Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald (23 page)

I selected the latest, the top of the stack, the
Duchesne Register
, and sat near the fire, bottle by the neck, reading the set type of yesterday’s news. Eldon was in his bag. He turned over and leaned against his helmet as a pillow.

I read the rodeo standings. A guy named Regan Vanderwoeden was in all around first. His calf-roping time was 7.1 seconds which I recognized as exactly how long coitus lasts between undergraduates. There was a photo of Vanderwoeden flipping a pained calf. This is when the goddamned paper caught fire, the fire surprising me with its large orange bites, and I hopped up, spilling the vermouth, and bunched the paper in a still-burning wad. Vanderwoeden and calf were smoke now, and I threw the whole bunch on the fire as I backed away. The flare woke Eldon who turned, his face white in the light, and said, “Oh, arson, now eh?”

Christ, you can’t even read the papers. I climbed into the sleeping bag … And in my old sleeping bag, a good sleeping bag of canvas with a flannel liner adorned with a wallpaper pattern of bears and turkeys not a speck of down or nylon near me, I felt pretty good. The air was sharp, but the smell of sawdust soft, and the brook fell beneath me. I thought I’d seen Vanderwoeden before. I think he worked with Panghurst in plates at the prison.

In the still, cold of the morning, I opened my eyes and between two trees caught the aerial photograph of the Great Basin sweeping purple and green in first light to the horizon and the first little steps of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. There was one cloud in a holding pattern over the tiny cluster of Roosevelt.

I sat up in the sleeping bag and righted the picture. Eldon was boiling coffee to a brown foam in a dented tin pan. I would catch fish today, and things, if not resolved, would at least be better. Eldon fried some eggs and Spam which we ate, sopping the grease with hard rolls.

“Our appointment with Nicky and the law is tomorrow at noon, so let’s get going. It isn’t a whole lot of solace, but it beats going to the dentist.”

“I’m ready, I’m ready.”

“Don’t you want me to pan fry a few flapjacks so you can construct onion sandwiches and fold them in your shirt pockets for lunch?”

“Enough Eldon. I’m ready to catch three fish to your one. We may have read the same books, but I can see we came away with different things.” I set the last section in the pole he loaned me, lined it, tied the hook on, and snagged it back through onto the reel. We had belt cans for worms and I had Nighthorse’s flies in my pocket.

“Okay, Young Boosinger. The fishing is up and over from here.” He pointed. “Don’t go out of the timber. The two streams run fairly parallel.” He went on with his plans and verbal mappery, and we made arrangements to meet at a mythical spot he described on the far stream where three trees had fallen across. As I nodded “Yeah, okay,” I knew I wouldn’t be able to find it.

Eldon cut across then to intersect and fish up the Iron Fork. I walked around the camp for a while, savoring our little household in the forest, the sleeping bags, the rocks ringing the ashes, the clothesline, the empty cans. I drank the rest of the coffee, cold, right out of the pan, slopping a stripe down the front of my shirt, and began hiking straight up, saving the stream as long as I could.

Over the knoll above our camp, I entered the lost dead forest where the loggers had harvested every stick to timberline years ago, and I dodged the stumps in the gray land for about a mile, gradually ascending. It was eerie and good, and if it weren’t for the massive wreckage, I would have sworn no men had ever been there before. In front of me ten miles I could see the bald noggin of Mount Gilbert bossing the other mountains around.

Colorado shimmered for me every time I turned around. Breathing became a campaign issue. I stopped and sat on one of the dry stumps, and took the packet of flies out of my pocket and examined them. They appeared the same, but looking closer I could see Nighthorse had made the eyes different colors. Maybe he was an Indian after all.

Finally, a breath for every step, I moved into the glowing forest, shade bright as air, floor soft as sawdust. I began climbing to my right through the widely spaced pines and rose up over a hummock. It was good to be the first man in the world again, and as I walked through each new room in the forest my reserves swelled.

Beside a boulder the size of a semitrailer on the hilltop I could see my stream drawing the silver line for its little valley. Walking, sliding, down the slope, the needles four thousand deep and golden under my feet, cushioning each footfall, the air slanted up now into my head, and I walked easily by the ninety-ton boulders, the furniture of the high woods. I passed through one grove of high pines and boulders, the trees not branching for seventy feet, the gray solemn rocks all square as houses, their shadows the size of European countries.

I first learned the value of being lost in the woods from my father near Spirit Lake on the other side of the Uinta Primitive Area. When I was eight we’d tour the lake in a rowboat, hunched in huge coats, sucking on lemon drops and fishing. He used two hooks and would catch one trout then wait to say anything until he had the second one swimming on the line and then say “Oh, oh.” That was his signal, a soft: “Oh, oh, Larry.” And he’d bring two amazed trout up to my amazed net. “You’re not kidding anybody by only using one hook.”

We’d limit early in the afternoon; he always let me catch my own fish. Then after cleaning them, we’d hike to one of the small upper lakes. It would rain every day at four as the new shipment of clouds ran aground on mountains higher than they’d anticipated, and my father and I would hunker in the pines looking at our pocket knives.

One year there was a sheepherder on the last meadow on the top of the upper rivulet of the Black’s Fork, and we spent the rainstorms with him in his tiny wagon which smelled of blankets. He talked the whole time it rained about the Jolly Roger in Evanston, an odd hotel. When we left, we hiked for two hours along the stream, teasing the small native trout with worms larger than themselves. Finally my father said not to worry about the sheepherder, that he was only lonely, and we walked out onto the last lake plateau, above the clouds. There was not a fish in the lake, and we walked around it slowly looking at the magnified rocks in the bottom, so recently released from ice. There was rock snow at the upper end, not a tree within a mile and the vast rocky talus amphitheatre of Mount Warren, not a single fan in the four million seats.

He always made sure we were “lost” on the way down, leaving the stream to follow a ridge that became two as the trees thickened, then two more, multiplying into a dozen alluvial toes. “Oh, oh, Larry,” he’d say, “we’re lost.” The sun would be behind Warren now, two hours of daylight remaining. “I’ll follow
you
out.” Then I’d take him up and down the ridges, surprising the small deer asleep beside damp logs, once in a while noting an eagle gliding below us, until we came to where the stream should have been. It would’ve moved by then, and that is when I was lost. My mistake would seem ominous. My father would walk us down the vale fifty yards to a trail, finding an Old Timer pocket knife once, and in three minutes we’d be walking down the safe, known corridor of the stream, pausing at the pools to argue about which side to fish since it was twilight and shadows were not a factor. We’d debate for three minutes and then he’d drop a line in his side and pull a flipping fingerling right out. It was always as if he had a deal in advance with the little fish. Once in a while I’d step on the grassy bank only to find my foot falling right through the overhang into the water. We’d walk into camp at the stroke of dark; I was always wet to the waist. He’d hang my trousers on the clothesline, fry the trout which I’d eat with my fingers, the oil healing every scratch on my hands.

I stepped up to this stream as it flowed across a meadow full of wild iris spears and skunk cabbage. It was wide and even here, rocky and shallow, so I moved up along the soft bank to a rock the size of a taxi-cab which was parked strategically enough to send the water back and around, forming a small pool.

I quickly hooked two ten-inch Rainbows out of the pond now, and placed them in my creel. The bottom of my creel was still lined with paper clips and ball-point pens. Red ones. The residue of my scrape with teaching. I’d given marks with those pens. I tapped the final shudder out of each fish with the side of my Forest Master pocket knife and laid them in the creel with three wet iris leaves. I wasted twenty more minutes at the pond being toyed with by some creature who left only minute teeth marks on the worm.

Upstream the ponds were spaced every thirty yards or so, knots in the rope of the river, a dozen trout tied up in each. I had six when I came to a larger pool which faced against one sheer rock cliff, and caught Sammy’s young nephew napping in the shade. When I saw the two-pounder, I knew his father had to be right above. The stream, however, moved into the walls of rock forty feet tall, and I had to back down and hike around and above almost a mile where it entered this canyon. It was dark in there and I wanted those fish. I crossed the stream four times trying to wish my way in. Finally I stood on a skull-size rock in the center of the stream and peered into the cave which narrowed at its top to about the wingspan of a crow.

The sun was speaking directly to all concerned from its perch in October, and I could feel the hair on my arms blonding. This is life on earth, I thought, for which I have perhaps too great an affection. In a month in the city a haze which will want to become frost will halo every streetlamp above the heads of football players as they walk home in the dusk. Now at 10:00
A.M.
on the edge of the world, it was hot. I rolled my sleeves another turn. Wearing clothes, khakis dried to their righteous stiffness on the line, oxford cloth shirts, walking around the planet, avoiding prison in its deadly mediocrity by keeping good company and commiting simple deeds that reside between the legal margins: I want these things.

I was climbing above the narrow chasm through which the water streamed. When I reached the top and caught my wispy breath, I could again see the United States flying over the edge to the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Most of the abyss, that opened on the stream fifty or sixty feet below, was narrow enough to jump across. I was on a broad shadeless rock shelf. Following the edge I came to a point where it opened. I looked down at the stream. It widened, too, in the pool I’d been searching, an apartment house for big trout. I lay on my stomach and stared down through the smooth water to four shadows on the bottom. I always see the shadows, but can never see the fish. Riddel had taught me a name for this phenomena in philosophy. It was one of the fideists’ central proofs for the existence of God. You can see the shadow and not the thing. Watching the immobile shadows, each the size and shape of the football that rested now behind the seat of my truck, it was proof enough for me. The sun clipped only half the pool, so I knew there must be about twelve fish sleeping below me.

I tied on a size larger hook, and threaded a fat worm over the barb, crimped a two-ounce sinker two feet up the line, above the leader, and lowered the line fifty feet and eased it into the water. I measured the depth as best I could to be about five or six feet, and watched the sinker raise a dash of sand off the bottom. The worm swam up, off the bottom, and began mingling with the shadows. I hoped they were fish. Philosophy only tells us that they
might
be.