The
rainbow trout has been taunting us for hours now. Every five minutes or so we hear a splash, whip our heads around,
and catch a glimpse of its shining curve just before it disappears again. I am sitting on a pile of round stones, feet
in the bottle-green water of the Rogue river, five hours and a world away from
our suburban home and the anxious person I have become there.
Here,
I am happy – grubbily, sun-on-my-bare-shoulders happy – lips stained from warm
blackberries, legs scratched by the brush, the scent of the river drying on my
skin. My husband is waist-deep in it,
trying vainly to catch the trout, casting and letting the fly settle on the
bright water, over and over again. The
trout keeps surfacing in different places, always ten or fifteen yards away
from each perfectly cast fly. The light
bounces off the water and plays a gentle staccato on the underside of my
hat. I clamber up from my rocky throne
and wade slowly into the cold river; my hands carve luminous trails as I
walk. The Rogue is calm and smooth near
the bank, the water like uneven glass; a deeper green center sluices by.
I
feel wealthy beyond measure, to stand in this body of old water. Little feeder fish taste my toes; the
dragonflies flit across the surface and then swoop to take the briefest of
bites, air-kisses. Hawks circle on
invisible thermals high above us – just as they all have done for lifetimes –
before I ever walked this earth.
We
take everything so personally, these days.
Cast and cast again: with easy parabolic arcs of the line in the breeze,
each time the fly settles gently onto the river. And each time, no bite.
We can almost hear the fish laughing just before he leaps again, into
the air, then smacks the water.
This is a story about a fish that won’t
bite, a world that won’t bend itself to us, a child that won’t come, no matter
how enticingly we call.
The
inherent futility of the phrase “trying to conceive” has always made me squirm,
and yet I cannot find a better way to describe it. However you want to say it, we have been doing it for a long time
now. This was supposed to have been a
momentous summer, the summer we embraced parenthood with open arms after many
years of ambivalence, when we knew, finally, we were ready. I remember one dusky evening when we made
love after a long walk in the country with our two dogs and the aria of
wildlife that called to the rising moon.
Swallow-swift-earthworm-vole-mare-eagle-towhee-coho-chipmunk-coyote-buck-bullfrog-moth,
all things seen and unseen – thrumming, joined in sound more resplendent than
music. I knew, felt it buried deep in
my cells, that this was going to be our night.
So it was with any number of nights and mornings and afternoons to come,
none of which produced our longed-for child.
Cast
and cast again. After a certain parcel
of time, we fell from the perch of our optimism, not expectant after all, and
realized that it had never really belonged to us. How naive, to believe that the reward for finally deciding to
have a baby was going to be a baby.
What has been given to us instead is a lesson in letting go, a zen koan
on the fact that the more you want something, the faster its wings beat to flee
from you.
But
we’re here, and the sky is singing and the river still flows by with an easy
indifference. We escape, whenever we
can, to these wild places, where we can slip into the real world and forget our
attachment to being at its center. This
trip to the banks of the Rogue began as a simple celebration of Indian summer,
but now I see it for what it really is: a flight from the noise and distraction
of our normal lives; a courtship between us and the moon, the herons, the wind
in the pines. And in the midst of my
sunlit exuberance, I know now that I came here to retreat from pain, to lick a
wound.
This is the Oregon I came here to find. Eight years ago, I stood staring at a jumble
of law school catalogs piled on the bed in our tiny rental house in Virginia. My husband was the one entering school, but
I had a huge stake in where we went: this was our chance to break out, to live
somewhere outside the mid-Atlantic states where we’d both grown up, to slip
into a new land like a new set of clothes and see how it fit. Somewhere in the middle of the pile, I
noticed green. Law schools catalogs are
stolid things that convey the weight of their subject – the scales of justice,
debate, the Constitution. They are
rarely green. I pulled the catalog out
of the pile. A trillium on the cover, a
wavy, out-of-focus background that could have been forest floor, mossy stones,
a river. Oregon! I stared at the trillium and the Northwest
sent long, dripping fingers out from the center of that photograph and pulled
me into it.
Eight
years later, the promise of that trillium is easily lost in the weekday
gridlock, the high tech culture of Portland.
We did not, as I had daydreamed, settle in a log cabin deep in the
forest where silver rain falls and hardly makes any sound as it drips onto the
leafy carpet. All the jobs in patent law
are in the city. We acquired a
mortgage, another car, two dogs. I
spend the fall raking leaves from the cottonwood tree that dwarfs our
stamp-sized backyard, too busy to rummage around the ancient forests. I walk the dogs in a manicured park that
boasts a few old cedars and firs. The
creek that used to run wild through this area has been dammed up to form a
picturesque lake-pond in the center of the park, driving up not only our
property values but the water temperature as well, feeding ravenous blooms of
algae each summer, driving the ducks and geese away. A nagging voice reminds me that I didn’t come to Oregon for this
metered suburban life with such a tenuous connection to the ground under my
feet.
This
morning, I stood in the chilly air outside our rental cabin. After a late breakfast, we started down the
trail towards the Rogue and surprised a small doe curled up in a thicket,
resting in the cool shade. I fell back
easily into my nature-vacation habit of naming all the life we saw: a doe bounding
away from us; madrones with their sunburned, peeling bark; rainbow trout; Mahonia
repens, the Latin name so much more melodic than the common Oregon grape;
nuthatches, black-capped chickadees, red-tailed hawks. The perfect specificity of taxonomy wraps
its strong arms around me. How
satisfying it is to know where everything fits in. I am proud of my ability to name the life on this patch of land
near the river, as if it proves my right to breathe the same air.
We
think knowledge is power. In the months
before we came here, I spent hours poring over fertility texts and online
discussion boards where biological facts are reduced to such puerilisms as
“spermie” and “eggie,” devouring every reproductive-health news article I could
find, unable to stop myself even as I recognized the complete abandonment of
all natural precepts in my growing obsession.
I could not simply let things be; I refused to give Nature any say in
the whens and whys of my body. I stared
slack-jawed at reams of data on everything that could go wrong and suddenly
found I was on a scheduled tour of my own life, with limited stops and allotted
times for everything, and the computer on my desk the insistent tour
guide.
But
knowing – now that is a different story altogether. We stumbled out of the car on our first day
here in the woods, bleary-eyed from the distances of traffic and highway. We dropped our bags on the bed in our cabin
and turned right back out the doorway to tramp down to the river. The dogs already knew all they needed to;
unable to contain themselves, they bounded across the field toward the path,
ignored our calls. I talk a good game
about loving the poetry of place, but really, poetry of place is a dog rooting
around in the brush, surfacing with earth smeared all over his nose. All that matters is his taut body as it
rockets through the wet grass, through shrubs and branches that lash his face,
unconscious of any pain, any fear, any cautionary voices, just launching himself
blindly into this damp, green, holy world.
We follow at a more sedate pace, but we can learn.
In
nature, mealy-mouthed phrases like “trying to conceive” are unutterably
ridiculous. This is what draws me,
again and again, into the backwoods of the Northwest, where I can be just
another one of the animals, and not a very sharp one at that. Where I can throw off all my useless
knowledge and begin to look to the birds and the fish for my answers, to dip
into that pool of knowing that lives inside of me, a birthright not just of
humanity, but of every life that crawls, slithers, or lopes upon this
land. It strips away the self-made
burdens I carry and drops me into the middle of teeming riches. Finally, I can hear things: the wind in the
trees, the rasp of a heron hoisting itself into the air, the invisible gears
that cycle inside me, following the slow pull of the moon in the September
sky. This is the value of the
primitive lands we still have here, that drew me 3,000 miles across the country
at the sight of a single three-petaled flower, a value that will never merit a
line item on Weyerhauser’s balance sheets, no matter how rare such wilderness
becomes.
Each
gray squirrel scrounging for acorns and each bat wheeling and flapping in its
erratic dance as evening falls are known by someone, if only by each other, for
what they are, not by what material value they may hold for us. Here by the banks of the Rogue, I am not
some infertile wretch, overwhelmed by self-pity. I am just a girl standing in a river, remembering her place.
The
trout still somersaults, refuses every luscious fly cast his way. Some fine drizzly morning, the gears of his
life will swing around and his time will come, claimed by a lucky fisherman or
hungry bear. Cast again, cast again.