The Hotel Eden(53)

“Look, Glenna,” I said. She had opened another wine cooler. “Look. We’re going to fish. This is a raft trip and we’re going to fish. It would help everything if you would take your drink and turn around and face forward. Either way, you’re going to get a wicked sunburn.” I moved the three plastic-covered sleeping bags in such a way as to make her a backrest. She looked at me defiantly, and then she turned her back and settled in.

It was still a day. I took the bubble off Toby’s line and showed him how to troll the triple teaser. “There are fish here,” I told him. “Let’s go to work.” I tied an oversize Royal Coachman on my line and began casting my side of the river, humming—for some reason—the Vaughn Monroe version of the ominous ballad “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” I knew the words, even the yippie-ai-ais.

WE PASSED LITTLE HOLE at three o’clock and I knew things would get better. Ninety-nine percent of the rafters climb out at Little Hole and we could see two dozen big GMC pickups and campers waiting in the parking lot. We’d already passed a flotilla of Scout rafts all tethered together in a large eddy taking fly-casting lessons. It was a relief to see that they didn’t have enough gear to spend the night on the river.

It had been an odd scene, all those little men in their decorated uniforms, nodding seriously into the face of their leader, a guy about my age who was standing on a rock with his flyrod, explaining the backcast. It was his face as it widened in surprise that signaled the troop to turn and observe what would be for many of them the largest breasts they would ever witness in person no matter how long they lived. Glenna had smiled easily at all of them and waved sweetly at their leader. I said nothing, but put my pole down and paddled hard downstream, just in case Glenna had really got to the guy and brought out the incipient vigilante all Scout leaders have. I didn’t want to be entangled in some midstream citizen’s arrest.

Anyway, it was a relief to pass Little Hole and know that we would see no more human beings until tomorrow noon when we’d land at Brown’s Park and the end of trail, so to speak.

By this time, Glenna was relaxed. She’d slowed her drinking (and her speech and about everything else) and seemed to be in a kind of happy low-grade coma, bare-breasted in the prow of our ship like some laid-back figurehead. Toby had been doing well with the triple teaser, taking three small trout, which we’d released. He handled the fish skillfully and made sure they returned to the river in good shape. I had had nothing on the Coachman, but it was not the fly’s fault. I had been casting in time with “Ghost Riders in the Sky”:

Then cowboy change your ways today, (cast)

Or with us you will ride, (cast)



and a fish would have lucky to even catch a glimpse of its fur.

A-trying to catch the Devil’s herd (cast)

Across these endless skies. (cast)



So there had been a little pressure, but now the long green shadows dragged themselves languorously across the clear water. It was late afternoon. We were past Little Hole. It was still a day. We dropped around two bends and were suddenly in the real wilderness, I could feel it, and I felt that little charge that the real places give me.

I had been here before, of course, many times with Lily. In the old days I thickened my favorite books in the bottom of rafts. Lily and I would leave the city Friday night, spend two days fishing scrupulously down the Green River, and drive back five hours from Brown’s Park in the dark, arriving back in town in time for class with a giveaway suntan and the taste of adrenaline in my mouth. My books, The Romantic Poets, The Victorian Poets, Eons of Literature, were all swollen and twisted, their pages still wet as I sat in class, some of them singed where I had tried to dry them by the fire. Those trips with Lily were excruciatingly one-of-a-kind ventures—the world, planet and desire, fused and we had our way with it. I remember it all. I remember great poetry roasting cheerily by the fire in some lone canyon while Lily and I lay under the stars. Those beautiful books, I still have them.

MY LINE TRIPPED once hard and then I felt another sharp tug as my Royal Coachman snapped away in the mouth of what could only be a keeper. I set the hook and measured the tension. The trout ran. I gave him line evenly as the pressure rose, and he broke the surface, sixty yards behind us in the dark swelling river.

“Whoa!” Toby said.

“Watch your line, son,” I told him. “It’s the perfect time of night.”

But even as I worked the trout stubbornly forward in the river, I was thinking about Lily. I’d never grown up and now fishing wasn’t even the same.

THAT FISH WAS a keeper, a twenty-inch brown, and so were the two Toby took around the next bend as we passed under a monstrous spruce that leaned over the water. Four hills later we drifted into the narrows of Red Canyon. It was the deep middle of the everlasting summer twilight, and I cranked us over to the bank, booting the old wooden oars hard on the shallow rocky bottom. We came ashore halfway down the gorge so we could make camp. The rocky cliffs had gone coral in the purple sky and the river glowed green behind us as we unloaded the raft.