Pale Evening Done

I groped the river rocks, eager to feel the aquatic Braille of caddisfly larvae. The larvae within clung to the rock desperately, as if they knew what being plucked off the rock meant. Dropping them into our jars, they would sink to the bottom and reanimate, a black star pattern of legs and primordial mandibles, sloshing along in the vegetal backwash of our small containers of river water. Each rock held a baker’s dozen. Grandpa, my cousin Brad, and I each loaded our jars with the tiny armored larvae while Grandma waited in the RV. Grandpa had shown us that peeling away the larval cask revealed the soft, vulnerable creature within, prime fare for rainbow trout. I tried to imagine how I would feel being strung onto an arm-sized hook, mouth first, as we would do to these creatures. Human ingenuity had led here, to know that this barbarity had human benefit. And how fickle that these bugs were collected for this grim work: the neighboring rocks still held their cases, snug in a sheet of cold moving water. My mind was on fish, solely. When the time came, I would impale them eagerly.

We got back in the RV where Grandma waited, and limped our way northeast into Wyoming, stopping for lunch—ham sandwiches, Pringles, Sprite—at a hornet-infested wayside in Kemmerer. Cigarette butts and spent prophylactics dotted the grubby picnic site like remnants of an underworld parade. Or was it our world? At twelve, maybe thirteen, it was a world into which I was only now gaining entrée.

We left northern Utah under the implied promise of warmth and open skies, but Wyoming was behaving like Wyoming. A knife-wind carved Fontanelle reservoir and stabbed staccato against the RV. Breakers pealed off the water, grasping up onto a dark shoreline. Grandpa was thrilled. We had hardly parked and he was decked out in his waders and fishing gear, two fly rods lashed to the sides of his float tube, boxes of scuds, leeches, and nymphs in his vest. We watched as he kicked his tube out into the reservoir, straining against the whitecaps. He soon grew smaller and smaller. The RV bobbed at the campsite like a coffin adrift as we watched Grandpa fade into the waves. The generator hummed, the heater breathing out warmth that we drank up. He’s crazy about fish, said Grandma, with measured respect and ridicule, watching Grandpa drift off into the elements like a mylar balloon.

Grandma and Brad and I geared up and walked the shoreline to the leeward side. We sat against a rock embankment that formed the state highway. Doing as Grandpa told us, we unhinged the caddis larvae from their cases, and threaded them onto hooks. They pathetically dribbled a bile-colored liquid, though we gave this little thought as we cast them out to suffer. The wind kept our lines far out in the lake and we waited. Grandma’s bobber was the first to drop, straight down with vigor. She cackled in mocking tones and took up her Ugly Stick. Within 5 minutes she had landed a fat hatchery trout. The sidereal flanked rainbow gasped on the bank, mute and beautiful, its whole world inverted, just as the larva’s was.

An hour later, despite using the same rig, Grandma had landed 3 more fish and Brad and I sat fishless, without even a bite between us. Eventually, Grandpa drifted back with a stringer of muscular trout. We ate fish, onions, and red potatoes fried in butter and coated with seasoned salt, and were reminded of the joy of eating after a day of deep cold. That evening brought a sunset that melted from the dark sky like magma, the cold wind hovered around and in us. Grandma and Grandpa slept in the RV. Brad and I had a tent. We talked about girls and ghosts until 2am. Brad drifted off. I sat awake pondering his story of skinwalkers, certain that a lone Coyote walked toward our tent on its hind legs. I turned fitfully in the straightjacket of my mummy bag, pleading for morning.

The next afternoon we packed up and continued on, toward the Wind River Range and Soda Lake, a small body of water with an abundance of aquatic and terrestrial insects, and a reputation for producing trophy trout. It was one of Grandpa’s favorites, and the excitement emanated from him like aftershave.

Arriving, Soda Lake was well-occupied. A gaggle of float tubers bobbed languidly at one end of the lake, and eyeing the shoreline, there were few vacant stretches. It was late afternoon, and Grandpa once again evaporated into his passion, festooned with the trappings of his desire. Grandma and Brad and I walked the shore to an empty stretch and set about fishing. Within 5 minutes, after retrieving my first cast, I was in a mare’s nest of monofilament. Something had happened with my spool, and the line billowed out from my reel and doubled back on itself in Gordian loops and spirals. Brad laughed at me. Grandma rolled her eyes and tried to help. After a while, Grandpa floated over to us, recognizing our trouble. Coming ashore, dripping, he looked at me with disbelief, then at my reel, then back to me, seething that I would force him from the water. You buggered the hell out of it. What’d you do that for? He had flown 48 combat missions as a bombardier in the South Pacific theater. He had fought his way to an excellent position in his industry. He was thrifty beyond measure, precise, athletic, keen. He was a man I loved and respected, and I knew he loved me, but he did not suffer fools. I cringed while he cursed the reel, the wind, me. After a minute’s hassle, he said Forget it, pulled out his pocket knife and cut the line at the base of the cluster. Loosening the drag, he pulled fresh line through the guides and handed the rod back to me. Not again, he said. I nodded dumbly, angry at the instruction. Brad, meanwhile, began wrestling a trout to the shoreline. Grandma whooped and Grandpa nodded admirably. Looks like a biggun, he said. Brad grinned at me with subtle derision, wearing the same face that I would have donned had our places been reversed. I didn’t wait around to see the fish.

Mad, embarrassed, done, I grabbed my wrist rocket and headed out toward a rocky escarpment that lined part of the lake. No one fished here. I climbed down to the shoreline and sat near some cattails, watching the water. Here the water was mossy, and now, in the light of late afternoon, was dotted with the tiny feeding signs of trout sipping emerging bugs from the surface. Further out, the lake was coming alive in fits: violent explosions of fish eating on the surface. Mayflies danced up and down in a curtain over the lake, and the trout hovered just underneath a mirror of water that doubled the color of the sky. A fish-pocked lake, the early evening light radiating from on high, all of it alive and real and huge.

A bolus of swallows skimmed the lake with precision, maneuvering deftly along the surface of the water by mere centimeters. I watched them daring the water, picking off flying insects, turning and weaving in their reckless and minute gyres. They coordinated their circuitous patterns, spinning balls of invisible yarn in the air. These tiny birds amazed me, like creatures who appreciated and reveled in their gift. I envied that.

Twenty yards in front, one tiny swallow landed on the swollen end of a cattail to preen. So miniscule. A breathing jewel atop the plant stock, the size of my middle finger. It sat motionless when not preening, as if contemplating the lake, taking in the scene as I was. The cattail bobbed side-to-side, inches at a time like a diminutive carnival ride. And for impulses unknown, led by some urge deeper than I reckoned, I raised my wrist rocket and with a shot that was one in a million, I sent a small stone crashing into the swallow’s body. I watched it fall, unremarkably, in a rustle of feather and flutter, to the base of the cattail stocks, to the froggy snail water lapping around the ground there. In disbelief, I ran to the spot.

I saw there a situation of my own making, a pain I had to acknowledge. I stood unable to render any aid or reverse the urge—a simple synapse that I had obeyed, for reasons that now evaporated like a book of sand. I watched the blue steel swallow throbbing in the mud, tiny and pathetic. Almost invisibly its stiletto wings trembled with thin electric pulses. Its beak pumped open and closed voicelessly, its spasmodic body convulsing in time. My own bones then became birdlike, hollow, my limbs slack. I wrangled the outcome internally. Why’d you do that? What the fuck is wrong with you? It was a fragment of a moment on the eternal tapestry of animal pain. The entire natural world is a canvas whereupon men and young men heedlessly spill essays of indelible red paint. The pulsing swallow—It was beautiful. It was suffering. It would die. The other swallows continued their billowing patterns. The trout kept feeding. No one saw the bleeding swallow but me—the one who made it bleed.

And here they surged: those heartbreaking aftereffects of reckless impulse. The deep aches of stupidity. The grim disapproval of the imagined observers who always hung around my shoulders, the saints on my neck and ring finger. Endless moments of imbalanced toil, reckoning the not-grabbing a thing and not-grabbing a thing when the whole world hangs there enormous, throbbing in your face. Then grabbing the thing. Then the hell you’ll either create or catch in that urge of self-indulgence, the both/and moment of manifest desire and complete failure of self. The terrible necessity of this lesson, and its quick forgetting. Desire. The terror of desire. Of the infinite ways that desire radiates from each of us, posits us in float tubes, packs us in the pews in gingham and mohair, abandons us on empty street corners scratching nervously, finds us on motel floors wishing the earth would open. Desire shooting out in death-rays of heat that only and always victimize. All of us, each one, just elements animated by writhing, livid desire bent on constant flight.

We were in Wyoming for a week after Soda Lake. I caught fish, including the biggest German brown I had ever landed. We visited other lakes and streams in that region: Boulder, Sweetwater, Popo Agie, Shoshone. My cousin and I sent a wake of juvenile debauchery undulating across the high desert plains of Wyoming. Our wake left small piles of bones once it ebbed away, and parts of ourselves. Small fits of pain and anguish and fulfillment and desire, muffled cries in the night, gyrations in the day’s dust. And as simple as they seem now, and ridiculous in scale, such moments remain embedded as slivers in my deeper awareness. An iridescent, perfect swallow, hemorrhaging alone at the base of green, swaying cattails.