Isolation Diary
Running a bit late getting
this issue of SHJ out. Lots of excuses, not the least, a week on the road
dodging rest areas, motels & restaurants in an effort to avoid the C virus
while getting home from wintering in Cali.
Not down to hoarding toilet paper, just taking common sense precautions where
possible.
Hope you all are keeping
well.
Got through the border on the
last day it was open, gone up to see Bruce Kruk & gather some gear I left
with him last fall. With the border closed I’m going to miss fishing with
Canadian friends & bummed about that. Friends on the U.S. side,
hunkered down, aren’t coming around. Only a few cars on the river road all day
with nobody going through the border.
Heedless, the birds are going
on about their business, the recently arrived robins working the russet ground
between patches of lingering snow. The first swallows showed today, always
landing just this side of the equinox. If they returned next year to find us
gone, all of us, would they give it a thought? We haven’t been easy to live
with…
Social distancing? An
excursion down an inviting race or tailout. Isolation is exquisite next to a
river; the sound of water over stones like a thousand hands clapping in a hall
forever lonesome.
Good to be back out on the
home water. The trout are still there, though not giving themselves up easy.
That’s okay. They are worth waiting for. They know no allegiances or patriotism
or borders, quietly suffering catastrophe without much help & very little
mercy, yet they persist. But they do exact a tax, & the taxing is energetic.
The river is low, in perfect
shape for swinging. Hiking in over the dry riverbed I found a skwala stonefly
sunning on a stone, a healthy #7, so I started with a suitable pattern &
swung it down a quarter-mile run for nothing.
So I changed flies, switching
to a #2 Red Demon. Pre-spawn rainbows like red.
And that did turn the trick on
a fine, colored-up UC tanker (a ‘tanker’ is a trout of 24’ or better).
I went out late, seems like
our trout bite best in the late afternoon this time of year, when the water has
warmed to the highest temp of the day. The second trout came as the sun touched
the ridges, not quite a tanker, though a strong & determined misbehaver just
the same, & elegantly dressed for the party.
The Reel News
At the Tying Bench
Seeing Red
It’s a fact that pre-spawn
rainbows are fond of the color red – & the same is true of cutthroat, brook,
brown trout & landlocked salmon. What is pre-spawn? Inland trout generally
have a two-month spawning period, rainbow & cutthroat in the Spring, &
brookies & browns in the Fall. I consider the pre-spawn to begin a month
prior to initial spawning, when trout are coloring-up in anticipation of the
mating rituals to come. Red is the color of passion, & passion is beginning
to bloom in trout minds during the pre-spawn. Not having hands to hold onto
attractive red things, they use their mouths.
 | |
| Red Spot Spider ~ hook: #6-#8 ~ thread: pink ~ hackle: furnace hen ~ rib: red wire ~ body: pink floss with thorax of pink dubbing topped with red wool yarn |
 |
| Spruce Variant ~ hook: #4-#8 ~ thread: black ~ hackle: brahma hen ~ body: red tinsel with copper tip & thorax of peacock herl ~ tailing: gpt tied in behind the thorax ~ winging: dyed yellow squirrel |
 |
| Swing Clown ~ hook: #4-#8 ~ thread: wine ~ tailing: peacock swords & red hackle fibers ~ rib: red wire ~ palmer: red saddle ~ body: copper tinsel ~ half-wing: gpt ~ rear collar: red guinea ~ front collar: black hen |
 |
| Red Ass Variant ~ hook: #6-#10 ~ thread: wine ~ hackle: partridge ~ tailing: red yarn ~ rib: red wire ~ body: red tinsel with thorax of peacock herl |
 |
| Royal Dee ~ hook: #2-#8 ~ thread: brown ~ tailing: golden pheasant crest ~ butt: peacock herl ~ butt collar: gpt wound as a collar ~ body: peacock herl with a girdle of red tinsel ~ hackle: red-brown hen ~ wings: white goose slips |
 |
| Mickey Finn ~ hook: #2-#6 ~ thread: black ~ tag: red tinsel ~ rib: silver wire ~ body: silver tinsel ~ winging: yellow/red/yellow bucktail ~ jungle cock cheeks |
 |
| Black/Red Spider ~ hook: #6-#10 ~ thread: black ~ hackle: red guinea hen ~ tailing: gpt dyed with red marker ~ rib: red wire ~ body: black rabbit with a thorax of 50/50 black rabbit & red seal |
 |
| Ounaniche ~ hook: #6-#10 ~ thread: wine ~ hackle: red guinea hen ~ tailing: barred waterfowl flank dyed with red marker ~ rib: gold wire ~ body: claret dubbing with a thorax of hares mask |
 |
| Kruk's Ducati ~ hook: #2-#4 ~ thread: black ~ tailing: gpt ~ rib: oval silver ~ body: red/black seal ~ palmer: black spey hackle ~ collar: guinea hen, sparse ~ wings: red goose slips |
 |
| Spawn Sack ~ hook: #8 ~ thread: pink ~ body: red tinsel ~ toppings: red egg yarn/orange SST/red flash ~ hackle: white hen touched with pink marker |
 |
| Red Demon ~ hook: #2-#4 ~ thread: brown ~ tailing: red gpt ~ rib: silver wire ~ butt collar: burnt-orange grizzly ~ body: red tinsel with thorax of Hareline UV Shrimp Pink dubbing ~ hackle: red/brown pheasant rump/blonde pheasant rump/pheasant church window/head of philoplume from the back of the church window |
A Spring Tale of Continuity, of Sorts
The Temptation of Lilith
I suppose you could say the
kid’s fishing pole is a bad idea. A Snoopy pole – picture of Charlie Brown and
Snoopy on the package, fishing. I don’t know. It might not be that great of an
idea for a gift. Even if there is a kid, it would only be three years old and
no three year old can operate a Snoopy pole, not without help anyway. But
there’s really nothing I can provide, realistically, so I guess the gift is
just my way of being a dad, if by chance I am a dad, and a way to show my
appreciation on the anniversary of our meeting.
I didn’t get her name. Not
sure she had a name, she never spoke.
Not in the way most of us speak. Yet no denying she was a master of body
language able to get her point across. I call her Lilith.
*
Winter had recently gone from
the low country along the river; the newly exposed mast beneath the pines still
snow-damp. Runoff hadn’t begun, the major portion of snow still holding on the
high country, so the river was low and in good shape to fish. It’d been warm
the past few days, triggering a hatch of grannom sedges. Really felt like
spring. That day it seemed like the whole world was hopping to a swinging
rhythm. It was palpable along the river where the critters make the first big
showing at getting down to the procreation business. Sedges flying around
hooked together. Love was in the air alright. Such a sweet day I couldn’t quit
hiking and ended up four or five miles upstream of the trailhead before
starting to fish. Wild, lonesome, it felt good to be in the back country.
I sing when I feel good and
don’t think there’s anyone around to hear, and I sang out loud: “Do not
for-sake meee O0o0ooh my daarrrlin…. Oh don’t e-verrr let me gO000o …” Hey. Nobody around to be offended. Right?
The fishing was good, but,
weird, after awhile I started to get the feeling I was being watched. I chalked
it up to the energetic nature of the day working senses that’d been shut in the
cabin most of a long winter and now a bit overwhelmed by Mother Nature’s
unfolding charms. I concentrated on casting the wee soft-hackle and minding the
drift.
Like I said, the fishing was
good. Leaning over the water releasing a nice cutthroat, I caught a flash of
movement in the brush.
I stood still, scanning the
woods.
There – a patch of auburn
showing through a break of scrub cedars. Fur. A big animal, I was sure. Then,
higher, another patch of fur showing through the greenery. It jiggled.
No. It wasn’t an elk. An elk
would make a mad dash out of there with a nose full of human at this range, I
reasoned. A bear. Had to be a bear. Okay no big deal, outfitting, I encounter
them all the time. Not grizzlies. Black bears. Unlike grizzly bears, black
bears are fairly shy and will avoid you if you respect their space, usually.
The jiggling color patch was a concern. I estimated it to be about seven feet
above the ground, which meant the critter it belonged to was taller than any
standing black bear. I figured: yup, shit, a
grizzly, and a big one,
stalking me, standing over there behind that bush inhaling my scent and licking
its teeth.
“HEY YAH YEEAH!” I made a two
step false charge toward it waving the flyrod over my head.
I held my breath. Thought I
saw it move. But my yelling and stomping hadn’t come close to producing the
affect I wanted, which was to get it to flush and run. At this point the smart
thing to do would’ve been to ease back out of there, but I’d already thrown
down a territorial challenge, so I figured the stalking bear might interpret my
retreat as a sign of weakness, inspiring it to more aggressive stalking. While
I swirled in the conundrum, the cedars quivered and out into full view stepped
Lilith.
She was fully eight feet
tall, and not thirty feet away, looking at me.
My mind couldn’t allow it. No.
This was a thing that did not fit my reality frame. I turned my head and looked
toward the stream, considered making another cast and just carrying on with the
fishing, then looked back to see her still standing by the cedars.
Obviously female. She stood
straight, not bent forward like an ape. Other than being eight feet tall and
entirely covered with red fur except for her pink face, she looked human. Well,
closely related to human. A ‘kissing cousin’, forgive the pun. The gold, almond
shaped eyes possessed a considered intelligence and, something else I couldn’t
immediately read. The mouth was straight and broad, showing just a hint of lips
spread across the slight protrusion of a muzzle – not much of a muzzle – but a
muzzle, no getting around it and… not altogether unattractive. Her breasts
weren’t the shoe-sole breasts of an ape, but round, glorious basketballs capped
with distended pomegranates. Her head was crowned with a maelstrom of red hair,
a shade redder than the auburn tone of her fur, matted to dreadlocks, looping
to below her waist. She was striking. Magnificent, really.
I was in shock and off guard
when she rushed me –
Stupidly, I tried to fend her
off with the antique Granger, and even though the stick was imbued with the
mojo of a hundred rivers and easily worth a thousand dollars, it proved
useless, a limp reed disintegrating to splinters against Lilith’s swift charge.
She snatched me up, tucked me under her arm like a football and ran upstream
covering impossible lengths of ground in a stride. I kicked and flailed like a
crazy man – which served to bring rib-breaking pressure from the giant arm, forcing
me to stop. Caught, crushed, terrorized, I flopped and dangled like a half-dead
carp fated for the canning jar. Hooking up a spur canyon she proceeded uphill
never breaking stride.
This was a bad dream and I
couldn’t wake up. I pissed my waders.
Lilith stopped at a rock
overhang near the top of the ridge. A
bower of cedar branches arranged like a large nest had been laid on a level
spot beneath the overhang. She dropped me into the center of the nest then
scrambled back to study me, the prize.
I didn’t move.
She squatted there for a long
time, watching me.
I observed her while
carefully avoiding direct eye contact. Something in her attitude convinced me
that she didn’t plan to kill me. If that’d been her intent she could have
easily done it by the creek. Still…
Then, slow, deliberate, never
taking her eyes off me, she rose to full height, stretched her arms to the sky
and put her palms together. She smiled. I think. I interpreted the expression
to be a smile. Then she swept her arms out to the sides, each hand assuming a
strange, delicate mudra, and she began to dance, graceful as any hula girl, her
hands like bird wings opening and closing, shifting through a series of
mysterious poses. Something about her… she was entrancing, magnetic. I couldn’t
look away. She was seducing me. I’m not completely thick, I know when I’m being
seduced. The notion was terrifying, yet, the urge to jump up and run was
dissolving, somehow.
Then a thought struck me and
I tensed, imagining a ten foot tall jealous buck sasquatch busting from the
bushes in full-cry fury, grabbing me between his thumb and forefinger and
pulling off my arms and legs and all the other grippable appendages, easy as
plucking petals from a daisy – he loves me… he loves me not… then pinching my
head off. Any sparking aspiration to
romance I might have been entertaining, maybe somewhere in some secret backroom
of my mind, was iced.
Lilith began to sing as she
danced, a song without words, melodic inhalations and exhalations of breath and
rhythmic sighs punctuated with low whistles: “Hih hih hih sweeeeeee,” – all the while her eyes pinning me.
I tend to reason in phases.
First, the reactive, presumptuous monkey-mind phase: I was past that one. I
figured she wasn’t going to kill me, at least not right away.
Then the pragmatic phase: I
reasoned that the beguiling Lilith was under the influence of her biological
clock, ‘in season’, if you will, and there was no male sasquatch available in
the territory, so I was to be That Guy.
That, leading to some
considerations regarding taxonomic boundaries, transitioning me to the meeting
house filled with severe Puritan ancestors who stood me on the precarious
fulcrum between a sense of Darwinian duty, rooted in the pragmatic phase, and a
moral dilemma, which always precedes the final phase: In which I transcend
reason and surrender to The Flow.
Lilith ceased her song,
stopped dancing and stood giving me the soulful eye. Then she stepped to the bower demure as a
maiden, turned her back to me and sank to her knees on the cedar bed, her twin
haystack bottom looming inches from my face. She smelled like a honey-glazed
baked ham. The pink yin-yang between her legs blossomed to a chaotic rose
before my eyes. This girl was good to go no doubt about it.
My call. I possessed the key
to my own salvation. My only hope was to place it into the slot and do my level
best. And I did need to get out of those wet waders…
*
There’s no good reason to
relate the intimate details. I’ve probably divulged too much already. For those
dying of curiosity, I offer that it is an actual fact, the higher primates
really do practice every type of pleasuring enjoyed by folks. We shared the
granola bars from my fishing vest. I was secretly proud when the energetic
Lilith, at the end of my second day of captivity, succumbed to sleep. That’s
when I made the getaway.
I hike in every year on the
anniversary. This year I’m bringing the Snoopy pole and the usual bags of
frozen berries and granola bars. I know she likes granola bars. I’ll leave the
stuff at the old bower under the ledge. Never seen any sign of her since that
time.
Love? Well. You feel something.
Soft~Hackle Journal is art & information brought to you through the generosity of its donor supporters.
