A Perfect Drift – Part Two

Night fishing is not unusual in these parts. Creeping the banks through the tangle and woody debris with big flies looking for big fish, the behemoths that cruise only in the dark of the night. Big brown trout striking at sound and movement, no matter the cause, anglers making casts to concentric reflections. But not tonight. It’s a little too soon. The days are warm but the chilly nights will keep most away. No one will fish tonight, except for Jack. And when he returns home in the twilight from his job at the creamery, the man who lives in the house up the hill won’t give it a second thought. He’ll simply drive by thinking, just another lunatic trout fisherman wasting his life away. He’ll walk to the barn to check on his cows, and go to the house for dinner. Around 10 o’clock the lights will go off. Everyone in bed. And he’ll never give Jack a second thought until he sees the truck again, still parked, a light frost on the windshield.

As the good light faded Jack sat down against a large tree and rummaged through his box of streamers, picking out an olive wooly-bugger, something fun to drift and strip. The bead will give it enough weight to sink a bit, but not so much as to get hung up in the riffles, he thought. Then he pulled a clear plastic bag from the pocket of his vest, reshaped the contents to their original form and proceeded to open and eat the remaining part of his mettwurst sandwich, washing it down with the last gulps of water from his bottle. As he ate he recalled a time many years ago sitting against a tree, sharing a bottle of Old Grandad with his best friend. After the Fourth of July fireworks had ended, after the crowd had gone, they sat at the lakeside park concealed from the spotlight of a patrolling police car, watching through the darkness as the waves washed over the old concrete piers, passing the bottle between them, the smell of alewives in the breeze, talking about girls, leaving home, and other pipe dreams. Jack furrowed his brow, softly shook his head from side to side and thought, what an odd random memory, where did that come from? Conscription took his friend from his home and he never returned. And Jack would leave too, moving around some until finally settling down not far from Coon Valley, living in an old farmhouse once occupied by an Amish family down the gravel road of a remote coulee.

On this night, however, he was alone. After a long day he was still feeling good, feeling strong. Tired but not exhausted. It had been a perfect day. He awakened with the valley many hours ago, and now he would put her to bed, finish things off while it was still on the warm side, then head home.

He cut across a fallow field to get to the meander where a large tree had fallen into a deep, scoured hole. A place where the bank collapsed during Spring flooding two years ago. Too far from the road for the casual angler, this was a favorite spot. A short riffle above the hole and a long fast stretch below. The crème de la crème. An easy sneak. Big fish always hold here on the edge of the eddy, beneath the foam, he thought.

As he walked, he replayed last year’s visit in his mind’s eye; an early evening hatch of blue-winged olives creating a feeding frenzy, the thrill when he watched a big brown emerge and gulp his fly, his disappointment when it tugged hard and snapped his tippet at the knot when the fish darted downstream. How he stood on a little spit of gravel for almost 20 minutes catching fish after fish, hoping the big one would return for another go, and then the action ending as fast as it began.

Jack had a look of satisfaction on his face and felt some anxious excitement as he walked, taking advantage of the light from the rising full moon. But an abandoned badger hole on the edge of the field caught him by surprise and with one bottomless step his knee buckled, flinging him hard into the weeds and sandy loam, and a rock where he cracked his head hard, knocking himself  unconscious.

The cows cautiously approached the crumpled shape lying in the grass, one venturing in close over the top of Jack’s head. When Jack came to, he opened his eyes slowly and tried to concentrate on the odd-looking form a few inches away, a warm moisture rhythmically sweeping above his ear. Cow breath. And as his focus cleared, he could see the reflection of the moon in the dark eye of the cow, like he was ensnared by one of those pictures hanging in the café painted by a Waldorf student. He groaned as he let out a hard breath, and the Holstein pulled back from her position of curious observation with a few plodding steps.

Jack sat up slowly, checked his head with his hand for blood, and craned his neck around to see a half dozen cows standing 20 yards away watching him with expressions of anxious contentment. A hard shiver passed through his whole body and he knew he needed to get up and walk off the cold stiffness he felt, but instead he sat there and simply took it all in. Sitting in a field with a group of black and white crepuscular grazers watching over him. The sound of the river racing over the riffle he didn’t get to fish. The frantic chorus of coyotes yapping not far down the valley.

He leaned over and reached out to retrieve his flyrod in the grass, laid it across his lap, and again his thoughts drifted as he flexed movement back into his hands with a few firm grips. The vast flawlessness of the night sky pulled his eyes upward and Jack squinted to focus on a group of stars flickering with agitation. He thought about explorers who search the universe. Looking through great telescopes from grand observatories, rovers crawling the surface of a faraway planet looking, searching, sending back pictures to scientists who scour them looking and searching for signs. And the stories he read always talked about the search for water, and he imagined being one of those explorers, a scientist or astronomer looking for signs of ancient waterways, and he imagined discovering the remnants of a primeval stream. A stream that may have had a riffle above a hole that could only be fished at the end of the day. A hole that could only be approached from behind. A spot where the cast could be long and unfettered. Where the placement would need to be perfect, and the drift would be forever. And for a moment his vision blurred and a rush passed through his body as if the particles of his soul were re-arranging into a new order. If only he knew about such things before becoming an old man, he thought, his choices would’ve been different.

A voice cracked the silence from across the field and a light hit Jack’s face, startling him from his aimless wool gathering.

“Hey, are you okay?” It was the man who lived up the hill. The man who worked at the creamery. Awakened by the sound of coyotes too close to his herd for comfort.

Yes, I’m fine, Jack thought as he nodded, raised his arm and waved. Everything is perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Dedicated to L.D. and D.D.