dreamranch

This is my favorite picture of myself, though the image may be too telling.

It was a piece of cake job, if you ask me, a junket, especially as a break from the hot, dirty work of cutting fire lines.

I am sitting on the bank of Hot Creek at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, 10 miles or so from Mammoth, California. It is a bright day in 1972. I am marking fins, measuring lengths and weighing luminous brown trout that have just been netted from the stream after supposedly non-harmful electroshocking for a U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey.

I have a Thermos on the stream bank. I sip hot coffee between quick chores with the shining fish. I can absorb the view at the same time. The cold stream with thermal pockets runs through low brown hills below snow-topped peaks.

I don’t know who took the photo but I have managed to hang on to it. I still have the Thermos, too, though the glass inside broke when I took it to a Sierra Nevada reunion on another creek in 2012. I think I can still smell coffee and sunlight is glancing off the water.