Trout Therapy

It wasn’t going well. My wife was worried and so was I. We arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where I would begin teaching at the university come fall, in late summer of 1966, and things had headed south almost from the start. The only affordable house we could find was on a one-way street that seemed to serve as a racetrack for every hot-rodder in town. There was no sidewalk in front, and the house itself sat perched like a shipwreck on a slight rise overlooking a bend in the speedway below. No sense of neighborhood assuaged us, no feel of community: just other small frame houses isolated like our own at intervals along the street. We had three small children and were reluctant even to let them venture into their own front yard (vestigial, grassless, steeply sloping) for fear of all the fast-moving traffic roaring by, mere feet and inches away.

And that was just the house. The town was no love song either: pale, washed out, nondescript, Eugene sat flat and listless in the middle of the sprawling Willamette Valley, with the less-than-impressive Willamette River gurgling through. From the remove of forty-plus years I can’t even remember what its central business district looked like. That’s how weak an impression it made on me. Eugene was like the first draft of a town before the necessary improvements have been made.

As for the university, it was physically attractive, but it seemed wanting in energy. I remember lots of pretty white buildings and a new football stadium that appeared to have been built on the cheap. The students were nice enough, in a diffident, wake-me-when-it’s-over way. My classes were small and well attended, the workload wasn’t onerous, and my faculty colleagues for the most part seemed all right. Overall, though, there just seemed to be a pall hanging over the place, as if everyone—faculty, students, administration, even the janitorial staff and the campus cops—was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course this might have had something to do with the general national unease stemming from the slowly accelerating war in Vietnam, but it felt more local than that, more endemic, as if the war were only a small part of it.

Whatever the cause, though, the tenor of life in Eugene, Oregon, in that fall of 1966 was so dismal that it had quickly begun to affect my health, both physical and mental. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I even passed out one evening while getting out of the bathtub, hitting my head on the lavatory on the way down and scaring the wits out of my wife. “Dear God,” she said as she helped me up off the bathroom floor, “what’s happening to us?” In a word we were miserable. It had all begun to seem like a horrible mistake. How had I managed to drag myself and my young family off to this wretched out-of-the-way corner of the country? What on earth were we doing there?

And then it started raining. Sometime in mid-October the sky grew overcast and the rain began to fall, quietly and steadily and without let-up. Had we known then how long it would be before we saw the sun again, we might have packed our bags on the spot. Day after day it rained, week after week, month after month. Rain became the norm. But nobody mentioned it. Apparently you weren’t supposed to notice. A hundred and fifty years earlier the Lewis and Clark expedition had almost foundered in Oregon rain at Fort Clatsop, just up the road. Now we were having our taste of it, and a situation that could not have gotten much worse did.

We had just come from two years in Iowa City, Iowa. They had been a glorious two years. Maybe that was part of the problem. Iowa City had been as bright and lively as Eugene was damp and disheartening. In Iowa City, as a graduate student at the famed...