Dear Friends,

I spent this weekend with 60 Christian attorneys at a conference-retreat in Monterey, California. I was born and grew up across the bay from there. It is a beautiful and special place and I am always glad to tell people that’s where I am from.

Growing up along the beaches and in the redwood forests of the Central California coast was where I began to learn the lessons about the grace and mercy of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That grace and mercy is sufficient for our salvation in eternity and the empowerment of our here-and-now lives.

The love of Jesus Christ is the essential truth of my life, but the knowledge of that love is most often learned when our human endeavors and expectations crash in failure, shame, pain and brokenness. What follows is a story of a little lesson of love learned on a cold, foggy morning along a steelhead stream about four miles inland from the Monterey Bay.

I never discovered where Soquel Creek began. In my imagination, it bubbled up from a spring beneath the roots of a giant redwood high in the Santa Cruz Mountains. 

The Old San Jose Road left the creek’s canyon near a flat-topped mountain called “Sugar-Loaf.” The creek flowed out of the woods beyond through the point of a “V,” the arms of which were steep slopes cloaked in the multi-hued greens of the forest–tall redwoods reaching up from the wet, dark creek-bottom, then oaks and bay laurels massing up to the ridges where firs and pines formed the skyline.

These were real woods. Hansel and Gretel couldn’t have found their way home through them with gingerbread and a map. The angles were steep, the ground was covered with deep, slippery leaf-mold. Thickets of shiny-leafed poison oak made passage impenetrable.

No matter where it came from, the creek was a big part of my life. To a boy a creek is as good as a library. The pools and rapids bring frogs and polliwogs into reach and far-away ships and places into mind. You can find snake grass there that you can pull apart joint by joint and put together again as good as any set of Lego blocks.

I learned life-lessons while playing beside the creek. Commitment followed by unhesitating momentum toward your goal is essential for success. If you are crossing on rocks or logs, stopping in the middle will almost always result in falling in.

Objects in the water are not always where you think they are because light waves bend with refraction when they enter the denser medium of water. Therefore, you must always keep in mind that what appears so clear and definite, may not be what you think. Discernment tempered by past experience must always be exercised with care.

There is sin in that Eden. Nettles sting, poison oak itches, and rocks bruise your feet right through your sneakers. Wet and muddy clothes from careless crossings can bring a maternal rebuke.

Pollution can be subtle. Seeming clarity is not reliable evidence of purity. Analysis and the help of others is necessary to judge what is pure and healthy.  Also, a little trash  left behind can  spoil a  lot of beauty.

Yet, the light drifting down into the creek bottom can transform the ordinary into the supernatural. Golden-flecked shafts of light pour down through the foliage and illuminate the pools, exposing rocks, sand, frogs and fish to view. Glowing halos of mist crown the redwoods, morning and afternoon. Splashing white-water accumulates the full spectrum of color as it rolls down through the rocky narrows.

By the year I entered the seventh grade, my attention turned from exploring to fishing. My friends Buddy, Dennis, Bill and I talked a lot about fish. We really hadn’t experienced serious fishing, but we liked the idea of it. The fact that there were fish in the creek brought the outdoors to suburban California.

We could catch rainbow trout by finding a little rapid emptying into a pool. Our bait was a fat night crawler stuck on a number 14 or 16 Eagle Claw hook. A flick of a cast dropped the bait into the pool and we would slowly reel it in through the whitewater. It didn’t take us long to catch a string of 10-inch rainbows.

But the really big game and the stuff of our dreams were the steelhead that spawned in the creek from November to February after the fall rains. They waited for rising water to cross the sand bar from the Monterey Bay into the mouth of Soquel Creek. These were large, feisty fish up to three feet long. My dad told me that “steelhead are rainbow trout that go to sea.” My friends and I repeated this phrase often and reverently to each other although we didn’t know why trout would do that.

It became our obsession to catch a steelhead. We lacked the equipment and technique to take on such a fish, but we were blissful in our ignorance and we were inventive. Once, after church, Buddy and I, wearing our best clothes, crossed the road and went under the Main Street bridge where the stream spread out over some sandy shallows. We spotted a large steelhead battling upstream through some shallows with its back out of the water.

Buddy’s parents were recent converts to the faith. He was not indoctrinated into the truth that our standard Sabbath attire of white shirt, tie, dress leather shoes and sport coat were garments of righteousness to be protected against spot or blemish. He waded out to the fish which frantically tried to evade him. He plunged his wool-clad arms into the muddy water and grabbed the fish.

Eleven-year-old hands were no match for 30 inches of slick, wet muscle. When Buddy lifted the fish out of the water about waist high, it shot back in with enough splash to cover us both with khaki-colored froth and mud.

That was as close as we got to a steelhead until the next November. It happened early one Sunday morning when I decided to give up fishing in favor of baseball.

I stayed over at Buddy’s house on Saturday night. We watched the late show on TV. Then we slept in our clothes on the living room floor. We slipped out at dawn through the garage with our fishing poles and tackle boxes.

It was foggy–a low, thick, wet coastal fog that muffled the sound of our foot-falls along the empty street. We crossed to the creek behind Bargetto’s Winery.

Behind the winery, the creek was encased by steep banks in a long, quiet pool. The pool was created when the trunk of a huge redwood log had washed down from the mountains during a flood and wedged, end to end, between the banks. The water from later floods hit the immoveable log and, with no place else to go, scooped out a deep hole. The length and depth of the pool testified to both the size of the redwood and the power of the water.

Stepping out on the log, we both inhaled out loud. Beneath our feet, on the downstream side of the deadfall, were more steelhead than we had ever seen–one . . .  two . . . three . . . four . . . eight . . . nine . . . eleven . . . fourteen . . .  fifteen big fish lying on the bottom with only occasional, stabilizing flicks of their tails to show their life.

My first thought was, “We are never going to catch one of these fish.” It was beyond hoping. This was the biggest thing that we had yet encountered in our fishing lives.

Buddy was transfixed. He stared at the water. I looked too, but I was no gambler. The trout downstream were more of a sure thing. “I’m going down to the rapids.”

“I’m going to stay here,” Buddy said.

When I left him, he was kneeling on the log beside his tackle box. I didn’t know whether he was changing hooks or praying.

The trout were biting. I caught a pan-sized rainbow almost every other cast. In a few minutes, eight of them were hanging on the willow twig I was using as a stringer. There was only silence from upstream.

The November morning was painted monochrome. Gray sky tinted gray water. Leafless willows formed gray palisades along both banks. My breath formed little gray clouds. The steady murmur of the passing water was interrupted only by the flipping splashes of the trout fighting my hook.

Buddy’s wail tore the fabric of the whole tapestry. “I’ve got one.” He yelled the words fast. His cracking adolescent voice made the phrase sound like a musical triplet. He hollered it again.

I scrambled up a stump to look upstream. Buddy was standing on the logs legs spread apart. His rod was a black bow against the sky over his head. There was the faint zipper-like sound of his reel paying-out line fast.

I grabbed my pole, tackle box and string of trout and ran up the bank. My hands were full and I was off-balance. Adolescent coordination was no match for the task and I tripped and fell off the bank into the water. It was ice-cold and the rocks were hard where I hit bottom.

When I stood up, I was confused. Buddy was yelling and running back and forth on the redwood log like a dog on a short leash. My string of trout and tackle box were floating away in a kind of race.

I grabbed the tackle box and pole, but thought better of plunging in after the trout. My PF Flyer high-tops sloshed and squished when I walked out on the log beside Buddy.

He glanced my way and laughed. Then his teeth set and he strained. The steelhead was out of sight and going deep down the pool. The line was whizzing out again. Buddy didn’t pull too tight.

The fish ran to the end of the pool and surfaced in the shallows. It jumped in a thrashing spray.

Buddy began to carefully reel in the line playing the fish. The fish reached the end of the pool, turned back and went under. The rod lost its bow. Quickly, Buddy reeled in the slack. Soon the rod was bent again as Buddy fought the fish’s attempt to hide under the log.

For a moment action suspended as the boy, fish and rod reached a state of delicate inertia. The taut line ran straight down beside the log. Then there was a dull glint as the fish turned. The reel buzzed again as the speeding steelhead pulled down the pool.

The other big fish held their positions in fleet formation. They quietly faced upstream waiting for the rains to raise the water level so they could move on to spawn. They had survived far worse than Buddy was attempting. Orcas, sharks and indiscriminate salmon trawlers menaced them on their sea journey.

Once-upon-a-time, grizzly bears roamed along this stream, eating their fill of the ancestors of these fish. A twelve-year-old kid with light tackle was of little consequence against their created will to spawn. Their instinct to die so that new life could begin, prevailed over the threats along the way.

A long time passed before that steelhead tired. How long, I don’t know because we didn’t wear watches then. After another run and return, the fish gave up. It surfaced and rolled over belly-up.

Buddy trembled visibly as he knelt on the log and put down his rod. He grabbed the line with both hands and picked up his catch.

Fishermen debate whether the thrill is in hooking the fish or landing it. Buddy had to settle for the former because he was only using six-pound test line and the fish weighed many more pounds than that. The line snapped. The fish slipped back into the water and disappeared.

It was still for a moment. Buddy stood up. He looked down to nothing but the other fish who didn’t change position. He reached for his rod and threw it javelin-style onto the far bank. Then he cried. He cried hard with gulping sobs. The boy had come to a man’s moment and found out that he was still a boy.

My thrill was definitely in the landing, not the hooking. I dove in to look for the fish. The water was winter-cold. It was dark under the log and full of branches and snags. It occurred to me that I could be hung-up in there. I kicked back up and broke surface facing a crying Buddy.

We gathered our stuff and trudged back to his house. I caught a cold and got to stay home from school on Monday. In future years, I fished a few times, then quit. I possessed no patience for it. My type-A personality craved quick successes and more productive pursuits.

Buddy’s dad took a job in Europe and the family moved to Holland. I never saw him again. Like the fish, he slipped away and disappeared.

I think of that day across the years as a sixty-year-old man. It is pressed deep in my memory–the morning, the fog, the stream, the redwood log, the steelhead, the friend–all elemental and defining things. I think back to it all and wish I was there. I wish Buddy had landed the fish.

I’ve suffered losses since then–losses of loved and prized things, losses of people. Why long for a fish that wasn’t even caught and remember a friend who disappeared? Why do I smile at the memory?

Because I’ve learned a wonderful truth through experience, a reality shared by people and steelhead alike in the grace of our common Creator. “He has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecc 3:11, ESV).  It operates as a homing signal leading us toward our heavenly Father, like the “map” imprinted in the brain of the steelhead that enables them to follow the magnetic field of earth back to spawn in the stream of their birth.

We are headed upstream. We are going home. Our best instincts overcome the losses that we sustain on that journey.

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

 

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