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Hook, line and sinker
In New Mexico's Gila River, we fished our waters dry. After that, what was left for us?

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By Renee Despres

Jan. 7, 2000 | An anthropologist once asked a Hopi why so many of his people's songs were about rain. The Hopi replied that it was because water is so scarce; is that why so many of your songs are about love?

"The river is a strong brown god," wrote T.S. Eliot. It's hard to think of the Gila River as any sort of god during early summer, when it is little more than a creek by the Midwestern standards that I grew up with. In places, it barely reaches to my ankles when I wade across. But here in the valley, the river determines the rhythm of life.

"The river's up 4 feet," comes the call at 5 a.m. "Time to move the cars to higher ground." The next night, neighbors pile into my house -- otherwise known as higher ground. The adults eat enchiladas and play team Scrabble as children fall asleep and dogs romp; soon the floor is covered with sleeping bodies. We spend an hour over coffee the next morning, listening to the river's roar, before they leave hesitantly, finally ready to confront the damage the river has wrought on their homes and lives.

I moved to the Gila Hot Springs Valley five years ago, almost by accident. An exotic job in Indonesia had fallen through, and I needed to leave southern Indiana. Suburban Detroit, where I had spent my childhood, seemed an unappealing mass of concrete. So I loaded my truck with my belongings -- four boxes of books, a laptop computer, one box of clothes and six pairs of running shoes -- and set off to see the world. Four months later, I landed in southern New Mexico and discovered a small holding of private land in the heart of the Gila Wilderness, known to its 40 inhabitants as "The Valley."

At night, I soak in the hot springs where Geronimo's mother bathed him when he was a babe. Endangered Gila trout swim a half mile south in Little Creek. A few miles north, the west and middle forks of the Gila River meet; a mile south, the east fork adds its waters. The main Gila flows forcefully from there toward southern Arizona, shaping the land and history of southwest New Mexico with its flow.

In 1824, a party of American trappers, the first whites to travel the length of the river, followed it to Baja California. It's trekkable in June, when the water is low, but during the late-summer and fall floods or spring runoff, the water rushes by higher than your waist, with a force that could easily drown you.

I'm still not sure if I met him because I live on the river, or if I live on the river because I was supposed to meet him. I do know that the river pulled him here, so he could stand midstream in dark brown waders, his tan fedora just barely aslant, fly-rod in hand.

He was so tall and thin that the fish probably thought he was a tree. He spent hours in the river, concentrating on the tiniest movement, the flicker of light that belied a fish. I could never see the movement. "It's a Zen thing," he'd explain as he played with the trout struggling at the end of the line. "You don't really see it. You sense it."

It was an odd peacefulness, coming from a man who had to do everything else at top speed. The day I met him, in a small cafe on his side of the mountain, even his words were too fast, as he proved himself a "real" writer. He didn't need to produce the credentials. The cafe owner had already introduced him.

"This here's Pat. He's the best storyteller in town," she said, a rare tribute from an old ranch woman. He passed me later on the highway and disappeared quickly into the distance, his ancient gray Toyota truck almost shaking apart over the bumps. My speedometer read 80, and I barely caught a glimpse of his face in the passing lane.

But that was one of the things that pulled me to him: his determination to get things done, and quickly. So he could go fish, of course. I learned this a week or two later, when he came to take me away on an impromptu camping trip. We spent 10 days driving from lake to lake, stream to stream, river to river. In between waters we drove, talked, camped, cooked and made thoughtless love.

Next page | Pulling the fish with psychic powers