All In The River’s Time
By Tom Bachert
The old man lurches forward with a slight groan, dragging the canoe bow securely onto the black pebbles of the long-forgotten gravel bar. Salty sweat blurs his fading vision as he reaches for the familiar gritty cork handle of his fly rod. The tattered remains of a small Elk-Hair Caddis flutters in the late afternoon breeze as he trudges through the ancient gravel towards the deep, cold pool at the tail of the gravel spit. His nose wrinkles at the sour smell of the spawned-out King salmon now feeding the gulls from its casket of shoreline rocks. Instinctively his eyes search the shoreline for any sign of lurking bear. Seeing none, he continues his trek towards the awaiting pool…a pool of promise. A pool seething with iridescent fins of Arctic Grayling long hidden from man by lonesome miles. A pool of memories, sealed forever by passing years.
The man pauses to rest and leans his weary bones against the bleached white skeleton of a large spruce trunk deposited on the gravel bar by the spring floods. “No sense in hurrying,” he muses to himself while staring blankly at the dark granite mountains through which the river has cut its course over the eons. “No hurry, all in the river’s time. No sooner, no later…all in the river’s time.” A slight breeze ruffles the white down growing on the tip of a fireweed flower stubbornly rooted at the base of nearby boulder, sending a few silky seeds into the air and reminding the man of the quickly approaching Alaskan winter. “When the fireweed turns to ash, time to make moose hash!” he laughs, recalling one of his late wife’s joyful proverbs about this time of year.
Throughout the many years they had traveled together, Katrina, his Russian-born wife, had always taken special delight in preparing each season’s first meal of moose, garnishing it with the garden’s bounty of potatoes and a dessert of fresh-picked blue berries. Katrina learned to prepare the rich meat with a proper reverence for both animal and taste-bud under the patient guidance of an Athabascan Indian woman who had taken the young, city-raised girl under wing. The beauty of the memory brings water to the man’s mouth as well as his eyes. Embarrassed with himself, he gruffly wipes his eyes and begins walking again.
Arriving at the head of the pool he stops to gaze into the depths of its swirling icy eyes. Its cobalt blue surface mirrors the rarified sky above and jolts his mind with reflections of his daughter’s eyes. She had been birthed into this world on a snowy winter night in a small cabin just a hundred yards or so back from the far bank of this pool, and these waters had cleansed her tiny, pink skin of the rigors of her mother’s labor. The swirling whirlpool of fear, confusion and ecstatic joy blurred the happenings of that night, but the pure blue of his new daughter’s eyes pierced the haze then, just as they burn through the fog of the years now. On that moonless night he declared her name to be Sapphire . During the years that followed her sparkling eyes added more glitter to his life than all the gold he had ever dredged from these lands. Ah, but like the shiny young fingerlings that spend their minnow-hood in this pool, she had long since left these waters to grow large in the distant sea.
The man shifts his gaze deeper into the pool towards a large, flat stone projecting at an angle from the submerged base of the cut-bank. The shadows of the depths obscure the details of the marble slab’s edges, despite the crystalline clarity of the icy water. His eyes strain against the current’s all encompassing movement, straining to detect the slightest movement of life. The autumn’s confetti of yellow and gold birch leaves drift through his field of vision, carried forever seaward by the river’s currents, yet his physical senses pick up no trace of the fish he pursues. Despite this lack of evidence, the man knows the fish is there, lurking among the shadows, waiting patiently in the pool’s rocky lair. It’s been there for years, growing larger and heavier with each passing season, its sail like dorsal fin fluttering like the most delicate butterfly wings amid the turbulence of the passing current. The fish has risen to his fly on several occasions, sucking heavily on his feathery offerings. It has even felt the sting of his hook more than once but has never felt the touch of his hand. The local Alaska natives believe that an animal must choose to give its soul to the hunter before it can be taken, and the man wonders if the same does not also hold true for this fish. “Perhaps you will choose me today…Perhaps today our souls will mingle.”
A loud splash downstream near the tail of the pool jolts the man from the depths of his thoughts. He looks up to see a beaver determinedly dragging a fresh Aspen bough through the persistent current. The animal, so preoccupied with its winter preparations, pays no notice to the man or the current’s constant tug. Despite this apparent lack of recognition, the current imparts an angle to the animal’s determined course, gently directing it to the snag-filled mouth of the feeder stream at the base of the pool. The beaver disappears into the incoming stream as if this was always its intended destination. The man cannot see beyond the mouth of the feeder stream yet his mind knows its rock-strewn course well. Indeed, it was the man’s back-breaking labor of dredging its cut banks and sluicing its gravels that molded it into its present shape. An ache in his knees recalls the hours spent standing in its icy torrents wrestling the working end of a suction dredge as it slurped and clawed at the bottom, churning up clouds of gray silt and puking mounds of black gravel into the top end of the sluice box.
During those endless summer days when the sun neither rose nor set, he labored, scarcely noticing the eagles soaring overhead and hardly tasting the food, which Katrina and Sapphire brought down for him. On particularly warm days, wife and daughter would beg him to take a break and join them for an afternoon of frolic and grayling chasing at the cabin’s pool, but he seldom accepted their giggling offers. There was gold in these rocks, and he was determined to find it! And find it he did, or at least so he had thought. It lay nestled behind boulders, embedded in the dark gravels and hiding between the rust-colored garnet layer and underlying bedrock. Tiny yellow flecks grew into slender, sand fingers between the sluice baffles. Occasionally, molten-shaped nuggets fell out of the garnet-laden gravels at the top of the sluice, waiting to be hand picked. His poke of gold grew while his young family’s poke of memories increased each day along the shores of the cabin’s pool. His wife Katrina had taken up the art of fly fishing when Sapphire received a Christmas gift of dyed feathers, caribou fur and a fly tying vise from T-bone Tom, the family’s upriver neighbor. On borealis-lit winter nights mother and daughter delighted in their colorful creations at the vise as much as they marveled at the metallic rainbow-painted fins of the Grayling that swallowed their winter creations under the summer’s midnight sun. Meanwhile, he delighted at the color accumulating on the bottom of his gold pans. Both palettes of hue painted their lives. Gold paved the road to good schools for Sapphire and comfortable living in nearby Fairbanks. However, it was the softer fish pastels that endured the inky blot of that sooty night and the smoky years that followed.
An almost imperceptible movement within the murky depths draws the man’s eyes. There, beside the slab rock, the fish moves. Its impossibly long dorsal fin floats among the current like the sail of a ghost ship. The fish’s silhouette rises from its shadowy lair. Its purple outlined spots grace its bronze sides and wink into the autumn’s light. The silky white underbelly flashes amid the murk as the fish sips some hapless insect from the surface. The fish sinks effortlessly back into the shadowy shroud of the depths with but a small dimple on the river’s surface left to testify of its passing. The man’s eyes search the current’s flotsam for any indication of the identity of the insect just eaten. Was it a tiny mayfly pupa struggling to burst forth with one last generation of new life before winter’s cold fingers seal the river? Was it the spent body of a caddis trapped in the surface film’s sticky coffin after a summer of flying free? The river reveals no answers to the man’s tired eyes.
The man’s nose twitches at the sweet scent of ripened labrador tea and blueberries drifting on a breath of a breeze floating down from the surrounding hills. The breeze ruffles the light tan caribou fur of the fly attached to the end of the man’s gossamer leader. Grasping the fly in his large sandpaper fingers, the man examines the fly. It is one of the few patterns he has learned to tie, a variant elk-hair caddis, made almost exclusively from caribou hair. It is equipped with tented wings, a flared head, and a thick body ornamented with gold ribbing. Katrina had shown him the steps for tying such a creation on a rain soaked spring afternoon. She had explained that it is a rather simple pattern but it floats high and is easy to see amid the confused ripplets of the river’s surface. It imitates an adult caddis fly, living free in the summer air after spending its juvenile years encased in a tomb constructed of river’s golden sands. When she described the caddis fly’s life cycle and the larvae’s propensity for constructing homes from the river’s sand, he had laughed and suggested that perhaps they could be trained to only select the gold dust to use in building their encasements.
“ Guess this tattered fly will work as good as any, “ the man mutters as he steps forward into the pool’s edge and prepares to cast. The back-cast loop straightens and the caribou fur softly whistles along its path to the far side of the pool. The trailing line is caught by the tugging current and the resulting u-shaped loop sends the fly skittering across the surface like a nervous female caddis eager to offload her eggs into the river’s water of destiny. The dancing fly entices no movement from the depths, so the man lifts the rod tip and sends the fly back into the air. The man performs a few quick false casts in order to dry the fly’s wings and contemplates his next strategy.
“It’s a bit late in the season for egg laying…perhaps a more subtle approach is in order.” The man allows the fly to settle onto the surface and then attempts to throw an upstream mend into the line so that the current will not drag on his offering quite so vigorously. Unfortunately his attempt to mend the line is a bit too energetic and the fly lifts off the water and settles into a back-eddy that will not carry it through the fish’s feeding lane. While the lifeless body of the fly drifts uselessly through the eddy, the fish once again materializes like a sulking submarine in the main pool and plucks something from the surface before disappearing back into the depths.
Feeling the frustration with his ineptness building in the pit of his stomach but not wanting to reveal it in his next cast, the man lifts the rod tip and lets the line flow into a backwards “D” off his right side. Just as the fly is about to again become airborne, he pushes the rod tip forward causing the fly to roll out behind him and then travel a circular path back out into the head of the pool. As it settles back into the swirling current he again throws an upstream mend, but this time with summer breeze gentleness. The still wet fly begins a sodden drift directly towards the gray shadows of the submerged slab of rock. This time its drift is unaffected by any current tugging at the trailing line.
The shadows of the pool begin to stir as the fly approaches. A dark silhouette emerges from the murk, taking on the sleek form of the fish as it angles upward towards the hairy offering. The surface boils as the fly vanishes from sight. The man leans back, setting the hook point into the soft mouth of disappearing fish. The rod tip vibrates for a second before bending towards the water as the fish struggles to return to the dark lair beside the submerged stone. The pressure of the rod turns the fish, changing tactics, the grayling surges towards the surface. It erupts from the water into the air spraying gem stone droplets into the autumn’s golden sunlight. The intensity of the display causes the man’s legs to stumble among the rocks. He back-pedals in an attempt to regain a purchase on the steep bank, but the marble-like gravel gives way beneath his boots, and the current’s cold grasp pulls him into the pool. The man raises his arms in an attempt to stem another aerial escape maneuver by the fish. This action causes his head to plunge beneath the entrapping currents.
Air explodes from his lungs as the frigid waters invade his waders and jab at his chest like boxing gloves of ice. For a moment the man thinks of releasing his grip on the rod and all the memories it embodies. Memories of Katrina and Sapphire’s laughter spilling out of the cabin’s walls while they tried to secretly assemble the rod whenever he left. Memories of his wife and daughter’s faces when they presented him with the product of their secret labors on that snowy Christmas morning. The thought letting go of all this is more painful than the watery blows pounding at his life. He clutches his rod’s cork handle even harder. The currents of the pool pull at his feet, dragging him ever closer towards the slab of marble implanted in the river’s heart. The slab that he at erected along the forest’s edge long before the river’s devouring currents had reclaimed it as one of its own. His boots bang against the slab’s algae-slicked surface, sending green strands of detritus into the currents and uncovering the letters he had engraved into it so many years ago through tear-blurred eyes and fingers numb with grief. The river pushes the man ever onward toward this pillar of fate. Through liquid haze, the man’s eyes behold the silt-tarnished letters, “KATRINA …” and the man’s soul leaps with a yearning deep within to forever join this submerged slab of stone. The liquid kaleidoscope engulfing the man rotates and the man again sees the thick smoke rising through the forest in the direction of the cabin site. Once again he feels the mining tools drop from his frozen hands as he sprints from the mine site down the snow clogged trail towards the flames devouring his home. His lungs again burn under the weight of the acrid smoke and his fingers tremble as they probe for life signs on the body sprawled in the crystalline snow. His ears wilt at the sounds of his daughter’s sobbing song emerging from beneath the blanket beside her mother’s corpse. Within the watery tomb the man’s mind screams. “Oh, let this be the day that river chooses me! …The day that it carries me home.”
The fish, angered by the hook’s sting and oblivious to the drama unfolding in the pool depths, streaks down river. It knows not its destination, but only that life lies in action. It bangs the stinging insect imbedded in its lips against boulders and flings it back towards the cobalt sky from whence it came. Yet through all these antics the insect maintains its aching pressure on the fish’s jaw. In desperation, the fish darts into the tangle of branches gyrating in the current beneath a dead-fallen birch. Suddenly, the pressure on its jaw becomes insurmountable, stopping any further progress of retreat. For a moment the fish lies motionless, held fast as the river and leaves wash past its scaled sides. Then driven by its lust for life the fish explodes into frantic flopping and writhing. Its lips of spongy flesh sear with the pain of fire and then go numb as the hook-laden insect pulls free. The river pushes the fish through the remaining tangles and the fish slowly settles back into the cloak of the rocky bottom.
The bend in the rod grasped by the man’s blue hand goes limp causing the man’s eyes to turn skyward. There, rising above the comforting shroud of hallucinogenic memories, burning through the enticing ghosts drifting in the river’s currents, a sapphire sun calls down to him. Unable to resists its song, the man pushes with numb legs against the entrapping stone and lunges towards the shimmering surface. His head breaks into the world of sunlight and cool air rushes into his parched lungs. With the rod still firmly embraced by his hand the man stumbles onto the rocky shoreline.
That night, warming his bones in the flickering campfire light, the man gazes into the colors painted on the river’s surface, reflections of the colors dancing in the sky above. As he reflects on the day’s happenings, a single Boreal Owl glides silently through the darkness and alights on top of the tall spruce tree standing sentry over the old cabin site. The man’s eyes grow heavy and he lies back into the warm folds of his awaiting sleeping bag. As he drifts towards sleep the owl begins a soft series of hoots. Within the bird’s soft serenade the man is sure he hears the words, “All in the river’s time …all in the river’s time.”
