Although I like to think I’m a well-rounded person, I often feel that the parts of my life are compartmentalized. It’s not often enough when my thinking life meets my personal life, when the ideas I care the most about actually touch moments in my life.

However, that happened this weekend while visiting my stepdaughter, her husband, and their new baby. While there I happened to mention to Cory, an avid fishermen, that I had been writing about Richard Hugo’s love of fishing. I mentioned that I had thought of putting in a Hugo poem about steelhead fishing that reminded me of Cory’s devotion of fishing, but I doubted that he was reading my weblog.

Cory went to the website and read the blogs I had written, and we spent a good part of Sunday talking about fishing and our common environmental beliefs. Cory’s trying to preserve a small, but beautiful plot of land on the Puget Sound.

Left alone, I spent a few minutes taking photographs of the fishing mementos that decorate their beautiful house that faces the Puget Sound, fishing mementos that reminded me once again just how important fishing is to the Northwest’s image of itself. Here’s a collage of those mementoes:

Plunking the Skagit

It’s mystery, not wind, the men
endure. Steelhead drew them here
where tons of winter drive above
them north and fires start the day
along the bar. A hundred feet
of nylon settles on the river
and the wait begins. Each line slants
tight from an upright rod to water
and underwater to the pencil lead.
A flat south: wind will hammer
water from their eyes, wind and water motion
faking knocks of steelhead in the bells.

These men are never cold. Their faces
burn with winter and their eyes
are hot. They see, across the flat,
the black day coming for them
and the black sea. Good wind
mixes with the bourbon in their bones.

A real name-steelhead-rainbow
from the sea. He runs in summer, too
but that is undramatic, the river
down and warm. No pour to push against.
No ice to snap his fins. No snow
to lay him on for photographs.

Men keep warm with games. The steelhead
is a Burmese spy, a hired gun
from Crete. He comes to mate, not die
on some forgotten sand like salmon.
He rides the river out in spring
planning then his drive for next
December, when big rains bring him
roaring from the sea with fins on fire.

This near the mouth, the river barely glides.
One man thinks the birds that nick
the river mark the fish. Birds believe
the men are evergreens. Above
the guess and ruffle, in the wind –
steelhead to the spawning ground.

Richard Hugo from Selected Poems