2 . . .

I'll come clean and attribute the attributed quote in my last blog to John Krakaeur -- I stole it from his book Into the Wild, which has a nifty quotation or two at the beginning of every chapter and lots of good references throughout. There are great tidbits from Thoreau and John Muir and all the other tree-hugging romanticist adventurers.

And were they also -- here's the word from a quotation that resonated in my mind -- monomaniacs? Considering my seven straight days of blogging about my two-week vacation, and also considering all the time and energy I have spent preparing for the trip and dreaming about it and planning for it, this unfamiliar word certainly hit with a sudden recognition. I think it's true: I have a minor problem with monomania. Were Thoreau and Muir nature monomaniacs? That would probably be unfair to say. But I'm free to say it about myself: I am a monomaniac.

This has occurred to me before, specifically in reference to fishing. Sometimes, I am fairly quaking with urges to fish that can only be quelled by actually going fishing. This effect is particularly pronounced just prior to any new or exciting fishing outing. It also gets exaggerated when the fishing seems finite, as when dusk is getting ready to fall on a very good caddis hatch, or when the peak of a good tidal current is starting to pass, or, most definitely, when I am thousands of miles away from home fishing for fish that you can't find at home (and by "at home," I mean within a 5-6 hour driving radius that covers the Sierra Nevada and the waters East and West of Redding, plus down as far as the Owens River).

Proof of Monomania is that I have made three previous visits to Brooks Camp, each of them four days or more, and I have never, ever, gone on the very popular bus trip out to the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. This time around, I may well do so. The ghost of Flakkarin the Wanderer is still wandering around my mind, stirring up fascination with volcanic landscapes. But no sooner do I say and imagine that than I feel something inside tugging at my mind's sleeve, saying "but dude, that could take a whole day away from being near the Brooks River. You might not even get a single sockeye on the line that day!" And yeah, honestly, something about that just seems wrong. When else am I going to have thousands of salmon swimming front of me, with hungry two-foot rainbows trailing? It's a fair question to ask when I'll be near a new volcanic landscape, too, and that might have worked wonders on me ten years or so ago when my monomania was mountains, not wetlands . . . .

Strangely enough, back in those days I had one or two epiphanies about that particular monomania, specifically when reading John Muir. He was alive to the whole picture: the storms, the hundred types of trees and plants, even the Douglas squirrels, all in addition to a sharp and intense awareness of the mountains themselves. I have a terrific book full of pictures of plants he pressed and saved from his travels through California and Alaska. I was reading the Alaska chapter this morning and marvelling at how open and alive that man's mind must have been. And meanwhile, he was an insane romantic, for whom the landscape was alive with meaning. About a glacier, he said, "the mills of God grind slowly. But they grind exceedingly fine."

What I generally think about glacial flour in the water is, "how are the fish ever going to see my fly?????"

One guy who very clearly was a monomaniac was Timothy Treadwell, star of Grizzly Man. The only question is whether he obsessed on the bears, or on his grand image of himself as the savior of bears. I do think that man was real good and crazy. Yet I do have some understanding of (I think) and respect for what he was up to out there on the Katmai coast. In fact, one quote that comes to my mind in regard to Timothy Treadwell is taken from a piece of great fiction, Naipaul's A Bend in the River:

A death like that makes us question everything. But we are men; regardless of the deaths around us we continue to be flesh and blood and mind, and we cannot stay with that questioning mood for long. When the mood went away I felt -- what deep down, as a live-loving man, I had never doubted -- that he had passed his time better than most of us.

I'm going nuts with my quoting today, aren't I? But the only way to climb is to stand on the shoulders of the giants. Naipaul was a great giant, as the first line of that novel (I can't resist another) proves: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." Good God I wish I could write like that.

However, the other quote I'd give in reference to Treadwell is far less romantic. It is the passage spoken by Herzog in the soundtrack where he basically says this: while Treadwell looked at the bears and saw kindred spirits, Herzog looked into their beady eyes and saw absolutely nothing except a wild creature with a half-bored interest in food. After watching hundreds of bears around Katmai, I agree with Herzog. And yet, that wildness, that blank and complete lack of kindred or caring between my human thoughts and feelings and the motivations that move the bear, or move the trout, or move the trees in the wind -- that is enough for me. I think I can build a powerful edifice of romantic and transcendental thinking/feeling on that alone.

Maybe I too am decieved. I'll make some inquiries and get back to you. Meanwhile, just two days separate me from departure to the place that stirs up all this monomania in the first place. Getting close!!!!!