Living in a Daydream

Trying my best to be less melancholy and more cheerful. It ain’t working at all.

After three or four half-hearted starts at writing something funny, I gave up. I’m not there. I’m not feeling it, so I apologize in advance. I am incapable of pontificating on anything that’s not important to me, or on my mind at the moment. I do not begrudge you going to read Dr. Gott. Not much, anyway.

Forgive me. I am entrapped and shackled, and can think of little else. I can smell nothing but pine and dogwood. I am focused like a pointing dog, like a prowling cat, on a singular daydream: Out there. Far and away. I’ve been behind shut doors too long.

Though the weather is warming, there’s rain on the horizon. Swell, just swell. I know lots of guys are fishing the bay in this weather; some may be fishing for sac-au-lait in the basin; of course, hunters have been out for months now. I am, it is clear, something of a woose: Me and the cold do not see eye-to-eye, as you know. So my complaints herein do hereby acknowledge my admitted wimpy status when it comes to cold, wet weather.

So I wallow in memories of better days beyond the back door. I do spend a lot of time with my maps this time of year. Online maps, paper maps, maps in books and maps in my head. I love maps, have been fascinated with them from childhood. Last spring, I found a few nice, blue lines on the map of Kisatchie National Forest that I hoped might have been fishable creeks, but realized might be wash-outs, gullies that only fill with water in decent rain.

My pal and I took off to find one while we were in the forest one day. I had loaded the coordinates into my handheld GPS. We drove down a long, red-dirt road until we came to the end, just as my maps predicted. From there we hoofed it, over a steep hill which, oddly enough, should have led us to the blue line identified on the map as Steep Hill Creek. On the other side, I could swear I heard water running, and though my GPS said we were standing up to our knees in Steep Hill Creek, not a sign of it could be found. I thought I was still hearing water, though, barely audible. There was a dense thicket of holly and briars nearby that we couldn’t penetrate, and maybe Steep Hill Creek was in there, but we never found it.

Such is the life of an amateur explorer! I’ve got several more to check out, to see if the blue lines on the map are real. That’s the problem, the topographic maps around here haven’t been updated in decades.

My buddy and I took off on a long trek to reach the lower flows of Kisatchie Bayou. In his four-wheel-drive truck, we took a narrow, winding, sometimes treacherous Forest Service road for miles, following our progress with the GPS, until we were just a few hundred yards from the creek…and ran smack dab into POSTED signs. There’s private property scattered all over the forest, you see, so we had to turn around and forget about it.

That same day, though, we were at last successful. Far down at the southern edges of the forest, we at last found a respectable creek other than Kisatchie Bayou. We had to drive quite a ways to get there, but finally we located an old concrete bridge that crossed Little Bayou Pierre.

Barely half as wide as Kisatchie Bayou, it was truly a little gem, tucked away there in the pines and away from most of the tourists. The Little Pierre was beautiful, a small cascading waterfall and then it flowed out calmly over sandstone slabs, surrounded by rich, deep and lush trees and shrubs.

Leaving the rods in the truck because the day was waning, we walked downstream to the little cascade where water stair-stepped down in a lilting dance. I stopped to get a photo, and heard an odd sound. I thought it was my camera malfunctioning, but as I held it to my ear I could tell the sound was coming from my right, and a sudden flash of intuition clued me: Rattlesnake. I leaped to my left, across a flow of the creek to the next sandstone outcropping, grateful the serpent, that I never even saw, at least was decent enough to give me a warning.

We didn’t fish the creek that day, it was late, past time to get back on the concrete spine toward home, but we know where it is now; I think it may hold a few fish, but even if it doesn’t, being in its presence is comfort enough, especially in winter when I am dreaming of solace.

So in the deadfall of winter, I look at my maps, and I see where Caroline Dormon Trail passes close – really close – to Kisatchie Bayou just north of the spot my friend and I tried to reach when we hit the POSTED signs. Since the trail is forest service property, it is public access. It appears to be two, maybe three miles down from the spot we usually park to fish Kisatchie Bayou, and would be well worth an investigative hike.

We’ll probably go after this month, when deer season is done in that area. I’ve never seen Kisatchie in winter, defrocked, browned and dozing. I can’t wait! If the rain doesn’t fall too hard or too much, if the temperatures cooperate, we’ll take to the trail and, and we probably won’t cast a line.

But you see, that’s what I’m holding on to. That’s what’s keeping me sane right now, an intermediary pursuit between now and spring. We may make a couple such forays, and let me tell you, friends and neighbors, no prescription bottle, no hymn, no soothing words and no careless promise can suffice near to what those red hills and coarse rocks can give me.

The winter, no matter how recently it began, has already been far too long.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 10:52 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.