WOTD- RUSHING

The randomly generated word today is RUSHING (trying to get my brain muscles toned for Lent Writing starting on March 9)

RUSHING

We stood in the middle of the river, my old PF Flyer tenny runners clinging to my sockless feet, the laces knotted together where they had broken from overuse, the chilly water of the Snake rushing around my little girl ankles as I stood atop a water-worn rock in the shallows. Mom was slightly downstream. I watched as she raised her right arm and flicked her spinning rod like a sassy wave to a flirty boy. The weighted line squealed through the Idaho air. She instinctively drew the pole back when she felt the sinkers approaching the spot where she wanted the bait to land. The pitch of the plunk, when the metal hit the water, indicated the depth or stillness of the pool and the potential for a nice deep hole. I tried to imitate my mother. Tried to wave my arm with the same grace, to command the direction of the line, and stop it where I wanted. More often than not Mom ended up having to wade on out to the willows hanging over the water at the river bend and try to retrieve my line, searching the weave of willow limbs for the squirm of a worm. When she found it she followed the translucent thread out of the mess I’d put it in, and when it was finally free she tossed it out into the water. I could feel the jiggle of freedom tugging at my line and for a second I imagined it was a fish making my pole dance rather than my newly freed sinkers making their way over the rocks on the river bottom.

Before sunrise Mom and I had ventured out to the river while the others slept, the slick bottoms of last year’s gym shoes slipping in the dewy grasses that led to the bend between campgrounds F and G near Island Park, Idaho. My whole childhood, and even half of my adulthood, I lived under the impression that that particular fishing spot was known as Effergee. It wasn’t until I was teaching my own children to fish that I realized they were saying: “Let’s meet at F or G” when Mom and her sisters were making their fishing plans.

Once in the river Mom and I stood in silence, the only sounds being the rushing water, the rustling of a deep summer Idaho breeze in the willows near the river, and the hawks and owls nested in the tall pines deeper into the dry spaces. Occasionally a crisp new sound rang out when a critter made itself known, or when the sun finally rose and hit a certain spot in its traverse across the cerulean sky calling the fish to the surface for a fresh hatch of flies. Then the fish would start jumping, proving their existence despite their mysterious neglect of our juicy worms underwater, their entrances and exits making an earthy sort of Xylophonic song in the bass cleff range. That’s when the fly fishermen came out and invaded our quiet spot.

But in those wee tiny hours before the grass blades dried in the Idaho heat, the place was all ours. We traveled up and down stream, finding an accommodating trunk of a fallen tree on which we could rest, our threaded bait strategically planted in a mysterious bottom spot while we waited. Once situated we could cock our reels and sit a spell. That’s when we’d reach into our pockets for a refresher. My pocket usually bore one of two treasures, available in my childhood only in the summer on our trips to Idaho: Big Hunk or Chick-O-Stix. To this day both of those treats make me want to go fishing. Maybe my successes on the stream were due to a tinge of sweetness lacing my worms in those days. Whatever the cause may have been, the fish generally responded and through the morning we would call back and forth to each other with our Indian whoops and hollers: “wooo – wooo - wooo” . If I could write out music I could show you the pitches of the call, the last “wooo” rising in pitch a third above the fist two calls. Like the birds that wake me on bright summer mornings from the woody hollow outside my bedroom window now, the call was co

nsistent and melodic and it meant one thing. We’d hooked and landed a fish. This was the language of the river: Silence carrying the fullest portion of the serenade, with the rhythm section of nature keeping a soft frenetic beat behind the melody of silence, with an occasional natural whistle coming from the trees or the fishing lines as we cast them, our feet suctioning out of the water as we shifted our places on the river, and the native American calls of our forefathers eeking out of our bellies as we voiced guttural gratitude for the food accented with the pride of the catch.

By mid afternoon I was sleepy and hungry. We took our harvest, strung through the gills onto two flexible willow branches which had been looped and knotted and planted under a rock on the riverside, so the fish could remain cool in the water until we were done. I hooked the loop of fish over two bent fingers , carrying them like a purse to market. We rose up over the lip of the river bed, water from the river sloshing in my shoes, sucking in and out like an air pump as I walked, the water trapped in the canvas seeping out over the tops of and out across my sun tanned ankles.

Mom fried up the fish for dinner in the old black cast iron griddle, speckled trout drenched in flour with salt and pepper. Fried up in three large spoonfuls of Crisco. Evidence of our feat remained speckled all over the circle of rocks in the fire pit or on the lid of the Coleman stove. The aroma of pine and water and earth swirled through my nostrils as my happy belly relaxed in a full bodied sigh and I settled under an accommodating tree for a little respite. Never was rest so perfect.

In the depth of winter, back in Pittsburgh; far from the meandering Snake River and high country pines and Big Hunks, I yearned for the moment. I could only find it in my imagination, back in the place that usually comes when my eyes are wide open but I see nothing…those magic picture moments when we stare into space and go somewhere else. I did discover once, when I was on the outside of adolescence that if I held a knee-high stocking just so; where the toe was in the water of my mother’s washing machine but the knee was in my hand; if I held it just so at the right time in the washing cycle, the agitator would jerk back and forth in such a way that if I closed my eyes completely I could swear there was a fish on the end of my line…that I was standing in the middle of the Snake River in the deep of the summer when the water was low and rushing over my feet, when the sun was warm and throbbed against my skin like a maternal heartbeat…that even though logic told me I was standing against the cold metal washing machine in the basement laundry room of my childhood…in my heart I was planted upstream from my beautiful graceful dependable mother in our spot out at Effergee.

FRY PAN

March 7, 2009 fry pan

When the wind comes whispering through the branches of the scrub oak trees in our front yard; when the leaves are molting from their winter nubs into fresh baby-green see-through ruffles, I can hear the streams of my childhood. Though there is no water here, I can hear them. We are warm in our sweatshirts, our wet shoes are nearly dry and we are huddled near the fire, the fresh gathered wood cracking against the heat, releasing a spew of sparks that rise into the starry sky. Pine smoke sifts into tall evergreens. The smells of the mountains change when the sun sets. Wet and earthy aromas of a warm sunny day have drawn the shades and bedded down for the night and we are left with fresh and crisp and clear, cold in our nostrils. We speak in quieter tones, an instinctive reverence overcoming all living things. There is a ring of strategically placed flat faced rocks in the coals of the fire, off to the side where Mom has shifted pieces of charcoal, where the flame has inverted into blackened chunks of heat which blush like embarrassed schoolgirls when she blows on them. Mom’s old black cast iron fry pan sits on top of the stones, appearing unaffected by the heat, looking rather lifeless, until she flings a fork full of Crisco into it. Then it screams and screeches as the white glob shrinks and glides across the hot thick metal. Beside her, on a large platter laid out like soldiers, is our catch of the day. Fin against fin, clean and headless and shimmering in the moonlight. She shakes a generous portion of salt and pepper on their rainbow skin, sprinkles a little flour if she has some, and lifts each one by the tail, gently sliding them into the hot oil like tired housewives lay themselves into a hot bathtub after the kids are in bed. They sizzle and curl, turning brown on the outside and pink on the inner. Their slivery spines pull away from the layers of meat when they are cooked just right. We stand in a line behind her as she bends over the fire, her hot pad wrapped around the handle of the fry pan. She shakes the skillet, turns the fish one more time, then edges the tines of her fork under the backbone to see if the flesh flakes off easily. “Here you go, Doll,” she’ll say as she lays one on my plate. I scurry back to my canvas folding chair, the one that smells like rubber and mildew and pine needles. I push my knobby little girl knees together and make a little table for my plate. Tiny bite by tiny bite I pull the delicacy from the skeleton, counting the ribs, knowing that if one is missing I’d better chew carefully. I do not need a fork. I can do it bare handed, once the fish has cooled a little. You can feel the bones better that way. It makes my mouth water to think of it.
This is the bright red cherry on top of a super banana split kind of day. A day that starts as a dark chilly Idaho morning, slipping out of my sleeping bag and following my mother, tiptoeing, down to the stream; fishing pole in hand, a square cork container with mulch and earthworms, a Big Hunk and Chick-O-Stix in my left coat pocket and my old tenny-runners on my feet. My mom stands beside me in the stream and we speak beautiful silence to each other as the sun rises over the shimmering ripples of the Snake River. There is a tug on my line, and a tug on hers, and we know that with the rising sun there is hunger below the waters. All day long, that blessed timeless kind of day, we gave ourselves to the wild.
Here, beside the fire, tummy full and body happy-tired, I take my plate to the stream and wash it off. This is the gift of a day. I am warm, and I am loved, and I am safe, and I am fed. There is no sweeter memory. Truly, no sweeter memory.

The Snake River and the Tetons

After a good day....Ann Marie, Libby, me and George in Aunt Edna's kitchen