The Reunion (I)
	June, 1992 will be my college class 25th reunion. At a school steeped in tradition, this is a big thing. It will be a long ways away, Boston, Mass., and occur during the same week as the salmonfly hatch on the Dechutes, which I would normally never miss. I have not kept in touch with many of my classmates, and my roommate died of a heart attack four years ago. I spent, in all, eight years in Boston proper, and one year an hour away in Providence, R.I., long enough to tire of the urban life and assiduously avoid it in the ensuing quarter of a century. But I will go to this reunion, I think. It is time. I have three old friends to check up on. I will check onto the plane with a telltale long round case, and have a float tube in my suitcase. I want to go back and check up on one lake, one tidal river, and reacquaint myself with one hell of a fish. At age seventeen I was placed on a plane to New York by my family. I, who had never been east of western Montana, was to attend, sight unseen, an ivy league college in Boston, actually Cambridge, to which I had applied solely on reputation. I was, to say the least, scared out of my mind. My vision then of the east coast was a paved strip of parking lots and freeways a hundred miles deep stretching from New York to Boston. Surely there could be no fishing, not REAL fishing, so close to millions of deprived eastern souls. I ritually said goodby to my private 500 yards of the (closed) upper Green River, ending that chapter in my fishing adolescence. I did not bring my rod to Boston. For the next four years I essentially gave up fishing except for summer and christmas vacations spent back home in Seattle. I did eventually, out of pure nostalgia, bring my rod back to Cambridge with me. I hung it over my bed, strung, and took it down to fondle and remember periodically during periods of stress and homesickness. I bought nearly every book there was to buy on fishing, REAL fishing, trout, salmon, steelhead, and nearly memorized them from cover to back. Without a car, life at college revolved around Cambridge and downtown Boston, anything reachable by bicycle. The Charles River, grey-brown and confused about which way to flow, epitomized to me the fishing potential, or lack of same, of the surrounding waters wherever they might be. I was, even to the Boston Bluebloods, a closet fisherman, a salmonid snob. For four years I lived a life of self righteous deprivation. Without wheels there really was little choice. It is better perhaps that then I remained in ignorance. In June of 1967 I had completed my finals and had a week of waiting for graduation ceremonies. My
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