Trout Fishing in America Read Free Page A

autumn wind upon them, they had decided that the future held only two directions: They were either going to open up a flea circus or commit themselves to an insane asylum.
    So they talked about it while they drank wine.
    They talked about how to make little clothes for fleas by pasting pieces of colored paper on their backs.
    They said the way that you trained fleas was to make them dependent upon you for their food. This was done by letting them feed off you at an appointed hour.
    They talked about making little flea wheelbarrows and pool tables and bicycles.
    They would charge fifty-cents admission for their flea circus. The business was certain to have a future to it. Perhaps they would even get on the Ed Sullivan Show.
    They of course did not have their fleas yet, but they could easily be obtained from a white cat.
    Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood would make intelligent fleas.
    And so it went on until it was exhausted and we went and bought another fifth of port wine and returned to the trees and Benjamin Franklin.
    Now it was close to sunset and the earth was beginning to cool off in the correct manner of eternity and office girls were returning like penguins from Montgomery Street. They looked at us hurriedly and mentally registered: winos.
    Then the two artists talked about committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter. They talked about how warm it would be in the insane asylum, with television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes, a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes, a locked razor and lovely young student nurses.
    Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.

Tom Martin Creek
    I walked down one morning from Steelhead, following the Klamath River that was high and murky and had the intelligence of a dinosaur. Tom Martin Creek was a small creek with cold, clear water and poured out of a canyon and through a culvert under the highway and then into the Klamath.
    I dropped a fly in a small pool just below where the creek flowed out of the culvert and took a nine-inch trout. It was a good-looking fish and fought all over the top of the pool.
    Even though the creek was very small and poured out of a steep brushy canyon filled with poison oak, I decided to follow the creek up a ways because I liked the feel and motion of the creek.
    I liked the name, too.
    Tom Martin Creek.
    It’s good to name creeks after people and then later to follow them for a while seeing what they have to offer, what they know and have made of themselves.
    But that creek turned out to be a real son-of-a-bitch. I had to fight it all the God-damn way: brush, poison oak and hardly any good places to fish, and sometimes the canyon was so narrow the creek poured out like water from a faucet. Sometimes it was so bad that it just left me standing there, not knowing which way to jump.
    You had to be a plumber to fish that creek.
    After that first trout I was alone in there. But I didn’t know it until later.

Trout Fishing on the Bevel
    The two graveyards were next to each other on small hills and between them flowed Graveyard Creek, a slow-moving, funeral-procession-on-a-hot-day creek with a lot of fine trout in it.
    And the dead didn’t mind me fishing there at all.
    One graveyard had tall fir trees growing in it, and the grass was kept Peter Pan green all year round by pumping water up from the creek, and the graveyard had fine marble headstones and statues and tombs.
    The other graveyard was for the poor and it had no trees and the grass turned a flat-tire brown in the summer and stayed that way until the rain, like a mechanic, began in the late autumn.
    There were no fancy headstones for the poor dead. Their markers were small boards that looked like heels of stale