Call of the Mild Read online

  I step into the water and feel the cold river swirl against my legs. It’s a strange sensation, wading into a river without actually getting wet. Scott stands behind me, the length of his body pressed against mine, his arms wrapped around my arms. I feel his breath on my neck as he swings me through the motions of a perfect cast. I feel graceful, as if his fishing know-how is becoming mine through osmosis. It’s easy. It’s natural. I should have been fly-fishing all my life.

  Then Scott steps away so I can try on my own. I let out just six feet or so of line, and flick my rod backward, then forward. The line plops in a depressing coil in front of my legs.

  “That’s good! Next time, try to keep your wrist straight.”

  When I finally do manage to launch my fly and keep my line straight, I puff with pride until I notice that the fly is so close to me, any fish who can see it can also see my legs.

  I cast again and watch the fly drift past me downstream.

  “Eat it!” I whisper.

  “If you cast twice in one place and nothing bites,” Scott pipes in, “take a step downstream before you cast again. There’s no point in casting to the same spot over and over.”

  “But aren’t they swimming back and forth down there?” I imagine that my fly lands like a neon billboard atop a fish superhighway. Sure, one picky commuter might swim by. But any second now, another will be tempted to stop and take a bite.

  Scott stares at me. Apparently he has a different vision of underwater life.

  “Uh, yeah,” he starts slowly, “they’re swimming. But not everywhere, all the time. The more water you cover, the more fish will see your fly.”

  On my next cast, the hook snags on a branch behind me. Scott hurries up to it and picks it off the shrub. Soon, satisfied that my casting is improving even though it still feels nothing but awkward to me, he wades downstream to start fishing himself.

  “You’re doing great,” he says, his eyes locked on to a promising riffle. “Yell if you need me.”

  A few casts later, my hook grabs onto a thorny wild rose and won’t let go. Scott is too far downstream, casting what looks like a quarter mile of line, to reach it for me. Branches scrape my arm as I reach for my fly. The line is not only hooked, it’s actually wrapped around the tip of a branch.

  After an hour or so, my right arm is tired, even though the rod I’ve borrowed from Scott weighs less than a pound. Something—I’m not sure what—keeps pulling back my arm for one more cast. Then one more after that.

  “Fly-fishing is a sport for optimists,” I remember Scott saying.

  I haven’t seen a single fish, but Scott has told me to trust that they’re there. And if I ever stopped to think about it, I’d believe him. But I don’t stop to think. I’m so caught up in my own actions—perfecting the motions of my arm, trying to let out a little more line, scanning the river for other promising spots—that I forget all about the fish.

  As my fly drifts past me, I try to memorize Scott’s pointers: Cast from the elbow and shoulder, not the wrist. Lift as much line off the water as you can before flinging the fly upstream. Give the line time to unfold in the air before jerking it in another direction. Keep your fly on the water as long as possible—you can’t catch a fish if your fly is in the air.

  I’m so wrapped up in all of this that I barely notice when the fluorescent bit of foam that is stuck to my fishing line pops below the surface of the water. I see it, and even feel a little tug on my rod, but I don’t think anything of it. In fact, Scott notices before I do.

  “Hey, you’ve got a fish!” He hurries upstream toward me.

  Fish! I’d forgotten about fish. Adrenaline floods my veins.

  “Keep your rod tip up,” Scott says calmly. “And keep your line tight. When the fish pulls against you, let it take as much line as it wants. As soon as it stops, reel it in.”

  I crank the reel, slowly at first. The light tug at the end of my rod becomes a hard, twitchy pull. Something in front of me leaps into the air and flexes back and forth before it splashes back into the river. Stunned, it takes me a moment to realize that the thrashing crescent I just saw fly out of the water is a fish. My fish. A glistening, feeling, living being is on the other end of this thin thread of plastic. It’s practically touching me.

  “Reel it in!” Scott jolts me out of reflection. I crank again, dragging the fish closer with each rotation. Scott wades toward it. The fish is just a few yards away from him when it decides to make one more run for its life. This time, the reel spins so fast that I can’t keep my left hand on it. It bruises my knuckle.

  As soon as the reel slows, I crank again. Scott takes one more step and closes his hand around my line.

  “Wow! Beautiful fish.” He bends down and unhooks the fly underwater. He lifts the fish out of the river. It has gold speckles and shimmering green and red stripes down its sides. It is beautiful, though I’ve never before used that word to describe a fish.

  “Do you want to hold it?” he asks.

  For some reason, seeing it up close—this slippery alien cradled in Scott’s hands—I chicken out. I’m not sure whether I’m scared for me or for the fish.

  “No, that’s okay.” Immediately, disappointment sinks in. The fish gulps at the air. What am I so afraid of?

  “Wait,” I say. “I want to touch it.”

  “Okay, wet your hands first.”

  I dip one hand in the water and brush my dripping fingers along the fish’s taut side. When I pull my hand away, a clear, slimy film coats my fingers. I rub them together, a souvenir.

  “I should let him go,” Scott says. “He’s been out of the water long enough.”

  “Bye, fish.”

  He lowers it into the water and holds it there, its mouth facing upstream. It catches its breath for a second, then darts out of his hands and disappears faster than I knew any living thing could swim.

  A week or two later, we return to the same stretch of river with a couple of Scott’s friends and I am surprised by how well I recognize it. Not from the houses or man-made markers by which I usually orient myself; there aren’t any of those here. Just a few months ago I would have described this place as barren, empty: a river and nothing else. But today I notice the lichen-covered rock that I tried to cast from. The giant alder where I lost two flies in a row. The stump where I sat and untangled my line after Scott moved downstream.

  In late July, Scott flies to the East Coast with me for a long weekend, to meet my parents and some of my extended family. While we’re there, we borrow my mom’s station wagon and head toward the Beltway when Scott suddenly asks: “What river did we just drive over?”

  I pause, wondering if he’s joking.

  “We drove over a river?”

  “Yeah, what’s it called?”

  “I have no idea.” I feel ridiculous. In all the years I lived here, I never noticed that this bit of highway crosses a ravine. I never glanced at a map and learned its name. I never got to know a stretch of its banks as well as I already know one stretch near Bend.

  Throughout the summer, we camp and fly-fish almost every weekend, and I start to pay more attention to rivers. When I drive over a bridge, I glance at the water and then look for a sign bearing its name. I check to see if the banks are raw and eroding or anchored by thick rows of willow. I look for a mix of fast-moving riffles and slow, deep pools, knowing that fish like variety. If we are on foot, I put on my polarized sunglasses and scan the water for dark, slender lines that hover, gently waving, over the streambed. These, I know now, are fish, though to the untrained eye they might look like weeds or shadows or like they don’t exist at all. I pick out the fishiest-looking spots, where I would cast my fly if I had my rod and more time. Now a river catches my eye because I know how to decipher some of its secrets. Fly-fishing is teaching me how to imagine some of the life that takes place beneath the water’s surface.

  But more than two years will pass before I one day look up from the river, to the surrounding valley, and wonder if it, too
, speaks in a language I don’t understand. The place that I have, by dumb luck, chosen to make my home will soon embrace me and steer me toward an unlikely decision. I will wonder if perhaps hunting could teach me to read landscapes the same way that fly-fishing is teaching me to interpret rivers and streams.

  CHAPTER 2

  PULLING THE TRIGGER

  It only takes a couple of weeks for me to realize that the town where I live and the rural area where I work are worlds apart. Bend, my new hometown, is a thriving example of the New West. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 10 percent of the city’s twelve thousand residents worked full-time at the town’s two lumber mills. Others felled trees in the woods or transported logs. Today those mills have been replaced by a Gap, a Victoria’s Secret and a movie theater—part of a shopping area called the Old Mill District.

  Tourism and construction have replaced timber as Bend’s economic anchors, and the once sleepy town has been wallpapered with an urban aesthetic. McMansions, groomed ski runs, mountain bike trails and Pilates studios beckon city-dwelling vacationers or retirees. Newcomers want more living space than they had in the city, but not so much space that maintenance becomes a burden. To meet this demand, owners of farms, ranches and forestlands eagerly subdivide their properties into ten-acre, two-acre, half-acre lots. The newspaper is filled each day with stories of rampant development, skyrocketing home values and a steady influx of new people. This is a good thing, economically speaking. New residents bring money and job opportunities. We also provoke a sort of identity crisis. Transplants like me, from bigger cities, are becoming the majority.

  My beat has two population centers: Sunriver and La Pine, both unincorporated. The rest of the area is composed of vast ranches and federally owned forestland. Sunriver, just fifteen miles south of Bend, was a World War II military camp that is now a densely populated resort with paved bike paths linking fancy homes to golf courses, riding stables and restaurants.

  La Pine, on the other hand, is a rambling, ill-defined cluster of neighborhoods that begins thirty miles south of Bend. Most of these neighborhoods were ranches until the 1950s and 1960s, when they were subdivided haphazardly. A typical homesite here is about one acre and includes a mobile home and three or four other structures. The owner is likely a former logger or mill worker, retired before he planned to because most logging in the region ended by the mid-1980s.

  By my third or fourth week on the job, I am already in the habit of driving right past Sunriver to get to La Pine. La Pine, I figure, is where the real stories are. The poverty, ramshackle homes, nostalgia for bygone days of logging largesse: These are the makings of a blockbuster movie or a great novel or at the very least a readable newspaper article. Driving to La Pine each morning feels a bit like driving back in time to Bend in the 1980s. The community is still struggling to recover from the collapse of the timber industry.

  Early one morning, I visit a married couple in their sixties for an article I’m writing about a neighborhood-wide property survey dispute. The man is a former mill worker who has suffered some sort of accident. He’s missing one eye and an ear. Smooth, translucent skin has been grafted over the dent where his eye used to be—a no-fuss patch, I suppose. The woman wears glasses and has her short hair set in curls. She does most of the talking as they welcome me inside with handshakes and a mug of instant coffee. We sit around an old metal table in the kitchen.

  As a child, the woman spent summers here visiting her aunt, who owned this very piece of land. She remembers when a water witch paced around the property holding a willow bough to sense where to drill the drinking well, which they still use today. She inherited this property as a young adult from her aunt, and the couple built their dream home here. As she says the words “dream home,” she opens her hands proudly. I look around the small kitchen—a worn linoleum floor, cabinets with chipped paint, a hulking cast-iron stove that takes up one-third of the still-chilly room, a calico curtain covering the room’s sole window—and marvel at the modesty of their dream.

  As she speaks, her husband gets up and opens the door to the stove. Amber flames warm my face from across the kitchen. The man picks up a pail and begins shoveling its contents into the glowing cavity. An orange peel and a wrinkled piece of plastic wrap fall to the floor.

  It’s trash. The man in front of me is burning household waste to heat his home. I stop taking notes and watch as he bends down, picks up the peel and wrapper, and tosses them into the stove. He swings the door closed and then sits back down at the table. Soon smoke fills the kitchen. The man opens the window and sits again, but still the smoke thickens. The woman keeps talking. A few minutes go by and the man gets up to turn on an old wire fan.

  “Maybe we should move into the living room,” he says over his shoulder.

  “Good idea,” the woman says cheerfully.

  Over the next few years, I will often think of this couple as I write my articles. I’ll imagine that they read the newspaper every morning before feeding it, section by section, into their stove. I will try to anticipate their questions, to explain how a ballot measure or a new county ordinance could wriggle into their dream home and make the life inside it a little better or a little worse. I also imagine how they would look at my own life, at my closet stuffed with designer clothes, at my iPod and laptop computer, and scoff at all the excess.

  That fall, though I continue to write about La Pine, I also take on a new beat at my newspaper, covering natural resources and the environment. I meet a particularly gruff, beefy logger in northeastern Oregon. We are sitting together on a bus, touring various logging projects and chatting about our lives, when he tells me, unprompted: “You know, the Western larch is my favorite tree.” He has a favorite tree! And when he talks about it, he sounds more like a giddy child than a jaded woodsman. He loves the larch not for its value—the pine-like wood is soft but rot-resistant so its primary use is railroad ties—but for sentimental reasons. Larix occidentalis, sometimes called a tamarack, is that rare combination: a deciduous conifer. In the spring, it boasts feathery tufts of pale green needles that turn gold in autumn and then drop to the ground. The next spring, new needles appear.

  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’d assumed that because he spends his days cutting down big, beautiful trees, he must not have as much affection for them as I do. Yet he has chosen a vocation that puts him in the woods all day, and requires him to distinguish species and determine the health and value of each specimen. He manages to be realistic about our need for lumber and, at the same time, romantic about the trees themselves.

  I begin to question my views about environmentalism in general and logging in particular. By the 1980s, most of the big trees in central Oregon had been cut down. Environmentalists filed lawsuits to slow the logging of remaining forests, arguing that logging displaces wildlife, erodes hillsides and pollutes streams. Old-timers blamed these conservationists for killing the local industry. When I first moved here, I had little sympathy. What kind of people would we be if we willingly traded the splendor of these forests and the life that inhabits them for toilet paper and two-by-fours?

  I have come to see it differently. Mill companies in central Oregon have shut down local operations and moved to Lithuania and Bolivia, where environmental regulations are lax and labor is cheap. Meanwhile, communities like La Pine have paid the price. I think of the disfigured mill worker and his wife, who live on so little. More logging and milling here would not make them obscenely wealthy, but every little bit would help.

  Besides, no matter how much we love trees, every single one of us needs some of them to be chopped down so we can go about our lives. Fallen trees make up our floors, walls and furniture, fuel our fireplaces and feed our printers. My newspaper career is dependent on paper. When some of our wood comes from local sources, we can carefully plan and monitor harvests with sustainability in mind. Otherwise, we’re simply outsourcing our environmental damage.

  As it turns out, loggers are not the only population
with whom I’m surprised to find myself sympathizing.

  Jim Court, the community’s fire chief at the time, becomes the first hunter I meet in real life. During my first interview with him, when business is done, I ask about his family. Then what he likes to do for fun.

  “Oh, I just love to get outdoors,” he says in an aw-shucks sort of way. “You know, fishing, bow hunting…

  “Bow hunting?” I must have misheard him. “Like, hunting with a bow and arrow?”

  “Yeah.” He pauses. “What did you think I meant?”

  I shrug. What I don’t say is: People still do that?

  Here we are, the fire chief and I, sitting in his office. And suddenly, much more than a desk is dividing us. Fear is part of it. Court is a hunter, which means he is capable of killing a living thing. Not to mention, he owns weapons. (The mightiness of the pen offers little reassurance next to a high-powered bow.)

  There’s another difference between us, too. And this one surprises me.

  Court goes on to explain that bow hunters, unlike rifle hunters, must sneak within about thirty yards of their prey to have any chance of making a kill. This requires intimate knowledge of both the animal and the forest it lives in, not to mention a little luck. I will be grateful that my first conversation about hunting happens to be with a bow hunter. With guns removed from the equation, it’s harder to fall back on the negative stereotypes that have, for my whole life, defined a modern hunter.

  Growing up, I never knew any real-life hunters. And I never talked or heard much about them. So without even realizing it, I based my opinion on the anti-hunting propaganda that had bombarded me from a very early age. Disney’s 1942 film Bambi, the first movie I ever saw in a theater, gave me the evil poacher who shoots Bambi’s mom and the unethical hunters who ignite the forest to drive Bambi and other deer out of the woods. Looney Tunes offered me Elmer Fudd, who is foolish, inept and clearly no match for the wily Bugs Bunny. In more-serious depictions, such as the novel Lord of the Flies, civility implodes when the characters start hunting wild pigs. In each of these cases, the hunter and the prey are enemies. So it wasn’t a stretch for me to assume that hunters, as a rule, hate their prey.