Fishing as ritual and solace

Fishing is one of the few practices that connects Hig’s life before the collapse to his precarious life afterward. It is recreation, food gathering, and a way to withdraw from danger, but its deepest value lies in the repeated acts of attention it asks of him. In a world increasingly organized around threats and scarcity, the creek offers a place where he can feel present rather than merely survive.

A practice of belonging

Hig describes fishing in the mountains with Jasper along the Sulphur as an experience of fitting into a particular place: smooth stones, leaning cliffs, spruce scent, and a cutthroat making quiet rings in a pool. The feeling is more than admiration of scenery. The creek and its surroundings seem to belong to him, and he to them; there is no need to justify the pleasure or turn it into a practical exchange. Fishing lets him simply be there, walking upstream as the day darkens and cools.

That sense of belonging includes Melissa, though differently. Hig thinks of the land and his wife as part of a shared circle, but sees Melissa as someone whose life he has been entrusted to hold carefully. The image also reverses his understanding of their marriage: perhaps she had been holding him. Fishing thus belongs to a private emotional world shaped by place, care, and the knowledge that lives cannot be possessed or protected absolutely.

The rod and its ritual

The practice is anchored in particular objects and a familiar sequence. Hig carries a four-piece Sage pack rod wrapped in flannel, a number four rod he has owned since high school. His father gave it to him for his sixteenth birthday, shortly after Hig came to live with him; his father died of pancreatic cancer the following year, before he could teach Hig to use it. Hig taught himself and learned from Uncle Pete. The Orvis reel his father gave him with the rod has stayed cleaned and oiled even when other parts of Hig’s life were no longer working smoothly.

Preparing the equipment is a ritual of careful, repeated motions. Hig fits the rod sections together, sights along the guides, turns the metal loops into alignment, and secures the reel in the cork handle. He knows the sequence from having performed it hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. It requires little thought, yet returns him to a concentrated state: he brings patience, attention, care, and a willingness to risk to the act of fishing. He began after his father died, trying to imitate a fisherman he had never actually seen wield a rod. The ritual is therefore both inherited and improvised, an attachment to his father made through a skill Hig had to learn without him.

Fishing through loss

Fishing recurs across the decisive passages of Hig’s life. He fishes after losing a high-school girlfriend and after frustration and despair make him stop writing. He fishes when he meets Melissa and hopes, cautiously, that he has found a love unlike anything he has known. Later, when disease strikes the trout and the flu takes Melissa, fishing continues. She dies in an Elks Hall converted into a hospital less than five hundred yards from their home. Hig is not allowed to bury her; she is incinerated with the other dead. As supplies dwindle, gas lines lengthen, and riots begin, he keeps returning to the creek.

The practice does not undo bereavement. Instead, it gives grief a recurring setting and a physical rhythm. By then Hig is fishing for carp with nymphs, following a stretch of water whose curves and moods he knows as intimately as he had known Melissa’s body. Across these losses, fishing marks time without making the losses interchangeable: it is present after each rupture, while the person or hope that preceded it cannot be restored.

A changed creek, a contested refuge

After the streams become too warm for trout, Hig continues fishing in the mountains, shifting to suckers and carp and learning to accept their taste and bones. Carp occupy the niche left by the trout and increasingly feed near the surface, sometimes making dry-fly fishing possible. The change is both adaptation and evidence of loss: fishing continues, but not in the same living world. Hig considers the disappearance of the trout bad and the loss of the creek worse. Two winters with little snow on the peaks have made the old seasonal expectations feel like nostalgia, and this environmental change frightens him more than attacks or disease.

Fishing also conflicts with Bangley’s definition of useful activity. Bangley treats recreation with scorn unless it directly supports survival, killing, or the planning of violence. He can accept deer hunting as a calculation of protein against risk, but Hig also needs to go into the mountains, get away, and breathe. Hig is not Bangley’s subordinate and continues fishing, though he learns not to put the activity in Bangley’s face. The creek becomes a refuge not only from danger but from a partnership in which every hour is judged by its immediate defensive value.

Jasper and the meaning of endurance

On a mountain excursion, Hig takes the rod case out of the sled so Jasper understands that he is off duty. While Hig fishes, Jasper lies on a sunlit rock and watches; later, when Hig moves along the bend, the dog wakes and follows him. The episode joins companionship to ritual without making Jasper the reason for fishing: the dog is present within a practice Hig has carried through many stages of life.

Hig catches four large carp with a nymph. Their resistance is not the vigorous fight he associates with trout; they hold back with a sullen reluctance, refusing to move. Hig comes to admire their refusal to be consumed, and recognizes something of himself and Jasper in it. When he lifts a fish and strikes its head against a rock, he thanks it, aware of what it is like not to be ready. Fishing here binds sustenance to sympathy: the fish becomes dinner, but its struggle is also a brief likeness of the survivors’ own determination to continue. The ritual offers no escape from death or necessity; it makes room, within both, for attention and recognition.