They say in the spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. Perhaps if he has enough time left over, his fancy can even make room for a cup of coffee.

‘Rembrandt Creek’ and ‘Carthage Sink’

The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America

These two chapters were lost in the late winter, early spring of 1961. I looked all over for them but I couldn’t find them anywhere. I haven’t the slightest idea why I didn’t rewrite them as soon as I realized that they were gone. It’s a real puzzler but I didn’t and now eight years later, I’ve decided to return to the winter that I was twenty-six years old, living on Greenwich Street in San Francisco, married, had an infant daughter and wrote these two chapters towards a vision of America and then lost them. I’m going back there now to see if I can find them.

REMBRANDT CREEK

Rembrandt Creek looked just like its name and it was in lonely country that had very bad winters. The creek started in a high mountain meadow surrounded by pine trees. That was about the only real light that creek ever saw because after it had gathered itself from some small springs in the meadow, it flowed off into the pines and down to a dark-tree-tangled canyon that went along the edge of the mountains.

The creek was filled with little trout so wild that they were barely afraid when you walked up to the creek and stood there staring down at them.

I never really went fishing for them in any classical or even functioning sense. The only reason I knew that creek was because that’s where we camped when we went deer hunting.

No, it was not a fishing creek for me but just a place where we got water that we needed for our camp, but I seemed to carry most of the water that we used and I think I washed a lot of dishes because I was the teen-ager and it was easier to have me do those things than the men who were older and wiser and needed time to think about places where deer might be and also to drink a little whiskey which seemed to aid thoughts of hunting and other things.

‘Hey, kid, take your head out of your ass and see if you can do something about these dishes.’ That was one of the elders of the hunt speaking. His voice is remembered down trails of sound-coloured hunting marble.

Often I think about Rembrandt Creek and how much it looked like a painting hanging in the world’s largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets.

I only fished it once.