Streams of Consciousness: Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life

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Streams of Consciousness

Hip-Deep Dispatches from the River of Life

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By Hull, Jeff

The Lyons Press

Copyright © 2007 Hull, Jeff
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781592289882

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Excerpt from middle of the piece entitled “Wonder Time,” from Jeff Hull’s collection:

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Fourteen years later, Juice breathes like the strokes of a handsaw. His muzzle is gray, his hearing dimmed to a close, murky globe near silence. His hips are so weak and rigid that I have to lift him into the pick-up, though he’s miraculously able to haul himself onto countertops to pull down any savory-smelling morsels left too close to the edge. He defiantly chews deer pellets and goose turds, and has not forgotten the pleasure of smearing himself in deliquescent dead fish. Sometimes he sits when I tell him to, but I’m almost daily afforded the opportunity to realize how irresponsibly optimistic I once was in my beliefs about dogs and how training them happens.
When my brother was still alive, my family bought the home Juice and I live in now, as a place to gather in the summer. My brother, Chris, lived in Phoenix, and my sister in Colorado, while my parents maintained the old house near Sandusky Bay in Ohio. We bought a place in the country, far up a dirt road, a house surrounded by pasture, with a pond where geese raise their goslings, and a small creek flowing through a gallery of cottonwoods. Soon after we bought the place, my brother came to stay here. He was very sick even by then, but he wanted to oversee theremodeling of the house, and when the job was finished, he wanted just to be here for a while, to live in the place.
Chris and I fell into an easy routine that summer. I would do odd jobs—there was always a fence to fix, or weeds to pull, bare dirt to seed, reconstruction mess to clean up. Chris would execute some brain work, figuring out what the next step was and what we’d need for that task, or he drove to town to pick up supplies. But every afternoon, just as the peak of the day’s heat started sliding away, we would stop whatever we were doing and walk the quarter mile to the creek with our small troupe of dogs, which by then numbered three. In terms of physical exertion, the walk to the creek was about as much as Chris could handle.
When we got to the cobbled banks, he used a tall walking stick to help with his balance. We had found a back eddy in the stream, an elbow of little current, and we would strip our shirts off and sit down there, the pool coming up to our chests. We would sit slowly, feeling the cool water wash the heat of the day’s work from our skin. My Labs would crash around the stream, chasing sticks, and Chris’s Sheltie would run the shallows along the bank, letting them know in sharp, jabbing barks, just how much better he could retrieve the sticks, if only he felt like getting his coat wet.
After our dip, we would walk back across the field to the house. The sun evaporated water from our shoulders, leaving a clean, tight sensation and the smell of aquatic insects on our skin. At the house Chris, who had once spent a year in Paris training for a life he imagined as a chef, would start conjuring dinner, and I would grab my seven-foot three-weight and head back to the creek to fish a little.
Our creek is not a productive fishery. The thoughtless, greedy forestry imposed upon this valley over the years has silted in much of the stream’s vital micro-habitat. Irrigation drawdowns, cows trampling the channel, and the hacking away of streamside vegetation to improve homesite views leaves the water too warm in summer. A history of mining in the tributaries and high on the main stem continues to leach heavy metals and sediment into the flow. Our off-the-grid neighbors up the hill poach with worms, ten-gallon buckets and withering efficiency. But there are times and spots, little pockets of cool, deep water, divots in the current taken by downed cottonwood trunks, where fish linger. And trout do keep trying to migrate from the Clark Fork, periodically slipping through a gamut of mergansers, herons, osprey and fishhooks to occupy these little niches. In other words, you never know.
On our creek, there is no better time to fish than what remains of the day after the sun has set and direct light is lost, when birds of prey heron lose the advantage of perspective. Caddis pop like popcorn on the surface, and small mayflies float like dust motes in the air. I fished a couple places on my absentee neighbor’s property, where a cottonwood trunk spans the entire stream, backing up water in front of its root ball, and scooping out a deep oblong of pool behind it. I could catch one or two fish, maybe three. Mostly these were small trout, six- or eight-inchers painted with parr spots, and then sometimes I would hook one that went twelve or fourteen. Once I caught a nineteen-inch rainbow just near the log, but not the summer Chris lived with me.
That summer I cast over the water that was sliding toward the same color as the sky, and watched the day fall away and felt again like this was my home now. What was left of the night was only a walk back through the field, then the peaceful sharing of a meal my brother had cooked, some easy conversation, and sleep with the windows wide open. When I finished fishing, walking back from the creek in that time suspended between day and night I could believe anything about the world and what might happen next. I could look across the field at the lit windows in the house and believe that my brother might be moving through those yellow boxes of light for many years to come, that this might be what our life would be like. And this allowed me believe that what had led up to now, how we got this far, meant something.
While I walked back toward the house, the stuttered whoor of snipe rose like distant rockets from the darkening streamsides. The whistle-edged voom of nighthawks dove overhead. Deer stepped from the woods, cautious, then suddenly grazing. Where the sun had gone behind the bumpy ridgeline, still a faint luminescence corroded the edges of the coming inky blue dark. For a few more moments careful shapes would be visible stepping to the edges of the field, peeking from beneath the low branches of the forest, dropping from the sky. This was what I had around me now, but in this soft hole in the day, the gap between light and dark seemed like an access, a place I could reach back through and touch pieces of life strewn along the way to here. If how we got this far mattered, I could believe, so too might the things we didn’t have with us anymore. In this way, for a few moments, twilight let me wonder if I could—even if I should—walk into the house and press the numbers on the phone. When I heard her voice on the other end, I could ask … Where you live now, are there geese?




Continues...

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Excerpted from Streams of Consciousness by Hull, Jeff Copyright © 2007 by Hull, Jeff. Excerpted by permission.
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