Our tackle was in the car, ready to whack trout, but first we had to find my brother. We drove around the streets of Martin City, Montana - all of them, a two-minute jaunt - without spotting the Martin City Hotel, where he’d said he was living. We decided, or I did anyway, to stop at a bar and ask directions. The bar’s sign shivered on its hinges and a couple of muddy pickups were parked out front.
My wife eyed the place warily. “Well,” I said, “are you my wife or not?” and in we went.
The bar had a sawdust floor, a barmaid who’d never heard of the Martin City Hotel, and a customer with a big luna moth of suds on his mustache.
“You missed Butte a few hours back,” the guy snorted. “Hotels for every occasion.”
He knocked back half a glassful. The barmaid waved him off, then leaked a little smile. “Place up the road’s got rooms this time of year. The Dew Drop Inn.” The name sounded dubious, but I thanked her and said we were looking for my brother at the Martin City Hotel.
The guy fixed one red eye on me. “Listen,” he said, with a note of menace. “There’s no hotel.”
“Who’s your brother?” the barmaid asked.
Now that was a question, far bigger than the whereabouts of the Martin City Hotel. The sort of numbing riddle that sages spring on the unenlightened: My brother, who was he?
Back in the Pliocene, when we were boys, I knew. Bob was me, more or less, and I was Bob. We were four years apart but did everything as one, finished each other’s sentences. We’d sail all day in a cardboard box, our boat, bobbing around on the sea of our mutual imagination.
We grew up, regrettably. Take that adverb any way you want. We hunted and fished together, but now we finished each other’s sentences, full of wisecracks, only as a kind of throwback joke. In our college days I literally lost track of Bob. At the University of Montana he took certain courses in the English department that convinced him he didn’t need a degree to ride boxcars. I was the one who had always loved trains, but it never would have occurred to me to go down to the yards and get on one without a ticket.
I heard about his hoboing and a lot more besides. I pictured him cross-legged in a boxcar gazing out at passing valleys and peaks, cold black rivers, tall stands of ponderosa like the masts of the mythical ark on Mount Ararat. Bob, the Buddha of the Burlington Northern.
Not that the barmaid needed, or wanted, to know any of that. I just gave her his name.
“No kidding?” she said, cocking her head. “Your brother’s Bob Bauer?” She twisted the wet bar rag around her wrist and gave me the once-over. It felt like getting a physical.
But she knew where he lived, it turned out, and drew a map on the bar with her damp finger. My wife was already easing toward the door. The Big Sky meatball weighed in again. “I don’t know nothing about your brother,” he bristled, “but there’s no damn hotel.”
We were halfway outside now. The barmaid leaned on the bar, not done with me yet.
“You just seem so normal,” she said.
_________________
Dusk. We drove past a boarded-up movie theater, the bones of old buildings, following directions. At last we found it, a dusty frame building like any other, no business sign of any sort, but Bob was there. The barmaid was beginning to look like an angel.
Bob roared my name - not simply a welcome, but a sort of annunciation. Then the same, thunderously, for his sister-in-law. “Charlotte!” he said, as if she were coming, with me, in glory.
Bob’s hair was long, not as long as mine but a lot messier. He had a couple of high-ceilinged rooms at the front of the building, with a big window full of snaky unkempt plants. The whole place had a honeyed, weedy odor, issuing from heaps and sheaves of mysterious leafy matter spread out to dry on every horizontal surface, including the bed and kitchen table. Bob gave us the tour, scooping up crumbly sprigs to our noses.
“Mullein,” he barked, theatrically. “Introduced from Europe, grows wild everywhere.” He lifted a pale wooly leaf to the ceiling lightbulb. “Antiseptic, astringent, emollient, expectorant, good for toothache, cramps, convulsions. Perfect for piles.” He twirled another, thin and feathery. “Yarrow - take it in teas for colds and flu, ulcers, abscesses. Stimulates bile, purifies the blood.”
And so on with skullcap and valerian and a dozen others. I wondered why I’d want my bile stimulated, but didn’t ask. In the months since I’d seen Bob, he’d become, somehow, an herbalist. Without seeking it, he’d gained some local renown: cures were claimed. Now he was stockpiling for the ever-imminent Montana winter, amassing mountains of medicinal herbs and drying them here in his rooms, enough for everyone he knew.
He swung open the refrigerator door to reveal jar on jar of greenish viscid-looking stuff. “Salve, just made it last week.” He unscrewed a lid and passed the jar to Charlotte. “Give it a try.”
“What’s it for?” she said.
“Whatever you’ve got. It’s soothing, you’ll see.”
He handed me another jar and I sniffed it. It smelled like the room, weedy and sweet.
“Won’t work that way,” he said. “You’ve got to rub it on.”
I stalled, asking what was in it.
“Yarrow, beeswax, a bunch of good stuff. You got nothing to worry about, it works.”
“Lips?” Charlotte ventured. “My lips are sort of chapped.”
“Lips! Lips! You’re gonna thank me for this.”
She smoothed on a dab and swooned. Zap, a believer. The jar went in her shirt pocket.
Several well-used banjos and guitars stood in a dim corner, as if they were sneaking a cigarette together. Bob was brewing a pot of herb tea, too busy to pick us a tune, but he did plunk a tape in his custom audio system: an eight-track deck he’d rescued from a junk car and wired to an antique console radio, long dead except for the speaker. This strewn-out unit took as long as the tea to warm up, but finally Bob Wills and his Playboys poured out, spry fiddles sparring with the speaker’s electrical pops and snarls. The tea, the distillation of Bob’s latest new life in northern Montana, tasted like the scent of the room, sweet and weedy and slightly suspect, like the salve, like everything else.
Anyway, we’d found him. My brother, whoever he was at that moment. I did have to wonder about that - because what had brought him way up here, I knew, wasn’t herbs. What lured him was logging.
Philosophically, spiritually, anatomically, Bob was no logger. But he’d been reading the Beat poets and liked the sound of the life they wrote about: music, spontaneity, easygoing girls, hitting the road in old cars. The only drawback was, road or no road, the Beats were basically urban types. Bob wasn’t about to hang on the Columbia campus or in Golden Gate Park. The notable rustic exception in the group was Gary Snyder, who wrote poems about working as a logger in the big woods of the Northwest - a Beat with a job.
So Bob got a saw; he already had the old car. How much actual logging he did I can’t say. He couldn’t have discerned much poetry in the gnashing havoc of trees crashing down all around. But out in the woods he did meet a luckless logger - a lyrically desperate case it seemed his destiny to help.
The man had gashed his leg with a chainsaw and gone to a doctor, but the wound only got worse. In mounting pain, he lay around at home where the propped-up leg obstructed his wife’s line of sight to the TV set. Several times she threatened to throw him out of the trailer, but then Bob showed up toting a brown bag of herbs. With nothing to lose but the leg, the suffering sawyer let Bob put on a poultice derived from old Indian remedies. The wife, an Indian herself, turned off the TV and watched Doc Bauer at work. In a few days the logger was out of harm’s way, and hers as well - back in the woods, lopping off trees right and left. The word went around. Bob’s reputation was made.
We finished the tea, sitting for a while in silence. Then out on the darkened street a car went by with loud pipes. “They’ve got a law against mufflers around here,” Bob grumbled. The rumbling looped away and faded at last. “I know where we can get some,” he went on now, nonchalantly, as if to his teacup, and I knew it wasn’t mufflers he meant.
It had taken us an hour of herbs to get around to it. Talking about trout, like angling for them, demanded a slow, sidelong approach. It took a ritual of access, devoutly kneeling, the way that courtship used to and religion, in the higher and crankier churches, still does.
Bob told us about the long walk he’d taken lately - the whole sixty-mile length of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. He’d carried his old twelve-gauge Stevens and lived lavishly on herb-stuffed grouse. He didn’t take a rod but did get a look, along the way, at the South Fork of the Flathead River. No one, not a soul, was fishing it. Clear as vodka, and it had to be full of trout. Why didn’t we head on up there, he proposed - just start out tomorrow?
“We don’t want to keep you from working,” I lied.
“You don’t?” he said, flipping off lights for the night. “What kind of brother is that?”
Charlotte spread her sleeping bag on the sofa. Then, with a start, she noticed that one arm of the sofa had a burn hole in it big enough to den a marmot, so she switched the bag around to put her head at the other end. I unrolled my own bag on the floor. Bob, I figured, would clear off the herbs and sleep in his bed, but instead he lowered himself, fully clothed, into his empty bathtub, an enormous old fixture on lion’s feet.
All was quiet except for the distant howling, doleful as lost hounds, of diesel locomotives crawling up the Continental Divide.
“Bob?” I said, after a while.
“Uh huh, what is it?” his voice came back in the dark, booming from the tub.
“What is this place we’re in here, anyway?”
“Martin City.”
“I mean this building.”
“What do you mean, what is it? The Martin City Hotel.”
“Nobody else seems to know that.”
“I know.”
By then I’d forgotten the question, and wondered what, exactly, was in the tea we’d drunk.
_________________
September was a good half gone. Wet weather was coming in a couple of days, the first headlong storm of autumn, but we went.
The dirt road climbed fifty miles through lush west-slope forest, mostly lodgepole and hemlock. A scatter of tamaracks stood in long shafts of last-chance sunlight, shedding their golden needles. A spare tire, bald, rode on the back seat beside me, on lefthand curves wanting to roll on my lap. The emptied beer cans of Bob’s lumberjack summer - Great Falls, Rainier, Grain Belt, Olympia - clanked around our ankles.
His station wagon, a Dodge Pioneer pushing twenty years old, lurched and whined under the burden of its monstrous tail fins. Bob had owned it only a few months and, one suspected, would soon finish it off. It had a pushbutton transmission, and at the slightest change in slope he’d punch a different button on the dash and the shuddering old beast would suck in its breath and shift up or down, either way giving us a good swift kick. “They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore,” he sang out for the twenty-third time.
But trout lay ahead. We were on our way, no looking back. As if to insist on this, the car had no rearview mirror: Bob had hung it over his bathroom basin, where it watched over the lion’s-foot tub and I’d shaved in it that very morning.
The road came to an end where a cluster of pickups and horse trailers was already parked. I imagined a band of outlaw worm-dunkers galloping in on our guileless fish. “Hunters,” Bob assured me. “Horns and meat, that’s all they want.” He was wrangling the woeful spare tire off the back seat. His doors wouldn’t lock, so he’d hide it in the woods.
Under the big pines it was blue-green and cool as we set out on the footpath. Yellow birch leaves, not yet fallen, seemed to float unattached to any branch. Thimbleberry leaves bigger than a man’s hand hovered in high-noon twilight. Bob darted around looking for the berries, more or less edible, but it was already too late in the year.
The going was rocky but he sailed up the trail, Charlotte and I chuffing along behind. We’d just arrived from Florida where the only mountain was Disney’s, made out of styrofoam. Bob had been reading a book by a Tibetan lama who described an esoteric practice called lung-gom: a way of walking very fast, done in a trance. Allegedly the lung-gom adept could ghost over the ruggedest terrain with his feet hardly touching the ground. Bob believed it, and I was in no position, fifty yards back, to do any scoffing.
But then we came to our first sight of the river, a revelation. We stood on a high footbridge looking down. It fit the overall category of river, the way a giraffe was a quadruped, but tell that to the first taxonomist who saw one. I’d never seen a stream so clear. Like a lens, the water focused the stony riverbed far beyond the ability of the unaided eye. So this was the South Fork of the Flathead: pools and long scrolling eddies, lolling along over pastel cobblestones, pink and cream and mint green, that might be two feet deep or twenty.
The first drop of doubt – mine – dribbled into this expedition.
Trout want clarity, like you and me, but this was overkill. How could you catch fish when they were spying on you, every move you made, through the aquatic equivalent of the Hubble telescope? Just standing on that bridge looking down, you felt naked.
And still we had miles to plod, all uphill. Don’t worry, Bob said. He’d brought along a jar of salve.
A pack string with a party of hunters came down the trail, headed home. The blocky brown horses carried no antlers on their loads; the riders looked glum under their cowpoke hats. We stood aside to let them pass and said hello.
All we got back was a grunt.
_________________
Next morning, near our camp, was chilly and gray. I sat on an outcrop that dropped to the river like a set of stairs. A bee settled on my knee and seemed to watch, drowsily, as I knotted on a fly.
Already Bob had disappeared around a bend upstream. The river ran through a winding, voluptuous gorge with walls rising sheer from the water. It was too deep to wade, so he must have found a ledge on the wall to walk on. Downstream looked easier, with chunks of fallen rimrock that Charlotte and I could work our way over without getting too wet.
But the water, to me, was way too clear. It slicked along stark and lifeless, not a riser in sight. Would we keep some to eat, Charlotte wanted to know. With all the trouble we’d taken to get here, and everything looking so virginal and pristine, she took it for granted we were going to catch fish.
Full of hope, she sprang from rock to rock flipping a gold spoon, while I threw limp casts and watched the river wash my streamer around. We kept at it half the morning and caught nothing.
Here I was, the big fishing ape who was supposed to have a grip on everything. I gazed at the river gliding past, emptying itself out, and didn’t have a clue what to do next. I wished Bob would come back with the key to it all, and when the day wore on and he didn’t show up, I began to worry about him.
No Bob, no fish, nothing. The river’s lisp swelled in the gorge like surf in a seashell.
Another thing - not that it mattered - we’d run out of new water to fish. Below us the gorge narrowed and the current sped up through the slot, with no more rocks to clamber around on. But where the wall flared out to form the narrows Charlotte spotted a little baseboard of ledge, and before I could compose a solemn essay against the idea she was out there on it. I couldn’t let her drown all alone while I stood and watched, so I was out there with her. Viewed from a distance, this had to be the dumbest fishing scene ever.
On her first cast she hung a fish. She’d crept out on the ledge as far as she could, then stretched her arm and flung the spoon around the flare of the wall, down the narrows, to a pool below that she couldn’t even see. The rod dipped, the line sang like the D string on a banjo, and minutes later she led a lemony fourteen-inch cutthroat back along the ledge to quiet water. I helped out by keeping my mouth shut. She hadn’t known you couldn’t catch a trout in this river, so she caught one.
About that time, Bob came around the bend waving his rod, frantic droplets flying off. He wanted us to come upstream. The footing was slippery and by the time we got to him we were wet to the waist. He was all worked up.
He’d found a good fish, it was rising, and he’d thrown a whole shelf of hardware at it, every sort of spoon and spinner. He held his hands up edgewise around an invisible trout. It wouldn’t hit, but since it was rising he was sure I could get it to take a fly. One thing, though - to make the cast, a long one, first I’d have to get myself out on a midstream rock. “An Errol Flynn leap,” he yelped, lunging and thrusting his rod at a juniper bush.
The trout was in a long, walled pool with a skein of slow currents. We scrabbled to an overlook, but saw nothing rising and sat down to wait. The sky was still dull as daybreak. A clump of harebells hung out their purple flowers on the broken-up rock beside us. It was over, I was thinking, or maybe Bob had only been imagining things - but then the fish began to rise again.
He held my rod while I made the buccaneer leap, barely. The rock was flat-topped, just big enough to stand on, far enough out to separate my back cast from the wall of the pool. Bob reached the rod across the gap. Taking hold of it, I felt like a statue of myself, as frozen as that, and wondered if anyone had ever stood on that rock before me.
I wanted to get it over with, get back to the bank. A good eighty feet away, Bob knelt at the tail of the pool to spot the fish, and I saw, as if from a great height, how absurd it all was. I couldn’t make a cast that far: at best I’d dump one a few yards short, in a heap. Not to mention that my fly, modeled on a dust wad found in a barracks, resembled no bug the trout might be rising to; but it was a bit late, marooned on this rock without my fly box, to be thinking of that.
Bob gave the word and the cast was in the air, ready or not. The whole thing, I felt, was out of my hands. I only knew if the first cast was bad there wouldn’t be another. The fish would spook. And amazingly, weirdly, the line flowed out flat and graphic, farther than I’d managed to cast all morning, hurling the big lumpy fly straight to the trout’s lunch bucket, or so I thought.
“You’re way off,” Bob called out, echoing in the gorge. “Go left.”
The rod seemed to guide my wrist, not the other way around, and made the called-for correction. Like a living creature, the unrolling cast licked at the air three or four rod lengths short of the fish.
“Shoot,” Bob shouted in a sort of whisper, and the last loose yards of line, released from my left hand, shot where they wanted. The cast fell back to the water with a few waves of slack, not a bad thing at all. I never even worked the fly, just let it drift, slowly sinking, straightening out the leader. Nearby, on his knees, Bob saw what I couldn’t, the flash of the trout as it took.
He threw up his arms, then pointed a finger at the fish, and it ran with the fly, ran and ran.
_________________
We ate both trout, with no apologies: in those days the dogma of catch and release hadn’t yet reached that remote fork of the Flathead. It was one of those meals so good, so kingly, you eat mostly in silence. To speak would seem a sacrilege. Charlotte’s fish, not so big, was the true delicacy, but both were delicious. We ate them with our fingers, like communion wafers, no one having thought to bring any forks or spoons in his or her kit. Nor did we have a skillet or scrap of foil. Bob simply broiled the fish on crossed sticks over the fire.
All along I’d been thinking of this outing as totally impromptu. We showed up in Martin City, Bob said let’s go, we went. But sitting there picking the trout bones, pondering our improbable catch - Charlotte’s ledge and Errol’s rock - I began to wonder about that.
The notion came to me, out of nowhere, that Bob had dreamed up everything we did, was still dreaming it as we went along. Somehow, he’d conjured up the trout I caught, found it in that crystal pool where no trout had been. Found it, moreover, for me. The fib about casting to the fish himself before coming to get me seemed as transparent as the South Fork of the Flathead. Any trout that went for my gargoyle fly would have turned itself inside out to grab his spinner.
That was Bob for you. A dreamer, banging away on a banjo, playing out possibilities in his head. Scenes, not schemes. Seeking and finding: letting go and giving away. If all this were a dream, Bob’s, in that bathtub, then the doorway we’d come in by was the Martin City Hotel.
There really was such a place, sort of. Riding up in Bob’s car, we’d passed the Hungry Horse Dam and the ugly lake it made, with barren mud banks: the less said about it, the better, except that some of the dam builders, long ago, stayed in the Martin City Hotel. That was its heyday; so Bob said. Later, when it closed, the locals mostly forgot about it, but the building survived, where Bob now lived. To him it was lore brought to life, rescued reality, part of a lost and found world of boxcars, old music, and herbal medicine.
So, was there really a Dew Drop Inn? I wasn’t so sure about that one, and didn’t necessarily want to know, if the answer might joylessly undo everything I’d just now figured out.
The fire began to spit and hiss; we felt the first cold raindrops. By dusk we were back at the car, rolling the spare out of the woods, and the rain was turning to sleet. Later that night it would snow. Bob’s wiper blades were shot, so he rigged a worn-out work glove on the blade on his side, and we headed down the mud-slick road. He tapped out a tune on the pushbuttons - Drive, 2, Low, Drive, 2, Low - while the glove waved across the windshield, flourishing the middle finger. A yellow leaf skipping in the headlights led the way.
Christ Episcopal Church
Ironton, Ohio
October 21, 2011
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