I eased down the stairs in my stocking feet trying not to disturb my sleeping family, and padded past the living room, through the kitchen, and onto the back porch where I kept my fishing gear.
The moon was slipping below the horizon. Darkness was soaking up shadow shapes like a blotter on spilled ink. I sat on the back steps in the glow of the porch light and laced up my high-top Keds. A breeze ruffled my hair as I shouldered my fishing gear and stepped into the morning air.
It was too dark to make out even the flower beds that bordered the driveway, but I had no trouble finding my way to the road. A dog barked somewhere in the distance as I made my way down the road, through a ditch, and squeezed between the strands of a barbed wire fence. I followed a trail through the pasture to another fence, then down a lane, through a barnyard, and into a sprawling fruit orchard. The farmer's dog knew me well and joined me, frolicking about until we got to the river, as he did every morning in that summer of 1950.
My thirteenth birthday was still several months away, but I knew this part of the McKenzie River like a seasoned guide. I fished the mile-long stretch every day during the summer. There wasn't a riffle, a pool, a submerged log, or a rock I didn't know. I knew that trout lurked in the quiet water behind rocks waiting for a morsel to drift by. I knew large trout hung out early of a morning in deep water just below rapids. I knew long, quiet pools held many trout, that would feed at the mouth where the white-water poured in then fall back to rest in the deep. And I knew that in the McKenzie River rainbow trout over fourteen inches long had to be released for breeding purposes.
By dawn I shook a night crawler out of the Prince Albert tobacco can that served as my bait-box. The breeze along the river was cool. I shivered in my thin cotton T-shirt. My hands shook with the nervous anticipation I always felt before the first cast.
Out on the river, misty fog figures emerged from the water then disappeared like ghosts into the pale light. A Hooded Merganser, its wings almost touching the water on the downbeat, skimmed swiftly up river as if on some urgent mission. I inhaled crisp, cool, clean air and fumbled with a hook and an energetic night crawler. The river crooned in my ear like a minstrel. I love that song to this day.
I won the tussle with the night crawler, and as the rosy fingers of dawn lit the eastern horizon, I made my first cast. I heard a hollow plunk, lifted the tip of my rod, and let the sinkers drift and bump along the bottom. My breath made a tiny cloud as I let out a sigh. I was fishing.
A sharp tug bent my rod into a satisfying bow, and I set my hook into the first trout of the day.
Farther upstream, I flicked a night crawler into the roiling rapids above a long, wide pool, and watched my bait drift into the deep water. My line stopped. A tiny vee formed where it entered the water. 'Dang,'ť I thought, 'Hung up on a rock,'ť and lifted the rod tip. Forty feet out the water erupted. A huge, shining apparition burst into the air shaking and twisting like a thing possessed before it hit the water with a whack, like the flat side of an oar. It was the biggest fish I had ever seen.
