Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

The double-handed rod felt light and purposeful. As it swung on the surface of the river the line had the pure curve of a bow. The river was pale green over white stones, darker green over the slots. On the far side, a tributary entered that was coming from the sunny face of the glacier. It was full of glacial milk and made a dense white streak against the bank. You couldn’t fish there. A fish would never find your fly, if there was a fish there at all, which there probably was not. I couldn’t imagine the suspended rock flour was good for their gills.

The cast that pumped down into the cork of the handle, the float and settle of the line, the taut curve of the swing, the progress down the run. The only reason anyone did this was to touch the eternal feeling, the circadian bigger-than-yourself feeling.

The arc of line flattened. A fish! It seemed to have come at the right time, and once I’d beached it, this fish so recently in the ocean, I could see through its fins to the gravel underneath. It was a hard cold bar of silver, gasping on the stones.

I used the rest of the light to pack everything but my sleeping bag. My fish was dripping grease over a small bed of coals. The glacier looked huddled in the incomplete dark of the wilderness, the stars growing closer. I didn’t want to close the double-sided battered aluminum fly box Dr. Olsson had given me long ago just yet, not while I could still see the small colors inside, run my thumb over the clips that held them, feel the hook points. I ate in the dark. I ate all I could, my chin dripping, like a bear’s. Tomorrow I’d want a napkin. This was certainly not my way of life, but it was surprising how quickly it came to seem so. In a day I’d be home, back in the loop, Dr. Pickett. I’d be the fish.

The sun was just up. I got into my down coat before I crawled entirely out of the sleeping bag, then rolled the bag and stuffed it in its sack. This I managed to get into the waterproof river duffel, and all was as orderly as the helicopter pilot could wish. I scoured face and teeth at the river, put the last items away, and using the duffel as a backrest, stretched out, hands inside my sleeves, to wait for my ride.

The helicopter never came.

I spent the day pacing up and down the riverbank, pausing hopefully at every sound, and in the end I unpacked my sleeping bag for the night. I had eaten of the fish three times, and now it was gone. I never looked at the glacier.

For the last ten days, I had lain in my sleeping bag and listened to the wolves as I fell asleep. Their songs assured me that this was no place like home, that no sensible wolf would sing with such majestic assurance without owning the place. Now I found them disquieting and eerie. I was sure they knew about me.

At last I faced the fact that no one was going to pick me up, that the arrangements I had made and paid for in advance were not to be followed. I tried blaming it on my declining the various added services the pilot offered. He may well have been disgruntled at my not electing side trips to see petroglyphs, totem poles, or grizzly bears, to fly to Mesachie Nose or Jump Across, requesting only a ride in and, at the appointed hour, a ride out. But he took the money. He should have picked me up.

More to the point, the food was nearly gone. I knew I had to walk out and take with me what I could wear. I had no backpack, and my attempt to adapt the wire grill I cooked on failed. I stuffed my pockets with snack bars, of which I had plenty, took my slicker, and left everything else, including my sleeping bag, behind. That was hard. Anyone who’s spent time in wild places loves his sleeping bag beyond its actual utility. The mummy shape, the loft of the down, the neatly sewn gussets had their aesthetic attraction. My bag was twenty years old and yet I could still remember the exact moment I’d bought it in Seattle, the salesman’s face, the weather, spreading it out on the floor of my hotel, looking at it as I brushed my teeth and as the expanding down inside it slowly pulled its fabric taut.

I left it behind. It was pale green and when I looked back to where it lay at the base of a huge cedar whose dew fell like rain, an odd feeling passed over me. I wasn’t heading into the unknown, but I did have before me a two-day walk on river cobbles. The water was safe to drink, and the fruit bars that bulged in my coat were enough nutrition. Moderate alertness would keep me from unpleasantly surprising bears, and with the equinoctial storms a week or so away, one night sleeping in my clothes was nothing to worry about. It might be that a chopper picking up goat hunters or another angler would see me, but realistically I hadn’t heard any aircraft in a couple of days. A walk it would be. There was a road-head and a native settlement, cars. I had credit cards and a bit of cash, among the things I took instead of the sleeping bag. For the first few miles, I thought of ways I could go back for it. I still pictured myself bent over and running under the blades of the helicopter.

What beautiful weather for a walk! Each time the river bent, the world before me changed completely, divided, rushed, shrugged off the old forest, spread before narrowing, always mindful of the sea. The few bears I saw departed at the sight of me, and at sundown I found myself in a canyon, a primeval wilderness crowned high above by a star-filled sky. I was tired enough that sleeping on the ground was not an issue, and my belief that I could smell salt water was part of what swept me to the next morning.

I walked into an Indian settlement in midafternoon under a beautiful blue North Pacific sky and could smell the ocean. I saw no one around but heard native radio blaring from one house, the theme song from Welcome Back, Kotter , then AC/DC “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” my favorite song for waking up and getting going. I thought that was a good sign. When I knocked on the door, the music stopped; an old native man in overalls and a worn Irish tweed cap appeared and asked what he could do to help me. I told him I’d been dropped above the forks on the first of September and that my ride had never come back for me. I told him I’d left my stuff in the bush, maybe somebody would want it.

He said nothing was flying and when I seemed not to understand, he said nothing was flying anywhere, not here or anywhere in the world. I don’t think he understood, at least at first, that I knew nothing of the attack in New York. I thought I was listening to some aborigine’s mumbo jumbo about how nothing really flies, how we are earthbound, how flight was an illusion. I was well along this cul-de-sac when he patiently told me what had happened.

“The bus runs from Hagensborg to Vancouver,” he said. “You’ll be halfway to your house.”

I got pretty well filled in by the passengers on the way down — forest, rivers, town, the smell of salmon everywhere, once in a while the northern ocean. Several passengers had watched the news on television and tried to describe the scene but gave up. They watched me gauge its effect, as though this had happened to us as Americans, of which I was the specimen. I would have thought it was a bit more general, but it hadn’t happened to Canadians, it had happened to us. All very odd because whatever it was, I couldn’t picture it. This was well before everyone fought to own it. To judge by the other passengers, half of whom were Indians, all agreed that things would never be the same.

In Vancouver I felt the strangeness of the flightless skies; and at the airport, where my futile hopes for a ride home led me, the sight of what looked like every airplane from round the Pacific Rim, a jumble of towering aluminum tails and cheery logos, finally persuaded me that all was indeed arrested. A van was hauling water to a queue of Chinese families winding out of the terminal to the parking lot. I was told they’d been there for four days. Old people slept on the tile.