The Simplest Way, by Lynn Kristine Thorsen

I’m a fisherwoman.  I tie my own flies.  I’ve caught my limit in lakes where fish haven’t been seen in three years.  I can catch fish in season, out of season, on wet line and dry.  I won’t fish for planted rainbows, though.  They’re raised in fish hatcheries and their fins are rubbed down to nubs from swimming so close together.  Jeremy used to say, “Hell, Molly, those rainbows are farm animals.  They’re raised like cattle and dumped into lakes from planes.”

I only go after the native fish, like the Utah cutthroat that have been here ever since Lake Bonneville covered three states and had fish in it as big as whales.  I’ll fish for Brook trout and graylings, and maybe German browns.  But not rainbow.  Rainbows have pale white and soft, almost slimy meat.

I love to fish.

Lake Bonneville was a huge, land-locked sea that covered most of Utah and Idaho and parts of Nevada.  It dried up into the Great Salt Lake.  People find fish fossils in the rocks way up on the hills around the lake.  They find the ghosts of fish and clams and silky underwater ferns on hills that are covered with red sandstone, sagebrush, and skinny lizards. 

There’s a mountain range around Salt Lake City, actually two of them.  The Wasatch is on the east and Oquirrhs on the west.  On the foothills of both ranges, you can see where the forgotten waves of Lake Bonneville broke against the shore.  It’s a wide rim that runs around the hills so clearly that, from a distance, it looks like a man-made road.

Sometimes in the dead of winter, a heavy fog moves into the valley between the mountains and settles where the lake ended, right at that rim.  At night, if you get above the fog and look down, there’s no city there.   The fog blocks out all the light and noise.  There’s just the ghost of Lake Bonneville, all quiet and gray and lapping against its own ancient shore.

Most people go out to the reservoirs to fish.  I don’t.  Only thing you can catch in reservoirs are rainbow and the only thing you can catch rainbow on are weird things like corn or marshmallows or cheese that glows and floats.  I won’t fish there.

You can catch one other thing in reservoirs.  You can catch carp.

I fish in the Uintas.  The Uintas are a range of mountains eighty miles east of Salt Lake.  They are an odd range, running east to west instead of north to south like the Rockies and High Sierra’s and the Smokies.  There’s only one other range of mountains in the world that runs east to west, and it’s lost and forgotten somewhere in Tibet.

The Uintas are old.  Geologists say that they’re some of the oldest mountains in the world and that they used to be twenty-four thousand feet high.  They’re only thirteen thousand feet now.  They’ve crumbled down.  The summits are broken and flat and covered with huge boulders.  Even so, when I stand on the tops of those old mountains and stare out over their broken-down peaks, I can hear what sounds like the wind whistling through sharp granite, through the ghosts of those ancient peaks.

When I was seventeen, before I met Jeremy or learned to fish or had seen the Uintas, I had a baby.   I named the baby Brian before he was born.  I could tell he was a boy by the way I carried him.  I named him and used to sing him to him before I’d even seen his hair or the color of his eyes.  Brian’s father was a young boy and not ready for a family.  I don’t know that I was ready, but I didn’t have much choice. 

My own father was gone by the time I got pregnant and my mother wasn’t too worried about the baby or about me not being married.  She said she’d help and we’d be just fine.  All during July, when I was seven months along, she’d come home from work and I’d fix dinner and then we’d spend the evening talking about babies and being pregnant. 

When I came out of the delivery room with a little baby all wrapped up in flannel blankets in my arms, my mother said, “How are you, baby?”

“It was just hard work, Mom.  I’m fine.”  Brian was perfect.

I learned to fish when Brian was four, the summer we met Jeremy.  I was still living with my mother and Jeremy was visiting his aunt, who lived two houses away on our same block.  He drove a big red pickup, had a big laugh, and played with all the dogs in the neighborhood.  I found him talking to Brian one morning, after breakfast.  The two of them were out on the front porch and Jeremy was saying, “I can’t believe you ain’t ever been fishing.”

Brian giggled and said he’d like to catch a fish.   I walked out on the porch with a dishrag in my hands and was brave enough to say that whoever was talking to Brian about fishing best be prepared to teach him.

Jeremy looked up at me and smiled and said he thought he just might do that.

We went fishing the next afternoon.  Jeremy drove us up to the Uintas in his pickup.  For the first part of the drive, he talked about the mountains and fishing.  After a while, when Brian went to sleep with his head on my lap, Jeremy talked about his ranch in Kamas and how he’d been engaged once, but that the girl had run off with his best friend, just like in the movies.

He said he knew I wasn’t married, his aunt had told him, and that it must be hard work to raise a boy without a father.  “I ought to know,” he added.  “My dad died when I was three and my ma raised me and my brothers.”   He looked over and winked at me and then said, “I’ll tell you something crazy if you won’t laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“My dad taught me to fish.”

“That’s not crazy.”

“You’ll think it is when you listen to this. When I nine, my uncle took me camping with his kids.  They all knew how to fish, and I guess they thought I did because they walked off and left me standing alone by the lake with a fishing pole in my hands and no idea about what to do with it.  I kicked at rocks for a while and got sweaty.  Then I got mad and turned around to yell because I knew there was somebody standing behind me.  Well, there was there wasn’t, but it seemed to me that somebody was standing next to me and telling me how to use both hands to cast out.”

“Who was there?”  I gave him a puzzled look.

He didn’t answer the question right away.  “Anyway, after a while, I had a couple of fish on my line and my uncle came over to watch.  When he saw the way I cast out, he said, ‘How’d you learn that, Jeremy?’  I said I didn’t know and he told me that it was exactly the way my dad had fished, using two hands to cast out like that.  So, it must have been my dad that taught me how to fish.”

“Did it ever happen again?”

Jeremy smiled.  “Well, if I didn’t know better, I could swear it was him that that told me to wander over to your porch and see if I could get you to go fishing with me.” 

Jeremy and I got married six months later and we moved to his ranch in Kamas.  Two months after that, Brian had a German shepherd puppy and his own pony named Rascal.  During good weather, if we weren’t working the ranch, we were all fishing, except when we drove down to Salt Lake to visit my mother and shop.  During bad weather, Jeremy taught me how to tie flies.

It’s a real art.  I learned how to tie mosquitoes and renegades, woolly worms, and black ants.  I learned how to tie little delicate flies with soft gray bodies and airy white wings called “Emery Angels” on a size 16 hook.  To look at them, you’d never know that they were made out of hair and hide and feathers and glue. 

When we fished, Jeremy showed me how to make my flies act like the bugs they were tied to look like, how to drag a black ant just so through the water, and how to make a woolly worm rise to the surface like a nymph just breaking out of its crystalline shell.

When Brian was twelve, he made first string on the Kamas Junior High football team.  That was the same fall that I caught a Brook trout that weighed well over three pounds and 19 inches in a lost lake in the Uintas called Cuberant. 

Two years later, the same red pickup that had driven us from Salt Lake to Kamas the day after the wedding, rolled over and killed my husband and my son.  I was at home keeping dinner warm when the call came through from the Highway patrol.

There’s no use in talking about grief.  There are no words that can be used.  But finally, there was an evening when I could pet the dog and tell him to heel while I walked over to the corral, like Jeremy and I used to do after supper.  And there was the morning when I picked up the shirt Jeremy had dropped next to the bed on that last night.  I didn’t strip Brian’s bed, though.  Some nights I’d sleep in it and try and breathe in his man-boy smell.

Three weeks after the funeral, I was standing next to the sink rinsing off dishes from the toast and cheese I called supper, when I knew that someone else was in the room.  “Curry?”  I called for the dog and turned around, wiping my hands off on the front of my shirt.  As the dog came padding in, I heard Jeremy say, “I’m proud of you, Molly.”

“Jere?”  I questioned the air.

“You’re doing everything just right.”

Another afternoon when the wind was high, I could hear my boy Brian clear as day, telling me just how to bridle his pony so that I could get the saddle on without getting him all riled up before I exercised him.

I had one bad night.  A windstorm blew down the big cottonwood tree next to the shed and it tore down a live power line and lit the hay pile.  I was sleeping.  It was the horses screaming that woke me up.   After putting out the small fire with a shovel and dirt and calming down the horses, I cut my shin up pretty bad walking back into the house with no lights on.   I was too tired to do more than sit down on the couch and cry and try and keep my blood off the carpet.

The next morning, I sat staring out the front window drinking coffee.  I didn’t see anything out the window, not even the weather.  I drank coffee until I couldn’t taste it and felt despair open up inside of me.   Either Curry or an open door stirred up the air and the hall closet door blew open with a bang.  I stayed where I was, not caring about the house or the wind or the closet.  And then Jeremy was there, telling me I really should do something about the closet.  He hated doors that were hanging open without a reason. 

I stood up and shuffled over to the closet.  I stared inside, caught by the bright fluorescent blue and wild golden shine. The closet was where Jeremy kept the fly-tying gear. Deeper inside were the smaller feathers and the fur and hair.  Before noon, I had three wooly worms and a new renegade on a size 14 hook all tied and drying on the kitchen table.  I tied flies the rest of the afternoon.

There are other, smaller moments.  What I have with Jeremy and Brian is like a slice of gray slate that carries the ghost of a fish or a clamshell.  It is a reminder, like being in Salt Lake when the fog rolls in.  It’s easy to think that the water in the air remembers the great waters of the sea and is drawn to where that ocean once lay. 

I will always fish and tie my own flies.  I will never fish in a reservoir or catch rainbows on floating pink cheese.  Every time I’m in the Uintas, I know that I am seeing only broken remnants of what those great mountains once were, but even so, there are places where the wind still whistles through their knife-sharp peaks.

–

---

Lynn Kristine Thorsen lives and writes, with her mathematician/fiction writing husband and two large cats.  Her short fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Calliope, Kansas Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, Every Day Fiction and her micro fiction will shortly appear in Shacklebound Books. Degree in Philosophy, lots of travel.

© 2024, Lynn Kristine Thorsen