I did not have Sex with that Server

I am thinking about the variations on a Bill Clinton theme for his wife's defense regarding the email controversy swirling around her. So here we go!

She could claim:

1. I did not have sex with that server.
2. I did not have sexual relations with that server.
3. I did not have *ex with that server.
4. I did not have *exual relations with that server.

I know, I know this is sticky-icky... but come on now, its the Clintons and you get what you get.

So okay, the FBI is looking into her emails, as they should, but what about the State Department.   

Here's the
 thought:  Clearly she run afoul of the U.S. State Departments own rules regarding emails.  Can the U.S. State Department bring its own charges?  And Hillary did not act alone here, after all she admits that she is technically challenged so this effort must have involved others working in concert in the State Department.  Oh boy...

So you have to wonder how Teflon coated is she?   It even gets more interesting.  Hubby Bill just shows up, out of the blue, and pigeon holes U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac of the Phoenix's Sky Harbor last week.  What the hell do you suppose was Slick Willy's agenda?  This just doesn't pass the sniff test, not even from across the country.

Now, what about the guy (one guy as I understand it) that was the email administrator or security guru.    Did someone bury this guy?  Where the hell is he? 

Oh Mr. Trump I think you have blood in the water here.

 And this coming from a Sierra Club, card carrying liberal.  GeeBus Fuckin Christ.


© 2016

Open Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

I need a dream to look forward to, a promise I can invest in, a word that I can stand on for all that is coming out of Congress is dramatic drool. During your campaign you energized my imagination. Could we get back to an America where science is restored and melts away the fog of ignorance; where health care is viewed as a right rather than a profit center; where the financial markets are disciplined by re-installing the constraints my father and grandfather put in place to curb selfish profiteering; where a college education is valued and affordable; and where the environment is treated with reverence rather than something to leverage. You painted such a picture and my hopes skyrocketed.
Mr. President, after you took office, it seemed a veil of compromise was thrown over this vision. The shroud was, perhaps, inadvertently dropped by the tactics you are using. A case in point: your health care town hall meeting. In concept a good idea, go and meet the people and discuss the issues. It worked for President Roosevelt, it ought to work now. But there is a huge horsefly in the ointment - this is not the Roosevelt era. The Republican Party has morphed into some kind of rage while the Democratic Party has fizzled into the yes-no-well-maybe party; the Internet has allowed venomous individuals to band together; and talk radio has even called you a Nazi. While you are speaking to hundreds of people in town halls, talk radio and Rupert Murdochians are speaking to millions… daily! You have delivered the occasional well reasoned argument while Sarah Palin and talk radio have conjured up the Boogey Man. Make no mistake, Karl Rovian tactics have been unleashed and your well reasoned arguments have been toasted and served up with Palin gobbledygook. You may be able to claim a debate point with the elite, but who the hell cares when Grandma is on the death list. And don’t forget Grandma has a decade or three of voting left.
Mr. President, I need you to slay the Sarah Boogey Man that is running riot in the health care debate. I need you to explain to me what your vision of health care reform is. I need you to put it to me in simple words, in several ways, that will allow me to build a vision I can invest in. But, Mr. President, you know that the Boogey Men is not going to go quietly back under the bed. I am thinking several Presidential addresses to us commoners would do the trick. In these addresses you need to create realistic scenarios, say, a fifty year bread winner, who has just lost his job, has no health insurance and his wife has cancer. Explain how, under our current system, a very real Boogey Man would raise Hell with this family. I need you to explain how your vision of healthcare reform will put this Boogey Man down. In short, Mr. President, you need to do what you have not done - create a ground swell of citizen support for healthcare reform.
Put another way, Mr. President, what is lacking is leadership. It’s that funny thing that gives people a dream to hope for, a vision to guide them, a promise for the future and a word that they can stand on. But, please don’t confuse leadership with consensus building, the art of carefully crafting compromises that, at the end of the day, fall short and no one is proud of. So, Mr. President, I want you to man-up and lead me. That is your job and it is what I expect.

Sincerely,
Stephan Fowler

Such is Life

I am sitting in Mom’s hospital room waiting for her final discharge. She is propped up in bed, sleeping with her head resting on my shoulder and what hair the chemotherapy has left mists over the crown of her head. Like a desperate poker player who has bet everything on a final losing hand, the old woman had gone all in and has lost.

One early morning last January her pivotal moment happened. She choked on her morning’s oatmeal. She grabbed her cell phone, collapsed onto the living room floor and dialed 911. She then struggled over to the front door and unlocked it. She didn’t want her door broken in by the emergency responders. I built that door and she coveted it.

When the paramedics and police arrived a slapstick pandemonium broke out bordering on grab-ass. From her vantage point on the floor, she saw huge black feet scramble after four little white dogs, whose weight is measured more accurately in ounces than pounds. The dogs yapped, bolted and darted with Murray City’s Finest in hot pursuit, all within a small radius of her.

After Mom was delivered to the hospital, the emergency room doctor, a tall slender man, with knowledge and compassion written on his face, studied her x-rays. It was obvious to even the most uneducated eye that a large malignant tumor was rampaging in her neck. The cells of her thyroid had gone insane, developing into a boiling mob that brutalized her thyroid and vocal cords, and then spread their madness to her lungs and eventually her liver. The madness will take her life.

I have shifted positions and have helped her to sit on the edge of the bed. She wants to go for a walk, to enjoy the wondrous kinesis of motion, but her energy has evaporated. Her head tilts to the right and she settles her cheek into the palm of my hand. Her right cheek folds over the edge of my hand like a dollop of warm velvety mashed potatoes. Her left cheek hangs and there is a hint of a tear dropping from her left eye. The old woman is aware.

I look down and read her hospital tag: birth date 10/02/1929. I take a mental journey and see a stampede of kids bursting out of a small, rural school house while their teacher tries to corral them by hurling threats and consequences. A pilot has barnstormed Mayfield, her home town, landing his craft in the farm fields just beyond the school. It is the first time any of the kids have seen an airplane up close and my mother is filled with amazement as her legs churn towards this marvel of modern science; she is not to be denied. She is maybe 10-12 years old, it’s around 1939 and the world is reeling from Germany and Japan’s shock troops. Unbeknownst to her, my dad, her future husband, ten years her senior, is spending his evenings strutting down Main Street, decked out in a zoot suit, a classy doll on his arm, spoiling for a brawl with anyone who gives him the hard eye.

I am back from the past and have checked Mom out of the hospital. Two young men have loaded the old woman into a medical transport van on a stretcher. We are bound for my home where she will spend her last moments. I climb in and am sitting in a jump seat along side her. I take her hand, the van accelerates and the hospital runs away from us. We gain the freeway and time and distance melt together. I am desperate to smash a window, reach out and claw onto anything that will slow this goddamn careening van and the hands of time. The oxygen bottles in the van clink and chatter, indifferent to the occupants, adding to the bump and hum of the freeway traffic. I want to tell them to shut-the-fuck-up.

I ask Mom to tell me about Jimmy, her favorite horse. In a shallow voice that sounds like sandpaper on metal she replies, “Jimmy was my favorite. He was big… and dark… a Morgan… a cutting horse. I liked to ride him bareback with a bridle. You had to be careful.” I stepped back into the past. I saw a girl well mounted on a big dark gelding. He was running hard, with the bit set between his teeth. The girl’s dark hair flew and waved like wheat in a summer breeze. The sounds of rushing air and horse were loud in her ears. She moved in rhythm with the horse as they raced through the pasture. The horse stretched his neck, threw his hooves and surged forward, while the girl leaned and rolled in syncopation, drinking in the excitement of the moment. They were electric.

The van jumps, the oxygen bottles clang a protest and I fast forward to a black and white photograph of her sitting on our living room couch, reading a story to my brother and me. My dad must have captured the moment. She is young, in her twenties, and radiant; hair done up in a soft swirl and wearing a summer cotton dress. My brother and I are young shavers, wearing pajamas, sporting crew cuts and boiling over with enthusiasm. I don’t remember the story but she instilled in us the wonder of reading. Oh the mental travels I have taken since then. I owe her one.

The van has stopped in my driveway. The young men tenderly unload the stretcher carrying Mom and slam the van’s rear doors. The oxygen bottles clang a parting shot, getting in the last word – those obnoxious sons of bitches. They carry her into my living room and place her in an awaiting hospital bed. This is where she wanted to rest; her final rest, looking out at Twin Peaks and Thunder Mountain.

A day or two has passed. I am sitting next to Mom, in front of a window that looks out onto the Wasatch Front. It has been storming for the most part, but today dawns brilliantly through the window. In a soft rasp she asks, “How are your tomatoes doing?” I answer, “Fine. All this rain has really helped.” She liked to raise heirloom tomatoes, Brandywine to be exact. She enjoyed their rich red meat and especially the acid when it prickled her tongue. About other tomatoes she said, “Those shittin’ bastards have ruined them!” Who those “shittin’ bastards” are I am not quite sure. It must be the guys who came up with a less acidy, quicker fruiting plant. Indeed, they are “shittin’ bastards” for taking some of the zing out of life.

For a couple of moments I see her tending a three foot high plant, tying the heavy fruit laden branches up to the cage that surrounds the plant. She has amended the soil to the point you can dive your fingers in, fully extended and explore the soft loam. Her hands smell of tomato vine and she is proud to share. As a friend of mine put it about her tomatoes “You take a bite and the goddamn juice runs down your arms!” The old woman knew how to capture the wealth of summer.

The hands of my wife’s antique Regulator should have spun around six times, but now its pendulum has been stopped to silence the hourly bong; my mother does not need the noise and I am grateful not to mark time. It is late in the afternoon. I am standing on my deck leaning on the railing, looking out at the garden and the mountains. The sky is heavy; it’s going to storm. There are too many people milling around her and the pressure has driven me out of the room. My brother and his wife are here, as well as all his kids and their kids. It seems that the old woman’s passing has become a spectacle and it offends me. Only a couple of grandkids took an interest in her. Why would the others come and bring their kids to view her passing? I suppose it’s a Mormon thing or maybe it gives a sense of closure or both. Regardless, I have become her protector and I don’t like it, but I have to choke it down nonetheless.

Mom has lapsed into a coma, her eyes half open. The raging mob within her has overwhelmed her; the old woman is shutting down. I want to tell her to go find Rebel, her favorite black Labrador who died a number of years earlier, but the words suffocate in my throat. I hope she will hold his big block head in her lap, stroke his soft ears and feel the chill of his wet nose on her cheek. Maybe a late summer breeze will carry them into my garden, Rebel at heel, the old woman stopping to sample a tomato, both enjoying the sparkle of summer.

I walk back into the room, sit on the couch by her bedside and take her hand. I think about a strange fanciful light pattern that danced on the ceiling yesterday morning. It consisted of several ellipses that jumped and cavorted around with each other. I stared, enjoying the exquisite whimsy. Where it came from only Chicken Man knows for sure. Maybe it was the morning’s sunlight refracting through the rain water, which pooled and glistened like quicksilver, on the glass table top that stood on the deck. Regardless, it was the sum of the parts that made it so delicately fanciful. And so it was with my mother. She was five foot nothing, beautiful, even at age 79; read J.D. Salinger and Parade; watched Meet the Press and Dancing with the Stars; volunteered for the Red Cross and often clawed back gifts; loved jazz, dogs and gardening and hated religious conservatism; fiercely independent but relished being asked over for dinner; secretive, but could not keep a secret; she could radiate one moment and glower the next; had no close friends but garnered respect and affection from others; taught the school of tough love, yet mourned when my brother and I moved out of her house; could set your hair on fire with her ill timed comments, but burst with pride over your accomplishments. This was my mother. As I watched a thought occurred and I ducked my chin. The old woman, like the light, will soon disappear. And so she did.

I am sitting outside on the deck with the family members who adored Mom, warts and all. The old woman has left the house; an undertaker and his assistant have taken her away. Both men are well into their fifties and have the studied posture and expression that allows them to do their job efficiently and respectfully. They loaded her into a nondescript van and drove off. I stood on the porch watching them go. Then in a panic, I bolted to the end of the driveway, frantic for one more glimpse, but the van had already crested the hill and disappeared. I felt gut shot.

We have poured a glass of rye for all and sip from cut crystal drink glasses. We are standing a drink for the old woman. The burn of the whiskey complements the caress of the cool storm struck air. Thunderstorms have been swirling around the Salt Lake valley for the past two weeks and this evening is no exception. A storm rolls in from the south, black, swollen, and spoiling for a fight. It brawls with Corner Canyon, then Bell Canyon and heads our way. On arrival, it throws a long flash of lightning that splits the sky and follows it up with a booming crack of thunder that shakes our deck. The thunder boomer has announced its presence with authority. Tom, my nephew, glibly comments, “Grammie has already pissed someone off.” The remark is perfectly timed. It felt good to laugh. Such is life.

The Canoe that is to Be: Part 2

She bulges in all the right places. She lays soft, supple and nude on the strongback. I have just finished crafting her hull and I’ve done good. I catch myself stealing glances, with my head along one stem, following the curve of her form, noticing how each cedar strip defines her form. Her cedar strip skin has transformed the vertical rhythm of the molds into a sensuous jazz melody, whispering at for and aft and Peggy Lee full bodied amidships. I take particular delight in feeling her tumblehome sides. It’s, well, like feeling a woman’s ass. I run my fingers from her shear line, over the crest of her bilge and tumblehome to her bottom. She is the Mistress Canoe.

The crafting of her hull did exact a blood price. A glove lies on a table top, flat and lifeless. It is my work glove, the left one, made of ivory nylon mesh with a royal blue latex palm and finger pads. The palm is spattered with droplets of blood, giving it an almost Jackson Pollack artistry. The droplets are the color of black going into red, jaggedly irregular and randomly scattered like a handful of pennies dropped on the sidewalk.

What happened is obvious from the thumb pad. It is torn diagonally, in a lazy barber pole stripe that is caked with dried blood. Towards the middle of the tear, an inkwell of a hole yawns, where a shot glass of blood had oozed, glistening in the afternoon sun. I had fed my thumb to my table saw and felt the blade’s bite. I was lucky; I did not have to pick my thumb off the shop floor.

However, the wound would travel a rocky road to recovery. Two weeks later the it turned black; gangrene had paid a visit. The wound was reopened, the skin peeled off the thumb pad and the muscle tissue scrubbed and probed it to remove dead tissue and ground in pieces of wood and glove. The healing time doubled. For over a month my thumb was bandaged up, looking like a soft serve ice cream cone.

A week or so after the bandage came off I sat sipping a cup of coffee, rubbing my index finger over the bulbous hunk of scab and scar tissue that was now my thumb pad. My thoughts drifted off to a November duck shoot. It was an early November afternoon that was more winter than fall. The sky overhead was a duck hunter’s sky; sunless, gray, the clouds textured like a Mexican tuck-n-rolled interior in a 57 Chevy. Under this sky the labored, cupped winged flight of waterfowl was easily noticed, making them bold targets.

Out across the expanse of marsh in front of my blind a storm was massing itself for an assault on the marsh. As it rolled across the waters and salt grass flats of the Great Salt Lake, it drove a headwind that sucked up dust and water, giving it the appearance of a roiling avalanche tumbling over itself. When the headwind invaded the marsh, it teased the unsuspecting water into spitting white caps that double-timed after the wind.

I stood up, looked over the front of my blind and braced myself. The head wind rolled over my small flooded island, pelting me with cold marsh spittle, beating the surrounding cattails into submission, rupturing their swollen heads, sending millions of seeds cavorting down the marsh under lacey canopies.

As I watched, the nucleus of the storm grew, boiling within, turning violently dark. As the storm approached, it churned up massive amounts of static electricity, releasing it in jagged tongues of lightning that flicked out, like a snake’s tongue, searching for grounded high points and slicing open the sky, who roared in agony, like a gut shot lion. With each flash and roar I jerked my head down, turtling it between my shoulders. It was clear I had overstayed my welcome.

I dug my canoe out of its hidey-place and pulled it around as I picked up my spread of decoys. Each time I stopped to pick up a block, the silt swallowed my boots, locking me into position, while the wind sliced across my wet hands, robbing my fingers of warmth and dexterity as I wrapped the soaked anchor line around the decoy’s head. After stowing it in the bow of the canoe I plunged my hands under my water fowling jacket, nestling them into the concentrated warmth of my arm pits. Before I moved to the next decoy, I had to break the silt’s lock by rocking my feet heel-to-toe. Only then could I take a step without stumbling and filling my waders with November’s marsh water. After tossing the last decoy aboard I trudged back to my blind, one muck laden step at a time, pulling the canoe by the bow line, while the headwind boxed my ears and slapped my face playing every bit the part of a street thug.

I looked at my hunting buddy, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, who was sitting on top of the large muskrat den. The headwind was bulling him as well, but he did not shrink from it. Rather, he turned his muzzle into the wind and savored the smorgasbord of marsh smells that the headwind had served up. It felt good to be here at the storm’s edge, even though I knew it was going to be combat-paddling to cross the open expanse of water and evade the snake’s tongue. I was right with the world.

I parked the boat in front of the blind, loaded my side-by-side shotgun, shells, thermos, the Chesapeake Bay, and the days bag of five ducks; two pintails, one mallard and two widgeons. The Chesapeake Bay sat amidships, threw his muzzle back into the wind and continued to sample the smorgasbord.

The day’s bag of ducks, however, was not as I had left them when I went out to pick up my spread of blocks; they had been decapitated. The Chesapeake had apparently acquired a taste for duck head. I suppose the heads have a creamed filled crunch to them, something like a deep fried Twinkie-potato chip combo, and for the Chesapeake, you can’t eat just one. The birds were still fit for the table so I just chuckled and called the Chesapeake a “fucking goat”. As usual he did not acknowledge my comment.

I shoved the boat out into the impoundment, climbed into the stern seat, grabbed my paddle, reached out, sunk it in the muck and pulled hard. The canoe leaped forward. The headwind caught the bow and peeled us leeward towards home. With the wind at my back, each stroke of the paddle pulsed the boat toward the access canal, where I would no longer be prey for the snakes tongue. My heart beat fast and my arms pulled hard on the paddle. The waves that broke on bow’s stem beat out a warning, “Lightnings a comin…Lightnings a comin.”

Will I paddle the Mistress Canoe through adventures like this? Only Chicken Man knows and He ain’t sayin. It’s hard to admit that the Mistress Canoe has suffered a setback by my hand. The epoxy covering her outside bottom surface has blistered badly; some of the blisters are the size of an out stretched hand. The tops of the blisters have been torn off, exposing a gooey jam like material under the fiberglass cloth. The two part epoxy must not have been mixed well enough, preventing the molecules of hardener and epoxy from mating properly. The only fix is to strip the entire bottom down to the cedar planking and fiber glass her again.

I God it’s been a long time since I have felt this defeated, but it is what it is. The urge to throw a tantrum, Sawzall her up and throw her dismembered parts in the garbage, was brutally strong. I hadn’t realized how heavily I had invested myself in this boat. My wife jolted my thinking and made me realized that part of me lives in this boat. True enough. Ah hell, to tell the truth I just hated having my faults put up for public display. That’s why, I suppose, the destructive impulse was so strong.

Indifferent to my bruised ego, the Mistress Canoe waits for a belt sander, running 60 grit, to strip off her bottom skin of epoxy so a new layer can be applied. It’s late September and duck hunting season is upon us. Will I launch her this season? Like I said, only Chicken Man knows…the belt sander is fitted with a new belt and my dust mask sits on my bench top.

This I Believe

I was 31 years old when my daughter was born. During my wife’s pregnancy I was belligerent. I took a photo of her when she was about 8 months along and purposely cropped off her head as a joke. A baby was the last thing I wanted. I wanted stuff: a BMW, an Alta ski pass, not a child. With a child all I could see was compromise. Why did I agree to her getting pregnant? I suppose I feared my wife would leave me, so I caved. During her pregnancy she openly questioned if I would hold the child once it was born. To be honest I had the same question.

The morning of the delivery I wondered if I was going to faint and crack my head open like a ripe melon hitting pavement. I remember asking one of the nurses, not quite jokingly, if there was a football helmet I could wear to prevent my brains from spilling out when my head smacked the tile floor. The nurse that fielded the comment looked at me as though she wanted to pull my balls off so that I would never place my wife in this situation again, or maybe she just had a gut full of me and my whine. Either way she was not pleased with me.

The miracle of birth happened in all its bloody, screaming, afterbirth, vagina splitting glory. And my melon stayed intact. The bug-eyed pediatrician pronounced the jelly coated slug a “GIRL!”, ceremoniously clipped the umbilical cord and everyone rejoiced. He then stitched my wife’s femininity back together while a doting nurse (the one that wanted to pull my balls off) commented to my wife that “this doctor is a real craftsman” when it comes to stitching up birth-split womanliness parts. Meanwhile, the staff kick-started the newborn’s breathing, sucked the jelly out of her ears and nose, gave her a passing grade and tucked her in with my wife, who began cooing a mother’s coo. I stood and stared.

Later in the day, when the backslapping and crying by the grandparents subsided, I stood alone staring through the glass that separated the newborn holding pen from adoring adults. There in the crowd of infants lay a newborn with my last name. She looked like a dehydrated, miniaturized version of Ozzy Osbourne swaddled into a cocoon. I turned, walked over, sat on some nearby stairs and stared at my feet. A feeling of belonging leaked into my thoughts. It occurred to me that I belonged to that Ozzy Osbourne slug of a baby and she to me and we both belonged to the exhausted elegant woman down the hall. For a moment my eyes pooled with tears. I answered my question: I will hold this child, hold her close for as long as I breathe. The child has grown into an elegant adult, simple at heart and strong of intellect, like her mother.

This is what I believe, I believe that people belong to each other.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2008, all rights reserved.

Right in the Corner of the Mouth

I was asleep at the reel when the red speckled brown sucked in my egg pattern and exploded into the air. The trout tumbled back into the river and shot down stream toward me, taking full advantage of the slack line. He then wrapped the leader around the dabbling toes of an exposed tree root and snapped it. I was left holding a limp line. It was a fuck-me-with-a-hot-poker moment.

Until this point I had pounded the river for the better part of the afternoon. I started with a black wooly bugger, then switched to a sculpin, followed by a worm and finally to a prince nymph trailing an egg. I probed likely pools and riffles getting only the occasional rock strike. Along the way my mind had gone numb; I was mind-dead from watching the fly line flow with the current over the last couple of hours.

I laced on a new leader, tied on a number ten bead-head prince nymph and trailed an egg behind it; the identical rig as before. I stepped back into the run, waved the bamboo rod a couple of times and shot the egg up and across where I had hooked the bull. The egg drifted, maybe a few feet, when the bull’s twin sucked it in. The same antics occurred. The fish bolted three feet above the surface, nose-dived and torpedoed downstream. This time I was not an empty fishing vest. I managed the slack and the bamboo rod flexed deep into the handle, allowing me to control the fish’s tantrum.

The bull was wearing the deep colors of the spawn. When I picked him up a white ribbon of sperm squirted from his rear hole and his stomach hung heavy, full and mottled like a game winning bag of marbles. One moment he had been fertilizing eggs and in the next, feasting on the dislodged caviar that was drifting in the current. There is a symmetry here that I appreciate.

A dinner fish I decided. A glass of claret, some potatoes and onions, and a green salad would round out the meal. I smacked the brown on top of the head with my folded Swiss Army knife, opened the blade and gutted him. The fish dripped blood on my waders like ketchup from an overstuffed ballpark hot dog. I pawed through the guts, found the stomach and unzipped it with the point of my knife. A harvest of iridescent coral colored fish eggs spilled out. Had these eggs escaped the bull, they probably would have drifted into slack water, settling into a bog of silt or moss where they would have smothered and decayed.

The bull’s carnivorous act is done without guilt or guile. It’s done out of necessity, the need to gain sustenance. The abundance of summer is over. The large hatches of aquatic insects are gone, and the terrestrials have disappeared as well. The stream bed in late fall offers relatively little easy pickins. Shortly the water temperature will plummet, forcing the trout into a drowsy dormancy. This is the trout’s last feast of the season. He has to take advantage of it to survive the coming winter.

I teased the spawners for the better part of an hour, landing fish after fish. Not wanting to exhaust the run, I reeled up, walked over to a fallen log overlooking the run and benched myself. I watched the spawning bed, but could not see a single fish, nor could I distinguish the spawning bed from the surrounding river bottom. The water simply slipped over the top of the bed, glittering and gurgling, not offering a clue. I had Forrest Gumped my way into the spawning bed.

Deciding I had tormented these fish long enough, I walked up to another pool. I drifted the egg through the hole a dozen times or more, but no explosion. What was so special about the hole before? The cogs in my head spun. I walked back to the spawning bed, sat on the bench and watched the river caress it. Slowly I pieced together a subtle, pockmarked pattern in the river bed that had camouflaged itself under the shimmer of the current. Then in an oh-shit epiphany I saw the spawning bed in its entirety. I realized I had only tapped the head of the bed.

I walked downstream, well below the foot of the bed and probed with a dozen casts – Nothing… Zilch… Zippo. When I checked out the foot of the bed, ker-slam-mo! A brown lunched on the egg and registered his protest by romping downstream. I released the spawner, reeled up and humped it upstream. I was a man on a mission. I ranged a good couple of hundred yards until I saw the same subtle pockmarked structure. First cast into the suspected spawning bed rendered a bucking, hook jawed bull, whose head filled the palm of my hand, from the crescent of his gill to the crook at the tip of his lower jaw. The action was again fast and furious. Once I worked my way through the bed then silence. My theory was confirmed, case closed.

The river had given me a gift that day; a right of trespass into a trout’s mating sanctuary. I probably will never share this gift. It is my fear that so called fishing guides will squat on these beds and plop their well-heeled clients in the middle of the runs, where they will torment the spawners well past exhaustion, devastating the spawning bed for the sake of a buck. You see this scenario unfold on all of the West’s popular fishing destinations. The profit motive, combined with a mutated sense of entitlement and a need for instant gratification, plagues the fly fisherman of this country.

Is this attitude towards guides and their clients hypocritical on my part? Not in my mind. Fly fishing for me is more about discovery than the simple hook-and-fight contest. The discovery process places me in intimate contact with the river, her bed and the populations she supports. It is the unraveling of the river’s web of life that enriches my fishing.
However, I am not above gloating or bragging. In fact, I seem to prefer doing both at the same time. And yes, I told my fishing cronies about this fishing. When they asked where I caught those fish, my sardonic sense of humor flowered. I formed my index finger into a hook, snagged the inside of my lower lip, grinned a smartass grin and quipped: “Right in the corner of the mouth.” My compadres have known me long enough to know my answer, but ask they must and howl with laughter I must. I just kill myself sometimes.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2008. All rights reserved.

Alzheimer's Lullaby

Alzheimer’s disease took my father. He was a Great Depression era kid, grew up tough, took a long drink from life and owned a sense of grace.

Some glibly say that those of us watching Alzheimer’s envelop a loved one are in a state of denial. Denial implies a choice; that somehow Alzheimer’s has been presented as a choice, but you simply choose to ignore the possibility. Only those of us that have seen the disease entangle a loved one know that you cannot look at a loved one as though they are the subject of a multiple choice question. The uninitiated onlooker is utterly bewildered. The only frame of reference you have is the loved one’s past. The vision you had of them does not fit the figure before you.

At first I thought that my father just needed to get out more; he just needed new material to freshen his mind. However, his conversations always migrated back to memories of years earlier. It was maddening. I wanted the conversation to move forward, to explore the contemporary, but the conversations remained entrenched in the past. It never occurred to me that Alzheimer’s was in the process of sending his memories of the here and now to the Bermuda Triangle.

My father’s sense of humor fell off the radar screen as well. The sense of humor that coined the quirky comic phrase: “Well isn’t that just prophylactic!” had vanished without a trace. The jokes, the kibitzing, and the warmth were gone without so much as a whisper. Once in a while a spark would reappear – a laugh, a smile or a word. You hold out hope that your loved one is emerging, but the sparks always fade back into the fog, reappearing less frequently as time goes on; then it occurs to you that you can’t remember the last spark.

My father knew he was lost. One evening he stood in my doorway, drew me close, eyes swollen with pleading tears, and whispered: “I’m in trouble. Something is wrong with me and I can’t figure it out.” For a moment I swam in the pooled tears in his eyes. He turned and left. I got the message.

About this time my father paced relentlessly, to the point of exhaustion. He had wandered into Sundowner’s syndrome. Perhaps he was searching for a beacon that would guide him back home through the fog of the Bermuda Triangle, but she is selfish. She does not give back what she has taken.

By the time it’s obvious that it is Alzheimer’s, the disease has spun your loved one’s mind like a roulette wheel. My dad sat down next to me, looked at me and uttered, “Chicken shit 1st Sergeant Fowler. (Fowler is our last name.) Christ, I hate seeing my men coming back all shot up!” He fell silent, turned and stared straight ahead. The roulette wheel had spun, the ball dropped and he was back in the South Pacific fighting the Japanese, in the spring of his manhood. I was not to be born for another eight years.

As Alzheimer’s progresses Friday the 13th emerges; paranoid psychosis finds a home in your loved one. Their mind becomes a caldron, mixing a witches brew of actual memories and grotesque fantasies. My father wanted to keep a knife with him at all times; a butter knife, steak knife, butcher knife, any knife. He was convinced that starving Japanese soldiers were coming in the night to steal food. How do you disarm a man who is trying to protect himself?

In a word: drugs. The prescribed anti-psychotic drugs dropped him into a zombie like state. The man was mobile when lead and stationary when placed. My father had become warehouse material. And my mother was exhausted. He died shortly after being placed in a nursing home. It’s interesting to note that anti-psychotic drugs are suspected to hasten the death of an Alzheimer’s sufferer. In my father’s case, the correlation seems strong.

They say Alzheimer’s disease is the long goodbye. That doesn’t ring with me. I like to think that Alzheimer’s disease sings a lullaby, distracting at first, then maddening, but ultimately comforting in the end. A comfort that eases you into that long Good Night.

Copyright Stephan Fowler 2008. All rights reserved.