Skip to main content

Falling



Standing midstream, I peer down at the rocky bottom through strands of broken light, calculating my next step across the slick stones toward a deep run of swift water in the bend flowing around a gravel bar downstream. A six foot length of stranded log, at knee-height, is obstructing my path, so I choose my route accordingly, navigating my way through water barely shin-deep. 


The juxtaposition of light and shadow, early morning sun beaming through the trees, glinting off water and stone alike, and the dark pockets where current seams merge, gives a false sense of assuredness of a path laid out before me. Allowing my feet to feel their way as they carry me along, I take my eyes off the bottom for a moment and examine the edge of the run, just as I reach the head of the captured log. 


Before I have the chance to retrain my line of sight to the riverbed beneath my soles, my foot finds no hold on an oblong stone, sloped just enough to let my shoe slide the length of it, and both feet shoot out in the air in front of me, my back crashing on the rocks, and my head submerging enough beneath the wash of impact to fill my mouth and nose with water.


Somehow, my right heel comes to rest on the log, which makes my attempt to rise out of the riverbed a bit awkward. My fly rod, still gripped tight in my left hand, is not hurt, but the knuckles on that hand are not so fortunate. Neither is my backside after I bashed it on the rocks, nor was my right knee that I somehow scraped and had punctured a small hole in sometime between when my feet came out from under me, and it found its place propped on the waterlogged section of hemlock.


Back on my feet, I try to shake off the water as a dog would do, and I look back over my left shoulder to see I had a witness. The man, another angler with a wide-brim hat, looks upon me as if waiting for an encore. After about a ten-count, the man looks away,makes a short, obligatory cast, and treats the situation as if it didn't happen.


I take great care the rest of the way to the gravel bar. The water washes around the bend in front of me, offering to carry my double nymph rig along the bottom to search for the trout hiding in the deep, but I do not fish. Instead, I replay the spectacle I had created, consider the other angler's take on my pirouette and subsequent fall, and imagine what his story will sound like the first opportunity he has to tell it. 


My knee is bleeding, my leg and glute are bruised and sore. I choose to continue downstream to find a path worn in the bank to escape the river and find the paved road, so that I can get above him without our eyes ever having to meet. 





Comments

  1. Wounds to pride heal the slowest... Great post, Josh. My trail guide claims we haven't had a hike until I fall down three times.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Henry. I feel like I'm doing it wrong if I don't get a good baptism once in a while.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: The Promise: A Fly Angler's Long Journey Home By Paul A. Cañada

My favorite stories are the ones that give the author depth and serve as a window of insight into a writer's mind. Within the first few pages, it is important for me to develop a connection with the author, less I will quickly lose interest. I don't mean to sound like some type of literary elitist by any stretch– it's just me being honest.  Reading the first chapter in Paul Cañada's new book, The Promise , I felt that connection immediately. Paul tells of his childhood growing up in a military family, having a father in the Air Force, and the moves and re-adjustments that had to be made each time his father received new orders to relocate. I did not grow up in a military family, nor did my family move from place to place, but the relationship between Paul and his dad gripped me from the beginning. For me, this laid the groundwork for what was to come.  As his bio states, Paul Cañada is an award-winning writer and photographer with bylines in dozens of magazi

Love Letter

I wake this morning, to find your scent still lingering on my skin. With sleep in my eyes, I try to shake the heady buzz from the hours of being entwined with you the day before. I feel your residual energy flowing all around me. I step into the shower just to feel the rivulets of water wash over my body. You are all I can think about this morning, and I know that I will not find peace until I return to your side. I am completely, utterly, and desperately obsessed with you. When I look upon you, I am captivated. I am enamored by your beauty, by your natural sensuous movements. I follow every curve, trace all of your soft edges with my eyes, immerse myself in the rise and fall of your breath. You whisper mysteries known only to the deepest parts of my consciousness, and the narrative you speak to my heart is as old as the earth. I have watched you suffer mistreatment at the hands of so many before. You have been taken advantage of, used and abused, stripped of your purity. I

Hunting the Hard Way

Early morning sun catches my eye as it peeks over the horizon. It seems I am at odds with the world this morning. Already a crow has found my hideout in the tree branches, and pointed me out to his comrades as a spy for the human kind among the oaks. Only minutes later, the squirrel that emerged from the ball of dried leaves in a high fork betrays my location with a series of shrill barks, and I’m sure that every deer within twelve miles knows of my plan and will steer clear of this patch of woods from now until two hours after sunset this evening.  Once the alarm calls fade, all is quiet again, too quiet. It is always coldest after daylight, and I sit shivering, without so much as a wren or finch scratching around in the leaves, or hopping from branch to branch to entertain me. For two hours I sit with nothing but thoughts of a warm bed to occupy my time. Forlorn and desperate for some sort of action, I lower my bow to the ground and climb down from the tree. I need to do