Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Cast Your Frog On the Water

m 67 Cast Your Frog On the Water “How will I know?” Jonathan mumbles. He flops on his stomach in his sleeping bag, still sound asleep. I prop myself on an elbow and stare at him, waiting for another question to surface. It’s a black night, full of stars. The Big Dipper hangs handle-down behind Jonathan, drawing a question mark that seems to emerge from his head, as if he were a cartoon. “How will you know what?” I ask, thinking I might lure his subconscious into conversation. Damp air drifts past, carrying the smell of the silent lake, of tule marshes, of silvery fish moving along the gravel bottoms. “How will you know when your flight leaves? How will you know what classes to take?” Silence. I take another tack. “How will you know where fish are holding? How will you know when to set the hook?” We lie on stone that was fluid not too many thousands of years ago. The rocks around our campsite undulate and swirl like water, flow back into eddies, tear loose and pour into the ravine, crack, break, tumble into rough piles and ledges. “How will you know the meaning of life?” That’s a stab in the dark, but what’s to lose? Jonathan sleeps peacefully, curled in his sleeping bag with only a fan of blonde hair showing under the flannel, and I lie awake, my mind rummaging for an answer to a question I haven’t figured out. At the head of the cove where Jon and I are camped, water from the lake flows into a crack in the basalt and drains down a hole, 68 m Holdfast glugging and thumping like beer emptying from a bottle turned upside down. I don’t know where the water goes next, but there’s a good strong current going down that hole, pulling along underwater algae, carrying the round seeds of water lilies and a scattering of pine needles that drift from trees rimming the lake. The way I imagine it, the lake must flow into a lava tube and move steadily downward through a tunnel of rough broken stone—an underground stream pouring through darkness, bursting above ground, then diving back into the earth. I listen to the glug, glug of the draining lake and wonder what to say to my son in the morning. Check the flight departure display. Talk to your adviser. Your father would tell you to look for fish where the current touches still water. Set the hook as soon as you feel a tug; if you hesitate, it’s gone. A light wind picks up a corner of the tarp and lays it down again. I think I hear a sound like movement in a plastic bag. I chide myself for not hanging the food out of the reach of mice. I wonder if there are bears. The lake we’re camping on is clear and icy cold. When we floated over the main channel this evening, we looked down and saw the lake bottom as clearly as if we were looking through winter air. The water held great green cumulus clouds of algae and, where the current was stronger, cirrus nimbus and green horsetail clouds. On top of the underwater sky floated a reflection of the sky above— layers of truth, and among them swam the brook trout, as long as the distance from my fingertips to my elbow and bigger around than I could span with two hands. Their slightest movements sent light rays darting against the channel floor. When I looked away, the trout disappeared, leaving only their shadows. It was tough fishing, with the water this clear. Jonathan cast a speckled-wing dun again and again into the gathering darkness. m Cast Your Frog on the Water m 69 When you’re floating on water in the dark, you realize with a certain uneasiness that you have to take a lot of things on faith, but how is that different from the day, after all? I have boated on water so clear that for all I knew, there was no lake and the canoe floated suspended in air. I have walked beside water so littered with dried leaves and broken twigs that it might have been the forest floor, but when I stepped onto the carpet of leaves, I sank into water over my head. I once...