -- each planing stroke a concentrated physical and mental effort.

Towards the shop’s closing time, I notice that Frank has pulled out a white board and is in the middle of screwing it onto another workbench.

I stop planing. “What’s that for?”

“By the end of tomorrow, you’ll be gluing.”

Gluing? My eyebrows raise curiously at the thought -- wondering, can these pieces, these splinters, really be glued together into some semblance of a rod? I don’t believe it. I can’t. It seems as though they will forever be as they are, separate pieces, perfected to use at no end. Albeit a beautiful uselessness, but a uselessness nonetheless.

“Well,” Frank says, “it does require a little leap of faith...”

Planing.

2012-01-17T17:18:00.003-07:00

Friday, January 13, 2012

It’s early. 5:00 a.m. Banjo barks at the wind’s knock on the door. As comfort to his nerves, and reward for his attention paid, I cautiously open the door to what I confidently know won’t be there. He’s passed on -- down the canyon, knocking and then running away, like a childhood prank. The shovel’s once squared edges on walks and driveways now angle, evidence that indeed, he was here -- leaving erosion in fast forward, overnight. The drift outside my rocking chair’s window now has scalloped edges, and I’m sure it looks like a high mountain cirque to the vole family who lives in an old pine stump the drift has now enveloped as an igloo. I scattered some breadcrumbs for the birds yesterday and the voles tunneled to reach them, so as to not miss out. How did they know?

Over drinks with my nearest neighbors during the holidays, I mentioned off-hand, “The wind hasn’t been nearly as bad this year as last.”

“Knock on wood.” they said. Knock on wood.

And as a fisherman, I should have remembered -- you never mention the “W” word -- what everyone knows is there, but never speaks, even when it’s blowing so darn hard it takes your hat.

Driving up to Longmont, I keep two hands on the wheel. This kind of weather doesn’t allow for daydreaming...but I try to anyway.

8:57 a.m.

I’m greeted Goodmorning at the fly shop door by Jake the lab-pup and from behind the front counter by Mike, as I walk back to Frank’s shop. There, planing forms sit, waiting to be set. Paper printoffs with the taper dimensions hang above the workbench, to be written down on the forms. Frank shows me how to read the calibrator, adjusting the forms with a screwdriver and wrench, pulling in and pushing out. It’s confusing, like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time.

My strips are all set out on the work bench. Waiting. Still bound with string to the metal form in which they were heat treated, Frank shows me how to cut the end of the string -- placing them against the planing forms, pulling, and rolling it loose -- the strips bloom out like the stretcher in a Japanese parasol my grandmother used to keep in a luggage trunk I remember as a kid, into which I always wanted to climb and disappear...to go on my own journey (but apparently, luggage trucks don't hold the magic of wardrobes, just in case you were wondering, and I'm sure you were). The string unravels perfectly. No tangles, just a ball of string in my hand.

Before planing, I sand down the frontsides of the strips. First the nodes, and then the length with a finer grain paper, even-ing to lay in the form later. When all of the butt strips are done, I start planing them down to the first dimensions before sanding the tips.

Blades are sharpened. The form is set. This feels like a prime opportunity to screw everything up. You know, how in old legends and myths, there is always that one fatal mistake? The hinge on which the whole story and character could turn, or not -- and my mind runs away with this...

Frank takes the first strip, sets it in the form, places the plane on top, and begins -- moving his arm forward, his body follows -- arm and elbow in a straight line; push more than press; momentum; make sure the plane clears the end of the tip; roll up your sleeves -- all of this, in one graceful movement. Planing is the rodmaker's version of a cast, I decide. There’s a technique to it, but once you feel it, it’s like dancing -- and it’s beautiful to watch.

And now it’s my turn...for dancing...or screwing everything up. One or the other. Or, I suppose, both.

The plane stops and starts down the strip. One of the partners is off -- I know it’s me. And I also know that there isn’t any way to get “on” but to keep planing...to keep tripping over my toes. Muscle memory, as Frank says later.

Midmorning, a man steps into the workshop to say hello, “back here makin’ some bamboo rods, huh?”

“Yep,” Frank replies....“because we can.” I keep my head down, sanding, and smile. Sometimes the answer is as simple as that -- because we can. We don’t have to, we want to -- and we can, so we do. And no, it doesn’t always make sense. In fact, these sorts of things seldom do.

Curls of cane soon pile up on the plane and I push them off onto the workbench. But they come back.

“What always surprises me is the static of the shavings,” Frank nods my way.

“They’re alive!” I laugh, shavings sticking to my hands.

We both chuckle.

But really, all the while thinking, maybe they are...

Suddenly, I feel bad for the fibers curled up in front of me. Though they wanted, they couldn’t stay. They don’t get to be the end, but they were a part of the journey, part of the history of this rod -- but that, some would say, holds the meaning. With a mindset of finished products, stories are left unfinished. And even though we live our lives to their end, our stories go on ever-after -- sometimes happily, sometimes not. We’re never truly done. Never complete. Never a finished product, or closed book. And yes, I know I’m anthropomorphizing here, but I take solace, remembering Kathy Scott’s reasoning that this is okay as long as it’s “mixed with a self-deprecating smile” (Changing Planes, p.150). So I grin as I continue on...

.….planing, until the butt sections are done, the sun has set, and the shop is closing.

Saturday, January 14, 2012 -- 8:30 a.m.

Not as windy today, and I spot a red-tailed hawk sitting high in a cottonwood over a tributary of Boulder Creek as I drive across on 119. Another fisherman. The creek being frozen-over for the most part, perhaps he’s waiting for a rabbit to be flushed from the tangled thicket below, with a beagle’s sense knowing that they’ll always double back.

In the workshop there is music -- blues and bluegrass and Dylan.“I used to wear headphones, but couldn’t hear the cane, so I stopped.” Frank says. “It’s important to hear it...”

Tips wait to be sanded and planed, but first I pick out a replacement butt strip. One of yesterday’s didn't turn out like the others -- it's usable, but still has a noticeable groove above one of the nodes, which might be hard to fix, even with another two planings. We can do better, Frank says. And so having some spares, we do.

Mike comes back during a break from customers to show me the rod he built with Frank a few years ago. It’s beautiful. A blonde. “They have more fun, right?” he says with a grin. I give it a few lineless casts, and still have a hard time believing that all of my splits will actually turn into a rod. Right now, it’s nothing but pieces I’ve torn apart form a whole, only to spend hours in putting back together again. Splitting apart, sanding smooth, planing off excess and scars, and so it goes. In life too. And eventually, with enough time and heartache and hard work, it’s put back together again. Different than it was, but maybe into what it was meant to be all along. And so perhaps rodmaking is just a further exercise of this faith → that being in pieces does not necessarily mean broken, certainly not beyond mend, and that, in fact, it’s necessary for growing into life itself.

I try to match my planing sound to Frank’s. Long, even, and sure.“That was a good one” he says, working on planing of his own, his back turned -- listening. Today, my muscles are beginning to remember. I’m not tripping over my toes so much.

I loosen my shoulder, push forward, and take a step to the end of the form. It feels good. All day. It feels good to feel and hear the cane, and smell its faintly sweet scent of burnt marshmallows, s’mores even, as it planes off.

Gillian Welch begins to sing I’ll Fly Away, and the evening comes. I can see the sunset, even out the eastern window. The clouds across the plains catch last rays reaching over Longs Peak, and I think to myself that sometimes, these reverse sunsets, just like alpenglow of morning -- are more beautiful than that which they reflect. Yes, I could lose myself looking out a window such as this. Or perhaps, I already have -- but no matter, I very much like where I’ve ended up.

Solitaire for Two - The Backcountry Journal.

2012-01-12T16:50:00.001-07:00

I walk through scars, charred and still tender in places although it’s been years — over a decade now — yet the land still is burnt. Wildfires have always frightened me, and now living in a mountain canyon, I’m petrified of them. This land could be my land; these wounds, my wounds. And while fire cauterizes, I know from growing up on a farm and watching myriad animal veterinary procedures: the patient screams...

Read the rest of this piece at The Backcountry Journal.

Splitting Cane.

2012-01-09T06:22:00.004-07:00

Friday, January 6th, 2012 - 9:00 a.m.

Walking into Frank Drummond’s workshop, five bamboo culms hang off the workbench, and more from the rafters. I peek around the corner. Frank turns and smiles. A good, hearty smile. And after short introductions, we get right to it, picking out a taper from the scientific looking graphs and measurements hung above the planing forms. After much questioning, I narrow it down to a Young or Garrison (Frank’s two favorite tapers he fishes, he says), and I turn around to look at the cane. So does Frank.

Looking at nodes soaks up time for my indecision. Examining the leaf sheath scars and bug damage -- birthmarks that make the cane what it is. All of these defects dictate what it will be, what it can be. Perhaps it could be a 8 1/2 ft 5 wt; but it shouldn't be, it wouldn't be happy. I could have been a plastic surgeon, but I’d have hated it.

"The cane tells you what it wants to be," Frank says, "Don’t choose a taper and then look for the cane, look at the cane and then for its taper."

It’s a free spirit.

Its length, space between nodes and bug damage, speaks a natural inclination. Just like people, I think. Its soul, evident not in its perfection, but in its imperfections. Its character, shaped by scars.

Running my hands over the culms one by one, they linger on the farthest. I look at Frank. Yes, that’s a good one. No bug damage, no leaf sheath scarring, no nicks in the enamel. I look back to the taper descriptions hanging above the workbench, then back to the cane. Garrison. Yes, the Garrison 202-E taper.

“Good choice,” Frank says, “Garrison’s favorite, and that piece you picked will be perfect for it.”

My mind warms with confidence, remembering reading how Ed Engle always picked out the rodmaker’s favorite taper and rod to test and fish for “Splitting Cane,” figuring it would be the best representation of their work.

I figure he’s on to something...and I move on to splitting.

Frank demonstrates on the first. Holding the knife in his left hand, rubber hammer in right...the knife blade must be exactly 90 degree angles from the cane to get a straight split. Whack! Now my turn. Bracing the end of the culm against the workbench, aligning the knife to the cane, I take a deep breath, blink, and make my first split -- sliding the knife down the entire length, alternating side-twists, it takes some muscle to get through the nodes. But I do. And it feels good. I must be smiling because Frank says, “Fun, isn’t it? My favorite part too...”

Now it’s time to fire the four halved sections with a propane torch. Frank lays them over a grill and shows me how to run the torch steadily down the strip, two passes down, then flipping the strip over so the firing is always in the same direction. The flame blackens, a slow moving shadow over the blond enamel -- look at it, Frank says -- the shadow instead of the flame will tell you what you need to know. The shadow instead of the flame. The heat pushes moisture through the pores and evaporates with a sizzle of white.

It smells like popping corn.

As much as I’m falling for the textures of making a rod -- as much as the feel of the knife, torch and file handles, and the bamboo itself, its smooth enamel, power fibers and fuzzy pith -- I’m falling for its smells and sounds.

The cane is now ready to be split again -- this time into thirds, and then those into halves which will be halved again. For this last split, I use a screwdriver to start, finishing by pushing the section through a knife held in a vise. As the sections get smaller their pitch gets higher, sounding like a pizzicato glissando on a guitar. I love it. Each split is a few seconds of music and I listen to the intonation change with the diameter of the split and where the knife is in its length.

I leave two neat bundles behind when I leave at the end of the day -- one of tips, one of buts.

See you in the morning...

Saturday, January 7th, 2012 - 9:00 a.m.

A bald eagle swoops into a naked cottonwood, just as I'm driving out of the canyon’s mouth. I’ve only seen a bald eagle around the canyon once before, when there was elk roadkill. I’m not usually a superstitious person, but I do believe (and have found to be true) that unusual animal sightings are always harbingers of good. On my birthday the year I moved into the canyon, I saw a bobcat in my backyard while I was eating dinner alone on my deck. That following year was one of the best of my life. It was a good sign.

My cane splits lie waiting, bundled with masking tape into two groups, just as I’d left them. A hot air gun sits tipped up next to the vise.

I watch Frank heat one of the nodes, starting with the butt-end splits, until it’s lightly charred and smoking, like a good marshmallow. That’s the only way they’re edible, marshmallows -- slightly burnt. Then he pinches the node hard, front to back in the vise, and then gently (so as to not crack the enamel) side to side to cool while the next node is heating.

“Think you’re ready now?”

I nod and take my hands out of my pockets....yes.

Taking my time, I turn the cane, feeling the fibers between my fingers, paying attention that I heat just enough, but not too much to catch fire. The hot air guns are loud. Lost in thought, and occasional stories and fly pattern talk, I jump when a “Hey Frank!” rises above it all. I’m introduced to Mark, a friend who had trickled back before Larry Jurgen’s fly tying demo begins at the Laughing Grizzly Fly Shop, to say hi. Frank is working on heating and pressing some extras as I do mine, and Mark watches us for awhile. “It’s amazing you can straighten the cane that way, but man it takes awhile, huh? Kinda boring.....it’d be more fun to throw paint at the wall and watch it dry.” He laughs, thinking he’s made a good point.

“No...not really...we’re thinking -- you know, we don’t get much time to do that nowadays, everything, everything, is constantly overstimulated...loud -- but we’re thinking about where we’re going to fish these rods, and what their first fish will be....” Frank rebuts, slightly smiling my way.

With a “Huh...well talk to ya later....got to get to the demo...” Mark leaves, knowing he doesn't get it and probably never will.

And for the next almost 5 hours, I heat and press nodes, one by one...thinking about where my rod and I will fish for the first time....getting it...not bored, even in the slightest.

History of an Education.

2012-01-05T16:52:00.004-07:00

By training, I am a classical musician. I know there is a reason musicians play scales. And I’m very familiar with sitting alone in a room, only my instrument and a metronome for company, playing scales for hours -- varying rhythm and dynamic a bit, just to keep things interesting. But still, just scales over and over and over again; the building blocks of the foundation. And as a musician, you can always tell who doesn’t practice their scales. It’s obvious. (Just like you can always tell who doesn’t know their history, by repetition of mistakes). There is a pedagogical logic to the way things have been done; often both for mind and body’s health.

Art is never instantly gratifying -- in fact, it’s a hell of a lot of ungratifying work. Amazing paintings, beautiful symphonies, and great works of literature, were (I assure you) painful to create -- as Shakespeare’s Beatrice says, my mother cried. And even when they are “finished,” after their birth, the artist rarely utters the contented sigh of completion. Work is never done. Children never truly grow-up. Art is never perfect. Most likely, it wasn’t inspired, and it didn’t come easy. It’s always a struggle. And perhaps this is why life has been cheapened to big-boxes, drive-thrus, and movies on-demand. We don’t want to put in the work; we don’t want to feel the pain. Life itself is a work of art, and we are rushing it to its end -- left only with cheap plastic, meaningless drivel, and bitter wine. This, is why life ceases to be gratifying....because we want to experience all in an instant. Like toddlers, we stomp our feet: right now.

My education first grade through twelfth was homeschooled, and we were always encouraged to delve into interests and become passionate about them. It didn’t matter what it was (and believe me, my sister and I decided on some strange ones) my parents were always supportive; although perhaps they did laugh a bit after we had gone to bed. But more than anything else, I believe, they wanted my sister and I to be curious, and never satisfied with just one answer. We were never “out” of school -- the farm was our classroom; life on it, our education.

Then in college, I attended a conservatory of music. There were required Guitar Literature classes, a semester each -- Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and Classical -- wherein the history of the instrument was taught...its beginnings and ends. Its art. During the Renaissance semester, I was even able to borrow a lute from the school and learn the literature of the time in its vernacular. I heard what Luis de Milán and John Dowland sounded like originally, in context, to 16th and 17th century ears. One of the dreams I used to have squirreled away into the back of my head with all of my other nutty ideas, was to be a luthier. How strange, says Benedick, that sheep guts should hail souls out of men’s bodies -- how beautiful. And I wanted to be part of that beauty, to be part of that history. Nylon just doesn’t do the romance justice. For many years now I’ve thought that my classical education, the years spent practicing and perfecting an art, was all for naught -- a waste. A performance career didn’t pan out, and teaching wasn’t paying the bills. Guitar literature classes, learning the lute, practicing scales, and finally, playing concerts -- none of it mattered.

But recently, I’ve come to realize that it all did matter, it’s part of my own history. It has shaped the way I understand and see the world, and it has taught me the worth of work, time, art, and the hard way of doing something.

And for awhile now, a certain hard way of doing something has been bothering me. A part of my knowledge and history is missing -- as if I didn’t know who George Washington was, or had begun playing Henze before Sor. As a fly fisherman, I have never fished bamboo. I don’t understand it. I am curious. I need to fish it. But first, I need to make it. For awhile now, I’ve known -- I need to build a rod.

Gierach wrote in Fishing Bamboo that “Somehow we modern, technological humans have gotten two fallacies into our heads. One is that the current generation has to break completely with the old one in order to accomplish something new; the other is that doing something new is necessarily a good thing. In fact, the best work is still usually done in the oldest tradition of craftsmanship: You learn to do the thing the way it is: as the end product of generations of collective genius. That can amount to a life’s work, and if you never get a new idea, fine. If you do get an idea, you’ll probably have to try it. If it works you use it, if it doesn’t you go back to the old ways and continue to do recognizably good work. Those who strike out on their own without first mastering the craft can end up on some pretty thin ice.”

I need to learn to do the thing the way it is....

.....I'm scared of thin ice.

I have read all I can -- books, listervs, forums and blogs-- and tomorrow morning’s dawn will find me driving north towards Longmont, to Frank Drummond’s shop, Brush Creek Cane, to begin learning from his ‘collective genius.’

I have been warned about bamboo, and I have also been encouraged towards it. I have been told that it’s impossible to cast (yet I tend towards the thought that the people who can’t cast bamboo, can’t cast graphite or glass either), that it breaks easily (which makes me wonder -- why then is it used for flooring?) and that it’s just a romantic notion of old men, clinging to the past. But as Kathy Scott wrote,“The warnings may just have egged me on a little.”

I’ve also seen the light in an old man’s eyes as he leaned across a table and whispered, cupping his hands as if he were about to caress a lover or sculpt her out of clay, “you can really make bamboo....into anything you want.”

And I will.
And I will give it my best.

Here’s to romance...

Come tomorrow morning, I’ll be splitting cane.

On Being a Writer.

2012-01-03T06:17:00.002-07:00

People, friends, family, folks I’ve never met, have all been calling me a “writer” as of late. Usually, we identify ourselves by our job, our career, what we do to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. You know, the practical things in life. But I’ve always hated being defined by the practical – that’s why I went to conservatory…to music school. For heaven’s sake, there's not one ounce of practicality in that.

But people have started identifying me by what I am, not what I do. And this is a welcome relief. You see, I really don’t like what I do. Who does? I’m told. But yet I hold out the hope that I will, one day. I’m hungry -- and, perhaps foolish. I have to believe that there’s something out there to chase down. Or maybe, it’s growing presently, underfoot. Maybe, I just need to move my left…or, my right. Or…oh I don’t know. But, I have to believe it’s true, just to keep sane.

So -- I’m a writer, they say. It’s what I am. And I’m coming to believe them. In fact, now I realize that I’ve been one even before I started writing. It’s very much like when in adolescence I grew breasts and realized that yes, I had been a woman all along. Damn.

I have a much similar reaction to the having been a writer, all along.

There is a narrator in my head, and she told me this is true. She has been with me for over 27 years now. She’s me. Sometimes, speaking in baritone. Sometimes, growling and hissing and howling like a wild animal; sometimes, she makes put-put-put tractor noises like a little boy. And sometimes, dressed for a ball, she sings.

I’ve spent a lot of time alone -- in childhood, and now as an adult. And this narration has been, and is, my way of "talking," I suppose. We humans have an instinctive urge to share experiences, thoughts, and stories – and this is often where, and how, we get hurt. Self sabotage. Opening up before we truly know what’s out the door waiting. We are herd animals though, and so we have to take the chance….always, take the chance.

But then, there are the loners, the ones who leave the pack, the ones who purposely separate themselves. These are the artists, the musicians, and the storytellers – they also often happen to be the depressed, haunted, and afflicted. Once removed, they observe -- exploring the tribe's condition from outside – and while it may look like a reclusion, really, it’s quite the opposite. You can’t see the picture, sing the song, or read the novel when you’re in it -- and so there are the artists, musicians, and writers…the storytellers.

I, am one of them.

Now, I see that I have been on the outside, telling myself stories my whole life…that narrator describing everything I do, taste, smell and see...back to myself. I thought this was normal. I thought everyone told themselves stories. But as it turns out, they don't. Instead, they listen. They listen for someone to find their experiences words – they wait to be given their own stories back.

This is a great expectation. And yes, one that depresses, haunts, and afflicts.

But so it goes…I am a writer.

Grey Hair & Paperclipped To-Do's; or, Survival of the Coming Year.

2011-12-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

I can’t pinpoint when it happened, somewhere mid-high school. Much like those doctor office first-visit-form’s questions about first periods – I don’t keep the start date in my memory, I’d rather forget, thank you very much. But somewhere in all of that, time sped up. I started wearing a watch and having to be places on time. Months came faster and faster, like someone flipping through a datebook, looking for a specific (yet still unfound) day, throwing ones I wasn’t quite done with just yet in the trash. And years piled themselves on, leaving physical evidence behind – a few grey hairs here and there and wrinkles beginning around my eyes. But I love them both. I’m not trying to hide them. I’ve earned them. I’ve lived. You can see the evidence in my face and in my body; grey hairs, the wisdom that comes from bad decisions; eye wrinkles, the laughs and the tear lines…some, still salty.

December 31st is a time for reflection. I learned that from my grandmother, The Birder. The thing about her is, she seldom tells you about life; instead, she shows you. All the grandchildren gathered at grandpa and grandma’s house each New Year’s Eve, and year after year I watched my grandmother quietly disappear into the basement around 10 o’clock. Standing at the top of the stairs listening, all was quiet but for a scarce flip of a page as she read the journals in which she religiously writes morning and evening (something which was my “resolution” year after year to do, and something at which I failed miserably). Each New Year’s Eve she goes back to read sections – sometimes the hard parts, sometimes the easy. The former have become more frequent, I think, as of late.

And so now, this is the time (as I’ve learned), to reflect – on what have I done, and what I will do; on the good times and bad. Like my grandmother, I go back to re-read the written and that left un...

Although never being one for resolutions (things started at a given time with much ceremony seem far too easy to break), my midwest makings simply do what needs done. Not setting out goals and plans, I just go forward – breaking and picking up and piecing back together again -- putting to work my mule-like tendency to put my head down and pull with all my might.

I’m not spending too much time on reflection this year --there isn’t enough time -- what’s before me preoccupies. For being a light eater, there is much on my plate. Linear days are already marked and scheduled, with notes made; accumulating paperclipped to-do’s, to-reads, and quotes I want to remember. I still like my days in pen and ink…written out.

But I do think back, and last year was good, very good – with laughter, stories, and adventure; yet also deaths, tears, and changes. Life doesn’t ask permission of us for any of these things. We must just go on, for you never know what will happen in the morning, even as dark as the night may be, even when the moon is new.

There’s much to be excited about this coming year; also much to overwhelm. I know how quickly the days will go and there is much to do – many projects, lots to research, much to write, much to learn. At one of my breaking points, Jay militarized me, go on, soldier, he said, looking sternly in my eyes- your mind tells you “no.” Right? Stop. You can’t go on, it tells you, Right? But your mind is a liar – albeit to protect, in defense – but still, a liar. A body can keep going long after the mind has said you have no more – like a chicken with its head cut off.

So I guess come this time next year, there may be some blood, some wounds, some exhaustion and dehydration – but I plan on still having my head, my wits about me, in the end.

And most likely, also a few more grey hairs and wrinkles.

But I’ll have earned them.

The Morning After.

2011-12-27T17:03:00.001-07:00

Thursday, 22 December, 2011 - 9:23 a.m.

Thirty inches of snow fell, overnight. I left a phone-message for my folks back in Nebraska when I made it down the mountain to work, and in a few hours they called back,

“Was that thirteen or thirty, did you say?”
“Three-zero. Thir-TY”

I always wanted this much snow as a kid, to tunnel into and hideaway; like the mice tunnels I saw in the fields, veining through thatched brome grass. Now, I don’t tunnel into it for reasons of time, not lack of want.

My kitchen window looks east, up a draw which I’ve been told by a self-proclaimed historian of the area was used in the 1800’s as a chute for ice blocks cut from a pond I’ve yet to find -- higher on the mountain than I’ve ever been as a result of private-property signs. But this morning as I ground coffee and looked out in the 5 o’clock darkness, my eyes guided by starlight and snow luminary, all I could see was white -- a solid picture window of it, drifts preventing even a view of evergreens -- and I could very well imagine blocks of ice being cut out there, right now. I felt dizzy and heavy -- the mountain's weight in glory pushing me back.

I grabbed hold the counter with my left hand, the one free of a coffee cup, and my eyes met with more of the same out the northern window by the sink. Landscape trussing outlining a flat space for car-parking has started buckling. Not too badly yet, but I saw its beginnings last spring after the thaw. Gravity, heartless as she is; a few years and she’ll have her way, I thought. Percolation began, steam formed on the window, and I noticed some of the stems of a mint plant sitting in its sill had frozen off during the night.

When I was going through the process of buying this place, the house inspector remarked that he’d never seen a mountain home with such a firm foundation. Unsurprisingly the earth here is rocky, and still shifting. Homes -- well the homes that last, at least -- have to be hardier than the bedrock. As I look out my windows and feel the mountain pressing against the cabin, throwing all its weight and pinning me to a wall like a fat-steer who knows he’s bigger and stronger, and all I can do is stand -- well, try to stand -- my ground.

I’m grateful for firm foundations.

Monday, 26 December, 2011 - 8:11 p.m.

I write tonight after two days, sunup to sundown, spent hauling and chopping and stacking wood, mostly from a dead 70 ft. pine Jay cut down -- and the one before spent shoveling the said 30 inches of snow. The cabin has a gas furnace and a really nice one at that, or so says the inspector I had check it over last year before turning it on for the first time after 3 years’ vacancy. I can tell you, woodfires every night November-March or April (depending on the year), is a heck of a lot harder than thumbing the thermostat’s white plastic gauge a tad more to the right.

And I do not have a snowblower, believing the Appalachian Trail’s Grandma Gatewood when she said "Most people are pantywaists, exercise is good for you.” Every muscle aching makes you remember that yes, you can still feel. Hurting in this respect is good. Pain makes you feel alive, because life at it's innermost core, is nothing but -- and that, is a twisted kind of beautiful.

I often think back to something my childhood best friend’s mom always used to say (as a panacea for shoe shopping -- all the Engelkemier women and all the Block women, have big feet),“Well they don't put a foundation under a privy, now do they!!!” No they don’t. And privys, are known to fall over...

After the last storm, a coworker, surprised to see me at work said,

“You got out!?”

“Yep...lots of shoveling.”

“By hand?”

“Yes...”

“Wow...you’re a hardy soul.”

Really? Hand-shoveling is what now constitutes one as a "hardy soul"?

Pantywaist.

Woodstove heat and shoveling. These are the old ways of doing things, and yes, a bit outdated. Then again, so are most all my material possessions. I’ve never grown out of hand-me-downs. And perhaps one day, I’ll turn up my gas furnace and a John Deere engine will be ready and waiting to blow out my driveway. But I doubt it.

I have a firm foundation. I ain’t a privy.

Midnighting.

2011-12-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

~ I wish the snow would stop crunching so loudly. Even my carefully placed heel-toed steps echo through the silent night, sung softly in my memories by a baritone. I climb the barnyard gate instead of opening it. The hinges are too squeaky, and the chicken fence strung along the bottom half of the gate to prevent goat-kids from escaping, would be much to loud on the crusty snow. The wind blows, and the gate chain clanks my nearing against its hollow green pipes like chime.

Shhh...!

I freeze onto the metal as degrees and icicles fall. And yet, there is still hope.

11:47 p.m.

Yes, there’s still time...

Now I wait for silence to return -- for her to crawl back under the night's blanket and be wrapped up in her beloved, darkness. I keep still. Listening. Hearing nothing, I know at last...the blanket has found them.

11:56 pm.

Hurry...

Stalking shadows' length and movements, I read how to approach and move to the left. The afternoon's cud being chewed is the only sound, spoken from contented bellies; but my ears strain to hear their voices...

.....any voices.

Yes, I am eavesdropping. I admit it. Usually, an activity spurred by the whats in the eaves being dropped; in this case though, I am only interested in who is dropping them. My mother tells me that animals can talk at midnight on Christmas Eve. Not that they aren't talking presently, she says...but they speak in silence; when our language fails, they speak another. On this night though, on the eve of Christmas -- we can hear...we're given a translator. ~

And so now many years later, I remember those Eves of Christmases Past, spent listening -- layering coveralls over my flannel pajamas and pulling on rubber mukluks over two pairs of thick socks. Finishing with a hat, gloves, and a red synthetic-fill quilted feed company jacket, I would sneak out of the house and down to the barn, year after year, until I was undoubtedly too old to believe in such things as conversations with midnighting animals.

Yet, I believed. And I still do.

So I'll layer up and pull on my boots, and am going to stay up late this Christmas Eve -- listening -- just like I used to do. And although there are no stalls filled with horses, cattle, or goats -- there is a mountain inhabited by mule deer, elk, mountain lions, black bears, raccoons, fox, ermines, voles and pine squirrels, just to name just a few.

And there is a dog named Banjo sleeping on the couch.

The smells of that barnyard linger, absorbed long ago into fibers and follicles -- only now, woodsmoke and pine sap mask it. No amount of soap, it seems, will cleanse me of it -- of this need to compost -- telling the story of what's been digested, for better or worse. Writer and farmer Jenna Woginrich has named a diagnosis for this: Barnheart. And it’s a condition that needs “smells and touch and crisp air to heal” alongside “Small measures, strong convictions, good coffee, and kind dogs.”

I think -- no I know -- I have this too. Only mine, a form whose cells have divided, as if bucking the antibiotics of stable and field, morphing into a disease of the wild, not the kept. Perhaps eventually it will be studied and named Cabinheart, or maybe Canyonheart. Yes, I think Canyonheart would be it. I don’t need the diagnosis though, I know what I have. And I also just so happen to have what this condition needs to heal. Far removed from my youth’s Iowa farm, I realize that it -- that barnyard full of manure and ice and cold shadowy superstitions -- is why I am holed up in a mountain cabin. It's why I've removed myself from city lights cemented into the stasis of change. It's why I see a full moon and remember a children's book being read to me about an owl. It's why I choose my dog walking mountain roads based on where horses are stabled. It's why I think owl pellets are cool, and it's why I always....always...look at scat. I do all of these things because yes, I have the disease.

This year, I bought Banjo a Christmas present (did last year too) and wonder whether I am becoming one of those odd women whose child is their dog. If I am -- and I probably am -- I really couldn't care less. Like Gierach wrote, “If people don't occasionally walk away from you shaking their heads, you're doing something wrong.” And in fact, those bumper stickers about dogs and honor students? I tend to agree. Go ahead, shake your head -- I think my dog is smarter than your honor student.

So yes, I bought Banjo a present and I'd like to hear what he thinks about it. I'm staying up late.

Right now though, he is keeping his thoughts to himself. Silent conversations center around our walks in the dark mornings, the musky smells of markings, and the coyotes that set off all the canyon dogs howling in subsequence like dominoes echoing off its side. It seems like a taunt, what those coyotes do....you're domesticated, they jeer...behind chain-link, tightly leashed, sleeping on 100-thread count Egyptian cotton instead of your old college flannel. You might be warm there, inside; but damn it dog, that's why you were given a coat. We laugh at you.

I hear him sigh, grumbling about something. The leash, perhaps? He runs in his sleep, breaking into an excited whine, picking up speed and then rolling into a laugh. Maybe he's laughing at me? Or maybe he's dreaming about being a coyote.

This gift might be just a pile of sinews and guts, but even so, good times can be had with a pile of guts...at least, I bet that's what a coyote would think.

On a Midwinter’s Night a Traveler.

2011-12-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

The earth like a gypsy, is always traveling -- a prodigal life lived farther and farther away from the sun. This year, since the twenty-first of June. An annual issue of domesticity betwixt her and the sun, taking half the year to put back to rights. Sometimes it seems that all the woodstove-fires, all the soups and stews and rummed nog are offerings, pleading the sun’s return while assuaging the guilt of our mother. We’re sorry. We’re cold. Can we please come back now...?

And eventually, she always says yes.

Growing up, the winter solstice was a day of rejoicing -- soon, we wouldn’t be doing chores in the darkness anymore. Barely done with morning chores, “evening light” came early, calling us back out again. Heat lamps, cracking ice, 5-gallon buckets of boiling hot water to keep the troughs open for a few hours longer. Then before bed, begrudgingly tromping out to do it all over again -- mom, do we have to? They’ll be alright until morning....they’re animals. But the frantic slurping gulps of goats, cattle, and horses proved to us that yes, indeed, we did have to.

One becomes acutely aware of light living in rural areas. There isn’t much light pollution -- no street lamps, headlights, traffic signals, no ambient light seeping from other houses’ windows or porchlights -- and the pitch night sky plus altitude makes for ideal viewing conditions. My sister has a few college degrees now, one in astrophysics, and when we were kids she sold a horse to buy a 24-inch Dobsonian telescope (which now sits in the cabin’s spare bedroom waiting for her to have space for it again, prompting unsuspecting guests to question whether I am even crazier than they think....“Is that a cannon?!?”). I learned the sky from her back then -- the stars, planets, constellations, and international space station orbits -- and I try to remember it all now. Cassiopeia, The Three Sisters, Orion, The Dippers, Canis Major and Minor -- and our own Milky Way, usually unfindable in urban areas, to my eyes it appears as a solid white brush stroke, as if the rest of the sky has been waiting silently for millennia to be a finished work.

Taken by Erica Block, through her telescope in a cornfield.

And then there are the planets: Mars, Uranus, Venus -- who never waver in their light. My sister taught me this: planets’ light appears unwavering. Theirs is solid. Sure. Steady through years. Stars however, flicker. As if in their insecurity they must grab your attention to see if they are, indeed, as beautiful as they think. A children’s verse has ceased to satisfy...

My night window is smaller here in the canyon than on the midwest plains. Tops of conifers and their branches reach out, grabbing away, and framing and shaping my view with a scalloped mountain mat, framed in shadowy Douglas Fir. Ironically, I see the night sky most often in the morning, on my 5:00 a.m. walks and runs with Banjo. When the moon is out, his face follows me, slipping behind the most-western mountain just as I reach back to the driveway. As if he’s been walking with me and is now also, home. I watch the paperboard coal sky change with the seasons -- different constellations being put up and taken down, by some giant teacher’s hand.

And now at the winter’s solstice, slowly, we will get “more light” -- the dying words of Goethe, which are always brought to my mind at this time of the year. Blinded near the end, did he just want more light into his world which had grown dark? Or was it more profound than that, “light” long being a synonym for enlightenment, for peace of mind and soul’s assurance. The world is a much more dangerous place in darkness. What you don’t know is there -- what you don’t see -- what you don’t know -- will, and wants to hurt you. I suppose I won’t truly know what Goethe meant until my world, too, grows dark. Then, I wonder, will I beg for more light, or will I receive it?

I don’t know.

But I do know that I will receive this more light with a thankful heart. Midwinter. And yet for me it is not. Another month to go until my canyon’s winter reaches mid -- miles to go, feet upon feet of snow to shovel, firewood to haul and maul and stack, and many words to write -- before the season is done.

And so tonight, the longest of the year, thick in the midst of darkness, I call out, echoing -- more light...

On the Big Thompson; or Bad Life Decisions.

2011-12-19T06:17:00.001-07:00

“Why does everything have to be so painful?” Jay said, missing a trout and hooking up with a coyote willow’s strike behind him. I was meanwhile busy untangling two midges who, had they not been tied by my own hands, I would have sworn were embedded with positive/negative magnets. All day, this attraction -- like I was playing chaperon over two horny teenagers, and was failing miserably.

Fingerless gloves, numb hands, frozen guides, freezing feet. Why does everything have to be so painful, indeed. Why does everything have to be so difficult? Fly fishing is always hard, and it becomes almost impossible now.

Almost.

Right then it seemed that winter fishing was akin to a bad life decision -- one of those whose red flags your mother and father warn you about and whose control issues your best friend gently hints at. Your gut tells you to stop. Think again. Peel off some layers. Go back inside to comfort and warmth. Watch some Netflix. But you don’t. You put on your waders, lace up your boots, and accept the decision you’ve made -- to fish -- for better or worse....to a point. To the point where, if you lose one of your flies one more time you won’t be able to re-rig. Your fingers have moved past the point of pain to immobility, curled into an arched fetal positioned fist, waiting to die.

And yet, this decision will also uncover of what you’re made, digging out some good, beautiful things, down deep there waiting.

We humans have a cerebral problem with pain -- in our bodies, lives (ours and others), and yes, in our fishing. We are fair weathered friends of the world, forgetting that almost every pain was at some point also a happiness. They come together. That's the deal, C.S. Lewis wrote. Seasons do indeed change....us along with them.

And as Jay drove the road back towards home, I sat in the sunny-side passenger seat and I fell asleep. For once an easy, painless thing to do.

The Herd.

2011-12-15T06:12:00.001-07:00

Tradition had it that my dad would take my sister and I out to cut down a Christmas tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. Piling handsaws, tie downs, and ourselves into the white Ford Taurus station wagon -- we’d get on the road towards Glenwood. Down a real gravel road -- dusty and chalky and bumpy, not what they consider gravel to be out here in the West. Here, it’s a mix of sand and dirt. I’m not sure what to call it. When I first moved to Colorado I avoided many a correct road when given and following directions, because it wasn’t “gravel.” Damn literal mind.

This gravel road twisted through the Loess Hills -- once harboring the underground railroad and outlaws; now hiding quarter horses, meth labs, and acres of neatly planted rows of pines. Some farmers had figured out a profitable off-season venture -- capitalizing on big-city-people-across-the-Missouri’s delight in driving 45 minutes for the experience of sawing and strapping a pine to the roof of their SUV’s and the reminder that places with “$10 X-mas Trees. U Cut. Leave money in Coffee Can on Porch” still do exist. Plus, Iowa gasoline was always at least $0.25 cheaper. Many of my grandparent’s visit to our farm were based, I suspect, largely on my grandfather’s reading of the gas gauge.

It’s a dangerous thing though, sending a man -- more specifically, my father -- out to cut a tree which is supposed to fit into a house -- a one-hundred year old farm house with low ceilings, to be exact. Bigger must be better, and thus manliness must be measured by how much of the bottom half of the pine needs cut off before it will fit in the living room. My sister and I encouraged him though, to be honest....active imaginations visioned cathedral ceilings.....yes, that’ll fit just fine! Perhaps fresh air increases appetite of eyes as well as bellies, and it’s reported to me that this year, my mother’s eyes were the ones so curiously affected.

For years now, I’ve missed that tradition. In San Francisco studio apartments I decorated Trader Joe’s rosemary trees, which fit perfectly in my one window’s sill. But that is just not the same....lovely as rosemary is and all. I did buy a tree one year and made it fit. But that also, is just not the same.

And then last year, finally, I had land. I had rooms of my own. I had trees of my own -- and I walked with Banjo up the mountain out back and cut a small pine from a grove that needed thinning. No longer was it about finding the right shape and size to fit the house (or not) -- it was about pragmatic pruning. I’ve a mountainside to care for, and it’s good forest husbandry to cull the herd every now and again.

There is something to be said for new traditions which will someday be old, yet will die with me. I am a mountain’s keeper, and it keeps me in return. The dead wood which I have hauled off its sides, is now chopped and stacked (although I wonder why we don’t say “mauled” wood, for that is what was used, and what was done. Yet like so many other of our semantic games, we choose the tidier verb, “to chop”).

Again this year I go up the mountainside with Banjo, and Jay now too -- up until we find a duet -- and mute the louder of the voices, letting the warbly one remain to gain confidence, straighten her spine, and sing even louder. The cabin’s Christmas tree will never be straight nor full -- canyon trees are like their people -- wiry, with branches bent by the winds -- yet they’re strong, and don’t demand much. They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to keep on growing. And come what may, they will grow -- in rock cracks smaller than a #2 pencil or a roofing nail, among incorrigible soil. So I will always have Charlie Brown trees -- for the tradition has become not to seek that which will be the most beautiful for the indoors, but that which will be the healthiest for the out.

Thoreau once wrote, wood warms us twice -- as will that which our small search-party labored up through a new 14 inch blanket of thick refrigerated warmth, to find. In fact, this tree will warm me three times over: the finding and chopping this year, the splitting & stacking next fall, and finally the burning next winter.

Come January, this small pine will be laid behind the woodshed to age until next year when, perhaps, it will warm the cabin as another one of the herd is trimmed.

Growing Up.

2011-12-13T06:37:00.002-07:00

morning walks
past an empty playhouse
built of red and white
skis like candy-cane stripes
wrapping around
waiting
for children and laughter
at christmastime
months away
or past

forgotten decorations
on a dead pine
behind the woodpile

Worth One Thousand Words; or, Life Abbreviated.

2011-12-08T06:34:00.001-07:00

Cameras keep us honest, and photos keep us straight, narrowed in on a 6x8 chiaroscuro or jpg attachment of place -- the condensed cream soup of our day’s doings. Perhaps the camera’s advent was the demise of storytelling as it had been; at the very least, it helped usher in the start of it. Now, we can see for ourselves...we don’t have to be told. And it’s much faster this way (easier too) -- getting right to the point so that we can get on with tweeting, texting, and facebooking -- our life’s stories, incomplete in structure, sentence, and punctuation, showing us as we are --> abbreviated. A picture can indeed sometimes be worth a thousand words, but all too often, we let it do all the talking -- and while talk is cheap, stories are not.

On a Sunday afternoon, warm by late November standards, I walk past a man standing in a river -- the river which I thought I had to myself. Silence echoes above the current, as waters move quietly through the winter months; perhaps not wanting to call attention to the fact that they are still running, and the ice hasn’t quite got the better of them yet; they hibernate, hunker down, and wait...like the rest of us.

A small English Springer Spaniel bitch greets Banjo first, and then me. Her dock tail looks frantic and her eyes smile in chocolate. The wet fringe of her legs and ears clump together into soon to be frozen dreadlocks and Banjo eyes her suspiciously -- as he does every dog who likes getting wet. If she fell in, well ok then, she gets a pass. But her willful romps back to her master through pools which are on her, neck deep, erase entirely the possibility of falling in. Banjo backs away. The man turns around: eyes as chocolatey as his dog’s, a blue-bobble stocking cap and a camouflage canvas jacket. He looks every bit of what my grandmother would describe as a “nice young man” -- yet the kind none of her granddaughters ever seem to bring home to her. This, a result of The Anne of Green Gables complex: wanting Gilbert Blythe, not Fred Wright. But now, I’m on a tangent.

With a wave and a smile, I keep moving on downstream.

Downstream far enough to where I am sure I’ve given the man and his dog enough room and won’t run into them again. He’s moving upstream. I’m moving upstream. All’s well, although it hadn’t ended yet.

I wade in. The water is low, barely over my boots in places, and Banjo follows me out to some rocks forced into the middle from strong spring runoffs. I work a pool, deep with eerie glacial blue-green, its basin boiling up aspen leaves that have been kept underwater between and under rocks, like specimens in formaldehyde. And as the lid is loosened, they float away, looking like the soft yellow underbelly of a brown trout; sumac blushing like the gill plate of a stream-born rainbow -- convincing shadows at which, I set the hook.

The nymphs sink further than I think they will, and on the third drift they snag on the bottom. My annoyed and impatient roll-cast frees both flies, and I shorten up my line a bit before casting again. There’s always some amount of reticence after a snag -- like falling off of horse: you always climb back on, but it takes awhile to get back to a full-on gallop again. Now, I know that the yellow mountain willow branches are behind me, and that the rock at the bottom of the pool is angled upstream, and that the ground, as I learned as a youth, is hard to fall upon.

Mindful of these things, I make another cast and feel the weight of a take and see the flash of a rouge side. I land her, a nice rainbow, and hold her gently in the water as I fumble for my camera in an inside zippered pocket of my vest. She gets away.

“Any luck?”

I look up, and into the face of the man I’d seen earlier in the day with his spaniel, already greeting Banjo again.

“One rainbow. A nice one for this stretch here....eight to ten inches, I’d say. In that pool back a ways, there by that rock face....they make nice deep pools. And you?”

“18 inch rainbow, right around that bend there!”

“Nice!”

“Took me 4 minutes to land her......7X tippet on and all. Ya know at first, I thought I’d snagged the bottom....she just held deep down there. Frozen. Glad I didn’t try to snap her off!”

I chuckle. “That’d be my luck.”

“It’s usually mine. Hey, what’re you using for flies by the way?”

“Nymphs...little tungsten beads for heads.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Guess we’re doing the right thing then” I smiled, still halfway out in the creek.

“Yeah. Guess we are. Well, see ya around, maybe...”

“Yep. See ya around....”

He turned and with a high careless whistle, the spaniel followed -- and I watched them both until they camouflaged back into the landscape and movement evaporated.

And as I did, I thought about how 100 years ago, we certainly wouldn’t have been lugging cameras around in our fishing vests and pockets. Our catch-of-the-days -- even lives -- would be documented only through memories and words. Often, orally. We would have no physical proof. No evidence. Instinctively though, we want someone to know what we’ve done and what we’ve caught (however not, always, where we’ve gone). We want to tell our fishing stories, and when you don’t have a photograph, words must come out of the darkroom -- as they have for ages past, and will continue to do in ages to come. Why am I so sure? Well it’s really quite simple: I am sure, because fishermen love stories, admiring and relishing one well-told as we admire and revel in a fish well-played. Fly fishing has a history riddled with great literature -- Juliana Berners, Izaak Walton, Robert Traver, Ernest Schwiebert, Norman Maclean, Thomas McGuane, John Gierach, Ted Leeson, Kathy Scott -- it’s shaped our sport. And besides, fishermen also seem to have the creative tendency of developing their own unique standard of measurement (something which making the move to metric wouldn’t fix). You can’t really embellish a photo, now can you ---> but you can in a story to a stranger on a stream.

While photos do capture a sense of place, emotion, and time -- the words said, things learned, and thoughts entered into, and then exited -- these things, no photograph can tell. Not in a thousand words.

Which now, I have gone over.

Summer's Loss, Winter's Gain.

2011-12-04T06:17:00.001-07:00

Light. Blue-grey in color, as if it’s seeping through a snow cave to wake me with the same warmth I remember feeling in a sleeping bag dug into a bank of snow high in the Sierras on a snowshoeing trip during college. Snow and ice aren't just cold, they’re also strangely insulating -- similar to how a pedal point quiets itself by simply always being there. The constants, are often the ones overlooked. I put back on my wool hat peeled off in my sleep, scratch the ice off the insides of the bedroom’s windows, and am greeted Good Morning by snow. Lots of snow. Surrounded by it, I feel warm -- just like in an ice cave. Over a foot and still falling on top of the thirteen inches we got a day ago. I start the coffee pot sputtering, auguring aches and pains...reminding me of an old man.

I grab a shovel from the shed whose door I have to dig open with my hands, and start at it. My muscles are still sore from the previous batch. My back and shoulders and chest. They tell me that I did something, that I worked and sweated for something, and I like that feeling.

And I like the feeling of this season, of winter, if for nothing else but the fact that it makes me appreciate the canyon’s short and sweet summers all the more. Living through something being taken away makes you adore it even more when it returns. Love, a lost puppy, wildflowers, food. I've grown accustomed to denying myself things, and in many ways thrive by doing so -- even, if those things never come back. Perhaps though, I’m just incredibly selfish, and this is how I combat it, how I punish and train myself to be thankful: by taking things away.

In the same vein, I took away temperateness so that I could fully bask in the sun. I sought out harsh, long winters, so that those 4 months of summer would be divine. Salvation, it’s said, comes through washing...mine comes through snow. I find myself through this loss.

Yesterday, I looked up the property records for the small string of houses along my road, trying to figure out and satisfy my curiosity about the survey lines out the back mountain, and I noticed how many times this house has sat vacant. It was three-years lonely when I bought it, and back in the 80’s, it sat for 10 years, alone. When I first moved in, Neighbor Tom walked down the road to welcome me to the canyon, and tell me that people usually only last one winter. They miss the convenience of city-life, the cell-phone reception, the connectedness, the friends, and the lack of snow --- and after the first winter, they flee back to civilization, to lower elevations. He’s seen it time and again, Tom says. This is the kind of thing that would have gotten me to stay here, even if I did end up hating it. Just to prove him wrong. But I love it. And that, is why I stay. As I shovel, he waves from his snow-blower. He sees → I’m lasting.

Yet, looking at those property records is eerie. All those people. All those changes of hands. All those dreams dashed, marriages ended, bankruptcies filed, and foreclosures finalized....yes, I have heard some of the stories. It’s as if there is a curse in the foundation of this place....a story that I don’t know...

But my story is this: I made it through the long winter last year, and I’m grateful for another. This chapter, containing much more firewood. And I’m grateful to not see aspen leaves, hummingbirds, and wildflowers when I look out my window. Yes, I’m grateful for that loss, and for the gain of icicles hanging from my gutters, a driveway full of snow, and window frost when I wake.

Because I know, canyon summers are divine.

Heed the Birds.

2011-11-29T06:23:00.002-07:00

"A fisherman does well to heed the creatures that fly."

~ Ted Leeson

My great grandmother's feeder in Minnesota, 1982.

My great-grandmother fed the birds, my grandmother feeds the birds, and my mother feeds the birds. Now, I do too. October 9th I put the feeders up -- my own feeders up, for the first time -- the day after our first snow. It's tradition. But carrying it on makes my grandmother and mother nervous -- and for good reason I suppose (as grandmothers and mothers usually have), there are many stories of canyon bears bending suet cages beyond mends and emptying feeders like a gradeschooler with one of those translucent Christmas candy-cane tubes striped from the inside out with red and white M&M's. But I've yet to have any trouble with bears, so I thought it worth giving a go.

Perhaps the feeders are a knock on wood. I’ll see.

But I have to see...for myself, and for tradition's sake. They are hard to keep alive, traditions, and nowadays hard to come by -- for like other things of age, many times they aren't appreciated until they're rusted, forgotten, and buried in dirt. Traditions are essences of humanity and thus they too will die at some point, to some end. But I haven’t forgotten....and so I feed the birds, and I watch them closely.

I grew up surrounded by birds. On our farmhouse's large deck were hung feeders on the corner posts, and a large messy mulberry tree naturally did the job in late spring. Sparrows and Grackles cleaned up around feeding troughs and buckets, Meadowlarks and Red-Wing Blackbirds roamed in brome fields, and warblers-of-many-colors blended into the umbrage of Indian Creek which formed our property into a "V," like the geese who flew over in autumn.

As an experiment once, my mother and I laid still in our northernmost pasture for a good hour as Turkey Vultures circled above us....just to see if they'd think we were dead, come down, and start pecking -- at which point we'd sit up like corpses in an overly-decorated lawn on Halloween night. That was the plan. They didn't fall for it though (most kids don't fall for corpses in the lawn thing either), and we ended up pocked with chigger bites...yet also backed with the encouragement that their refusal meant we still smelled alive.

And then there were the Barn Swallows, for whose sake I, year after year for two weeks out of the summers, re-arranged barn entries and exits so their young could fledge without being accidentally killed by fat-steers stomping at flies. The swallows ate the bugs in the end, so I thought it the least I could do. The steers certainly weren't helping themselves in the matter.

In our family we were always watching the birds. It was borderline blasphemy to call a Cardinal a "red bird" or Blue Jay a "blue bird." Identification ignorance was grounds enough for incredulous scrutiny upon whether you indeed were of Lundsten stock or not. When I moved to California for college, my grandmother's parting gift to me was Peterson's A Field Guide to Western Birds and a pair of binoculars. There were going to be new birds, and I wasn't to be calling them simply by their color. Snowy Plovers, Brown Pelicans, Caspian Terns, and Northern Mockingbirds were all in my vocabulary by the end of first semester. Grandma will be proud, I thought.

And now, a Kauffman Guide to Birds of North America sits on my kitchen window sill (allegiances switched from Peterson), with the binoculars my grandmother gave me still sitting atop. Ironically, a Gray-Headed Junco flies into one of my big kitchen picture windows as I sip coffee and write this piece. He falls into one Banjo’s paw-prints which is crusted in snow like a plaster cast. In between stillness, he twitches. And then, like my mother showed me to do as a little girl, I go outside and cup him in my hands until the warmth revives him and he flies away. I am not sure why this works, but infallibly, it does -- like salt on a fly.

My grandmother and mother have taught me well. When I am on a lake, I watch the Pelican’s placement, and the Osprey's hover and dive to make a catch before I can. There is no competition between us as fishermen. They are the old masters, the ones who rely on being a good fisherman for food, not a pleasured pastime -- although I do sense they find pleasure in it as well, for it is their craft and livelihood and that which builds a life for them and their families. I watch and learn. I heed what they say. And when I’m on a river or stream, I watch the harbinger Bank Swallows and Dusky Flycatchers swoop into a hatch before the trout can even rise.

Ted Leeson writes that while one can acquire all the technical skills one needs -- that, does not make a fly fisherman. Rather, fly fisherman is a temperament which one is either born with, or not. A gene which can never recess, and manifests differently in each of its hosts. Recently, I've had the thought that I've been enduring the symptoms my entire life, and only now discovered the treatment -- only now do I appreciate my temperament, seeing it working to some end, good or no.

And recently, I've been thinking that my great grandmother must have been, and my grandmother and mother must be fly fishermen too. They show the symptoms. We were all just born that way.

On This Day, Thanks.

2011-11-24T06:42:00.004-07:00

In many ways, thanks is a lot like love. We say we love chocolate and coffee -- a color, fishing, books, and our significant other. When we talk about food or friends, shoes or our grandmothers, we talk of “love” and it comes out sounding just the same. Sometimes we even say we love things just to be polite or to get something in return – those looking for the former are notoriously guilty of this. In the English language, we don’t really differentiate -- we just love. And it’s a curious thing to figure, much like thanks.

Which we give often -- thanks for nothing, for sharing, for sending, thanks for listening. Thanks for dinner. Mindless turns of phrase however fine and culturally useful. And yet, I live under the belief that words mean something – hurting more than sticks and stones and sticking longer and harder than zap-a-gap accidentally dripped on your index finger. Words scar, and words sculpt our ideas and understanding of the world. This, is no light matter.

And so when I say thank you, for reading, for commenting, for your thoughts….I mean it with all sincerity. Thank you.

But intrinsically, I am not a thankful-hearted person. More easily can I say I’m appreciative and grateful, yet these all leave feelings of indebtedness. Which might really be the point -- to know what you’ve received is at cost to someone or something and to appreciate -- yes, to be thankful for -- the gift. To put things in perspective that the world isn’t just you and yours. Yet human nature is not inherently thankful, observe that we have to be taught to share and to say please and thank you -- we're selfish little souls. And although I was taught these things well, my constitution is discontent. Not unthankful, mind you, but thankfulness seems tainted with a satisfied complacency, an acceptance of what one has been given is all one will get -- I’m thankful just to be here, for example.

"Butter Boys" by Eva Zimmerman

But I’m not. I’m not thankful just to be. Anything. It is not greed, but perhaps the disruptive quality of curiosity poking holes in my personality -- my inquiring mind does want to know -- there must be more to it, there has to be. And why? I’m here to do something, to think, to write, and to live with integrity in the definition of words, for they in the end will define me. Words will be spoken of me after death, and will these words be honest with thanks and love? Or rote -- my name filled into blanks in a funeral service template.

Today is Thanksgiving, and today I will put a large turkey in my old gas stove -- more than enough for a small dinner for two, schnups for one dog, and copious leftovers for a week. And today I am thankful -- for words and love – for the love of my family, my dog, and a good man.

Face Down.

2011-11-22T06:50:00.004-07:00

walking against a current
of lunch breakers
cyclists and joggers
heading away
from downtown
on the bike path
as a mob with fire
in their bellies

I stay on the dirt
side blindside
going the wrong direction
but the right way
close to the creek
and the pool
that two weeks ago
drowned a homeless man
face down
staring at trout
just like I’m doing now

Addition.

2011-11-17T06:27:00.002-07:00

These are the days after daylight savings time -- of early rising and setting, of falling back into being standard -- and maybe this is why it feels good. Springing forward rushes, spurring urgency, reminding that you must run hard and fast over the next six months. There is no time to stay at home or indoors or lallygag. The sun beats from its high-noon arched pulpit that the days are longer for a reason. So get busy. Find your reason.

As a child my reason was kick-the-can into twilight. As a youth, it was bathing and blowing cattle and cleaning stalls to George Straight’s croons late into the night. Modern ‘lightricity,’ as my sister used to say, lengthened days as well as work. I wonder if Franklin or Edison thought about that --- now, you can always see the shit.

Then as a college student, I lost track of seasons and daylight -- and my reason -- locking myself into windowless practice rooms for hours at a time, within a city socked in the stasis of fog. For years, life was measured in sonata form by semester.

And now as an adult, I’ve found it again -- my reason, the highcountry. Long days are created for hikes deep in and their opposite. Spent in these glacial-fed-lake cirques, the hours are a microcosm of the larger world. Strange, I always think, being in a place at once expansive and yet suffocating, ages old and yet young – but such opposites tinge love (of place and person); and thus, we not only are able to discover familiar in the foreign, but also foreign in the familiar. Like a lover who daily you learn, and after years turned into decades still find pleasure in re-reading....like a good book or homewaters.....none are ever exactly the same twice. Such opposites, discrepancies if you will, also tinge life – and mine and its parts are summed between abacus wires framed on foothills, equalized on talus.

Yet right now the days are short, and getting shorter. Right now is the time of addition. The sum will be worked out in seven months or so. In the meantime, I add.

If we want to survive, we have to. For what is life but subtraction always at work? Thus we run on, trying to keep the ground we’ve gained, trying to work harder. Sometimes putting up trail signs – not the kind showing the animal track of its namesake; rather the un-named sort following blazes in tree-trunks. Other times, we want no one to follow us -- the terrain being too good, or bad -- and so we nail up No Trespassing signs at overly-cautious 9 ft. intervals. But I want to survive, and I want to leave a trail.

Thus I eat, adding a little weight here and there, in the tradition of mammalian wintering.

I read, laying in a sun patch, spreading like a stain over carpet I should be vacuuming. But instead I add stories and words to a mind already full.

I sit at my desk and tie, adding to boxes from whom many were lost. Some blood stained. Some frayed. All, mirrors of a soul.

I write, to add memories to a life I hope won’t someday be forgotten.

And I wait, to be measured, weighed, and not found wanting.

Down the Hatch - The Backcountry Journal.

2011-11-14T07:41:00.002-07:00

The Backcountry Journal is a new online periodical created and edited by hunter, fly fisherman, fly designer, and writer, Ben Smith of Arizona Wanderings. I am very excited and honored at being included in the first issue.
Read it here: The Backcountry Journal.

Mason Jars, Dead Bugs, and Worship: or, Why a Praying Mantis Should Be the Mascot for N.O.W.

2011-11-10T06:42:00.004-07:00

I developed an obsession with crane flies this past summer. It started as a vengeance of sorts -- Jay and I getting skunked at a backcountry lake...the kind of lake it had taken half a day just to walk to. And then, a half-a-day's sweat and expectations were dried up by crane flies. They were hatching (and being eagerly eaten) all over the surface of the water, but neither Jay nor I had a crane fly pattern in our box. Jay had some Halfbacks though, so we coated them with floatant, and they did just that. But the cutthroats knew better, and we walked the five miles out at dusk, muttering....we really need a crane fly pattern.

A few weeks later Jay trapped one who was flying around the mason-jar yard light, with another mason jar (these might, in fact, be the most useful things in the world aside from duct tape). I sat at the kitchen table and stared at it, as a ghost of the kid who I once was, transfixed before a praying mantis cocooning on a magnolia tree twig in a sun-tea jar. I remember feeling empowered because I'd read that after mating, the female eats the male. How cool. I always felt somewhat jipped by the birds at my mom's feeders in the backyard -- the males were always prettier. The females? Pragmatically dressed to care, feed, and hide the young. You know, the usual. And to my growing mind of feminist leanings, it was a microcosmic view of what I feared awaited me in life. A praying mantis should really be the mascot of N.O.W.

But, it isn't.

And so I continued looking at the crane fly in the mason jar, eventually letting him go to fly around the house until he escaped through the door propped open for Banjo.

Then just a month ago, one appeared dead on the bathroom floor. I left him there, exactly where he lay -- just like a CSI investigator would do -- a body on a scene. The gestalt. That's how I do things creatively -- I type and write and tack pictures up on my wall -- I keep the subject always before me, trying to understand its entirety. For that, is worship -- and worship in some form, is necessary for creation. It need not always be praise-full though, I fully believe there to be a type entered into out of fear, hatred, or in this case, avengement. And sometimes this sort of worship is the truest, making for the most interesting of creations.

So for a good month now, I've swept and cleaned around, leaving him undisturbed as an ever-constant reminder that I needed a pattern after his kind. I'm sure preserving an insect for observation on one's bathroom floor is considered uncouth, and I was glad there wasn’t to be company (at least, that is, expected company; and be it un-expected, well, then I'd have a good excuse for the large insect laying on my bathroom floor. Caught unawares, you know).

Having decided I had stared enough, I picked up and pinned him above my tying desk to look at some more. To worship. To tie. And as I did, I thought about the lake, it’s lay, and how I would go back with this fly. Yes, this next high lake season, I’ll have crane flies in my box.

Crater's Crane Fly
Hook: TMC 100 size 18
Body: Ferruled dubbing loop (brown dubbing)
Legs: Four turkey tail feathers, 1 fiber knotted for each leg
Wings: Brahma hen soft-hackle feathers trimmed on one side and tied back in a loop
Hackle: Brown saddle hackle

Chances.

2011-11-08T06:28:00.002-07:00

I watch for deer
there is no movement
only the sun rising
on the wheel
my hand and a coffee-cup
over miles of slate road lines
reading neat hand-writing
slowly dying out at the end
but chance
like the deer
is always there waiting
for astigmatism behind fogged glasses
to see

On Ethics.

2011-10-31T06:37:00.005-06:00

It was the last day I was in the high country this year, spent at a brook trout stream -- and that was a few weeks ago now. The wind was blowing hard and there was already a lacing of ice on the stream’s hem. I spent hours walking and casting into pools and runs that looked promising. And they were (or I should say, would have been). Trout were there, I could see them even without the polarized glasses I had forgotten back at the car. Not even a nibble though, and I couldn't make sense of it until I came to a large, deep pool, casting my fly at the head of it and stripped it in, creating a wake of avoidance. A Female hovered her redd as males hovered behind her, soon aggressively moving beside…not taking the genealogical chance of waiting their turn. It was a microcosmic dramatic ballet going on in that pool, and my fly had disrupted it – like an audience member rushing the stage -- and I sat and watched for hours. I watched the ageless dance of hormones on the small creek’s bed. They all knew their place, their white-taped X marking their spot on the floor of their world, and they danced upon it until a partner came. I watched the creation of small breaths I would perhaps someday hold in my hand. I watched the dichotomous beauty of love-making with its power and submission, beauty and violence.

Fly fishing has a heritage of a fairly caught fish, and I want to be a bearer of this – even, if sometimes it is a burden and even, if it sometimes means long stretches of fishless days. I suppose my Midwestern Protestant upbringing understands and feels right at home with this, with the weight of expectation in action upon my shoulders -- that there are things you just don’t do, out of principle and also, tradition. Sometimes the answer, “it’s just not right,” needs no explanation.

Fishing to a female on a redd, angering her to the extent that she eventually eats your fly just to get it out of her face, doesn’t fall into the category of fully fair – at least, that is, to me. John Gierach once wrote, “Casting to spawning trout is a little different than what most of us are used to. The idea isn’t to fool the fish into eating something that looks like food because he’s not too hungry at the moment. You’re trying to make him mad.” And even if the fish “eats” it of of anger, there is still a smell of un-fairness in the air. I see a difference between presenting a convincible midge pattern to a fish who then decides it’s food, and essentially force feeding through annoyance. The former, the trout has the decision to make; the latter, you leave the trout no other.

When anything in life is forced, there inevitably comes a sense of guilt. Forcing love, forcing loyalty, forcing a fish to feed, any of these things takes away the free will of the individual and also, the satisfaction in knowing that it is true. As Ted Leeson writes, “I released the fish with no sense of achievement, but only the same mixture of shame and profound regret one sometimes feels after “winning” a protracted and particularly bitter domestic argument.” When you forcibly bend another’s will to yours-- be it of husband, wife, or trout – ruefulness comes shortly after. There is no achievement in wearing a spirit down. Absolutely none.

This is one of those subjects that I’m learning fishermen (at least in the U.S.) just don’t talk about. (It’s much like – and also related to -- the pegged bead issue, which Jay Zimmerman philosophizes about much better than can I, in “Pegged Beads (And My Turmoil About Them)"). Perhaps this subject is left lay because people just don’t know it is an issue, don’t want to have to think about it because it might ruin their fun, don’t know what their stance is, or secretly they feel a little guilty. In any case, it’s hushed to bed, lulling the issue to rest with alluring songs of big fish. But here now, remember what the sirens' sweet song did to Odysseus. Beautiful women, and big fish -- are not always worth the catching.

I got started thinking about this issue when I read that a blogger friend from Scotland was rearranging his plans to go fishing for browns, and instead went fishing for grayling because he saw that the browns were starting to spawn. While at the same time, I was surrounded by hoards of fishermen planning trips towards them. While many European countries have spawning restrictions and laws, precious few American states have spawning date regulations. Wherefore comes this schism in ethics? And since it is there, shouldn’t it be seriously thought about, debated, and considered? To date, I have only heard this whispered about. And yet I think that whenever there exists such a disagreement, one should seriously consider one's stance, making sure one is in rights according to one’s own conscience.

I’ve done much reading and research to assure mine it is so, and in doing came across an older editorial by Karl Licis in the Denver Post. He writes specifically about the Dream Stream and the South Platte and I’d encourage you all to go read his well written piece, "Ethics: Don't Fish Spawning Areas." As Licis states, many of the areas fished hard during spawns still have a decent population (of browns, and the rainbows are stocked anyway), combating the belief that catching spawning fish hurts their numbers and success rate. However, I cannot help but think of the principle about stress on an organism – that, stress on a body disrupts its function, causing ruptures in mental ability, digestion, reproduction, etc. And who is to tell what their numbers would be like were they not stressed during their spawn.

In fact, there are several scholarly articles relating to stress and its impact on spawning trout. One, in the in the journal Biology of Reproduction, “Stress Reduces the Quality of Gametes Produced by Rainbow Trout” (Campbell, Pottinger, and Sumpter), states that such stress “resulted in a significant delay in ovulation and reduced egg size in females, significantly lower sperm counts in males, and, perhaps most importantly, significantly lower survival rates for progeny from stressed fish compared to progeny from unstressed control fish.” Now, are trout stressed when under normal conditions they are caught? Of course they are, but when done carefully and correctly, no harm is done to them nor their eventual offspring. Catching large spawning females comes at cost to them, their offspring, and thus in the long run, yourself. Abstaining from fishing spawning areas for a period of time, may indeed make for healthier fisheries.

All of this writing (and perhaps rambling) of mine is not to convince you, reader, of anything -- the area is grey, not gospel; but rather to urge you to, if not done so already, figure out exactly what the issue is, where your stance on it is, and even moreso, if it has legs strong enough with which to carry you. And I will consider this well written if only we can all just step aside our programmed instant gratification selves even if but for a moment, to assess the reaches of our decisions, whatever they end up being.

So after much thinking, reading, and research, I sat on that high country stream bank a few weeks ago and I made my decision: I will not cast to spawning fish.

And then I went home, glad for once to have not brought a single fish to my hand.

In the Impressionist Wing.

2011-10-27T06:46:00.004-06:00

It's not often that I go down from my mountains -- down far enough to see the whole picture. I skirt the foothills just enough to go to work, but otherwise stay tucked into my canyon, or go further up...and further in. Each time I go down though, I notice I am fitting in less, and less.

I suppose it's very much akin to the mountain people of generations past -- the explorers, mountain men, trappers, miners...the ones who journeyed high to get what their natures couldn't get them below -- in that each time they returned to the cities, they found themselves farther and farther removed. I've seen this happening in me. Once you go, once you take that step, you can’t come back unchanged -- experiences are tattoos on the soul of which you can never truly be rid. I guess I'm carrying on the legacy. I’ve got the ink. It's not so much that it's noticeable on the outside, except for on the rainy-plains days when I drive down and out with feet of snow on the roof of my car and people in the city wonder, where the heck did she come from? Rather, it's inside.

Altitude messes with your state of mind and with your blood. It marks you. A doctor recently asked me at what altitude I lived, because if I wasn’t living at over 7,000 ft., there would be something wrong. My red blood cell count was high for Denver, but to be expected in the mountains. There’s something extremely visceral about that – about being impacted by your environment to such an extent that doctors and their microscopes know exactly where you live, and can guess what kind of person you are, just from a drop of your blood. It makes me feel that I actually have the mountains in me.

The lay of this land makes you feel removed, isolated, but yet very much protected -- like a womb. And like a child in a crib, my home gets as close to the canyon's sides as it can. To replicate the pressure, and remember the enveloping warmth. Sure, there are practical reasons why the canyon houses are built nestled up on the sides -- roads and floods, for example -- but the impractical is that she is nourishing and growing her own, attached to her insides, and I much prefer that reason.

Yet still, I am removed. No TV. No phone. No expansive view, even. I cannot see the sun rise, nor set. But still I know it is there and that it does. My home beds on the canyon’s sides and the view out my windows is that, the side of a mountain. Oh yes, there are the canyon houses with grand views, but those are inhabited by people who only want to see and be seen, and who pay inordinate sums for heating and insurance. Some I suppose, would find my view suffocating, although I find it much more to my liking than breathing down my neighbors neck and having the sides of their house for my view. Plus then, I would need curtains...and I cannot live with curtains. So to some, this small, viewless home with little in the way of modern amenities may sound like a lovely vacation, but surely not for every day use -- dress-down clothes; yet this is my place, my dot on the map, the point to which I’m calibrated to go back to every night -- and like a homing pigeon, I do.


*Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand-Jatte,* by Georges Seurat.

My existence emanates from this dot, rooting me to the earth so I don’t fly or float away on life. That dot is sometimes overwhelming in its nearness. John Gierach wrote that these everyday things are just fields of “distinct dots up close.” Like pointillism -- sometimes, you have to step away to see the picture, to get the meaning of it all.

And so last week, I found myself driving I-225 south, looking west, seeing the mountains as a range – stepping back across the art museum room, letting my eyes adjust. I used to see them every day like this. But now as part of them, I lose sight -- those closest to us elude us, Maclean once wrote. I live with and in them, and yet the entirety of their being escapes me, daily.

Coherent, and even beautiful scenes from a distance, are often chaos up close. They've been organized, by someone, but yet often it seems as if they've been done so purposely to confuse -- or maybe, to force us to step back, think, and re-evaluate what the heck we're doing and what exactly is going on. It makes me think about all the 14,000 ft. peaks I've climbed, with all their false summits. Walking up the mountain's side, you can't see its top...and then, when you think you do, you reach it and also reach the stomach-sinking realization that it is false. The mountain is toying with you, pilgrim, playing with your mind -- but all the while it's leading you on. You can't turn back now, because there is something, waiting, still ahead -- and even if it is only another false summit, still, it is part of the picture.....you just can't see it yet.

What You Don't Plan For, Won't Happen.

2011-10-26T06:53:00.003-06:00

"It's 20 degrees" Larry said, sipping milked-coffee as he looked at the truck's electronic temperature reading. A statement of craziness, right there. 20 degrees, and going fishing. Sure thing. We were each bundled, yet also admitted to not wearing long-john’s. Perhaps this is a fisherman’s forced harbinger for a warm day. What you don’t plan for, won’t happen, right? Or something like that. Or, something completely to the opposite.

I came to find myself sitting in a large white truck –reminiscent of Iowa days -- driving south through Trumbull on a Monday morning, upon a fishing invitation from Larry Snyder, of Fly Fishing Crazy. Now, fishing invitations are sort of like paddle-balls -- most times, the ball doesn’t get very far. Work, geography, time -- Life, just gets in the way, and instead of living it, often times if feels as if it is living you, using you, just because it needs another tap on the board. But Larry is a prompt sort of fellow who has learned that if you don’t do something today, you might not get a tomorrow (or else, he is a horrible paddle-ball player, always breaking the string) --he had emailed me a smattering of dates within days – and we both made life get out of the way, if for only about 10 hours.

Thanks Larry, for a thoroughly enjoyable day!

The day did warm-up, unlike those in mid-January when the high is at 6 a.m. and falls from there, and before 10:00 we were heading back to the truck to take off fleece jackets, and stocking hats, and fingerless rag-wool gloves before heading back to the lakes to continue telling stories while casting to Donaldson Steelhead who jumped in the air like dolphins off the coast. But then came late-afternoon winds moving in a front for the next day’s storm – readying, like unpacking the flannel sheets.

So, we called it. Moved out of preparation’s way. And returning to the truck to pack down, we both noticed how differently our rods were rigged -- yet throughout the day, both of us were catching fish. Larry opened his fly box to put away his Thingamajig and Buckskin Nymph, and I opened mine, catching a ferruled leech and soft-hackle spider as I nipped them off and they fell. “It’s really all in how much confidence you have in your fly,” Larry said.

Right? Right.

You know how it goes -- you have your fly, your go-to, the one you feel most comfortable with and know always catches you fish -- and then someone asks “what’re they bitin’ on?” You tell them, and show them the fly, and they pick one out of their box (or something nearing close-to) to give it a go. But perhaps when they try it, the fish aren’t biting. The fly gets blamed. Logically then, they switch back to their fly, about which someone in the near future will them ask about. And the same thing will happen again, in reverse. We all have our fly -- the one we’ve designed, or like to tie, or caught our first fish on; and so, as Ted Leeson wrote, these flies are fished better and more often, increasing our confidence in them, “and so on in the thoroughly ordinary type of cycle where causes and effects slip in and out of one another.” What makes the fly work? The design, or the amount of faith with which it’s cast out.

Or is it, in the end, just one of those things in that ordinary cycle, slipping in and out of understanding and place.

When the Wind Won't Stop.

2011-10-25T06:32:00.003-06:00

Most things living at altitude are sensitive. And I've always wondered how those able to withstand such a harsh climate, can be so susceptible to change. The trout, tundra, pika, and the krummholz -- blown bare on one side, they don't know what to do when the wind stops -- when there isn't anything to lean against anymore...even if that crutch wasn't anything but pain in the first place.

But then again, if you can still feel the wind, that means you're still alive...

Behind Closed Doors: or, A One-Fish Supper for Two.

2011-10-21T06:15:00.003-06:00

I knew it would come – someday -- I would see with my own eyes what I knew was going on behind closed doors, when I wasn't around. I suppose it must be what parents feel like when their teenagers begin to date -- to "see" people. I didn't date in high school -- thus, didn't cause my parents this grief. Yet I can imagine it's still there when the child is in her twenties and has a house of her own.

Since June, I've lived in a small space adjoining blissful ignorance – although it’s really neither of the two because I've never been that blissful a person, and I know full well what’s happening – but still I've stuck my head in the sand, admiring the shiny grains and granules, and pretending not to feel the heat on my back.

The door has been opened up a crack, a time or two -- I’ve seen other men there next to her. She makes them work hard….for nothing. But she likes me…she has from the first. I took hours with her -- learning her depths and shallows, where she habitates her secrets, what she’ll tell, and what she won’t. I know her. When she forgets, she even tells me some secrets twice. I don’t correct her though. I guard them. I keep her trust.

And so it goes that during my last visit to her, I saw what I didn’t want to – what I didn’t want to admit was happening. One of her secrets, told. One of her stories, ended.

Yes, all this waxing over a little trout pond. I know. But it’s a little trout pond I love -- all full of browns. She’s never easy, and while I’ve seen some others try – with large lures and 5 gallon orange Home Depot buckets – I’ve never seen one succeed. That is, until now.

Here I should state that I’m not against the killing and eating of fish -- I do it myself from time to time, but bucketfuls of browns from a small pond wafts a nauseous reek. I knew it was happening….it had to be. But I didn't want to see it.

That afternoon I stood, admiring the autumn day and how the wind had died down and how I could see the browns circle and take my size 24 dry fly, two men came walking up behind me. I had seen them coming – their olive drab external frame Jansport packs had spinning rods and shot-guns strapped to the sides. Instinctively, I didn’t like them but for the sole reason they were breaking my silence.

Animals are the greatest judges of a person’s character. I don’t write that as my thoughts on the matter. I write that as the truth. And as the men got closer, Banjo started to growl. He has never growled at anyone before like this, and so my hackles rose with his.

“Hey lady….that dog safe?”

“Well….yeah…usually.”

I mumbled, somewhat taken aback by Banjo’s behavior, and preoccupied by trying to manage a strike at my dry.

I missed.

Then the wind started blowing again.

The men rigged and plopped – both bodies and bobbers – while I kept catching, and releasing. One of the men took off with his shotgun, and one stayed put…"to catch supper,” or so he was instructed to do. After some time, I heard a yell and a splash and saw his pole bend. I stared at him from across the pond – like a car accident, or fire, or other scene of misery...I couldn’t look away. I could see the lure in the brown’s mouth from across the way, probably 1/3 the size of it, and it was a decent sized fish. He dug out some pliers and removed the lure. I waited. I watched. He watched me back. Then he bent down, and gently released the trout back into the water.

I breathed again.

But minutes later, his buddy came back. “Catch anything?”

“Only one….but it was too small to keep.”

Sure. I smiled. Too small -- or, my stare was as convicting as a Baptist grandmother’s -- and I do have experience with those.

Another hour passed, and then it happened again. Same man, different trout, smaller than the first.

“Kill it!” the man’s friend yelled, still shouldering the shot gun.

The man paused and looked at me; then, turned his back.

Soon after that I left, not wanting to see another. I couldn’t plug my ears and sing row-row-row-your boat anymore, ignoring the soft sounds coming from the other room. I’d seen with my own eyes. And I walked the dirt path home quietly -- somberly -- knowing in detail what goes on behind closed doors…..wishing I didn’t.

The High Lake Larry.

2011-10-19T08:23:00.002-06:00

Hook: Skalka Scud/Czech Nymph #14.
Thread: Blue 6/0 UNI-thread.
Brown 6/0 UNI-thread.
Wire: UTC Ultra Wire, two strands,
one gun metal blue and one silver.
Dubbing: Poul Jorgensen, SLF, electric blue.
Hackle: Brahma hen saddle hackle, brown.

Northern Pike & Saving Grace.

2011-10-17T06:42:00.004-06:00

“Don’t forget your headlamp!”

“Dog got it.” Jay said as he entered the living room, holding up the mauled device.

We looked at Banjo. He opened one eye. What?

Arriving at the pike lake later than we wanted, but earlier than I expected, we still beat the sun there and walked to the east side of the lake in darkness. Come to think of it, I never did turn on my headlamp. Through cattails, we ended up waist-deep in water that reminded me of an onyx headstone -- rough on the sides, but with a glossy finish. The wind grained light through the stone lake, and its surface looked substantive enough to stand upon. But it wasn’t. I was still standing in water, my waders were leaking, and I was cold. It all looked beautiful though, so I didn’t mind.

Then the sun rose with the kind of light that warms inside but does nothing to warm your skin. It’s beginning winter light. And after coloring the sky rogue -- like a little girl putting on her mother’s make-up, who soon realizes she looks ridiculous and that her mother is calling her -- she wipes it all off after only minutes. Today wasn’t a day for being pretty.

“If we’re going to catch anything, it’s going to be in the next 20 minutes.” Jay said, breaking me out of my thoughts with a wild look in his eye as a splash and torpedo sent wakes out from the reeds. “We jumped a pike.” Just like that. It sounded awfully back-alley to me.

And so we kept on casting -- for the next 20 minutes. And then 50. And then soon enough hundreds of minutes that turned into hours. We’d slunk down the best stretch of habitat and hadn’t caught anything except my one baby-bass. The day’s light was making our prospects dim.

“I need food,” Jay assessed. “Want to head back to the truck for snacks?”

“Sure.”

Because even when you’re not hungry, food has a marvelous way of making you feel like things will get better. It’s some inherency from our forbears, I’m sure. That at the very least, if you have food, you can go on living – and that, holds the possibility of things getting better. Then again, it also holds the possibility that they won’t. Granola and bananas made pike seem pretty possible though and I was optimistic about the outlook. I said so as I threw away my banana peel and walked back to the truck.

Jay looked at me tiredly, his Nittany lion stocking hat sat saltily askew, resting on top of his ears. He had predicted we were going to have to work for these fish today. Jinxed us, maybe.“Well I'm no optimist, but I'm going to go out there and fish as hard as I can.”

And I thought, as we waded back through the cattails and into the lake, that it's like the idea of being saved by grace. You don't have to work for it, and so you expect that it'll cover you...no matter what you do. But what happens if in fact, it doesn't. You question. And so you live every day, working -- and casting -- hard. Optimism and positive thoughts won’t get you fish, anymore than the feathered wings you made when you were eight-years-old got you flight. And while grace is hard to figure out – impossible, maybe – I still believe it’s there, although it doesn’t come easy, and I’m left with knotted shoulder muscles and leaky waders all the same.

Yet I’m also left with the option to fish and live as hard as I possibly can – wearing myself down and out in the process. And sometimes, that's what it's all about in the end, being worn down to a place where you appreciate the little things.

Altitude Sickness.

2011-10-13T07:42:00.006-06:00

I used to get sick in the mountains when I was a kid. There are horribly embarrassing fainting episodes at the Trail Ridge Road Visitor Center in Rocky Mountain National Park and at the top of Pikes Peak, and another involving spewing car-tripping snacks all over a gas station floor near Vail. Never made it to that bathroom. Really, it's surprising my parents took me along on any vacations at all.

But now, I start to feel sick when I'm down in the flat lands. I love my thin air, and early season snows, and special "high altitude" directions on recipes...even though I never follow them. I feel as I imagine fish do, out of water, when I’m below 7,000 ft.

The backcountry season is soon to close, and I feel its pressure as I try to squeeze a few more trips through the door. This winter, I’ll forget exactly what it feels like to walk through an alpine meadow of wildflowers, to stand at 11,000 ft. and cast out into a glacial fed lake, to hear thunder echo through a cirque, and to be reminded that nature really doesn't care if she kills me or not -- and somehow I find that reminder necessary to living. So come late June, I’ll head back up. To be reminded. To go on living.

Although, that’s eight months gestation yet -- the exact same as a moose’s…and no, I’m not sure how that relates other than being interesting – and I’m sitting here tonight depressed -- altitude is my high...the only one I get. I’m thinking about the alpine lakes and streams I visited. Noting which ones I want to check back on next year, and jotting new names down. Closest thing to an address book I’ve ever had.

Snow has already flown. The door is shut -- past curfew, but there's always the slim chance that the-parents-that-be might have forgotten to lock the door. So I'll give it a tug anyhow...just in case I can, after all, get in.

Miss Sue Says.

2011-10-12T08:14:00.006-06:00

aspen peekaboo

like toddlers at storytime

tuesday morning
glimpsing faces and yellow
laughing spaces between

chubby fingers

thinning leaves

falling

too quickly

to catch

What I Want to Be.

2011-10-10T06:30:00.004-06:00

A fisherman. Not a fisherwoman. Not a fisherperson. Perhaps I'm just not PC-enough (which is most likely the case).

I realize that many women will loathe me writing this. Many women backed the suffrage movement until they realized what it meant. Until they realized that it meant they would be treated as equals. That they would have to work out of the home. Have to think about careers. They might have to be single their entire life and have to earn a living for themselves. They would have to pull out their own chair at dinner and would have to open the door themselves. Yet, they could also vote and decide and drink and smoke and wear pants. And, they could think for themselves. Thank God, we could finally think for ourselves.....out loud.

I know full well what this belief of mine means, and what writing this means. It means that as a woman in a male-dominated world I have to be as good as, no --- better than --- most of the men. That is, if I want to be taken seriously. And I do. And I will be. I'm not just a pair of breasts in waders. I'm no trophy, nor are my fish.

I've been here before, in the minority. I've been the only girl in the show ring holding up a 1,600 lbs. steer's head. They didn't make women-specific cattle for me. And I had to train my steers better as a result. Less muscle = more finesse. I've been the only woman in an entire conservatory classical guitar department. The only woman on stage, and they didn't play any slower for me. I had to keep up. And I did. During the first week at the conservatory a classmate said, after hearing me play, "well, you're good for a girl." I cringed. I refused to be good for a girl. By the end of the year I was better than him. And I refused to be "good" because I wore short skirts and low cut tops. I wasn't going to sell out my sex. I won cattle shows and I was a damn fine guitarist. I was good. And not just for a girl. Did I have to prove myself though? Of course.

And now in yet another male dominated world -- fly fishing -- with which I've fallen in love, I know I need to do the same. Segregating the sexes is not any way to make the field more diverse. The Bitch Creeks and Page 6 Chicks do nothing to make women become interested in or feel more comfortable fitting into this sport.

By placement, it's shown who the real fishermen are. And it's been fitting, for the most part. Women have written woman to woman, not flyfisher to flyfisher. My sex still needs to prove itself. Women have done it to themselves. We've haven't risen to the standard of fishermen. We’ve risen to the standard of fisherwomen. And while I know it isn’t PC to say, it’s different than that of being a fisherman. The standard is lower whether people will admit it or not, and even if the title persists, the expectation needs to change.

My kind of feminism isn't sexualized. I'm a woman and I think that's fairly obvious. I don't need to have a pink rod or waders that hug my hips. And I don't need to be overly tough and bitchy to make my point. My kind of feminism, my way of being a woman, means that I will cast and tie and fish as well as men. Not out of spite, or to impress, but out of respect. For you -- and, for myself. I want to fish with you – not against or behind.

I will be the first to admit that there are some very big physical differences between men and women. Some very big strength differences. We aren't the same and I am not one of those women who think that we are. However, not being the same doesn't mean we can't do the same things; only, in different ways.

My fishing partner, a man, told me the other day that I’m a good fisherman. I don’t feel good yet, but I hope to be. Someday. A good fisherman. That, is what I want to be. And that, is what women need to be.

So there. I said it. Out loud.

Parachute Adams and Boulders; or, How We Found Our Bliss.

2011-10-06T06:43:00.004-06:00

It's early morning -- that pitch black kind of early. Later, my sister Erica will ask me what the heck I was doing, being up at that hour on a weekend -- texting her at that hour on a weekend. Are you crazy? Funny thing is though, while my body despises early rises on workdays, on days off there's a different connotation to those words -- early rises -- and that, gets me out of bed.

Coffee spills on my open map, making fingerling trails on my keyboard while I look at a photo glowing internet blue on Mountain Project. That's it -- the offshoot climber path which will find me Erica in the boulders, like a needle in a haystack.

Banjo loads himself into the car. He's getting impatient now. I grab my coffee. And we go...to find Erica.

But first, to find trout. High up. Step after step feels good -- I need to walk and talk to myself. There's an eerie lack of other people on the trail, and I'm more than fine with this. I take more steps. Alpine sage roasts in the sun, and many aspen leaves have already fallen, filling my nostrils with fermentation that's almost off-putting, but not quite. The smell of death without the sting.

Finally I've gone high enough, and find the high lake waiting -- just for me -- there's not another soul in sight. Nestled down in a bowl of willows, nature has built her the opposite of a moat -- surely, in protection of something. Indeed, anything surrounded in such a way must have something worth the getting. So I start down from the trail, soon over my head in the willows. Banjo let's me go first, pretending to be a gentleman, and follows close at my heels...on them sometimes.

After navigating the moat and finally reaching the bank, I discover the somethings -- trout, cutthroats, cruising along the bank -- like small-town highschoolers on Main St. after school. Both usually eating -- Parachute Adams or Big Macs -- this, of course, is entirely species dependent.

The 10% chance of afternoon thunderstorms comes early, on the dot at noon, and in hail form to boot. So I start heading down to find that internet-blue-glowing trail in person, and the needle in the haystack, my sister. I'm excited, and Banjo is too. It's as if he senses Erica will give him cheese puffs or something.

Although she's younger by 3 years, I look up to her -- both literally and figuratively. She may not know it, but I've learned a lot from her in the past few years; mainly, that I can't live my life for anyone else, and I shouldn't even try. She lives with a delightful abandon, and has found her bliss. Bouldering. And just like her horsemanship, musicianship, and understanding of physics and retina-frying lasers, she's good at her bliss. Really good.

I find her chalky handed, and watch her strategize the route and prepare-- brushing, chalking, and ticking. It strikes me as so very similar to my fly fishing, her bouldering -- it isn't just climbing up a rock, just as fly fishing isn't just casting out a bobber from a lawn chair -- and there's a mind game to both.

Now she's ready...and now she climbs...

But soon the hail and rain start again, and we sit in a cave waiting it out, talking and snacking and sharing said snacks with Banjo. When it’s time to start hiking out, I walk away smiling. Happy. Happy because I love my sister, and because I know that we’ve both found our bliss and that we’re living it – with delightful abandon. And I smile in thanks, knowing that I can always find her somewhere, here amongst the boulders.

Goodbyes.

2011-10-05T07:00:00.002-06:00

The family drives a day, arriving in time

for supper around the old butcher’s table with a view
of fallings, failings, and other things that bind
generations together; tendons of tradition,
sometimes strained, or pulled and sore;
but after stretching, they’re stronger for this
new growth in autumn, over dead leaves
on Sunday afternoon goodbyes; it’s tradition,
they always wave at the end of the driveway,
and then the bend in the road’s herding lines,
like a sheepdog’s stare, separating the flock into lives
standing still, and lives driving to pastures, greener
pastures, all the way home and back again.

Rocky Mountain Fishing Frenzy.

2011-10-03T09:35:00.002-06:00

Kyle Perkins (Compleat Thought), Moi, Andy Suttoff (AJSutts Blog), Sean Sanders (Up The Poudre), Gary Thompson (Silk Lines & Paper Hulls), Jen Kugler (Fly Fishilicious), David Goodrich (Back Country Fish Nerd), Larry Snyder (Fly Fish Crazy), and Emily Blankenship (The River Damsel)

I have an experiential belief that people, animals, and even things, live up to their names -- except streams, it seems...fishermen like to keep these things secret, and purposely name them to keep them so (Dry or Bitch Creek, anyone?). A horse named Stormy, a bull named Satan, a cat named Scratch, or a girl named Jezebel. Christening is a serious business. And The Frenzy lived up to its name. So many bodies of water with so little time gets one to feeling -- well...frenzied. In a good way.

Saturday morning I got to fish Boulder Creek with Emily, The River Damsel. There is a story here, but it is hers to tell...

My story? It's simple. This was good. This was fun. I hope there will be another one.

Leg-fulls of Bruises.

2011-09-29T07:27:00.004-06:00

"Why did I wear white....what the hell was I thinking?" Jay scolded himself.

"Don't know...but you hadn't had coffee yet."

"True. But I've got to get over this, I'm not in the military anymore. There aren't going to be snipers at the top of the canyon...I'll live."

"Yeah…I hope we both will."

Because really, we didn't know what was going to happen that day. There could be snipers at the top of the canyon. There could be. Was it a probability? No. But a possibility? Of course. All things are possibilities. Especially, when in unknown territory – which we were.

The plan had been incubating for several weeks, and now it was time, it’s fall -- caddis are hatching. Both Jay and I had fished the river from the North and from the South before. But there was this section in the middle that we hadn't been able to get to. Yet. Because of The Narrows, as they'd come to be called. Impassible except for during low water flows (although, we didn’t know this before setting out, and hadn’t checked the flows that day. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. For, had we gone one day earlier, we wouldn’t have made it through. But then again, there’s always that possibility that we might have…).

Thus, there was this one stretch we'd never fished and which, we postulated, few others had. It was nearing Eden-like fantasies in my imagination by the time we started out that morning. It would be perfect. Untouched water, and trout that hadn’t seen a fly in perhaps, their whole life. They’d have little suspicion that what they were being fed were lies.

And so we schemed -- we’d drop off a car at one end, and drive to the other. Like a reverse float, except we’d be wading. So really it wasn’t like it at all, I guess. But that’s how I thought about it at the time.

What started as small rainbows – small enough to catch on a back-cast, and throw at your fishing partner’s head, all before you knew what was happening (and yes, this did happen) – turned into better and better fish around each bend. The pools got bigger and deeper, and their holdings grew along with them. Here, you could actually feel when you had a fish on. And soon, Jay pulled out a brown -- I knew he’d be there, he said.

I stepped out onto a small ledge on a large square boulder which probably broke off the canyon’s wall eons ago. Who knows for how long it has been hiding trout here in secret. I like thinking about these things – about rocks as protectors – and that not only do you have to outwit the fish, but you have to get past the rock too. Jay said that the pool looked juicy, “you just know there are big fish in there.” I did, but also hoped -- against a fisherman’s nature -- that the trout not be too big. I was standing on the definition of precarious.

But I threw out a few casts anyway – tired, and sloppy – and in what looked like slow motion, my dry fly sank. Huh, must need more floatant. Or, a snag on my dropper? Or maybe…..just the trout I’d been hoping against.

I don’t remember what I said that alerted Jay to my situation at hand. But from behind my shoulder I heard, “A double header!” He had a big fish on too, “Damn…now this is when a net would be nice.”

“Yeah, maybe we should start bringing one?” I questioned.

“Nah, this is more adventurous.”

He’s right, of course.

“Just…..um…hold on to him. I’ve got to get mine off first.” Jay yelled.

So I let my trout swim, tire, get angry, and fight -- and in his fighting, I saw him – it is in these situations that you really see people (and fish for that matter), as they truly are – in fighting, in anger, and in sorrow. A lot can be hid under a smile. It’s an amazing thing, the first time a trout breaks the surface. Before that, it’s like fighting someone in the dark. And sometimes when the light is turned on, you find that their fight was larger than their size. But in this instance, that wasn’t the case. This trout matched his fight.

“Okay…off! Now swing yours back behind you here….there’s a shallow pool, we’ll land him there.”

How exactly I swung around, I don’t remember. But I managed to.

“Don’t let him go down those rapids, Erin! You’ll lose him…..”

Yet even had I lost, fighting him would have been enough. In fact, that might have been a more fitting end. But I didn’t let him go down the rapids. I won. And by luck, my 6x tippet didn’t break.

“Well played, Erin….well played.”

My hands were still shaking. “Now you try a cast in that pool.”

So Jay climbed onto that same precarious ledge, made a cast, and I saw the familiar bend in the rod.

Now autumn light was urging us to pick up speed towards home – urging, that is, once we noticed her; like geese, finally heeding migration, and even when they don’t want to leave just yet, they must. Plus, we didn’t know how far we had to go yet. Foolishly, even though I know that the distance between two points on a map can be deceiving and is seldom ever short, I hadn’t checked the mileage. It looked walkable, and that was good enough. At least, that morning it had been good enough. Now, I wished I knew if it really was walkable.

I must have appeared worried because Jay looked back over his shoulder and winked. “Remember, we’re on an adventure.” I smiled. That’s right. We were. Whenever we go out together, for some reason we never go fishing -- we go adventuring. “Want to go adventuring tomorrow?” I know he means fishing, and my answer is always yes. It’s that mindset of come what may, you keep on keepin’ on. Even, through The Narrows. When you’re in doubt, Jay tells me, the best thing to do more often than not, is charge ahead. When your mind tells you that you can’t make it up that boulder or across that river; that your grip won’t hold, or that all of your 120 lbs. isn’t any match for the current --- really, you can do it. Your mind lies, showing you something that is false. Just like a fisherman to a fish. So I kept on, and took Jay’s offered hand… just in case I couldn’t, in fact, do it. I didn't entirely believe his optimism, but I trusted him. These can be two completely different things, believing and trusting.

And as the sun was setting, silhouetting pines against a grey-blue-sea sky, we finally got back to the car dropped off that morning. A full circle. We’d made it, white t-shirt and all. There were no snipers, or men with shotguns protecting their makeshift panning operation -- but there was evidence of such.

The car ride was silent. My mother always says that this is evidence of a good day -- when everyone is either too tired, or too deep in thought to talk. We got home after nightfall with legs full of a day's bruises. And here I’ll add that’s evidence of a good day too, leg-fulls of bruises.

“Had to work hard for those fish today…had to work for them.” Jay said.

“Yep…and it was an adventure…it always is…”

Simple, Important, Beautiful Things.

2011-09-26T06:00:00.002-06:00

Years back, my grandma, mom and I went down to New Mexico to visit my sister who was going to college in Socorro at the time; and also, to see the migration of Sandhill Cranes. My grandma and mom are avid birders. Although, my grandma now says she is "past her prime" and is content to classify the unknowables as "immature." But, she has years experience and wisdom enough to do so. In other words, she has earned the right.

My grandma has a way of describing things which makes you feel that they are simple, important, beautiful, and infinitely complex...all at the same time. That, it is the little things which are worth noting -- the way the sapsuckers eat the suet all a bit differently -- some make little holes and some peck down one whole side -- kind of like people eating watermelons; the way the cats nap in the sun, soaking up rays like a solar panel; and the way the pastors voice quivered as he read a poem before the service on Sunday morning, like the old sopranos leading the hymns. But why are these things important? She knows...

On one of those early New Mexican mornings, everything was still except the air. It trembled, ready and waiting for the signal -- take off. My grandmother held her hands to her chest....it's so primordial...she whispered. And it was -- this migration, and these creatures, who have been doing this for millenia. The dinosaurs saw this, and it was beautiful and important then too. They knew...

It's impossible to tell from whom and from where the ok finally came, but it did, and the squawking crescendoed until it could no more, climaxing into thin air. The tension released...freely. My grandmother's hands still pressed against her chest, as if she was being raptured up with the cranes. When her time comes, I will think of her this way...with the cranes.

And as I walked out on some carp flats recently, and saw backs out of water -- feeding, doing what they've been doing for centuries, I had the same thought as my grandma did towards those cranes -- primordial. Adapting and changing. Revered by the ancients for their persistence and stoicism, the traditional Chinese dragon has the 'scales of a carp' for their shield, and The Dragon Gate enshrines endurance and courage, and the story of a carp who swam upstream and over the waterfall to be transformed into a dragon -- for, it had the heart of one already. In manicured ponds, for luck; or in abandoned gravel mine mud pits, forgotten -- they survive...they always will. They will always do their thing, these river dragons. They're survivors. Just like the cranes.

Why are these things important? I know...

Stillborn Damsel.

2011-09-20T19:09:00.001-06:00

A hostage to home, her body
young and broken, falling to pieces in health

betraying happiness; when she thought

she was only changing, and growing

into something more beautiful than herself;

and in death, she finally has.

Love Observed.

2011-09-18T20:40:00.002-06:00

Jay’s parents have a tradition -- the kind that has no real start, it just evolves into being over time, the kind of time that can't be measured. He told me about it long before I met them and even then, I knew that John and Kendall Zimmerman have something very beautiful. This too having evolved over time, and like anything good and lasting, it wasn't sought, nor given. But yes, it was worked for. Jay likes to say that if you go panning for gold, you'll find yourself fools; but a farmer digging rocks out of an irrigation ditch will find himself gold. So it goes. And John and Kendall found the latter.

Now the tradition is, that when they eat fish, John always de-bones some fillets for Kendall. She argues back that she is perfectly capable of de-boning her own fish, thank you. Which she very much is. But John looks at her, Eat them, Love. And so she does, saying I love you back.

They’ve always done this, and Jay says he has always known they loved each other because of it. It's predictable and assuring -- like bedtimes stories, and grandmothers baking pies and fathers who leave love-notes around the house for mothers. These little things that children pick up on, and that get incorporated into ideals – often, subconsciously. But still, you come to expect that books will be read, pie will be eaten, and someone will love you. And these things often end up being not so predictable (nor reassuring) in the end.

When finally I did meet Jay’s family earlier this summer, one evening we all sat around my cabin’s old wooden table eating a trout fry of stocker rainbows from the state park up the road. And sure enough, John began to de-bone some extra fillets on his plate, and fork them towards Kendall’s.

“You were right,” I whispered across the table to Jay and squeezed his hand underneath. It was predictable, in the best of ways. And it assured me too -- someone will love me...

Recently I thought about that dinner of trout again, as I was fishing for others; these were browns, to catch and release. And I thought about love – the kind that makes a hunter feed his partner first, and the kind that makes a fisherman save the best run in the river for his.

That afternoon, as I waded on the south side of a fork of the Saint Vrain, and Jay waded on the north, we moved upstream together hitting whatever pockets were in our range. The ones in the middle, we leapfrogged. I became a bit too preoccupied with getting one perfect cast under some hanging tree limbs -- frustratingly imperfect, that -- and Jay got to be a bit ahead of me as a result. When I finally I looked up-river, Jay was motioning back towards a thick middle run...I saved that one for you.

But it's your turn.

It's a good one though…the best…and I saved it for you…fish it!

And so I did.....

She Was Made For Trout.

2011-09-15T17:50:00.002-06:00

We could see only a few trout through the surface chop. They were down deep. And spooky. That fish in a barrel thing, I guess; only this was a very large barrel. These were very sensitive fish.

I had met Dave, the Back Country Fish Nerd, early that morning. Bloggers fishing together is a great experience he said in an email earlier that week...and we should fish sometime...it would be "neat-o." Really, how could it not be? We'd be fishing, after all. Plus like Dave said later, it's interesting to see the inside workings of another blog and its writer's creative processes. What will strike them about the day...what will they write about? So I found myself driving north along a windy highway, as coffee cooled and conversation began. We were headed towards trout -- this was going to be neat-o.

But after a few hours, there was nothing neat about our prospects. Strangely, after much looking we could find no inlet. Water must feed in underneath the boulder field from the upper glaciers we figured, and decided to skirt back around to the outlet. We had to climb over a lot of big talus, and Dave was goat-like -- in his element...

"In New Mexico, I grew up in houses built on this stuff."

"Well in Iowa, my idea of 'scree' was gravel roads."

He chuckled.

I did too....because it's true.

Finally though, we both found a good perch by the lake's outlet. I would have placed a serious bet that Dave was going to fall in trying to get to his, but again -- he was in his element. And here finally, there were bumps and bites...but only that.

"She's being suggestive, isn't she," I shouted over to Dave.

"Yeah, she is...kinda like a woman in a bikini...a little bit too small of a bikini...just a little bit."

"Not the metaphor I'd have chosen," I laughed, thinking that a woman in a small bikini wasn't really that suggestive at all, was it? Wasn't much left to the imagination, was there? But I suppose it was perfect for the lake....because she was showing us that she had trout -- she just wasn't giving us any. "And anyhow, men and Speedos just don't work that way."

"No, they don't. No one wants to see that....men's bodies just aren't made for it."

Except we did want to see more of this lake. She was made for trout, you could tell. But, was being something of a prude -- a very cold prude -- and I liked her all the more for it. In the end though, after making us put in the work, she did let us see a little bit.....and Dave was right, the day was neat-o.

Compliments...

2011-09-13T20:03:00.002-06:00

"You're beautiful, like a May fly."

~ Ernest Hemingway

Many years ago now, on a late summer Iowa evening, I found myself walking through an unfamiliar pasture. It was actually right about this time of year, come to think of it – right about September. The grass was tall and dry, and the cottonwoods were starting to yellow and look like aged book pages. I was there in this pasture, trying to find my cow. The farmer whose field it was walked with me, amused. An early spring attempt at artificial insemination hadn’t taken -- the next month, she cycled. And so this farmer had offered to pasture her for the rest of the summer with his herd -- which included a bull. Lovely, I thought. I had raised her from a bottle calf, and this would be good for her, to be in with a herd and learn to be a cow. Because as it stood, she thought she was a human, or a dog of some sort. While I was a good mother to her, I could never be one of her own kind. So I figured she’d have fun -- “Like summer camp” as my mom described it. Although, I know of no other summer camp where the end goal is impregnation.

In the last month of her stay, I called up the farmer, Chad Henderson, to see if I could come see Angel. Just to check in. It’s a big pasture, he warned. And I knew that, but assured him that she comes when she’s called. At this point, he laughed -- silly girl -- but said that yes, yes he’d go out there with me to see about Angel. I think he just wanted to see if she really would come when I called her.

Chad lived in a big white clapboard farmhouse -- alone -- and was in want of a wife. Jane Austen’s truism about men in possession of good fortunes could also be applied to men in possession of working farms, I'd think.

And so that late summer evening, we walked, and I yelled out "Angel" periodically. He was right. The pasture was big. But we kept on walking, and I kept on calling. In between my bellowing he slipped in, like a paper -- like a secret note under a door...

“I offended a woman yesterday.”

“You did?” I couldn't imagine this soft spoken man offending anyone at all.

“Yes...I did.....I commented on her eyes. They are beautiful. But yeah, I love cows….you understand."

I nodded. I did.

“And so I told her that she had eyes like a cow’s.”

“Oh...she didn’t take that as a compliment, did she….”

He shook his head, looking down, “I don’t think she wants to see me again.”

“But cows have the most beautiful, soft, watery eyes. I know exactly what you mean...gosh, I’d fall in love if a man ever told me I had eyes like a cow's.”

“Someday, somebody will. Don’t you worry. I’d tell you right now, but I shouldn't.”

Flustered, I realized that I hadn’t called for Angel in awhile, and thus decided to do so right then…and called again...and again...and then finally, I heard a moo back. It wasn’t just any moo, mind you, I knew this one. I loved this one. And over a knoll, my Angel came running. I think Chad was scared she was charging, and stepped aside. But she ran right up to me, and put her big wet nose on my shoulder, licking my curls into frizz with her sandpaper tongue like she always did.

Chad smiled, “You were right…she did come,” as he adjusted his baseball cap like men do, with almost a nervous twitch. “And you know what… she has beautiful eyes.....”

And now I sit here and wonder if Mr. Hemingway’s woman understood him and mayflies, and if she understood that being beautiful like a mayfly is a compliment.....just like having beautiful eyes, like a cow.

Catch & Release.

2011-09-13T08:46:00.002-06:00

Read the 3 Reasons by Jay Zimmerman.