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Stories
Written by Doug Gilmore   
Friday, 23 May 2008 23:14

BobOn a particular Monday in May, I go fishing. As is my usual custom, I travel alone and I fish alone.

This particular Monday hosts an annual bacchanalia of drink, barbecue, and outdoor fun - the unofficial first day of summer. The rivers are crowded.
My favorite streams are packed with corn-chuckers, bait slingers, and hardware throwers. Not the sort of halcyon fishing environment sought after by most fly fishermen, and particularly not by solitary types like me. 


The crowds don’t know about Sweetwater Falls and the rhododendron lined brook above it, tucked two miles back in Juniper Hollow, all two miles accessible only by feet that know the pathway and have the permission of the land holder. That permission would be hard to get these days. I buried him four years ago after the old wounds finally caught up with him. He left me trustee over a piece of land timbered and old and green and gray and wrinkled.


Sweetwater Falls shows up readily enough on the USGS topographic map. The blue line crossing a set of crunched together contour lines is a dead give-away. The water drops eighty feet in three steps, each step not deeper than five feet. They serve to not only please the eye and ear, though that would be good enough. No, the falls have an even bigger affect: they serve as a natural barrier from the imported rainbows and brown trout that the government started stocking in this part of the country back in the twenties.

Salvenius fontinalis (southern strain) is still lord over Sweetwater Creek above the falls, sharing the water on a permanent basis with only a smattering of mayfly nymphs and a sparse population of stoneflies, none longer than two centimeters on their best day. The insect population is large enough to support the brook trout that swim about. There are not enough insects, nor water, for the brookies to attain any size to speak of. A brookie of ten inches is braggin’ rights. In thirty years of fishing Sweetwater, I’ve caught one twelve incher, released her and never saw her again. Most of the fish are in the six to eight-inch category and stay that way. In Juni’s pool, there was an eight-inch fish that I caught three years in a row. The scar on its left side, just beyond the anal fin, betrayed it. For three years that fish never grew. Salvenius fontinalis abbreviatus.

So I awoke, another May Monday in another year and kissed the wife good-bye, not waking her and stole out the backdoor, pulling on my pants and boots as I stepped onto the porch.

The sky was still dark and the birds sat perched in the trees, their heads tucked behind their wings. I like to awake early on this day, partly because I like sunrises, partly because I like the smell of coffee perked on a camp stove in the woods before the sun winks hello, but mostly because that’s the way he would have done it ... and did it for the twenty-six years we fished together on Mondays in Mays past.

The truck was packed the night before, just after I got home with the kids from church. I let it roll silently backward down the driveway and started the engine when I was well away from the house, out of danger of waking anyone. I love my wife and kids dearly and love fishing with them. But this day doesn’t belong to them or, for that matter, to me.

The drive was quiet, filled with sweet late spring night air, with the stars still sparkling beneath the domed sky like the planetariums they have in the big cities.

Occasionally, I drove past a dairy farm (dairy used to be big business around here, but like a lot of things, the dairy farming business has seen better days) and the smell of silage and cow manure briefly wafted through the cab.

Finally, just as the eastern sky began to turn that grayish blue gray of pre-predawn, I stopped the truck, opened the gate, drove in, locked the gate and parked a short 300 yards into the hardwoods at the throat of Juniper Hollow, at the burned stones that once were the foundation for the old man’s home. I dropped the truck’s tailgate, wincing when the slam of metal rang through the air like a struck bell and cursing myself for not catching it before it reached bottom.

The single burner backpack stove fired up like it always does - pump like a demon, turn the crank, strike a match, open the valve, pump like a demon again, rotate the crank three times and then fix the flame. I leaned back in the bed of the truck, watching the stars as the coffee pot warmed and then, after a few minutes, began to perk.

The hissing of the stove and the soft slamming of water against the clear plastic perk top blended with the waking sounds of the earth as the birds answered with their song and a rooster crowed, probably from Lester's place down the road, I thought. Lester raises fighting cocks and one of them is always crowing about something, or maybe just to hear himself crow. Roosters are a lot like people. Some strut and yap all the time. Those you ignore. The ones who walk slowly, proudly, but silently - those are the ones you bet on when the birds hit the floor. Least that what the old man taught me. I quit the cockfights long ago.

I watched a meteorite streak slowly across the sky, breaking into pieces just before it disappeared, low over Cagle's Knob. Terribly low, I thought, as I poured my first cup of joe. Coffee in the woods, strong from the percolator and framed by the early morning air, tastes better than the best espresso in Roma's Campo de' Fiori.

Mornings in the woods are what man was made for. God walked with Adam in the Garden in the morning. I like to think He taught the first man to fish in a stream like Sweetwater, with the long rod and gossamer line and an angel-haired fly; not unlike how the old man taught me when I came back, soul scarred and tattered, from a hell covered in heat, humidity, blood, terror, and black-suited men who wished you out of their country and treacherous "allies" who changed shape before your eyes.

Finishing my coffee, I picked up the pack and rod and walked up the hollow towards the falls. If you climb to the top of the falls via the side trail the old man cut long ago, you save yourself the 500 meter or so roundtrip to the bottom of the falls. I like to take the detour and pay homage to the water sprites that dance in the mists and froth of the tumbling waters.

Mostly I go to remember the night he baptized me in the plunge pool, washing away the blood and agony and self-doubt and listlessness that the year in the jungle had left me. And so I did that morning, sitting again as I did that night, when I cried and screamed while he held me and said nothing, the cleansing waters of the old man's creek exorcising the demons from my soul.

I lit up a cigarette, a Lucky Strike - his favorite, and coughed at the first rush of smoke to my lungs since the year before, and the year before that and, again, the year before. I forced myself to inhale deeply each time until the weed was no more and then placed the cigarette pack, full save the one, in the hollow of the sassafras tree that stands on the east bank of the stream, at the tail of the plunge pool. I walked back down the trail to the fall trail and climbed to the top of the falls.

You fish this water stealthily, like an animal, not like the classic fly fishing poster boys who stand in the middle of a wide pool, casting their rods back and forth in tight arcs, slinging flies 60 feet away. On Sweetwater, you can’t see 60 feet in some places, much less cast. The water is so clear and the trout so wary, that just stepping into the water will give every trout between here and Abrams lock-jaw.

No - you get down on your knees and crawl forward through the rhododendron and dap the #16 anything on the surface of the water. I say #16 anything because that’s the way it is. The old man taught me, and he was never wrong about these things, that these trout were too hungry and food too damn scarce to be picky about what they ate. Put out anything remotely resembling food in a size #16 and they grab it. They do and did.

From the first pool, I caught two beautiful fish with deep green undertone haunches and slight amber-bronze bellies, their under-fins tipped in white like a bride, and jungle camouflage worm trails etched on their backs. Second pool, same results. Third pool, Juni's pool, no fish, no sign of a fish, no shadows, no streaks, no flashes of light across its dark rocky bottom. That happens. Things feed on the brookies in these pools: herons sometimes, maybe a bobcat or two. But they always regenerate. That's the way of nature. Two more pools, two and a half more fish. The half was a handless-release because I didn’t tie the hook with care. The old man taught me better than that.

I am older now and appreciate naps more than ever. When I was younger, I never napped. Now I take them when I can. That morning, after catching my six and one-half brookies, none more than eight inches long, I took a nap…

...He sat down beside me quietly, but I heard him anyway and saw him sitting to my right, dressing the fly line with his handkerchief.

“Well, well sleepy-head. About time you woke up. Good heavens! You’ll sleep your life away and miss all the fishin'. Thought I’d taught you better'n that. Shoot, go away for a while and the whole world goes to sleep on me. Pfft!"

I gloried in his raspy voice, gloried in his staccato syntax that punctuated each sentence end with a high note and an intensity that filled your soul, if not your ears. Oh, how I had missed that voice.

"Pfft, yourself, old man. You used to nap every so often, as I recall."

"Yes, I did. Still do too. But not when there's fish to be caught and flies to be dapped."

"Slow down, slow down, old man.” I slowed my own speech to a crawl. I wanted these moments to last forever.

“We’ve got all day to fish. I haven’t seen you since last year. Hold on and let’s talk," I said.

"Okay, what do you want to talk about?"

"For one, how are things going?"

"What do you mean 'how are things going'? What kind of question is that to ask? Things are going like things always go. They go. Didn’t I teach you nothin'? Or did you forget it all down there in the city?"

"No sir, I didn’t forget. I remember…. I remember.”

We sat in silence and I watched how he looked to the sky every so often. A red-tailed hawk circled the top of Cagle’s Knob.

“Lots more hawks these days”, he declared.

“Yes sir. Not too many farmers any more. Nobody shoots them for killing chickens. Getting rid of the DDT helped out too,” I answered, knowing the words weren’t necessary. Oh, it was good to see him again!

“How are the wounds?”, I asked.

“Oh, them.” Now it was his turn to pause and collect his thoughts. He lit a cigarette. I wrinkled my brow. “Don’t worry, they can’t hurt me now."

He took a long draw on the cigarette and proclaimed "Oh, how I miss these things! Found ‘em down there in the Sassafras tree while you were scarin’ the specks!”

“Yeah, yeah, you were going to tell me about the wounds,” I chided, getting him back on the subject.

“Can’t feel a thing. Best part of this whole deal is that the pain’s finally gone. That and I get to fish some genuinely nice water: alone if I want, or, if I need company, well there’s always someone to fish with. There’s some fine fisherman up there."

BobThe old man had suffered for fifty years with the pain of a left shoulder that the doctors had stitched back together after he had been greeted by a 7.92mm Sturmgewehr on a June Morning in the poetic sounding town of St. Mere-Eglise above a beach called Omaha. Six months later, his knee was torn to shreds by shrapnel in the forests around Bastogne. That one finally sent him home.

The wounds were deep, the damage permanent, the pain ever present. But he worked a job in town and ran his farm, alone after his wife died from the chicken pox in '67, four years before he baptized me. I remember that night and waking the next morning in his house, all cried out, all the demons gone. On the wall across from my bed was a picture, framed and old, of a young man in dress uniform. A light blue ribbon hung from his neck with thirteen white stars at the tie above the pendant. On his left breast, above rows of colored ribbons, were pinned a silver parachute surrounded by wings and a silver wing-wreathed glider.

He got up from the ground beside me and walked to the edge of the rhodo’s. No limp - Amazing! Four years now with no limp after fifty with an unruly right leg seemingly with a mind all its own. He turned and looked at me for a moment. Then he winked and disappeared on his hands and knees into the rhododendron, in pursuit of God's own gift.

I awoke. On the ground beside me was a single Lucky Strike, lit, with just a few puffs gone. I smiled.

A wood duck hen whistled. The stream bubbled over rock fall and moss. A squirrel barked.

I put out the cigarette, grabbed my backpack and rod, and began the walk back to the truck.

(for my dad, PFC Homer Gilmore, who now resides in the National Cemetery in Chattanooga, and for SFC McIntyre, 101st Abn Div – D/326 Engr Bn wherever you are).

Doug Gilmore © 2001

Last Updated ( Thursday, 05 November 2009 14:44 )
 
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