The Source
Posted By Heather on June 10, 2010
Are you Stumbling about in life, wondering what its all about? Feel like you should just put your head in a hole?
Well, pull your head out.
I pulled my head out in early June and was ready for my week of fishing. All forces conspired and spring runoff hit the rivers on the west side of Oregon. On friday June 4, I drove to Salem and back on river rights issues and noticed the Rogue was chocolatey, then the South Umpqua a frothy mousse, and the North Umpqua was like mud, and the coast fork of the Willamette River was looking like a real river not a creek, then the Willamette was raging and so was the Mckenzie. The Santiam was just plain ol swollen. I was supposed to be fishing the next day, so that was not good, not good at all.
So when Roger arrived from Montana on Saturday, to fish the not- running off rivers of Oregon, we had a problem. What to do with time off and no water to fish? So we headed east hoping the ongoing drought in in the Klamath basin would yield decent water. That’s really a crap attitude, hoping a drought area is going to fish well?! What they really needed was a bunch of snowpack. But, trying to make lemonade out of lemons is not always easy, so we headed east.
On day one we crossed the Cascades on Lake of Woods hwy and dropped down onto the Klamath Basin (another part of the fabled state of Jefferson). We intended to fish the Williamson the next day, but on this day, we merely were going to follow up on some interesting looking things on the map. So we found a short, and very winding blue line on the map and starting looking for places to give it a look. Best to start at the top, the source, the headwaters, the spring, the font.
And the spring spreads out into a breathtaking pool of pure aqua. I blinked, and it was still that color.
I followed the path around the edge to see the color from all angles, and everything grew quiet inside me and if nothing else happend in this trip, this was enough. The startling color, the snow capped mountains, and I stole a few seconds away from eternity and stayed with it.
This became basecamp for the next 3 days. It’s a good place to come back to, a good place to be stopped and still for a moment.
Comments