The Beginning

First chapter of rough draft

GOOD TIMES AND CREATIVE TRUTHS

How it all started

 

            This is a story about some of the best memories of my life.  It is also a story about all the people who made this life possible.  Interestingly enough, it is more about them than it is about me.  To begin the story, however, we must take a look at a younger me and my misplaced habits.  To be frank, there wasn’t that much of a variance in my schedule.  Anytime I wasn’t busy slacking off at Big Springs Elementary school, (and later Yreka High School) or paying for said slacking by working on the ranch my family lived on, I could be found in one of two places.

            The first place I could be found was sitting on something in the little office room adjacent to my grandfather’s shop.  I say ‘something’ because I’m fairly certain I never had a chair, and if I did, it was usually some sort of tatty camp-chair … more often I think it was a milk crate or something similar to it.  The primary reason for my being there was my grandfather, who would sit in the big chair at the big desk in the little room and gently work on one of his many intricate projects.  He was excellent at carving leather, whether it was a purse for my mom or a wallet for my brother, or a new fly for the steelhead run in the fall; he created beauty with a patience that I will never be able to equal. 

            Now my grandfather, Neil, smoked a pipe.  The work ‘pipe’ in this day and age seems to have different meanings than it did fifty years ago, so I should say that his was simply a tobacco pipe, and the smoke it gave off was smooth and sweet.  It curled softly through the air and was more pleasant to the senses than any potpourri ever conceived.  So Neil would sit in the big chair and work, and I would sit and I would watch, and while I watched, Neil would talk.  Well, I say he ‘talked’… that isn’t really true.  What he did was tell stories, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed, he did it well.  He is one of those story-tellers with the ability to introduce his listeners to people they have never met; but when he is done speaking about them, anyone who is listening will feel as though they have known those people all their life.  It’s hard for me to describe those times now, because so much of it is purely sensory in my own mind.  I remember the curl of the smoke, the smell of wet leather, the epoxy glue that made the fly heads, the sporadic heat from an ancient heater in the winter, or the whine and hum of the swamp cooler in the summer.  And all the while, in his quiet Texas drawl, Neil would tell me about his life, and all the things he had done.  There were a thousand hunting trips for a score of different game animals with a dozen characters, (shady and unsullied), from Neil’s life.  There were the years he spent in college, and the years he spent working in the mills, and the twenty years he spent as a teacher.  Not to be forgotten were the years Neil was a falconer, so there were all his different birds, long gone to this world, but still alive in Neil’s mind, and because I listened I suppose they are alive in mine.

            I loved all these stories, I listened to him tell them with my ears well and truly open.  Neil has the ability to paint pictures in the mind, and in my mind there are any number of pristine canvases that have been tinted by his words.  My favorite stories, however, were the ones about the Klamath River … the stories of the whitewater canoe.  There were always a few pictures in the office … one of ‘Misty’, Neil’s red-tailed hawk, one of Neil’s favorite old dog … but the rest of those big pictures on the wall were alive with the image of a whitewater maelstrom, and looking very small amidst the raging water was a bright red boat; but the figure in that boat emanated absolute calm and control.  The figure was Neil. 

            I’m still not sure exactly how I became a whitewater canoe guide.  I think perhaps it was assumed from the moment I was born I would someday be a guide.  It would be nice to think so.

            Now, thanks in no small part to those pictures and of course, those stories, years before I ever made it onto the water, when I just barely had a grasp of which end of the paddle to hang on to, Neil was already a giant in my eyes.  He was one of the ‘great ones’: a river-god in mortal guise.  How could I have ever thought otherwise?  Everyone in my family talked about Neil and his prowess on the water, they all said he was the greatest.  Other people in the whitewater game who came to visit us thought about him in the same way … even when they didn’t say it; I could hear it in the words they didn’t say.  I could see it in their eyes.

            It was promised to me, that when I was old enough, Neil would teach me.  I don’t know if anyone can understand how important it was.  In the meantime, Neil would sit with me in the little office, and I would ask him about rapids.  Neil would smile, and take out a piece of paper, and he would draw the pattern of individual rapids I had never seen, and I don’t think they could ever be as big in the real world as they were in my mind.  Nevertheless, Neil and I would dissect the routes through Rattlesnake, Devil’s Toenail, Dragon’s Tooth, Schoolhouse, Honolulu, Hamburg Falls, Pyramid, Otters Playpen, Upper Savage and Lower Savage, and any other named rapid that an adult was foolish enough to mention while I was in earshot.  I may have been the only person to memorize the routes through every major rapid on the Klamath River before ever actually seeing them.

            When I was fourteen, my official tutelage began.  It progressed for exactly one week, and at the end of that week, I was put into a solo boat and I took up my position as an assistant guide on my first canoe trip.  I remember that first trip perhaps better than I remember any other, though that can hardly be surprising.  I think I was almost more of a hindrance than I was a help, though it is only through hindsight that I can see this.  At the time, I was too happy to care.  I was a young man paddling with a giant, and I was finally getting to see firsthand all of the rapids that up until then had been simple graphite on parchment.

            It was a rough week for me.  I was the youngest person in the group.  Not, let me be clear, the youngest guide; the youngest person in the entire group.  I was a fourteen-year-old boy trying to tell adults how to paddle.  As I said, it was a rough week.  But this leads me to the second place I could be found:  Sarah Totten Campground, Hamburg California, on the banks of the Klamath River.

            Ah, let me tell you about it!  The sandbanks, the sunshine, the blue skies and the evergreens, the constant rush, gurgle, and sloshing sounds of the river in the background … it is truly a place of beauty.  They say that smell is the scent most closely tied to memory, but as I cannot press the smell of that campground and that river onto this paper, I will simply do my best to describe it.  The Campground sits at a place on the river where there are many, many different types of tree nearby, and each of them does give off a faint aroma.  And so, there is the sharp scent of pine and fir trees, the more mellow scents of madrone and oak, and the sticky-sweet smell of the willows that line the banks of the river.  Let me tell you, it is a glorious smell … to me, at least.  Mixed in with all of this is the smell of the river itself.  As anyone who has spent any time on it will tell you, water has a smell all its own.  Even today, seventeen years after that first river trip, I can pick up a whiff of it from the old paddling gear stowed in my garage, and every memory comes flooding back in a total sensory barrage.  And because it meant so much to me, I decided to share a little bit of it with you.

            The following stories are mostly true … for a given value of the word.  As Obi-Wan-Kenobi tells us, many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.  As a guide I learned early on that it is improper to disagree with or correct a client if he or she is very sure they are right about something.  One correction is OK, but if they insist, its better just to let them have it.  If, for example, they are absolutely convinced the Great Blue Heron they are looking at is actually a Bald Eagle … well, perhaps it really is a Bald Eagle, and the light is just playing a funny trick; making it appear to be blue-grey in color with a very long neck and spindly legs.  Forever after, they will remember the time they were paddling with Neil and me and saw their very first Bald Eagle … and what kind of heartless man would rob them of that?  The job of a guide, after all, is to make sure everyone has a good time.  And to that end, we must occasionally tell a creative truth.  Enjoy! 

Author's Note

Review away.