We’ve just ended a sorely-needed week of vacation near Yellowstone. Dad bought into this fishing ranch in the 1960s, and I’ve spent a week here nearly every summer since I was eight. The ranch gave me my first job stringing fence and herding cattle, more horse-fly bites than I can count, and a lifelong conversation with my father.
He and I have argued about politics and parenting, sighted wildlife, gotten nostalgically drunk, and listened silently to the riffles running past the porch of the log house he built for his retirement. Fortunately, we’ve become better listeners to each other since he died 14 years ago. I recently came across a hardback edition of “The Jungle Book” that Dad inscribed to me on my eighth birthday. He had apparently hoped I would absorb Rudyard Kipling’s animal fables of obedience to one’s parents and superior officers, and so take my place in the social order that once supported the might of empire. Unfortunately, he gave me the book in 1968, a time when everyone under 30 (myself included) judged Kipling to be full of fascist crap, so I never read it.
But Dad was laughing at me the other night.
The best trout fishing on this property happens between dinner and dark. You can choose the river, which involves work, skill, and stealth, or you can fish the pond, which merely requires that you heave your fly a decent distance from shore. I was too rebellious as a teen to permit Dad to teach me to fish the river properly. But he did drill into me the ability to cast a fly, and I love floating a long line over still water with the sunset deepening into moonlight, and listening for trout to rise. It’s in the cast, and the anticipation, that the pleasure lies. Actually catching anything almost ruins it.
A family of beavers also inhabit the pond these days. In Dad’s era, beaver were not allowed to keep lodges on the pond, nor on the prime fishing stretches of the river, owing to their tendency to disagree with humans over the proper course of water. Dad and his partners employed a retired game warden named Pinky Sears to oversee the ranch, and his wildlife management plan for beaver featured a .38 service revolver. He sometimes let me fire it at brown bottles while he made remarks about “expelling flatus.” In those days, I got along with Pinky a lot better than with Dad.
Of course, with both of them now gone, my generation is making the decisions, and we mostly voted for Obama. Consequently, when I walked out to my favorite fishing point at dusk two nights ago, a beaver swam straight towards me from his lodge on the far bank. He stationed himself about 30 feet to my right, lay on his back, paddled in circles, and periodically slapped his tail in the water (which, if you’ve never heard it, sounds like a cannonball into a swimming pool). I thought, “OK, fine. You can have that spot. I’ll fish the other side of the point.” But just as I turned and began to cast, a second beaver cruised up and started putting on the exact same show to my left, about the same distance away. I couldn’t decide whether they were channeling Kipling or Gandhi, but the result was the same. As darkness fell and I stood there processing the fact that I was being hazed off the pond I’ve fished for 45 years by a pair of goddamned beavers, I heard my father’s favorite phrase: “John, the REALITY is, somebody’s got to be in charge.” I still chafe against the idea that there’s “a” reality, but with two live beavers and my dead father ganging up on me at once, there’s only so much denial I can sustain.