Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Grandpa, Jason and fly-fishing




Grandpa 1983.
Grandpa with 35 lb. King Salmon. 


The thin nylon cord sang as it whipped through the air to dance above shimmering green water.

I sat outside and watched him as the summer sun set in golden light behind towering Douglas firs. Deepening shadows turned the lake from emerald to forest.

Content, I sat nearby, perched on a cut-out tree round for a step, tucked into the side of a hill. Huckleberry and blackberry bushes' ripening scent hung in the warm air along with dragonflies.

We both loved the quiet at dusk, being outside, with the aroma of Grandma's cooking wafting downhill.

Grandpa worked as a mechanic at Boeing in Seattle in the 1960s and 70s. After his hour-long commute home to Monroe, he quietly walked from his home down to the lake to fly-fish

There was a large, round piece of plywood that he'd nailed to a fallen tree where it rested in the water. He stood on it, and cast his line about 15 feet from the muddy bank. 

From the age of eight through 11, I spent a month every summer with my brother Les at our grandparents' place in the woods. Most of our time was spent outside exploring or with Grandma doing errands. But it was my grandpa who fascinated me. 

As I grew older, I noticed his sense of humor was subtle. He smiled at me a lot, but wasn't much of a talker.

On the way home from trips to the big city, we passed pastures of cows and horses. He tried to convince me that horses were cows and vice-versa. I pretended to agree, mooing with him at startled horses. He grinned his close-lipped smile, nodded his head, and kept driving.

In their younger days, my grandparents lived in Lake City, raising my mother and her older brother in that busy suburb of Seattle.

Later, they bought the place I remember most;  a little house overlooking Lost Lake. The road was a dead end, enveloped in a wild, tangled forest of tall trees and thick bushes and deep shadows.

Their house was built on a steep slope halfway down to the lake.

Underneath the house on stilts with its wrap-around deck was a cave. When he wasn't fishing, Grandpa worked many years on that place, widening the hole to convert it into an extra living area and storage space.

To me, as I looked up at the house from the lake, it was a gaping monster mouth. For all I knew, Sasquatch lived in it. Many times I ran pell-mell up the hill to the house to avoid whatever I "knew" was hiding there. That was one place where I didn't follow Grandpa.

I knew Grandpa differently than his grandsons did. My other brothers, Marty and Jeff, visited for a month in summer as well, but my grandparents couldn't handle all four at once. Maybe it disturbed Grandpa's quiet too much.

I was the only granddaughter, and sometimes I think he didn't know what to do with me. Because he was so quiet and reserved, I didn't get to know him well at all. I was a silent watcher of him.

He taught me how to fish, and showed me around his smokehouse chockablock full of fishing rods, but that's about it. I mostly remember him fishing, or enfolded in a chair in front of a blazing fire encased in an orange, rounded pyramid-like, free-standing wood-stove while he watched television when the lake was iced over.

To remember my grandparents is to remember fish. Always fish. My grandmother was a fisherwoman.

I saved only a few black and white photos of the multitudes of trout and steelhead and salmon they caught, hung on lines by the gills throughout decades of fishing. 

Even now, whenever I travel in Washington I recognize river and lake names from seeing them printed in faded black or blue ink on the backs of those photos. Skookumchuck. Skokomish. Sammamish. Toutle. 

Although I never learned to fly-fish, I taught my own two children the joy of tying a hook, digging worms, the thrill of the red and white bobber popping up and down, and the adrenaline rush when the rod bent under the weight of a trout and winding it in on a taut line. 

My son, Jason, walks in his great-grandfather's shadow. 

He lives in Colorado, and travels to Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon with his wife, his friends, his father, and his camera. He is also a photographer of all things fly-fishing and is beginning to make a living at it. 

On a visit to a crystal clear stream in the Rocky Mountains one January, Jason tried to teach me how. As always, I just loved being outdoors. Pine-scented air, the sound of frigid trickling water over smooth stones, the ziiiiing of the line as it sailed downriver were enough for me. Good thing, as I never did get the hang of it.

I think Grandpa would be proud of his great-grandson. 

Jason took the elder's hobby to another level. 

Yet...

I know that he knows, as Grandpa did, that there is something soul-satisfying about casting a line at the end of the day while the sun goes to rest, trout leap for flies--real or fake--and there is silence all around.

Just for fun. 


Elmer Bruce Bartlett died in March 2000, age 82.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

The times, they have changed

I can identify with Rip Van Winkle.

Since I arrived home from living in Australia since January 2007, I've had to re-establish myself here. 

New bank account. New (to me) car. New cell phone. Arranging for car and health insurance, living arrangements, warm clothes, a new hometown and more all had my head spinning in the first few weeks.

I liken myself to Rip Van Winkle, a fictitious character in the book by the same name written by Washington Irving in 1819. 

The Dutchman falls asleep under a tree with his trusty dog by his side in the Catskill mountain range of New York.

He awakens to find shocking changes. 

His musket is rotting and rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog has disappeared. 

Van Winkle wanders to the village and doesn't recognize anybody. He discovers that his wife is dead, and that his friends have died in a war, or moved away. 

Unaware that the American Revolution has taken place, he gets in trouble by proclaiming himself a loyal subject of King George III and is surprised that the old, mad king's portraits have been replaced in establishments by those of George Washington.

Like him, I'm trying to wrap my head around so many basic changes to the way I used to live and where I lived.

I wanted to have a look at my old home town, where I was a journalist/news manager for the local newspaper, which has since changed hands. Driving down a road, I anticipated a familiar intersection that had a stop light.

On my right heading into town, a well-known family-owned restaurant was boarded up. All the other buildings that made up that corner were gone. The gas station was gone. The bar was gone. The real estate offices were gone. It looked like a howling wasteland with nothing left but broken concrete, gravel and litter.

Rather than being victims of the economic downturn, the owners of those buildings had sold out in order to widen the two-lane highway leading into the city. All was bulldozed, except for the lone restaurant owner's holdout, who ended up with nothing except a useless falling-down building.

It was surreal.

Other changes were not as dire, but still surprising. 

Television is no longer free. One can't just plug it in and adjust the antennae. In order to watch live television, one has to have satellite, cable, or Internet access to a variety of, well, I don't even know what they're called. Services? 

Video rental places have all but gone out of business with the arrival of Red Box and Netflix. One is a drop-off station outside of most stores, the other is available via Internet for television at home. 

Banking has changed. Swipe your card at the teller station to deposit, withdraw, whatever you want to do. Cash a check? Take a picture with your phone, send it to the bank, destroy the check.

Banks also encourage saving accounts, and they didn't as much before I left. Mine is set up so that my purchases are rounded to the nearest dollar with the spare change going into savings. Likewise, $25 per month is automatically taken from checking and dumped into savings. I can move anything around at will via Internet. Or my phone. 

Using cash is rewarded at nearly every service station with a 10-cent discount per gallon of fuel. 

Hardly anyone has a landline telephone anymore. Long distance? No such thing. Almost. Get a basic cell phone plan and you can call anyone anywhere in the United States for free. It does cost to call anyone who has a landline, though. 

There are discount and service cards for nearly everything. My wallet is full: Costco, Burgerville, Safeway, Fred Meyer, Haggen, Sally Beauty Club, The Good Book, and various coffee shops. For good measure, I renewed my library card too.

The way Americans diet is newer too. There is more awareness of food intolerance, such as gluten. We are crazy about Greek yogurt, Quinoa, agave, and fructose. A huge craze right now is Paleo. What the heck is that? 

Home coffee makers now have pods for personalized tastes. Australia has that too, but in typical American fashion, we've taken it a step higher. There are three size settings; one, of course, fills the travel mug. 

My friends Lisa and Cheri grinned as I regaled them with my observations about how much has changed in seven years. They understood and remarked how people just go with the flow and don't really pay attention to new ways of doing things. It is what it is. 

I'm getting the hang of it.

At least I know who the current American president is. 












  





Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Home

After seven years of wandering around the Southern Hemisphere, my travels have brought me back Stateside.

I'm Home.

I feel like Dorothy in many ways.

It was a tumultuous, surreal, strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes nightmarish experience in the Land of Oz.

I met a lot of interesting characters. Some were warm, caring and friendly people that will forever be part of my "circle." Some were astoundingly horrible and best forgotten.

However much it feels fantastic to be at home in the fold, there are bits of my roots left in that wide, treacherously enchanting country. Australia has a way of getting under your skin and enticing one to put down roots and stay.

I went there with the intention of making it my home forever. I believed people that I shouldn't have. Their masks were cemented in place, and they fooled a lot of my "circle" people too. It wasn't long after I arrived that the cracks started to show and the crumbling away began.

Reality was mind-numbing.

In trying to make it work, I nearly lost myself. A second time. Two failed marriages has a way at eroding whatever self esteem one has. In the end, it will destroy you if you let it.

When my one-way flight for Los Angeles left Brisbane for good on a sunny September morning in 2013, I gazed out the window. I realized I'd been holding my breath. In fact, I think I'd been holding my breath since I escaped my living conditions in February.

As Virgin Airlines' Boeing 777 cleared the coastline on my right, I pictured my roots, like tentacles, tangled in the land, attached to me and stretching, stretching, stretching--until all I saw was blue-green water under a cloudless cerulean sky--then they snapped. They broke off, doubling back on themselves and fell.

I know there is a long road ahead. A lot of healing is in my future. It's begun, slowly.

It's nice to be in a safe environment to do that. It's refreshing to my soul to have true family and friends who genuinely care about me, surround and soothe with the balm of their love, laughter, respect, kindness, generosity, and time.

I won't sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" anymore.

My pot of gold is here. Home. America. The land of the free and the home of the brave.

I am breathing again.

I'm writing again.

I'm smiling and can laugh again.

Most importantly, I'm living again.