The Master of Meander: Destination, September

Master of Meander – it’s a title I take to myself somewhere in the Central Valley, hurtling through level darkness and flinching as insects suicide against my windshield.

All right then, the bugs aren’t dying by design, and I’m hardly hurtling: Viola, the first vehicle I’ve ever named, is an ancient Toyota truck saddled with two tons of fishing castle. My darling she is, but a rattletrap still, with hardly enough torque to climb a curb. No matter: on 505 she hits sixty and I lean into the road, so pleased that I sing with the rattle of pans. It’s a good speed, after all, since I don’t know where I’m going.

It’s not my job. Or it wasn’t for a decade, while I had a faithful fishing partner who took great pleasure in Forest Service maps and the newspaper’s angling reports. For weeks in advance, he’d trace drainages on checkered maps and measure gaps between topo lines. After a nod to some chapter from Jim Freeman’s California Trout, he’d say softly, “I think this place would be good.” It fell to me to fall in and out of the truck.

Then he married well, twice – first to his own business as a private investigator, then to a woman who went into his business. Three years it’s been now, but I think of him still as I pass the Winters exit.

We fished Putah Creek together before the onslaught, before Z. caught a nine-pound brown on a dry fly on the pool near the dam, then sent there every damn fool who bought a rod from him. Oh, there were browns there then, believe it, sought mostly by skulking locals baiting the beasts with shiners and nightcrawler gangs. Now the chill tailrace is a neoprene jungle.

Don’t think about it; drive. It’s only nine o’clock, and Viola’s steady shaking is settling my mind. Besides, the Aladdin’s just a cup shy of full.

I-5, up the Sacramento. I could stop at Tehama, cut across to Los Molinas. I’ve taken shad there, from the boat of Humberto del Rio when he still worked the river. We’d watch otters play in a cottonwood grotto while swinging comets through the current, imagining the little quicksilver tarpon, one behind the other, stretching single file to the bay, to the sea, to the drift nets. At night, Humberto and I lay in his boat, gorging on pickled shad while drinking icy tonics. What would it be like to catch the fish of your dreams and love the loveliest woman at the exact same time?

A year later Humberto called me up to write a story on squawfish. “They’re killing the salmon, just killing them. Thirty or forty of them marry the hens going upstream. The bucks can’t fight them all off the redds.’ Fish and Game told me that the squaws make a career of lying in wait behind the Red Bluff diversion dam, ambushing smelts disoriented by vertical eddies.

I wrote the story and sold it. Like everybody else, too late and too little for the salmon. Humberto of this River left it for a steady job on a lake. A minor matter of feeding his family.

No, not the Sacramento; not this time. Maybe the Feather …


At Corning, I contemplate the road to Oroville. Below a bridge there I took my first steelhead on a fly, one cold morning, only minutes after landing a bright Chinook hen of nearly twenty pounds. An hour later, I took a buck of nearly 50, stripping him in by hand after he ripped the handle off my reel. A head like a German Shepherd, he had, no kidding.

Then there’re the odd little bass ponds nearby, fecund to stinking, and the secret population of stripers …

But Oroville at night is a nasty gamble, the kind of place where, in the dark reaches near the dike, you want to sleep with a blued-steel companion, reminding yourself of how the safety switches off to the left. The last decision of the evening would be ‘buckshot or slug?”

The Feather? I think not.

I head east, or west, out of Red Bluff, with Viola’s tiny tank full, chugging uphill either way. I could swing into Lassen, launch my tube with the Manzanita Armada, learn again not to tempt fate by fishing a #4 woolly bugger on 6X tippet. I could try a neighbor of that water where, long ago, I released my first trout longer than two feet …

Or I could turn toward Indian Creek to test my axles in the dark while climbing reaches so windswept that Viola’s shakes turn to shudders. The same has happened to me there, on those high roads, in a night that felt less solitary than full of wolves. There’s wildness above Indian, truly, eerie echoes and gates with padlocks the size of a melon.

The Aladdin pours a last cup. By the cab light I search out a fine blue line on a battered map. The Master of Meander has wearied, now, and so there slips from a synapse a better memory –

September morning, waking in a meadow, determined this time to do it right. Past a curious quartet of horses, I dragged a window-screen seine, reward from a garage sale, where an excited old fellow thrust it at me with a shout – “You know what it’s for! At last, somebody. You take it free, son, so’s it has a good home.”

It proves its worth right off by helping me wave away an inquisitive stallion. And in a clear little riffle it finds for me … what is that thing?

Ignorant I was then, even more than now, but in my vest was a simple fly tied to look just like this whatever the screen had revealed. Yellow body, black head …

I took half a dozen trout that morning. And the first fly I ever tied myself was an attempt to mimic this yellow whatever.

A tiny line on the map. Yes, that’s the place I was looking for, had been all these miles and hours; would find.

Dream and drive.

Three o’clock in the morning and I’m trembling. My hands want to stay wrapped around the wheel but there’s coffee to be rid of, a moonlit meadow at which to marvel, smells to suck into the back of my lungs. I hear the stream running over rocks I turned over so long ago. Near the fence a mare stares over the back of her foal. I return to Viola, drink to her and the morning – when I search Viola’s cupboards for that yellow fly I once tied, finding it at last in a gray box full of ‘firsts’ – streamers created, apparently, to imitate road kills. I fish the crude caddis and take a half-dozen rainbows, yes I do, then seine the stream again for fun.

The pupae are more orange than I remember, so I cannibalize Viola’s carpet for the dubbing to match, tie, return to catch browns. How is that?

Watching hoppers flee at noon I laugh when I realize their legs, emerald iridescent, look just like Flashabou strands I have in my case. I sober fast when I find I’ve lost the gray box amidst a myriad of gray stones; after mourning this for hours. I find a Swiss Army knife in the dust while trudging back to the truck.


And I believe that aII along this was my destination. That it was mystery revealed, reward collected for risk taken – fortune favoring the ambivalent, if you’re not quite so kind. And so it should happen, I think, when you set yourself free in a September, making of yourself free in September, making of yourself a Master of Meander.

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