Scrublands: Part II
I woke up to the sound of rain...
I woke up to the sound of rain. It was morning or morning enough. The light outside was dim and grey. I studied the tent ceiling. I could imagine it spinning. Years ago I would have been up and dressed in a hurry. But I stopped hurrying so much or I’ve tried to stop. Unless the weather demands otherwise, I try to let myself be patient with the morning. On very cold or wet days, you need to move. You need to get your body moving to produce heat. You need to dress. You need to heat water. You need to re-organize your gear or straighten the tent or change your socks. You need to move. There are other days, other mornings when it is better to wait, to go slow, to see not just the light but to see the light change, to find that languid edge between sleeping and waking, when your dreams are blurred with reality. Take your time, as a friend once told me, then you will have more of the day, more of the world to savor as it passes.
Tore got up and lit the fire.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.”
“It’s wet outside.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I heard from Stein Viggo this morning. He said the rain should stop by this afternoon. So we are not in a hurry, but I can make breakfast if you want.”
“I’m good.”
“No breakfast?”
“I may eat a piece of bread later. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I may go back to sleep. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. I just didn’t sleep well.”
I sat up in my sleeping bag and decided to clean my boots. I carried a canister of boot grease with me. I am intentional about using whatever I carry on trips. It’s an important part of knowing what to bring and what not to bring on future trips. My boots are older. They are leather and Italian made. I am not aware of another walker, hiker, or backpacker who would buy a pair of boots like these, though people must buy them or they wouldn’t be for sale. They are heavy. They need care. I brushed them off and then rubbed the grease into them. It made me happy to see how the leather darkened under the oil. It was confirmation of care and that my boots would be solid for another day. This is my second pair of these boots. I suspect my next pair, after these come apart, will be my last. I don’t know if I felt this sentiment because of my age or because my father had recently died. Part of our human experience is to have lasts—last boots, last sip of coffee, last I love you, last goodbye—and sometimes we are aware of our lasts. I cared for my father knowing that he would die and that he would die soon. The fire snapped in the stove. Tore read on his phone. I rubbed more grease into the boots and half prayed, half wished for more miles with them.
By two o’clock that afternoon we were driving to the lake where we would fish. Stein Viggo and Rajas took up the backseat of Tore’s car. I mean they took up all of it. There wasn’t space for another soul to breathe. We drove around 20 kilometers before we pulled-over and parked the car and began our walk to the lake. We were in the moonscape country, where the land was barren and shaped by stones. There are krøkebær bushes and stunted willow trees or what the Norwegians call vier kratt, but the rest was all stone and wind. I happen to love country like this, flat open spaces that extend to the horizons of no place else. When I was a child and my parents drove us from Utah to Texas to visit my grandparents, there were stretches of highway between the New Mexican border or Wichita Falls that my parents dreaded, yet I kept a private affection for that landscape. There were massive acres of grasslands, soybean crops, scarp, and the fallowed memories of homesteaders that were left behind whenever they had abandoned their shacks and shaky windmills. Sometimes you’d see a trough at the base of those slack windmills. A few of them held water, though I’m not sure how. The sun sweltered enough to dry them to the bone. I’m uncertain of what soul wandered by to crank whatever handle was necessary to leave water for drifters, be they two or four legged creatures. It was years later that I drove across the Great Plains. The Plains were more fertile than the Texas Panhandle, or they seemed that way. There were thousands of acres of croplands and grasslands, and the sky textured the land with shadows and light. There were distant, dark strips of virga always backlit by the sun and crepuscular that hinted at God’s return. I am drawn to these places. A landscape similar to what I have seen in the Far North is the Tibetan highlands, which are, like the North, windswept, barren, rock strewn. I was in that country once over twenty-five years ago, but I remember well the wind, the rocks, the stones, and unlike the North, the horizons of Tibet are walled with the Himalayas. It was there that a young girl approached me while we had stopped beside the road. We stopped to look at the country and to give our achy legs a stretch. The girl approached me and opened her hand and showed me a fossil she carried. She communicated that she wanted to sell the fossil. I had no idea what it should have cost. In her hand were the remains of an ancient sea creature imprinted onto stone. We were at 18,000 feet in elevation. I was dumb enough not to purchase the stone for what would have amounted to change. I told her ‘no’ by shaking my head. She didn’t seem disappointed. She went away to what I presumed was her family. They were tending yaks not far from where we had stopped. My friend, whom I was travelling with, came over to ask me what the girl had wanted.
“She tried to sell me a fossil.”
“And you didn’t buy it?”
“No.”’
“We’re 18,000 feet in the Himalaya and this little girl finds a rock with a sea creature on it and tries to sell it to you and you say ‘no?’”
“Yeah, I guess that’s about right.”
“I don’t know, kid. That seems kind of stupid to me.”
We trekked over the low ridges and hills towards the lake. Each of us carried rods and packs. The sun was hot. The weather had changed from cold rain to hot sun. While none of us would have wanted rain, we all would have preferred cold. The land crawled all the way to the sea. We could spy the sheer cliffs where the sea had carved fjords. The wind blew, and you felt the wind was constant in the country, though you tried not to desire a break from it. The wind is the wind. It is not personal. The wind is not trying to punish you. Beauty has consequences, be they the wind or a heart that’s been destroyed. There were lines of fenceposts, marking drive lanes and corrals where reindeer would be driven in the fall. Thousands of reindeer would be brought here in a couple of months. All of them, all of the reindeer belong to the Sami people. It can be said that the Sami are wealthy in reindeer. Tore said to me, “You know how you are not supposed to ask people about how much money they keep in the bank.” “Yes,” I said. “The Sami are like that with their reindeer. You do not ask a Sami how many reindeer he owns.” Then Tore added. “It is important to remember that not all Sami people own reindeer. There are coastal Sami, too. They live off fish and the fish economy, even today. They are Sami, but they do not own reindeer. Sometimes people think that the only people who are Sami are the reindeer Sami, but that is not true.”
We arrived at the lake, and it was big water. The wind chopped up the surface, and I didn’t see any place where I could fish. I could’ve fished blind, but I wasn’t going to do that. Lake fly fishermen cannot cover a lot of water, not like spinner fishermen. To fly fish a lake with confidence, you need to see fish or you need to be able to reach water where you are sure there is a fair chance of catching a fish. You need a weed bed, a shelf, a channel, an inlet or outlet. You need a place where you can cast and have true confidence that a fish might bite. Otherwise, you are more likely to cast where there are no fish at all. Walking down to the water, I pointed out four row boats that had been drawn up on shore. Tore and Stein Viggo saw them but didn’t say anything. Fly fishing a lake from a rowboat is a fine way to fish and a fine way to catch a fish. You can row to better water. You can fish into a weed bed and not across it or out into it like you do when you fish from shore. You can net the fish you catch easily and cleanly. There is a beauty to fly fishing from a rowboat. It is unhurried. And not to be forgotten, there is joy being in a rowboat, rowing along as you like, looking down into the water and looking across the country from a perspective that few people get to see. Nothing needs to happen. You are in a rowboat. You are fly fishing. You are, as Ratty from The Wind in the Willows proclaims, “simply messing about in boats.” This quote comes from a passage in the first chapter of The Wind in the Willows, in which Mole is learning about boats. He had never been out in a boat until he met Ratty. He sees Ratty’s enthusiasm for his river life and for his life in boats, but he questions his new friend. Mole asks him, “Is it so nice as all that?” Ratty is practically offended at his new friend’s ignorance. “Nice?” he begs of Mole, “It’s the only thing.” He goes on to explain to the Mole that, “there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” The Wind in the Willows goes with me everywhere. It is, in fact, my favorite book, and its relevance continues to inform my life. A water rat, a mole, a badger, and a magnificent toad are companions to my life, if only I was theirs.
Stein Viggo was aware of the boats. I suggested we use one of them. The hour was pushing three o’clock, and no one would be tramping to the lake at this time of day. No one. We would, of course, as I expressed to Stein Viggo, put the boat back after we finished fishing and then be on our way. Who would care? I told him if one of those boats had been mine, I wouldn’t care if anyone used it.
“Yes, but last week someone complained about this at the shop,” Stein Viggo said. “It was one of the owners of those boats. He came into the shop and complained that someone had used his boat.”
“How did he know?”
“He said the boat was not put back where he had left it.”
“Did they hurt his boat?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, it was fine then.”
Stein Viggo laughed.
“I don’t think it was fine for this man,” he said
“Besides,” said Tore, who had been listening to our conversation and had caught up with us, “the owner may have hidden the oars.”
“Do people do that?” I asked.
“Sometimes, yes,” said Stein Viggo.
“And sometimes fishermen need wood for a bonfire and oars sometimes look a lot like logs,” said Tore.
That was a very Tore way of speaking.
We reached the lake, and I didn’t string up my fly rod, which is to say I didn’t bother to string up my rod. Instead, I watched Tore and Stein Viggo make casts. They used their spinning rods. I would guess for each of them that their first half-dozen casts were hopeful, but then neither of them had a bite. They tried various spinners and spoons, but there were no bites. Tore loaned me his rod because, as he said, nature called, and I walked along the shore and against the wind away from where Tore and Stein Viggo had been fishing. I hadn’t gone far when I approached a fence that blocked the lake off from the shore. Above and below the fence, the earth had been trampled into mud and looked like a wallow. Reindeer had converged here. Their prints were everywhere in the mud. From here they had been driven around the lake and up to a fenced area beside the highway, where there were more corrals and more fence and a trailer and a couple of lavvu. There was maybe a car or two parked there, but I couldn’t remember. I didn’t look that closely. Thousands of reindeer would be driven here in autumn, in høst, which is the Norwegian word for autumn and one of the words I love. I crossed through the fence and went another few meters along the shore. There was a narrow ribbon of water between the shore and the tip of a small island. I couldn’t see into the water because of the wind, but there might have been a channel here or maybe a couple of shelves. I made a few casts, but like Tore and Stein Viggo, I didn’t get a bite. Nothing.
We ate lunch at the place where we had started fishing. We talked about the wind and the sun and the fishing and about the big fish Tore and Stein Viggo had heard about and that had been caught in this lake, including by Tore’s mother. But not today, we agreed, not today. After we ate and drank water and picked up after ourselves, we walked back to the car. I guess the fishing was like we had expected, though we didn’t talk much about it. The walk had been worth the trouble, and we got to see new country. Back in town, we dropped off Stein Viggo and Rajas. Stein Viggo’s mother was sitting outside on her porch. She smiled and waved at us and got up to hug me and Tore. She asked if I had finally learned Norwegian, and Tore shook his head on my behalf. She was glad to see us. She was glad, I think, to have visitors. She told me that the world was crazy and the U.S.A was especially crazy. I didn’t disagree. Tore, Stein Viggo and I tentatively planned to fish a river on Sunday, which was the day before Tore and I would drive back south. We would need a boat to reach the river, and Stein Viggo said his boat was ready to go. He had fished the river a couple of weeks prior to our arrival. He had caught a salmon in the river. He showed us pictures of the river and of the salmon. “Sunday then.” “Sunday.”
Tore drove us back to camp, and I looked for our tent as we approached the campsite. Given the slate-grey color of the tent and where we had positioned it at the base of two hills where grey stones had collapsed in the water, the tent was pretty much concealed. We were not at camp long when Tore suggested we drive to the village at the end of the road. Tore seemed restless. Maybe it was because he had not yet connected with his homeplace. For years I thought that to be at home or to return home was a matter of knowing and loving a landscape. You had to be able to cross nothing more than a ditch or a street and suddenly you might find yourself full of memory of that ditch, of that street, and then you would be home again. You would know the place. You would know the stories that came from the place and some of the stories would be yours. I felt this for the place where I had grown up, and I grew up in a place of dramatic scenery, where there were deep canyons and miles of high desert that felt hidden from the world. It was a landscape of edges, and it was a landscape that nourished both my body and my spirit. My legs grew strong from exploring the canyons and the mountains on the edge of the canyons. My dreams rose under the presence of God whenever I saw rain in the desert, whenever the view from a canyon rim whispered of an eternity. But as years passed, my bond with the landscape shifted away from it, yet I am hesitant to say that it lessened. I remain unclear about all that had changed, both within myself and within the landscape, though part of what changed was my kinship with the people from that place. There were fewer and fewer people who remembered the stories. There were fewer and fewer people who remembered canyons before signs had anchored everyone to the ground, who remembered backroads, or where the orchard had been before it was mangled into a cul-de-sac. Part of what I am still learning to understand is that the landscapes of my youth and of where I once called home was, maybe, ultimately cultivated by the heart.
For Tore, the village up the road is his homeplace, but we had not yet driven that far. The village was a settlement of a few modest cabins and a boat dock. Tore said that his uncle and his uncle’s wife were staying in the village. He wanted to say hello to them. He also wanted to see his father’s grave. He could not remember the last time he had visited the gravesite. So, we vacated camp and drove the last dirt road at the end of the world all the way to its end. There were edges everywhere. The sun was ahead of us and divided, as it was, into liquid passages between the clouds that curled above the sea. A golden light filled the valley and in the moment banished any words I might have used to describe it. Yet here was a world fluent in light and gifts.
If you missed Scrublands, Part One, click here to read it now:
Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.
If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.
If you have any thoughts about it, please leave a comment.
If you think others would like it, hit re-stack or share:
If you want to read more:
And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always contribute a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.
another wonderful journey into your world, damon. so many passages could have led to more. but you kept us in the moment and left it to us to go further. that to me is part of the brilliance of your writing. you allow us to find ourselves within your words.
Beauty has a cost. I’ll ponder that line. Always a quiet joy of discovery in reading your work Damon. I’m always trying to figure out your voice, its appeal. I think it may be the matter of factness of it, the lack of adornment. You’ve married your voice to the landscape you love.