OUR WIDOWED STRINGERS

At the meager courtesy area of the grocery in Soldotna, AK, the coffee is beginning to bring me back from a sour mood. I look down at my dripping waders. On my thigh, impaled into the neoprene—too deep to dig out—is the most regrettable fly. Three days back, tired of jerking for sockeyes with the other 200 fishermen lining the Kenai/Russian confluence and not entirely sure whether beads and naked hooks were legal, I tied on what is known locally as a sperm egg. I wanted to catch a few trout. 

The pattern produced a fat little rainbow right away. I felt relieved, as though this 3,500-mile drive was worth it. But on the ensuing cast I snagged myself. I was afraid to yank it out for fear of springing a leak. As I am sitting in the Fred Meyer, two husky Germans begin talking about the fly in my inseam, laughing a bit at the pink egg, the flourish of white Mylar that is supposed to represent salmon sperm. These guys, blood on their waders, silver scales in their hair, have big bright smiles that tell of quick limits. They smell like roe and pilsner. Though I cannot understand their words, I know what they are laughing at: the slumping American, pruned hands, road weary. The sperm egg has dried a bit, and the bare fluorescent lights of the store make it sparkle. It’s the fly of desperation, fly of last-ditch efforts. It looks huge on my leg. A pompom. The sperm egg will be my badge of courage as I continue my Alaskan odyssey. Me and the sperm fly forging on together, wedded as it were, like salmon and long periods of daylight, like watermelon berries and the this, this, this of waders rubbing together as fishermen emerge from the woods to survey the river...

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