Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice, and this is true of the forest, as well. The redwood grove is an ever-changing world. Time seems to stand still. But from minute to minute, shadows shift, and from hour to hour, vegetation moves with the sun. The plants are communicating with one another through aromas. Insects are tunneling in the soil, slowly turning up small mounds of earth. Month by month, needles drop from conifers and leaves fall from an understory of deciduous trees to become the duff on the forest floor.
It is a quiet world. The deep, spongy duff dampens sounds. The air is fragrant with the spiciness of bay laurel wafting up into the conifers. Closer to the ground, there are aromas of ongoing decay: of fungi, black humus, rotten leaf mold, of forest detritus gnawed away to dust by insects. The mulch on the forest floor is releasing ammonia and amides, a feast for molds that will turn it into nitrogen to be dined on by bacteria. Life on earth is the story of the interaction of living things with each other and their surroundings — in a word, cooperation.
Here grow the giant coastal redwoods. They are the tallest living things on earth. Their auburn trunks rise skyward from a jungle of ferns, mossy rocks, and shamrock-green sorrel. The trunks of the ancient redwoods are free of branches for the first one hundred to two hundred feet, which accentuates their great height and immensity. Their thick, reddish bark feels soft as velvet. Up and up they climb, rising above an understory of tanoak, alder, vine maple, and other companion trees until their feathery branches seem to sweep the clouds. They seem a breath away from immortality. We are looking at trees that were alive at the time of Columbus, of Christ.
Water is moving up those giant trunks, tapped by surprisingly shallow roots supping from the ground. Moment by moment, the cloud of transpiration given off by the forest rises into the air to mingle with the breath of all the other plants in the world, a dance of wet and fresh swirling currents that form the earth’s atmosphere.
This stand of ancient redwoods must be to the world’s forests what the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was to the High Renaissance. Low winter sunshine is filtering into the naves through clerestories in the forest canopy. The slanting sunbeams cut through gloom, backlighting trees. The celestial light reaches all the way to the ferns, leaving the woodland in patches of shadow and sunshine. The almost universal instinct to regard a redwood grove as a cathedral only begins to suggest its spiritual dimension, if by “spiritual” we mean the residue of awe that has not yet been erased by modern life.
There’s nothing halfway about the Pacific Northwest. The forests have the biggest of everything. The world’s tallest tree (redwood). The tallest spruce (Sitka). The tallest hemlock (western hemlock). The tallest cedar (western red cedar). The tallest pine (sugar pine). The tallest true fir (noble fir). The Douglas fir — not a true fir, but a genus all its own — is the third-tallest tree on earth and grows alongside redwoods. Climate, soil, and rainfall by themselves don’t explain the size of these trees. Other wet regions of the earth don’t grow trees this big. Biologists think the trees of the Pacific Northwest adopted immensity as a solution to a unique regional problem. It rains all winter here and is dry in the summer. Did these trees increase their intercellular space in order to store more water? Whatever the case may be, redwoods also get a steady amount of moisture from summer fogs sliding in off the Pacific.
I see that the winter trees are pollinating now, the redwood branches dropping an unbelievable number of seeds on the ground. Virtually every plant in the winter forest shows buds or new growth. A hundred kinds of mushrooms are sprouting in the dampness. Winter is the season of slow growth in the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest. Cold air is kept at bay by a steady onshore movement of relatively mild ocean air and by the presence of eastern mountain ranges such as the Cascades, which block most of the downward drift of polar air, keeping arctic blasts well away from the coast.
The trees aren’t the only things around here that come in jumbo sizes. Down the centuries, these same redwood spires have looked upon countless runs of salmon and steelhead. The world’s biggest salmon (chinook) and largest rainbow trout (steelhead) are native to the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. This particular river in the redwoods is one of their strongholds. And that is way I am here today. A path through the towering grove leads me down to a gleaming gravel bar and the sound of rushing water. The grandeur of the immaculate canyon is mirrored in thousands of yards of sunlit water. Configurations of rock give the river its timbre and tone. Water clean as air flows into emerald pools that mirror looming redwoods. And the bedrock is shot through with serpentine, a mineral with a soft, jadelike color that adds to the otherworldly hue.
The river — like the forest — is new every moment. Heraclitus was right. Even the amount of oxygen in the water is changing constantly, moment by moment. Mostly these changes are imperceptible. At other times they are recognized externally by a feeling in the atmosphere, perhaps a change in barometric pressure, to which birds, insects, and even mammals respond. Fish react to meteorological phenomena just as avidly as avian and terrestrial life. One moment steelhead can appear somnolent — the next alert, active, craving to do something. It’s as if someone had thrown on a switch.
How will they be acting today? Hemingway said something about “the last good country,” and there is always the fear that the steelhead you caught yesterday might well be “the last good fish.” Catching one is always something of a moonshot. And steelhead are a “threatened” species. I stare at the river, as if I might be able to read the fate of our republic in it. I don’t have a social conscience. I have a personal conscience. Any threat to our environment I take personally.
The river blew out last week in a storm. Fortunately, it recovered quickly. So I am back with a fly rod for another dose of enchantment. The salmon run ended weeks ago. Some arrived early, others late — nature keeping her options open. Winter steelhead came in behind the salmon, bringing more marine nutrients up from the ocean. And new fish arrived overnight.
I think the river in wintertime must smell extra heady to a returning fish: castoff leaves and conifer needles flushed by storms, old salmon carcasses, and an overflow from tiny creeks that might have been dry during the summer. The lower pools likewise must be receiving an abundance of fresh aromas coming from miles upstream, where the forks flow through thick forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock, ponderosa, sugar pine, and rare Port Orford cedar before meeting the Pacific amid the glories of the redwoods.
The water is breathtakingly pristine and transparent. You could read the Wall Street Journal in it, provided you were so stupid as actually to want to do that. I notice a steelhead flashing against the substrate in the pool. It is finning very near the bottom. The steelhead flexes its body two or three times, as if to capture and reflect back available light. This series of rather bright arcing flashes describes a kind of clockwise motion against the stony, illuminated bottom.
I tie on a Muddler fly, hoping for some magic. Once back from the ocean, steelhead stop eating in any meaningful way. It is a fact that steelhead rise more frequently to twigs and leaves than they do to living or drowned insects. The ideal steelhead fly would imitate a twig. So why do they take our flies? Is it aggression, mere curiosity, or some latent feeding reflex? The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery.
I wade into the river cautiously. The current is stronger than it looks. The pale greenish water in the shallows is much deeper than it appears. Taking a tumble would be like falling into the world’s largest and coldest Tom Collins.
I fish the pool religiously for about an hour. The canyon is a feast for the senses. But the steelhead might as well be in a coma. So I hike the gravel bar upstream to a narrow spot where forest shadows stretch halfway across the river. One particular shadow looks as dark and detailed as a Rembrandt painting. I decide to fish it for purely aesthetic reasons. I study this shadow, hoping it will tell me something. With shade on the water, there is little contrast in the pool, and what lies below is mostly invisible. The redwood canopy paints a highly detailed reflection on the shadowy surface. The surrounding redwoods are lovely, mirrored in the water, but they cut off my view of the bottom. The riverbed is a floor of pebbles and round stones and larger rocks under a streaming current. Not knowing what’s there can be an incitement to a pleasing act of the imagination. It can also lead to woolgathering. All reflections are viewer-dependent. Philosophers ask: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If there is no one around to look into a pool, can a reflection exist?
A tug on my line interrupts one of the great ideas of Western man. My reel bursts into an aria. Line comes off in spasms. The rod is bending under a very satisfying weight. I can feel a steelhead shaking its head in disbelief. I lean back on the living weight, and the steelhead jumps out of the river. The reel continues to sing like Maria Callas as the steelhead dances downstream. For a moment, I have to wonder if the ocean-going rainbow on the end of my line has ever felt any kind of restraint on its personal liberty before this moment. What is going on inside the delicate neural pathways and synaptic junctions of its brain? Maybe it’s better not to ask.
I am fighting the weight of the current as well as the fish. Again my reel lets loose with another burst of coloratura. It takes me ten minutes to get this fish under control and another five to bank him. Soon I am admiring this bright traveler before releasing him back into the river. If all goes well, this male steelhead of eight pounds will complete a journey that is one of nature’s more obvious wonders.
The high morning sun is warm at my back. A fresh breeze in the canyon mingles the scent of both the river and the forest. I hike back down the gravel bar toward a run of gorgeous water that, like all the pools in this stretch, reflects the green canopy of the stunning redwoods. This looks like as good a spot as any. The water in the rather transparent shallows darkens to a deeper emerald the farther out I wade.
For the next few hours, I cast and gawk at nature. Nothing much is happening. Are there any steelhead in this run? Are there even any more left in the river? Hard to tell. As Donald Rumsfeld said, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” If the trout are lost, smash the state. Who said that? I think it was Dick Cheney, another fly fisher.
I hike to another pool and wade in. I roll cast line onto the water, make one or two false casts, and shoot it out as far over the river as I can get it. At first I angle my casts slightly downstream, but this way my fly doesn’t get down far enough, so I start casting straight across to give it more time to sink. Winter steelhead won’t chase a fly very far because the water is too cold.
I am working the fly through the tail end of the pool when I feel a tug on my line and pull up. A steelhead vaults out of the water, returns with a splash, and begins kicking up a boil on the surface. The irregular ratcheting of the reel is replaced by a high-pitched Doppler scream as line disappears off the spool. More than a hundred yards of backing go out before the steelhead jumps again at a spot in the river that appears to be impossibly far downstream. I back out of the water and start running on uneven cobblestones, trying to contain the fish. I can barely keep up as I am pulled downriver. I stumble over rocks, unable to check the flight of the panicked steelhead. More backing comes off my reel. And I am running out of gravel bar. I have to go back into the water again, but it’s much too deep here. I bark my shin against an unseen rock. Finally I find myself cornered against a river boulder and can’t pass. By now, I recognize that I am feeling only the weight of all that line and backing out there in the river and that I have to reel in.
I share the moment with a golden eagle that is floating high above the redwood spires. What the bird thinks about the piss artist with a fly rod remains unknown to science. The late afternoon light slants into the river. On the far bank, a damp thicket disappears beneath the towering monarchs. The redwoods on this river have been standing here for a thousand years. They are backed by the immensity of existence.
As for our role in this stunning tableau, who can say?
