My comrade and sometime piscine partner Fred sent a couple of disjointed dispatches from his trip east to Montana last week. He fled figuring, reasonably, that we have more run-off to go out here and Montana is, well, Montana; where a river runs through it and all. Fred is a mental health worker who spends his days trying to convince county methheads to part with their axes and come to the front door. He needed a little Fred-time.
While his propensity to turn basic participles into mistyped iPhone jibberish can sometimes lead to some fairly bizzare missives from the road — these seemed to lend themselves to more of a literati bent. Kind of a new form of cyber freeverse — iHaiKu, which follows no rules of meter, syllables, lines, spelling, English language or html formatting whatsoever.
His first dispatch proved particularly poignant for weary travelers, I have titled it:
“Hell for RVs”:
Winds 30+ from the west. 3 wt useless. 10 wt might go.
Start work
on ” small fish” today.
West montanas miserly with tent sites.
Hell for rvs though.
The next in the series is stunning both for its brevity and clarity. Titled:
“Caught a pike last night”
Caught a pike last night
A meditation on peak summer in the heart of the trout tourism country and, the challenges of pairing iPhotos with iHaiKu, it’s called:
“Fred, where are the good photos?”:
Shitty ones in the real camera.
Work on trout today.
About a zillion floats on flathead ladt evening( $ zoo)
And finally, a brilliant koan on wandering in the woods; working title:
“I Think Homeland Security is Scrambling my GPS”
Therriault lakes ne montana 6500ft maybe in canada( really)
Roll over David Foster Wallace, and tell Ken Kesey the news.