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Date: January 30, 2008 at 01:22:16
From: ken, [pool-64-223-43-111.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: November Reveries |
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Sept November etc
November is a time of waiting.
The waiting is there inside of everything you do.
Orion is in the sky rising in the East with his belt and sword.
A winter sky but not quite.
The year is over and yet it is not.
It is a time of reflection.
Thanksgiving comes in November.
Steelhead are moving up their rivers and trout rise to the little olives. Tiny ones so small that I can not see them now that my eyes are in their November. The stripers are moving south slowly now, the large slow fish are moving through.
Orion looks down and I wonder if the stripers see him on their journey.
Perhaps they do in some primal unknowable way.
Some days are soft and some are hard and crisp. Trees are brown and wood smoke is in the air from time to time. There is a pungent smell in the woods and bogs and pheasants cry out and crow. Ducks fly by and sit in the coves and the bays. You can hear them talking all night and the geese circle in the night sky their wings whistling as they call out to each other.
The moon is the last moon of the year and the next one is a marker of the solstice.
November is an end but not quite
November is the month when I cannot stop thinking about steelhead.
I remember the first one I ever saw. I cannot forget the look in her eye. Wild and free and driven to complete her task, strange how a fish can have a task and yet it is there obvious to your eye and one does recognize that purpose so completely that there is no doubt that it is truly there. There is no fear in that eye. No resignation to failure just a waiting presence, an awareness of purpose and death is not a factor just purpose total abandonment to that purpose which can not be known by man fully only by her and her brethren.
We can only watch and wonder if we wonder about such things at all.
A steelhead on her journey is a mystery and we can touch her if we have the will. That spirit that dwells in her so completely can only be seen it cannot be captured by man only touched with our eye. And yet in some way, in some unfathomable way it does change us through the witnessing of it. Can a fish hold that much nobility in her being?
I know she can and so in November I wish to see it once again before I pass.
Alexander in all his glory was perhaps as noble as this fish perhaps a little less.
November Rivers are cold and hard. Grey days and blue grey water, ice along the edges. Winter is not here yet when the ice makes sheets across the riffles and in the hardest part paves the stones beneath the flows. And the steelhead hover there beneath the canopy of ice and hold in the icy flows content to wait. A river in November is a portent of all these coming wonders that are only seen by those with a heart of adventure to be felt and seen far from the warmth of walls and fire.
November is easy.
The water is still soft. The big hook jawed males come first and the hens are there among them watching, swimming moving further and further up the flows and each evening as the light fades and the river dims to sight they swim in circles through the pools and make their rolls and some do jump to the sky and crash back down and perhaps they are full of joy or perhaps it is a pent up energy of wanting to be in the throws of fishy fornication. Who can tell?
Some do make redds before the time. I have seen them and been amazed.
Some do and some wait till evening and swirl and jump and somehow test the boundaries of their containment and touch the sky and set themselves free for a moment and then move on or perhaps sleep in some steelheadish dream.
Do steelhead dream?
They must and I for one would have it so. Steelhead dreams are of the river or perhaps of flying up a waterfall and down, down, down into the depths of an abyss or maybe of the sky and of the stars and of Orion. Who can tell?
Sweet November brings the steelhead dreams and the trout and the stripers?
Yes and them too.
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