Welcome Creek

I decided to reprint this ahead of tomorrow's anniversary. It's 8 years old now, but it still seems to summarize how I feel quite nicely. I welcome your comments. JB

Joe Baker, Boiling Springs

Copyright© February 2005

Bitterroot

I, Joseph Anthony Baker, do hereby testify and affirm that Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 passed completely without incident in the middle of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. My nephew, brother-in-law and I caught trout and rock scrambled around a pristine alpine lake tucked in against a sheer and soaring granite headwall a thousand feet high. We ate some of the trout for dinner, along with rice and fresh vegetables from the Missoula Farmers Market, then laid back to enjoy a sky girded through with the great white belt of the Milky Way. So engrossing were the stars, and the quiet and funny conversation, that we never noticed the complete absence of aircraft.

After the long hump out of the woods on the 12th, we stopped at the gas and mercantile in Victor for ice cream. They had a radio on, and the middle-aged couple that owned the place were having a tense, quiet conversation, pausing from time to time to listen to the news. I told them we’d been hiking for the last few days and asked them if we’d missed anything. The woman looked at me with eyes wide and red from tears:

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

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We drove to Missoula completely stunned, listening to the radio. The news said there were 3000 dead people in New York and DC, maybe more. Maybe a lot more. Time spent walking in wild mountains produces a suffusion of peace, a permeating calm that has to do with a mix of endorphin, quiet, and ancestral memory. I’m not talking about some new-age mumbo-jumbo mysticism/crapola here. What I’m talking about is as solid and real as a grizzly bear. Exposure to horror in this condition is a kind of violence; something that produces shock in its most clinical sense.

We got a cheap motel room on Broadway, and I asked the proprietor, a biker with a shaved head, the obligatory black Harley t-shirt, and a strong aroma of Budweiser, what he knew. “Christ, all this means is some of these dumb punks around here might actually have to go fight for their country like I did. I bet they’re scared shitless. I ain’t paying much attention to this, I got enough problems. Hell, I’d like to turn terrorist on my ex-wife; shove enough dynamite up her fat ass to blow her to the fuckin’ moon!”

I suppose I was just looking for some sympathetic and insightful communion with one of my fellow citizens. This was the wrong place, evidently.

We got in our motel room and turned the TV on: bad idea. We stared at the images mesmerized, wanting to turn away but unable to do it. Everyone has digital video cameras now, so there were lots of awful images playing over and over; the planes slamming in like missiles, the fire and explosions, the bodies, the collapse of the great towers, the smoking rubble, the frantic search for the wounded, and the quiet of death in two of the East Coast’s great cities. In between the horrifying pictures were talking heads that didn’t know anything and proved it every time they opened their goddamned mouths. Finally, in the most demeaning episode of voyeurism I’d ever seen, they showed film of a man deliberately stepping out of a blown out window in the Trade Center and into the air. I got really pissed and shut the television off.

We called home. Everyone back in Pennsylvania and Maryland was sobbing, scared, wondering how and when we’d get back. Our flights weren’t due out until Saturday, and there was speculation that the airports might not open again for many days, weeks even. Our families needed us, but there was nothing we could do about that. We clearly had a couple days to burn, at least. We decided to go to Rock Creek the next morning, to fish and calm down some. In the interim, we could find a restaurant and get drunk.

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There is real danger here, peril that has not yet been addressed a decade later. September the 11th has been compared to Pearl Harbor, and while the sense of national outrage and resolve is surely comparable and appropriate, there is one enormous difference. At Pearl Harbor, the airplanes that rained death down on the defenseless and unsuspecting were plainly marked with the Rising Sun. There was no doubt or confusion about who did it, or why, or how to respond.

On 9/11, things were not so simple. The bastards that flew the planes into the buildings committed suicide, a fact sometimes lost in the hot rhetoric that has followed that awful day. The president and many other public figures of both major parties called them cowards. I am compelled to point out that they were among the first to die and boarded the planes that morning with the certainty of their own imminent mortality held close and quiet. Precisely what was in their hearts is probably beyond our ken, but it clearly wasn’t cowardice; as several other writers have pointed out, they were emphatically unafraid to die. The faculty at the Army War College just down the road from my house will tell you that an enemy who is heedless of his or her own life is just about the most dangerous thing there is. The character and motivations of the 9/11 hijackers and their ilk are a product of weightier and more complex stuff than cowardice. Religious zeal, bigotry, poverty, political oppression, fear; some of it centuries old, some of it a product of the last sixty years, form the reagents and catalysts of a volatile and lethal chemistry we don’t understand very well. We’ll not decipher it with simple-minded demagoguery about “evil-doers” who “hate freedom”.

Anger is certainly part of the mix. Our country sits atop the world’s economic heap, and our policies affect everyone. Like other nations, our policies are set by leaders who determine what, in their view, is in our national self-interest. The current popularity of “moral values” notwithstanding, it seems that our self-interest is not always enlightened with concern for the well being of others. That’s unfortunate, and also dangerous. When we sell or give weapons to countries and regimes which then employ them, people die, and their relatives and friends fault us. When our diplomatic efforts prop up repressive regimes, the repressed fault us. When we buy fuel and other goods from nations whose rulers pocket everything, and leave their citizens dispossessed and impoverished, the poor fault us. The Middle East is full of angry, desperate people, people to whom a fundamentalist lunatic can sound like a deliverer or a prophet. We cannot ever quench that anger with retributive or preemptive violence. Every militant we kill or haul off to Guantanamo, every innocent sacrificed as “collateral damage”, leaves behind family aggrieved and bent on vengeance. They listen to the mullahs, they prepare themselves for martyrdom. Hydra’s heads sprout from the severed necks we leave behind us.

We are on thin ice. One of these days, one of these furious, crazy and committed people is going to get his hands on a nuclear weapon.

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Welcome Creek

A ways up Rock Creek, near the Welcome Creek trailhead, we stand on the swinging pack bridge suspended high above the water in brilliant morning sunlight. We watch the trout working down there, their silver sides flashing up from the deep green as they take mayfly nymphs off the bottom. It is as old as time. The little river quietly gouging it’s way deeper into the rock, the hungry fish gorging themselves on the tiny insects; it all goes on as it has every day for millennia. For us up here on the bridge, everything has changed, but not down there.

So we go fishing, the three of us splitting up and moving to different stretches of water. I work the edge of a steep bank, where big chunks of talus drop right into the water. The fish are tucked in behind the rocks, beneath little patches of dirty foam. I’m fishing a deer hair grasshopper with a small nymph suspended behind it, and the fish are completely fooled. I take some on the grasshopper, some on the sinking fly, including a big rainbow that bulls and leaps his way downstream, propelled like a bucking horse by the spur of the hook. It’s fun, familiar and absorbing, a thing unchanged by what happened a couple days ago. I forget for a while.

I eat my sandwich and drink a bottle of beer sitting on a flat rock at streamside. In the quiet I can hear the voices under the rocks that Norman McLean spoke of. McLean thought the words under the rocks came from God; maybe so. Like every fisherman, I have listened to their talk before, but now the words are different, chilling. Before I know it they have resolved themselves into screams, I am seized in an implacable grip and dragged into the whirlwind. Old Man Death comes for me and finds me sobbing and praying in my seat on the airliner, or quietly pushing paper in my office, or shitting myself just before the plane burrows into a Pennsylvania hilltop, or stepping out of the hundredth floor window to escape the fire. Here, in this lovely place along this sweet little river, the moment is horrible beyond any imagining. I get a grip and shiver myself away from death’s cold hands. Standing up, I dab tears away from my eyes and start upstream looking for my kinfolk.

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I am an archaeologist. In February of 2003, as thousands of American soldiers invaded Iraq, I found myself in the quiet of a laboratory in a government building contemplating a bullet. Specifically, I was cataloging and analyzing a lead Minie ball, dropped in the heat of combat during a vicious little engagement of the American Civil War in 1862, in central Maryland. It weighs 28.3 grams, is .59 inches in diameter, and has a prominent mold mark. It has not been fired, likely haven fallen from the trembling fingers of a young man under extreme duress. Like all artifacts, it connects me, the sole occupant of this lab, to another life.

These personal connections to other people that lived and died a long time ago are among the many rewards of my profession. I am handling precisely the same object as another, probably much younger man some 143 years ago. I can see him, a tow-headed 18 year old kid from the Carolina mountains. He’s from a poor family, no money, no slaves, no big fields of tobacco or cotton, never been north of Raleigh before this year. He’s not very clear on what this war is all about, but it’s been fun, a great adventure. All the Yankees he’s seen so far have been running away or getting themselves shot. There are victories under his belt, the invincibility of Marse Robert’s leadership putting a swagger in his step, and almost making up for the slim rations and forced marches. It was all good sport until today. Now he’s pinned down behind this low stone wall, with about 120 of his fellow infantry. There are a couple thousand Yankees firing on their position. Men are falling everywhere around him, screaming their lungs out or just dropping over dead. He’s shaking, and the round, this round, drops from his hand as he fumbles with the ramrod. They are advancing on him with bayonets, now only yards away, and he can’t load his rifle because he’s too scared. If he jumps up to run they’ll cut him down. If he plays dead, they’ll stick him to be sure. He thinks of his comrades, his mother, his sweetheart, he starts crying…

I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray, Hooray

I leave him to his fate, unwilling to watch.

His experience is no different than that of thousands of other mostly young men from the plain of Bronze Age Troy to the streets of Fellujah. It’s always the same. Geneva conventions, rules of engagement, codes of chivalry and honor, all go out the window when the shit really gets going. It’s not that nobility and courage don’t appear on the battlefield, they do, but it’s usually overwhelmed by savagery and bloodlust and sheer unholy terror. I was lucky, just a couple years too young for the Vietnam draft, but I have played confessor to a number of less lucky souls. My grandfather fought at Caporetto, a friend’s dad island-hopped through the Pacific, a cousin froze his feet in Korea, the older brother of one of my high school chums was hideously wounded and left for dead during Tet. Some talk more than others, but the stories are all more or less the same. Prisoners got shot, innocents butchered, the wounded murdered on their stretchers, brothers-in-arms died an arms length away, incompetent officers were executed by their own men, bitter cold, stifling heat, close-order and hand-to-hand combat, filth and squalor, artillery, boredom, rape, hunger, looting, terror, loneliness, insanity, insomnia, nightmares. None of these guys are pacifists, most are pretty conservative, but they all tell me that warfare, while occasionally necessary, is the absolute last resort, reserved for problems and wrongs that can’t be solved or redressed in any other way. They all tell me it’s usually bastards that have never seen combat who are quickest to call for it or send folks off to it.

I drop the Minie ball back in its labeled bag, shut off the lights in the lab, and go home to watch the news.

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A hundred yards or so upstream on the opposite bank, I find my sister’s son. I clearly remember him looking out at me in wide wonder through the bars of a playpen in need of a fresh diaper. Now he’s 30, tall, strong, and handsome. As I watch, he hooks an immense fish on a wet fly, which instantly wiggles off. It would have been the biggest trout he’d ever caught, or probably seen.

“Goddammit!”

“Oh well…”

“How big do you think…?”

“Don’t know…a couple feet long anyway. There are more in here.”

He wades across, and looks me over.

“You OK Uncle?”

What a wonderful and decent person he grew up to be. I tell him I’m ok, just a little scared and uncertain. Nothing much we can do anyway, short of fish the day out, then head back to Missoula and check the flight schedule. Maybe we can stop at the Rock Creek Bar on the way for the annual Rocky Mountain Oyster festival. We don’t actually plan to eat any, but the bumper stickers only cost a buck and proclaim “I Had a Ball!”

I walk upstream out of sight of my nephew, and go back to fishing. My second cast hooks a big trout, but he spits the hook out and I respond with a loud string of profanities. I look up to find I’m not alone, and am a little embarrassed. He’s across and just upstream, a guy in his mid 50’s, a grizzled old long hair pounding away like a machine with a big streamer and a sinking line, constantly moving downstream. Clearly a guide.

“Looked like a good fish. What’re ya usin?”

“Hopper dropper.”

“That’s the slow way. The good fish’ll never take a dry fly here, these fish want big meat!”

Just then he hooks a big bull trout, but it gets off. His choice of words is a lot like mine.

“Well, now I don’t feel so bad about cussing in front of you!”

“Yeah, well… “

We have a conversation across the stream. He’s had a couple clients cancel, can’t get a flight, so here he is on a busman’s holiday. I ask what he thinks about the events of the week.

“See, this is why I left the East. Stuff like that don’t happen out here. I don’t think this affects me at all, except fer my clients can’t get here, but things’ll calm down by next spring, and they’ll come back. I say just stay the hell away from the East and you’re fine!”

I feel like saying a whole bunch of things that I don’t say. He seems like a genial old pirate, and I don’t want to get into an argument. I just shrug and say “Maybe”. He says he saw my brother-in-law about a quarter mile upstream, so I wish him luck and walk upstream a ways. When I have passed out of his earshot, but not out of view, I turn around and silently watch the smooth arc of his methodical, efficient and utterly graceful casting for a couple minutes. I hear my own voice say “There’ll be no hiding from this. Not even out here.” My brother-in-law appears out of the streamside brush.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody…just talking to myself.”

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Looking Glass

On Saturday, the boys got a flight back to Baltimore through Minneapolis, but I was told I couldn’t fly in to Pennsylvania until maybe Monday. After seeing them off, I considered my options. I was running low on cash, so camping seemed like a better choice than a motel. I hopped back into the rental car, and headed down the Bitterroot Valley, grabbing a campsite at the Looking Glass access. It was a good choice.

The Bitterroot is open, broad and windy, braiding through gravel bars and cottonwood bottoms in a valley six or eight miles wide. The expansiveness helped lighten my mood, the space and light driving the darkness away into the footslope forests at the base of the jagged mountains that nearly killed Lewis and Clark. It was so warm that there were kids swimming in the river, very unusual for a Montana September. They were whooping it up and laughing, completely untroubled. If a person was going to be stranded by an international act of terrorism, there were worse places to get stuck.

I wound up sharing my picnic table and a beer with a high school science teacher from Missoula whose young daughters were swimming in the river. We talked about how this was playing in the classroom.

“The hardest thing to get past is the feeling that this doesn’t really apply to us, ya know? We’re way the hell out here in Montana and the trouble is all back there in the East. The kids don’t necessarily make the connection. We’re safe, so what’s the big deal. They don’t really understand that this changes everything.”

“Yeah, I met a grownup the other day who thought the same thing.”

“I feel like I don’t want to scare them, but I have to make them understand that this affects them and their families. I want them to try to understand how and why this happened, and what that has to do with them. Frankly that disconnection they express scares me! I’m worried for those kids. I’m worried for my country.”

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Me too.

Maybe the primary motivating factor that causes Americans to respond so heroically to crisis is the deep-seated belief that we’re different. We’re free. We can say what we want, do as we like. We can worship, or not, where and how we choose, make and raise families, or not, as we see fit. Our government is really ours, and we can’t be robbed or locked up or abused or killed for no good reason. We are virtuous and friendly, and we don’t seek empire or domination. Our land is still young and beautiful and big, our heritage important and grounded in equality and liberty. It’s worth fighting for, dieing for. Some or most of this might be mythology, but most of us feel this way. I feel this way. Generally I am proud of my homeland, and happy I was born and live here.

But I’m worried now. Our tax money and our good name were used to detain and torture people and to peremptorily invade countries that might have become enemies in the name of preserving that American vision of difference. There are phones being tapped and e-mails being monitored and people going to jail without warrants and oversight. I’m not an idiot. I know that some or all of those people locked up in Guantanamo are bad guys. I know that Iraq might have eventually facilitated attacks on us, WMD’s or not, and that might also be true of Iran, Syria, North Korea or other countries. I know there are bad people who want to kill or hurt us right here in this country. I guess I just don’t think that’s the point.

If this place is different, special, worth defending with our lives, there are responsibilities that keep it so. The cost of freedom is neither a multi-trillion dollar deficit, nor making war against those who might, but haven’t yet, made war on us, nor the voluntary sacrifice of some of our rights in the name of security. The cost of our freedom is more substantial. We have to be brave to be free. The bad guys in Guantanemo need to be charged with something. They need lawyers and trials with judges and juries. If they don’t want to give us information, we can’t knock them around and mistreat them. We can’t send our kids off to attack or threaten other countries because they might, someday, attack us; we have to wait until they give us cause. We can’t eavesdrop on or detain our own citizens or visitors to our country without evidence of wrongdoing simply because they might be up to something.

Make no mistake about it; there are consequences for doing the right thing. Some of the guilty are going to be acquitted in a trial and freed, and some of them will continue to try to hurt or kill us. Some people with dark and dangerous secrets will never reveal them. Some countries will sponsor surprise attacks on us and hurt us badly. Some of us will die as a result. Real patriotism puts us in harm’s way. The qualities that make us proud of our country require our courage. But we don’t really have a choice. If we are afraid, and surrender to our base instincts, we are in one sense worse than the deluded monsters that flew the planes into the buildings; we really are cowards.

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Its morning on the Bitterroot, near Bell’s Crossing, and once again the trout have me befuddled. A pod of large fish has lined up in a current seam upstream of me, and they have begun gently rising in constant rhythm, but there are no insects visible that would prompt this. A shaft of angled morning light solves the little mystery. Visible in the column of sunlight are tiny glimmers, minute refractions like so many prisms or snowflakes, dancing up and down in the light above the river. It’s a small thing of beauty that holds me spellbound until the column of light shifts and dissipates. They are tricos (Tricorythodes sp.), little mayflies with bodies less than an eighth of an inch long that appear in huge swarms on many rivers on late summer morning. I pull out a fly box, smiling because this is a pattern I always carry with me.

I will be flying home tomorrow to a new and uncertain world. I’m a little scared of flying right now, understandably, but objectively speaking the rigorous security means tomorrow’s flight will probably be the safest one I’ve ever been on. When I think about it, what I’m really scared of is the future. The twin towers are down, thousands of people are dead, and the country is angry and shocked. Anything could happen. Still, it will be good to see my loved ones and hold them close. The week’s events have reminded me how much I love my family and friends, and how hurt I would be if I lost them. Whatever this future will be, I will happily face it with them.

I have the fly knotted to my leader, and move myself into position to make a good cast. The tiny fly lands precisely where I want it, and floats into the current seam. A brown trout tips up and inhales my little deception, and I am tight to a good fish. He leaps, showering spray into the morning light, then makes a long run downstream. I follow him, and bring him to hand in short order. I am kneeling along the generous river now, releasing a handsome fish, and thinking that while this new world scares the hell out of me, it is also very sweet.