The Longest Silence (13 page)

Spring was here and it was hot. In one day it shot up to the eighties. I could feel the purling melt coming out from under the snowbanks. Runoff was going to drop me in midstride.

I drove away from the places I thought would get the first dirty water, away from the disturbed ground. At daybreak out on the interstate I found myself in a formation of Montana Pioneers driving Model-Ts. This piquancy didn’t hold me up long and I soon made my way to a wonderful little district where various grasses, burgeoning brush, wildflowers, and blue-green strips of fragrant sage had all somehow got the news that spring had sprung. The cover was so deep in places that deer moving through it revealed only their ears, which flipped up and disappeared. An old pry bar lay lost in the grass, polished smooth by use. Ranchers never had the help they needed and they were all masters of prying. These bars had the poetry of any old
tool, whether a dental instrument, or old greasy hammers, or screwdrivers around a man’s workshop, especially when the tool owner is not in immediate evidence, or is dead.

The river whispered past this spot in a kind of secretive hurry. I got in and waded upstream, then sat on a small logjam to tie on a fly. The logs under me groaned with the movement of current. I was suddenly so extremely happy, the sight of this water was throwing me into such a rapturous state, that I began to wonder what it could mean. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t something misanthropic in this passion for solitude.

I put my thermometer into the river, knowing already it was going to come out in the forties. Taking the river’s temperature is like taking your own temperature, with all the drama of the secret darkness of the interior of your mouth; you wait and wait and try to wait long enough. Is it 98.6 or am I right in thinking I don’t feel too good? The water was 49 degrees, fairly acceptable for now.

Across from my seat was an old cabin. These old structures along Montana trout rivers are part of their provenance, part of what comes back to you, like the wooded elevations that shape and bend and push and pull each river so that as you try to re-create one in your mind the next winter, there is a point where you get lost, always an oxbow or meander where a certain memory whiteout occurs. I am always anxious to return to such a stretch and rescue it from amnesia.

To reach my pool, I had to wade across the riffle above the logjam and then work my way around a humongous dead cow inflated to a height of five feet at the ribcage. The smell was overpowering but I needed to get to that pool. A mule deer doe was back in the trees watching me with her twin yearling fawns. One was already getting little velvet antlers.

For some reason I was thinking how many angry people, angry faces, you saw in these romantic landscapes, as though the dream had backfired in isolation. There were the enraged visages behind pickup truck windshields with rifles in the back window at all seasons of the year. I remembered an old rancher telling me about a rape that had just occurred in Gardiner, and in his eyes was the most extraordinary mixture of lust and rage I have ever seen. He lived off by himself in a
beautiful canyon and this was the sort of thing he came up with. A friend of mine from the Midwest looked at the chairs in a restaurant covered with all the local cattle brands and cried out in despair, “Why are these people always tooling everything?” The pleasures of being seduced by the daily flux of the masses were not available. All the information about the world had failed to produce the feeling of the global village; the information had only exaggerated the feeling of isolation. I had in my own heart the usual modicum of loneliness, annoyance, and desire for revenge, but it never seemed to make it to the river. Isolation always held out the opportunity of solitude: the rivers kept coming down from the hills.

Having reached my pool, having forded the vast stench of the cow, I was rewarded with a sparse hatch of sulfur mayflies with mottled gray wings. I caught three nice browns in a row before it shut off. I knew this would happen. A man once told me, after I’d asked when you could assume a horse would ground-tie and you could go off and leave him knowing he’d be there when you got back: “The horse will tell you.” When I asked an old man in Alabama how he knew a dog was staunch enough to break it to stand to shot, he said: “The dog will tell you.” There are times for every angler when he catches fish because the fish told him he could, and times when the trout announce they are through for the day.

Two of the most interesting fish of the next little while were ones I couldn’t catch. One was on the far edge of a current that ran alongside a log. The trout was making a slow porpoising rise. I managed to reach him and he managed to rise, but drag got the fly and carried it away an instant before he took. The next fish, another steady feeder, rose to a Light Cahill. The dinner bell at a nearby ranch house rang sharply. I looked up, the fish struck, and I missed it.

I caught a nice rainbow by accident, which is the river’s way of telling you that you’ve been misreading it. And then thunder and lightning commenced. I got out of the river. Bolting rain foretold the flood. I went up and sat under the trunk lid of my car, quite comfortably, and ate my lunch, setting a Granny Smith apple on the spare tire. The thermos of coffee seemed a boon almost comparable to the oranges we kept on ice during the hot early weeks of bird season. The
rain steadied down and I could watch two or three bends of the river and eat in a state of deep contentment. I didn’t know of a better feeling than to be fishing and having enough time; you weren’t so pressured that if you got a bad bank you couldn’t wait until the good bank turned your way and the riffles were in the right corners. The meal next to a stream was transforming, too, so that in addition to the magic apple there was the magic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

The rain stopped and I went down to where an irrigation ditch took out along a rip-rapped bank. I had a very nice Honduran cigar to smoke while I watched a heron fish the shallows. The air was still. When I puffed a great cloud of smoke and it drifted across the little river, I imagined it was the ghost of my grandfather, who loved to fish. The ghost glided past the heron, who politely ignored him.

I just knew something was going on. There was a readiness; the rain had barely withdrawn. The sky looked so heavy you felt if you scratched it you’d drown. This was the storm that would loosen the mountain snows, and the glistening fingers of this small river system would turn as brown as a farmer’s hand. Time, in its most famous configuration, was running out. This could be my last day on the stream for a good while. Having broken out of the pattern of home life and work, you might as well keep going.

I crawled down into a canyon made by the river. It was not far from where I had been fishing and the canyon was not that deep. But I needed both hands to make the descent, lowering myself from projecting roots and points of rock, and I had to throw the rod down in front of me because there was no good way to carry it. I found myself between tall cream-and-gray rock walls. The river flowed straight into dissolved chimneys, rock scours, solution holes and fanciful stone bridges.

The sky overhead was reduced to a narrow band over which the storm had re-formed. More killdeer conducted their crazed, weeping, wing-dragging drama around my feet. The storm became ugly and I looked all around the bottom of the small canyon for a safe place to be. Lightning jumped close overhead with a roaring crack. The rain poured down, periodically lit up by the lightning. What little I knew about electricity made me think that bushes were a poor connection,
so I burrowed into a thick clump of laurels, became mighty small, and studied the laurel: round, serrated leaf, brownish yellow bark, a kind of silvery brightness from afar. It had become very gloomy. By looking at the dark mouths of the caves in the far canyon wall, I could monitor the heaviness of the rain while the steady rattle on the hood of my parka filled in the blanks. I spotted a lightning-killed tree at about my level on the far side. The river had seemed so cheerful and full of green-blue pools. Now it was all pounded white by rain and only the darker V’s of current indicated that it was anything but standing water.

Then the air pressure lightened. The dark sky broke wide open in blue. An owl crossed the river, avoiding the return of light. The rain stopped and the surface of river was miraculously refinished as a trout stream. I looked at the drops of water hanging from my fly rod. I thought of the windows of the trout opening onto a new world and how appropriate it would be if one of them could see my fly.

The standing water along roadsides in spring is a wonderful thing. On the way home, I saw a flight of northern shoveler ducks, eccentric creatures in mahogany and green, and off in a pasture stock pond, teal flew and circled like butterflies unable to decide whether to land. I wondered what it was about the edges of things that is so vital, the edges of habitat, the edges of seasons, always in the form of an advent. Spring in Montana is a kind off pandemonium of release. Certainly there are more sophisticated ways of taking it in than mine. But going afield with my fishing rod seemed not so intrusive, and the ceremony helped, quickening my memory back through an entire life spent fishing. Besides, like “military intelligence” and “airline cuisine,” “sophisticated angler” is an oxymoron. And if it wasn’t, it would be nothing to strive for. Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.

It was ten minutes to five. There was absolutely no wind. I could see the corners of a few irrigation dams sticking up out of the ditches. The cottonwoods were in a blush of green. I was ready for high water.

I
FISH ALL THE TIME
when I’m at home, so when I get a chance to go on a vacation, I make sure to get in plenty of fishing. I live in south-central Montana, and because of drought and fires this year it resembles one of the man-made hells such as the Los Angeles basin. I make a trip every summer to fish the Big Hole River, and this year, knowing it was somewhat out of the range of smoke and ash and heat, I particularly looked forward to it. My friends Craig and Peggy Fellin have a small fishing lodge, with a capacity of eight, and I was perhaps their most regular annual guest.

Montana is so large and contains such a diversity of distinct regions that a trip from where I live to the southwesternmost corner, the Big Hole, provides a tremendous transition of environment, change of weather, change of terrain, and culture. The Big Hole ranchers are different from others in the state, and many of their farming and stock management practices also differ. The age of that district is seen in the old ranch headquarters, the hoary barns, the places founded by Frenchmen and fur traders, the stables that once held famous racehorses and, one valley over in the Bitterroot, the old mission churches.

But to head across Montana this year is alarming. With limited annual rainfall, much of its appearance is desertic to begin with. But this year the yellow desiccation of midsummer crawled closer to the green shapes of mountains, until finally the wooded high country
stood in ghastly attendance over what looked to be a dying landscape. Then all the fires began, first in Yellowstone, then in the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall areas. Inspired by this festivity, Missoula arsonists began to have at it until the feeling began to be that, generally speaking, Montana was on fire.

Water had become fascinating. It was fascinating to water the lawn. It was fascinating to direct a fine mist at a flowerpot. It was fascinating to take a bucket and measure the flow that filled the tank that watered my cows. It was fascinating to watch the saddle horses dip their muzzles in a spring. Suddenly other things in the landscape were not interesting. Wind generators were not interesting. Electricity was not interesting. Power lines were not interesting. Telephones were not interesting, and all the wires and relays over the prairie that laced this largely empty region to the fervid nation were not so very interesting anymore. Water had become the only interesting thing. It had rained one-quarter of an inch in three months. I had watched water-laden clouds go overhead at terrific speed without losing a drop. Montana was getting less rain than the Mojave Desert. The little clouds that look like the clouds on a baby’s crib were the sort of thing you wanted to shout at. Wind beat the ground on the rumor of water. Stockmen hauled water to battered, unusable pastures for their cows and calves. Forest springs remembered by generations suddenly evaporated.

I drove west on the interstate along the Yellowstone River. A long Burlington Northern train came around a curve in the river in the dry air, approached in silence, then was alongside me at once in a whirring rush of metal and movement. Astonishingly, the air was filled with a train smell, an industrial odor that stood out sharply in the drought-stricken air. But the ash in the air was from the fires, and the smoke that poured out from the valley of the upper Yellowstone had the inappropriately sentimental tang of autumn leaf-burning. Still, the train rolled on, and the first thing one wondered was whether or not it was a machine for starting fires.