The small town of Hailey is located in the Wood River Valley between two rows of mountains, one on each side. The world famous Sun Valley, Idaho, is just twelve miles north. Sun Valley is a small part of the larger Ketchum, Idaho. We were neither the rich nor the famous, but rather the working poor. My mom was a housekeeper at the Moritz Hospital in Sun Valley, where I was born. I did not know my dad; he left when I was four, but in his place was a tall, mean man whom we were to call “Big Charlie.” We called him that because my name was also Charlie and so he became “Big Charlie” and I was referred to as “little Charlie.” I hated having to share my name with him. I hated everything about him and so I spent as much time outside as possible.
In front of our house was a one-lane dirt road. On the other side was a slow running creek. Not far down the creek was a small bridge, not high enough for a tall person to stand underneath, which made it a good hiding place. There I was, a young girl in the first grade, hunched over, peering into a small pool of muddy water. This stagnant pool was all that was left of the creek that had swollen up in the spring from the overflowing waters of the near by Wood River. Every spring, when the snows melted off the Pioneer and the Sawtooth Mountains, the Wood River rose and spilled into this otherwise dry creek bed. As the dry creek bed filled with water, the grasses along the banks flushed out into every shade of green: yellow greens, blue greens and purple greens. My favorites were the tall snake grasses; their tubular stalks were segmented and you could pull them apart and then snap them back together. The creek was now busy with grasshoppers, ladybugs and water skippers. Birds would fly down from the towering cottonwood trees to get a drink and every now and again, if you had a sharp eye, you could see the shimmering colors of a rainbow trout. Every fall the waters receded and the grasses died back and turned brown once again. The tiny tree frogs no longer chirped in the night and the little spider bugs that lived in their little rock houses and scurried on the bottom of the creek were gone. Every year the fish that swam into the creek, got trapped in the last pool of water underneath the bridge.
The Salmon River is one of Idaho’s prized rivers. It snakes through Idaho's famous rugged wilderness and lay just north of Sun Valley. The locals held nostalgic images in their minds of Ernest Hemingway fly-fishing those waters. They imagined him waist deep in the cold water, casting out and waiting for the snag on the line. They also remembered when they heard that he had accidentally killed himself at his home in Ketchum, while cleaning his gun. They also knew that it wasn’t an accident, but rather suicide. Some of the tourists who came to the Wood River Valley wanted to live some idea they had of this brilliant writer; so they dressed themselves in the finest fishing vests, bought very expensive fishing poles and then asked for directions to the Salmon River. But these were the concerns of adults and were of very little importance to me as I stood in the murky water. The day before, I had caught many fish and had taken them down to the Wood River and released them, but I had failed to catch this one last fish and I was hell bent on doing so.
I had to rely on touch, as the water was too thick to see into. On the bank was a large white bucket, half full of the same brown water. I made small circular motions with my hands as I shuffled around feeling for him. The thick mud squeezed through my toes as I walked and every time I felt something small move across my feet I squirmed, thinking of those little water spiders that buried themselves in the thick mud. It made me uneasy to think of them crawling across my feet and around my toes. Then I felt the tail of the fish brush up against the back of my leg and I hurled around to catch him, but missed. I had learned that it was practically futile to try to catch a rainbow trout with your hands. They are so slippery and can easily muscle their way out of your grasp, even if you are fast enough to catch one, but instinct had taken over. I learned that the real trick was to use my shirt as a sort of net to scoop the fish up into. My mom was never really happy about this idea, but it was the best way to catch a fish. I held out the bottom of my shirt in both directions as far as it would reach and started sifting through the water.
I glanced over to the far side of the bridge where the concrete met the ground. Tucked up underneath that corner of the bridge was where I had caught a large garter snake earlier that summer. When I caught him, he bit me, leaving four punctures in my middle finger, but I didn’t let him go. I knew that if I could get him to curl around my forearm he would stay there and would no longer hiss at me. I knew that snakes were cold blooded; they liked something warm to curl up to.
Once, while packing my snake around, I decided to tag along with my brother Shane on his paper route. One woman came to her door to pay her bill. When she noticed the snake curled around my neck, a look of horror came across her face; she turned pale and closed the door. When we got home my mom arched her eyebrows at me, saying, “Mrs. Twombly called, you practically scared that poor woman to death.” I told her that I didn’t mean to. I told her that I had originally put the snake into my coat hood, but that the snake had crawled out and got around my neck because he was cold. Still, mom made me let the snake go.
Then another memory came to me, looking down toward the other side of the bridge. I remembered when my sister Teresa and I decided to collect snails. We waded, chest deep into the water and began to pluck the small light brown snails off the plants and dropped them into our colored plastic buckets. We had decided to do our snail harvesting on the other side of the bridge because the water was warmer over there. That part of the creek had more plants and therefore more snails. An odd odor wafted from the water, but we did not care. I had no idea of what we were going to do with all those snails; I just knew that our mission was to pick as many snails as possible.
Once our buckets were full, we got out of the water, only to realize that we were covered with hundreds of small pale colored leaches! We dropped our buckets, snails going everywhere, and ran for home as fast as we could, screaming for mom on the way.
Mom hurried us into the bathroom and made us get into the tub. She filled it up and dumped a ton of salt into the warm water. The leaches started falling off our bodies and falling to the bottom of the tub. We were so horrified and grossed out that we couldn’t stop crying. After Mom got us cleaned up and calmed down she told us not to play in the water on the far side of the bridge. She told us that the sewer water drained into that part of the creek; then we started crying again.
While daydreaming of past events, I realized I had the fish trapped in a small area underneath some dead branches, but I couldn’t scoop him up because the dead wood was in the way. I tried and failed, so I started throwing out all the branches from the water. I had rolled up my pants past my knees, but they were soaked as was my shirt. My clothes had become a sort of permanent brown, stained with mud. My short, mousy brown hair was a tangled mess and I smelt of the strong odor of the dying creek. I saw the fish’s tail come out of the water and I moved in his direction. He’s got to be very close, I thought to myself. I have a good chance this time; I just have to stay crouched close to the water. Suddenly, there he was, the fish thrashing in my shirt, I closed it around him, holding him against my chest. I hurried to the bucket and carefully dropped him in. Splash! The fish started circling in the bucket. I felt a huge sense of relief; now I could breathe easy.
The walk down to the Wood River, a quarter of a mile down the graveled road, was not easy. The bucket was heavy and it seemed like it was half my size. The gravel on my feet reminded me of the time when I outran one of the boys in my class. We were on the same gravel road; I was barefoot; he was not. I had reason to run, he wanted to kiss me and I didn’t want anything to do with him. I had to be fast and I was. Carrying the huge bucket was arduous. With every step a little splash of water jumped out of the bucket and dropped on the ground, leaving a trail of muddy water behind me. The road went over the Wood River Bridge, on the other side, to the right, stood a tall cottonwood tree. It marked the opening in the barbed wire fence. I walked through the opening and down along the foot of Della Mountain to where the deep and calm part of the river was. This was also the place where all the kids from town came to swim. They climbed up onto the rocky face and jumped into the deep cold water to cool themselves from the hot days, but now it was fall and the water was too cold to swim in. I could hear the sound of kids playing in my head, but I only heard the constant churning of the white water. I sat there alone, listening to the river. I was reluctant to let him go, because it was so difficult getting him into the bucket in the first place. I sat watching the fish circling, and began talking to him, telling him only the things that a child would say to a fish. Then I decided it was time to let him go.
I lowered the bucket gently down into the water, just so the lip of the bucket let in the water of the river. The clear, clean water mixed with the brown water and the fish swam out and over the edge of the bucket and down into the deep and out of sight. I put the bucket down on the rocks and stared into the water, wishing I could see him one last time. And then, there he was, he came back and was circling freely in the open water! I could hardly believe my eyes.
He turned and swam back down into the deep water. I was trying to make sense of what had just happened when here he came again, circling no more than an arm’s length away. My heart swelled and I gazed back at the fish. I had no idea of what to do, I was confused. I splashed the water with my hand to ease my discomfort and the fish darted off into the deep running river. I sat there a long time thinking of this one particular fish, he was just one of so many others. |
