The Christmas Map – Part 2
John Luthens
Phantom railroad crossing and the starting point of the Christmas map.
The anticipated snow came that night as I rumbled through the cabin basement in a map-making scavenger hunt. Besides housing countless boxes of who-knows-what, the basement is a holy shrine constructed for the sole purpose of trout fishing.
I found a box of markers in an old tackle box and decided against them. They might smear in the hostile environment; besides, they smelled like old worms. A forgotten box of fishing flies cost me an hour, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor and pondering the potential of every hackle-wrapped wonder. I tried on an old pair of patched waders, rigged up a fly rod, and tried a few roll casts into the sump pump cistern. I giggled like a child counting presents beneath the tree.
Smugly deciding against a box of crayons as too childish for a budding Magellan, I settled on an old yellow legal pad and a stub of a pencil that I sharpened with a forgotten fishing knife. It would have to do.
Christmas Day, the weather moderated into beautiful sunshine, and I walked into a winter landscape painting on my quest of cartographic genius. Slides of snow dropped from the sun-warmed pines and exploded into white clouds. Blue jays bickered. A red squirrel poked curiously around a tree and added his chatter to the morning’s caroling.
I turned down a deer trail through a canopy of balsams decorated in silent ornaments of snow. No finer Christmas trees could exist. Balsam fragrance penetrated my winter clothes and snow cascaded down off of the boughs. I was soon covered in powder.
Breaking through a final pine tangle, I had time for a quick glimpse of flowing water at the bottom of a steep incline before crashing and rolling over the snow and down the slope, stopping short of the icy water by the grace of a well placed poplar tree. A quick inventory showed my map making equipment and camera still intact. Nothing hurt but my pride, and there were no witnesses, so I made an executive decision that it hadn’t happened at all. Even the Christmas-cookie rations in my pocket were only slightly crumbled. I celebrated my ski run by eating them.
Notepad in hand, I stumbled down stream banks now emptied of summer camouflage. There were submerged logs and undercut banks. I startled several small trout out of their energy conservation in the slack water. A larger fish tailed lazily beneath an ice-encrusted log.
Merry Christmas! This was better than unwrapping presents. I was fishing where no man had gone before. Well, not exactly fishing, but close enough for the middle of winter. Runs and pools opened up their hidden secrets. There was so much good looking water, in fact, that a problem soon arose: I’d not thought about how much water lay between here and the cabin.
The stream twisted and turned, looping back on itself. There was only so much time and I had only so much paper. The pencil was just a stub to begin with. I wasn’t out to design Mt. Rushmore, for heaven’s sake! I just wanted to catch a trout or two, or maybe three or four. I needed to edit down to a smaller sample of the trout stream.
I tunneled through more pine groves until I found myself at the remains of an old railroad bridge. There were eight piling posts sunk deep in the stream bed. Bright, heavy moss covered the sides, and they were topped with caps of snow. In summer, it’s fairly deep and easy to fish. The place has occasionally yielded a dark-speckled trout, giving me confidence to keep getting skunked elsewhere in the tangles.
I’d known about the runes but, until that Christmas Day, I’d thought there were only four posts. The two posts on either side closest to the banks had always been overgrown by jungle. Traces of the railroad grade were also wiped clean in the summer, but now, in the snow, even though forty-foot pines were now grew in the midst of it, I could see where the ancient tracks must have stretched.
It fascinated me. A map or document must exist to tell a story about the phantom railroad crossing, perhaps buried in the Christmas past of an old town-hall basement. I didn’t ponder on it long, because more important was the fact that the old grade was a perfect starting point for a smaller, more manageable area. It was the perfect stretch for the map.
I hopped along the bank of my chosen stretch, peering through frozen brush tangles, grabbing handfuls of icy branches for a leaning view of the deep cuts in the stream bottom. I jotted notes in the yellowed margins of the pad, penciling arrows to mark my way down the snaky line of my trout stream.
The undercut banks necessitated the longest entries. Those are the trickiest trout predicaments on a small stream. One wrong step sends warning vibrations to every fish in the watery neighborhood. They’ll just sit tight and laugh at you. I documented them all – X’s and O’s and arching arrows, until the map resembled a diabolical military maneuver. I scribbled when to kneel, when to crawl, and when to pray.
A doe and two yearling fawns crashed into the brush in front of me. I was startled from my cartography and found it was nearly dark. I watched three tails of white disappear into deepening shadows. I followed the deer up a ridge and beneath a massive red pine. It stood alone on the ridge top, and I marked it as fitting endpoint for the map.
Later that night, with children tucked in tight, and dog and cat safely locked on opposite ends of the cabin, I stretched my feet to the fire. I took a gloating last look at the map. It was really pretty good. I wondered if I should maybe lock it away in a safe-deposit box, to keep it out of the wrong hands. I never really trusted that Santa Clause fellow. I’d be willing to bet that he’s a trout fisherman, and I know he has his summers off.
Instead, I walked to the basement and securely folded it away in a pocket of a faded and long-abandoned fishing vest. That’s where a lost map belongs. I knew it would wait there; waiting and lost till one fine summer day. Waiting and ready to uncover the secrets of all the hidden trout.