Fish

I have a very detailed memory. I would not claim it is particularly accurate, but I find that I remember all sorts of minutiae about people and places from the past without much sense of hierarchy in their importance. Having returned to more or less where I started in life, physically, I have lots of interactions with people in which I recall mutual acquaintances with such detail that I mislead the person I am talking to into sensing a greater connection between myself and the person or subject at hand than really exists.

For instance, I asked a new friend here if a kid I grew up with named Jason was still around. I did not know Jason well, but we played baseball together and had many friends in common in high school. But you would think, from what I remember of him, that Jason had either been my best friend or else someone for whom I had a sycophantic attraction to. I have no doubt that the person I was talking to will see Jason, mention my name, and be confused when Jason cannot really recall me with any clarity.

By the same process, when I meet someone who has been here for a long time and we play that game of parlaying old stories on top of one another, I know that I leave a strange impression of being at once very familiar with this place and yet completely unknown in the community. I talk as if I have always been a part of this place, and yet no one knows my name.

A ghost.

I was driving home today, and a neighbor was hitchhiking down Cachagua Road. When I picked him up, he said that he had seen a rainbow trout in the flowing creek. I had forgotten this happens, how the dry leaf choked stream bed floods and then once clear the trout make their way fast up from the river to the bigger pools. People tell me the steelhead still make it past San Clemente dam and all the way to Jamesburg in a good water year.

It somehow made me feel a little better, to see an obvious metaphorical connection to my own life here. You see the trout and remember that they are part of this place, have their own nose for what goes on in the temporary streams, but most of the time they are invisible.