A River in my Pocket
Paul Quinnett
© 2009 – Paul Quinnett (reprint permission granted to anyone)
Through no fault of my own I was born in Los Angeles, California.
But I got over it.
And I got out.
A born fisherman, the only way an angler can endure life in Los Angeles is to wear one of those Valium-on-a-Rope bars around your neck so you can lick it while stuck in traffic.
With the hot breath of the paving machine on the back of my neck, I escaped from LA in 1958 and headed north by northwest in search of trout streams and an education, in that order. I stopped off at a couple of universities to pick up degrees (Utah State and Washington State) and then, one day, drove from Pullman to Spokane in search of Mexican food.
I didn’t find any quality enchiladas in those days (my how things change!), but I did fine one hellava’ great city.
I’d never seen a city like Spokane before. For one thing, you could get in and out of it in less than 20 minutes and keep all your marbles without having to take medications.
Standing on a bridge and looking down into the river that runs through it, I watched a trout rise.
A wild trout!
Georgian’s love to say that when they die they don’t want to go to heaven; they want to go to Atlanta. But that’s only because they’ve never been to Spokane. Here was a city with a river in its pocket.
Some who know me say I am obsessed with fishing. I do not deny it. I have tinkered around with several obsessions in life, but fishing is the only one that has worked out.
When I was a lad I didn’t so much catch my first little rainbow trout so much as it caught me. The headline in my head screamed: TROUT CATCHES BOY!
I have never been the same since, nor wanted to be.
So imagine my reaction at seeing a trout rise in a river in the middle of a city. Compared to me, only addicts accidentally locked up overnight in drugstores can feel anything like the joy I felt at seeing that wild red band trout catch a mayfly.
After moving to Cheney (closer to the lakes), and with my Spokane office only two blocks from the river, there were many spring days when I earned perfectly good wages while dreaming about fishing instead of listening to my patients (I practiced as a psychotherapist for 30 years and paid close attention to what my customers said except during those late afternoon caddis hatches that we fly fishers live to die for).
A fishing buddy once asked me, “How can sit and listen to people’s problems all day with hungry trout rising only two blocks away?”
In an unguarded moment, I blurted, “Who listens?”
The only way out of this ethical dilemma was to stop seeing troubled people during the fishing season and take up with the trout.
I began to pack a rod and a pair of waders in the trunk of my car. I kept my work schedule open from noon till two and, in good weather, developed a reputation for “disappearing” from the office for a couple of hours - sometimes coming back with my hair ruffled and my tie loosened and askew.
Several of the receptionists who kept my appointment book spread it around that I was having an affair. Grateful for the flattery, I forgot to correct them.
For people born and raised in Spokane, the river that turns and swirls and flows and falls through the heart of the city may not seem like much. Twenty years ago you didn’t hear people bragging about it. You didn’t see them on it much. Not many fished it.
Old Spokane didn’t play it up much, or build it up, or raise it up in the minds of strangers, as I’m sure the original Spokanes once did and still do come Powwow time.
Perhaps when you’re born in heaven you don’t notice the streets are paved with gold, or that, in the case of those living in Spokane, your home river is a vibrant, living, breathing, natural treasure beyond all metrics of measure or esteem.
But that is changing now, and mostly for the good. What we all might aim for is a greater river than the sum of its parts, a river we can embrace in ways that will bless us all, each and every one, in our own needful way.
.
New Yorkers may lunch long on rare beef and Martinis, Los Angelinos may idle away midday swigging Perrier in open air cafés on Rodeo Drive, but only in Spokane can citizens break for lunch, reach into their back pocket and pull out a river to fish or float or walk along while holding hands and dreaming…, a river too beautiful to believe.
End.
