Fishing And Writing At The Creek

Caleb is in the creek, his back toward me. Fly fishing. The creek is swollen, redolent with moss and muck. The sleeves on his flannel shirt are rolled up, the better to pitch the leader and tippet downstream, which he does with impressive concentration at first. He stretches back his shoulder and almost slips—the creek has a current this morning. I had seen him last night. I had spotted his name on a marbled notebook. We had even talked a bit, shyly, because he is a writer, and I am one too.

I had come to this retreat in the foothills of the mountains in western Pennsylvania with the plan to ignore the other writers, and to write. This morning, I had taken my battered notebook to the creek. I don’t know where the women writers have gone to at this retreat. Not fishing. Caleb is younger than most, with nimble hands, gleaming, even teeth.

I chose this weekend-long writer’s retreat to start a long piece, another novel. However, the novel, even an outline, isn’t coming. I thought of what had saved me in the recent past: sudden or flash fiction, which is often described as stories 1,000 words or less, sometimes as short as a hundred words, or even less, six words. There are six-word fiction and creative nonfiction sites on the Internet, and they have saved me from despair before. Pop taught me how to fish. That’s not quite a story, but there’s a start to something there. It’s June but at the creek’s side, seated in an Adirondack chair with a notebook on my lap, it feels like March, bleak, unsettled, empty of words.

Caleb is up to his knees in the creek. He should wear boots but he doesn’t. He splashes in the water, clumsy, big-footed on the smooth river stones, on the gravel and silt. “Fuck,” he curses as the water gushes around him.

After a half hour or so of me not writing, and Caleb fishing, the trees bend closer to the creek with fat, fragrant droplet of rain. The tendrils of branches obscure the old trail, and the creek feels like an artery without a body. He reels in his fly line in slow motion and it is like I am watching a train easing out of the station, gathering speed. He flicks the line, the smallest snap before it grazes the water, once, and then after a breath, snap.

He searches downstream, tugs at his full beard flecked with creek water. The beard is probably really soft and smelling like moss. The waters thrum with fish swimming upstream, eager to spawn. The mud is lush and restless with worms. In my experience, this kind of spring brings out the brown bears. I search up and down the creek’s side, survey the woods beyond the cabins for him, and see nothing. Patience, Caleb.

Thrushes flock into the trees. The creek surges, as if wanting to be something else, a river, a sea.

Caleb slips. His knees go down. He flays and curses more before rising, bloodied, pants torn, hulking, panting. His chest expands in a roar. He tears twigs out of his beard and climbs out of the creek. “Shit.” He flounders onto the muddy banks, full of his disquiet, his fishing rod held like a shotgun at his side.

I want to tell him: How good the fishing is here. How the river trout are running this morning. How the fish will find you, and you will write; you will write about the waters, about the woods and bears, about love and sex, if you have patience, if you stay here at the widest part of the creek.

He tramps off downstream, away from the cabins and the Adirondack chairs, without acknowledging that me, a woman of a certain age, is watching him go. Maybe he thinks that I am writing my novel and doesn’t want to disturb me at the start of something endlessly long and involved and intricate. Or, maybe he is polite, or just intent on fishing undisturbed and finding his own inspiration.  

I will seek him out later, over a drink, a beer, or better yet, I saw him drinking bourbon last night and will hand him a bourbon shot. (I will not do this. I’m afraid that he will know how closely I watched him in the creek; but I like to imagine that I am the kind of writer who, on occasion, drinks shots of bourbon).  

On my lap, my pen streaks across my damp notebook, a cold rush of words, not quite a story. Patience, I repeat to myself. My Pop always wanted me to be more patient than I was, though he never was either—he cut all our week-long camping trips short; we only fished once or twice in our lives. There was always work to get back to—another life back home. Pop taught me how to fish.

Write this down. Write six words, write a hundred, write five hundred, or even a thousand. Let short and fast save you, if long cannot. Describe what I have just seen, with Caleb, with yourself. Think about the past when you went camping and fishing with your Pop, and the present, before you have to return to another life. Write.  

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Caroline Bock is the author of the award-winning debut short story collection, CARRY HER HOME, winner of the 2018 Fiction Award from the Washington Writers Publishing House. CARRY HER HOME features 47 short stories from flash to full-length, set in the 1960s to present day, many focusing on her Jewish-Italian American upbringing.

Find out more about her on her website www.carolinebockauthor.com and follow her onTwitter @cabockwrites.

 



Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing