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The Conception
- University of Wisconsin Press
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38 The Con cep tion The boy could smell the pines be fore he saw them. Or he thought he could. Cramped in the back seat between the sweat ing thighs of his older broth ers, he caught only glimpses of the dark jagged line ris ing out of the miles of plain still ahead of them—said noth ing of what had swelled for min utes in his chest. That smell, and what it meant. The Black Hills. Even a year ear lier, his first time, the scent had started some thing vi brat ing in side him be fore he had any idea of its source. When he could no longer con tain his ex cite ment, no one else in the packed, over heated car under stood. His teen age broth ers jabbed his ribs and mocked him. His father sim ply teased. “I can smell ’em from here, Scotty. Can’t you?” “Don’t kid him, Har old. You know how upset he can get.” “Look! Now I can even see through ’em. Just below that ridge, under the cloud cover. See it—the water? Those fat rain bows swim ming around in your fa vor ite pool?” Hoots of laugh ter and more jabs from his broth ers. A quick shush ing groan from his mother, look ing back ner vously into his eyes until she felt sure he wasn’t going to gouge or kick out at their legs. Thirty years later, when mem ory has sloughed away so much else, the fish er man can call up those mo ments—the smell of the pines, the acute an tic i pa tion—as if it were yes ter day. Ap proach ing a trout stream, he felt more than a trace of them still. He had never been poetic or phil o soph i cal enough to fathom why this should be so. Why his father and broth ers had seemed to look for ward to that an nual week of Au gust 39 The Conception va ca tion as much as he did, but never fished—just stared va cantly at his catches, inter ested only in their ap pear ance an hour later on the cabin’s din ner table. Why they’d teased him mer ci lessly the morn ing he’d blurted, “You’ve ruined the whole day!” after no one had wak ened him at dawn so he could spend every day light hour on the stream. Some how in a bi po lar uni verse the gods had or dained fixed sets of op po sites: man and woman, death and life, those who lived to fish and the far greater num ber who did not. He rarely went deeper into it than that. What he found him self doing in stead as he set tled into mid dle age was sim ply re mem ber, and in ev i ta bly with the re mem brance, com pare. It was not the kind of thing he had ever shared with an other fish er man, though he fished with many, nor to these com par i sons too did he at tach any great phil o soph i cal weight. His mind chan neled down a flow of em bed ded im ages that laced rocks and runs and shaded pools to gether across half a life time of fish ing North American trout streams, a kind of angler’s déjà vu. A month ear lier, wad ing round a bend on the San Juan, he’d stood trans fixed for sev eral mo ments try ing to re mem ber where . . . where . . . until it struck him. The rif fle on the We naha in east ern Ore gon where he’d caught a dozen good browns on an Elk Hair Cad dis the morn ing he’d sprained his ankle on the rocky trail down. A river of linked im ages, wid en ing with every year. Now more than three decades had passed since that first cra dling of a fly rod in his small hand. It had all begun back there, on Spear fish Creek. South Da kota. A ten-year-old boy thrilled be yond meas ure by this un con ceived world of pine woods and bur bling clear water only a few hours’ drive from his home on the other Da kota plain. That first rod was made for...