By Michael Altizer

He was in a hard place, and I had nothing to send him for Christmas – at least nothing he could actually use. But then, I had a thought.

A well-meaning friend once asked about the most perfect meal I ever had, and I thought for a moment and then responded, “ . . . anything my Mom ever cooked.” That’s about as far as I could narrow it down.

The truth is, there are precious few encounters with Perfection in a person’s life. But they are there, and we must be ever vigilant for their coming and open to what they may bring. They stay but for a moment and then are gone. Except of course for the memory.

They may come in any form – your daughter’s first cry, the first snow of winter, the silence of a high desert sunrise, anything ever written by William Shakespeare or Ludwig von Beethoven or Guy Clark.

Still, I suppose it’s inevitable that such questions should arise from time to time, casually and without much consideration – your best shotgun, best bird dog, best hunting trip; your favorite painter, favorite poem, favorite wine, favorite Kafka short story – you get the picture.

I suppose some things just shouldn’t be asked, for it’s virtually impossible to speculate on such matters, much less come up with a cognitive response. At least it is for me.

Except of course when it comes to mybest fish.

That one’s easy.

Winters are long when they’re lonely and cold, and even longer when they’re hot. And for him, this winter had the potential to get very hot in a hurry.

 
I remember Christmas came on a Sunday that year, and I still had nothing to send him, at least nothing he might actually want or find useful. All he really needed he pretty much already had, at least in terms of material goods. People would ask, but I had no meaningful answers for them, at least none that I could actually give. Suffice it to say that fishing was not something he was going to be doing this Christmas. And most likely, neither was I.

Mind you, it’s not that I couldn’t fish; it’s just that I didn’t much have the heart to do it. You see, we had always fished together on Christmas, my brother Jack and me, somewhere, sometime. It might be on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day or perhaps even on the day after Christmas. It might be up on Doe Creek or Laurel Fork or over on the Holston or Clinch or Watauga. But at some point, we were going to fish.
But not this Christmas.

Not this year.

We had last talked early Tuesday morning – at least it had been early for me. At the time, both of us had been overlooking water, me sitting on a rock along a little creek that few people knew about, having just released a 20-inch rainbow, him eight hours ahead of me sitting low behind a barrier on a rooftop in Baghdad overlooking the Tigris.

As far as we could tell, only he and I and two others knew of this little creek where I now sat and about the big trout that came up into it from the lake in winter to spawn. He knew the run I was looking at, knew it better than I did – heck, he even knew the rock I was sitting on, and when I told him where another trout had just rolled, he knew that too. We had caught them here before.

He had occasionally glimpsed fish of mysterious lineage out among the runs and reeds of the Tigris through his spotting scope or long-range binoculars, and sometimes he’d even given some thought as to what flies and tactics might work. But times and tensions being what they were, he had never actually risked fishing there.

And so we had simply talked. I told him about my morning so far and that Mom had been doing fine the evening before when I’d taken her a trout and that I had nothing to send him for Christmas, and he said that was okay because he had nothing to send me either. And when the talking was done and we’d both stuffed our respective phones back into their safety pouches, I really didn’t feel much like fishing any more.

Christmas dawned bitter cold and empty. It had snowed during the night, unpredicted, a quiet, windless snow, the kind that cannot help but ease the most troubled spirit as it calms the forest and settles the streams. It was a soft, beckoning snow, one that comes a welcoming gift when you really aren’t expecting it and therefore need it most, and for a moment I thought about my brother and our secret stream. It was such an unlikely little stream to be holding such large and secret trout. Jack had discovered it on his own a couple of years before he’d left and had then taken me there. Ordinarily this would have been a perfect morning to fish it.

But not this morning.

Not without him.

And so I just stood there, unshaven in my old sweats and stocking feet, torn and ambivalent, peering out through the falling snow into the quiet woods trying to decide what to do with myself.

He would go. He would have gone without me; he’d told me as much when we had talked Tuesday morning. And now as I stood arguing with myself, the first fragments of an idea began to take form.

So I got dressed and gathered up my fly rod and waders and old wooden net – and most importantly my camera. For I figured that if Jack and I couldn’t fish the little stream together, I could at least show him what it looked like here on this cold Christmas morning in America.

 
In an hour I was there.

When I had last been here with my brother it was January and ice was in the air and we had caught two big buck trout – one for supper and one for Mom. We’d carried them back up the steep trail, him holding one end of the heavy stick around which he’d wrapped the stringer with me holding the other end, and I don’t think either of us even came close to breaking a sweat.

Now alone on this cold Christmas morning, I began shooting photos as soon as I hit the narrow path that winds down beside the overgrown fence row below the gray meadows, across the little feeder creek and then into the woods. I meant to show him what the stream was like on this snowy morning, from the trailhead all the way down to the lake. I wanted him to wince at the frost in his nostrils and feel the ice peaks crunching beneath his feet as he tracked the frozen mud. I wanted him to slip across the ice-glazed stones in the trail with me where it became too steep and forced me over into the crunchy leaves and to taste the hard chocolate we had once shared at the first bend where the trail meets the stream, and to hear the dull thud that the frozen soles of our waders always made on the cold wooden planks of the old footbridge where now I paused.

The last time we’d been at this bridge together, I’d had the same old 6-weight that I carried now, freshly rigged and ready, the one we always seemed to share. We had swapped rods as we passed, and I had eased up the right-hand side of the creek. Moments later he had yelled for me just as he’d hooked into that 24-inch rainbow when I was 80 yards upstream smack in the middle of the reed patch, and he was already off the bridge and into the creek as I plowed in alongside him.

We had finally worked the big trout to the net, and I had photographed them both as he carefully revived and released her. Now I shot a photo from the bridge itself, peering nearly straight down into the current, and then without really thinking much about it, I made an idle cast into the head of the run.

It was one of those unseen, small-fish hits, just a light, pulsing tap, and when I struck, quite honestly I was thinking “ . . . creek chub.” I swear I nearly yelled for my brother as he had once yelled for me when I saw the big trout swirl, all dark and long and coral-sided as he shredded the surface before snaking hard over into the current.

I headed off the bridge as Jack had done two years earlier, dumping the camera in the frozen leaves and stripping line while I picked my way across the big root tangle and down into the fast water, somehow managing to maintain a light but firm tension from the rod tip to the fish.

Once in the creek and with my feet firmly planted, I reorganized my fly line and myself and turned to the task at hand. Again the trout swirled deep and dove for the roots, then suddenly changed direction and bolted downstream. I moved with him, picking my way along the underside of the bridge and then out into the long tailing run where I was finally able to get in position below him.

Then he turned yet again and tore back upstream. But I now had the current in my favor, and so I applied only enough pressure to keep him centered above me and out of the tangle. It was truly some kind of dance, but we eventually met just below the bridge, where I was able to orient the fish to the flow and finally lift the old net around him, wishing desperately that my brother was here.

For a moment I just stood there, alone; we release most of our trout, but now I found myself wondering how long this one might keep in the freezer until Jack would be home and Mom could cook it for him. And so I left the big fish in the net and made my way to shore, then carried him back up the trail to the footbridge where I laid him down next to our fly rod and shot one more photo.

Oh, I continued on down the trail, the big trout hanging heavy from the stringer wrapped around one hand. But I never made another cast, instead shooting photos as I went, the last one showing the creek where it finally dumps into the lake.

I sent the photographs to him in the order I had shot them – except of course for the picture of the big trout, which I saved for last. I sent them in groups of three or four, including a message with the first e-mail that said, “Thought you might like to see what the creek looked like on Christmas morning. Will try to give you a call at 17:30 tomorrow, Tigris time. Be well.”    

As it turned out, things got ugly for him that Christmas, and the communication links got pretty squirrely and it was three days before I was finally able to get the entire flight of photos e-mailed without them being bounced back. Jack told me later they couldn’t have come at a better time.

I didn’t ask.

There are some things you learn not to ask.

Like, “What was the best fish you ever caught?”

For my part, I sometimes think about the big red drum I once beached on a southwest wind in November in the booming surf of Cape Hatteras. And of course, I’ll always remember that late-October, hook-jawed chinook from the Muskegon river in Michigan that was five ounces shy of 30 pounds and took me 200 yards downstream and from dusk into darkness. Then there was the 40-plus pound Alaska king salmon, four miles upriver from the Bering Sea, that nearly broke my fingers when the handle on the screaming fly reel tore into them as the great fish began his second run.

But they and all the others pale in comparison to the perfection of a three-and-a-half-pound rainbow that came a gift from the Lord Himself on His birthday to my brother and me one cold Christmas morning in America.