Fishtrap and Back Again
Before I slid off the road, I’d stopped in La Grande, to hear a man speak about Emily Dickinson, at a small inn, in a big, old house. The room was full of sun, and I sat on a white wicker love seat next to a woman who wore perfume. The speaker had published an important new biography of Emily Dickinson, after teaching her poetry to his students at the University of Kansas for many years. Now he lives far out in eastern Oregon. His name is Alfred Habegger. He is a small, friendly man, and he spoke to us as if he were telling stories of a beloved distant cousin with whom we have all lost touch.
Emily Dickinson can be a lovely way to spend a summer week, or maybe a winter break over Christmas, working through the poems as they happened in the life, reading text and footnotes. But Alfred Habeggar just told us stories. It was easy and sweet. I drifted in and out of reverie, trying not to think too much about icy roads and snow between me and Portland, and letting my thoughts wander to the week that had just passed.
It was the last week in March, and it was the end of my friend Suzy Vitello’s stint as the Fishtrap Writer-in-Residence, Bonner County, eastern Oregon. She’d been teaching writing classes in some of the Bonner County public schools, in Enterprise, in Imnaha, in Joseph. I had been her guest, at a one-room-schoolhouse in the tiny town of Troy, Oregon.
On the day we drove to Troy, I didn’t want to get there. Some trips are like that, when it’s more about going than getting there. There were ring-necked pheasants at the edges of the frozen, grassy fields along Hurricane Creek Road, Suzy piloting her minivan along the back road into Enterprise from the cabin on Wallowa Lake. The back road was out of the way, and made the trip even longer, which was fine. I had left my watch on the dresser, and the day was sunny.
I started a new list that morning. I want these things to come my way: a red feather from the neck ring of a ring-necked pheasant, a cardinal feather, a feather from the shoulder patch of a red-winged blackbird, and one from the crown of a purple finch. I want to hold my hands open, palms up, and wait for these feathers to just fall from the air.
My New Year’s resolution at the turn of the millennium had been to wait for a white eagle feather to come to me. I wouldn’t keep it, I would just catch it, hold it, have it for a moment. But I am Scots-blooded, from a long line of Scottish Presbyterian ministers, with just enough Irish Catholic thrown in for a touch of scandal, and I knew I might have long to wait for an eagle feather.
The drive to the school at Troy was an hour and more of twisting road through Whitman National Forest. We drove past a ghost town called Flora, and then down a long switchback to the Grande Ronde River, at its confluence with the smaller Wenaha. There at Troy’s one room school house was a fourth grade boy, a fifth grade boy, and a kindergarten girl named Emma. Emma was the daughter of the teacher, whose name was Clark. The county librarian was there too, since the county library itself took up half the building.
What can you do with such a diverse group of young writers? Clark held Emma on his lap. We were in a circle of library tables that fit together, in a wooden room. The floor was not wooden, it was linoleum made to look like wood, and I was fooled.
I said, What an old, nice building. Look at the lovely floor.
They all laughed at me, even Suzy.
I didn’t get out of the small inn in La Grande until late in the afternoon. I wasn’t wearing my watch, but the sun was below the ridgelines. There was thick snow falling on the way up Meacham Pass, although Interstate-84 was clear, and the sky ahead was clear. I was trying to remember the Emily Dickinson poem that begins Hope is a thing with feathers and I was trying to figure out what time I would get home.
I didn’t consider black ice in the shady spots on the road, and I slipped a little left, and a little right, and then off the road, onto the right shoulder, sliding to a gentle stop in a foot of snow. It was possibly the white eagle feather coming my way, so I did what had to be done. I got out and looked around; a beautiful, wide open pass, scattered Ponderosa pine, patches of bright blue sky.
Interstate traffic less than ten feet away.
I got out my tire chains, laid them behind the rear wheels, got back in and tried to back up. I got out again and gazed hopelessly at the dirty snow and gravel I had scattered.
For a small space of about a minute I tried swearing at the sky, but that felt silly with RVs and semis and other Volvos whizzing by. A young man on his way to Hood River stopped and he tried to get me out, and couldn’t do it, so I called Triple A from his cell phone.
This would never have happened to Suzy Vitello. Suzy moves through the world with a relative grace when it comes to vehicles and children.
She said to the kids at Troy, Tell us about the river.
They giggled and shrugged and squirmed. They looked at Clark, and at the county librarian. They didn’t really want to look at Suzy or me.
They told each other about the river.
To me the riversides were red and gold with spring growth, with blue snow in the shadows of rocks and cliffs.
But they spoke of fly fishing, of the best steelhead runs in a hundred years. The Wenaha is blue, the Grande Ronde is brown. There was a duck with a hurt leg, it was bloody. Sometimes there is no place to stand when the river rises.
We said, Write about that.
Clark wrote down what Emma told him. She said, Write that it gets swift.
A state cop went by on the other side of the interstate, going west, a blond woman, who waved, and then pretty soon she came back and pulled up along side me.
She said, It’s busy for tow trucks. Your guy will be here soon. Don’t worry.
She said, Stay in your car and buckle your seat belt. This is a dangerous place to be.
I said, Thanks, and she said, Can I see your driver’s license please?
After that, the goodhearted world stepped in.
Every few minutes, someone pulled over. I would get out, run up to their car and say, Thank you for stopping, tow truck on the way, I’m fine, really, thank you so much, yes.
Soon my feet were wet and cold from getting in and out of the car. I had the heat turned on, and I was trying to remember the last two lines of Hope is a thing with feathers, and trying not to watch in the rear view mirror for my tow truck. The day went to dusk. After another half an hour, when the tow truck came, it took less than five minutes to get me out.
The tow truck driver had blue eyes that wrinkled down toward his tired smile.
He said, There ya go. Drive carefully.
Less than two miles down the pass toward Pendleton, the road was dry and the sky opened above me. Stars came out. I got gas at the Milton-Freewater exit, washed the windows, bought a Snickers bar, and then drove on as fast as I could. The speed limit was sixty-five. I tried not to look at the mile markers. I wanted the miles to go faster than one at a time.
Ten minutes is a long time in a little school library, so after ten minutes we asked them to stop writing and read what they wrote. The teacher, Clark, read Emma’s.
Suzy said, Circle one thing you wrote that you could change.
That Suzy Vitello is so smart. She knows how to make things work.
She said, Just circle anything.
Emma changed fishing with Mom to fishing with Dad. She fictionalized. Clark says Emma tells stories all the time. To him, to her dolls, to herself when she’s in the bathtub.
One boy changed Fourth of July to Independence Day. He liked the way Independence Day sounds. He was hearing the music of language.
One boy wrote about standing in cold, cold water in the summer, fishing near the bank.
I said, What’s another word for cold?
He said, Ice.
I said, What’s cold and fun and summer all at the same time?
He said, Ice cream.
And the other boy cried, Sno-Cones!
And the kids all cried out, Sno-Cones!
Emma jumped off Clark’s lap and knocked over a chair. The fourth grade boy pounded the fifth grade boy on the shoulder.
Standing in water as cold as a Sno-Cone.
Portland was cold to come back to, a cold that made the daffodils look hard-edged, cold that stilled the tendrils of the winter jasmine. There is a new Hochino red bark cherry tree in front of Andre’s house next door. There were tiny birds in the new cherry tree this morning, hundreds of tiny birds, maybe ten or eleven, small, like a hummingbird is small, and they flew off through the back yards and I couldn’t see them anymore. I may not see them again until October; they may be on their way to the Sunshine Coast or Barren Island, from Costa Rica or Guatemala.
The screen on my kitchen window holds dust and seed wings and cobwebbing. I can’t see through it very well by now, at the end of winter. The outside world is trapped outside my kitchen. I sit at this table by this window, maybe all morning, with tea or not, with dogs or not, with sunrise or maybe only that slow, exhausted lightening toward a dense valley day.
I wear my small watch sometimes, just for adornment. To be serious about it would require a New Year’s resolution. To be serious about it would mean wearing a watch with a face I can actually see. To be serious about it would mean wearing glasses, and I would rather see far away than up close. Far away is something I don’t know yet, maybe a tree, maybe a really big dog, maybe an itinerant deity wandering the universe. Somewhere in the middle distance are ice patches on roads.
I am more willing to get serious about Sno-Cones.
Suzy and I took the long way home to her cabin on Willowa Lake from Troy, circling up into Washington state on the road that looped around Flora and met back up with the highway at the top of the pass. We were quiet. We had done our work, had shared the language of children as they wrote of their world, a sacred and secret language. As teachers, we were moved. As writers, we were fed.
Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without words
And never stops—at all
I put my reading glasses away, in their case, in my desk drawer, and leave them there and go out into the world. Palms up.
