A warm October breeze was blowing through the mountains of western North Carolina and I felt on top of the world, so I figured I might as well go there. I had a great job at a local university, I had just published my first book, and I’d finished my mid-semester grading, so I treated myself to a day on the headwaters of the Pigeon River. Amid the thick rhododendron and plunging pools tucked just below the Great Balsam Range, I caught speckled trout all morning in the autumn air. After a short cast across a deep pool, an enormous shadow flashed above my ear. I peered up to see a bald eagle perched no more than seven or eight feet from me. I froze, letting the line drift, and communed with the majestic bird for what felt like an hour. Then the eagle departed as abruptly as it had come, and as I slowly stripped in line a trout seized my fly. Surging with energy, my rod bent into a hook, the very shape that would be carved into my head by surgeons nine months later.
The next morning I was back in the classroom, finishing up a lecture on modernist poetry, when suddenly the world reeled. I ended class early, stumbled down the hallway, and fell into my office. The world was a kaleidoscopic hell for the next three hours. I thought it might be altitude sickness, which often brings symptoms of dizziness the following day. But the vertigo came the next day too and the next, each fit punctuated by even longer periods of nausea, constant dizziness, and persistent headaches as well as muddled vision. Doctors couldn’t figure it out. And then an MRI the day after New Year’s revealed a vestibular schwannoma, a brain tumor on the eighth cranial nerve which governs the body’s equilibrium and hearing.
These are small tumors, but they pop up in an even smaller anatomical chamber. It brings to mind the slim space encircled within a fly rod’s running guides, how you need the line to move through those eyelets with just the right balance of friction and freedom. Your casts are awkward when a clumsily tied nail or loop-to-loop knot struggles to run through the guides. The vestibule of the inner ear is similar, with nerves like fly line running through a tiny pathway, and the tumor on my cranial nerve disrupted the fine balance needed for my body to function. My vestibular line kept getting hung up in the guides. Or, if an ecological metaphor works better, think of our mountain streams as their own fluvial network of blue nerves running down from the landscape’s brow. My tumor’s small bundle of cells had, like so much real estate development, refused to stop growing, clogging my brain’s watershed with excess sediment.
It was a welcome portent when the neurotologist recognized my Orvis shirt. There, in the cramped confines of a medical examining room, we talked for five minutes about fly fishing before we moved on to the less serious business of brain tumors. Call it superstition if you like, but it made me feel better that the doctor who would suture my broken skull back together knew how to tie an improved Clinch knot.
The week before I went under the knife in late May, my friend Dan drove me to a stretch of delayed harvest water in Transylvania County. It’s a nice river, and easily navigable, although it gets too much pressure for my liking. On this particular day it was glorious. It was like the fish wanted to give me a parting gift before the surgery. Maligned by dizziness and fear, I was merely flicking an olive wooly bugger into the current and letting it drift before slowly retrieving, but the trout attacked the fly with a rapacious hunger. Every cast, it seemed, would end with a fish sliding into my net. Each time I gently removed the hook from a trembling mouth, I wondered about my own jaw muscle, which they would peel away from the side of my head to access my skull.
It strikes me that the fish I held in my hands are saved, in a roundabout way, by getting hooked. There are few populations more focused on preserving the ecological health of watershed habitats, promoting environmental responsibility, and fighting the depredations of corporate greed and toxic waste, than fishermen. Often this expansive vision and conservationist zeal is born of that first surge of energy coursing through the bent rod, holding a beautiful creature for just a few seconds, briefly sharing in their wildness by way of a sharp hook pierced in the lip. I’ll never forget the first time I caught a speckled trout—I remember thinking it was the most precious thing my fingers had ever touched—and it changed the way I think about the politics of land and water. The fishers of fish become fishers of men.
Now that I’ve had my surgery, I have been hooked too. There’s no way round it. My jaw will never be the same, my forehead is marked by a prominent dent, and a quadrant of my mouth remains numb. That brief encounter with the surgeon’s steel, in other words, has left its mark, but on the other side of the scale I have my life back. The procedure left a scar that you can see when I cut my hair, which is punctuated by a shock of silver that cropped up in the wake of surgery. The scar starts behind my ear, moving straight up before curving over toward my forehead and ending with a downward curl. It looks like a fish hook. It looks like a bent rod with a fish on the line.
Twelve months after I had brain surgery, Dan and I headed to a small creek high up in the Pisgah National Forest to celebrate my recovery. It’s an odd medical term, “recovery,” as if your health were the absence of pain, as if you’re slowly given back a negative. Health is itself a precarious balance—for mountain streams, for the fish who make them home, for all of us. Or so I thought as I eyed a deep pool while straddling a small waterfall, one boot perilously sliding on a slick rock as I flicked a Yellow Sally through a tiny window of rhododendron, hoping to feel again that sudden thrill of energy as the rod bent toward the water.
