The Drowned Spork

I went ahead and re-read a few of those pre-Alaska posts, and found a whole new value in them. You know what they were good for? They gave me an excuse to tell some old stories that I never got around to telling at the time. Like the story of the four bears at my Idavain camp, or the story of the dude in his bloodied shirt outside the Anchorage flea-bag hotel -- those were stories worth telling, right? I certainly enjoyed hearing them after having lived them (and then written them), though that may not be a strictly scientific test of their worth.

I don't have any New Zealand stories. Yet.

But here's an Alaskan story from this summer that I actually started composing right after it happened, and then never got around to telling. It is the story of The Drowned Spork. At the very time that these events were unfolding, they immediately reminded me of a story from a book of cool stories, "Shadows on the Koyukuk," by Sidney Huffington. Needless to say, there is a story behind that too -- this book was given to me by George Taylor, in Ewkok, AK, on the last day of my 165-mile Epic Solo Float Trip -- but the story behind the actual original story was simply that Sidney Huffington was a badass Alaskan outdoorsman who made these "Man vs. Wild" characters look like the clowns they really are.

And before I go on, I want to point out that I am a lesser man, less than both of those classes of men. I neither have been forced into great hardship, where I was forced by Fate to confront the world with great strength and discipline (Huffington), nor have I gone out and intentionally sought contrived hardships so that I could confront them with strength and spirit (Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild), or make them into a personal suicidal psychodrama (Timothy Treadwell of Grizzy Man), or make them into a low-brow, lucrative TV show (guy in Man vs. Wild or whatever the show is called). Far from that, what I do is go out into the wild to have as fine a time as possible given the scenario, which means carrying single-malt Scotch whisky in my backpack and listening to an mp3 player all day when paddling my kayak. I bring everything I can bring to enjoy myself, and take all precautions to come back alive so that I can pack up with more whiskey and Bach and get the hell out there again for more.


Given this, it may not surprise you to hear that the greatest actual misfortune that befell me on my last trip to Alaska occurred when I dropped my plastic spork into six feet of extremely cold lake water. Sure, a few days earlier I had a hungry-looking grizzly walk by 50 feet from my bubbling oatmeal breakfast, and had another bear follow me down a narrow track, and got caught briefly in some white-out fog while paddling all the way through an arctic night; but those were only close calls. This was the real thing: in an absent moment, I turned around awkwardly on the little granite shelf where I had just finished eating grilled lake trout, and knocked the spork clattering beyond reach, deep into the cold, clear water! Without that spork, I was going to have to eat with my bare hands! Oatmeal, pasta shells, couscous, all the staples of my outdoor diet (ramen, I can tackle with twig chopsticks) -- all without the assistance of a spork!!!

I tried a few times to hook the spork on a jig, and also to drag it up with the tip of a fly rod. Useless. Obviously, if I wanted that spork, I was going to have to go down there and get it with my grubby little opposable thumb, diving or swimming into water that was a scant few degrees above freezing, on a cloudy day just below the Arctic circle. Oh boy. They didn't teach me THIS one in Webelos.

Fortunately, I remembered what Sidney Huffington had done when his dogsled team had sent him crashing through actual frozen water, actually above the Arctic circle, creating a serious hypothermia emergency: he immediately built a huge fire, and while warming next to it, built another fire to keep him warm while he stood on the site of the previous fire and dried off his naked self and clothes. Well, hey! I already had a small fire going for my fish grilling, and all I needed to do was build it up into a huge blaze, and then I could stay warm in my birthday suit in the Alaskan wilderness, just like Sydney did!


To make a long story shorter, that is just what I did: after stoking the fire up to a big wide blaze that covered half of the little granite shelf on a little granite island, I stripped down, dove in, and retrieved the goddam spork. Indeed, the fire was hot enough to dry me off and keep my shivering frame from freezing while I put back on all the layers that were critical for getting through the day up there. But all the time, I was chucking and shaking my head, thinking the following:

Huffington stoked up his fires to save himself from certain death due to an unforeseeable accident in the middle of an icy wasteland; I did it so that I could more conveniently eat pesto-flavored couscous with extra virgin olive oil and toasted pine nuts.

Do you get it? Is that story gettable? Is it even a story? I am very grateful that nothing really serious even happened to me when I was camping alone out on Naknek Lake, where serious things can certainly happen. I'm also grateful that I can laugh at myself and my precious spork. I'm grateful that I ended up reading Huffington, and that lessons from that book helped me out in a sudden plastic-cutlery emergency. I guess I should also be grateful for the big old Google server where this written-down story will live for a while and relieve the pressure on my forgetful mind. It's one of the things blogging is good for!!

New Year, New Trick, New Zealand

In the week leading up to my Alaskan trip last summer this blog received a post per day, leaving no doubt for anyone actually reading that the blogger was excited about his trip. "I'm going fishing in Alaska! I have a PERFECT two-week plan!" It wasn't so much a need to shout this out to readers, but rather just a strong need to vent it -- the excitement was bubbling over and leaving accumulated gasses in all corners of my consciousness, bored to tears as it was with my normal daily life. Writing was a healthy distraction.

So why haven't I written a whisper about the two months of careful, engrossing planning for the upcoming trip to New Zealand? Certainly, I have been obsessing on this trip in the usual way. Trip planning may be my own particular geeky specialty, like entomology and "the fascination of what's difficult" can be for other fly fishing geeks. Taking GPS waypoints from Google Earth, trolling around on bulletin boards for tips, reading and re-reading available books and articles -- I do my homework when it comes to trip planning, and, far from treating it like a chore, I enjoy the hell out of it. The planning process stimulates the mind and the imagination. When the process is finished, the product is a thing of beauty: a logical plan for navigating the landscape (and waterscape) backed up with the right gear to get it done and the best possible information on tactics to help join fly to fish.

Needless to say, the satisfaction in executing such a plan is only exceeded by completely and totally changing it on the spur of the moment, should that be your whim once you are on the ground, and especially if you are the type of person disinclined to obey authorities (particularly your despotic self).

          untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell'd,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd;
Proud though in desolation; which could find
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

OK, that's a bit of a stretch, but if you have even the remotest opportunity to quote Byron before heading on any journey, you take it!

Anyway -- I'm going fishing in New Zealand! I have a PERFECT four-week plan!!!

Or to be honest, I think it is a good plan. The difference between New Zealand and Alaska or Patagonia for me, is that I'm a complete virgin. When I toss a six-weight line out on to the Hope River in about two weeks, it will be the first time I have fished a Kiwi stream. So, despite an avalanche of good information from friends, books, websites, videos, and kind strangers on bulletin boards, it is pretty much an unknown quantity. For this reason, The Plan is more likely than ever to be broken up and rearranged. Instead of going straight to the Hope/Hurunui area around Lewis Pass (though my bus ticket is already reserved), I may go to St. Arnaud and check out the Travers and Sabine rivers. Or, hell, I might even end up walking down the Hollyford first -- it's all the way at the other end of the island, but it is the easiest trek, and might do well for a warmup. What then if my 43-year old feet or knees or back start acting up at just the wrong time? Then I'm looking a whole different, non-"tramping" (read, backpacking) trip, and the rivers change to road-accessible names like the Clarence, the Mataura, the Grey.


Four weeks seemed to be about the right window for working out these kinds of questions. I may end up wishing I had more time, and/or wishing I had brought my portable sea kayak, or inflatable river kayak, or both. But I figure I need to get the lay of the land over there before making any really gigantic plans. It's important to find out first whether New Zealand is the right place for gigantic plans -- and if you have watched the hobbit movies, you suspect that the answer is yes. I know a few fly fishers who rave pretty hard about New Zealand. In Patagonia, I fished for sea-run browns with a Swedish kook who insisted that I HAD to go try New Zealand at some point. To Ole, New Zealand was mandatory for a traveling fly fisher. I have resisted it partly because I wonder if I am up to the technical challenge of fishing for notoriously spooky browns, and whether I have the patience to walk along sight-fishing and only making perhaps a dozen casts a day, always to visible fish. But a fly fisher reaches a threshold of age where patience and skill may be adequate, and beyond which, legs, lungs and back may soon be inadequate for the task . . . .

So with that in mind, I finally quit my full-time job and got the ticket for this trip. Several months ago I moved to a terrific apartment with cheap rent (helpful for taking long trips) and then over the past six weeks have unwound my full time technical writing work (essential for taking a long trip) with a certain share of anxiety and uncertainty, and so things have been busy. The next Friday coming up will be my last work day, and the Sunday following gets me on a plane that goes over the date line and lands two days later. What I actually see or do after that, what I actually catch or (likely enough) do not catch, will be the topic of some blogging from Down Under!