stay together, learn the flowers, go light.

I had to go Trout Fishing in America one last time before I left for Asia again.  It’s these moments that I don’t get to experience too often here that can consistently feed my energy needed to counter my homesickness overseas, before the America nostalgia sets in and slowly drains my life bar.  But, I can collect these beautiful moments to use later, like recovery hearts in an RPG item bag. 

My brother took me to the “Schoolhouse hole” this time, a hole directly behind a schoolhouse’s backyard.  There is also “bridge hole,” “barrel hole,” and “stump hole,” specific holes that are located exactly where they sound.  ”Fishermen aren’t too creative with the names they give,” my brother always says. 

The water was freezing (quite literally), but the occasional rush of having a fish on line would keep me warm all day.  Brautigan describes it well, almost like poetry (huh, imagine that.)

“I threw out a salmon egg and let it drift down over that rock and WHAM! a good hit! and I had the fish on and it ran hard downstream, cutting at an angle and staying deep and really coming on hard, solid and uncompromising, and then the fish jumped and for a second I thought it was a frog. I’d never seen a fish like that before.

God-damn ! What the hell!

The fish ran deep again and I could feel its life energy screaming back up the line to my hand. The line felt like sound. It was like an ambulance siren coming straight at me, red light flashing, and then going away again and then taking to the air and becoming an air-raid siren.

The fish jumped a few more times and it still looked like a frog, but it didn’t have any legs. Then the fish grew tired and sloppy, and I swung and splashed it up the surface of the creek and into my net.

The fish was a twelve-inch rainbow trout with a huge hump on its back. A hunchback trout. The first I’d ever seen. The hump was probably due to an injury that occurred when the trout was young. Maybe a horse stepped on it or a tree fell over in a storm or its mother spawned where they were building a bridge.

There was a fine thing about that trout. I only wish I could have made a death mask of him. Not of his body though, but of his energy. I don’t know if anyone would have understood his body. I put it in my creel.”