A Glimpse, a Glow, and a Vision

I'm not even going to try and make apologies for the kookiness of what I'm thinking, or try to convince anyone that I'm not in fact crazy. If you know me, you already know that I think that what's normally considered normal in America is in fact fairly crazy, and that a little bit of craziness is fairly normal for me. So --

On my Katmai trip I had an experience of the kind that Lakota or Sioux people would probably call a vision. Left to myself, I would probably have just called it an "understanding." But then again, if I hadn't been reading about Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, I might not have called it anything -- I would have just experienced it, and would have been left, like before, with a deep unidentified desire to go back to Katmai and experience it again.

In fact, one aspect of my "vision" is that I realized that I have had very similar experiences before, experiences that I remember vividly but did not until now consider very significant. When I first went into Katmai backcountry in 2006, I stayed in a creek mouth camp where two days running my midday meal was interrupted by a family of four bears walking along the shore. The first time I retreated in a minor panic, honestly quite frightened. The second time, after inspecting their tracks and the chew marks on my wetsuit, I got out of their way much more calmly -- even, you might say, politely. The third time, it was me who walked up on their meal: the four of them, cubs almost as big and fat as their mother, were calmly sitting in a bunch of bushes and munching placidly on leaves, inspecting me carefully but without alarm as I walked around them at maybe 100 feet or less. They noticed me, I noticed them, and what I really, really should have noticed, was that it all seemed as normal as nodding to someone you pass on the sidewalk.

In my small gringo way I had entered their world, which is a natural, wild, undomesticated world as pregnant with meaning as it is beautiful to the senses. Though I didn't see the full meaning of it at the time, I knew it felt good. I fished the creek mouth in a sort of mild euphoria (admittedly, a common sensation while fishing) and paused in my casting when I saw a moose poke its nose out of the trees. Again, that animal (the moose) noticed this animal (myself) and vice versa, and the moose carefully waded across the creek mouth in front of me before folding back into the trees.


Now, without the vision, that just sounds like a guy doing some fishing and wildlife viewing. But no, really, it is more. The animals weren't special things I went out expressly to view, like someone going to a zoo or a gallery. It was more like they were my peers, and we were all cautiously sharing the area around the creek mouth for our own particular purposes. Necessarily, we were aware of each other. But I was not a big bad human with a gun or a noisy flying machine or a crowd of menacing cohorts; and they were not big scary beasts making me run indoors for cover. To be this way in this place for a few days was only a tiny glimpse of the larger, richer world of living together continuously in a sort of "natural culture" with animals like Lakota or other native Americans did in the precolombian world. But a glimpse it was.

In 2008 I paddled out into a zone miles across the lake from that creek, and I left in the evening because a storm was forecast to blow in the next day. This left me looking a little frantically for a campsite as the few mild (but disconcerting) summer hours of half-darkness came down on the lake. The second or third spot I checked turned out to be perfect: a broad, short peninsula, with a rocky headland at the end and nice long beaches on the East and West sides, plus a perfect grassy tent area smack in the middle. I am no religious man, not then nor now, but I remember feeling like there was some kind of "grace" involved in finding this perfect camp exactly when I needed it. Maybe that feeling was an initial clue that the ground was good for vision-seeking.

Little did I know how perfect a camp it would be! I started finding out the next day when I started hooking 34 inch rainbows a quarter mile out of camp. There was a secret pike spot nearby that felt similarly perfect. After waiting out the storm in the nice tree-sheltered tent spot, I spent a couple more blissful days before paddling across the lake, motivated mostly by a sense of duty to continue my trip as planned. Almost as soon as I set out, I felt that camp pulling at me to return. I got nine miles across the lake, looked at the situation, and paddled straight back. All ten nights of my trip were passed there. The words that occurred to me then were "at home." I felt at home at that spot, in a novel and powerful way.

And yes, the animals were there. There were new bear tracks on the beach every morning, all the same size and punctuated by plant-filled scat. I concluded that the bear was shy and at least for the moment, not particularly carnivorous. I took care to keep my food safe and watch out for him, but he remained invisible, walking well around my camp when I was either fishing or asleep. One afternoon I was somewhat shocked to find a half-eaten fish on the beach. Dang! Almost reflexively, I tossed it out into the deepest water I could reach from the beach, and moments later an eagle flew into the trees nearby and gave me a good, hard look. The "noticing" was happening again, and certainly not for the first time on this trip: I had seen the resident eagles every day, and I'm pretty sure they got a half-filleted fish or two from me by diving into the relatively shallow water where I tossed them. Sometimes when I was fighting a nice fish up to the side of the kayak, I'd notice them circling close or settling into a tree, noticing me. Wanting my fish. Probably not taking it personally when they didn't get it -- though the one whose fish I stole must have been pissed off at some eagle-ish level.

I consider that ten-day chunk as more of a glow than just a glimpse.

On this most recent trip, the glow cleared to sharpness at my American Creek camp, a place I have already mentioned in a fishy blog. Wolves howled and left prints all around my camp, and the eagles were ever-present there, "noticing" both me and the ospreys, and regularly stealing fish from the latter. And rather than try to describe my sharp vision in any detail -- probably an impossible undertaking -- I want to focus on the eagles and how they became a point of contact between my environment in camp and my readings in Lame Deer. The significance I have been hinting at is what Lame Deer thought of as "symbolic" significance, and his text has a nifty riff on the eagle as a symbol of American nationalism. He points out that an eagle represents powerful things like freedom, and grace, and shrewdness and fierceness -- but that somehow white Americans, carrying pictures of eagles around on their money and trotting effigies of eagles out on national holidays, are not really sensing that meaning. To contemporary whites, the eagle is there, and we know it is associated with our nationalism; but its significance ends there. The richer, stronger meaning of the eagle is absent.

To me, in my hammock camp surrounded by eagles and wolves, the meaning was present. Very present. I felt it when I woke up in the morning and when I went to sleep at night, and to some degree I acted it out when walked upstream into wild country at night, after all the jet boaters had disappeared and left the wilderness intact. The wind blew hard over my head, and the current was very very strong on my legs as I crossed the creek in areas where I probably shouldn't have done, and deep parts of my brain clicked and flashed when I touched a beautiful wild fish and slipped it back into the water while an eagle circled overhead.

I was at American creek smack in the middle of my 16 days in the bush, and camping, fishing and hiking or paddling were the "ordinary" activities that filled my days. But Lame Deer's narrative points out something very important about ordinariness:

"We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which, in our minds, are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us symbols that teach us the meaning of life. This is funny, because we don't even have a word for symbolism, yet we are all wrapped up in it. You have the word, but that is all."

As wondrous as that quote is, and as happy I am with my faltering efforts to write about my vision, the fact remains: these are just words. It will take many more of them, and more references to Lame Deer's philosophy, to keep trying to convey the Katmai "vision." Hopefully I'll get some of them down in this blog, or somewhere -- and hopefully covering the thing with a bunch of words won't do too much violence to it! But actually, I think the bigger risk is to kind of forget about it, and let it get snowed under by the prosaic, sterile unmeaningfulness of my everyday life in California (sad but largely true, and it does no good to pretend otherwise). So I guess the right thing to do is keep writing. Though, if you can sort of "grok" these three photos of wolf tracks, bear trails, and tiny bugs on tinier flowers in the same way they appeared to my "clarified" mind on the trip, then none of these words really would have been required.

Katmai Skies

You cannot buy the sky; you cannot sell the sky; and it is very hard to fit it in a picture frame as well. Nonetheless, I do try, and this blog features some of my meager results.

The Alaskan summer sky is an immeasurably large, constantly changing canvas of clouds and color. Once your mind gets free of the punctuate and frenzied pace of perception we white men call "everyday consciousness," those skies start to seem like a living, acting entity, broadcast on the biggest and most beautiful screen on (or around) the planet.

Anyway, my first day at Brooks presented a classic calm evening sky with lots of moisture and a glowing sunbreak:


On the next day, and the rest of my pre-trip days, the sky got colder and started rubbing with increasing urgency on the earth in the process of what is called "An East Wind:"


When there's an Easter, Katmai Air flies into Brooks Lake instead of Naknek, which means there are shuttles on which me and my boat can hitch rides. Here waiting for a plane is Taylor, who is a fishing guide but nonetheless a good guy:

That day they were flying out a bunch of gear and a single Texan tourist, who watched me put my camping and fishing stuff into the boat and commented on my apparent self-contained program, "you've got the world by the tail there, don't you?" Yes my friend, that is the idea.

Day 1 of my lake journey presented the common scenario where a grey sky comes down close over a grey lake, with a thin layer of green earth between:


That kind of sky creates some really good fishing conditions, so I wasn't complaining. Though, after a couple of days of it I wasn't complaining about a good thorough clearup, either:




What, a movie of the sky? Sure, kind of. Here's the East Wind dogging my northeasterly trending route across Naknek Lake to Fure's cabin:



Fure's is a good place for skywatching, especially after the wind lays down a bit.



I had some really lovely skies at Grosvenor, too.


On the way back to the portage, it's another one of those grey days -- but here, you can see the mountains looming in the back:


OK, I'm going to indulge myself; here's the sky, and also the guy watching the sky.


Here the sky is talking to me, saying, "hey, guess what -- you get another big East wind for crossing the lake again!!" And I am replying by getting giggly and enjoying some wave-surfing as I make the generally southwesterly crossing in beam and tail-ish winds:




But much of the time the sky is like one of your oldest friends, who can sit there with you and feel just fine without making any chitchat.


It is quite possible that I'll be back under those Katmai skies come August, and at that point, there will even be night! Darkness! Stars, if you're lucky! Here in California you can see plenty of those when you get away from all the white men -- which I assure you, I am going to do before too many more days pass here . . . .

1000 Salami Sandwiches

Five lake trout dinners; four rainbow trout; two tasty char. Without that fine, sustaining meat for my fry pan, soaked as it is in omega-3 amino acids, I think my arms would have given up halfway through my 16 day backcountry sojourn. After a day spent paddling around Naknek lake in a minor gale, this is a pretty thing to see:


Even with all the fish in my diet, I was effectively starving. After a week my arms were visibly shrunken. Any mention of food in The New Yorker or The Best Short Stories of 2010 made me wince and cringe. Mercilessly, an article on Silvio Berlusconi, in addition to passing mention of pasta with clam sauce and lasagna and cake, noted that "the P.D.L. was bringing a thousand salami sandwiches to distribute." A thousand salami sandwiches!! I woke several times in the hammock on that blustery night with visions of salami sandwiches blowing in wind like autumn leaves, salami sandwiches lined up like char in a riffle, salami sandwiches heaped in a mound under a belching grizzly bear. You just guess what I had for a late night snack here on my first full day back in California.

Naturally, most of my fish, which this year were more notable in number than size, swam back unfilleted. At Brooks, I worked between the hordes of mustachioed fly flingers (note to self: do not visit again on the opener, when there are more humans than bears; it is much more fun to dodge bears than Simms-clad Anchorage types) and got my first official trout on a stimmy shown downstream:


And I got reacquainted with my old pal closer to the outlet that likes black leeches:

And a chunky feller that just about pulled my arm off when he grabbed a customized sculpin-swinging rig (I confess, I enjoyed scandalizing all the purist Anchorage-ites by fishing an indicator rig with plenty weight. Fuck those little Thunder Creek patterns, you goobers!).


By the way, many of the goobers were actually good guys and fun to hang out with in camp.



On a day off from the river mayhem, I hitched rides from the lodge staff up to Brooks Lake and harvested a small laker that seemed perfectly made to lay on this log and break in my new Swiss Army knife:


Finally launched out on the lake, I start the real carnage. A laker bleeds out:


Provides more work for my new knife (thanks again, Pavel!)


And then gets back-burnered to dinner by a very lunchable trout:


After three days of beautiful cloudy but relatively calm weather, a big East wind (to Katmai what the Norte is to the Sea of Cortez) comes up and makes my crossing to Fure's cabin a decidedly high-calorie event. Fortunately, one calm lee on the lake provides some protein for me:



At Grosvenor, I tried not to waste calories fishing below the surface film -- not when crease flies looked good to dollies:


And lakers were taking even dorado-grade poppers:


Photo credits for that go to Ray at Grosvenor Lodge, who is a great guy and a guide who doesn't suck:


Filming on my own, I tried to get a topwater hookup into a movie, but something always went wrong (I erased the film where the crease fly uproots a small tree on backcast and launches it into the current). In this clip, I miss a take at :30, flip the fly back out, and unbutton another take at :45!

In American Creek, dolly varden/char were as abundant as 1000 salami sandwiches. Almost all of them had a really distinctive yellow-lip coloring that I'm not sure I have seen elsewhere:


And a few had some really beautiful red coloring (the flesh of the river char was dark red too, and insanely delicious, while the lake char had bright orange flesh that was insanely delicious).


Most probably, all those douchey "sports" flying into American Creek were there for the rainbows, which came a bit thin at a rate of one per dozen char. Anywhere I have been in Alaska that lacked rainbows also lacked fishing pressure and was rich in solitude, and I think I may have reached the point where I'll just avoid the "premier game fish" on my trips. For me, it is much more fun to catch species that don't exist here in CA, especially when they have big nasty teeth and extremely aggressive attitudes:


I mean, did you ever see a trout do this to a fly?


That is the remains of 50% of my Dahlberg Diver supply, and in the end the other 50% got the hook clipped off when I was trying to release another chunker pike with hemostats. No matter; I kept fishing the hookless fly for a happy half-hour, amazed at how long they'd hang on to the thing before letting go. If you see anything like this while swimming in any lake, I recommend exiting the water immediately:




Oh and leave the red and white speedo at home. Armed with a Diver, a black leech, and a red & white spoon to find where they're holding, I am transformed into my alter ego named Dances with Pike.


I'm a fly buyer not a fly tier, and I'm not above taking possession of a Thunder Creek fry pattern that some numbnuts left in a trout's mouth, dangling what appeared to 6 or 7x tippet (I mean, come on dude); also, I am an inheritor of flies in a small way. I'm not sure if this classic smoltish pattern came out my maternal grandfather's box or a box of flies that my father kept for a while, but I can confirm that twenty-first century rainbows find it perfectly acceptable:


And lakers like it fine too:


My battery indicator started to red-line when I got back over to Naknek Lake, but I still squandered power on the kind of two-footers that seemed to be my upper limit this year . . .


. . . so you can go ahead and accuse me of fish-taling when I say that on my 15th and last day on the lakes -- a day on which I explicitly went "trophy hunting" with my ugly-ass Jet Divers and Kwikfish plugs and spoons on braided line -- I finally got into not one but two of the classic Naknek bows that stretch out over 30 inches and start getting REAL deep and fat. I currently have no physical camera battery at all, and this is why: 1) hook 30+ fatty and discover that camera says "Cambie la batteria"; 2) remove battery from camera and stick it in armpit to try and warm it up for one more shot; 3) try to reinstate battery with shaking hands and angry trout at yakside, and lo! 4) Oh yeah, that's the battery jumping overboard and sinking into 40 feet of pure Katmai lake water!!

He he. I could only sit and laugh bitterly at this idiot named Litters Lakes with Lithium. Got another giant that same day trolling a spoon directly tied to 40 pound braided line, and if you ever get jaded with spin fishing and need a quick reminder that you are alive, just get a feel for a healthy bow on that kind of inflexible tackle. It's like they are hitting you on the elbow and shoulder with a wooden bat. When I paddled out the next day, facing 10 miles of headwind after over-paddling during my trophy hunt on the heels of a very strenuous East wind crossing the previous day (read, tired as fuck and very apt to be grumpy), ANOTHER 30+ chunker came on the spoon/braided line rig for my Bay of Islands farewell. Because there was no way I was going to pull in another one of those beasts and still have juice in my arms for the paddle back to Brooks. Where, needless to say, I got into a bunch of beautiful sockeyes and trout, including on mouse patterns, of which there will be no pictures due to La bateria cayo en las profundidades del lago. But you trust me, right?

That about exhausts my fishy pictures, but I think I've got a couple more blogs worth of landscapes and that kind of crap.

Back from Katmai

On such a refulgent summer morning in the Soquel Hills, it would have been hard, even if I wanted to be that way, to wish I was still in Alaska. I'm writing in my customary little morning coffee spot here surrounded by birds and breezes and beautiful things, much like it was in the Katmai wilderness in coffee spots like this:


There, of course, I shared my little coffee kitchens with eagles and ospreys and arctic terns and bears and wolves and bobcats and squirrels, most of whom were content to keep their distance when I was around. Needless to say I too would have ceded way if any brown bears had already been sitting on that mossy rock when I clambered down with my bear can and thermarest chair.


Around the corner from my bear-free, human-free Bay of Islands camp I saw a nice little bear family fishing, and then ran into a solitary brown at my pike spot.



This latter guy had a reached an all-too common semi-habituated attitude, in which seeing or hearing a human does not cause flight, but rather curiosity. He sat on his ass and watched me hook three pike from the kayak before wandering off, and kept me looking over my shoulder during a splendid session of Dahlberg-Divering from shore:



In a kind of irony, the closest I actually got to a non-finned wild animal (other than an arctic tern whose tale I may or may not tell later) was at the window at Fure's cabin. Last year I woke up one morning and momentarily stared eye-to-eye with a huge boar who immediately turned and ran for the trees. This year I was prepared with my camera by the bunk at all times, and so was able to get a video of this somewhat more casual customer:






At my American Creek camp there was no bear sign, but plenty of wolf sign, including howling each morning and some bone-chilling snarling (sorry for the cliche, but in fact that is exactly how it feels) near my hammock. I tried to film the haunting up-and-down tones they were making, but only got the breeze and closer-by sounds.




That swampy hammock camp, which I named "Puddle Camp" for the soupiness of the area where my feet had to go when exiting and entering the hammock, was at once the most wild and the most crowded camp of the whole trip. From about six in the evening to eight in the morning, roughly ten hours of light including super-prime fishing hours, the place was all mine -- a fast and powerful (barely crossable even in the best spots) clear creek full of wild rainbows and dolly varden, a place where wolf calls wake you up and Osprey TV keeps you entertained whenever you are not fishing yourself.

Truly, it was like watching a sports matchup to see how they would dive and get a fish, and before they could fly off, here come two bald eagles planing calmly out of their hiding places in the trees. Game on! Osprey drops fish and is joined by second osprey in harrying eagles; birds whirl and swoop, cries ring out over the sound of the river; but in the end, it seemed like the ospreys only ended up with one fish for each three they got. Eagles 2, Ospreys 1.



But around eight a. m. or so, here come the float planes buzzing in. Give it minute; yep, there's the hum of jet boat, and lo! three or four Simms-clad "sports" running by with a guide, racing the other boats up to the best spots. There were at least four such parties and possibly as many as six on the river each day I was there, and I'm sorry to say that the braids just next to my camp (the furthest I could paddle up against hard current) was a favorite spot. Bring on the earplugs! I'd never travel to Brooks Camp without ear plugs; but I did not expect to reach as far as American Creek and still have to shut out from my brain the insipid utterances of the kind of people who would hire somebody to show them how to swing a string leech. At one point I watched a sport hook a char and actually give a loud dog-whistle to summon over the guide to net it -- and the guide actually responded to that! Nature offers no spectacle more contemptible, moose turds inclusive.

Listen to me rant and complain. And it's not like I haven't seen it before; it was the same on the Agulukpak in 2007, and the Nonvianuk outlet in 2008, and it looks like it will be just the same at any trouty place in Alaska where a boat can be stashed and a plane can land. I told rangers at Brooks and Ray at Grosvenor Lodge that they should reduce the permits for people to do this stuff, but other than that all I have is valium and earplugs for the day hours, and patience to hold me through until all the naked apes fly back to their bunks.

That's when I can get back to world of experiences and symbols and sensations completely different from what we have created for ourselves with our motors and heated rooms and domesticated animals and fishing guides. This is the world described by Lame Deer in his narrative "Seeker of Visions" -- a text that made deep trails into my thinking during this trip, and which deserves a blog entry of its own. As do a few other things from the trip. If you like Katmai and can stand my writing style, stay tuned for some more discussion of a Katmai waterways fishing/paddling trip that I challenge anyone to top. After a half-dozen years of going there I think I have it clocked in pretty well, but my mind is open to any good suggestions.