the accidental angler

“Set!” yells the guide, and then patiently explains again why the fish escaped and what I must do if I am to catch a fish. Intellectually, I understand that my rod needs to come up as I simultaneously put tension on the line to set the hook into the fish’s lip. Sensing precisely when and with how much force still eludes me; the guide points out that it is a feeling, and feelings are difficult to teach. As with so much in fly fishing, I fall short of putting theory into practice. I have yet to catch a fish.

Surprisingly little of my rural childhood has prepared me for fly fishing. I have vague memories of overhearing men discussing bait and lures, of falling into the lake while watching my dad fish, of watching with horrified fascination as he cleaned the fish that would be our dinner. Until recently, I thought of fishing, when I thought of it at all, pretty much as I think of golf, which is to say mostly as an easy way to spoil a perfectly good day outside. But I married into fly fishing, and fly fishing is, to its practitioners, nothing less than a way of life. It is also a measure of character, and so I gamely cast my fly in the direction I think the guide is pointing. I ask questions about fish habits and habitat, about what my rod and line should be doing, about different kinds of flies. It is a beautiful sport, but one so filled with strange vocabulary and arcane practices that I struggle to understand the basics. My father-in-law enthusiastically answers my questions with technical detail and scientific reasoning. My husband replies that the aim of fly fishing is always the imitation not only of the food itself, but its approach to the fish.

Therein lies the difference between my husband and his father, but it occurs to me as I stand in the river skittering my fly across the water to mimic a struggling insect, that such an artfully meticulous sport also approaches something akin to theater. Fish need to be convinced, drawn out with a realistic imitation of life, from tying flies to casting to managing the line in the water. As my husband likes to observe, fly fishing is a world where the fake beats out the real. If a grasshopper were tied to a hook, it would plop unconvincingly into the water and give away the illusion. Instead, to fly fish is to animate an imitator with skill, timing, and luck. What actor doesn’t hope to achieve the same? Fish, it turns out, seem to want what so many of us want, which is to believe in skillful imitation, in art, and occasionally, in things we know to be too good to be true.

of habits and improvisation

On a recent trip to Victoria, BC, Kendall and I went three times to Rebar, taking in breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Like pilgrims on a journey, we arrived eagerly, if somewhat shyly. The pattern of the day settled around our meals at the restaurant, much in the same way that the weekly rhythm of our relationship grew around food. We didn’t date so much as find ways of eating together. At first, we reserved for each other weekend evenings and special dishes designed to impress without seeming overwrought. Kendall's specialty--and the very first meal he made me--is salmon with lavender-orange salt, pasta with pesto sauce, and steamed asparagus; I made him flan and bread pudding with brioche and bourbon butter sauce. He made vegetarian borscht; I made walnut bread. One Thanksgiving, we baked a pumpkin pie together; the next year we made wasabi sweet potatoes with pork tenderloin in a balsamic vinegar and caper sauce. There were Saturday football cookouts at Beau and Ashley's, which inspired theme dinners later that winter. Asian night, for example, with peanut noodles and spring rolls and lime-pepita cookies, or Americana night, with gourmet mac-and-cheese and pulled pork and potato-buttermilk dinner rolls. (Luckily, more energy went into cooking and eating than into naming.) Food has featured prominently in our travels, and we've eaten at markets in Mexico and road-side barbecue trucks in Texas. We cheered Beau and Ashley in the barbecue competition at Dodge City Days and devoured their practice samplings. We followed the recommendations of parents (Rio Mar in New Orleans; Blue Sky Burgers in Amarillo), and searched out new favorites (El Reynaldo’s in Goodland, KS). If food initially provided an excuse to spend time together, changes in our relationship showed up in our culinary habits. We went from cooking for each other to cooking together. Dress and manners got more casual as the recipes got harder, and we found reasons to buy things like star anise and lemongrass and powdered shrimp and tamarind paste. Weekend dinners grew into multi-step affairs that necessarily included friends and leftovers, thereby weaving us more tightly into the textures of daily life together. We evolved a repertoire of recipes, got to know each other through the habits and nuances of food. What we’d eaten and would like to eat, the politics of food, how you can learn most of what you need to know about a person by the way he or she eats. Through the long bitterness of last winter, cooking and eating together was both catharsis and comfort, and our wedding this spring featured Gruber’s appetizers, Beau’s prime rib, wine from Kendall’s parents, and Stacy’s vegan chocolate cupcakes.

Because we’ve spent several years eating our way through their recipes, going to Rebar for the first time felt a bit like a first date with an old friend. It was silly and extravagant and a little obsessive, and completely in line with the habits that make us who we are. We promised ourselves that next time we'd check out Victoria's other food offerings, and we probably will. Sometimes, though, it's best not to mess with a good thing; after all, the salmon with pesto is still in heavy rotation.

secrets

When my birthday gift certificate to Amazon covered the price of a long-anticipated cookbook with a few dollars left over, I bought a used copy of Thomas McNamee's authorized biography of Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Although the story seemed better for the characters in it than for the telling of it, I read it compulsively. It even fueled a cooking binge, complete with olive oil bread, boiled kale, tempeh tacos, and projections for shortcakes dressed with locally-foraged berries. Not all in the same meal, of course. Last night, however, I dreamed in vivid detail that I kept trying to order, unsuccessfully, a chicken sandwich from McDonald's.

habitat

Leaving Lawrence was hard, although harder in the imagining than in the doing. When the time came, after the packing and the re-packing and the farewell dinners and errands and tears, I got in the car and headed west. That morning, I did many of the things that were fundamental to my daily routine in Lawrence: I went to Checkers, I walked on Mass Street, I got money out of my local bank. For an occasion that seemed so monumental in my mind, though, these one-last-time events seemed almost as ordinary as they had the week before, somehow strangely lacking in significance.

I dearly love Lawrence, and it was hard to leave, but not necessarily in the ways I’d thought. I miss individual friends, of course, but also the established texture of social life, the patterns, the hangouts, the friend to call for coffee on a Wednesday afternoon and the one for a Saturday morning run. Along with social space, I miss the familiar routines of place, the personal landmarks and learned shortcuts, all the accumulated knowledge of twelve years of inhabiting a place. The way the social and the spatial overlap.

Lawrence is home, but living there felt like unfinished business. Leaving was necessary, but limbo still feels a little daunting.

westward, ho!

Highlights from the Lawrence-to-Bellingham trek, or, why we’re glad we shipped our stuff and didn’t drive a rental truck

The Nebraska Sandhills
Although a lot of my experience on I-80 through Nebraska consists of fairly stock images of mid-western farmland, the route from North Platte to Valentine is entirely different. Once the road turns north, it enters a vast, sparsely populated region characterized by narrow, steep hills that are actually sand dunes held in place by grass. Ranching, rather than farming, dominates the area, and the views are expansive. I’d traveled through the region several times as a kid, but failed to appreciate its beauty; I was put off by the very openess, nearly unsettling in its magnitude, that now attracts me. Driving through in late afternoon and early evening, the sun caught on the grass, and the sky—that commanding Great Plains sky—glowed with a tangle of light and cloud. A fitting transition from mid-western to western, this is one of my favorite drives anywhere.

Valentine is a center for outdoors activities, including hunting, fishing, canoeing, and rafting along the Niobrara River. We stayed in the Dunes Motel, which is pet-friendly. The town also has a great western-wear store.

Devil’s Tower National Monument
After seeing the South Dakota Black Hills on the tail end of winter the previous May, the summer season seemed a little too overpopulated. The drive from Belle Fourche, SD, to Devil’s Tower was beautiful and far less crowded. I’d only experienced the plains and high desert of southern and eastern Wyoming, and so I’d imagined the monument rising out of the flat grasslands. Instead, it stands at the western edge of the rugged, forested hills that continue into South Dakota. The place is still used by Native Americans for ceremonial purposes, and their ribbons and bundles hung from trees were a slightly incongruous mixture with the carloads of tourists vying for camera angles. The paths around the based are pretty kid-friendly, which is a good thing, but the monument itself is, like most national parks, not dog-friendly. There was a moment when, with the wind rustling the pines, the energy of the place was palpable. It was quickly broken by a loud family with a mom in an anti-abortion t-shirt, but it was there and it made the trip.

Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Our quest for campsites took us near the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area west of the town of Buffalo. It was a clear weekend in July, and many campsites were already full. We followed the friendly brown sign promising an established campsite on Forest Service land, but ended up basically in a cow pasture alongside the dirt road leading in. What lucky cows, though, because the road dipped through a broad valley before rising again to forests; snow-capped peaks were visible in the distance, tinged pink with sunset. We unhooked the bikes and took a spin. Kendall discovered that his cruiser is better suited to the streets of Lawrence than to rutted mountain roads, but that he can in fact ride with two dogs in tow. It was the coldest night of the trip by far, and the combination of clear, cool air and mountain elevation made for one of the more brilliant displays of stars I’ve ever seen. The Milky Way was luminous, and the Big Dipper sat nearly atop the mountains. Our morning hike took us through pine forests and past lakes, although the trail seemed merely a jumping off point for longer treks into the wilderness.

Welcome Creek Wilderness Area, Montana
We’d been here fishing the previous July, so when we struck out at all of the easy-to-reach campsites along the highway, we hit the back roads and returned to the Rock Creek area. The drive in from Phillipsburg was beautiful, as the road ran along high, rounded hills in agricultural country, with mountains farther in the background. Our hike that morning was steep, starting in a stand of trees and then climbing through a grassy area on the side of a mountain. It was light when we started out, but we hiked a good distance before the sun came up over the eastern mountains and began to burn off the dew. We should not, however, have driven the thirty miles of dirt road to get back to the 90, particularly not in a Honda Civic loaded down with two computers, a television, cleaning supplies, wineglasses, a stereo, and a baritone sax.

readers

A lot of my reading seems to be cyclical lately, or at least thematic in ways that don’t relate directly to a dissertation. Noticing this trend made me think about how certain books find us, and how much our personal context affects why we like what we like. Inspired by this blog post, I’ve read two novels by Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird (1976) and The Angle of Repose (1971). I read Spectator Bird first and, although The Angle of Repose is perhaps the more complex novel in terms of plot structure and historical, this is the novel that resonated most with me. (Although I did run across an interesting twist on Stegner’s description of the Doppler effect in this article.)

It was due in part to the moment at which I was reading it, one of those happy coincidences in which exactly the right book falls into your hands at exactly the right time. I was on a plane bound for a job interview and had just finished When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (2007) by Sylvia Sellers-García. Although Sellers-García’s novel has many things to recommend it, among them supple language and the fact that its author is a PhD candidate in history (ah, the lure of extra-academic creativity), it failed to excite me. So when I began Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, it was without much expectation and mostly to pass the time. Instead, it was engrossing, if slightly uncomfortable, to read about the protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with his life as it is, not as he wishes it were. I read throughout the flight and stayed up late the next two nights to finish the novel.

Sellers-García’s and Stegner’s novels share thematic and structural elements, most importantly the search for individual identity as set against family history. The characters travel to the purported geo-cultural source of identity, Guatemala in the case of the former and Denmark in the latter, and re-read diaries to make sense of the past. For the protagonist in When the Ground Turns, this means re-visiting his late father’s diaries while searching for his parents’ former home in a small Guatemalan town made tight-lipped by the atrocities of recent civil strife. The town’s secrets draw him deeper into regional rivalries and personal feuds, until he inevitably finds the family he seeks. This scene—in which the protagonist is threatened with physical violence until he literally cries ‘uncle,’ thus revealing his familial relationship with his attacker—topples the plot structure. As befits the post-everything academic novelist, the reunion is ‘problematic,’ fraught with the tensions of otherness and assimilation in a globalized world, but this scene triggers a denouement in which the protagonist decides to stay indefinitely in the remote town. He’s got no job and no family left in the States, true enough, but really? Perhaps in another context it would be believable, but here it smacked of sentimentality. If going ‘home’ is that easy, then why all the fuss about the search for identity?

In The Spectator Bird, an aging literary agent and his wife read journals written during a long-ago trip to Denmark. The protagonist reads reluctantly, unwilling at first to re-visit a period colored by the loss of their only child. He is the son of a Danish immigrant mother, and the trip forces him to confront the overlapping of personal, cultural, and national identities. From the Midwestern couple they meet on the Atlantic crossing, returning to an imagined ‘Old Country,’ to their encounter with a Danish novelist famous for writing about Africa, identity is layered in this novel by both time and place. Social class is an important dimension of his experience of Denmark, given that the protagonist is of a markedly different status than either his immigrant mother or the landed elite with whom he stays while abroad, a difference alluded to but not explored by Sellers-García’s novel. In The Spectator Bird, the protagonist too falls sway to the exoticism of the almost-familiar, including a friendship that verges on romantic with their beautiful Danish host, but remains apart, cognizant of the different cultural forces that have shaped him, as well as of the social structures that would have separated him from his hosts, given other circumstances. It is this restraint that makes the novel work. The protagonist is grouchy, unwilling to confront old age with the cheery goodwill urged by his contemporaries. Likewise, this quality prevents him from over-indulging in reunions with an imagined homeland. He is stodgy, motivated by an almost anachronistic sense of duty and disenchanted with the social changes of his time and place, yet his character is painfully aware of his own failings and of his limits.

Both novels are about readers, and about how texts can draw one in and elicit unexpected responses. The blog post on Stegner cropped up according to its author’s logic, following a schedule far removed from mine. Yet I found it on the heels of a year in which I’d spent a great deal of time traveling through many of the places in Stegner’s fiction, and at a time in which I not only had freedom to read what I wanted, but during which I needed to read about the kinds of things talked about in the novel. It was a random encounter, of the sort that feels anything but. Because I read both novels at a time in which I was seriously evaluating my place in academia, their content underscored other doubts. Really awful things happen to people, and how do we make sense of them? How does one write anything at all about a place such as Guatemala, a country with a horrific recent history of violence, without delving into sentimentality or paternalism? Is my discomfort with Sellers-García’s novel in part a reminder of the uncomfortable dynamic between indigenous groups and anthropologists that I experienced as a student in Guatemala? Am I harder on her because I also study Latin America?

Weighty questions indeed, but this process has also induced a measure of humility about my own reading process. As an instructor, how often have I groaned about the reading habits of my students, about their lack of motivation to complete assignments, about the ways in which being nineteen interferes with their college education? In the end, though, I’m not sure I’m much better. Oh, I can force myself to think critically about something I dislike or to finish canonical novels out of willpower, but unmotivated reading is still unmotivated reading. Part of being an adult is doing unpleasant things, of course, and a large part of what one learns in college is task completion, so I’m not letting my students off the hook. But instead of imagining myself as a Literary Critic or as The Instructor, thinking about my personal reading context brings me back to being a reader. We’ve all had times when headaches or personal hang-ups affect how we understand a book, or conversely, when everything aligns and the right series of books falls directly into your lap. Although I know that books don’t literally seek us out, I like to think that great reading benefits, not unlike love, from luck and personality and timing.

por la cerveza

Stacy put the team together and mapped the course. Erin gave us a name and a slogan. I designed the t-shirts. Team Portacervezas ran through snow, rain, and the Kansas wind to complete a 44-mile relay race from the Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City to the Free State Brewery in Lawrence.