The Snowfly (4 page)

“Nice fish,” he said.

Rose nudged me. “Professor Ennis, I came to ask you about the snowfly.”

“Did you? And who might you be? A friend of Rose? One of her curled-toes club?”

Rose looked at me and rolled her eyes. She had told me during the drive to the cabin that Ennis was “not all there.” His specialty was the history of the Rockies. He had spent a lifetime tracing the movements of mountain men, spending several winters alone in the Rockies to better understand his subjects.

“What's he mean?” I whispered.

“Talk to him,” she said impatiently.

“I'm Bowie Rhodes.”

Ennis smiled and cocked his head in my direction. “Any relation to Grizzly Rhodes?”

“No, sir,” I answered without knowing who he was talking about.

“He came out of Pennsylvania around 1800. Merchant family, well-to-do people, but he was the black sheep and a bad fit for the self-styled civilized East. He lived to be ninety and he was quite a man. Unusual in that he could write, but he didn't much bother. Married a Crow woman and taught her. They had a dozen kids, all of whom lived, which was unusual in itself. The woman's name was Red Face. She and those kids were writing fools. I located forty journals written by various members of the family. What we know about the lives of mountain men sits squarely on the shoulders of Red Face Rhodes and her spawn. Helluva lady, she was. Sure you're not a relation? The Rhodes family had iron blood and molten fire in their hearts, that's for damn sure.”

“Not aware that I'm related.”

“Too bad for you,” he said. “Why do you want to know about the snowfly?”

“I heard about it once.”

“Par for the course. It's one-a those things that doesn't get much talked about. Lotta people say it's myth, but me, I say myths're usually based on something. Smoke from fire, right? That's what history's taught me.”

I wanted more, but Ennis only stared out over his pool.

“You believe it's real?” Some people needed prompting.

“Doesn't much matter what I believe.”

“But I'd like to know more.”

“Someday maybe you will and maybe you won't. The snowfly's a peculiar slice of life. Some are meant to know. Most aren't and those who do know usually end up sorry for the knowing. The snowfly's a burden, son, and I wouldn't put it on so young a man. Best keep your attention on Rose there.”

In August my roommate, Larry Showly, was killed during a fire in the Bitterroots. We were bunked two to a room and Larry was a quiet guy from Kansas who wanted to be a forester, did his job, and got along well with everyone on the fire team. He'd crossed a log in his corks, which was against procedure. The rotted bark gave way, he fell seven or eight feet onto a stob, was impaled and bled to death. I was the one who found him and the vision of him lying there with his unseeing eyes staring up into the heavens would not leave me.

I did not fish much after that. Rose and I spent most of my free time in her bed. Rose taught me about making love. “It's like basketball,” she said. “You can't win in the first five minutes. You need to play the whole game.” When I got into my VW in September for the trip back to East Lansing, I had pretty much forgotten the snowfly. It took forty-nine hours to make the drive. Life lay ahead and I was eager to get on with it. I arrived just as registration began, secured my classes, and headed for a friend's house to sleep. I had an apartment leased, but was too early to take possession. I felt empty without Rose. There had never been anything like what I imagined to be love between us, but we had been fine companions. The last thing Rose said to me was that I would never be comfortable again sleeping without a woman at arm's length. She laughingly called it her legacy. She also said that wherever life took me, no matter how many women I loved, I would always think of her.

I slept for twenty-four hours after I got back to East Lansing and then went to claim my apartment, the top floor of an old house on Michigan Avenue. It didn't take long to unpack, but it was another day before I found the envelope stuck between two shirts. It smelled of Rose and made me smile.

 

•••

 

Sweet Bowie: I guess I get the last word in. I know how bad it was for you on the Bitterroot fire. It changed you. I like to think I changed you, too. You changed me. I guess that makes us even. While you were in the Bitterroots I went to see Red Ennis. He says the snowfly legend is probably baloney, but here it is. The snowfly hatch takes place every ten to fifteen years. Nobody knows where it will happen or when. Never the same place twice. You know that trout don't live that long. That's what the fish biologists say. But Red says they do. He says some fish with particular genes can live forty, fifty years. They find themselves a great place where nobody can find them and grow fat and old. Only the snowfly brings them out. They risk their lives then. Nobody knows why, but it's prolly no diff than college boys trying to keep a bunch of trees in nowhereland from burning up. Knowing you, there's a hundred questions you'd like to ask, but I've given you all that Red gave me so it's in your hands now. I worry about you, Bowie. I keep thinking what Red told us about Grizzly Rhodes and I wonder if the blood of that family flows in you. You have certainly got a fire in your heart and it's a thing that keeps people from ever getting too close. I suppose that will never change, which is sad. We are all who we are. I won't say be careful because I know you will, to the extent you can, but I also realize that when a man so young seeks out fires to fight, he will probably be fighting one sort of fire or another for the rest of his life. I wish you a great life, Bowie. And true happiness. I don't know about this snowfly thing. Please know what it is that you want, my darling. Life is too short to waste. My love forever. Rose (P.S. We sure didn't waste our summer!)

 

•••

 

I spent the day in my front window watching the traffic pass. I wanted to know more about the snowfly. During the next few years I didn't think about it all the time. But there were moments. Which is how an obsession takes root.

2

Long before I arrived at Michigan State I knew I wanted to write. I didn't tell people about it, but I knew and the Markham Award had strengthened my conviction. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my writing, but I had bested Raina Chickerman at it, which reinforced both my interest and my resolve. I did not resent the life our parents had given Lilly and me, but neither did I want to relive it. They were happily rooted to Michigan, but something inside me wanted more and to have a job that gave me the means to enjoy it. I settled on journalism as a major and in my junior year at the university I signed up for a course in science writing; it turned out that I was the only student and I figured the class would be canceled, but Professor Luanne Chidester was a woman with a mission and if there was only one student, so be it.

“People lose interest in science,” she announced to me at our first session, “because too many teachers learn by rote and pass it on the same way and that's a shame. A newspaper's a business,” she added. “You'll hear a lot of righteous, pompous piffle about public service, but it's the bottom line that drives news. People ought to be interested in science because it's at the root of understanding life. I want to produce reporters who understand how science works so they can cover it properly. If reporters can write interestingly about science, it'll become an important part of the news.”

Professor Chidester was in her midthirties. She had worked for papers in Miami and Sacramento before going back to school for her master's and doctorate at Northwestern. She was tall, a shade over six feet, thin, and not unattractive. I had grown an inch the year after I finished high school, topping six-five, and her reedy figure made her seem nearly as tall. She always wore high-heeled shoes and baggy dresses. When she talked, she looked right into my eyes, and she seemed to sense my curiosity early on and did all she could to encourage it. Her class was one of the few I had that didn't seem like a class. It was more like we were colleagues trying to understand things together.

The first week we met in her office in the journalism building. After that it was at her house or on the road. We drove every other weekend to Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland to attend scientific symposia or trade shows.

We usually stayed with friends or colleagues of hers, which kept expenses down. She took me to an autopsy and seemed pleased when I ­didn't flinch. She took me to an Air Force museum near Dayton where a retired colonel gave us a half-day lecture on aircraft design.

In October we drove down to Kentucky, where she took me to a church in a small town on a Saturday night. A gnarled minister with bad breath explained something called creationism. We met with the Reverend for an hour after the service. His name was Jerboam and though he didn't have a beard, there was something about him that reminded me of Abraham Lincoln. He was passionate in his beliefs and tried his best to use logic to convince us, but his arguments didn't work for me.

We had rooms in a boardinghouse in a town called Greenhill, which was in a gray, hilly area denuded of trees and vegetation by strip miners. After our meeting with the minister, we went to a small restaurant where the food was greasy but the servings large.

“Do you believe in God?” Luanne asked over dinner.

“I don't know.”

She smiled. “You don't give up much of yourself.”

“It's the truth. It's not like I haven't thought about it, but I just don't know.”

“Religion is like science,” she said. “There's a central hypothesis. Believers test the hypothesis by making observations and trying to prove what they believe. Do you buy this creationism thing? I'm afraid it's just getting up a head of steam again after several decades in hibernation.”

“Well, it runs counter to evolutionary theory, doesn't it?”

“Evolution is
fact,
Bowie. A lawyer might say we have an evidentiary trail. There is no scientific basis for creationism. Still, people believe it. Why do you think that is?”

“I guess people want to believe in something. They want somebody to tell them this is how it is.”

“Why not believe in science?”

“Because it keeps changing. We know one thing today and another thing tomorrow. Science is the search for answers. Religious beliefs are answers. Or what passes for answers. And they don't seem to change.”

“Why aren't you a believer?”

“I don't have enough information to believe in the literal creation, but I believe some things.” Queen Anna believed and never questioned. This always bothered me, but I never felt it my place to question her.

“Such as?”

“I think life's precious. We only have so much time and we ought to do what we think is important. We ought to use our lives to make things better, not just for ourselves, but for everybody.”

“What's guilt, Bowie?”

“To me?”

She nodded. “Do you ever feel guilty?”

“Not really.”

“That doesn't worry you?”

“No.”

“Some would say that guilt is a signal from your conscience. Sort of a
go slow
sign on a dangerously curving road. There's pathology connected to the total absence of guilt. It can be sociopathic. Do you heed traffic signs?”

“Most of the time.”

“Why?”

“Common sense.”

“Do you always use common sense?”

The conversation was making me uncomfortable. Was she trying to dig into me? “Do you?” I asked her. We had never talked so personally. Usually there were other people around us and my job mostly was to listen to what they had to say.

“Not always,” she said. Then she chuckled. “Sometimes not at all.”

She stared at me a long while and I stared back and sometime during that long look I began to see her as pretty and to think of her not just as a professor, but as a woman. I wondered what she thought of me.

We left long before daylight on Sunday. She had to get back to East Lansing for some sort of late-afternoon meeting. We trooped silently out to her station wagon and she tossed me her keys. “Will you drive?”

“Do I have to obey the traffic signs?”

She clutched my arm and laughed. “You have definite charm, Bowie Rhodes.”

We weren't far out of town before she was asleep against my shoulder. She had a soft snore. It felt good to have her so close.

It was still dark when she awoke and rubbed her eyes. She was still on my shoulder and snuggled closer. “Need a break?”

“I'm okay,” I said. She closed her eyes and soon her breathing told me she had fallen back to sleep.

I had a fair number of fantasies about Luanne Chidester after that drive, but our relationship remained formal. I got an A from her and she sent a letter to the dean of the College of Communications Arts & Sciences recommending me for a scholarship that would pay for my entire senior year. My job out west had earned me a sizable nest egg, which had taken the pressure off for a couple of years, and if I got the new scholarship I knew I would get through without much worry. I would still have to work, but mostly for expenses.

The class finished before Christmas and I moved on to other courses with other teachers, but I made it a point to stay in touch with Luanne. About once a month, usually on a Sunday afternoon, I was her guest for brunch. These were wonderful sessions, filled with discussions of arcane science and an incredible range of tangential subjects. Over time, we became friends. By late March I was bubbling with anticipation for the opening of trout season.

“Tell me about this fishing,” she said. We were in her solarium. She had her legs tucked beneath her and she was settled in a huge soft chair. “You have a passion for it?”

“I love it.”

“Why?”

“I guess I never thought about it that way.”

“That's not an answer.”

“I just like to fish for trout.”

“You say ‘trout' a certain way, as if there's a distinction and hierarchy between trout and other fish. Is this a snobbish thing?” She flashed a mischievous grin.

“Probably.”

She smiled. “Are trout good to eat?”

“Yes, but I usually don't kill them.”

She sat up. “What's the point then?”

“The search, I guess. The pursuit.”

“You catch them to let them go.”

“Pretty much.”

“You don't like to eat fish?”

“I like fish fine.”

“Is it that you feel sorry for them?”

“No. I don't have any feelings for them. They're just fish.”

“Then why let them go?”

“To catch them again.”

She giggled. “How would you ever know if you caught the same fish?”

“I wouldn't and it doesn't matter. I let them loose so they can be caught again by somebody. It doesn't have to be me. It's just so they're there. I guess I like knowing that.”

“But somebody else will probably kill them.”

“I can't make decisions for others. All I know is that I don't want to kill them.”

“It seems to me that if you really cared about their well-being you wouldn't catch them at all. You'd just leave them alone.”

I couldn't argue. “Okay, it's a selfish act. I get what I want, but the way I see it, the trout also benefits. Each time a fish is caught and released, it gets harder to catch. Trout learn and pass their lessons on. In England they say that brown trout pass along their experience genetically.”

“That's not possible. Mutations are critical to evolutionary theory, but they don't work like this.”

“I don't know what the science is. I don't think anybody really knows for certain, but if one fish is better at recognizing food than another, it's going to thrive, and if it thrives it will pass this on. Look at athletes. How many times are the sons of great athletes also good at their fathers' sports? All I know is that in England and other places there are trout that are extremely difficult to catch.”

“But people still try.”

“Naturally.”

“Do you think you could show me?”

The following Sunday she met me at my place. We went to a parking lot behind the house. I used a black cast-iron skillet as a target, strung up the old bamboo rod, and demonstrated the cast. At twenty yards the fly landed in or close to the pan about half the time.

“Wanna try?”

She cast until her elbow got sore.

After about an hour, she said, “I want to do this for real.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean everything I say,” she said solemnly.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“The season opens at the end of the month, but it'll be crowded then and the weather's usually lousy, especially up north.”

“I don't care at all for crowds,” she said.

We settled on a Thursday in mid-May. She had no classes to teach and I was happy to cut mine.

I took her north to the Brother River. It was shallow, wide, open, a good place for a beginner. Luanne swam in my waders, which were far too large for her.

She hooked her first fish on a tan caddis soon after we started. These were hatchery fish reared on pellets and hand-fed, so they weren't picky about food. I had her play the trout to the shallows and got my hand on it. She got down on her knees and stared, openmouthed.

“Bowie, it's
fantastic.
” The eight-inch rainbow squirmed. “The color is indescribable!”

“Shall we keep it?” I asked her.

“What do you mean, ‘keep'?”

“Kill it, gut it, cook it tonight.”

“I can't kill anything this beautiful.”

I held it in the stream, keeping its head into the current and moving it back and forth to get water moving through its gills; when it was sufficiently revived, it flitted into deeper water with an energetic spurt and disappeared.

Luanne sat down on a rock. “Now I want to watch you.”

I caught four fish out of the same run, the first one a fifteen-inch brown. She didn't say anything for a long time.

“Stop,” she said. “Please.”

When I turned, she splashed clumsily over to me, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me so hard we both collapsed onto the gravel bar. “I understand now!” she said. “It's not just the fish. It's the music of moving water, the smell of clean air, the scenery, the pull on the line, it's the whole thing. You're a romantic, not a sociopath!”

She did understand. Rather, she had a start at understanding. On the other hand, I kept wondering if she had really considered that I might be demented. A sociopath? It was a disturbing thought.

“I want to do this again sometime! Can we?”

Of course we could. The heat of her kiss had inflamed me and I seized on the thought that maybe our friendship could get more intimate.

She looked at the bamboo rod. “How old is this?”

I told her the story of the floater on the way back to East Lansing. When we got to her place she kissed me again and I thought I might get invited in, but that was not to be.

In early June she went to New Orleans for some kind of academic conference. After she was gone, I came home to find a package. It contained a new fly rod made of fiberglass, and a new reel. There was a note inside. It said she was taking a job at Tulane and that she was sorry to see our relationship end so impersonally, but she hoped we'd always be friends and she thought it was time I stopped fishing with a dead man's “pole.”

I felt abandoned and sad to lose her friendship. Maybe I still hoped for more and this was the source of my disappointment, but all I knew was that her news left me swimming in self-pity.

She called me in late June. Her words slurred. Sleep, emotion, booze, all of this? I couldn't be sure.

“Bowie? Did I wake you? I'm sorry, but I wanted you to know.”

“Know what?”

“I'm getting married.”