Rain On The River. Jim Dodge

fifty,

      it consoles.

      Another transformation

      changing nothing.

       Decomposition

      I don’t know

      and I don’t know

      what to do about it.

      I simply hit a point

      where I lost heart for judgments

      and was swept

      into the voluptuous, harrowing

      complexities composing a single breath.

       Psycho Ecology

      AN HOMAGE TO WALT WHITMAN

      Reality is the work of imagination.

      Imagination, the flume of emotion.

      After all the tears and laughter,

      emotion empties into spirit,

      and spirit condenses on reality

      like dew on a leaf of grass.

       Life of the Spirit

      A salmon leaps.

      Transcend what?

       Aweigh

      Vicky and I were steelhead fishing on a secret riffle of a nameless Pacific Northwest river, perhaps the best iron-head water between the Russian and Bella Coola, to which you may receive directions for a thousand dollars cash. It was late afternoon, the sky the color of wet ashes, the river high but beginning to clear. I was drifting a roe-glo through the upper stretch of the run when I felt a slight pause in the tick-tick-tickity rhythm of the pencil-lead sinker bouncing along the stony bottom. I set the hook. The rod tip bowed and began to pulse, the heavy, solid throb running through my shoulders.

      “Fish on!” I hollered to Vicky forty yards downstream.

      She turned and looked at me, yelling back, “Really?”

      For some reason, this is the usual response of my fishing companions, leading me to believe they regard me as either an astonishingly inept fisherman or an insanely reckless liar.

      “Really!” I assured her at the top of my lungs, lifting my doubled rod as proof before turning my attention to the battle.

      Actually, it wasn’t much of a battle. The fish was sulking in the strong mid-channel current. I tightened the star drag slightly and applied some pressure; the fish turned lethargically and headed downstream. I lightly thumbed the spool; at the added resistance, the fish swung toward shore down by Vicky, who had just reeled in and started walking my way, no doubt to offer encouragement, counsel, and general assistance.

      As my line sliced toward her, she stopped and peered into the water, then shook her head. “Hey,” she called, “you’ve got a big ol’ sore-tail salmon.”

      “No,” I begged her.

      She pointed emphatically a few feet offshore. “I can see it. Big, beat-up sore-tail.”

      I took the Lord’s name in serious vain–no wonder the fish wasn’t fighting–then tightened the drag to reel in the fish for quick release. The fish offered little resistance until it was about twenty feet away, then made a sullen move toward swifter water. When I clamped down, it swung back, passing in front of me. Sure enough, it was a spent salmon, its rotting fins worn to nubs, the battered body mottled with patches of dull white fungus.

      But something wasn’t right. The sore-tail was languidly corkscrewing along the bottom, a movement that didn’t match the steady quiver I felt through the rod. Then I saw why: The sore-tail, in blind expression of the spawntill-you-die imperative, was engaged in a last-gasp courtship of the fish actually connected to my line, a steelhead longer than a yardstick and as deep as a Dutch oven.

      Hearing Vicky move up behind me, I whispered, “That sore-tail you saw isn’t the fish I have on. It’s trailing my fish, which is one humongous hog of a steelie, putting on some spawning moves.”

      “Sure it is,” Vicky said.

      I worked the steelhead a few feet closer, telling Vicky without turning my head, “Step up easy and see for yourself.”

      Vicky stepped up easy, very easy, but not easy enough.

      The riffle was about fifty yards wide. With the power of a nitro-fueled dragster, the steelie crossed it in one second flat, leaving me blinded by the mist sprayed from the spool mingled with smoke from the drag. Struck dumber than usual, I simply stood there as the whopper steelie made a sharp right at the opposite shore and streaked downstream. I watched the line melting from the spool. I felt like my nervous system was being stripped from my body through my solar plexus, a rush beyond sensation toward something as clean and empty as my spool was about to be if I didn’t stop the fish. But I didn’t want to stop the fish. I didn’t want the feeling to end.

      The spool was almost down to the backing when the steelie abruptly swung back into the heavy current and dove to the bottom, slowly lashing its head.

      I wanted to tell Vicky to go home and pack some grub because I was going to be there all night, but when I finally got my slack jaw working I discovered I couldn’t utter the few words I could remember.

      Train wreck in the cerebellum. Synaptic bridges collapsed.

      I concentrated on the basic sounds, managing something close to “Biffeegaaaagh.”

      Vicky cocked her head. “You what?”

      “Big,” I gasped. “Godzilla.”

      At the moment, though, it felt more like I was hooked to Godzilla’s heart, thirty pounds of pure throbbing force, the rainbowed rod pulsing steadily as the fish hung in the current, gathering power for another slashing run.

      Then the hook pulled out.

      I felt like a lover had just hung up the phone after telling me, “I’m sorry, but it’s over.”

      Like I do when the Dream Joker whispers, “You won 100 million in tonight’s lottery,” and I wake up broke as usual.

      Unplugged a heartbeat short of Divinity, a nanosecond shy of Solid Full Circuit. Lost. Looted and left behind. Mentally exhausted, emotionally gutted, spiritually bereft.

      Vicky helped me back to the car.

      But as I fell asleep that night, I remembered the wild power of the steelhead’s cross-river run, remembered it from my bones out, in nerve-meat and blood, that rush of glory as I emptied into the connection, joined for a moment, each other’s ghost, then blown away like mist on the wind. And my gratitude for that moment’s nexus overwhelmed the despair of its loss–as if one can truly possess or lose anything, or the connection ever break.

      In fishing, as the moment of experience enters the future as memory, it’s prey to seizures of enlargement and general embellishing. I feel sure, however, that that steelhead weighed close to twenty-eight pounds. It’s possible–and, given a few more years of voluptuous recollection, almost certain–that the fish would have tipped the Toledoes at over thirty, making it easily conceivable that I’d hooked what would have been a new state-record steelie. But even taking the distortions of time and memory into account, ruthlessly pruning any possibility of exaggeration, carefully considering the Parallax Effect, the Water Magnification Variable, the Wishful Thinking Influence, and the El Feces del Toro Predilection, I would lay even money in the real world