114 ~ Fishing with Maria

Sometimes I'll put my head to pillow at a motel near the fine town of Viroqua, for a night's rest after trout fishing in the area's spring creeks. I was recently back at one of my usual lodgings there, but for a different reason, a pause for a night's rest on a trip to Minneapolis. I was at the end of long day of work, and still immersed in jetlag from some recent travel in Europe, and I couldn't make the drive all in one go. I was on my way to attend the memorial service of a dear friend, Maria, taken by cancer in a flash between diagnosis and her death. Her passing left a hole in the good of the world. A generous and soulful one, and a dancer by profession and passion, she founded and directed a dance company, Kairos Alive!, that focuses on bringing dance participation into nursing homes and other care facilities. Every day at work she added goodness to the world.

At the motel desk a friendly lady from Gujarat got me registered, I found my room, and crashed. But as is the wont of jet lag, the hour at which you go to bed and fall asleep, or how weary you are, are immaterial. It will rouse you when it sees fit, and in this case two in the morning. I was irretrievably awake, eyes popped open like roller blinds, but my brain was too fogged for reading, and channel surfing turned up no movies or programs of any interest (Home Shopping Network at 2 am anyone? The Boss knows a thing or two - "57 Channels and Nothin' On"). The hours turn slowly in that dark and quiet time, and I had several more ahead before I would grab breakfast and continue the drive toward the 11:00 am service. What to do in the meantime?

Go fishing of course. It's something that connects me with the world, and a few weeks earlier I'd fished one my favorite streams nearby, and came upon a pool with some large trout hunkered at the bottom. They would have nothing to do with me or the flies I cast, as is often the case with larger trout. The big boys and gals often hold at the bottom of a pool during daylight, ignoring everything, then emerge, like leopards, to hunt at night. One reason is that it's safer then; many of their fellow creatures that hunt them - ospreys, eagles, fishermen - have gone to bed. If you can manage it, fishing for brown trout at night can sometimes be rewarding, especially for larger fish. I'd made a mental note to one day return to this pool after dark.

Well, here I was, with jet lag at 2 am, and only about 15 minutes' drive from that pool. Carpe diem - or rather, carpe piscis. By 3 am I was edging along the streambank toward the pool, guided by the friendship of a three-quarters moon. I love this world of fishing in the dark, when the rest of humanity is asleep, and the world is reduced to just me, the barred owls and the moon. As I approached the pool and made the first casts I promptly landed and released a small trout. And soon another one, not a lunker, but a good fish about a foot long. I made an offering of gratitude, dispatched the trout, and put it in my creel. I had a cooler and ice packs in the car, since I'd planned to fish a bit on the return trip home. This first fish would hold just fine.

This was a promising start, but then it completely shut down. Over the next 40 minutes or so I raised not another trout. Perhaps I'd become disoriented in the dark, or misremembered the extent and layout of the pool and inadvertently spooked the fish there. Or maybe Grandmother Moon was also a friend to the trout, and illuminated me a bit too much to them (I've found that while it's more challenging, of course, to fish on nights that are completely dark - at least to our eyes - it's more productive). In any case, with my one gift from the stream, I returned to the motel just as dawn was breaking onto the world, and soon continued the drive toward Minneapolis.

The service for Maria was beautiful. Her husband, my good friend Cris, and their two daughters brought into the proceedings some ritual, but not only that; some heartfelt grief, but not only that; and some happy celebration of Maria and her generous, dancing life, but not just that. It was a skillful and moving blend of all three.

At some point during the proceedings a regret hit me: it felt like a mistake, a transgression, to have taken a life, to have killed that trout, on this day of Maria's memorial service. We were all assembled in the church precisely because there had already been too much death. It was not a day to add more. I decided as I sat in the pew to make a modest amends: I wouldn't eat the trout and thereby benefit from my error. Instead, when I returned home I would feed it to my compost pile, and from there the trout would feed the gardens and the Earth next year. Rumi wrote, "there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground", and this was a small way I could honor Maria.

When the service concluded, Cris directed the couple hundred of us in attendance to head downstairs to the basement meeting hall, to share a meal. And he made a request - that we all look for someone we didn't know and sit with them and introduce ourselves. He said that since we were all friends of Maria we were all amazing people, and all connected through her, and so we should take this opportunity to deepen those connections.

His assignment was easy for me. I'm not from Minneapolis, and so the only people I knew of the multitude were Cris and his two daughters. But, you know, go with the flow, stay open and see what life serves up. After passing through the buffet line, with my plate of food in hand, I scanned the tables and chairs for a landing place. A couple at a partially filled table caught my eye. "They look like interesting people", I thought, "I'll sit there." I sat down, and introduced myself to Trish and Gary. The open chair was next to Trish, and so she and I started a conversation. In short order, not apropos of anything in particular, Trish mentioned a great meal of fresh walleyed pike she recently enjoyed in northern Minnesota, and another of lake herring along Lake Superior. Interesting...

"Do you like fresh fish?", I asked.

"Yes, I do!"

"Um, would like a fresh trout?"

I then told her about my fishing outing earlier that morning, and my insight just minutes before that I should make an amends by making a gift of this trout. Would she like to have it? She surely would! And so after the meal we went out to my car, and I gave the trout away, not to my compost pile, but to a grateful Trish, a dear friend of Maria's. I'd listened with amusement as she explained that her husband Gary hated fish, and consequently she had more experience eating fish in restaurants than cooking them at home. I gave her some tips on how to cook the trout, and I could see as she took it that she looked forward to the adventure of it. The world was feeling right again.

After the trout transfer, and spending some time with Cris, I pointed the car home and got another night's rest at a motel along the way, still in Minnesota. The next morning, over a good greasy spoon breakfast, I pulled out maps of the remainder of my route through Wisconsin, scouting for a trout stream to try. Given that I was still well north of my usual angling haunts, I figured I'd take the opportunity to give a new stream a try, and see what some aqua incognita had to offer.

I traced my finger over a county I'd never fished before, La Crosse, and my eyes fell upon a small blue thread of a creek that held some promise. I'd never heard of it, but I saw it had a mention in my booklet of Wisconsin's extensive trout fishing regulations, so there must be something doing there with trout.

When I reached the bridge over the stretch of the stream I planned to try, already parked there was a car adorned with some trout fishing decals and stickers. So I kept rolling and drove upstream a few miles more to the next bridge, which my map showed was probably the last bridge before the stream faded into the Driftless hills. I parked, and walked onto the bridge to have a look over the rails. Here the map’s thin blue line had become so narrow and shallow that I doubted it held many trout, if any, and not of any size. In places the creek was just a few feet wide, and most of it only a few inches deep. But while small, it was beautiful, and its bright, clear water tumbled in constant, musical movement. It danced, like Maria.

I decided to give it a go, despite the marginal prospects. I was here, on a fine autumn day, nowhere else to go or be, and it was unlikely that other anglers would bother with such a diminutive ribbon of water. And after Maria's memorial service, it would just be good to wade in cool, flowing water, and let its movement and music take some of the sorrow downstream.

I tied a fly onto my line, stepped into the creek, gave the living water some greeting, and started some casts, each one a whisper of hope, a prayer, as they always are. On one of the first casts I was somewhat startled when a trout, a hefty one, smacked the fly in very shallow water. I soon brought it to my net, and thought, hmm, a bit of a freak, living in that spot. But within minutes another trout, and then another, and another. The little stream was flush with trout, many of the them good-sized, pressing themselves against the bottom in swift current just a few inches deep. I'd never seen anything quite like it.

I’ve fished a lot of streams in various parts of the world, and considering both the size and the quantity of these trout, in such minimal water, I'm quite sure it ranks as the highest ratio of trout biomass found/volume of water fished that I've ever experienced. If I may dive into that word, the fishing was miraculous. In just a couple of hours I landed 20 brown trout, none of them small, and my creel was bulging with my limit of keepers. I started back to the car, a bit in awe.

I had felt Maria's presence in the interaction with Trish the day before, and I felt it again on this creek. It was as if my amends with that first trout, to honor and help keep sacred the day we'd gathered to remember her, was now somehow being rewarded, with abundance. To be clear, the purpose of an amends isn't in expectation of something in return; its sole purpose is to clean up our side of a messy street, and learn to do things a bit better next time. That said, good consequences sometimes flow from an amends, such as the healing of a relationship, even if such an outcome is not the goal.

Of course, it might all be nothing, this felt connection with Maria - merely mundane coincidence rather than more meaningful synchronicity. But pretty much all any of us have in this world are stories. To a large degree, we create the world each morning when we get up (or at least after the first cup of coffee!), assembled from the stories we tell ourselves about it. And so Maria was present with Trish and me, and somehow involved in this spectacular morning of fishing, because I chose to believe it - or at least, to allow its possibility. Wonder can't pass through a closed door.

Whether this connection is 'factually' true or not, matters little. Believing it helps keep the world alive, even as we individuals pass through it, coming and going.

Today, November 2, is the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, Dia de Muertos, and I will be using the occasion to deepen my connections with other dearly departeds - connections I once thought were lost, but that I now understand - and choose to believe - were merely transformed.

As for this special water, as is the way of trout fishermen, I'm not giving up its name. But you can know it by the name I'll use for it from now on: Maria Creek.

113 ~ Life lived through moussaka (or, ‘From moussaka to Oaxaca’)

A Bird in the Bush