They say the dreams that we feel last hours take only seconds in real-time. How about our waking dreams? Memories, and situations we anticipate with pleasure or fear . . .
Let’s stick to memories. Say, for example, your recollection of catching a special fish. Remembering water, land, sky, maybe the hike and wade or float to get there, or perhaps cutting quickly to the take, set, fight, and landing; along with these, perhaps, the feeling you had when everything was over. Does it matter how long ago the memory was first made? How many times you’ve played it before, editing, embellishing, or distilling it to its essence? Does it matter how old you were when the event occurred, or how old you are now? If you retrieved it deliberately, or if it arrived by random prompt or association, does positive or negative make a difference?
What do you think, reader? How long does it take for the mind to fly through or slowly savor the experience of that striper, sunfish, or rainbow? Two seconds? Thirty? Five minutes? If it’s true our entire lives flash before our eyes at the End — I’m not saying I believe this — does the recollection feel rewarding? Rushed? Redundant? Will we really need to take seventh-grade civics again? In our mysterious brain, are there skip-this or slo-mo functions?
Hard to say, so far. And none of those issues occupy me when I come in from the cold, exchange hellos and hugs, chat a little while snacking on a wonderful cheddar sharp enough to cut kindling, then follow a roar into a TV room with a ginormous screen and 17 feet of an L-shaped, deep-brown leather couch that lines two walls. More greetings, gruff endearments, smiles. Space is made, so I settle down with the groan that accompanies any bending of the spine these days. Ah-oh ! — oh. Sounds like somebody folding an origami crane with a twoby-four.
Down, I am fine for many minutes as the pregame hype proceeds, get even better as a glass of good cab appears in my hand. The bowl reflects red, rounded images of turf and teams, faces — individuals, panels. A wide-angle shot shows a human galaxy cheering a dotted line of whirling blue pom-poms while a voiceover discussion debates team strengths, weaknesses, and salary caps exceeding NIH funding for researching major illnesses. This observation, so old it’s a personal trope, bothers me less than an announcement kicking off kick-off:
“Football Sunday!” cries a professionally excited voice.
I cringe. Instantly. Force of a habit still dominant. Here I am, surrounded by family, friends, offspring, the smells of warm wool, wine, the barbeque banquet incoming . . . and yet . . .
Snug as I am, gorged as I will be, I know, hearing these two words leave me riven by regret and remorse. Because —
I could be fishing.
I should be fishing. What am I doing here?
While I hope you’re saner, better balanced, and more insightful, perhaps you know this feeling. Mine’s been with me a very long time.
Beginning with the ’tween years. Growing up in a neighborhood that was a fine blend of Main Street and Lord of the Flies (In the Desert!), there would come afternoons when my pals would fasten themselves to a television set — the Joneses’ actually had color — there to watch other people play a game we ourselves could be enjoying at the high school just a long block away. It sounds incredible even today, so let me emphasize: instead of running around, throwing and catching, shooting, shouting, smacking balls or each other in real-time. . . my Highland Street homeboys turned into houseboys, wedging themselves into fat pieces of furniture or splaying out onto the deep, dog-hair-enhanced shag carpeting all the rage at the time. From dead zombie positions, the sluggards would spend hours barely cheering and booing — Phoenix hadn’t much in the way of pro teams back then, and who liked ASU? — tiny black and white figures who diddled around on grainy screens (except at the Joneses’, where they scrambled through an aqua mist exactly the color of urinal disinfectant).
“Seriously?” I would demand, confronting them with some piece of athletic equipment that I smacked between one hand and the other, for emphasis. “Man, you guys can’t be serious.”
They were. Also two or three years older than me, therefore infinitely senior in rank and appropriately smug. Inevitably, somebody would sneer back something like “Forget it, runt. You didn’t notice, it’s like a hunner-fifty degrees outside.”
“Uh-huh. Like you didn’t notice this is Phoenix, state of Arizona, where it’s a hunner-fifty degrees at night.”
“Don’t exaggerate, man.” “In winter.”
So. Sometimes I would hunker down, staring balefully at stand-ins for our real lives, consoling myself as best I could with Mrs. Jones’s fresh-baked Iowa cookies. Other times I would throw up my hands and set out on a solo adventure, armed with ball, bow, fishing tackle, or maybe a book like Ivanhoe, which was offered in what I found a more active medium. If my exit earned catcalls, I’d reply from a safe distance with the second-nastiest insult I knew: “Bunch a’ wieners.”
Occasionally somebody would break away. Benny, because he was already schizophrenic, and his voices rarely let him sit for long. Simmons, an older runt, who risked a belt beating if his father found out he’d set foot in anybody’s house, including his own before dark. But on weekends, both these friends were buried by loads of chores heaped on as punishments.
Meanwhile, while I actually played more sports than anybody else in my pack — though never so well as Benny, whose father and madness never let him join a league — the rest tried to convince me of the outrageous. To wit, they clearly declared that as fans, they were really more loyal to sports than runts who wanted to play — that somebody who knew batting averages and standings had a commitment superior to the kid who’d hit four for nine during a Pony League doubleheader the night before, including a double off the wall.
Older, senior of rank, they also outnumbered me. But seriously?
Simmons died in a car crash my senior year, Benny by his own hand soon thereafter. Another homeboy, Ed, went on and off heroin, in and out of jail; I never liked him anyway. Of the two remaining, one probably gets a deer every year, maybe doves and a turkey. The other might play a little golf, but I doubt it. Our ranks changed long ago. And sometime later, maybe decades, I fell to one more of the myriad “two kinds of people in the world” theories that extrapolate from insignificant samples to sweeping generalizations. To wit: “There are two kinds of sports in this one world: those who play some as kids, then spend the rest of their lives spectating; and those who play as long as they can, arthritis and aging eyes be damned.”
Like fly fishers.
This may be wrong, as I often write, mainly to avoid impassioned arguments from exceptions, including reports from devotees whose seasons have closed or who suffer winter temps a hunner-fifty degrees below freezing. I get that. But I also remember the assertion of a fly-shop owner who hailed from somewhere in Michigan: “If the weather’s decent, best day of the year to fly fish is Super Bowl Sunday. Usually have the river to yourself.” He sighed. “The truth is, there just aren’t as many traditional sportsmen around, old-school people passionate about field and stream.”
For many years I found this observation often held. Of course, there were fewer fly fishers around then, and some might not have recognized that certain kinds of cultural events — not only play-offs, but also Easter and the Academy Awards — created shore space.
That changed. The tribe grew. And if the newcomers weren’t traditional sportsfolks, a lot seemed to have only moderate interest watching games important to so very many other folks’ lives. This left them time —
— to Play. To be Players. To let unshagged rugs lie, also the kind of deep couches like the one on which I lay to witness an event on a screen the size of a mansion door, hi-def enough to reveal nose pores on close shots . . . listening to a call from the distant kitchen “Pulled pork’s ready, burgers on their way. Make sure to try the garlic mashed potatoes — Sue’s gravy is great. Whatever you do, save room these desserts.”
Ah, yes, I think, salivating a little as I feel my eyes narrowing with fulsome self-loathing. How the mighty slouch and eat and won’t get up. A chilling ennui almost compels me to drag a fleece comforter up to my neck while wondering wretchedly, “Who am I now? Where’s that guy who — two years ago? Three? This time of year, for sure — was prying ice from his guides, flush with success at having just landed a six-pound trout eating salmon fry on a river he had all to himself? So cold, the day, the shallows frozen, the kind of cold that clarifies the call of a single bird from towering, snowbrushed evergreens in a woods speared through by sienna and gray chevrons of deciduous tree trunks and limbs, stark, naked, beautiful and bleak as crossbones.
An interception jolts me to attention. Seven guys and three gals thrash about in agony; John’s up, stamping his feet shouting “No! No! No!” Passions do run high here and occasionally conflict, but no cursing: there used to be “kids” in the room . . . who are here again, now in their late teens or twenties. As close as anybody comes to anger is a Chargers fan, regularly incensed by the home team, shouts “Cheaters!” repeatedly.
Couple of drinks from now, another bearish friend will start predicting turnovers before plays — his record is inexplicably astounding. Meanwhile, twenty minutes away sits a small lake open to fly fishing all year, where cold cutthroats hang around drowned deadfalls like schools of crappies — fish that will actually peck at a nymph dead-drifted down, tap tap tap, as if your yellow marabou tail tastes just fair, not great. In the channel, a stripped streamer, red somewhere, will occasionally take triploids to three pounds. The “trips” are plants some folks resent. Others just wonder why they don’t seem to live longer than a year or two, seeming always to remain between two pounds and four.
The browns, few and far between, have already finished their fall rampage, pinning minnows against reed banks. I once saw them — One? More? — force a boil here, scores or hundreds of small fish flashing into an upward flight that fell back into the water like sleet, over and over again for a minute. Stripers inspire that reaction in the Delta and Lake Powell, so do bonitos off San Diego and Redondo, also salmon chasing herring in the Pacific Northwest . . . but browns?
Maybe yes, in the McCloud arm of Lake Shasta, when they mixed with spots and smallmouths to force massed shad up from the depths. One man’s theory is that the rapid change in water pressure stuns these masses of terrified prey, which I can imagine fluttering down into maws, some smooth-mouthed and gaping wide, others with teeth on their tongues.
When was the last time I saw any of those, I wonder. Paradoxically, frustration at the failure to remember returns my attention to the screen just in time to see a leaping catch at the sideline. When the room has finished erupting, our hostess appears, holding a platter. Everybody contributes something to these gatherings. Now some late arrival brought a slab of smoked chinook, served with capers, sliced red onions, cream cheese, and crackers.
I’m not saving room for desserts, I already know, and we’ve not even plunged into entrees. A little more wine, or? Let me think . . .
About the road to Loon Lake, a long time ago, driving at night through a channel of deep snow, snug as bugs, if too tired to mumble much over the hum of a heater on high. Suddenly, a tawny form flies into the off-yellow high beams, an arc of dark gold paling to the belly, the only mountain lion I’ve seen in the wild.
The back side of Mount Lassen, rumbling down in Viola, my ancient RV, heading north. Snow melts from the rocks on one of those mornings when here and there, for moments, light breaks brilliant through layers of cloud-broken sky. One of these streams through just as a shaggy, cinnamon mass barrels down from the slope above the road — must be moving twenty miles an hour — leaving me with an image of cinnamon hindquarters as broad as bull shoulders, along with a mind roaring BEAR.
One Christmas with in-laws, marooned in China Lake, I headed for the only legal water anywhere near, halfway back across the Sierra’s spine. Above the snow line, I saw a gray shadow slipping across the scrub on a the slope below me, so pulled over, stopped, and for more than ten minutes watched a bobcat casting for scents in a switchback pattern.
An hour later, near my destination, but missing its access, I stopped at a saloon cum diner for directions. A half-dozen locals fell silent when I walked in, eyes peering from faces pulled back into collars of red plaid or sheepskin, some both. A large, long bartender reluctantly stirred behind a cash register. “What can I get you,” he asked in a monotone lacking the least bit of interest.
“Directions, I hope,” said I, raising a map, quickly adding “and coffee, of course. Please.”
“Coffee I can do,” he replies, dispensing with the here-or-to-go issue by separating a Styrofoam cup from a tube of its peers.
It wasn’t exactly the Hotel California, which burned down in the town of Westwood east of Lake Almanor some years ago — but when I looked around, most of the crowd was still staring. Two fellows in a booth had manners enough to turn toward a television in the corner that was silently showing a football game.
Another, sitting at the counter a dozen feet down from where I stood near the barkeep, reached for his 11:00 a.m. draft, then sucked foam.
“Two dollars even,” said the bartender.
I thanked and paid him, then started to spread the map. “I’m trying to find my in to the stream, do a little fishing.”
“Shit,” said the early drinker. “Who in hell told you the creek is open?”
“The regs.”
He laughs harshly. “Oh. The regs. ’Course.”
Like that he was off my Xmas-card list. Unhappily, the bartender returned my gaze and shrugged. “Not a fisherman, myself.”
Maybe not, but in a burg with a total populace that might field a pair of softball teams, coed — he had no idea where I could find a piece of the stream that ran through it?
“Ah. Too bad,” I replied, maintaining a neutral expression. “You hunt?”
He hesitated. “Some,” he said cautiously.
“Why?” draft boy snorted from a foamy snout.
“Just wondering. I saw a pretty big bobcat driving across the pass.” (This was true.)
Foamy Snout smiles unpleasantly as he licks a lip. “Oh yeah? And just how big was it? Why don’t you tell us, huh?”
I shrugged, then pointed out the window toward the parking lot. “See for yourself. He’s in the back seat of the Honda, tearing the hell out of my upholstery.” Draft stood so quickly he staggered.
“What? He’s what?”
I stared at him, silently, holding fast to my neutral expression for a moment before loosing a small but sympathetic smile.
Silence another second, followed by a jolt of laughter from around the room. “Oh, Hap,” somebody muttered, “Hap . . . you are busted, big time.”
“The hell —” says Hap, but the bartender’s voice interrupts.
“Busted Hap. Don’t even say anything.” Then he turns to me with a wide, wry grin. “Uh-huh,” he says softly. “Hap had that coming, but he’s not a bad one, really.” Then, louder, “What Hap meant, about regs sayin’ it’s open? Open legally, sure, but frozen over from above us to I don’t know how far down. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it Hap?”
Hap, now sulking, nods, sucks the last of his foam, and licks his lip.
“Sure it was,” continues the bartender. “Like I said, I don’t fish, but let me look at that map.” He studies it few seconds. “George?” he calls, “I’m thinking ’bout that bend at the top of the park?”
Somebody named George answered. “Maybe. Long shot. But the tower’s up the road from there, so County’s probably kept the road clear.”
The bartender pulls a golf pencil from his vest. “Right here?” he said, drawing a surprising light circle. “This bend narrows, and the current’s pretty fast even this late in the year. If water’s open anywhere — not saying it is — it would be here.”
It was. Barely — a five-foot-wide tongue that could be approached only from a pool below, frozen over with ice of unknown thickness and quality. Dangerous, no kidding, but not to my upholstery.
It’s still first quarter when I come to again. We lead by ten. Sophie, my daughter, crosses in front of the screen and slides up beside me with a heaping plate. “Hello, Father,” she says — a faux formality she adopted as a child. “Mom thought you’d like this.” I take the plate in my left hand as she kisses me on the right side of my forehead.
Wait a minute, I think. What could possibly be wrong with this moment? Since when is watching always a sin? And why haven’t I ever questioned that? What —
“Did you have some of the smoked salmon?” Sophie asks. “Don’t tell me you haven’t. . . ”
I look at the enormous hors d’oeuvre plate I’d all but forgotten. The king salmon slab’s eaten down to the skin in places. I notice it was smoked in two pieces, fore and aft, these brought together to plate.
This thing must have been twenty-five pounds, I think — and thrill to imagine it leaping into the sun, somewhere.
