Thomas McGuane - Nothing but Blue Skies

“Here we go.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t know why I became a hippie. And maybe I wasn’t really one anyway. I never thought I was a hippie at the time. I liked the music. I’m still a child of rock and roll. Lots of us will never escape that. And when we’re old, we’ll probably let our hair grow out again, if there is any. Right now we’re in the swim of things. It’s not perfect but it is highly tangible, you know what I mean? We’re kind of running the store. Know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, you’re in your youth. You’re washed around from possibility to possibility. God is telling you nothing matters but meeting the perfect partner, nothing. The world seems to be out ahead but nothing is real. It’s all ideas. You’re racing toward these balloons that the air currents move steady in another direction. But you get older and you catch up to some of those balloons. You get even with things and they’re not drifting away ahead of you. I know that I’ve settled into the limited possibilities of feeder cattle and rental property and grain sharecropping and the ridiculous limited characters of my friends and my own rather fascinating inadequacies. And all these things are so real! I can feel my limitations like the surface of marble a sculptor touches. And there’s only so much grass to be leased in the summer, and even subirrigated ground can only produce so many bushels of grain, and Budweiser and Coors are only going to accept so much malt barley, even if we do get it combined and delivered and past the tests for moisture content. The only things that undermine my happiness are things I can’t lay hands on.”

“Like what?” said Holly.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Just give me an example.”

“I can’t.”

“Is regret one of them?”

“Sure.”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

“Of course. That’s a bad one. It’s not like other things that strengthen you. Loneliness makes you weaker, makes you worse. I’m guessing that enough of it makes you cruel.”

“Two more pale morning duns and we can call it quits,” said Holly. She turned and looked at her father in thought. She smiled. He shrugged. She laughed, reached over and squeezed his nose. “Poor little friend,” she said.

The sun was just coming up. They could make out the light in the tops of cottonwoods. And dropping smoothly out of sight was the pale disc of the moon with its wonderful discolorations. It was like being in a big church in the middle of the week and the only light was in the high windows. They put their rods together and leaned them against the hood of the Buick. Frank opened the bag of doughnuts and set them out and Holly poured coffee from the steel thermos.

“It’s already warm,” she said. She screwed the lid back on the thermos and set it down decisively. The steam curled up from their cups. There was a dusting of powdered sugar from the doughnuts on the black paint of the hood.

“It was good we started early.”

Holly turned her head and listened. Then Frank heard it, a coyote insinuating a thin pure note that seemed to fade into the sky. He could almost feel himself carried with it into a pure blue place. “Are you going to take a net?” Holly asked. She still cocked her head in the direction of the coyote. She smiled to indicate that she had heard it. The little wolves had been here for thousands of years.

“I don’t think so. The lanyard always stretches in the brush and fires the damn thing into my kidneys. You know what, though? Maybe I better. Think if we hooked a big one somewhere we couldn’t beach it.”

“Gosh this coffee is good. Didn’t that ’yote sound pretty?”

“Beautiful.”

“Beautiful … That’s right, beautiful.”

Frank went ahead and found a cow trail through the wild roses with their modest pink blossoms. The cottonwoods left off quickly and they were on a broad level place. Here and there were stands of cattails, water just out of sight. And while they threaded their way on a game trail through the brush, they could hear waterfowl chatting among themselves about their passage. When they were almost to the stream, they walked under a huge dead cottonwood, a splendid outreaching candelabra shape festooned with ravens who nervously strode their perches and croaked at the humans beneath them. One bird pirouetted from his branch and, falling like a black leaf, settled on the trail ahead of them. They stopped and Frank tossed his last piece of doughnut. The raven hopped up to it, picked it up in his beak, flew back with it to his roost. “This isn’t his first day on the job,” said Frank.

Before they reached the edge of the stream the sun was upon them. There was no bank as such, just the end of the wild roses and an uplifted ridge of thorn trees where magpies squawked at the intrusion. But they could hear the stream, which emanated not far away from a series of blue spring holes at a water temperature that stayed constant, winter and summer. Frank loved to arrive at a stream he knew as well as this one. You could strike it at any point and know where you were, like opening a favorite book at a random page.

They stopped at the edge and gazed upon the deep silky current. A pair of kingbirds fought noisily across the stream, and on its banks were intermittent pale purple stands of wild iris. Holly said, “Ah.” For some reason she looked as small as a child in her chest waders; whenever she stopped, she stood her fly rod next to her as a soldier would, while Frank flicked at the irises with the tip of his. He stared at the steady flow of water.

“Nothing moving,” Frank said. “Needs to warm up.”

“Where is the otter pool from here?”

“Well, right above us is the long riffle —”

“With the foam buildup in the corner?”

“Yup, and then the long ledge with the plunge in the middle of it.”

“Okay, I know where I am now. Otter pool right above that.”

“Holly! We’re a little foggy on details.”

“I’m a history major. The foreground erodes for history majors. We like an alpine perspective.”

They worked their way along the bank, blind casting to the undercut far side, hopscotching upstream until they could hear the shallow music of the riffle. Frank tried to watch Holly without making her self-conscious. She was an accurate close-range caster, her line a clean tight loop, and she had the ability to slow the line down, almost to the point of its falling when she was presenting the fly. She soon hooked a fish.

“What have you got on?” Frank asked as she fought the fish, her rod in a bow. The fish jumped high above the pool as they talked.

“Elk hair caddis. Just something that floats.” She hunkered next to the bank and slipped her hand under the fish, a nice trout of about a pound. She let it go, stood up and smiled at Frank while she cast the line back and forth to dry her fly.

At the broad ledge they were each able to take a side of the stream and fish at the same time, casting up into the bubbled seam beneath the rocks. Holly pointed to the plunge at the center and said to Frank, “After you, my boy.” Frank cast straight into the center of the plunge. The fly barely had time to land before he hooked a rainbow that blew end over end out into the shallows and held for a long time against the curve of his rod, a band of silver-pink ignited by the morning light. Soon Frank had it in hand, a hard cold shape, gazing down at the water while he freed the hook. Frank let it go and rinsed his hand. He looked upstream and said, “The otter pool.”

“You forgot to thank me for that fish.”

“Thank you, Holly.”

The sun was still too low, and so they waited quietly before they started upstream. The tall sedges grew down so close to the bank that it was necessary for them to stay in the stream to get up to the otter pool. They waded in the center where the current had scrubbed the bottom down to firm sand. Frank was in over his hips and Holly was almost to the top of her waders. She held her rod up in the air and pressed the top of her waders to her chest with her free hand so that water couldn’t splash in. They made two great V’s in the current. “This is the moon,” said Holly, “and I’m on tiptoes.”