Where Paradise Lay

By John Holt

Natalie and the valley’s derelicts live in a wilderness paradise, but a gold mining company is about to savage a local mountain known as Jane’s Hill. Can they stop it? Probably not. But Natalie -- a woman whose attitude was sizably influenced by the life and writings of Gertrude Stein -- continues to work on the problem as she throws “sedate salons” at her Joint, a two-story lodge of rough-hewn logs, and fishes the clear streams for brookies. She knows the mine will kill the river. That’s why she finds a conflict in being nice to Parker, the six-foot-tall, sandy-haired mine manager. But then there’s her unresolved relationship with Jack. Sarah, the shrink from Missoula, is always reminding her of those issues. And meanwhile Painter Bob is stirring up local folk, saying they should bomb the mine. My God, what if they did?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AbsolutelyAmazingEbooks.com
• Release date: Mar 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310051654

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Examinations of Paradise

WHERE PARADISE

LAY

John Holt

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Where Paradise Lay copyright © 2016 by John Holt. Electronic compilation/ paperback edition copyright © 2016 by Whiz Bang LLC.

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For Ginny,

... With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the center. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

In view of the all too common tendency to identify characters in fiction with real people, it seems proper to state that there are no real people in this book: both the characters and their names are fictitious. If the name of any living person has been used, the use was purely accidental. The same goes for those who have moved on in the process.

WHERE

PARADISE

LAY

-One-

THE HERON STANDS ON A GREY, WEATHERED LOG. MOTIONLESS, looking like the fractured stub of a broken limb. Invisible. The bird’s long, pointed beak is aimed at the heart of a small eddy swirling at its feet. The Great Blue’s eyes bore into the clear water, through the bubbling surface down where small rainbows are holding just above the graveled streambed. The bird sees only those wild trout, never noticing the whitetail deer feeding beneath the pine trees across the river, or the skunk as it pushes its way along the bank, nose down sniffing for food. Mayflies lift from the river’s surface. Trout rise to eat these insects. A cluster of yellow butterflies gather on a patch of moist silt nearby, wings lazily opening and closing in the light. A bald eagle soars by far overhead using the soft force of a warm breeze to cover the streamcourse swiftly, effortlessly. The heron notices none of this, only the small rainbow gliding slowly upwards towards the center of the swirling water, opening its jaws to take an emerging mayfly trapped temporarily in the eddy. As the fish sips in the insect, the heron’s neck shoots down, its beak spearing the trout in the back and through its white belly. The small fish wriggles to free itself causing the large bird’s head to jerk back-and-forth and up-and-down. Then the trout quivers briefly and dies. The heron moves silently from the log on its long legs, back into calm, shallow water sheltered by overhanging brush and grass. The bird makes short work of the rainbow, then swishes its beak rapidly in the water, shakes its feathers back in place and resumes its position on the log. Motionless. Dead still eyes peering through the water.

~ ~ ~

She is never ready when they come out of the darkness. She will be lying on her back in bed late at night, eyes closed, thinking of him. The good times that went past magic. The bad times that were pure hell. And she imagines how she hopes things can be somewhere down the road. Then as her mind starts to drift towards sleep the faces appear. Ordinary, harmless at first glance, but once they make eye contact they turn wickedly garish, their mean light ripping into her. They laugh madly, the sound mocking who she is, hating her. They visit so often that she is no longer afraid of them now. They startle her with their abrupt arrival, but she doesn’t fear them anymore. In some ways she knows them well, but she’s always taken by surprise when they invade her thoughts.

Who are they, really? She recognizes them but who are they? Often they lead her to a landscape of low hills and tall emerald grass. A place where rough buildings of grey weathered boards line a muddy street down in the dimly lighted valley. The structures do not have any outside walls, much like an incomplete movie set. She can look in and see people pacing, smoking cigarettes, drinking, screaming at each other, playing cards at bare tables. She’s been inside many times in her dreams, visions filled with terror, sorrow of the most hopeless kind, episodes of sordid sex, drugs. A bad place that she’s inexorably drawn to for unknown reasons, reasons she knows she needs to understand. The faces float about the buildings mocking her in electric silence, in extreme heat and humidity, absolute despair, pain. And past the green hills there is nothing. Absolutely nothing. When she walks beyond this landscape she is instantly back in bed, awake, sleep a long way off. The desperate fear she feels was from those in the buildings, not from within her, but intense all the same. She always returns from this wasteland exhausted, dissipated.

The faces first began when he left, the night after they’d parted at a motel in Livingston. A brutal time of reckoning and too much honesty. A time when they both realized, knew for certain, that things between them weren’t working and maybe never would. She drove home in a depression that made her crazy. After taking several sleeping pills, she pulled off her clothes and climbed under the deep down quilts. In her sleep she saw herself sitting at a desk in a darkened room as a black liquid shape wrapped itself around her, smothering her identity, her soul. She woke up screaming, shaking. Then the faces came at her in bursts of wide eyes and blazing white teeth, diving at her from the ceiling and from out of the walls. The first few times this happened the only relief was turning on all the lights and the TV, then filling a water glass full of Jim Beam. More drugs and the whiskey. Then she could sleep, now that her mind was shut down. After a while she no longer needed the booze or pills.

The faces scare her because they aren’t like the way she wants people to be or hopes they are inside. They come unexpectedly. The faces are part of her life, at least for now. She’d accepted this much.

As time passed she was able to detect their approach. Subtle images of everyday objects would drift across her mind’s eye, these she recognized as precursors to their visits. The faces would come shortly. They always did. Usually they could be driven off by concentrating on them individually. They would simply vanish in darkness when she focused on them. Lately she works at drawing them into her to try and see who they are. What they are. What they represent. They never change. Never show their inner selves, their souls. There are many of them. Demons, but whose, she wonders? Last night the one that looks like a cancerous clown on a bad acid trip haunted her. As she stared hard at the face it metamorphosed into the man she loved. Expressions of cruelty, anguish and hatred flickered across his features. He looked at her with hard, black eyes. There was no love or caring in them.

In the name of Jesus, go away, she had prayed.

~~~

The river flows quietly down here, drifting below cut banks of rock and clay. Dry, powdery-green grasses, roots exposed along ragged edges of the dry soil above the water, grow above as do stands of Ponderosa pine. Small bands of deer, three, five, seven, browse among wildflowers now fading in the growing heat of summer. None of this matters to the river of course. It just runs on down to its meeting with the Clark Fork around Missoula. There, the two waters mingle, mixing in a long line a person could see from the Interstate if he bothers to look. The river’s aquamarine ridges against the deeper green of the Clark Fork for hundreds of yards until the two blend into a subtle shade that is a mixture of each of them – another river, different, but still the same. But back up here the current works its way patiently as it slides under the banks, gliding over and around smooth boulders, across sandy flats or bubbles among stretches of rocky streambed. Large brown trout hide in the darkness, holding steady, slipping briefly into the light to snatch a grasshopper that plops on the river’s surface or to crush a minnow that makes a careless move. Rainbows, tails up and flashing in the sunlight, nose among the rocks in shallow water, kicking up mayfly and caddisfly nymphs. Easy pickings for the trout. This is the way it will be until the clouds, rains and finally heavy snows come in October and November. The rhythm is constant and changes only with the appearance of brief thunderstorms that raises and clouds the river. The hatching of insects varies by species as the days move along, but the trout and the silvery mountain whitefish never stop feeding. They don’t care about time any more than the river does. They’re aware of only the need to eat and avoid being eaten. The fish feed on whatever is prevalent and easiest to kill.

The river is just the river, not a conscious entity like you or I. The river doesn’t care about anything. No worries, just water moving down hill doing gravity’s bidding.

Upstream below a slight bend, a dark-haired woman stands at the edge of a deep glide. The day is already hot, mid-eighties. She’s wearing nothing more than cutoffs, rubber sandals and a white T-shirt. A slight breeze pushes the careless grasshoppers above the swaying grasses and out over the water. The browns are lined up like wolves waiting for them. Nothing delicate about this. Slashing, pouncing, smacking of toothy jaws. Natalie imagines that she can hear the trout’s teeth crashing together as they grind down on the crunchy carapaces of the insects. She works fifty feet of line back and forth enjoying the sight of the water vaporizing into fine spray as it merges with the light creating miniature rainbows. The rod is cane from the Tonkin region of southeast Asia, an old rod that her father gave her when she was fifteen. One of the last made by Wes Jordan, a true artist in the arcane art of constructing bamboo fly rods that are not tools but rather extensions of the fly fisher’s arm and his mind. The wood glows with a red-brown grain and matching silk windings. A wonderful example of vanishing craftsmanship that took hundreds of hours to make. For years she rarely used the rod, afraid of breaking the precious instrument on an errant back cast or a large trout. She brought it out only on some small spring creeks near her home, taking little cutthroat and rainbows. One day Jack told her that not using the rod, leaving it in its leather case in a closet, did its maker and the rod a disservice. Jack fishes more than anyone she knows. He occasionally writes magazine articles and books about his experiences, far-fetched, wild situations that few people believe, but Natalie does. She’s been there for some of them. His book Chasing Fish Tales is considered a classic in the eccentric world of fly fishing. So is his collection of short stories called Guide Wars. He’s never made much money at the writing, but he’s often told her that some internal fire drives him to write even a little every day, that this is not about money or recognition but something he can’t really explain and doesn’t feel the need to define either for others or himself. They’ve been on-again, off-again fishing companions and lovers for a long time. He’s taken the time to show her that the stories he tells are real if you know where to look and spend the time to really see, to examine things slowly. Takes concentration not to concentrate, he said one day. She asked him if he knew what that meant and he said Hell no, and started laughing. Vintage Jack, she thinks every time she recalls the incident.

The damn thing was meant to be fished, he said. Better to blow it up on a cannibal brown. Fish with it. Don’t drag it out once or twice a year and stare at it like it’s some painting hanging on a wall in a museum. Fish with it. Let it show you what casting really can be.

So she took his advice, as she usually does, and now fishes almost exclusively with the cane rod. Except when she uses a little si6-1/2’ Paul H. Young Little Giant bamboo rod she discovered in a second hand store down in Broadus in the southeast corner of the state several years ago. She was looking through old books, searching for a first edition, first printing of anything for her library when she spotted the dark leather-covered rod case gathering dust in a dark corner. Twenty dollars was all she paid. Jack said the rod was probably worth close to $4,000 considering its near-mint condition. And he looked at the rod, then Natalie and then hugged her laughing all the while and saying You have radar that defies my understanding.

When she cast with either one of them, they truly are a part of her, an extension of her arm and she laughs out loud while standing in the river, out loud with the joy of being alive and standing in the river doing what she loves.

Natalie snaps a quick haul on the line as it loads on the back cast and sends the bug sailing across the river’s surface on a slight downward arc propelling the hopper crashing into the water where it ricochets a few feet to land above a large brown she’s watched feeding for some time. The raucous touchdown down catches the trout’s eye. The fish charges ahead leaving a widening wake as it moves quickly against the current. She can see the fish’s white mouth open and swallow the fly. No need to set the hook, the brown takes care of that with its vicious take. It thrashes the surface at the first bite of the point and barb. She dislikes barbless hooks along with most of the arrogance and pretension that often surfaces around the concept of catch-and-release fishing. She wants to make sure that she lands what she connects with. Natalie wants to drop to her knees in the river and hold the trout, feel its cold, smooth wildness. She’s tried to pretend to herself for a long time that there isn’t anything sexual in being a predator among the wild, but she knows that she’s only trying to hide from the truth, to ignore her true motivations and feelings. Being a predator is at once violent, secretive and sexual. Life and death.

So, the hell with it, she thinks. Let it slide. Enjoy the rush.

The brown is well into her backing, the line taut but bowed slightly over distance in the river. The rod bends towards the water, throbbing up and down. Nothing sensual here, either, she said to the curious whitetails. Line is slowly regained and then the brown lies spent in the shallow water at her feet. Stooping down she twists the hook from the trout’s jaw, drawing blood that mixes with some of her own as it drips bright red from a clean slice along her thumb ripped by the fish’s teeth. She lifts the creature in her hands and pushes it towards the sun, laughing joyfully as she does so. Deep browns, rich yellows, black and crimson spots, burnished coppers, hard silvers and the white mouth glow against the blue sky. Natalie holds the trout in the air a long time before she kills it by whacking its head on a rock. She enjoys eating trout sometimes and killing the fish this way is swift and harshly merciful. This also preserves the quality of the flesh for cooking instead of having the meat fill with lactic acid from stress.

Thank you for this fish, she says quietly to the land, head shaking slowly back and forth. Just plain nuts, I guess.

She walks to shore as the stream’s water combines with more of her blood that ran down the front of her shorts. She smiles at this.

This brown, me, all of us bleed in our own ways in this one, she thinks.

The river does not mind. Doesn’t care. How can it, being nothing more than a combination of water, silt, fish and insects mixed among flashes of light and dark? Be realistic here. A river is just a river and this one is not changed by Natalie’s intrusion. One less brown trout is all.

~~~