Anglers' Ball

The 2008 Robert Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award 2nd Place Story

Maximilian Werner

Mark Yuhina

For Metcalf

When my children were in the first water of the womb, my wife Kim and I would periodically eavesdrop on them with the ultrasound. I remember the tiny sprigs that would become hands and feet, the cartoonish skulls, the sea-horse-shaped bodies. And in the midst of it all was a crisp dash of blinking light, the electrical beating of their fierce and infinitesimal hearts. This flash of light pulses deep within living things, and so even when death finally alights it must insinuate itself, like a thief picking its way into the locked rooms of the body, until finally it reaches the last place, which, though diminutive, contains just enough light to write a letter by, enough to lead us out of the now darkened house and along the moonless lakeshore. My own death is calling to me, but the sounds of the river fill my ears so that I cannot hear it.

Last summer I invited death to go fishing on the Weber River. On the way there we listened to Morning Edition on NPR. The stories were sadly familiar: A suicide bomber killed himself and 40 other men, women and children in a market in Baghdad; two American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb that had been stuffed into the chest of a dead dog; the body of a missing college girl was found inside her car in a river near her home town.

“That’s a fine trout river,” death says. “World class.” Then he takes a bite of muffin and chases it with a gulp of coffee. On this particular morning, northbound on Interstate 15, death is visiting my friend Jeff Metcalf, feeling him out, trying to read his light level: Too much light, death will hit the road; too little is an invitation to lay out the bedroll. I turn off the radio.

“Had your fill?” Metcalf asks. I could see barn swallows feeding above the apple orchards.

“My fill?”

Jeff nods and offers me a Thermos top of coffee. “Yeah,” he says, his thick beard hiding his mouth. I shoot the coffee and then hand back the top.

“Will things change if I say I have?”

When we get to the river, I turn onto a tractor road and park above the water. “Damn,” I say. “Flows are way down.”

Metcalf leans over and looks out the window. “It does look low. Maybe 60 cfs?”

I open the door, step out and stretch. “Something like that. Lower than I’ve ever seen it.” Although I’m soon busy rigging up, I’m still mindful of Metcalf. I note the six-foot, three-weight Winston; the oversized duffel bags whose contents to this day remain a mystery; and at the end of it all, a squiggly, three-foot spike of line that resembles a pig’s tail tied with a single fly.

“What do you have in there?” I ask as Metcalf rummages through the back of his vest.

“What I have in there, Maxee boy, is lunch. Take this,” he says, tossing me what must be just under a pound of sandwich expertly wrapped in tin foil.

“I can tell this ain’t P, B and J.”

Metcalf looks at me hard, as if I have committed a sacrilege. Then I smile and that does the trick. “Ohhhhoooo, no, no, no, no, my brother,” he says, holding aloft his sandwich. “This is pesto, and Parma prosciutto, melted Parmesan and sautéed peppers on toasted panini with a drizzle of 100-year-old balsamic vinegar.” He says all this as if it were an Italian melody, as if he tasted the words, their alternately sweet and salty music. I drop the sandwich into the back of my vest. I say Thank you but I’m thinking How can this be, Metcalf? How can you be so goddamn beautiful and alive and still be dying before my very eyes?
We walk above the river, careful to avoid a remnant braid of barbed wire that weaves in and out of the tall yellow grass. I need some contrast so I look down through the vegetation and glimpse the sun on the Weber. In the low light of morning, the water appears milky and slightly golden. For a moment I am awash in happiness. I debate whether to say anything to Metcalf. Somehow it seems callous to remind him of how beautiful the world is now that he is preparing to leave it. I decide to merely point to the river and say “Look.”

When Metcalf doesn’t respond, I figure he has stopped to admire the golden water. “I knew you’d like…” I say, turning back. But Metcalf is not there. I scan the river and see him through the trees, fishing the milky strand of water. He looks up at me and I wave: “You’re way ahead of me, man.” He smiles and puts his left hand to his ear. I shake my head and wave nothing. Metcalf nods and gets back to work. Watching him down there with that six-foot rod, working maybe 10 feet of water, his body leaning toward the river with each cast, head slightly tilted, as if he were both looking and listening: I realized how intimate fly-fishing can be, how immediate and near. And how often times the farther I cast, the farther away I get from myself and from the intensity of the moment.

That’s the trouble with moments: there are only so many of them. I also sometimes find that those moments already lived are still alive, or would like to be. And that is why we experience the passage of time. Snow can fall on a mountain stream and evoke a feeling whose age cannot be known. This is one difference between memory and nostalgia. Nostalgia is generally painful because it is often without a precise referent. It is like autumnal air and autumnal light. Wind blowing dry red leaves into the streets. Which is why I feel grateful when I reach that place where the Weber narrows and slows along its southern bank. There I remember the exhilaration of catching a big rising brown some 15 summers ago. Perhaps death is light receding, and the past is a faint glow that travels however far and lights the present moment. This is what I find each time I come to the Weber, or to any river with which I share a history.

As Metcalf works his line, I walk a few yards along the path and gaze up river. The trees on either side are thick with morning mist and birdsong. I must have walked this path 100 times, alone and with friends, many of whom are now gone. Not dead gone, but gone just the same. When I get to be as old as Metcalf, gone will assume new meanings, and most will be final. I ought to thank the river. I ought to thank Metcalf and my other older friends for showing me how life changes as it starts to wind down. I can’t see much of the future when I look at the friends my age. But with Metcalf, I see myself in 20 years. And so I prepare and I plan. It is a strange day. The sky is starting to cloud up and I can’t shake the idea that whatever animates Metcalf is slowly leaving him. A few caddisflies appear above the water. One alights on my thumb, crawls to my wrist and then flies away. One summer evening I witnessed a full-fledged hatch, the likes of which I have not seen since. My friends Tae and Nole and I had fished until near dark and were walking off the river when it began. Thousands of caddisflies filled the river corridor and rose some 20 feet into the air before they began to dissipate. They sheltered in my cuffs and crawled between the seam of my shirtfront. I had a caddis in each nostril.

“Better close your mouths,” Tae said, laughing. Or open them, I thought, fantasizing that these were all the words I had ever spoken coming back to me. I remember looking down at the river and seeing the rolling silver and slashing fins of frenzied fish as they gorged themselves. It didn’t even occur to me to fish. Instead I stood there, entranced by the primordial spectacle of killing and eating.

Metcalf had since reeled in. “How did it go down there,” I ask him, extending a hand to help him step out of the river. He waves me off, kicks his toe into the bank, grabs a handful of grass and hoists himself up. We make our way up river to a long run that has produced some big browns over the years. When we get there I’m tempted to tell him how I fish the hole, but I catch myself because I know he sees everything I do and more.

Maximilian Werner is a writer who lives in Salt Lake City.