Once Beside a Fire

I wanted to smell the scrub oaks through the smoke. I wanted to smell the creek as evening came on.

Photo by James Owen on Unsplash

He wrote in blue ink. He often wrote in blue ink.

So I was reading, “Purity of Heart” by Soren Kierkegaard, and I found a perfect description of my present day life:

Oh, the desolation of old age, if to be an old man means this: means that at any given moment a living person could look at life as if he himself did not exist, as if life were merely a past event that held no more present tasks for him as a living person, as if he, as a living person, and life were cut off from each other within life, so that life was past and gone, and he had become a stranger to it.

There was no salutation. I had received the letter in March, and it was from Dad. Because I needed to be in the States in April, I made plans to visit my folks and to visit Dad especially.

I slid the letter back into my shoulder bag and set the bag next to me on the blanket. There was enough space between myself and putting the letter back into bag that I thought of Chance again. I thought of the pistol he carried and how he had pulled it from his rucksack. In three decades of wandering I have never carried a weapon, though I have thought about it lately. I stopped at a Goodwill store after I left Mi Vida and purchased the blanket. The blanket did not cost more than a couple of dollars. Then I stopped at the grocery store and bought a loaf of bread, a steak, oatmeal, a pint of milk, and a box of black tea. I had water with me and a cup. For years now I have traveled with a stout metal cup and a scarf. I bring other gear for other trips, but the cup and a scarf are necessary.    

Memories of growing up on Mi Vida sent me into the foothills that shaped the mountains on the edge of town. Maybe I had wanted to look around town more. Perhaps I would have caught sight of someone from my youth. Perhaps I would have discovered a forgotten memory. But I could not find the heart to search anymore. Nothing of our lives is kept in reserve for us, not even for when we return. Life goes on, and we go on with it. The places we love change. I try not to despair too much over these obvious facts, though I did despair thirty years ago. Thirty years ago I spent season after season driving across the Southwest and up into the northern States. I was angry then, as many of us were, at changes in the west. Suddenly towns had coffee shops. There were bicycle shops that sold mountain bikes. Like most people then, I didn’t know what made a mountain bike different from any other bicycle. There were new picnic areas and camping areas. There were solar toilets at trailheads. There were upstart music festivals, film festivals, festivals for the sake of festivals. All of these things, from the solar toilets to the festivals, were new then, new in the sense they were not common in our part of the world. Next came developments, subdivisions, branch campuses. I was not vocal about these changes, not publicly. I did talk with individuals who saw them differently from me. Branch campuses: Shouldn’t our children have a chance at an education?  Picnic areas and camping areas with solar toilets: We cannot just let people destroy these places. Developments and subdivisions: Think of all the jobs. Music festivals, film festivals, festivals for the sake of festivals: Who doesn’t want to hear great music or watch a cool film?  A dozen or so old timers made money off these changes. Bankers did. Property owners did. They made their money. People drank better coffee. Every place—every outcropping, every balanced rock, every arch, every canyon, every gulch, every overlook—suddenly had a listed name. In the end, or what I think of as the end, difference surrendered to sameness, and sameness made money.

I am entering an age in which resentments will either live or die. Mercifully, most of my resentments are dead or dying. My wish is to keep the stories of other people and to see the better moments of life as I literally die, a sunset where I stopped to watch heaven enter the sea, a stretch of mountains where my heart desired to vanish, the face of the girl who gifted me a bamboo fly rod as we stood beside a gar filled lake in South Carolina. In my teens someone told me that we all reach a point when we have more days behind us than we do ahead of us. That is true. I do not suppose that I am seeking anything new, though I continue to search for where to go, as if to stop were to make an early agreement with death. We can add up the leftovers of our past and remember where we have been, remember who we have sat with or lived with. We can admit where we are. We can confess our failures. We can celebrate the good. Yet nothing gets replaced—nothing.  

I camped that night on the other side of the mountain and picked a place where no one would see Dad’s truck. I threw out the blanket and the rest of my kit in a patch of scrub oak. A small creek ran below the trees. It is a creek I know well. Locals say no more fish live in the creek. Tourists do not stop in these flats. It is a landscape most people pass over. There is no drama here. No light on the red rocks. No formations to photograph. There is sage brush and weeds. There are fallowed farms and the discards of forgotten homesteaders. I never minded the sage brush or the weeds or the rusted out cars and spent pipes. I have hiked the creek from the flats to its source in the high country. Much of the creek lies hidden from any road or trail system. The water seeps through fields in the low country, and in the high country, it feeds meadows and stunted aspen trees. I slept beside the creek as often as I could as a boy, as a young man. After I learned to drive, I came into this country to put distance between myself and high school days. Later, towards the end of those high school days and, what I didn’t realize yet, the end of an everyday life in this country, I went to the creek to put distance between myself and the girl I once loved, the girl who I refer to as L and who did not like onions and who, after her father had warned her against me, admitted another possibility. “My Dad says I should stay away from you.” “What do you think?” “I think I am in love with you.” That was the first time anyone outside my family told me they loved me. That was also the first time Eros took the shape of a face and a voice. After things ended with the girl, after she picked another boy, I went to the creek. I went there to build a fire. I needed to put distance between myself and my own broken heart.

Dad called this episode with the girl “puppy love.” It sure as hell didn’t feel like puppy love. Yet after so many years of thinking about that time and what happened, Dad might have been right. I remember he gave a sermon one time in which he spoke about how young people believe themselves to know more about love, how they figure all that intensity and desire they carry plunges into the very depths of love. But no, Dad preached, if a person wants to know what love is then try staying married for years and years, try enduring children, poverty, sickness, every imaginable failure, and the two of you stick it out, still manage to say, “I love you.” After that, the Preacher said, you will understand something about love. I will not say Dad was wrong, though I am not so confident to deny anyone’s experience of love—neither is Dad, despite his slippage of “puppy love.” I would not argue against the flame of young love or the awakening of new love. I would not rely on them either.

That evening beside the fire, a breeze sometimes stirred the flames. I like the warmth of a fire on my face, even when it is not cold outside. There is a comfort in fire, a cleansing of a kind that resembles the cleansing of water. We feel more alert to whatever is around us when we sit beside a fire. Then we feel a calm from within. It makes sense that our oldest ancestors used fire and water for their rituals. I had built up a stack of twigs. Every now and then I threw a couple of them into the flames. It is a curious fact of being human that we listen to fires. We listen to them. We do not simply stare at them. We listen. As though other voices might rise from them. I kept my fire low but it was enough for the warmth, enough for security. I wanted to smell the scrub oaks through the smoke. I wanted to smell the creek as evening came on.

The edge of the creek cut short yards below my camp. I sat beside the fire and read the water, noting the pools and pockets where a trout might live. I imagined the fish I could have caught and remembered, too, the fish I had taken from the creek as a boy. I did not bring a rod or flies on this trip. I’m not sure I would have fished if I had brought them. The best pool on the creek was a stone’s throw from where I sat. Above the pool, the creek narrows and drains over a shoal of gravel and sand. Below the shoal, the water empties into the head of the pool. The pool is the deepest on the creek. The streambed has configured itself on the opposite bank into a half-moon curve. Above the curve a few scrub oaks grow along the bank, and some of their roots enter the stream. The water is deepest there, and the largest fish rest in the shadows of the creekbank and oaks. From the half-moon pool, the creek turns sharply to the right and runs for a long stretch into the flats. The water moves quietly across the flats. The banks grow closer together. There are places where a person can hop from bank to bank. The fish that thrive in this section do so by hiding under the cutbanks and feeding whenever the light is low.

Nick Adams would have found solace in this country. “The Big Two-Hearted River” was the first story that captured me as a boy. It is the story about a young man who went into the woods alone and caught good trout and lost a big one. Even as a boy, I sensed a desirable loneliness in the story. I appreciated, too, how nature restored Nick, nature and fishing. Nick set up his camp with the attention of someone who needed home. He fished and caught fish. I recall the lines, “Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.” I wondered about that. What is all the old feeling? The old feeling of catching a trout? Of finding home? Of returning to an uncorrupted self? The last sentence of the story tell us, “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.” Nick found peace in those Michigan woods and beside his river, though I do not imagine that peace lasted long. Hemingway’s peace did not last long either. He blew his brains out, as anyone who has ever heard of Hemingway seems to know. Hemingway spent a lifetime burying sadness. When he could not bury it anymore, he made his last decision. I do not know if “A Big Two-Hearted River” is his best story, but it stays with me more than the others, and it does so for reasons other than style.

I set camp in the exact spot where I had watched Uncle Lloyd make his final fly cast. It was Uncle Lloyd who gave me his blessing to go ahead as a fly fisherman. And I did. I fished and fished and fished for years. I dreamed of fly fishing while I fly fished. The freestone streams of my youth became dreams of African rivers and fish that no one had ever caught. The mountains where I fished became the mountains of New Zealand. The long roads between rivers became the roads into the big ranches of a Patagonia I have never seen. For me, to have stopped fly fishing then, to have lived away from naturen, as the people of my Northern country say, would have marked an end to joy.

So it was when I walked up on Uncle Lloyd that evening and saw him standing above the pool of the half-moon, that I witnessed a fly fisherman and saw the pursuit of fly fishing leave the riverbank and enter some far-reaching world. Lloyd was changing flies. His fly rod was tucked under one arm and his glasses were set on the end his nose. His hands were near his face, as he sought the end of the tippet pinched between his fingers. He saw me though.   

“Any luck?” he asked me.

             “A few.”

            “I got one right here.”

            “Right where?”

            “In the pool. You see him?” 

I looked, but I didn’t see the fish.

“He is rising just past the shoal. You see him?”

I looked again. This time I saw the trout.

            “Ah, I see him.”

            “You should catch him.”

            “He’s your fish. You’re changing flies.”

            “No, no. You catch him.”

            “I don’t want to catch your fish, Uncle Lloyd.”

            “Catch him. He’s your fish.”    

Lloyd stepped away from the pool, and I took his place, with the creek on my left and a gap in the trees on my right. I changed flies, believing the trout wanted a dry fly. I landed the cast above the shoal. The fly drifted like a natural. It drifted over the shoal and into the pool. It hesitated a moment. Then danced. Then drifted. Then the trout took! I lifted my rod, and the fish pulled against the line. The fish was small, but I played it well. I kept the rod tip high. I did not hurry. Eventually, and it wasn’t a long time, I went to the head of the pool and knelt there and swung the fish into my hand. It was a cutthroat trout, the prettiest trout there is, and I held it up for Uncle Lloyd to see. Lloyd grinned at me. I then released the fish and after it swam away, I looked up at Uncle Lloyd again. Uncle Lloyd…dear Uncle Lloyd…he stood there above the creek, and I see him now. Late summer tans his face. His felt hat sits pushed back on his head. His fly rod remains tucked under his arm. He has reeled in his line. I do not want to lose this better moment with Uncle Lloyd. It is a moment and a story I wish to keep. Uncle Lloyd with summer on his face and the world around him, as though he never needed to fish again. He wore a brown t-shirt and faded blue jeans. The light and Uncle Lloyd ended there. They never ended there.

I tossed a handful of twigs onto the fire. The flames flared up, and I looked over the country. The long fields. The distant mesas. Some other life happening on the horizon. There is a coolness inside of spring. l pulled the blanket up around my shoulders and read Dad’s letter again. As if life were merely a past event that held no more present tasks for him as a living person.

The country faded into twilight, and I tossed a couple of heavier pieces of wood onto the fire. It was the time of day when animals start to move, when you might see a deer or an elk. You might see smaller animals on some final journey before they vanish. Coyotes travel at night. There are bears and cougars here, too, though neither of them are likely to bother a man with a fire. They are not likely to bother a man at all, but they do come around occasionally. Twenty years ago my wife and I established a camp in a clearing surrounded by a wilderness of dense conifers. It was twilight, and I had a sense that something or a creature watched us. I looked between the breaks in the trees, trying to glimpse whatever watched us. I looked for any movement, the flicker of a tail or an ear, a discoloration. But I didn’t see anything. Everything was real quiet. Yet everything in my body told me something was there. It might have been a grizzly. We were in grizzly country, and there are such creatures as mean grizzlies. It could have been a bear. That is what I told myself. That is what I told my wife. Pretty soon we broke camp and drove into town and found another place to sleep. Part of me felt embarrassed, felt cowardly about that experience, though leaving had been the right decision.  

I toed the larger pieces of wood closer to the center of the fire. With the blanket around my shoulders and open at my chest, my body took in more warmth. Slowly the heat from the fire wrapped around my body. The old feeling was returning—the old feeling, as Nick understood it. The old feeling of being in a good world and fly fishing and a sense, not even a hope, that all this will go on forever. Along with the blanket, I had purchased a tarp. I had rope with me in Dad’s truck. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to construct a shelter with a tarp, but I was too lazy to leave the fire. I didn’t want to interrupt being here. There are plenty of obligations, calculations, and schedules to erode away life. Building a shelter can be necessary in the woods. It is often necessary. But the blanket was shelter enough. The fire was enough.

Had I expected more of town?  Probably. Except the town where I grew up did not exist anymore. Town, by name, was another place, another village for other people. Many of us return to wherever we come from with the intention of discovering more about ourselves, about our families, about people whom we lived with through ordinary days—attending school, grocery shopping, putting gas in the car, fixing a meal. We go back, as if we had dropped clues for ourselves, sensing that we would return one day and discover another trinket of memory. I was not in search of a particular memory. The heat from the fire leaned into my soul, and other questions were put to rest. In the deserts and half deserts there are stories. Men have always sought them. Stone by stone. Story by story. Yet it is possible that all our stories are the search for one story, and it is the story of how our hearts were formed. Call them what you wish.

The sun went down, and I put more wood on the fire. I had gathered a couple of armloads of dead branches before settling in for the night. The air got chiller, and I built up the fire but not enough to drown out the light. The heavens curved over the world and over the top of the mountains and the foothills and over the place where I camped. Constellations soon appeared. Orion. Tarus. The Big Dipper. The Pleiades. My own fire a spark in the cosmos. I laughed at the thought of it, not at the absurdity but at the truth.

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Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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