Restless Waters: Caroline

Restless Waters: Caroline

Great billowing clouds of dust, like horizontal tornados, chase my truck down the road. Rocks fly in a wide spray, tumbling into the ditch as I rooster tail around a wide bend, tracing a dip in the landscape scraped out by glaciers. Overcorrecting, I zig and zag, taking my half of the gravel roadbed out of the middle. Pulling over to the right as I crest a rise, I see the river making its serpentine way through the valley below. With a mile to go, I feel my pulse rise, and push the gas pedal to the floor. My mind races on Caroline.

The access lot is empty. A thin layer of cloud covers the western half of the sky like a thin sheet pulled across an azure mattress. The sun is still low on the eastern horizon, but it is already hot, and humid. I wipe perspiration from my brow as I wrestle with boots and waders. A pair of barn swallows, nesting on the eaves, dive bomb my head as I retreat from the commode. Glancing at the bridge and the water upstream, I think of going toward the Lazy M, but it’s too close, too easy, and probably too heavily fished. I climb the ladder over the barb wire, and head off through the hummocks.

Aiming for a spruce grove against a distant hill, I cut a diagonal path through a mile of pasture. Clouds, no, oceans, of mosquitoes lift with my every step. It’s as if they sat in the wet grass, waiting in vain for a cow that would never come. They had probably given up hope of ever making a bite. Now I rescue them. The whine is frightening. My waders looked like a scene from a horror film. They can’t bite through Goretex, I tell myself. It’s no use to hurry, each step made in flight gives rise to a new airlift. So I spray my face and neck with DEET, and slog on through the bogs.

There are plenty of places to leave the field, and head for the water. Miles of river, if the ribbon could be straightened, I shun. Bends I have never seen, lay just beyond the wire. But I push on, the combination salt and bug spray sweat burning my eyes. When I get to the single strand of wire, the kind with no barbs, I pass the rod under the fence, and very gingerly climb the corner rails. Leaping clear of the electricity, my boots sink in the black goo with a resounding smack that flushes a cow moose and her calf out of the willows. Stuck in the muck, I wait.

Looking back, I can just make out the miniature red form of the outhouse on the far horizon. I can’t see the car or the road. At last, cutting sharply toward the tangle of trees, I push through, and peer out over the shady, black water. Looking upstream, I see the place, just as I remember it. A long, curved, blue spruce leans out over the water then rights itself. Long strands of dry grass shift slightly along the bank at the base of the tree. Weeds shiver this way, then that, in the slick water above and beside the pool. Easing into the river, I very gingerly walk upstream to a fairly safe distance, then sit down on the bank.

Cedar waxwings cavort in the willows. Western tanagers, a tequila sunrise splash of color in the dark edges of the forest, flit from limb to limb in the larger trees. Something scurries through the thick weeds behind me. A muskrat perhaps? Then my fish rises.

It’s a left hander’s lie, and in that regard I am in luck. The hatch is trico duns, not spinners, and in that regard I am wanting. A smaller fish, an insignificant fish, begins rising between and below my fish. But in this stream it means I will have to take it out, or put it down and with it, my fish too. So I drop an ant toward the near shore, and yank the small brown downstream end over end, releasing it into the pool behind me.

I sit for nearly an hour, thinking about Caroline. It’s the gentle, warm winds drifting in off the aspen parkland. No, not exactly. It’s the songbirds chirping eloquently all around me. No, not quite right. It’s the way the water gurgles and whispers its river song. That’s closer to it. My fish rises, and I know why I fell in love. It’s all her spring creeks. I never had a chance!