I feed
the line in with my left hand so that it hangs slack from the rod just above
the reel and begins to coil at my feet. I pinch the line above the slack part
with the trigger finger of my right hand so that I will feel if there is a
strike and the line will be taut when I jerk the rod to set the hook. It is the
late morning and there is a high, warm sun and a sharp, cool breeze. There are
no sounds except the river and the birds and the rustling of leaves. Where I
stand in the river the water comes to just below my knees. It is cool and slow
moving here where it pools shallowly beside the main channel. When I have fed
in enough line, I retrieve the fly from where it battles the current and, with
a few swift flicks of my wrist and forearm, I dry the fly in the air and then
cast it back upstream to where I think there might be trout.
‘If
there are fish, this is where they will be,’ I have told her, pointing to a
similar section of river some ways upstream. She is there now where I left her
after I set her rig and saw from the first cast that she knew what she was
doing.
‘I’m
going a ways downstream,’ I said.
‘OK.
When I catch one, you’ll have to come back to take it off the hook,’ she said.
‘When you catch one,’ I said, ‘I’ll show
you how to take it off the hook yourself.’
‘OK
but I don’t want to touch it,’ she said.
The
fly runs quickly down the channel passing through all the good holes as I
intend it to. As the current takes it, I feed the line in to keep it taut. When
the fly has passed through the good section and is dragging in the current, I
jerk it free, sweep it dry through the air, and send it back to the top of the
run as I have done several times now.
As
the fly runs downstream and I begin to feed the line in, I think about how
quickly the time has run passed. It is our last full day in the mountains
outside Telluride where we have spent the last week. We only just got here, I
think, only it feels like we have been together a very long time. Then I think
about how this is our third week since leaving South Sudan and how far away
that feels and how it has all happened very quickly and quite unexpectedly.
Something happened around the New Year, I
think as I watch the fly float passed, because we had mostly ignored each other
before that and then after we began slowly to be friends. After the New Year,
we met a couple times in Juba when one was coming and the other was going and
once when there was a coordination meeting for several days at the head office.
After that we began to exchange text messages in the evenings as we lie in bed
before turning the lights out. I suppose it was a way to get to know someone
slowly without the pressure of a proper telephone conversation. It was a fun
thing and it helped to make the time pass and it gave you just enough to get
you through the lonely nights.
‘So why did it take us a year of knowing
each other?’ she asked when we reminisced about it a long time after.
‘I think we were both getting ready for
something,’ I said. ‘It’s like our orbits needed time to synchronize.’
‘It sounds nice when you say it that way,’
she said. ‘You’ll have to write it down so I’ll remember it that way.’
Then it happened that we gave notice around
the same time so that we would both be passing through Juba at the end of the
month on our way out of the country. She drove up a few days early from where
she was working in the south to help them in the head office to do payroll and
a few days later I flew down from the north. The office had held a party for me
the night before and afterwards some of us drank and I drank quite a lot. So in
the morning I felt very bad in my head and my stomach but it helped that I was
looking forward to seeing her and I did not feel so nostalgic for leaving.
‘I’m a bit hung over this morning,’ I wrote
her in a text message as I waited to board the flight.
‘So I don’t get the sharp you?’ she
responded.
‘Just the mild cheddar version,’ I wrote
back.
When I arrived, she was having lunch at the
Indian restaurant where those who worked at the head office went for lunch
because it was the best thing within walking distance and not too expensive.
When I arrived she smiled and said hello and then went back to her
conversation. She mostly ignored me during the lunch and most of the walk back
to the office so that I started to wonder if I had read the situation wrongly.
Then she caught up with me at the end of the walk and she was very friendly now
as if the ignoring me before made the being friendly with me now more seemly.
‘I felt like people were watching!’ she
said a long time later when I asked her about the ignoring.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but, if they were, it was
only because it looked like you had a grudge against me.’
We spent the rest of that day in the common
office and we chatted very easily as we completed the last pieces of our work.
Then, in the evening we arranged for one of the drivers to take us to a
restaurant. Giorgio who was the new director sat in the front passenger seat
and, when we got in, he announced that he was going out for dinner.
‘What kind of food is it where you are
going?’ he said in his very strong but understandable accent.
‘It’s
a Thai restaurant,’ she said in a tone that might have been meant to make it
sound less appetizing.
‘Thai?’
he said as though it was a lot to consider. ‘Yes, that sounds good. Can I join
you then?’
He
saw that we both hesitated and then he quickly added, ‘Unless it is private or
something.’
Neither
of us knew what to say but eventually I managed to speak.
‘No, of course not,’ I said.
At dinner Giorgio did most of the talking.
I expected to be very annoyed that he had come along and at myself for not
telling him to find his own restaurant. But, I decided later, it was actually for
the better.
‘I think it let us just be there together
and, since he did all the talking, we did not have to put any work into it,’ I
said a long time later when we were reminiscing on it.
After
dinner the driver took Giorgio to the residence and then dropped us at the
staff house. Her room was the one beside mine in the block of concrete units
outside the main house. In the night, she came over in her pajamas and we put
on a movie and we watched some of it together. We watched on my laptop under
the green mosquito net that we tucked under the mattress on all sides after we
got under. As I think about it, standing in the cold river holding the rod and
the fishing line, I remember how the strange green net made the bed feel like
an island or a ship at sea and anyway it felt very private and much more
romantic than a concrete room with bare walls and a drab curtain had a right to
be.
During
the movie, we lay beside each other and I was terribly nervous. I was more
nervous than I could ever remember being. Also, the nerves had gone to my
stomach, which was already bad from the excessive drinking after the going away
party the night before, so that I felt very bad and very nervous and very
awkward. Each time when we looked at each other and spoke during the movie I
hesitated because I was nervous and, missing my opportunity, I became more
nervous.
What’s wrong with you, I thought, lying
there not watching the movie and being very nervous. You’ve done this before,
haven’t you? Why does this one suddenly have you so inside out?
Finally, when the nervousness was so bad
that more of the nervousness would be worse than any possible alternative, I
turned and I kissed her on the mouth. It was very sudden and very awkward, but
she managed not to be too surprised by it.
‘Very bold,’ she said after that first long
kiss.
‘I couldn’t wait any longer,’ I replied.
A long time later when we reminisced about
it, she was rather more critical of my first performance.
‘Wooosh! You just came out of nowhere!’ she
said. ‘It’s like all of a sudden there was this face in my face and you were
attacking me!’ she said, laughing at the memory and being very amused to hold
it over me.
‘I know! I was horrible!’ I conceded. ‘My
nerves were shot and I was just glad that I didn’t bash your forehead or teeth
or something!’
In
the morning we took one of the vehicles into work. She was supposed to leave
that day but she decided to miss her flight so that we could have one more day
together. So, in the afternoon we had the driver take us to the airline office
after she had already missed the flight. She smiled and chatted with the clerks
and made them feel that she was very grateful to them.
‘Of course they changed your booking for
free!’ I said when we walked out of the office and she carried a new ticket.
‘You have this thing that you do that’s like a Jedi mind trick or something.’
‘I’m just very friendly,’ she said more
innocently than was genuine.
‘I think that’s why I was so standoffish
with you at first,’ I said when we were remembering it a long time later. ‘I
thought that you would use your mind trick to take advantage of me somehow. I
can’t stand how it feels to be taken advantage of, especially by a woman, so I
guess I was too cautious.’
‘Really? And I always thought you were very
intimidating,’ she said.
That
was our last day together in Juba. We had planned to go out for dinner alone
that evening but when two colleagues invited us out we decided it was easiest
to accept than make excuses. We went to the nice place that is opposite the
pumping station where they make the Greek pizza that was very good the first
time I had it and never quite measured up after that. We sat in the outside
courtyard and had drinks and waited a very long time for our dinner. Mostly we
talked to each other while our colleagues talked about work between themselves.
I was still nervous but I felt very good and I noticed that she and the
courtyard and the drinks and even my pizza were very perfect that night.
After dinner she came to my room in her
pajamas.
‘You are utterly incapable of staying
properly dressed when you come home,’ I observed a long time after.
‘I know! It just feels wrong to be at home
in your outdoor clothes,’ she said.
‘It was that way right from the beginning!’
I said.
We went under the green mosquito net and we
began to watch another movie. In the night I lay awake with the nervousness bad
in my stomach and I thought how I liked everything about her and there was
nothing that I did not like.
She has you turned all inside out and very
quickly, I thought later in the night when I slipped outside while she slept
soundly under the bed net. I stood outside in the warm, still air with my
stomach clenched in knots from the nerves and I thought how it felt different
than too much to drink or bad digestion.
‘What did it feel like?’ she asked when we
spoke about that night a long time after.
‘Well, not like how you’d imagine
butterflies!’ I said.
I left the next day. Her flight was
scheduled for later in the day so she spent the morning with me as I packed
and, when the driver arrived, she came with me to the airport. Outside the
airport, the awkwardness came back and I said goodbye and left her very
suddenly.
‘I thought it might have just been a fling
for you,’ I said a long time after when she asked about the abrupt goodbye.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I liked you and it was
much more than that.’
‘Well, I know that now,’ I said, ‘but at
the time I didn’t want to be the guy who gets all sappy outside an airport.’
Inside the airport as I stood in line with
all my things about me, sweating profusely in the crowdedness and the heat of
the terminal, I received a message on my phone.
‘Damn, I’m gonna miss you…’ it said.
I like you very much, I thought after I
read the message, and I hope we are not through yet. Then I thought about the
nervousness and the awkwardness that was in how I had kissed her and how I had
said goodbye and in almost everything else I had done. It’s either how you’d
ruin it or how you’d win her over, I thought, or maybe she just didn’t notice.
Some days later, when we were both gone
from South Sudan and that life immediately felt very far away, we were speaking
by telephone and I said, ‘We could meet somewhere between LA and Toronto.’
Then I remembered how one night in Juba I
had asked her preference on holidaying: ‘Would you rather a condo on the beach
or a cabin in the mountains?’
‘What about Montana or Colorado?’ she said
over the phone, remembering that same conversation.
So we decided on Telluride and I found a
beautiful cabin in the mountains above the town. It was rustic and modern and
secluded and completely exposed to the mountains for miles around. It had high
ceilings and walls that were mostly windows and the bedroom was a loft. It got
the sunrise in the morning and the sunset in the evening and a view of
everything all throughout the day.
Some mornings we went running or went for a
hike but most days we stayed inside and we did
not come out until late in the afternoon when we were desperate for
food. Then we drove into town and found a restaurant, and we ate well and drank
beer or wine and we never had a shortage of things to say to each other.
On the third day we drove through the
national forest and into Durango and back again in a circuit. We listened to
music as we drove and she read trivia questions and the country was very
beautiful. The next evening we ate pizza and drank beer at a restaurant in
town. I was beginning to realize that I could find nothing wrong with her and
that made me very nervous again. Also, the being together was only getting
better and I was not needing any alone time from her as I had always needed
before. I realized that I liked her a lot more than I had been prepared for and
that made the awkwardness come back.
‘You’re not finished?’ she said.
‘I think I am for now,’ I said.
‘But you’ve barely eaten anything,’ she
said, ‘and this is our first meal of the day!’
‘I know!’ I said with exasperation. ‘I
don’t eat enough when I’m with you. You make me lose my appetite!’
The next day, I went for a hike and she
spent the afternoon at the spa and in the evening the awkwardness continued
when we met for dinner. We sat at the bar and we ordered drinks and then she
ordered a steak. I went to the restroom and when I came back I had reached a
decision.
‘So I was standing at
the urinal and I got some thinking done,’ I said.
She nodded and smiled
and did nothing to stop me from barreling into it.
‘I was thinking that I
don’t want this to end,’ I said. ‘I want you to come to Liberia with me.’
She looked very happy
and she waited a moment to answer while she enjoyed the feeling of it.
‘Yes, I’d like that,’
she said.
‘Good,’ I said and I
must have looked very happy also.
‘That’s what you
thought while you were peeing?’ she said.
That
was only last night, I think as I stand in the shallow pool in the river and
watch the fly float past. Then I hear a noise in the bushes upstream beside the
river and I turn to see her coming. She emerges from the bushes and then stops
beside a low tree to untangle the tip of her rod from one of the branches. It
seems like we’ve lived a long time together but it has been almost no time at
all, I think, and it’s all been so very good and unbelievable. I feed in more
line until the slack part coils in the water at my knees. Then I whip the fly
out, swing it overhead, and cast it back upstream. She comes alongside me and
she looks for the fly in the river.
‘Did
you get any strikes?’ I ask.
‘Not
one,’ she says. ‘Did you?’
‘One
good one that took my fly but nothing since then,’ I say.
I feed in line as the fly passes downstream
and, when it drags at the end of the line, I reel it in. Then we stand there
with our feet in the water, saying nothing and just being there with each
other.
‘Are you getting hungry?’ I say eventually.
‘Very hungry,’ she says.
‘Where should we go?’ I ask.
‘The Blue Grass Festival started today so
probably the parking will be impossible,’ she says.
‘So let’s drive up past where we turn off
to the cabin and see if there’s someplace to eat out that way,’ I say.
.JPG)
After
a bit more back and forth, some more urging, and several additional references
to my ‘white whale’ she gave in and we suited up to ride Mulholland Highway
through the canyon to the Rock Store. On the way we passed many bikers in
singles and pairs and larger groups and when they acknowledged us with a left
hand held out below the handlebar, I felt good and confident returning the
salute because I knew that finally I was a proper motorcyclist with a gorgeous
bike and solid riding gear and that I could biker-babble with the best of them.
‘Are
we going to talk to anyone?’ Jess asked.
