I became a young man late. In my teens my old man had given me imperatives toward that end, sometimes suggestions like “You should study engineering,’ sometimes admonitions like “Get a job” or admonishments like “Don’t be a parasite.”
It wasn’t until I was twenty-two that he said, “Be big” as fatherly advice on how to live with a broken heart. “Be big,” he said, and “Be honest.”
So with the intention to be big in my life I finally began to be a young man, and I began to seek adventures and go towards challenges.
I traced the footsteps of my heroes to a cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho, and to Trinity and University colleges Dublin. Stood at the infamous corner of Nguyen Dinh Chieu and Cach Mang Thang Tham in Saigon and gave respects in the village of My Lai. Adventures and challenges with women, maintaining intimate relationships that sustain me still in my solitude. Faced problems of my own making (the time my brother and I shot Mistletoe Creek in a “borrowed” 12-foot rowboat during spring runoff), and problems gifted to me (hospitalizations on three continents – in Greenwich Village and Grand Marais and Dublin and Ho Chi Minh City).
And I caught trout on three continents, too.
On the longer South Island of New Zealand, which stretches to the Antarctic waters, coming down from the glacier peaked Thumbs through the Ashwick Flats, the great river Tekapo passes through the Maorinamed town of Timaru.
Back up through the big valley of apple tree and sheep farms, we went through tall gates and sturdy grates and then wandered up the wide basin. When the jeep couldn’t take us further we humped and humped and crossed powerful tributaries – my girlfriend on my back holding on – coming down from Mount Dobson. Upstream we crossed and re-crossed the pounding Tekapo when and where we could.
First we caught a big, big German brown in a deep run. Then casting far across the river to the far bank a big rainbow.
We humped up the flat rocky basin devoid of vegetation with the slate mountains collapsing around us, and the air felt infinite like the ocean but without the ocean smell and with no horizon.
We advanced on the source of the river, the place where frigid, clear glacier water came out of the sides of The Thumbs, where I squatted and drank directly from the bubbling spring.
There was a great wide mystical pool with aquatic vegetation I could not identify. One monster trout in a perfect ambush owned the pool like a dragon, rising off and on to swallow mayflies. I casted upstream and across over him through the water greens and he took it rollingly and we beached him in the muddy grass. He was a brown trout of twenty-five inches, and the photo shows the heroic mountains in the background miles away.
In the temperate rainforest of northern Minnesota where visibility is reduced to nothing, the contours of the land may be imperceptible. You get the lay of the land because the creek flows over riffles indicating gradient down. The creek is small: one step from the fern bank in, one step over the marsh marigolds out. Stepping out, the sun is bright and warm, and one looks for shade again to rest, and smoke and re-tie. The brook trout too look for the shadows – under sod or trailing grass or submerged logs or twirling eddies.
You fish downstream, or circumvent the hole and approach from upstream, because there is little room to cast. Only laying a small fly into the water and feeding it line. Lateral movement of the rod tip from bank to bank gives the fly life, as does a tug or two back upstream toward you.
Today I bring to hand a four-inch adult brook and three-inch parr (immature). I have many, many bites and many fish on, but I lose them to the delicacy or difficulty of the fishing.
I’m older now, and there is no one left to admonish me. I might hear out a suggestion from time to time. I give myself imperatives, and they are not fatherly. My goals and purposes are mine alone and not to be shared.
Except that when I finally stopped being a young man, I was able to be honest about one thing. I now seek to catch the most satisfactory fish in the smallest body of water. The old, stunted brook in some forgotten creek.
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