Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan Page A

America said, “I know that fish who just struck. You’ll never catch him.”
    â€œOh,” I said.
    â€œForgive me,” Trout Fishing in America said. “Go on ahead and try for him. He’ll hit a couple of times more, but you won’t catch him. He’s not a particularly smart fish! Just lucky. Sometimes that’s all you need.”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “You’re right there.”
    I cast out again and continued talking about Great Falls.
    Then in correct order I recited the twelve least important things ever said about Great Falls, Montana. For the twelfth and least important thing of all, I said, “Yeah, the telephone would ring in the morning. I’d get out of bed. I didn’t have to answer the telephone. That had all been taken care of, years in advance.
    â€œIt would still be dark outside and the yellow wallpaper in the hotel room would be running back off the light bulb. I’d put my clothes on and go down to the restaurant where my stepfather cooked all night.
    â€œI’d have breakfast, hot cakes, eggs and whatnot. Then he’d make my lunch for me and it would always be the same thing: a piece of pie and a stone-cold pork sandwich. Afterwards I’d walk to school. I mean the three of us, the Holy Trinity: me, a piece of pie, and a stone-cold pork sandwich. This went on for months.
    â€œFortunately it stopped one day without my having to do anything serious like grow up. We packed our stuff and left town on a bus. That was Great Falls, Montana. You say the Missouri River is still there?”
    â€œYes, but it doesn’t look like Deanna Durbin,” Trout Fishing in America said. “I remember the day Lewis discovered the falls. They left their camp at sunrise and a few hours later they came upon a beautiful plain and on the plain were more buffalo than they had ever seen before in one place.
    â€œThey kept on going until they heard the faraway sound of a waterfall and saw a distant column of spray rising and disappearing. They followed the sound as it got louder and louder. After a while the sound was tremendous and they were at the great falls of the Missouri River. It was about noon when they got there.
    â€œA nice thing happened that afternoon, they went fishing below the falls and caught half a dozen trout, good ones, too, from sixteen to twenty-three inches long.
    â€œThat was June 13, 1805.
    â€œNo, I don’t think Lewis would have understood it if the Missouri River had suddenly begun to look like a Deanna Durbin movie, like a chorus girl who wanted to go to college,” Trout Fishing in America said.

In the California Bush
    I’ve come home from Trout Fishing in America, the highway bent its long smooth anchor about my neck and then stopped. Now I live in this place. It took my whole life to get here, to get to this strange cabin above Mill Valley.
    We’re staying with Pard and his girlfriend. They have rented a cabin for three months, June 15th to September 15th, for a hundred dollars. We are a funny bunch, all living here together.
    Pard was born of Okie parents in British Nigeria and came to America when he was two years old and was raised as a ranch kid in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
    He was a machine-gunner in the Second World War, against the Germans. He fought in France and Germany. Sergeant Pard. Then he came back from the war and went to some hick college in Idaho.
    After he graduated from college, he went to Paris and became an Existentialist. He had a photograph taken of Existentialism and himself sitting at a sidewalk cafe. Pard was wearing a beard and he looked as if he had a huge soul, with barely enough room in his body to contain it.
    When Pard came back to America from Paris, he worked as a tugboat man on San Francisco Bay and as a railroad man in the roundhouse at Filer, Idaho.
    Of course, during this time he got married and had a kid. The wife and kid are gone now, blown away like apples