‘Please,’ the river said with a voice that was now only the shadow of a whisper. ‘Help me. I need water for my trout. They’re dying. Look at the poor little things.’

The storm looked at the trout. The trout were very happy with the way things were now, though they would soon be dead.

The rainstorm made up some incredibly elaborate story about having to visit somebody’s grandmother who had a broken ice-cream freezer and somehow lots of rain was needed to repair it, ‘But maybe in a few months we might get together. I’ll call you on the telephone before I come over.’

The next day which was of course 17 August 1921 a lot of people, townspeople and such, drove out in their cars and looked at the former river and shook their heads in wonder. They had a lot of picnic baskets with them, too.

There was an article in the local paper with two photographs showing two large empty holes that had been the fountainhead and the sink of the Carthage River. The holes looked like nostrils.

Another photograph was of a cowboy sitting on his horse, holding an umbrella in one hand and pointing into the depths of the Carthage Sink with his other hand. He was looking very serious. It was a photograph to make people laugh and that’s exactly what they did.

Well, there you have the lost chapters of Trout Fishing in America. Their style is probably a little different because I’m a little different now, I’m thirty-four, and they were probably written in a slightly different form, too. It’s interesting that I didn’t rewrite them back there in 1961 but waited until 4 December 1969, almost a decade later, to return and try to bring them back with me.

The Weather in San Francisco

It was a cloudy afternoon with an Italian butcher selling a pound of meat to a very old woman, but who knows what such an old woman could possibly use a pound of meat for?

She was too old for that much meat. Perhaps she used it for a bee hive and she had five hundred golden bees at home waiting for the meat, their bodies stuffed with honey.

‘What kind of meat would you like today?’ the butcher said. ‘We have some good hamburger. It’s lean.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Hamburger is something else.’

‘Yeah, it’s lean. I ground it myself. I put a lot of lean meat in it.’

‘Hamburger doesn’t sound right,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ the butcher said. ‘It’s a good day for hamburger. Look outside. It’s cloudy. Some of those clouds have rain in them. I’d get the hamburger,’ he said.