Big Blue

When he first had come to the river it was summer and he was 12 years old and he carried a spinning rod and reel. He used a small silver lure that wobbled and flashed on the retrieve. The fish in the river were mostly brook trout, but occasionally a brown trout would appear and even a rainbow, stocked by the local conservation club, and all attracted to the small silver lure that wobbled and flashed.

The river was not very wide and it ran crookedly through a forest that had not been logged, his father said, in maybe 50 years. The river water was brown, but clear, the result, his father said, of having been stained by the roots of the trees that grew along its banks. The boy found it one day by hiking along a gravel road that ran past the rented summer cottage that his parents had used for many years and his grandparents before that. It was a beautiful place. One that he sometimes would come to, not to fish, but just to think, and be quiet. He would do that, sometimes, after an argument had upset him, or just because it made him feel good to be surrounded by the fresh, green silence and the perfume of pine resin in the sun, and always because it was an adventure. It was never the same, even if he entered the forest near the big granite boulder that had rolled down the hillside and embedded itself near the gravel road. The road had been carved many years after the boulder fell. It was not until later that he wondered why it was always different if it was the same. He never quite understood that, but it didn't make any difference. What was important is that he remembered it was different and when he remembered, sometimes when he was troubled, it was calming and it moved him past a difficulty.

There was a blue spruce on the river that leaned from the bank over the water, he thought, like a prizefighter he once saw portrayed on a boxing poster. The fighter was perfectly straight, but he was leaning at an angle that would not support his body, the result of being hit in the face, and those who viewed the poster knew he was going to fall. The tree hung over a pool and the pool was his favorite place, not only because of the tree, but because there were trout in the pool, and they never seemed to learn that the small silver lure that wobbled and flashed was something to avoid. He did not keep the fish he caught. He had read, in outdoor magazines, that it was better to let the fish go. But he also had read that catching a fish stressed it and it was better to keep it and eat it than to let it go. That bothered him for a while, but he still released everything he caught under the blue spruce, and elsewhere on the river.

The tree, which he had decided to call Big Blue, was sort of lonely, in a way, because it was surrounded by hemlocks. And, when he was 12, it was not very big, either, but it still leaned. He did fish in other areas of the hemlock forest, but he always returned to the spruce tree and the pool, like visiting the old house on Bender Road, after the family had moved to a newer place over on Ivy Lane. It was comfortable to be there, by the pool. When he carried his fishing equipment along the gravel road, he would notice the crows that swung in wide circles above him, sometimes calling to one another and talking, he thought, about the boy below with the spinning rod. When he was older, he might carry a .22 caliber rifle to target shoot at the garbage dump on the gravel road. And when he did that he noticed that the crows were gone and he thought crows were pretty smart. His companion, sometimes, was a large dog with long hair and an indiscriminate background. He was called Hopper by the locals because he hopped rather than ran, especially when he was excited. Hopper also was very interested in the fish in the river, the small ones that skittered across the shallow gravel bars ahead of the pool. He once gave the boy a good laugh when, while trying to catch a fish, he entered the river at the wrong angle. His front legs collapsed and he went nose-first into a sandbank on the far side. What was really funny, the boy thought, was that when he came out of the water he looked around like he was expecting someone to embarrass him by laughing at his performance.

When he was 20 years old, and had a girlfriend whom his parents had allowed to stay with the family at the rented cottage, he would take her to the river, to the pool, and Big Blue. And though she never showed the kind of enthusiasm, he thought, that the tree and the pool excited in him, she was a pleasant companion and she smiled when he talked about his previous visits to the river. But she didn't really understand, he thought, and after a while, she departed and he went back to school, and graduated, and his mother died. His father, a man devoted to his wife, decided he no longer could enjoy the cottage, and his son discovered that he no longer could visit the river and the pool and the blue spruce, which by now had grown at least eight feet and had tilted another three or four feet toward the water.

It wasn't exactly pain that he endured when his visits ended, it was more withdrawal. He didn't have enough money to rent the cottage because he was on a savings mission to buy a house and despite his desire, he was not going to cut one dream short to fulfill another. So he kept saving for the house and kept thinking of the river and the forest with the hemlocks and the blue spruce.

After some years had passed and he had dated some women, he asked one of them to marry him, and she did, and he suggested a honeymoon at the rental cottage, and she thought that would be a good idea because she liked to hear his stories about the time his family used the cottage and he was young and adventurous. And she readily agreed to share the mortgage costs on their home.

The wedding was lovely, his friends said, and his father helped with the expenses. The honeymoon cottage was about the same except for new appliances, and the road outside had been paved.

Still, in the heart of the boy now a man was the anticipation of the visit that he had kept mostly under control for these years, had not allowed his thoughts of a possible return to dominate his behavior, though he had entered a period of counseling to deal with a problem he thought was beginning to affect his life in a negative way. His counselor told him to try yoga and invited him to join a twelve-step program. After a while, he saw the value in stepping back. And after a while, the joy of potentially re-visiting the river became less of an obsession and more of a warm thought, which he planned to indulge on his honeymoon.

And so, with his bride of one day, he stood next to the boulder near the gravel road that had been paved for its entire length, and he led her into the woods and toward the river. He couldn't deny that he was excited and, since he had graduated from a spinning rod to fly rod, which could not be used in the space around the pool because of overhanging branches, he was just happy to lead his new wife to his childhood Camelot.

The area had overgrown and was dense and he hardly recognized anything, though there were several clumps of white birch that he remembered. Then, like a curtain pulled back from the stage, there was the pool. But there also was something terribly different. Big Blue had disappeared, except for the massive root system that extended upward nearly six feet from the ground. The trunk leading from the roots had been sawed, exposing a diameter of nearly two feet and lying parallel to the ground. On the other side of the river lay the rest of the trunk, its butt about the same width. The missing twenty-foot section also lay on the other side of the river, its barren branches bereft of needles, like a skeleton abandoned by caregivers who had lost interest, he thought.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, not loud but loud enough. And he thought of his father grieving over his mother's death, and a mental conflict arose sharply, piercing him with the fundamental difference between plants and animals. Until he realized that trees raise young by dropping seeds for regrowth from their branches. That trees feed each other, too, through their root systems. That grown trees protect each other and even different species that had been cut or burned or fallen to disease. He turned away from his new wife because he did not want her to see the salty water in his eyes. She had said “Oh,” after his curse and then nothing more because she did not know what to say.

The hike back to the road was silent except for the snapping of twigs underfoot and the slight gasps of exertion. October was a beautiful month and he thought the world could not exist without October and he was happy that he and his wife had chosen October in which to be married. The few hardwoods in the hemlock forest were brilliant, like rubies and garnets, and they glowed in the sun where they were not blocked by the shadows of their coniferous neighbors.

When they got back to the road he suggested they take a drive on the unimproved road that ran along the big lake and began about a half block from the rental cottage. She smiled and said she thought that would be a grand idea.