Natural karma, wild trout and lies not told on the Greenbrier River

It seems such a modest number, five miles. In a car – or a boat, even – the distance passes rapidly, blurring with each minute. Daydream but for a moment and it’s over, a flash relegated to short-term memory before disappearing altogether.

There was a time I considered myself a smart man, but all notions of the inherent intelligence and understanding of my species in general – and myself in particular – vanished the moment I made a crucial mistake while spending a weekend float-fishing, by kayak, with my dad.

To pull off a two-person, five-mile float trip along the Greenbrier River in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, especially when one of the vehicles in your possession is not a pickup truck and therefore cannot transport one kayak, let alone two, it should be self evident that two cars are therefore required. The logistics are a bit mind-numbing.

It helps to explain the 11-step process, if patience allows:

1. Get up bright and early from camp, before sunrise, and drive two cars to the river’s take-out.

2. Leave one car at the take-out (the one that cannot transport one kayak, let alone two).

3. Climb aboard the truck together, and drive the kayaks to the put-in.

4. Load both kayaks into the river, and hop aboard.

5. Fish all day, through five miles of river.

6. Arrive at take-out, exhausted.

7. Leave one person with the kayaks while the other drives the car (the one that cannot transport one kayak, let alone two) back to the put-in.

8. Leave car (the one that cannot transport one kayak, let along two) at the put-in, driving the truck to the take-out (where the kayaks and the other fisherman is waiting).

9. Load both kayaks, and drive the truck back to the put-in (where there sits the car that cannot transport one kayak, let alone two).

10. Take both cars back to camp.

Merely a hint of summer’s coming humidity greeted the day in question, the dawn having broken bright and clear and cool. The river ran swiftly, the fish eager. Zealous rock bass, pulled from the waters with their unblinking eyes of deep scarlet. Luminescent bluegill and sunfish, tattooed with an array of color along their bony mouths. Swift and enthusiastic smallmouth lay in wait in the deeper pools, launching out from beneath rocks to snatch their counterfeit prize. Then, of course, our raison d'être: rainbow trout. Skittish. Elusive. Delicious. The end of any such trip should invariably be the tales by the campfire, fillets of trout sizzling in a cast-iron pan. It was of dreams of such a delightful end that fueled our kayak’s motion nearly as swiftly as the rapid current of the Greenbrier River.

Through years spent on riverbanks with my father and, later, on my own or with friends, I’ve had ingrained in me what Howell Raines, an angler of some renown who was once the editor of the New York Times, called “the Redneck Way.” But fishing for quantity, not quality, is an evolutionary adaptation not easily shaken, akin to eating a bag of chips not because of hunger, but because the Id wills it. As an adult, I’ve learned to ignore some demons on my shoulder better than others and, in turn, have become a kinder, gentler angler, prone to catch-and-release.

But in times of a great fishing frenzy, usually in the company of my father or old friends from my childhood, I’ve succumbed to the song of a scaly siren who says, “Catch them! Catch them – and kill them all.”

And so we did.

Not all of them, of course. Some fish, as if by some primal understanding of their awaiting fate, thrust themselves out of the water with abandon, throwing the hook from their mouths. Still others, how many I do not know, and whether by fear or instinct, made no attempt to feed. As the higher animal, we bestowed God-like mercy on the small, the weak and those not normally known for their taste (read: bass), casually and unceremoniously dismissing them into the water with nary a thought the moment the hook was removed.

Those that met our carnivorous criteria went on a stringer, a cruel device indeed, medieval in purpose and practice: a metal ring and sharpened point connected by a length of fabric, often nylon. When a prized fish is caught – the right size and species – the spear is threaded through its mouth and out one of its gills, and the entirety of the rope follows until the metal ring, larger than the fish’s mouth, halts its progress. In this way fish can be stacked on top of each other and left trailing in the water, alive, until the angler ends the sad affair by dumping the whole lot in a cooler of ice. A combination of suffocation and hypothermia, then, is the method of execution.

It follows, then, that the first trophy has to suffer multiple indignities.

There is the initial catch, followed by the stringer. A return to the water leads the fish to believe itself free. But yet, time and again, it is pulled from the water when one of its cousins is likewise captured, and the process of freedom and incarceration repeats itself. The recidivism rate is high for the first catch. What’s more, it is likely the first to die, lying still in a plastic coffin full of the very thing that gives it life. Except, in its solid form, water only hastens its death.

Thus the karmic drama began the moment our day on the river ended, brought to pass, I would later believe, by a row of trout dangling from their gills in the cold water of the Greenbrier River, tails like flags of surrender waving in the current.

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“I don’t have my keys.”

“They aren’t in your chest pack? They didn’t fall in the river, did they?”

“No and no. I think I left them in the truck.”

At least that was the hope, once a check of the boat and all my gear proved fruitless.

The day had ended – at least the part that truly mattered, and so Pop sat down among the brush, and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “Best get going. It’s a long walk.”

While a cynic, if not by nature then certainly by experience, I looked for silver linings in the dark clouds overhead. The distance, though daunting at first blush and after a day spent fishing in the hot sun, should be no problem. I’d hiked much longer distances. The terrain itself was not problematic, either. The Greenbrier River Trail is a gentle companion, trod by old men and young boys, by families on bicycles bought from Wal-Mart. An old railroad route, used in times past to shuttle vast swaths of virgin timber from the Alleghenies to markets far afield, the GBT is flat and graded, its ties long gone, following the river for 100 miles – but only five lay between our two cars.

Pop’s eyes were already closed, his breathing heavy. He’d removed his river shoes and lay barefoot in the shade. Gnats hovered in the thick mountain air, and a serene breeze wafted through the underbrush. I left my gear beside him, taking only a nearly empty water bottle and my regret.

The first mile was easy, like stepping into a Thomas Cole canvas, the trail covered in arching boughs of sycamore, maple and oak. Ancient rocks, covered in verdant, pillowy moss, lined the hillside, interspersed with twisted branches of rhododendron. Yet with each footstep in the dirt, the piney aroma of moss and mud and decaying trees, I felt a growing psychic weight.

I imagined spared fish swimming languidly in silt-stirred pools, their lips scarred by the hooks of untold fishermen, the memory of their capture and eventual release long gone, their size or species having spared them from the pain of a filleting knife and the indignity of the frying pan. Would they be pleased at my plight, of the miles I had left to travel as they lazily undulated in water that formed high in the cumulus overhead, until saturated, they poured atop the mountains before the water found its way into swollen creeks rushing in a meager torrent toward the Greenbrier?

What do these fish truly understand? Do they know the creation myth of their domain? There is an aquatic irony at play, lost on these denizens of the Greenbrier as it funnels into a river as ancient as their evolution: the New River, as old as time. Wider now, the water picks up its pace, joining with the Gauley to form a still bigger river – the Kanawha – along the land of my birth. At the junction of three states, the Kanawha disappears into the Ohio, deepening and moving faster now, bound for the Mississippi -- the Old Man -- full of old myths and tall tales, dark brown and opaque. Then: blue! The waters of the Gulf of Mexico, shallow and serene, knowing nothing of how it all began, only that something tells it to keep going, deeper and darker, into the Atlantic, rising with the heat of the sun into pillowy clouds destined to drift, once again, over the green expanse of the Appalachians and a return to those pebble-strewn creeks: a Mobius strip of water and earth. Over and over again, this cycle, which formed into a fitting a metaphor for a solitary figure walking along a trail, each bend bringing him no closer to the end of his journey. Ulysses in the Alleghenies.

Or so it seemed as I walked, taunted by foolishness and abject stupidity. All caused by a lost set of keys. Or was it a fisherman’s karma, a bill built up over the years finally coming due? I imagined the trout, buoyed by schadenfreude, enjoying the revenge that is surely theirs after a life spent as the object of pleasure for weekend warriors floating on the waters above, casting fake food into deep pools.

There was no such drama, much as I’d like to tell you a story of great adventure. Of having to camp overnight along the trail, eating green, unripened blackberries that induced diarrhea until, weakened by lack of fluids and exhaustion, my near lifeless body required rescue by Forest Service Rangers. My soul longs to craft a tale worthy of being remembered by generations to come, children who bear the color of my hair and eyes but whose names I’ll never know. A harrowing epic of survival. Sisyphus with a fly rod.

But again, the trail was flat and the distance modest. My only encounter with Appalachian fauna was a small garter snake who, having tasted my scent with its tiny, forked tongue, slithered quickly off the trail in fear. Would the angry squirrel suffice? It barked insolently at my presence beneath his beech tree, protestations that faded as I plodded on in the pre-dusk gloaming. It was no Grendel. There would be no epic tale. Only a fool made uncomfortable by breaking the Boy Scouts’ cardinal rule.

He was unprepared.

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Hemingway tells the story of a young soldier, under siege during a battle between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces near the Piave River, during World War I. Classic Hemingway, it needs no great exposition to get at its central theme: what lies do we tell ourselves in moments of crisis?

I thought of that nameless soldier as Pop stoked the pulsating coals of our campfire, serenaded by a summer chorus of unseen frogs and cicadas. Above the silhouette of deciduous trees, icy pinpricks of starlight bundled together, and millions more just out of sight lay somewhere in the unfathomable distance, hidden by a gibbous moon and the orange glow around which we huddled, eating fried trout.

I’d told no lies, and made no promises. Not to the Jesus whose story went untold to a prostitute in Italy, circa 1918. Nor to myself or, more importantly, the trout whose lives brought us to this river, in the wilds of West Virginia.

I will return again.