Trout Flashes

Abstract

Trout Flashes Bill King (bio) 1. In the Blue Ridge mountains of southwestern Virginia, sitting on a rock that juts like a peninsula into a little stream called Back Creek, my twelve-year-old brother—wiry, already chiseled and lean—wets a piece of bread between the tip of his tongue and his front teeth, takes it out, balls it between his thumb and index finger, and then sticks [End Page 38] it on a hook. He throws it into the current at the top of the hole and lets it drift down and down. Maybe you'll catch a trout, I say. Ain't no trout in here, he says, pulling up another mad-tail-flipping sucker, a fat-headed thing with horny bumps on its crown. I want to fish, too, but there is never room for both of us. 2. An Irish tale tells of the forlorn young lover of a murdered prince, who, in drowning herself in a pristine mountain lake, transforms into a white trout. She is caught by an evil soldier, who cuts the white trout's side, releasing her bleeding human form. She bids the terrified soldier to throw her back in the little lake so that she can await her lover's return, which he does in great haste, bloodying the water and giving us the beautiful pink-streaked rainbow trout. In South Carolina, my uncle once told me to rub dirt, mud, and leaves on my hand to hide my human scent. Trout know, he said. They are the oldest and wisest fish you will ever catch. 3. There are rainbow trout, lake trout, cutthroat trout, brown trout, and tiger trout. The only trout native to West Virginia, though, is the brook trout. They live throughout Appalachia but only in the coldest and purist mountain streams. They sport a beautiful vermicular pattern—from dark green back, to bluish sides, to pink to scarlet belly—and interspersed throughout this swirling sky of color is a galaxy of yellow and red spots like stars behind a day-blind sky. No photograph can capture a brook trout's beauty. That's why, each spring—with pungent ramps greening the darkest hillsides and maple leaves still small and bright as babies' hands—I can't help but go for them. If I'm lucky, I'll get to cradle one in my palm—half in and half out of the water—before watching him slip beneath churning bubbles, which pour downstream like spilled pearls. [End Page 39] 4. Brook trout drop over fallen logs and shelving rock, into a deep and roiling hole, before settling in the shadow of a submerged boulder. Where they decide to stay, unless a fisher comes along and puts one in her creel, as heart-struck as a boy with a new ball. Mike Trout, the youngest in major league baseball history to hit 100 homeruns and steal 100 bases, smashes white balls with red stitching over fences throughout North America. They drop over walls like trout over a weir: into parking lots, under parked cars. And no one knows about them—ball or trout—when they step into their car, when they back out of wherever they are and head for highways at least two ridges removed from nowhere. 5. My 50-year-old friend Gordon loves to fish, but he acts like a boy when he catches a trout. Once we went up McGee run, which tumbles through the spruce, rhododendron and laurel of Cheat Mountain, before meeting the Shaver's Fork. It's hard to get there and you have to walk up the middle of the stream to navigate the tight confines of the holler. He put a picture of a brilliantly speckled 6-inch brookie on Facebook for his friends in Georgia to see. His face was flushed and red. His green eyes like stars sunk in a depthless pool. They made fun of his measly catch. You do not understand, he replied. 6. In Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, a father and son push a wobble-wheeled grocery cart down a broken road. They wend out of the Appalachians, through the...