Robert Schultz The Ephemera
In Imperial China, when a bureaucrat was said to have taken up fishing, it was understood that he had retired from court because he disagreed with current policy and had lost the support required for effective action. Whether or not he actually sat, pole in hand, next to the gliding river, he had moved sideways into the contemplative life, a figure of mute dissent. In America, somewhat differently, the bygone cliché of the small-town shop window sign—“Gone Fishin'”—testified that the demands of commerce, schedules, and productivity had been set aside in order to honor the claims of nature, idleness, and day-dreaming.
What a relief it is, sometimes, to be absent. Americans are in love with work and oblivion, and our habits of escape tend toward medication—narcotics, alcohol, TV—or industries of fantastic diversion like golf resorts, Disneyland, Las Vegas, or video games. But we do possess the beginnings of a contemplative tradition, in which absence from work means being wholly present to something else. I'm thinking, for instance, of Thoreau's almost ecstatic absorption into otherness when he writes in his journal:
A very meagre natural history suffices to make me a child—only their names and genealogy make me love fishes. I would know even the number of their fin rays—and how many scales compose the lateral line. I fancy I am amphibious and swim in all the brooks and pools in the neighborhood, with the perch and bream, or doze under the pads of our river amid the winding aisles and corridors formed by their stems, with the stately pickerel.
Likewise, to stand in a small, spring-fed stream at dusk, with the caddis flies emerging and the trout rising, is to lose oneself into the elements at hand. Beauty is there, of course, but beauty in such moments stands in the background, a scene-charging presence secondary to the color, size, and profile of the hatching flies; the currents of the stream; its obstructions and hides; and the dimples on the creek's surface made by the sipping trout. Almost without thought, the concentrated fisherman chooses where to stand, how to cast, how to present the fly so that he and his line completely disappear, so that only the fly—that tuft of hair and feather and a hook—presents itself among all the others, apparently natural. When he does all correctly the fly drops gently into the feeding slot of a working trout. In the perfidious fly, drifting without drag, he is both present and absent. For the trout, he is not there. A skillful fisherman vanishes.
This might all sound like just another form of work, and maybe it is—technique applied to a goal—and yet, at the end, beauty rushes forward and overcomes the event. Played to hand, the fish emerges, a wild piece of jewelry discovered amid the weeds and corn. I hold it in my hands for a moment, admiring it, and when I submerge it again it darts back into the flowing creek and disappears. It's like panning for gold, finding it, and putting it back.
I didn't grow up fishing. My father was a coach and taught me team sports. So I found fishing late, on a summer trip from Iowa to the Montana Rockies. A group of friends made the trip to celebrate our college graduation, and we drove straight through, taking turns keeping the driver awake, then driving, then sleeping in the back of our small pickup, sheltered by an improvised plywood top we'd hammered together and fitted onto the truck bed. The ones who knew Montana took us to Big Timber and the nearby Upside-down Creek Trail, where we climbed to the Rainbow Lake Plateau. On that high plateau tiny creeks run through a chain of lakes originally stocked with rainbow fingerlings dropped from planes. We camped for a week at 9,000 feet and lived on pancakes and trout. At noon one day the fish were so plentiful that two of us fished, two cooked with skillets over lakeside fires, and two of us ate, rotating through the stations until we were full. The next fall, when I went to New York's Finger Lakes region for graduate school, I found myself in another great trout fishery, where streams tumbled through slate gorges to Cayuga Lake. I practiced with my friend Rory Holscher, another poet in Cornell's MFA program, and one fall the two of us caught dozens of browns running in the creek behind Ithaca's downtown Woolworth's store. Another fall we crawled on our bellies through dried weeds to approach the spawning redd of two wary landlocked salmon. They had run up out of the deep lake into a tributary the size of a one-lane road, and they dwarfed the browns and rainbows we usually caught there. Lying in the weeds we flipped our streamers into the current and horsed them near the redd. When the protective male struck and felt the pinch of the hook, he tore line off my reel at a shocking rate, then leapt and threw the fly away with the ease of a superior athlete.
By the time I completed my graduate studies I was a reasonably accomplished fly-fisherman, so when my wife and I and our two-year-old son moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I worked variously as a business consultant, academic advisor, publications editor, and English professor, I was able to explore the brook trout waters in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Five years later I returned to teach at my undergraduate alma mater, Luther College, in extreme northeast Iowa, and again found myself in a remarkable fishery.
Trout live in beautiful places. Northeast Iowa is part of the “driftless” area, sometimes called the “Paleozoic Plateau,” where the glaciers of the last ice age split and the landscape went unscraped. In the little town of Decorah, the Upper Iowa River curves beneath limestone bluffs on its way to the Mississippi. Some of those bluffs contain deep fissures where water drains, freezes in winter, and remains frozen all year, producing a rare phenomenon geologists call an Algific Talus Slope. When air moves through the fissures and over the ice, emerging through small vents in the sides of north-facing bluffs, it creates cool microclimates that have remained sufficiently constant to support plants and creatures long extinct elsewhere. Walking a wooded trail between the river and its bluffs within the city limits of Decorah, you can feel in summer a sudden cool emanating from the steep hillside, and then you note that the foliage has changed. Oak leaf fern, walking fern, and an ancient saxifrage-like plant, Chrysoplenium iowensi , cling to the limestone rubble. And beneath them a careful observer might glimpse the tiny Iowa Pleistocene snail, known only in the fossil record until it was discovered alive in an Algific Talus Slope in 1980.
Thirty miles to the east of Decorah, the Mississippi itself features high bluffs topped by intact burial mounds, some of them dating back to 500 B.C.E. and shaped into the forms of bear or eagles. As the Athenians built the Parthenon, Eastern Woodland Indians arranged bear-shaped mounds in a line, as if walking the ridges above the great river. The first white men arrived in 1673 when explorer Louis Joliet and Father James Marquette paddled to the mouth of the Wisconsin, where it flowed into the larger river later to be called the Mississippi. In 1805 Zebulon Pike passed through and named the prominence overlooking the convergence “Pike's Peak” before he discovered his big prize in the Rockies.
In the driftless area that spans northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and the "coulee region” of Wisconsin, springs spate from hillsides to form creeks that wind between hills and ridges. In Iowa's Winneshiek and Allamakee Counties, Waterloo Creek, French Creek, and North and South Bear Creeks support naturally reproducing brown and rainbow trout. And the remote little South Pine Creek holds a population of brook trout that may be natives. Genetic testing has shown the South Pine brookies to be older than strains introduced after European settlers arrived, and one study speculates that these driftless area natives repopulated the upper Midwest and Canada as the last glaciers receded. In northeast Iowa, with its prehistoric burial mounds, the Pleistocene snail, and the South Pine brook trout, a fishing excursion can feel like a trek back to beginnings.
When Rory, my old friend from Ithaca, moved to northwest Illinois, we made plans to fish the South Pine for its native trout. Strangely, after 19 years in the area, I had never gone before. But when I asked for directions, I discovered that many of the fishermen who had told me about these distinguished survivors had never fished for them either, and instructions on how to find the creek were vague. Finally, an English stonemason married to a local woman named Pine gave me instructions: “Park in our driveway and walk north until you get wet.”
On a hot and humid July day, Rory and I and his son Nathan followed a series of gravel roads, found the house, parked the car, and checked a compass. Looking north from the handsome stone house with its solar panels and free-range chickens, we saw untilled fields sloping down into woods, then another fallow field rising to the horizon. There were no obvious paths, so we struck off through the tall grass and found a deer trail that entered the woods. The narrow trail seemed always about to disappear as we walked in file, bent at the waist to duck the undergrowth of saplings, each of us enveloped in a cloud of buzzing mosquitoes. At the bottom of the woods we crossed a dry creek bed and climbed until we emerged in the next field. We hiked to its crest, crossed a barbed-wire fence, then descended to another woods. An old, overgrown road wound through the trees and led, at last, to a running creek just where a beaver dam had created a deep pool. “South Pine Creek, I presume,” Rory said.
His son Nate was yet to be born when Rory and I fished the Cayuga Lake watershed in upstate New York. Now he was 22, a college graduate and an aspiring musician. Rory and I urged him to make the first few casts, and he skillfully lofted a delicate spinner near a fallen willow at the head of the pool. Almost immediately his rod bent with a strike and he played to hand a small, feisty trout. When we bent close to examine the shining specimen we saw its dark green back, mottled with the familiar brook trout scrawl; as with other brookies, the lower fins were colored bright red, edged brilliantly in white. But its sides were lighter and more metallic-looking than the eastern varieties I'd known in Virginia. Its silvery flanks were spotted in gold. We admired the fish, took pictures, and released it. Wild and lively, it darted back under its fallen willow and disappeared in the dark green water.
We went on to explore the creek as it wound through shoulder-high grass to its beginnings as a thread small enough to step across, and we noted the springs that fed it from the sides as it traced its course. We caught and released more fish. Then, shortly before we left, kneeling in the shallows to release another gold and silver brook trout, I looked down at my boots. All around them a cloud of tadpoles swirled, whipping their tails and pushing their oversized heads across the muddy bottom. There were thousands of them, black and spermy, careering blindly . The image sticks with me, the sign of the day—an emblem of origins.
Theorists of post-modernism say that we live in a post-natural world. The tenet asserts that reality, for most of us, is urban, cultural, and technological, and consists of a welter of “signs” produced by everyone from artists to advertising agents. Everything is a text to be read, and “texts” need not be made out of language, but include buildings, billboards, fashion, and screens. Especially screens. TV, movies, computer screens, and mobile phone displays produce a wilderness of images, and this is the woods in which we browse and forage. Even nature, glimpsed on TV or through a car window, has in this context taken on the quality of a sign; it is something to be read and interpreted rather than something of which we are a part. In our media-rich experience, everything is mediated—even nature—and so our world is “post-natural.”
The description may ring true to our experience, but the fish haven't heard the news. Creeks still splash over stones, and the trout still face the current, watching for tumbling nymphs. Even when we're not there, a falling tree startles the birds with its crash. But as I write these words I'm nagged by complications. Most trout in the streams—with the notable exception of a few native strains—would not be there if it weren't for stocking and conservation efforts ranging from the nineteenth century to the present. And even the native strains are managed and protected; the South Pine brook trout wouldn't have survived modern farming if it weren't for government-managed easements and set-asides. At the same time, agricultural runoff of nitrates, pesticides, and herbicides are the greatest threats to the streams. We change nature, for better and worse, with our agriculture, pollution, and park systems. Nature and culture, finally, are not so easily distinguished. And as we consider the claims each makes upon us, we don't really know what we want. In Iowa, the Department of Natural Resources maintains French Creek with agricultural buffer zones and special fishing regulations, but the state legislature cannot bring itself to provide the department with rules to protect the creek from the hog confinement center perched above it that produces thousands of gallons of potentially disastrous pig manure.
Perhaps our alienation from the natural world is not unique to the post-modern situation. Even in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Thoreau noted the domestication of nature and our ignorance of true wilderness. “We have not seen the west side of the mountain,” he wrote, convinced that this was an experience vital to complete knowledge. Reaching back even farther, we might ask: How old is the expulsion from Eden?
Is it even possible for us to step out of culture into the true wildness of nature? And if we could, would we like it? I suppose the experience of primal terror in the jaws of a shark might be revelatory, but only briefly. In my own experience, intimations of the truly wild have been different from what I had imagined, and often they have been unsettling. With my college roommates, Hans Carlson and Mark Schrader, I climbed one of the peaks surrounding the Rainbow Lake Plateau. At 10,000 feet we looked around and could not see a single road or power line. In every direction, there were only mountains and trees stretching away to the horizon. Peering over a sheer cliff to a snowy clearing below, we spotted an elk that appeared to be the size of an ant. The only sound was the wind, and we heard it coming for what seemed like a full minute before it arrived. And when it did arrive it almost blew us over. Fearful of being caught in a storm, we scrambled down from the peak, and several times I lost my footing. On the steep slopes, gravity clutched at me, and the suddenness with which I lost control was startling. “Panic,” we say, because Pan is a fearsome god.
We had brought to the high plateau the rudiments of culture: sleeping bags and tents, a pot and a pan, cups, canteens, matches, cooking oil, pancake mix and other dry goods. Someone had carried up a foil pack of freeze-dried ice cream. But in the course of our ten days at 9,000 feet something happened. Once we reached the plateau, the natural world was no longer divided into the parts on the left and right sides of the road. There were no paths, no signs. We could no longer think of where we were in terms of its relation to anything man-made. It was just there, and it surrounded us. At 9,000 feet the sky seemed closer. The sun fell behind the peaks; the sky reddened and blackened; the overwhelming stars appeared; the horizon glowed with arrival and the moon rose up; and then, after sleep, the dawn. Day after day, night after night, the lights wheeled in the sky. At night I heard deer snorting and stamping, spooked by our tents. And in the jingling of the stream I heard, perversely, a cocktail party—trays and glasses and women's laughter. This remote place was, by turns, beautiful and terrifying, and after a week I became moody, edgy. I couldn't put my finger on what was bothering me, but I went for walks alone and things looked different. I regarded the rocks and trees, said “granite” and “pine,” but their names did not subdue them. They loomed forward with a previously unsuspected presence. “Dominion” seemed a foolish notion. I tried to recall stanzas of poetry, with limited success. And I remember actually pronouncing aloud the word “tragedy” and hearing it fall apart into its syllables— trag-e-dy —mere sounds. A landscape is not tragic, and it does not think of us.
On one of these walks I ran into Hans standing by a shallow snow-melt pond. He confessed to a similar unease—he said he felt like he was coming apart—but his response was different from mine. Instead of pronouncing words and recalling lines of poetry, he threw off his clothes and ran into the icy water, shouting with the shock of the cold. When he came out he said he felt a little better.
Back at our camp we found Mark, who was dealing with matters in his own way. He had gathered a flat stone and two stout sticks. He had tied a red bandana to the end of one stick and pressed it into the ground some yards away. With duct tape he fastened the flat stone to the end of the other stick. Then, using the stick with the flat rock on its end, he chipped a pine cone toward the distant pin.
We were all spooked. And so I came to understood the scene in Sartre's Nausea in which Roquentin sits on a park bench and stares at a tree root underneath it, frightened by its suddenly uncanny presence. Nature is never entirely subdued. The “post-natural” era exists, but only in our minds.
My father coached me in baseball, basketball, and football, and he taught me to play tennis. When we played one-on-one basketball in the driveway, he never let me win. In this way he did not condescend to me, and he taught me to be a competitor—an important American gift. Much later, when we both lived in Charlottesville, we occasionally played tennis, and again he almost always beat me. But now I was 33 and he was 55, and it had become harder for me to sense the pedagogical value of my losses. My father, however, does not fish. And my son, somehow intuiting at an early age that the field of competitive sports carries a walloping charge in our family, avoided team sports altogether. He preferred as a young boy to take long rambles around our little town, walking the wooded trails or poking into creeks and marshes. When we bought him a pair of rubber boots, a net, and a specimen jar, he was delighted, and he's been going fishing with me since the time when his main interests were chasing frogs and throwing rocks into the creek.
Once, when he was about eight years old, we hiked through woods along a winding creek. I fished the riffles and pools as we went, and he found crawdads in the shallows and a jewelweed bush covered in yellow butterflies. At a remote pool at the farthest extent of our excursion, I landed a big rainbow, a remarkable fish large enough to feed all the guests at a party for six we had planned for that evening. I asked Schuyler, “Should we take it or let it go?” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Let's keep it.” I nearly always released the trout I caught, and never kept anything that wouldn't fit into a frying pan, but there was the matter of the dinner party, and Schuyler was excited to show off our catch. So I picked a rock out of the creek, held the fish steady, and struck it on the head. It quivered and was still. Then with my knife I opened the fish from vent to gills, pulled out the offal, and used my thumb-nail to scrape the vein away from the backbone. I rinsed the languid body clean in the creek and held it up. Schuyler looked at it, stricken. Then he said, “I wanted to keep it, but now I feel sad.” I felt the same way. We both admired the handsome fish solemnly, then walked back through the woods in silence.
Years later, when Schuyler was a college senior, we were out together again, this time both of us fishing North Bear Creek on a fall evening. We stood about 50 yards apart in a small pasture, casting into a wide stretch of the creek so smooth it reflected, leaf for leaf, the blazing foliage on the opposite bank. As the sun sank and the light honeyed, the colors of the trees intensified, still mirrored in the water's surface. And when Schuyler reeled in his line and walked over to me, he said, “It's so beautiful right now it's hard to take in. Sometimes I feel like I'm a crystal goblet and nature is filling me with a fire hose.”
We hadn't eaten supper yet, so we took home two trout and fried them up. As we sat at the table and ate, Schuyler, a chef, said, “Every time I kill a trout I feel bad. But I'm glad I do. I feel like I should, somehow.” His mother, who studies Classical Greece and Rome, was sitting with us. Sally said, “I think that's why people sacrificed. Killing is traumatic, and they felt like they were taking something. It felt serious, so they made a ritual out of it, a way of giving back.”
“So the trauma of killing is the beginning of prayer,” I said. And the conversation made me think of the trumeau in the church at Souillac in southwest France. Sally and I had seen it two years before, an unexpected find in the small, twelfth-century church where we had gone to see the famous “dancing Isaiah” carved in one of the doorways. But it was the trumeau —an elaborately carved decorative pillar inside—that struck me. The stone had been chiseled into an intaglio of bodies latched onto each other, tooth to haunch. Some of the figures were human, some animal, and some were monsters combining the bodies of lions with the heads of apes or the heads and wings of birds. Cleaned leg-bones with jaws clamped to them formed the edges of the column, and I thought immediately: This is what it means to be a body in the world. The composition was elaborate but orderly, expressing an ecology, but a monstrous one. It represented, I felt sure, the tragedy of a world of bodies “fallen” into time and history, in which life must feed on death, and in which even the most scrupulous of us cannot entirely escape the violence involved in staying alive.
On the back of the trumeau we discovered three carvings of couples, stacked one above the other, each rendering, we guessed, the expulsion from Eden. Each couple stands in a hopeless embrace, their tilted heads on each other's shoulders, their arms around one another in a vain attempt to shelter and comfort. The stone faces stare into the middle distance, forlorn. The lowest pair stands on a twisted serpent, the next on the heads of the first, and the next, in turn, on the heads below. Together they make a cartoon of fallen generations, helpless to protect themselves from the carnage of life in time.
We told Schuyler about the Souillac trumeau and the solemnity it had provoked in us. So we prayed, in this fashion, and ate.
For D. H. Lawrence, we are crossed beings, and the symbol of the crucifix represented for him the curse of our doubleness. Lawrence abhorred his status as a natural being plagued by self-consciousness, and he celebrated in romantic fashion the unity of animals and our own momentary plunges into the wholly instinctual life, into what he called “blood consciousness.” But what would it be like to be permanently sunk in sensation and instinct? It may be a pleasure and relief when we touch that state in rare moments of simplicity, but to imagine a life wholly lived in moment-to-moment sensation is to contemplate the death of the human. If moments of “blood consciousness” are refreshing, there are also the pleasures of thought—and of liminal states, moments when we hesitate in the doorway and look both ways. Whitman compared his position as poet to being simultaneously in and out of the game, involved but detached, both a player and a knower, and this is the pleasure of all the arts, including fishing. For example: fishing a nymph imitation to a submerged trout, my imagination goes under the cress bed to the fish in its shadowy cover, while the conscious mind attends to matters of technique, mending the floating line against the stream's current so the fly can sink to its proper depth and drift without an unnatural sideways drag. The experience combines Thoreau's empathic translation into another realm with the execution of conscious art. And this quality of heightened attention is one of fishing's chief pleasures, mixing activity and contemplation in a kind of walking meditation.
When all goes well there is, of course, the thrill of connection. When the trout takes the fly, suddenly there is a live muscle at the end of the line. This is the experience that brings fishermen back to the water over and over—the experience of connection when the rod and line come alive—and this sought-for moment always arrives with at least a slight jolt of surprise. It carries a charge of discovery, of coming alert, and suddenly I'm connected in that other realm. The fish may run, tearing line off the reel at a thrilling rate, or I may feel through my rod a big fish, hunkered deep, shaking its head from side to side. It is difficult to describe the sense of discovery and wonder that attends the event, however many times it is repeated. The experience registers simultaneously in the senses and the mind, gaining access to the imagination by way of the muscles. Down below a shadow moves, tugging hard, and I strain for a glimpse through sliding water and surface glare.
No wonder fish carry a heavy freight of symbolic meanings. Carl Jung read the fish in dreams as a symbol of insight rising from the unconscious. And in his Mysterium Coniunctionis he wrote of the significance of fish within the arcana of alchemy. According to the alchemists, our temporal world consists of the scattered sparks of eternal light. We are imprisoned beings, fallen into a fractured world, and the work of a lifetime is to recover wholeness by seeking the unity hidden in multiplicity. This way of thinking is Gnostic and kabbalistic, a restless dialectic in search of ever-greater syntheses, both physical and psychic. It employs Biblical symbols, and seeks connections everywhere. The inner nature of a human being is, in this system, a hidden spring, a secret place where “the spark of the light of nature” can be found. Connecting inner and outer nature, we reassemble the shards of undivided light, and achieve transcendence. This is the experience of the prophets in their ecstasies, or of a certain stripe of natural scientist. As the seventeenth-century ecclesiastic Caussin wrote, “[I]t will suffice, after the light of faith, for human ingenuity to recognize, as it were, the refracted rays of the Divine Majesty in the world and in created things.” And within the arcana of mystical alchemy, fish hold a special symbolic import. “[T]he eyes of the fish are always open and therefore must always see,” Jung says, “which is why the alchemists used them as the symbol of perpetual attention.” Like the eyes of God, the fishes' eyes gaze steadily, taking in the totality of things beyond mere human perception.
Since the project of mystical alchemy grew out of the desire for a vision of a transcendent, original wholeness, it is no surprise that Jung, later in his study, takes up the subject of the mandala, for him the symbol both of God and the completed Self. To move from the round, unblinking fish's eye to the circular sign of everything is a comprehensible leap, but a breathtaking one. Perpetual attention would see all—the intricate unity in multiplicity, and eternity in the cyclings of time. Mandala-like, the world would shine, each piece in its place, a wholeness regained.
Such thinking soars away from field and stream. And, certainly, the experience of fishing is, first of all, a common, humble thing. Yet, when my taut line cuts through the water, I tip beyond myself, leaning toward another realm. With fish below and birds above, I sense myself as earthbound, longing for fuller knowledge. The way it feels reverberates with a deep, unarticulated longing to hook up with something beyond myself, something other and powerful and only dimly intuited until, mysteriously, I connect.
I'm standing up to my thighs in the Upper Iowa River just outside Decorah. Above the wooded banks the sky is a strip of blue. It is early fall—dusk—and the temperature cools as the sky darkens. I peer at the ropes of current twining and untwining under an over-arching tree where a trout rises steadily. I cast repeatedly, trying different flies, but the fish ignores my offerings. And then, in the dim light, it begins. On the river's surface—exactly where I am looking—wings emerge and something rises, white and fluttering, into the air. It happens swiftly, as if the small creature has been pulled out of the river with a tug from an invisible string, or as if an inch of the water itself has crystallized suddenly into a living entity. It rises away, its white body and wings glowing in the dim light. It is the Ephoron leukon , the White Fly, large by mayfly standards, nearly an inch long. Another rises, and then another. One drags with it the husk from which it has just emerged, a limp double hanging from its lower abdomen. In a matter of minutes the air is filled with White Flies, all of them lifting away from the water at the same angle. It looks like a blizzard in reverse as the fluttering sparks lift out of the dark water and ascend together, rising in gusts. By morning the sidewalk of the College Avenue bridge in Decorah will be drifted inches deep with the small, brittle bodies.
As with all mayflies, the sole activity of the White Fly in its winged form is mating. Their mouth parts are not fully formed and they do not eat. Before the hatch they have existed as nymphs burrowed into the riverbed, small brown and gray creatures with segmented bodies, six legs, and heads that feature a pair of claw-like tusks with which they feed on algae and other aquatic plant life. When the right combination of water temperature and light conditions prevail, the nymphs crawl out from their burrows and swim to the surface, where their backs split and the duns emerge. It happens at dusk, at a signal precise to them and obscure to us. The males appear first and fly to streamside foliage to molt. There they shed another layer and emerge with grayer translucent wings. In the meantime the female duns emerge and hover over the water, to be joined by the mature male spinners. They mate in the air, the male grasping the female with forelegs elongated for the purpose. Afterwards the spent males fall to the water and the mated females continue to fly, racing up and downstream as their eggs quickly mature. Then they dip to the water, release the egg clusters, and die. The flies live for two or three frenzied hours and the trout gorge on them when they fall. It is one of the year's great hatches, so intense and so protein-rich that it draws the biggest and wariest trout up from their deep hides. In Iowa it usually happens in September, over a period ranging from a few days to a couple of weeks. Then the flies are gone and their eggs, having settled to the streambed, ripen to yield the next generation of drab, burrowing crawlers.
This, with variations, is the life cycle of all mayflies, an order of aquatic insects with a bounty of lovely names. As the year proceeds from early spring to late fall an attentive fisherman may note the succession of Blue-Winged Olives, Blue Quills, Quill Gordons, Light and Dark Hendricksons, March Browns, Gray Foxes, a variety of Sulfurs, Cream and Light Cahills, and Drakes ranging from Gray to Brown to Yellow to Dark Green to Slate. In the Midwest and East the little Tricos and big White Flies follow. And finally, when the air sharpens with cold, another wave of Blue-Winged Olives completes the cycle of hatches. Mayflies vary in size and color, but each develops through a process of metamorphosis in four stages, from egg to nymph (the two aquatic states) to dun to spinner (the two winged, airborne states). As they go, the lyrical vocabulary of mayfly generation carries an aura of classical myth and Platonic striving. The nymph is sometimes called the naiad, and dun and spinner are referred to more technically as subimago and imago. According to Greek story, every river and pool was animated by its presiding naiad, and a healthy trout stream is alive with nymphs. Some burrow but others cling on submerged rocks, crawl the bottom, or swim—and all are in constant flux, molting repeatedly as they grow. Emerging as they do from the streambed, then hatching into the air, it is no wonder that mayflies inspired the ancients to believe in spontaneous generation. And living at most for a day or two in the element they share with us, they have come to symbolize the brevity of our own lives. The scientific name for the order of mayflies is, appropriately, Ephemeroptera . Within the intricacies of stream ecology, they are the sustaining ephemera.
In his poem “The World Below the Brine,” Whitman contemplates a scheme of lower and higher realms, reiterating the argument of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” His metaphor of stacked worlds places humans between sluggish darkness and a light beyond the light of day. The undersea world is, for him, a dim realm of “Dumb swimmers,” “Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom.” It is, nevertheless, merely a slower, grosser version of our own world: “Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air.” After a lengthy catalog naming and describing its underwater denizens, the poem suddenly accelerates, registering in two lines the leap to our realm and beyond:
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.
It is the familiar argument of ratios: the underwater tribes cannot conceive of us, the subtlety of our air, the sharpness of our sight, and we should take the lesson, using our livelier minds to imagine other, higher “spheres.” Within this poetic argument, the mayfly would be a figure of transformation, metamorphosing from world to world.
Still standing in the river, I tie on a White Fly imitation, the largest fly in my vest. The spinners are falling now and the trout rise hard. White wings flutter as a helpless fly drifts, and then with a swirl it is gone. I pick out a fish that is rising steadily and cast into a slot of current ten yards upstream. My imitation drifts down, then disappears into a sudden dent in the water. I raise my rod tip and feel the weight of a big trout. He runs downstream three times, using the current against me, before he tires, and I play to hand a heavy, eighteen-inch brown. Removing the hook from the upward-curving lower jaw, I see the White Flies jammed in his gullet. I let him go and he slides away. The fish are gorging on the big hatch, frenzied beyond caution. I catch and release big trout until it's too dark to see, and then I fish blindly and catch a couple more by sound and feel alone. When I reel in for the last time, the flies are still falling and I continue to hear the heavy glunk and splash of big trout feeding on the surface. But my back is tired and I've caught enough fish.
Before I make the effort to wade ashore in the current, I stand still and rest, staring into the dark as the black water rushes around my legs. Downstream the Upper Iowa feeds the Mississippi, and in a couple of weeks this water will enter the Gulf of Mexico and the ocean currents. The springs that feed the Upper Iowa are recharged by thunderstorms and blizzards that blow in from the west. The river is always going away and coming back, turning through its changes, as the mayflies within it cycle through their metamorphoses. And I stand in the river, gazing and changing.
I remember seeing an old postcard of northeast Iowa with a map on one side marked with pictographic cues to the area's attractions—Ice Cave, Effigy Mounds National Monument, the river towns of Marquette and McGregor. The map was colored forest green and carried the legend, “Iowa's Little Switzerland.” Little, indeed. The rope tow of the “Nor-Ski” ski run just outside Decorah ascends a total of 1,200 feet. The topography, though, has a human-sized charm. And if its sublimity is not vertical, there is sublimity, nevertheless. I recall walking French Creek with my friend Jeff Skeate, the most skilled dry-fly fisherman I know. It was evening, and we were walking out of the winding coulee where the creek runs between steep, wooded hills. The sun had set behind the ridge to our right and a full moon rose to our left. It was early dusk. The colors of the grasses and the trees were still visible but tinted pink in the last shades of sunset. The hill to our right, dark with summer leaves, glowed silver with moonlight. And what I remember next could not have really happened, I think, and yet I see it vividly, a memory and not a dream.
We noticed our projected forms on the hill to the right, two outsized gaps in the glaze of moonlight. Our shadows, tall dark patches on the moonlit hill, rose and dipped as we strode. The darkening sky glowed a final blue, intense as neon. Then Jeff raised one arm and painted the hillside with the shadow of his hand, tree by tree. It seemed a powerful gesture, the sweep of a giant presence.
But it was just a moment, a chance alignment, and our brief shadows passed. It was dark then, and we heard the water falling over stones. Where the creek slowly carves its valley, we are ephemera.
Some days stand in memory, markers in what Joseph Langland calls “the wheel of summer.” Saturday, July 28, 2001 is one of these. Sometimes I mix it up with that year's July 4—Independence Day—because of the fireworks over the town that night. But it was Nordic Fest, Decorah's big ethnic celebration. That morning I left town and its festival hubbub and drove to Waterloo Creek. The day was hot and clear, the humidity uncharacteristically low so that each detail of sight started out with a preternatural clarity. The creek, too, was clear to the point of invisibility, and its aquatic foliage shifted in the current as if in a slow-motion breeze. Some of it, long and supple, waved languidly. A second, coarser kind resembled a horse's mane, but green. And the fronds of a third had small, triangular tassels that shook like bells on a string. Each one shone its particular green, from pine to kelly to neon. In the clear water the trout hung, as if in air, in the plants' shadows, in the open current, or behind rocks that shielded them from the current's force, conserving valuable calories. At intervals they rose and made the surface visible for a dimpled moment, then resumed their watchful positions. I waded slowly upstream and stood behind them until they forgot me. With a dry fly—a #16 Griffith's Gnat—I caught and released the nearest one, then with longer casts the next one up, and the next. The water was so clear that I could watch the trout notice the fly, rise and follow, then strike. After catching the first three, I took a few steps forward and waited again for the upstream fish to forget the mild disturbance behind them. As I paused, a cloud blocked the sun and the surface of the creek turned opaque in the changed light. Then the cloud moved on and the water seemed to disappear except for the little grace notes of glinting reflections. It was like a magician's trick with a cape. Now you see it, now you don't. When the water vanished the trout hovered and the plants swayed, all revealed as before.
I caught and released fish all morning, ate a sandwich under a streamside tree, then fished some more. Though the Waterloo is a popular creek, I didn't see another fisherman all day. I walked the bank, knelt by pools, and waded riffles, looking and casting. When the afternoon heated up I dipped a bandana in the cold, spring-fed creek, tied it around my neck, and let the water drip inside my shirt. Drenched in sensation, I sank into the body and moved around the stream's bends in a wordless trance of focussed attention. Deep, flat pool — waist-high grass — jingling riffles with a beach of stones — pocket water —rainbows and browns on the Griffith's Gnat —voles in the weeds when my boots pass over — black-eyed Susans — skull of a deer with grass through its eyes — quiet water — sporadic midges — sun — shade — the sun again —
At the end of the afternoon, tired and hungry, I drove into the little town of Waukon, found The City Club, and ate a ham sandwich at the bar. Above the ranged bottles and bowling trophies, the White Sox were on TV with the sound turned down. I drank a lot of water, then nursed a beer and watched Mark Buehrle beat the Red Sox at Fenway, 3-1. As the close game moved pitch-by-pitch through its situations, it felt like a repetition of the afternoon, when cast followed cast, tailored to the dictates of currents, obstructions, and flies.
When I went back outside the sun had tilted toward the horizon and I started toward Decorah on Old Stage Road. But I'd forgotten that the Freeport Bridge was still closed for repair and had to backtrack toward Highway 9, cutting over on Trout River Road. Then, next to Trout River, I saw Jeff Skeate's white van and decided to stop. It was early evening now, and often there's a nice caddis hatch at dusk, and besides, it was always good to see Jeff. But he was nowhere in sight, so I began to work my way upstream where the river curves through the open ground of a horse pasture. True to form, the trout came up at dusk and dimpled the surface of the bend pools, sipping down a late-hatch spinner fall. I had already caught plenty of fish, but now I caught more, often on successive casts. Then Jeff walked up behind me and we fished together as night came on. When it was too dark to see our flies the trout were still rising, so we kept casting, fishing by sound, striking whenever we heard a splashy rise. In this fashion we caught and released yet more trout, and it felt like a bonus, the booster stage of a rocket that sent the day into a higher orbit. Near the end of things Jeff hooked a very big fish that ran hard and jumped five times, then threw the hook. Fishing by “sonar,” we never saw him.
At last we reeled in our lines, clipped off our flies, and broke down the rods for the walk back to the road. By now a full moon had risen over the near ridge, shining so brightly that we cast dark shadows on the silvered grass. So we strode back to the cars, comparing notes on the long day, stepping on our shadows.
When I reached home it was late and Sally had gone to bed. Standing in the dark house, I heard the fireworks and went outside to the front steps. Sitting there, my muscles aching, I saw the fireflies glow and fade in the pool of darkness where the front yard was, while up between the trees, in a patch of black sky, the fireworks thumped. From the dark stoop I watched lights below and lights above. Over the town, down by the river, little trails of sparks rose, then bloomed into shapes like dahlias or chrysanthemums, red and green and white and blue, every color written briefly on the night sky. First the colors burst out, then the bang sounded, muted by distance, then the bright circle sagged and quickly faded. It was 2001, the summer before that fall, so the fireworks only reminded me of flowers—and of mandalas—the petals of worlds flaring and fading, for a moment whole.