Haiku Steelhead

My friend Ken Campbell has revived his blog 'Haiku Steelhead'.
Ken is an artist in his appreciation for those things sublime and beautiful, and is one of a small brotherhood of those of us that attempt to find a deeper meaning in our fly-fishing adventures. Please check it out here.

An ode to our river at spate

*Spate: A U.K. term meaning flood, large influx of water, full of water, freshet, etc.

The river is deep and dark with mystery, danger, and expectation. It presses on your body and moves you. It surrounds you. The trees in skeletal state stand as patrons, ever watching. Voices come and go, created and swallowed by the black water.

Somewhere in that cold river waking from winter’s sleep moves a sleek form. Born to wander, the prodigal fish returns. So too, does my joy return. I immerse myself in the vast emptiness, and in that dark forbidding and cold water, find renewal. I cast my long line over the water with an offering, a hope of a connection to nature and some hidden or forgotten part of myself. Snowflakes tickle my nose, melt into drops of water, and join the billions of others flowing with authority to the lake.

My boots shuffle off the gravel and cobble. I bob through hidden holes as the water hisses around my waders. Where others find loneliness, I find harmony, in those waters as deep and dark as our souls.

The Cadenza

The Cadenza
Fiction Copyright 2009 Erik F. Helm



I just had to get out. There is a point in our winters in the Minnesota north woods when serious dementia can take hold, despite our best efforts. Call it cabin fever, seasonal affective disorder, or winter blues; it is what drives Alaskans and others in desolate climates barking mad each and every year.

I was suffering from writers block, or more appropriately, composer’s block. Having completed a commission for a short piano concerto, all that was left was to write the cadenza. How one runs a metaphorical marathon of inspiration, only to come up short, unable to continue and within sight of the finish line, is beyond me to explain, but here I was.

I sat for days at the piano scribbling notes and crossing them out. I listened to recordings. I cooked, cleaned, wrote poetry, reorganized the sock drawer; all to no avail. If something didn’t happen soon, I was going to run up against the deadline, and the regional symphony would have no holiday showpiece. As I stared out the frosted window while sipping hot cocoa I knew I needed a change of pace.
I expect everyone has a special little place they go to get back in touch with the voice of their soul. For me, that place was a creek that ran though the woods not a mile from my cabin.

It was December 15th, so I had little expectations other than the possibility of a bit of open water in the riffles. I grabbed my knocking-around rod, an old South Bend cane with a bit of an actual southerly bend, donned my parka and snowshoes, and with a single box of tattered flies, set out for the stream. If nothing else, the fresh air and exercise would help to clear the cobwebs from my head.

The world was painted with a deep and soft background of white intersected by brown, black, and gray vertical lines. Dark and moody clouds loomed overhead. I took the path through the woods, and noticed that a hare and a skunk had preceded me. Chickadees and cardinals imparted motion to the sleepy landscape as I trudged forward. I still had no real idea what I was going to fish for on the frozen creek, escape, trout, inspiration, or perhaps just solace.

Arriving by the little riffle, I was delighted to find a twenty-foot pool of open water. I cleared the snow from my snowshoes, and began rigging the rod when the clouds parted and the sun shown forth in all its glory. Tying on a dark nymph with a slightly rusted hook, I crept slowly to the edge of the pool and peered in, letting my eyes become accustomed to the sun and the water.

Then I saw it. There was a flash of silver in the very center of the pool. There was a brook trout down there, moving from side to side and examining his upside-down world.

I tossed the fly to the top of the pool and slowed its travel to sink it. The fish immediately flashed on the nymph. At the very moment I struck and missed, strange sounds started to issue from the bushes and branches surrounding the stream. They began slowly, almost tentatively, and then grew steadily. I was at a complete loss. What was this?

Then it dawned on me. The forest was alive with the sounds of melting snow and the formation of icicles. It made sense now. The temperature according to my window thermometer at the cabin was 12 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun was heating the branches and melting the snow, which in turn, froze into icicles. Then the icicles began to crack. Snow fell from the uppermost branches of trees, and unloosed the ice, which tinkled onto the frozen surface of the stream. The limbs above began to groan in low notes.


“Groan, tick, tick, tinkle, swoosh, tinkle, ping, crack said the woods in ¾ time.

Suddenly I had it. Here it was: nature’s own music and rhythm. The perfection of snow and ice and winter sun playing on their own instruments a delicate ode to the end of the year. I quickly found the stub of a pencil and began recording on the back of my fishing notebook the chords and melodies that were playing before me. The little fish could wait.


I had found my cadenza.

Sucking the marrow out of life

I found this little gem yesterday while editing some of my work to submit for publication. It was written in late 2008, and predates some other essays touching on the same themes. Kind of interesting to see ideas emerge. I don't know how to classify the piece. It is not an essay or vignette, more of a train of thought prose. Not polished at all. Rather raw. I wanted to edit it, but decided that it needed to stand on its own. E.H.

Sucking the marrow out of life.


I have been thinking about Thoreau lately. As I talk to people these days I am struck more and more by the fact that they don’t know where their food comes from. They don’t know a river from a stream. They are against hunting and fishing while eating factory farm food and chemicals. They don’t know what a turnip is. They can’t identify birdcalls. They are afraid of rain. They have never gone out on a cloudless night and sat in a field watching the stars. They have never spent an hour eating black berries in the wild. They have not lived.

Children no longer look at clouds.

Our society shelters us to such extent that the average 20 year old today could not survive in the world of the 1930s. Nature has become a stranger, and man has built walls removing himself from his environment.

The best days I have had in life have involved adventures. Not adrenaline surged gnarly DUDE maxed out, but more like quiet discoveries alone in nature: being stuck in a river during a rainstorm, getting lost in a mosquito infested swamp while trying to explore a tiny trickle for wild brown trout, rowing a river after dark, collecting a leaf sample or a wildflower, finding a great horned owl. In other words, prying under the rocks of life to find out what is under it all.

A day where I don’t get muddy is a day wasted.


A friend of mine who I am quoting anonymously wrote:

“I just like it better knowing what it’s like to be alive. Truly alive. Scared, cold, sweaty, tired, sore, somewhat lost in the woods. Chasing, on foot only, that elusive mule deer or elk with longbow and arrow. Steelhead with classic methods…..Even better when the mood strikes to run with a hand-made cane rod, silk line, and hand made fly reel.”

Perhaps it can be thought of as living closer to life. Grow your own food, cook your own meals, hunt, fish, be inquisitive, know what lives under that rock, get wet and muddy, wear a strange hat, take a book into the woods, eat an entire meal made up of things growing wild, peer into holes, stick your head under water and look around, build a shelter and stay the night in it, build a fire from scratch, perhaps even go an entire day without touching an electronic digital device.

The best apple I ever ate came from a wild apple tree happened upon during an autumn walk.

To know the wildness of nature… to be uncertain… to be afraid but calm.
To know the cycles of life and death.

To slow down.
To look.
To listen.
To learn.

To know restraint.
To smile at a sound or a smell of nature.

To go against the crowd.

To live… to really live!

Walking

Walking in urban nature:

I love to take walks. Apart from the joy of exercise, walking in urban nature settings can be a joy of observation and discovery.

I was a lucky child. My father took me on long walks. On these walks to local parks, he would stop and explain to me how to identify trees by their bark, leaves, and fruit. He pointed out wildflowers. He taught me to see things that most people would never see. We watched birds and animals. He taught me to listen and how to be quiet. At night, he showed me the stars and the planets, pointed out constellations, and told me some of their stories and myths. In short, he installed in me a curiosity that grew as I did.

As a child, I was always the one peeking under things, poking into bushes, tasting berries, smelling blossoms, and looking for four leafed clovers. I had my own magnifying glass.

Fast forward many years and I am still on that same walk. A book on birds in one pocket, a curious leaf I gathered in the other. I am passed by joggers with cyber-attachments to tell them when they have achieved maximum heat rate efficiency, and wires in their ears to drown out the sounds of their own footsteps. Shaved head bikers with sunglasses roar by on motorcycles, living the consumer culture rebel dream. I walk on the grass, where nobody but the occasional dog or sunbather strays. All of humanity tends to stick to the pavement when possible.

There are others like me. Occasionally I will spot someone walking and pausing, looking into a tree, or watching a cloud. Once, a few years back, I was looking at a woodpecker through my binoculars, when a couple stopped and asked me “what I was looking for.” I answered “The meaning of life.”

I am going for a walk. Where to, I do not know.
Won’t you join me?

Modern man removed from nature

Those of you that follow some of my writings know that I often ponder observations into philosophical daydreams. One such line of thought came to me the other evening as I cast in a local park on the water, and observed the interactions of people with nature.

Modern urban humans are so detached from nature’s rhythms, forms, flora, and fauna that they act like tourists from another planet.

Approaching a river, they look like deer hypnotized by headlights. They look at the water, and then begin to throw rocks and every conceivable object into the river. It is as if the river is a foe or a danger to them.

They ask me if there are fish in the river, and I reply by asking if there are any birds in the sky. Overhead, the clouds and birds slip by, unobserved. Cedar waxwings dine on insects over the river in an exuberant dance. A falcon dives on some ducklings and misses. A great blue heron spooks out of the water and croaks as it flies into a nearby willow. An owl hoots. Only I seem to notice.

Nearby, at the top of the park, elderly Russian immigrants pick mulberries and black raspberries. The American families amble by with cell phone and I-pod, ignorant to nature’s bounty. Food for them comes in a plastic container.

We seem to have conquered nature so completely and removed ourselves from it that it mystifies and even frightens us. Mothers cuddle their children away from the dangers of curious squirrels, girls run screaming from dragonflies, and teenagers smash anything they can reach.

A small boy spying a deer, tells his mother that it (the deer) looks kind of like the ones in his video games. His mother, busy text messaging, walks into a tree. A twelve-year-old asks his father what those funny things are in the water. (Ducks)

I wonder where the free-range humans are?