They’re like clockwork against the far bank. Two browns holding down the midge buffet line. Rise…rise. Count three. Rise…rise. I know how big they are. With every lazy porpoise exposing the immense distance between snout and dorsal, dorsal and tail-tip, they’re telling on themselves. My first cast of this southeast Oregon morning slips quietly through the high desert canyon air, closing the gap between their clockwork and the inevitable sound of my reel in retreat.

Before letting the fish slink from my hand back to its lie, I consider the landscape of its shining, dark back. The distance between the snout, dorsal and tail revealed with every rise minutes before. The negative space between what I could see fully defined the shape of what I could not.

Thinking like this is not advisable at 6 a.m. Even less so with the remnants of beer long past midnight, one cup of camp coffee, and a hunk of venison jerky in your belly. On the other hand, the Beat poets found brilliant epiphanies under far heavier circumstances. I’m not shaking, mumbling, half-starved and shirtless on a horsehair mattress in a cold-water flat crowding the El. I suppose the least I can do is let my mind ramble on.

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