https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/42ed47191efc103f6dca32be63b083ca.pdf 19d21d15a675b2cb273f1bd09cb407bf PDF Text Text Life Writing VOLUME 9 NUMBER 2 {JUNE 2012) Brown Trout, Pantheists and Me Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 Chad Hanson Keywords self-Reflection; travel; fly fishing; spirituality In the first sentence of A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean offers a line that explains the essence of his childhood. He writes, ‘There was no clear line between religion and fly fishing’. 1 first saw those words 21 years ago. At the time, I wasn’t sure what he meant, so this year I reread the story. I assumed that I missed themes and details. As it turns out, I missed a lot. I still have questions about the relationship between faith and fishing, but rereading Maclean forced me to think about prayer. Praying and casting share a likeness. They’re both shots into the invisible world beyond our vision or capacity to know. They both rely on an ability to hope. In the past two decades, I’ve cast more lines than prayers, and at times that made me feel a little uneasy. I felt like I fell from the fold. I learned to pray by whispering a series of requests. Some of them bordered on the menial. Some of them had to do with the outcome of particular college hockey tournaments. As an adult, I became less inclined to place demands on the creator of the universe. That meant I prayed less, and as I prayed less, I started spending more time in the library. I needed to find out if my actions were going to buy me a ticket to eternal damnation. I discovered that prayers are offered in a range of ways. They also come with a variety of intentions. I like Emerson on the subject. He wrote, ‘Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life*. In his mind, there are no requests. There is no admission of sins or transgressions. The act of prayer is like an acknowledgement or a meditation. When I ponder Ralph Waldo’s definition, it feels like permission to think of the time I spend appreciating life as a prayer. I also take comfort in the words of Mary Oliver. She is wiser than me, but she is equally confused, and that makes me feel good. She once wrote, ‘I don’t know what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention’. I’m usually kept from paying attention to anything that is not on my to-do list. Like everyone else, I’m bound up in our culture of speed, but each summer 1 take time to travel on foot ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/12/020221-08 n Routledge © 2012 Taylor a Francis http;//dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2012.667739 �Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], (Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 222 HANSON with a backpack. On the bank of a creek, with a fly rod in my hand, the world receives my attention. This year, I pencilled ‘Wind Rivers’ on to the calendar in August. The Winds are scenic and remote. They are a land of dark forests and lucid creeks. Native Americans camped in the foothills and hunted the slopes for 15,000 years. White settlers marvelled at the beauty of the peaks and the bountiful game—including the cutthroat trout. The ancestors of modern cutthroats found their way to the region through the tributaries of the Snake River. Until the twentieth century, they were the only trout to swim the waters of the Wind Rivers. That started to change in 1930, when a fishing guide by the name of Finis Mitchell started stocking fingerlings in lakes above 9,000 feet. Over the course of a decade, he packed more than two million trout into the range, in wooden buckets strapped to the backs of donkeys. He’s been described as the ‘Johnny Appleseed of Trout’. He wandered all over the mountains, planting fish in the water. Four generations of fly fishers are familiar with the work of Finis Mitchell. Some vrish he would have left the lakes and streams as he found them—solely occupied by cutthroat trout. Others are happy to catch brookies, browns and rainbows. Mitchell even stocked his favorite lakes with golden trout from California. I know people who make an annual pilgrimage to the Winds in search of golden trout. But the jury is split. For every fly fisher that would have thanked him for filling the waters with a variety of species, there are others who shrug their shoulders and wish the ecosystem looked the way it did before he stocked non-native fish. When a discussion of Mitchell’s work comes up in Wyoming, there are questions about his motivation. Some are quick to point out that he made his living as a guide. To Mitchell, more fish in the lakes meant happier clients and therefore more bookings and higher profits for his business. It is easy to imagine how money might have moved him to sow the seeds of new trout populations, and I am typically satisfied to use greed to explain behavior, but not in the case of Finis Mitchell. In 1999, the University of Utah published a guidebook that he wrote entitled Wind River Trails. It’s not a regular guidebook. The editors collected Mitchell’s sketches and maps of routes through the mountains. Then they placed them in an order that corresponds to trailheads. That is a standard arrangement, but the book is distinctive because it begins with his autobiography, and it is unique because it’s sprinkled with poems. I have 20 guidebooks on the bookshelf in my office. None of them contain poems. In his verses, Mitchell reveals his purpose. When you read the poetry, you picture an evangelist, spreading the word as he spreads fish. He makes it plain that he felt moved to plant trout in the Wind Rivers, and then share them vrith every person he could enlist to tag along on fishing trips. In a poem titled ‘My Thoughts’, he says, ‘To enjoy life, we must help others do likewise’, and in a scrap of verse titled ‘My Pledge to Future Generations’, he sheds light on the �BROWN TROUT, PANTHEISTS AND ME 223 force that compelled him to stock the Winds with fish from the West coast, Germany and New England: Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 V/hile here on earth I shah endeavor with all my ability and steadfast efforts to preserve and add to our wilderness, so all who follow in my footsteps might have the same opportunity to use and enjoy it as I have. I understand Mitchell’s desire to protect the natural world. I feel the same sense of responsibility that inspired him, and I also share his enthusiasm for wild places. My only question has to do with our capacity to ‘add to our wilderness’. On the way to the Wind Rivers, Highway 23 weaves through the Sweetwater Rocks, a region of granite uprisings. The planet pushed mountainous stones up out of the high prairie, and then the wind sculpted them into monoliths. The scenery makes it tough to concentrate on the road or my steering wheel. After a quick stop in Lander, I jump back into my wagon and point it toward the trailhead. There are no paved thoroughfares or passes over the range, so a trip to the Winds involves driving on gravel streets. I roll over the crest of a hill and come upon a group of antelope. A buck and three lady admirers eat grass on the shoulder. Pronghorn often graze between the fences that line roads. Cows eat the plants on the lee side of the barbed wire, but in the ditches where the cows can’t go, the vegetation flourishes. I startle the animals. The buck raises his head when he hears the car. He stands like a silhouette for a second, and then he bolts, smashing into the fence on the roadside. In the moment that it takes to pass the antelope, I watch the buck crash into the fence another time, with the females nervously milling around in the bottom of the ditch. Pronghorn antelope can’t jump. I shouldn’t say that. They could jump. It’s just that they don’t. Or they won’t. It never occurs to them to use their legs to lift them over anything. Pronghorn evolved on the prairies and basins, in between the ranges of the Rocky Mountain states. For half a million years they had no reason to think about leaping. There were bears and lions to outrun in foot races, but there were no obstacles. No logs or sticks of any size. No rocks that they could not avoid by turning to the left or right. White people changed the formula. We fenced the West. By the end of a century, pronghorn faced barriers that stretched before them to the horizon. Our history has been tough on their migratory patterns. If you look closely at pronghorn in states like Wyoming, you will notice the hair on their backs is teased up and the skin is often scarred. They spend too much time scraping through horizontal layers of barbed wire. It’s ironic that we refer to fences, houses and outbuildings as ‘improvements’. Antelope don’t likely see the fencing of the prairie as an improvement. Our actions are motivated by self-regard. We often build and change and destroy without thinking of the consequence. That is a new way of relating to the planet, however. We have a longer history of pantheistic thoughtfulness. In the �Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 224 HANSON second century BC, Marcus Aurelius said, ‘Everything is interv/oven’, and he went on to add, ‘The web is holy’. I am not sure that Finis Mitchell thought about the degree to which everything is interwoven, but I know that he would have agreed with Marcus Aurelius on one thing—the web is holy. I ease the wagon to a stop at the trailhead. I spend a minute stuffing food and clothes into my pack. Before I step on to the trail, I spread my topographic map over the hood of the Subaru. I haven’t hiked here in the past, so I try to memorize the route before I have to wonder where I’m going in the vrilderness. I start on a trail that leads into the north, along the bank of New Fork Creek. I plan to follow the path up to 10,000 feet, cross three ridges, pass by the south side of the Lozier Ponds and reach my destination on the shores of Elbow Lake, resting below Sky Pilot Ridge. I plan to take two days to reach the end and two days to hike back. That leaves a day to fly fish and meander through the rock and ice. Hiking down the bank of the New Fork, I am reminded of a phrase used by the Russian writer Gogol. He described the world as a ‘surging immensity’. Water rushes beside the trail. The green ghost-backs of trout slip in between boulders. Nuthatches chirp in the pine trees, and a flock of turkey vultures circles overhead—snow-covered peaks in the distance. Three miles from the parking lot, the path leaves the shore of the creek and switchbacks up a ridge between Dome Peak and Double Top Mountain. I arrive at the Lozier Ponds in the light of dusk. I’m exhausted. I intended to fish today, but my eagerness waned as I struggled up the final climb. Mosquitoes attack every patch of skin I’ve left exposed. All I can think about is setting up my tent. In wilderness areas, the Forest Service insists that you leave 100 feet of ground between your shelter and a body of water. I’ve always obeyed the rule. You never know when a flood could rise up and steal you from the bank of a river. That is not the only reason to comply, though. Animals come to drink in the evening. If they see people on shore they shy away, and they need the water. Behind the walls of the tent I take time to eat a sandwich, but I am not tired enough to go to sleep. In what remains of the alpenglow above the peaks off to the west, I decide to stroll through the ponds of the Lozier valley. I walk through a stand of willow bushes to the north. I pass between ponds on a strip of land, and from my map I learn that I am closing in on the last of the pools. Then I step through a row of branches and I’m greeted by an acre of water. A bull moose wanders out of the willow shrubs on the bank to my left. I sink into the grass and hold my body motionless. Moose are keen when it comes to detecting movement. The bull walks knee-deep into the pool. He turns back toward the shore and nibbles on the branch of a willow. He makes a puffing sound through his nostrils. He swings his rack toward the water, and then back to the shrubbery. I can’t take my eyes off of the moose. I feel like I’m getting a gift—a chance to watch a beast, four times bigger than me, caught in the moment on the bank of a spring pond. Hiding in the wings, I am reminded that I am not the center of the universe. I begin to doubt the universe has a center. If it does, I think it might exist in the heart of this animal or maybe in the sand and gravel underneath his feet. �Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 BROWN TROUT, PANTHEISTS AND ME 225 It’s getting dark, and I still have to hike back to the tent, so I stand up and start to v/alk away. After 10 paces, I look back and find the moose studying my retreat, but he is not concerned. When our eyes meet he goes back to chewing the willow. I sleep well next to the Lozier Ponds. In the morning, I’m up at sunrise and so are the mosquitoes. I boil water, make a cup of coffee and then enjoy it from behind the screen door of the tent. When the caffeine settles in my veins, I pack my gear and start down the trail to Elbow Lake. I make it to shore by mid-morning. Even before noon the light from the sun is palpable. I set up camp on the edge of a stand of white bark pine. The site offers a view of the lake and the ridge above. Geologists refer to the landform as a cirque. 70,000 years ago, glaciers crept over the region. They scraped the soil away and revealed granite from the Pre-Cambrian age. As I stake my tent to the ground, the 20-storey wall of stone pulls on my attention. My eyes drift away from the tent to linger on the rock that soars above my site. After I put the last stake in the ground, I assemble my fly rod and walk toward the bank, but before I make it to the water I stop to sit on a boulder. Years ago, I discovered that 2000 feet of granite have the effect of shrinking your ego to the size of a raisin. It’s easy to feel big strolling through the rooms of your own house. When you roll down the sidewalks of your town, the setting feels like it’s been catered to you, but a 20-storey cirque can bend your sense of where you fit in this world. In relation to the rock, my 40 years amount to the time it takes for a bubble to form and then pop on the surface of a creek. I used to test myself against the elements. I used to choose routes that were long and steep enough to challenge my strength and endurance. If I finished what I set out to achieve, I went home feeling accomplished. My approach is different, today. When I spend time at high elevation, beneath cliff walls made of granite, it is to remind myself that it doesn’t matter if I live up to expectations. We turn to dust. I spend half an hour letting my eyes wander over the wall of stone that foists the ridge up close to 13,000 feet. Six stories up and to the right a rock outcropping plays host to a row of pines that cling to life on the side of a cliff. The trees remind me of a conversation that took place between my wife and me outside Cooke City, Montana. Lynn and 1 sit beside the Lamar River. We’re staring at the peak they call The Thunderer. We pass a pair of binoculars between us. Four pelicans follow the river toward the west. Lynn sees a strip of pines higher than the tree line, and she wonders out loud how they grew up above the forest. I can’t resist an opportunity to speak. I slip into professor mode and hold forth on a lesson from the biology course I took as a sophomore. I explain how birds eat seeds, fly them up to ridges, poop them out and start new stands of trees. She lets me finish. Then without looking my direction, she says, ‘I thought God planted the trees on that ridge’. I take a quiet sip of coffee from our Thermos. Then I say, ‘Yeah. I suppose he did’. �Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 226 HANSON I stand up and walk toward the lake, but on my way, I turn to look at the boulder that had been serving as my perch. It’s a piece of granite from the wall above. Over the course of time, water seeps into the crevices of rocks. In the fall when the temperature drops, the water expands and presses on the fissures. That widens the crack and busts the stone. In other words, a cup of water pried this three-ton boulder from a cliff. Think about that, next time you fill a glass tumbler at your sink. Buddhists have long held that water is the Earth’s most powerful force—not volcanoes, not earthquakes, not killer whales—nothing flashy or dramatic. When I leave home for more than a few days, I store my acoustic guitar in its case along with a freshly dampened sponge. The sponge is made for this purpose. It has a hook on one end that allows it to dangle into the body of the instrument. When I return, the first strum is an octave higher than before. The water evaporates and the wood absorbs the liquid through the air. That forces the guitar to swell and stretch its strings. Loren Eisley wrote one of my favorite lines on this subject. He said, ‘If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water’. I walk toward the bank. Mosquitoes buzz over the lake, so I choose a fly to match their appearance. I loft a cast into the air. A light wind riffles the surface. I let the fly sit still for a moment. Then I jiggle the line to make the fake bug look alive. I watch the fly for ten more seconds. No takers. The lake is deeper to the left, so I walk the shore sending casts into the blue water. I haven’t seen any fish, so I assume it’s going to take something special to coax one up to take a fly. I sift through my tackle until I find a Stimulator, an oversized orange tuft of fur with a hook on the inside. It hasn’t been used lately. I ruffle my fingers through the hackle to spruce it up and give it life. While I fiddle with the fly, I notice a piece of plastic on the ground. It is a leader bag. The retail sticker on the outside says, ‘Three Pack!’ I catch myself whispering, ‘What the hell?’ I wonder what kind of person hikes to a spot like this one—marches two days away from anything— only to junk the place up with reminders of our throw-away society. It is tough to imagine. Chet Raymo suggested that Americans are autistic when it comes to our relationship with the land. He claims that we are incapable of making a genuine connection to the world, which is odd for a nation that declares itself to be Christian, and thus loving in every direction. In his book When God is Cone, Everything is Holy, Raymo recounts our long-running relationship with our environment. He explains that we’ve been at odds with nature for most of our history. Plagues wiped us out. Droughts starved children, wild animals chased us and fires burned entire villages. Nature used to make us feel afraid. Thus, people harbor a deep-rooted sense of anger. Fear, hate and disrespect are a nuclear family. They live in an apartment in the basement of our temperaments. I tuck the plastic bag into the pocket of my shorts. I figure it won’t kill me to carry it off the mountain. I keep casting. Then the wind picks up. The breeze makes it difficult to fling the fly, but I continue anyhow. I watch the lake like a sailor. Ripples on the surface let me locate the next gust and when I see a break I take a cast. I’m able to send the Stimulator 40 feet into the air, past a drop-off into deep water. �Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 BROWN TROUT, PANTHEISTS AND ME 227 The waves begin to toss the fly. I can barely see the bug, bobbing in between whitecaps. With the fly still 30 feet from shore, I lose sight of it completely. I lift the rod to bring my line up into view—and there’s a splash. Then my rod bends as a trout makes a run toward the depths. The fish’s attempt to shake the fly takes him down into the water, but the line keeps him from running away. He swims to the right, and I hike along shore to match his pace, reeling and easing him toward the bank. At this point, the trout’s identity is still a mystery. By now a rainbow would have jumped twice—shaking and tossing its head. I think to myself. It’s a golden trout. I’ve never seen one in person. I have photographs and paintings of them, but I haven’t seen one in the flesh. The fish has more energy than he should. It takes longer than I expect to lure him into the shallows. I take up line, but then he pulls it back with charges toward the center of the lake. Two more minutes and I pull him in past the drop­ off, into water less than three feet deep. I see the fish against the bottom. His shape, color and markings are familiar. It is a German brown. He’s beautiful. 1 step into the lake. As the water laps onto my knees I reach down, grab the fish, and raise him up so I can pull the hook out of his mouth. He isn’t gold, but I don’t care. His belly is awash in copper. Orange spots cover his sides. I do not hold the trout for too long, but in the moment before I release him back into the lake, the situation strikes me as a miracle. I am aware that there is no mystery in the daily operation of a fish. We know where they came from. We know the purpose of every cell in an animal’s body. In other words, we know how a trout works, but we don’t know the answers to all of the questions. In particular, we don’t have answers to the pesky little question, ‘Why?’ I ask myself. Why this fish? Why this mountain? Why are we here, together, in this corner of the otherwise barren cosmos? Like ours, trout’s bodies are made of water. As I slip the fish beneath a wave, it occurs to me that I am pouring water back into water. The trout swims across the shallow shelf extending out into the lake. I watch him while he shrinks away—a band of fog—a pack of molecules that agreed to take the shape of a brown trout. I sit on a boulder near the bank. I am not through casting, but the fish gave me an occasion to contemplate. The Bible paints a picture of the afterlife: pearly gates, streets made of gold, angels on high, etc. I know people who spend hours trying to imagine the details. I cannot think along those lines. Most of the time there is too much in front of me to try to comprehend. My views lean toward those of Thoreau, who wrote, ‘Give me one world at a time, please’. For my part, I would shrink the request further. I say, ‘One trout at a time’. Giving a fish my reverence might be the best I can do in the way of prayer. References Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance and Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1993. �228 HANSON Downloaded by [T&F Internal Users], [Anita Braun] at 13:15 03 May 2012 Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature. New York: Vintage Books, 1959. Gogol, Nikolai. Dead Souls. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through it and Other Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Oliver, Mary. The House of Light. New York: Beacon Press, 1990. Richardson, Robert. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. � Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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Title A name given to the resource Brown Trout, Pantheists, and Me Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"><a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2012-05 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chad Hanson Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Chad Hanson Journal Publications, CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01_ChadHansonPapers_15 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Searchable PDF Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <em>Life Writing</em> is published by Taylor &amp; Francis, LLC