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.

Simple Pleasures, Simple Treasures...

Straddling a half-fallen cottonwood which curved out across the gentle creek like a rough-hewn bowsprit, I flipped the bail of my reel, cast a clear bobber dangling bait into the nearly motionless pool just upstream of the James Street Bridge and sipped at an icy cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. I’d climbed out on the log less as a fisherman and more as a nostalgic observer returning to one of childhood’s very familiar places. The water which lay seven feet below my bare feet reflected more than just a few branch broken bands of turquoise afternoon sky and leaf-dappled goldenrod sunbeams – it reflected the foundation of the creek bed in its wrinkles and bulges, the faint footprints of tiny water skimmers, the gentle character of a small-town summer.

Though it was near enough to eighty degrees in the late afternoon, not a kid-laden inner-tube drifted past, no laughter of shirtless young boys echoed off the rocky banks, no happy family gathered beneath the James Street bridge with their picnic chicken as mine used to do. The only sight was the water moving along at a leisurely pace. No sound could be heard but the gurgle of round stone ripples and the occasional swoosh of a car passing by on the street above. And no fish nipped at my hook from down in that cold dark hole.

It didn’t take me too long to finish my beer and once it was gone, it was time for me to go on back home, to help Pradeep and César grub up an unexpectedly resurrected briar patch, to get back to the business of being the Farmer de Ville. Though they flew by me, those twenty minutes were just the thing to put my head and my heart back together, to provide a small measure of renewal, to kick today’s overly adult outlook half a foot back toward the ease, the unfettered lightheartedness of youth. And as I walked the fifty-odd yards back to my home, I remembered a thing which my friend Gaston Lachenal had said to me once as we foraged for mushrooms along a stream which flowed behind his Coast Range yurt – “A proper creek is a simple pleasure, a simple treasure…”

Don Knotts & The Summer Solstice Tradition...

Though there are many tasks to take up around the property on a daily basis, tons of popping morels and porcini to be picked in the high Cascades, unending demands upon my time now that the weather has veered toward true summer, this past week brought with it an occasion which is always a helluva lot of good fun. This year's solstice celebration started up just as the first shadows began to stretch out from the white-barked birch trees lining the sidewalk, as warm and fragrant hints of evening breeze puffed through the open windows of the great room, as saline and woodsy aromas escaped the still hot stack of smoked oyster pizzas which, in the view of the invitees, are the best of all possible shellfish-based dishes. And as the warm vivid light of afternoon faded inexorably toward the rusting hues and soft dimness of dusk, one by one, a half-dozen hand-picked guests arrived, entered, settled into their predictable roles. We’d all done this scene before; we all expected to do this scene again.

First to walk through the open door was Goran 'Der Kommissar' Markowitz, an acquaintance from many of the past decade's Sasquatch expeditions who just happens to be a well-regarded sommelier at one of Portland’s top restaurants. Rolling up across the front lawn on his ’67 BSA Victor Special, the six foot six scarecrow was quite a sight with his brilliant peroxide blonde crew cut hair, classical Japanese tattoo sleeves, patchwork dungarees, and skin-tight black Von Dutch tee. He pulled four bottles of wine from his saddlebags and handed them to me before giving me a firm hug and a peck on each cheek - not terribly unusual given that he’s gay and European.

I gave the bottles a quick scan as I walked him into the sitting room: Josko Gravner’s ‘01 'Anfora' Ribolla Gialla, Domaine Tempier’s 'Cabassaou' Bandol Rouge ’01, Fritz Haag’s ’76 'Brauneberger Juffer-Sonnenuhr' Riesling Auslese Goldkapsel, Kalin Cellars’ ’97 'Cuvée DD' Pinot Noir. Every bottle was an exceptional and off-beat selection consistent with what I’d expect from such an exceptional and off-beat character. Once inside, he began rolling himself a cigarette and I went to grab the little café tumblers which we both prefer to stemware.

Shortly after Markowitz, in through the side door came my WWOOFer’s friend César. Apparently, no one had informed him that the food was already taken care of, because he carried with him a steaming foil bundle which proved to contain four dozen decadently soft and delicate pork tamales made earlier in the day by his Guatemalan girlfriend. As I took the tamales and placed them beneath a thick towel, he and Pradeep headed out to the garden to check on the progress of the artichokes which seem so strangely mesmerizing to both of them.

Father Domenici and Straw Hat were sweat soaked by the time they showed up. They’d ridden the eight and a half miles from Scotts Mills on bicycles. Specifically, Straw rode in on some vintage Huffy girl’s five speed with the handle-bars turned upside-down and the guy we affectionately call 'His Grace' sat atop a compact BMX bike with yellow mag wheels.

They’re kind of an inseparable pair these days, which probably stems from the fact that His Grace has been living in Straw's shed since just after the black helicopters came late one moonless night in May and unloaded a squad of masked agents who pulled that shiny piece of metal from the bottom of the big hick's hand-dug hole while holding him zip-tied at gunpoint. Subsequently afraid to be alone, Straw called Domenici to come and stay awhile. Now, crammed into a squalid space no larger than a small mid-century camp trailer, the defrocked priest has been researching and writing a book entitled Extra-Terrestrials and The Third Secret of Fatima, hiding out from the Vatican agents he’s sure are stalking him, and making ends meet by selling Mission-style birdhouses which he builds in his ample spare-time. After they’d dumped their rides on the porch, both made a bee line for the punchbowl of sangria.

Eleven minutes passed before one of my very favorite exes, the bawdy Miss Celeste, an unshaved post-Ivy League granola girl with a penchant for witchcraft appeared outside the screen door. Reeking of sandalwood oil, she absent-mindedly wrapped her she-sadhu jata into a tall bun on the top of her head and - drifting from side-to-side - looked as though she’d gotten a bit of a head start in the intoxication department. When I called her on her bloodshot eyes, she gave me a mischievous gap-toothed grin and said simply, “Bhang lassi.” Stopping at the stereo before continuing on to the powder room, Celeste inserted a disc, turned up the volume to a loud but just tolerable level and began doing some kind of trance dance to Cat Power’s rendition of A Woman Left Lonely. It created a pleasant enough languid summer evening atmosphere.

Predictably late came Dick 'Big Mac' Maccabee, a five foot two inch, two-hundred and five pound, acne-ridden Messianic Jew who, from time immemorial had held the focal point of our festivities in his personal possession. The bottom-line is that he loves everything that has anything to do with Don Knotts and got us started watching The Reluctant Astronaut on a solstice evening almost twenty years back. Why the tradition stuck, I haven’t a clue.

At any rate, the guests all came together under one roof and got down to the business of the marking the longest day of the year. Whereas our Winter Solstice gatherings are sober affairs, marked by the burning of a scarecrow stuffed with handwritten note cards detailing our regrets and those habits we wish to remedy as the days grow longer, our Summer Solstice celebrations are light-hearted and without any semblance of a grand purpose. We simply join together, eat smoked oyster pizza, swap stories over wine and beer, laugh at the spectacle of our lives and at one of 1967’s finest - and most overlooked - pieces of comedic cinema. This goes on until we pass out one-by-one into an unconsciousness which is only interrupted when we awake one-by-one in the late morning from our various crashed out contortions on the couches and chairs of Mas des Rigolos, deeply hung-over, increasingly old and achy, glad to find that our friendships still persist.

Pradeep & The Wild Oregon Piranha...

Yesterday evening, after returning from a successful trip to the local hardware store to purchase his very first fishing license, Pradeep sat down at the picnic table and diligently read the 2008 Oregon Sport Fishing Regulations guide from cover to cover. In a manner totally consistent with his personality, he peppered me with countless concerns, points of clarification, and questions as he pored over the text. I tried my best to help the kid understand things better.

While most of his questions were easily answered, I was caught off guard when he asked – “My dear friend, where do you find the piranha?”

“Did you just ask me where to find piranha?” I replied, unsure if I had heard him right.

“Yes boss, it is saying that piranha cannot be fishing for in Oregon without the appropriate permit,” he responded seriously. “Where are these piranha living? Certainly not in our Silver Creek…”

“Pradeep, you must be misunderstanding something. There are no piranha in our rivers and streams. Those fish are from the Amazon basin and couldn’t survive here,” I said, trying my best not to laugh at such stupidity. “There used to be an urban myth about piranha getting flushed down someone's toilet and washing alive into the Willamette, but I think that story was just so much crap.”

“No, I am not misunderstanding things,” he continued. “It says so right here…”

Handing me the pamphlet, Pradeep pointed to the section in question with his finger. And as I read it, I was surprised to find that he was correct in what he was saying. As random as it may seem, in the midst of the General Restrictions portion of the text it clearly stipulates that:

"Unless authorized by a specific permit issued by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, no person may angle for or possess any of the following species of fish: Goose Lake Lamprey; Pacific Lamprey; River Lamprey; Western Brook Lamprey; Miller Lake Lamprey; Klamath Lamprey; Pit-Klamath Lamprey; Klamath Basin Lamprey; Goose Lake Tui Chub; Warner Basin Tui Chub; Alvord Chub; Catlow Tui Chub; Oregon Lakes Chub; Sheldon Tui Chub; Summer Lake Basin Chub; Borax Lake Chub; Oregon Tui Chub of Hutton Spring; Oregon Chub (Willamette Basin); California Roach; Millicoma Dace; Fosket Springs Speckled Dace; Lahontan Redside Shiner; Goose Lake Sucker; Modoc Sucker; Tahoe Sucker; Lost River Sucker; Short Nosed Sucker of Klamath County; Jenny Creek Sucker; Warner Sucker; Malheur Mottled Sculpin; Margined Sculpin; Pit Sculpin; Grass Carp; Caribe or Piranha; Walking Catfish; Snake River Spring/Summer Chinook Salmon; Snake River Fall Chinook Salmon; Columbia River Coho Salmon.

As I drove along Hazelgreen Road this morning, I found my self still ruminating on the implied possibility that our local rivers support a population of man-eating piranha and that it is evidently a protected fishery. Intrigued and curious, I’ve given Pradeep a special task for the week. In addition to the permacultural projects that he’s working on around the household grounds, he’s to procure piranha fishing permits for the two of us. The prospect of fishing for these little pink-bellied devils is an exciting one. Perhaps we'll be grilling up a whole mess of 'em soon.

Susan Atkins & The Twenty-Eight Years...

From my window I can see that the good light which has been so absent at last washes down along this gentle valley to the west of the foothills which stretch from vague haze into vague haze and on again unto the curved edges of the civilization of which I am a part. Barn swallows dive and soar and pirouette effortlessly between the crown of the maple and the fringes of space. Tiny yarrow blossoms burst up from the sidewalk flower bed like hot magenta clusters of mescaline fireworks for no particular reason save gratuitous beauty. It is late afternoon and the easy warmth of early summer streams down from the house of the sun and brings all the garden’s growth to its green zenith.

Out back of the cyclone fence, Pradeep tends to the tomato bed with his new friend César, a migrant seminarian whom he met while reading books up at the Mt. Angel Abbey library during a rained out day last month. And though I should be outside trimming back blackberry vines with my loppers, I’ve spent the day sitting alone at my desk watching YouTube footage of interviews where a repentant Susan Atkins – of Manson Family fame – tries to convince various interviewers, aggrieved family members, and parole board officers that she feels remorse for her actions, that she understands the damage she’s inflicted upon her victims and their loved ones, that the nature of her heart has been transformed during her nearly thirty-nine years behind bars. And somehow, these conversations resonate deeply with me. Somehow I find myself drawn through the full range of intense human emotions via the testimony of this aging butcher. Somehow I hate her and feel sympathy for her all at once.

For some reason – not entirely clear to me – this woman’s horrific situation has pulled me in just about as far as any spectator can be pulled. Since reading six hours ago that she is being considered for compassionate release due to a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, I’ve been sitting here soaking up every piece of information that I can find on her, trying to wrap my head around the gravity of the damage she caused in her youth, trying to come to terms with how I feel about the possibility of someone such as her being freed for any reason, trying to sort out whether she deserves my compassion, trying to figure out whether she could have actually changed from a belligerently young-demonic-pretty murderer to a sixty year old woman of deep introspection and good intention, trying to get a grip on how she could ever prove that her latest words and motivations are worthy of any kind of belief, trying to understand why I even care.

At this point – out of all of the emotional background noise which studying her case has brought up within me – I think that I’ve uncovered why I care, what has been responsible for drawing me into her story on such a gut level. Susan Atkins pleas have carried to me - in novel form - a question which has tortured me for most of the years of my life. How can one person ever truly prove to another that they are worthy of belief and good faith and trust? And more specifically – will I ever feel safe trusting in whomever holds my heart in their hands?

Twenty-eight years ago I caught a man I loved very much cheating on a woman I loved very much and in that moment of discovery a measure of innocence and faith and trust fled my heart and turned to anger and abiding suspicion. Something beautiful and fragile was frightened away on that goddamned day in the mountains which I’ve all but given up trying to revive within myself and for twenty-eight years it has been my unshared secret and I’ve never mentioned it to another soul and never spoken to the one who failed me of the damage inflicted upon me that afternoon. And it seems as though that one betrayal has been the watershed from which all my fear and controlling and manipulation has sprung and that I’ve never recovered what I knew so naturally before and that the most important moment of my childhood was that long-planned special weekend which became for me an emotional crucifixion.

And as I sit here wondering why I'm typing this, I know that there is a part of me somewhere which died back then, an entombed part of me which wishes for the strength to roll away its stone, a part which still awaits its resurrection...

Campfire Conversations Revisited...

“So, do you remember that time I tried to explain to you why I believe that humans are hardwired to find campfires, hearths, and bonfires soothing and reassuring, that fire is the greatest heirloom of our species, and that it is the gift which separates us from the lower beasts?”

I’d decided to pick up a conversation Erin and I had started and cut-short several years ago while at a primitive skills rendezvous on the banks of the Imnaha River. The subject of that old aborted talk was something that always came into my thoughts in tandem with the predictably drug-like effect that I experience whenever I watch an open fire. It was a talk in which I stumbled and bumbled in an effort to explain my belief in past lives, reincarnation, and deep memory.

Shifting closer to me against a particularly strong gust of wind off the nearby lake, she pinched me hard on the cheek. “What the hell, dude?” she laughed. “Don’t even tell me that you’re still hung up on trying to sell me on that same crazy ‘I remember fire from the beginning’ trip. I can’t believe you even remember that chat. It was like five minutes like twenty years ago.”

“It was five years ago and it should have been easier to explain to you.” I mumbled into my half-empty mug of Spanish coffee as my red-headed snapdragon of a friend leaned her bony shoulder against mine. “I have the concept so clear in my head. Why the hell should it be so hard to put into words?”

She smiled and the reflection of the blustery night's campfire flames danced across the shine of her two front teeth. As far as I can tell, she’s always smiling about something, but I never seem to know what exactly that something is.

“What are you smiling about, Erin?” I asked. “Am I more loaded than I thought I was? Do you think I’m a moron?”

Turning away and looking toward the fire-pit, she replied, “I’m smiling because you’ve been sitting here for the last five minutes staring into that bonfire so intently that you’ve not seen your marshmallow burn down to nothing and your skewer mostly turn to ashes and because I forgot how much I like watching you when you’re thinking hard. You get so totally lost into whatever goes on inside of you. You look like you go somewhere else. And I’m smiling because some part of you has been thinking about a conversation we never finished for like twenty years.”

After a momentary pause, she punctuated her response in an intentionally patronizing tone of voice, “I must be totally important to you, huh?”

Erin and I have always shared some kind of similar psychic wavelength. I’ve always suspected that she saw through most of my acts. Tonight, she was right. I’d gone somewhere else.

In the midst of her turn back toward me, I said, “You’re right. I was somewhere else.”

And there came that smile again across her face, her thin lips parting, revealing her shining porcelain whites, allowing another quiet chuckle to leak through into the narrowing space between us. Her eyes stopped me with their intensity and I looked down and away instinctively.

Then there was the slurred voice of a man with a scratchy throat, “What are you two sluts up to over here, plotting your infidelities?”

As Lasse leaned down to hand me a plate of shashlik and mottled flatbread, I sort of faked a short laugh and put a bite of food into my mouth.

Erin answered her husband teasingly, “He was just about to explain his feelings on bonfires and why he understands them to be so very important to the human experience, how he feels that people are programmed to find comfort in flames. He calls it something like “positively reinforced cellular memory arising out of infinite incarnations since the beginning of time.’ You know, just greasy kid stuff like that.”

“Very deep stuff there, eh Mr. Farmer? But I think I’ll crack more suds and find something a bit less ‘serious’ to talk about.” he jabbed as he walked unevenly back toward the tumbled and jumbled rock-wall where Pradeep, Jefé, and Pavel huddled together, doing bad Tommy Chong imitations, pulling each other's fingers, and mopping up pork drippings from their sugarcane plates.

I was glad he’d walked away. Truth be told, I’ve always found Lasse Sorensen’s definition of manhood and camaraderie to be a bit too strict and old-school for my tastes. He doesn’t believe in serious talk, perhaps he’s not capable of it. A lot of guys are that way and it bugs me.

“Wow, you were paying attention after all,” I said through a half-mouthful of meat. “But do you want to know something else, Erin? Do you want to know a secret that I haven’t told any other people?”

She raised both eyebrows at my question and quickly affirmed her interest. “Tell me your secret. I really really want to know.”

“I prefer talking to women.” I mumbled with a surprising amount of self-consciousness.

“What did you say?” Erin asked quickly before adding, “You should learn some manners. Talking with your mouth full. Didn’t your mama teach you anything?”

Feeling even more self-conscious, I repeated myself, “I prefer talking to women over talking to other men.”

“Why’s that?” she replied. “I mean what’s so great about us girls?”

“It’s mostly that I think male interactions are mostly a bunch of crap. There’s so much posturing, so much thinking about looking like a man, so much image and perception management behind everything that is said between men.” I paused and tried to think of where I really wanted to go with this. “Men don’t like to get to deep into serious emotional territory with other men. Or they want to but they’re afraid of getting a smart-ass response. With women…”

She interrupted my explanation impatiently, “And should they worry about it?”

“Yes, most of the time that’ll be the kind of response any ‘soft’ conversation will get. For sure.” I said with complete certainty. “But with women it feels different. It’s like women seem to crave those intimate conversations, like they’re eager to explore risky feelings and motivations and uncertainties. I feel like they seem to trust that kind of dialogue and I feel that I can basically trust them to not bust my balls for opening up.”

Erin looked up at me, opened her eyes wide and said with a semi-real seeming exasperation, “Is this the part where I’m supposed to get all goo-goo eyed and say ‘why can’t all men be like you?’”

I couldn’t believe it. She’d given me the same kind of smart-ass response I would’ve expected from any of my guy friends if I’d tried to explain anything emotionally revealing. Struggling for the right response, all I could find to say was, “Ouch…”

My eyes went back to the sparkling, crackling, popping dance of the timeless campfire. And just as I was beginning to sense a low-grade bitterness creeping into my state of mind, I felt Erin lean in again, bump me with her bony shoulder, felt her chapped lips peck me quickly on the cheek, heard her whisper in a voice which could have been sincerity hiding behind a needling sarcastic façade, “Ooh, my poor little baby. Don’t worry baby, Mama loves you even if you’re a moron…”

Chinese Poets, Rainbow Trout & Bad Weather...

As I sit here at my desk trying to order my reflections on this past week’s journey to the dry side of the great mountains of Cascadia, I find myself reliving something unique which occurred late on the first night. Standing alone after dusk, I saw an image of the gibbous moon reflected on the surface of the water. In all my years outdoors, I can’t recall ever having seen such a sight before. It called to mind the poetry of Li Po, Du Fu and Sun Yün-Feng – all of whom referenced the moon in their classical Chinese writings. I thought to myself that it would be wonderful to be able to write with the evocative simplicity of those dead masters, but that trite imitations seem to be the best I can manage:

Above the flickering campfires of distant strangers I perceive
tendrils of illuminated smoke reaching through the dark needles of swaying pine.

Half-drunk at the edge of the black water, the yellow moon and I
dance and sway in synchronicity with the mountain breeze and the shoreline slosh.

Though laughter’s rise and fall from close behind reminds me
that good friends are at hand, still I prefer my brief solitude to a night of crude jokes and stories.

As a last band of purple twilight retreats from the rushes on the far bank, the love songs of ten thousand bullfrogs ripple up into a treasure-vault of cold white stars.

- After Sun Yün-Feng

But cheap rip-off verse is not the point of this entry – it is a digression. When I sat down to type, the real purpose was to sum up the journey in simple and descriptive prose. Thus…

Over the course of three days we traversed the rough cold waters of two high Cascade lakes in search of wild kokanee, big brown trout, and mountain crawdads. Early mornings found Jefé, Pavel and I fighting gusty headwinds across Wickiup Reservoir in an 8’ Zodiac powered by an anemic Minn-Kota electric trolling motor. Afternoons saw us drifting through the numerous sheltered bays and shallows of Crane Prairie. Evenings were a time to stand on the pumice and sand beach behind our campsite casting plugs into the lake and reeling them back in. After nightfall we’d gather around a pine and juniper fueled campfire and await dinner with cold PBR’s in hand.

Summer’s first luke-warm flush hasn’t managed to find the swath of montane scrublands and forest which occupies a rough triangle of ground between the South Sister, Newberry Crater, and the Willamette Pass. For the almost the entire duration of our excursion, the wind blew strong and frigid, clouds occupied the high places and enshrouded the snow-capped volcanic peaks we’d hoped to know as a backdrop to our outdoor activities. Where we’d packed for a pleasantly cool early summer fishing trip, we should have come dressed in union suits and Cossack hats. The experience bore more resemblance to a late autumn duck-hunting slog than anything else.

By all accounts, the action at Wickiup – normally a hotbed for early summer fishing – has been unusually slow. Who knows what accounts for this. Cold temperatures. Rough agitated water. Lack of any insect hatch. Alien medical experiments. All possibilities are possible considerations.

Regardless of the source of the slowness, we encountered no success fishing this sprawling man-made lake east of La Pine. Zero kokanee. No brown trout. Not even a nibble during our three days at the Gull Point campground. The only ray of light: I caught one crawdad in a trap I’d baited with bacon and canned tuna…it later escaped back into the deep.

Several miles away at Crane Prairie – a strange shallow reservoir edged with long dead snags and lined with an inordinate amount of aquatic vegetation – we fared marginally better. Pavel hooked into several energetic but useless six-inch rainbow trout. I landed three of the same. And, in the sole true fishing success of the entire trip, Jefé brought in a strangely lethargic 21” hatchery rainbow. After that catch, it was back to nothing for the remainder of our expedition.

Where our wishes for fishes failed to materialize, we found opportunities to eat like gluttons, drink like functional alcoholics, and revel in good company the entire time – particularly after my WWOOF’er Pradeep, a Washington artisan baker I know by the name of Lasse, and Lasse’s elfin-hot wife Erin joined the three of us for our last night in camp. Our camp experience reaffirmed my belief that cold beer, hearty stick-to-the-gut foods, and closely gathered friends are more than ample antidotes to generally uncooperative external conditions. And what a camp experience we had.

Luckily for the entire group, Pavel – culinary technician extraordinaire ­– prepared a series of incredible meals over the crackling fire and via the Camp Chef portable grill. In what ranks as one of the most genius decisions in wilderness history, he thought to bring along his little Grizzly Spit. This battery powered rotisserie was set up directly above the wood fire embers and - in a slowly rotating manner - yielded some of the most delicious meats I’ve ever eaten outside of a restaurant. From a daringly rare Oregon leg of lamb encrusted in cracked black pepper and sea-salt to no less than five pounds of Painted Hills natural beef striploin dredged in secret Cajun spice mix to Tatar pork shashlik served smoking hot onto thick pieces of Lasse’s basalt-block baked Afghani green onion naan, we had it more than good. I’ll be ordering my own portable spit-and-motor from Cabela’s in the very near future – no doubt about it.

We broke camp on Tuesday morning in the midst of a freak mid-June snowfall. As we packed bags and loaded our gear, a couple of hungry rust-breasted robins and tiny stripe-backed timber tigers – a colloquial Oregonian term for chipmunks – moved in to finish cleaning the crumb-littered site where we’d been camped only moments before. Though we’d arrived to the high country as a trio, we departed in three groups of two. Pavel and Jefé piled back into the truck that brought us and drove off directly for home. Erin and Lasse farted out toward I-97 south and the resumption of a road-trip to visit an ashram in the Santa Cruz mountains. Pradeep and I headed back north for a morel and spring porcini picking detour in the Grand Fir stands between Sisters and Jack Creek. And at no point during these departures was any jumping fish seen to surface on Wickiup Reservoir.

Relating To Midnight's Oysters...

I think he knew that I was feeling down and that the bag of fresh oysters was a goodwill offering intended to reset both of our emotional receptors. Pulling a stubby knife from the top drawer, I began shucking through the pile of shells and laying out the exposed mollusks on a white china platter. At no point did it occur to me to ask Pradeep where he’d managed to score five pounds of fresh shellfish late on a Wednesday night. I just kept shucking and told the kid to start working on some mignonette and a little chipotlé lime butter for seasoning our midnight snack.

His knife technique is worthless and I always worry that he’s going to add the tip of his middle finger to whatever he’s fixing. I made this observation again as I watched him mince a whole shallot. Happily, it was a fingerless minced shallot which ended up being added to a small glass bowl with a bit of champagne vinegar at its bottom. Setting down the santoku, he grabbed the pepper mill from the ledge behind the sink. Loosening the adjustment to make a very coarse grind – the way he likes it – he cranked away. Finally, flinging a small finger pinch of Fleur de Sel de Camargue into the bowl, he furiously whisked everything together.

As Pradeep moved to the refrigerator for a stick of butter, I began shifting half of the shucked oysters to a small sheet pan and turned the oven to 425˚ Fahrenheit.

“What do you think about half raw and half baked?” I asked in a shout so that he might hear me with his head stuck in the refrigerator.

Reappearing with a handful of whole limes and the butter stick in question, he chortled back with a quick, “That is sounding most good, my dear friend…”

“Pradeep,” I replied. “I thought your people were all strict vegetarians. Isn’t south India some kind of herbivore bastion?” It was a question I'd been meaning to ask him for months.

Raising one eyebrow á la Mr. Spock, he quickly clarified the point for me, stating with confidence, “Yes, but I am thinking this is not Tamil Nadu is it? How is this saying – ‘When in Rome do as the Romans are doing.’ So I am in the lovely northwest of this state of Oregon and am doing as you Oregonians mostly seem to do. When I am living once more in my country, I’ll refrain from such indulgences. And furthermore, I will most certainly not be telling my mother of my adventures in the eating of flesh.”

“Gotcha,” I shot back. The kid made perfect sense from where I was standing.

Soon the kitchen was filled with the sound of a whirring, clacking, rattling electric spice grinder and with the smoky-spicy aroma of the dried chipotlé peppers which Pradeep was busily turning to dust. As the air cleared, he began halving the limes and melting the butter over a low heat. Once the stick had completely liquefied, he squeezed in the citrus juice and stirred in the chilé powder according to the instructions I’d given him.

All the prep work was done. As my companion sat down to work on his balsa wood and Elmer’s gluework model of the Eiffel Tower, I slid the pan of oysters which were to be baked onto one of the racks which were suspended within the glowing mouth of the oven and caught the clean saline whiff of Willapa Bay water on its heated exhalation. Mesmerized by the deep orange of the elements, I lingered with my eyes focused somewhere indistinct, thinking, “Pradeep is a damn good kid…”

Poyitu Varen Means Good-Bye...

Her elbows rested on the kitchen counter and she stared down at her fingernails as I stood over the stovetop adding a half bottle of Lavantureux Petit Chablis to the green-lipped mussels simmering away with shallots and butter in the small warped All-Clad sauté pan which I stumbled upon some years back at the St. Vincent de Paul store on Portland Road. Pradeep loaded her luggage onto the bathroom scale and made suggestions as to how she could’ve packed more efficiently. Half a dozen fresh Cascade morel mushrooms dusted with cracked pepper and panko breadcrumbs sizzled in a hand-me-down cast-iron skillet. This was the scene for tonight’s last supper.

That was two hours back. Just a moment ago, I finished scrubbing that pan and wiping out that old skillet. A few minutes before that, I poured what remained of the murky Chimay which she loves so much down the drain – between being a Pabst Blue Ribbon man and the fact that I can’t stand the stuff I couldn't bring myself to drink it. Perhaps half-an-hour earlier, I fed the scraps of local albacore to Khiva the Boxer. And prior to handing out those leftovers to the dog, I stood at the front door and watched the tail lights of the Westy drift over the James Street bridge toward the airport with Pradeep in the driver’s seat and her riding shotgun.

I choose to use the word “her” with intentional repetitiousness because – in a brief window of time – she has made a strong enough impression to merit inclusion in the reverent list of those whose memories will be easily conjured up by longingly mentioning “her.” Even now as I type these words and she prepares to depart on her red-eye flight from Portland to Miami, it is a facile thing for me to imagine the scent of sandalwood oil that might follow her entry into a darkened bedroom, to recall the sheen of her ink-black hair, the depth of her brown eyes, the spark that I felt when she’d catch my lingering glance. How would I have ever guessed that the greatest joy of taking on a WWOOF’er would turn out to be the visit paid to Mas des Rigolos by his twenty-three year old sister – what a wonder.

Of course, what transpired between us was nothing more than intense flirtation, the occasional “accidental” brushing of bodies in passage, and the mutual – if unspoken – sense that a nuclear connection was going to pass between us unconsummated. In truth, it was my caution which held back both of our emotions, which stopped the bumping of shoulders from slipping irresistibly into intertwining bodies and breaths. I felt how important the short stay of his sister was to my young assistant Pradeep and did not want to place myself and my desires between he and his most dearly loved sister. And though my restraint was the right path of action, I know that I’ll regret not indulging all of my urges when the chance stood before me.

In the next few minutes, Lakshmi will be boarding a jumbo jet for her transcontinental flight. By tomorrow evening, she will be landing in Brazil where she’ll live in the household of her Uncle Krishna for an entire year while studying traditional Ayurvedic medicine under the expert tutelage of her Aunt Ratnabali. And by next month, all that will remain between us are occasional letters, promises to connect next summer, and fears that we’ll never cross paths again.

Good-bye Lakshmi…

The Worst Kind of Help...

When I got his telephone call yesterday evening, it was all I could do to not put my fist through the door of my kitchen cupboard. My rage was instantaneous and gripped me tight as a jacket of blackberry briars. I hung up the receiver and went for a long walk along the banks of the creek trying to get a handle on my emotions. Crouching by the old swimming hole where the water curves away from the mud-wallows of childhood’s swamp and runs off toward it’s confluence with the pudding behind the dairy barns, I tossed stones into the eddy and watched them sink.

Stepping back into the sitting room of Mas des Rigolos, I realized that, as I was closest to him, the unpleasant task of phoning his inner circle would fall upon me. Out of all the numbers which appeared on the page marked Fortean-Zoology, the first one I called was the home number for my old cactus-munching buddy, a Chilean transplant to Oregon who currently resides in a small town on the island of Hokkaido, where he is apprenticing with a chef famed for his seafood cuisine. I knew he’d be the one to most closely share my outrage at the news.

“Paco, it’s the Farmer calling, can you hear me?” I asked, surprised at the amount of static and interference clouding the line. “I’ve got some pretty heavy things to fill you in on.”

After that strange sort of echo which often mars international telecommunications, I heard the familiar voice of my good friend, his unmistakable manner of speech, his molasses-thick accent, crackle through the earpiece.

“Long times, eh? Whas jou been doing, Gabacho?” came the loud response trailing off into smart-ass laughter. “Jou never calling me since months and months now, whas gives? I’m starting to worry jou doan love me no mores…”

“Hey man, this is serious talk.” I replied in my slowest, steadiest, most real-business tone of voice. “I got a call tonight from Smacky. His kids negotiated power-of-attorney and had him pulled forcibly down off the mountain the day before last. The old man is pretty shaken up. Suicidal by the way he sounded…”

“Nah, Guerito, doan say thas true. Who does dees kinda theeng to an ole man like Smacky?” Paco practically spit into the phone. “Jou doan tink he’s going hurt himself, eh?”

In my mind, I pictured Smacky Versteeg relaxing in his hut near the Silver King mine, probably drinking a cup of spring water he’d filled from his wooden bucket, scanning the ridges and logging-scars for any sign of Sasquatch. When he left civilization behind in mid-December, we all knew that he was intending to fade away up in the mountains of the Santiam watershed, to pass on doing what he loved, to find some proof of his life’s obsession, the Indian Devil, and then await the end of his days. How he must have been loving things before civilization, with its rules and regulations and fears, came to snatch him back to the confines of assisted-living. And how broken he sounded when he unloaded his forced removal to me on the lobby phone of the home where he’d been confined by his children.

“Bud, I think the old man is gonna off himself.” I said with no small measure of anxiety. “There isn’t any way that a guy like Bob can accept life in a home. I don’t even know what to say to him. I mean, how do you try to talk down a suicidal eighty-some year old mountain man who finds himself surrounding by antiseptic walls, drugged-out elderly zombies, and reruns of Sally Jesse Raphael? If I were him, I’d want out.”

“Mang, I got jou. But where he going go to?” he said in response. “I mean, Smacky ees old, really old. Eef he’s going, he’s only going out in a hearse. Jou know what I’m saying? Bob’s way too old for run back to las montañas. He’s stuck now.”

“Paco, what do I do here?” I asked, almost pleading. “I’m so pissed off right now. And I feel so goddamned bad for Smacky. This could be me eventually. And if it was me, I’d sure as hell want my friends to do something to help me out.”

There was a pause as Paco considered things. What sounded like a Chihuahua yipped angrily in the background. Then came the sound of a young Japanese woman screaming what had to be curses. Finally, he found what he wanted to say.

“I thing jou gotta ask Smacky whatever he needs right now. An jou gotta do whatever he says he needs jou for do.” my friend said in a way which telegraphed a kind of emotional slump on Paco's part. “Dees might be real facking hard, Guerito…”

Realizing that there wasn’t much more to say, we hung up on each other. And in that instant all of my rage and anger began to transform into a funk, a genuine state of depression, as I mulled the fate of the elderly in our culture. I wondered why it is that those who are farther from death and incapacity inherit the right to dictate the final days of those who are so near to their end. As I considered how I might feel if, at Smacky’s age, my honest plan for living my last stretch of life in a fulfilling manner was hijacked, if I were taken from a death bed which I'd chosen and made for myself and removed to a setting where my bodily functions would be supported for a few more years at the expense of all my joy and satisfaction, I felt chilled to the bone.

“Why can’t they just let the old bear go in the way that he wants to go?” I mumbled to myself as I stripped down buck-naked and crawled into bed. It seemed the most unfair of all possible endings to Bob’s remarkable life story.

This morning, following through on a commitment I'd made when he'd called me, I drove up to his assisted living facility in downtown Estacada, a quarter mile from the Clackamas, a river along whose banks he fished, hunted, and sought for signs of the ape-man for so many years of his life. Stepping into his room, I was shocked. It seemed to me that the bolt-straight beast of a man whom I’d known was gone. In his place was a man who seemed resigned to his inclusion among the ranks of anonymous and hopeless invalids. An oxygen tube ran around his head and fed into his nose. On his table was a yellow plastic tray with a small pile of celery-flecked Knox Blocks, a few fried chicken nuggets, some dried-out carrot sticks, and a package of Oreo cookies. He let out a long sigh as I walked toward him and rubbed his back.

“What do you need from me, Bob?” I asked my old mentor. “Just tell me what you need.”

He wouldn’t look me in the eye as he contemplated an answer. His hands wrung one another and he worked his jaw back and forth as if trying to work out the words he wanted to say.

“Go back up to the Silver King for me, if you would,” he whispered. “You recall just where I done built that roof for keepin’ my wood-n-timber dry?”

“Sure, Bob,” I said plainly.

“Well if you’ll look under the log round what props up my heavy maul, you’ll find what I need.” he said in that same low whisper. “I want you to bring it back here to me and don’t tell no one at all.”

“Sure, Bob,” came the response once again. “How will I know what I’m looking for?”

At that, he looked me square in the eye and said in a hard way, “if it looks like a loaded revolver, you’ll have found what I need from you.”

We sat together for a few minutes longer before I got up and walked to his door. He followed me with his eyes and nodded slowly as I swung the screen shut. That nod stayed with me for the entire drive home to Silverton. It was a nod that conveyed trust and faith and which also begged for his good friend to put aside all hesitation and bring a strange flashlight into his unexpected darkness.

Our Brief Seattle Excursion...

I’d tilted my head back to admire the ceiling of the Paramount Theater just a half moment before the rag-dung trumpets began to drone. Where a moment before there had been only baskets of flowers, illuminated projection screens, attendants finalizing adjustments to the manifold offerings, and an empty ritual throne beneath a twenty-five foot tall thangka of Sakyamuni Buddha, now there was the Karmapa himself on stage. Pradeep was lost in sleep and could not be roused from whatever dream-path he wandered. His sister Lakshmi clutched her hands together and closed her eyes. I watched the young man - Orgyen Trinley Dorje - whom many regard as a living buddha walk slowly across the stage and ascend to his brocade seat.

I’d been anticipating the opportunity to experience this teacher for so long only to realize that I didn’t really know how to process the presence of a being who by most accounts represented the seventeenth reincarnation of one individual emanation of Chenrezig the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion to take embodiment in an unbroken line of lives beginning with the 1^st Karmapa – Düsum Khyenpa – in the year 1110 of the common era. As I sat in my seat between the snores of Mr. Shankaran and an elderly woman from Nova Scotia who just happened to be a lama herself, I realized that my head was full of questions and conflicts.

Is there a palpable energy radiating throughout this historic Seattle hall? I think so.

Can I believe that captured in the body of a 22 year old Tibetan refugee is an enlightened spirit whose only purpose is to ease the suffering of all living beings? Again, I think so.

Am I here out of genuine faith, or out of a desire for something more exotic than the simple Christian beliefs of my younger years? I’m not sure. I think that it is quite a bit of the former combined with the taint of the latter.

Why am I so angry at the ease and happiness of the crowds gathered around me, of the dozens of lamas, teachers, pilgrims, and wannabees who seem completely bathed in the warm glow of a sanctified experience? Jealousy perhaps. Or envy that some find true faith so easily. Frustration at the fact that I can’t turn off my skepticism despite desperately wanting to believe, to be reassured, to have confidence.

Do I really need to be carrying all my day-to-day judgments into this scene with me: checking out every halfway beautiful woman that passes down the aisle, critiquing the ridiculous get-ups of wannabees who are trying so hard to look like serious hippies, grumbling to myself about the rude guy in front of me who is chewing vegetarian flat-bread with his mouth open. No, but I can’t seem to stop the stream of negative assessments which flood my awareness.

Is it doing me any good to beat myself up for thinking as I always do in the context of this wonderful opportunity, for not being able to instantaneously purify my whole being in the presence of such an ostensibly holy individual? No, it isn’t. I am who I am. Flawed. Angry. Lustful. Judgmental. Proud. Irritable. Lacking focus. Hard on those who are close to me. A busted-up human being making a four hour drive in search of inspiration and some measure of goodness and feeling bad when it doesn’t appear in my heart right f---king now.

Many of my teachers passed by me on their way to seats in the front of the auditorium. Lama Rinchen from Honolulu whom I did the Nyungne fast with. Lamas Tsang Tsing, Sonam, and Kunzang from Kagyu Dakshang Chuling in Eugene. Lama Michael Conklin from Kagyu Changchub Chuling in Portland. And though I looked everywhere for Lama Tashi, my closest guru, he was nowhere to be found in the packed room.

Old friends passed by as well – some who no longer had names attached to their familiar faces, others whom I’ve shared time with and won’t ever forget. I saw B. from the Kauai center walk by and thought about the time she and I did a retreat with Lama Tharchin on the slopes of Mauna Loa. I remember meditating in my tent out on a grass-covered relic of a lava field, glowing sparklets of static electricity arcing in the midnight shade from pole to peg to zipper to flashlight. To this day – Karmapa included – I’ve never felt such an intense radiance from another living being as I felt from Lama Tharchin. I found it magical. B. found it terrifying.

The day flew by in a dervish of chanting, laughing, bell-ringing, drum-thumping, applauding, praying, listening, and absorbing. The half of me which was expecting – based upon other’s recollections of the bizarre experiences which many had in the presence of the 16^th Karmapa – to have some sort of paranormal illumination was slightly disappointed at the end of the day. But the realist in me, the half of me which has a reasonably mature outlook on the spiritual world, the observant foil to that part of me which hungers for entertainment, realized sometime on the drive back down south that whether on his first or seventeenth go round, the man who is called His Holiness the Gyalwang Karmapa is, all esoteric trappings aside, no more or less a struggling human being than the rest of us.

Driving through Tumwater, past the old Olympia brewery, I turned and asked Lakshmi which of the Karmapa’s words had resonated most strongly within her. She turned her eyes down and replied. “His most poignant statement occurred at the conclusion of the second of his teachings of the day. It came after he’d begun to walk off stage, as he was saying good-bye after his first visit to America. He stopped, turned, spoke directly to each and every of us. He said in a more serious tone than he’d used all the rest of the day, ‘whatever this body is which is about to leave you, whatever becomes of the physical form which is about to return to India, know that in truth I will never leave you, that we will never be separate from one another, that we will always be together.’ Babuji dear, in the instant that he spoke those words, I believed him as no other before.” Pausing briefly, she acted as though she was about to make some further explanation, looked back toward her napping brother Pradeep as if to ask for help with her thoughts, and then, seeing that he was back to his dreams, ended the conversation by turning away quietly, looking out at the green roadside scenery blurring by, rubbing her soft ebony earlobe between the delicate fingers of her left hand.

And from where I sat, thinking things over, rolling all the day’s input through my own web of reflection, I had to admit I’d taken that same statement most deeply to heart.