Reflections On The Irrelevance of Brook Trout...

“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after…”

- Henry David Thoreau

Hansel and I left town early this morning with the idea that we’d catch our limit of brook trout in the high lakes to the east of the Willamette River’s valley. Although we returned home from the crags, ridges, and creeks of the North Santiam drainage with nothing tangible to show for our efforts, today’s seven hour boondoggle of slow driving and slower hiking along some of my very favorite basalt-cobbled backwoods boulevards proved – for me – a thoroughly relaxing and therapeutic journey studded with opportunities – both simple and dramatic – for witnessing the riotous blooming spectacle, the impatient green energy, the wildfire of vitality which summer’s sunshine has only recently ignited upon the steep western slopes of Cascadia’s backbone.

Though this is the third consecutive fishing trip I’ve made this year without anything I’d call a catch – a fact which might be depressing to someone who is genuinely concerned with the catching of trout - I've lately felt that I’m not as genuinely concerned with the catching of trout as I am with the use of a fishing pole as a tool for slipping – if only temporarily – those chafing ties which lash me to a workday existence filled with plastic technologies, forced pleasantries, and toxic professional pretense. I also have a lingering sense that perhaps I'm not meant to catch anything at this point in time, that I may not be catching any trout because nature doesn’t wish for me to catch any trout. And that would be understandable - if I were nature, I wouldn’t wish for someone like me to catch trout either.

At any rate, it seems that on this particular day, nature didn’t even want us to get close enough to fish-bearing water for any outside chance of success. Which is to say that we left Silverton with a fairly modest list of smallish lakes upon whose tangled and brush-choked banks we intended to test our angler’s luck. Despite that list, and as that luck would have it, each attempt to reach one of the lakes in question ended in failure at some unreasonable and unseasonable and definitively impenetrably deep bank of lingering snow. And yet – through some little providence – the frustration of each failure was quickly replaced by an unexpected experience of inspiration.

After failing to reach Daly Lake and its neighbor named Parish Lake, we took a few minutes to walk near a floating bog fringed by ivory trillium and lemon-blossomed skunk cabbage and discovered that the often overlooked wild strawberry crop is looking as promising as any we've seen in the past.

Halted on the steep track up toward Opal Lake, we clambered down a crumbling bank to watch the liquid quartz waters of French Pete Creek blast through a narrow stone chute flanked by a pair of stately Doug-fir and Western red cedar groves before disappearing around a sharp bend.

Turning away from a back-door stab at reaching the switchback path which leads to serene little Tumble Lake, we startled something in the salal bushes uphill of a culvert and gasped together as we saw a compact, powerful bobcat explode down the gravel road in something reminiscent of an abstract smoke-ring built of dust.

Forced to a stop well short of the broad waters of Elk Lake, our feet carried us more than a mile along forest road still blanketed with three feet of gathered spring snow interrupted every few hundred yards by bare patches of roadside seasoned with lavender wildflowers on delicate malachite stems.

And these inspirations served to reinforce my growing belief that the reasons I give others when they ask me why I’m heading into the hills are not so much reasons as they are excuses. Truth be told, I have absolutely no good hard reason to catch fish, or pick berries, or spend long hours harvesting savory mushrooms in the rain and the cold. Need no longer seems to exist, and the world of consensual reality offers up far more convenient avenues to acquire these commodities.

Instead of fishing, tomorrow morning, I could drive to the city and purchase as much trout as my old skillet might hold.

If some random craving for flaky-crusted wild huckleberry pie happened to arise in my gullet as summer ebbed, I could always place a quick phone call and have five pounds delivered directly to my doorstep.

Should Thanksgiving day find me hankering for battered chanterelles, I could always stop at the grocery store and pick up a sackful.

And so, as I kick back at my picnic table on one of the loveliest evenings of my thirty-sixth year, the better part of half a life on from my first childhood experiences of the same places I sought to visit today, I suspect that I’m not really drawn to foraging, finding, or catching. It seems far more likely that I’m drawn to the experience of nature’s complex simplicity, to the boundless expansiveness which exists where there are empty spaces on my topo map, to the way that – occasionally – I can catch some faint echo of Eden energy expressing itself within the unordered dance of the wild world.