Searching for Paradise

When my mom was little, my grandmother took her camping every summer, setting up an elaborate spot on the shores of Lake Tahoe with my mother, my uncle, and other adventurous families. My grandmother brought carpets, which she rolled out over the dirt and swept every morning. My grandfather stayed home, happily spending his days at work and his evenings reading alone in his den.

History seems to dictate that the husbands in our family not like camping. My dad never liked it and neither does Blue. Although I notice he doesn’t mind the full-sized mattress I set up using the car battery, nor sleeping separately from the kids in a tent big enough to stand in.

My mother and I solved this dilemma easily enough by going camping together. We camped on rivers all over Northern California. One summer as she was approaching her eightieth birthday, she said she would like to camp at the Lake Tahoe of her childhood. So we did, staying within a stone’s throw of Emerald Bay and walking the Rubicon Trail. As per tradition, we set up an inviting camp, cooked gourmet meals, and read our books by flashlight in the tent. Still, my mother had had enough of the manual labor involved in camping, the extreme afternoon temperatures, and squatting to get in and out of the tent. A few summers before, she had treated my brother Timothy, an artful fly fisherman, to a few days on the McKenzie River in Oregon. My mother, who had fished pristine rivers in Canada and the Rockies, said the McKenzie River was her favorite, partly, I think, because of the planted section where fishers could catch their trout to cook over a fire.

I could pretend I was concerned that summer for my mother’s welfare, but the real reason I kept asking about the cabin on the McKenzie River was to secure an invitation myself. Thus it was that my mother spent her last camping trip on the shores of the same lake where she had camped as a child, and the following July we flew to Oregon.

As a woman of eighty-plus years who camped and fly fished, my mother was but a fledgling. We were going to have dinner with her friend Dixie, who at ninety-six ruled the waters on the northern McKenzie. Dixie had spent her summers in a cabin on the river with her husband, and after he died she went there to recover. Now she lived half the year in the cabin that had not changed since the 30’s when it was built. When we arrived for dinner, the kitchen windows were thrown open to the woods and the sounds of the river rushing by. A turkey breast warmed in the convection oven, and orzo cooked in an electric crock-pot on the deck.

We had cocktails on the deck, a ritual which, despite our enthusiasm for it, Blue and I could never pull of with the same formality or regularity as our parents. While we had our drinks, some of Dixie’s animal friends came to visit. The stellar jays swept in for the peanuts in the shell she had put out. A chipmunk dashed in from behind a Douglas Fir, grabbed a peanut, and scurried off.

Dixie said that when she arrived back in California in November, she put out the peanuts and called to the Stellar Jays, “Come get your dinner!” In five minutes her Jay friends were back.

Dixie told us the trees surrounding her cabin were Douglas Fir, Aspen, Vine Maple, and Big Leaf Maple. The next day on the river, our guide Wade pointed out Red Cedar, Incense Cedar, two varieties of the river duck, as well as mallards, swallows, and kingfishers. Once when we were anchored at a rocky spot where the trout were feeding, a flock of geese flew past us, and a few minutes later a goose came floating downstream calling for her friends. She must have had an injured wing because the call was clear: “Where are you guys? Wait for me!” Like Dixie’s “Come get your dinner!” that after six months drew the jays back within minutes, the languages of humans and other animals were not as far apart as we liked to think.

Dixie said that in her next life she wanted to come back as an oozle, the small birds that bobbed up and down on dry rocks in the middle of the river, diving for insects and staying underwater for long periods of time.

“I’d like to come back as an osprey,” I said, as one flew overhead looking for fish.

“They migrate,” Dixie said. “Oozles,” she added with a twinkle in her eye, “Stay year round.”

Wade, Dixie's guide, had a sturdy aluminum boat with huge oars he used to navigate the rapids and place us in position over holes and banks to give us the optimal lines. It was the ultimate in fly fishing.

The first day one of us stood at the front of the boat fishing with two dry flies on the line, while the other sat nymphing on a fly reel with monofilament line. We lost count of how many fish we caught, catching as many on the flies as the nymph. All but two were planted rainbows, ten to fourteen inches. We kept a few for lunch and released the rest. We released two wild trout about eight inches in length. The next day we gave up nymphing and took turns dry fly fishing.

At lunch we pulled up to an island where the guides had built a fire ring in the sand with stones from the river. Wade set up a table and chairs, cleaned the fish, covered them in onion salt, and fried them in a long handled iron skillet which he had heated over the fire and filled with a generous amount of margarine. The fish, which we ate with chips and fruit, was delicious.

That night at the bar, I heard the ultimate Fish That Got Away story from a young man who had gone fishing to unwind after work. He said he hooked a twenty-four inch rainbow on a fly, only to have it jump the hook before he could reel in and release it. He was nursing his disappointment with a couple of shots of tequila. I asked him about wild versus planted trout, and he said that while they didn’t plant as high up as he was fishing, the planted ones did swim upstream, and that while you had to be quick with the wild trout, who barely mouthed the hook when they rolled over it, they loved the flies.

When I repeated the Fish That Got Away story to Wade he said, “How did he know it was twenty four inches? If it was, it was one of the three biggest fish on the river.”

After our four days on the McKenzie River, Mom and I drove to Portland, where she caught a plane home and I met Blue, Carly, and Eliot for adventures farther north. A week after our fishing trip, Mom and Dad were moving from the San Francisco home where they had lived for fifty years, to a retirement community in the warmer city of Palo Alto.

Blue, Carly, Eliot, and I traveled to Vancouver Island, where we stayed with our friends Scott and Sal and their sons Jared and Josh. We ate vine-ripened raspberries the size of golf balls, swam in the cold clear pools of a river, and stuck our heads under a waterfall. From British Columbia we drove to Tacoma, where we stayed with our friends Jeff and Elizabeth. We ate sushi, went for long walks, and swam in a pool with a 180-degree view of Puget Sound.

The day before we boarded the train bound for California, Mom and Dad were descending for the last time the three flights of stairs they had walked tens of thousands of times. I spoke with her on the phone as they were packing the last boxes. She said every time she needed an emotional lift, she thought of our days on the McKenzie River. I knew what she meant. Even though I was filled to the top from our time with friends, my favorite days with those with my Mom. As the train pulled away from Tacoma, I rejoiced that Eugene, Oregon, where she and I had turned east for the McKenzie River, still lay ahead of us on the tracks heading home.