I was fourteen years old and twelve miles into the backcountry on the North Slope of the Uinta Mountains. My brother Justin and I were away from camp, hiking off trail, and looking for a lake. In the Uintas, you don’t generally have to look far.
In this instance, the maps showed an unnamed lake one ridge over from the lake our Boy Scout troop was camped at, so it did not take us long to reach our destination, even though there was no real trail. We walked around the new lake, which felt miles from anywhere. I have never felt so isolated as I have fishing no-name, no-trail lakes a dozen miles from a trailhead.
Then, in a sudden rush of sound and wind and confusion, a small plane shattered the sky and the easy silence. It flew low over the granite peaks and dropped a payload of fingerling trout into the clear water.
I had never seen an aerial stocking, and I haven’t seen one since. It was more than twenty years ago, but I remember the sound, the rushing whine of the engine that broke the wilderness calm, the heavy wind and metal of the plane as it roared into the granite bowl and blasted its way out as fast it came, the engine’s volume chasing after.
We made our way around the lake to the shallow end and waded out to some boulders whose peaks triangled out of the water twenty feet from shore.
There—in the small waves sparkling around those boulders—were the casualties. Several dozen hatchery minnows hadn’t survived the drop, floating in the shallows, telling us something about pine trees and stone, wild places, and man’s attempts to tame anything so primal and impenetrable as a castle of gray stone peaks and the endless blue of mountain lakes.
Seeing those trout floating belly up in the shallows, I leaned close to listen, to hear something that goes on long and lasts into the dense star-filled black of a mountain night. Something that can’t be spoken or made domestic. Something that exists in only a few wild places that haven’t been bent to the service of commerce. Something that speaks quietly if it speaks at all. My brother and I waited, knowing that something important was happening.
I am still listening, sure there is something else to hear, leaning close and waiting.