Sitka Mountain Gear

A fisheries scientist and his father,
The Preacher, Gathering Salmon


I

Monofilament taken by the rod guides
as we have planted our spinners in the cold.
Wed Cohos light hit our hooks almost every cast,
shoaled and bite at low tide.
But dad played bad Presbyterian
Scots bad, bursting off an expensive decoy
after another as he tied knots ugly
fishing line and weakens
when improperly folded and crimped.
Strike after strike
Dad broke poorly thrown enter the swivel.
We looked at each bolt salmon or slides
in the shade with a golden plate
glow of his jaw, a flash stabbed the darkness.

I could not count the times I learned the Old
Node amount of change, the highest for terminal equipment,
made him drop his head on my hands and track
as I have wrapped, looped twice, then pause
before saying, 'Always take two
ends of the tightrope.
Deformation of a point in your stack of soft curves
lower the threshold of failure. "
But I preach my sermons on tensile
when a bite was on or salmon had just rolled
near the surface, shone with wide side.
Frantic to throw, his attention wavered
while adrenaline vacillating between his hands
and its nodes could not hold the Cohos he struck.




II

We plied our material while the clouds
Shaggy drifted in the Gulf of Alaska to snag
fleece wicks on the shoulders of the fjord,
Softening the escarpment to the north.
Dad and I had our boat threaded through the drizzle
the work of the estuary at the back of Katlian Bay, established
established by the parents, in turn, snow
melt and rain water, which generate
Katlian River. Our day was so calm
that whenever a decoy
punch through the skin of the bay
thunk light delivered to our ears
as the assertion whispered:
we were not there,
smaller than us.

Anchored to the sea
drowned valley, steep mountains and growing nearby,
we switched the treble hooks away from us
like little prayers iron, cast into the dark
from which another generation of Cohos
allied to their birthstream.
And the rain hanging gracefully above us.
And the forest littered the mountain to our anchorage.
And spruce and hemlock branches slung over the Littoral
curves, as if the gill net and threaded the needle to collect the mist.




III

Old whooped again, setting the hook,
then fell in line went slack. Again. He insulted
a chance to whisper, blinded by his desire,
unable to see the disgrace of its nodes.

Several crows came, as if a meeting of priests
mounting in trees that we had anchored by
Alert to trap fish viscera.
Elegant in their coats of feathers, the bird-
old choir chairs ahead, the members
Sitka spruce. They chanted their lawyers
as to scold him for the great one who escaped.

Presbyterian as hell, my father had always advocated
Grace, his chair a casting platform,
the sanctuary a place of capture and output
the hands of the gentle Angler
in the relaxation of iron from a jaw stung.
But there, beside the estuary Katlian, he left
the taste of prayer refused to acids in the mouth,
look at me as I hitched
yet another parent to us.




IV

"Getting a big one!"
Throughout my life fishing
is what the old man had asked my back.
I shoulder my heavy flyrod
and lower the familiar.