Arc and Pulse

Fishing an Oregon river with my wife, Chloë, turns to dancing. I touch her back and shoulders, leading her gently. She smiles, follows my gesture, swings back, and sees in the bubbly kiss of this emerald tailout a big slivery flash. A fish that’s come from the ocean. Chloë has taught me a lot, but today I’m teaching her to cast for steelhead. We met a few years after I arrived at Western Oregon University. She was coming through a divorce, and I was surfacing from a drowning relationship. At Richard Bunse’s art studio in Independence we used pencil and charcoal to draw nude women and men, sipping wine and learning about each other. We talked, explored ideas and the tastes and positions that shape them, and I remembered old Herbie Clark’s crude adage, “Head before tail,” in a new way—that you must love a person’s mind and personality if you hope to continue loving his or her body and place beside you. Chloë and I dated, shared our histories, took her children fishing, spent a night and a few months together, and fell in love. A good bit of Roman poetry is worth repeating, “Let your hook always be cast,” Ovid tells us in The Art of Love. “In a pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”

We had fished this coastal river once last year in early September. The woods were dry, the water low and clear, and the fish wary of our shadows as if they were the smoky dances of fire. The fires of any romantic relationship can burn in the wrong direction. As Chloë and I got to know each other better, we had our first arguments. The issues were familiar—my excessive time spent fishing, long days on the water without a phone call, or just my need to be alone when Chloë said she needed me around. And when plans for marriage firmed up, we had our first disputes about money. Most disagreements worked themselves through to a place of better understanding, but some clashes turned red and sore. One quarrel over my debts exploded into harsh words, slammed doors, and days of silence. When I emailed Chloë to ask if she still wanted to go fishing on Friday as we planned, she typed back, “Okay, but no champagne.”

We walked deep into the warm canyon, whispering about the Siletz Indians who once speared, trapped, ate, laughed, and lay along these basalt ledges. What is it we really want and need from the world, from other people? The Indians surely worried about many things before the ships and wagons arrived but not loans and credit cards. They needed each other; they needed fish. Hours into the canyon, Chloë and I didn’t see another person, and when we found a sun-drenched stone over a deep pool, we stripped down and plunged into the cold water. Wild awake with just the river and ourselves, it felt so easy to see, touch, and love completely. Would I ever need anything more?

I would need this October when rains bring more fish and the opportunity to catch them. Chloë swings the rod forward and sends the blue spinner into the riffles. It has a nice vibratory resistance, and she’s steering it right into the sweet spot. No bobber or bells for this woman. She likes to “feel it,” she tells me. I glance up at the narrow gray sky, the rocky canyon lush in moss, fern, and fir—a great cathedral echoing wonder and promise. She brings the spinner across the deep tongue and there!—the arc and pulse of the rod, a splash, line tearing out—she’s into a fish.

There are many ways people grow closer, and each way comes with the risk that it will lead inversely to pain and undoing. We learn each other’s burning passions and dull apathies, the consistencies and idiosyncrasies of our minds. We count on each other, raise children, take care of a house, garden, even a pet. A couple years ago a skinny gray tabby cat jumped in our boat while I was cleaning up in the driveway. The cat gobbled some leftover prawn baits, rubbed against my leg, and purred. Chloë called him Shrimp and said we should take him in. I was reluctant. Just another thing to worry about. But she and the boys convinced me. We love the cat, of course. And yet I do worry sometimes when he’s out at night—will he get bit by a raccoon or hit by a car? Then that worry seems silly in light of the children’s health, the life concerns of our family and friends, a leaky roof, bills, work. So much matters. But during exciting moments of possibility—diving into water, reaching for someone you love, hooking a great fish—nothing else seems to matter.

Chloë is focused, excited, anxious. I touch her flexing back and say, “Great.” There’s nothing quite like a big, bright, sea-run fish in a rushing river. She keeps her balance on the slippery rocks, stepping back into the shallows. I coach, and she retrieves a little line, and then there’s a confused moment of slack and a rocketing burst of steelhead, its body completely out of the water in an electrifying silver somersault.

This fish left the river as a small smolt two or three years ago, returning heavy, handsome, and hard to hook—until now. Steelhead may be the sexiest gamefish in the world—and it’s taken me a lifetime to find them. When this fish splashes back and disappears, the rod resumes its pulsing arc. “It’s still on. It’s coming,” she says. A chrome steelhead streaking through the blue-green river.

And then it’s gone.

“Oh no! What happened?” she groans. My jaw clenches and eyes squeeze shut as I exhale a tremendous sinking disappointment. You can’t pray for everything. Like young Huckleberry Finn, who prayed hard for fishhooks but never got them, concluding “there ain’t nothing in it,” I had long ago replaced divine entreaty with high hope. My hopes were sky high that Chloë would hook a fish today. And she did. Long ago, I got over losing fish on my line, but only recently have I dealt with what it means to lose the women in my life. Chloë’s never caught a steelhead, and she’s worked hard at it for days, the river rising and falling, the fish constantly on the move. Today’s conditions are ideal, her rod-work perfect. I examine the line and hooks. Everything is fine. “Sometimes it just happens,” I say. “You did great. What a gorgeous fish. Cast again.”

The endless, repeated promise of fishing—the hope that the next cast will be the one that connects you to a fish, a magnificent fish, the fish of a lifetime—can lead to a hobby, obsession, addiction, healthy emotional and physical persistence, the faithful practice of something like religion, even passion and love. It has to lead somewhere. “The craft of angling is the catching of fish,” the writer Ted Leeson wrote after wading these same Oregon rivers. “But the art of angling is a receptiveness to these connections, the art of letting one thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realize some small completeness.” And then you start over.

West and east, open ocean and weedy ponds, urban canals and pristine springs, hot swamps and arctic lakes, rowing into a fresh breeze and motoring through outboard fumes, drunk and sober, serious and silly, swinging baits, lures, and flies for hits and misses, landing little sprats and lead-bellied leviathan, eating some fish and letting others go—it’s been an endless journey of angling. And along the way there were relationships of every variety—backseat and front seat, crazy and calm, primal and cerebral, one night stands and lifetime friendships, years of dating and nights of being alone, divorce and marriage. The endlessly repeated, recurring, predictable, surprising, erratic, and bizarre experiences that are so much a part of fishing can drown in an instant or, over time, become the sustaining forces of our existence. Like the constant and constantly changing river that Chloë and I wade in today, you never know what will happen.

“Take a step upstream,” I say, “and cast again.”