Monday, after Armen was released on his allotted afterschool parole, his biblio-gravitational field had him back at the county library as usual. He didn’t walk through the door with any particular agenda. Walking into the library was as automatic for Armen as switching on the TV was for many other school escapees.
Almost as automatically, Armen coasted from the library entrance to the reference section, where stood the atlas cabinet. He leafed through the Times Atlas of the World, and dropped into the USA SOUTHWEST plate. He knew the plate number. He had memorized it passively through repeated access. His eyes settled into the deep olive green of the Great Valley. They rolled south down the Great Valley from its narrow northern tip at Red Bluff, past the broad watery maze of the Delta, and down past the San Joaquin into the Sink, the maternal bulge of the depression encroaching upon the western edge of the Range.
Armen’s eyes were caught by the sky blue rectangle of “Tulare Lake Bed,” and they followed the navy blue Cartesian lines that proceeded from the blue rectangle to the Range and the sea, more like blue highways than streams. It occurred to him to open the California Water Atlas. He opened the heavy cover as though he were opening a chest of treasure, and he paused to admire the artistry of it. Each entangled flow diagram in that holy book always gave him the sense he was inspecting a great electrical circuit.
Topographic and irrigation map of the Sink
He stopped to browse a plate titled “The Virgin Waterscape,” and noticed that the lake at the heart of the Sink wasn’t depicted as a rectangle, and it was drawn larger than the same lake on other maps. The endless dusty plain around Slough City was a peninsula amid riparian marshes, and not far beyond a narrow band of marsh, the lake; the largest freshwater lake in the West. It wasn’t there anymore, of course; not even a shoreline remained. All topography and texture had vanished before the plow. The lake had remained a rectangular abstraction on maps like a ghost with no existence in the real world. Armen had tried to find it before. It wasn’t there.
He flipped through the atlas. A century-old “Topographical and Irrigation Map of the San Joaquin Valley” showed the familiar sloughs and canals around Slough City that Armen and his friend Peter had fished years ago: Mussel Slough, Peoples Canal, Lake Side Canal, and Sand Slough. There were other familiar names within a short bike ride: Last Chance Canal, Cross Creek, etc.
Sloughs. Canals. It occurred to Armen that slough fishing had been on his mind. For a moment he blushed with the warm glory of those old dreams he’d shared with his friend Peter, and then he felt the cold water of the flood on his shins.
He dug into the card catalog and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. He couldn’t find anything about fishing in the sloughs and ditches, but he did find articles and books on sport fishing. They covered many popular sport fish, including rainbow trout, and a special species of rainbow, the California golden trout. One article sported a glossy color illustration of that brightly colored fish. It piqued Armen’s interest enough to get him to read the page text. He read that the golden trout was native to the southern drainage of the Range, on the forks of the Kern River. He read on. An expansive wilderness area had just been legislated into being on the upper Kern watershed, dedicated to the protection of that particular species of trout, and aptly named the Golden Trout Wilderness.
He tended to wander through the library. Rather than simply seek out a good sport fish and determine where and how to catch it, Armen preferred to paint a detailed mental image with a variety of information. He studied the habitat of the fish, the natural history of the land, the human history of the land, and whatever else turned up. The more that Armen wandered down the narrow, neglected game trails of the library, the more the land of his imagination filled in with shapes, colors, textures, sounds, and smells. In this solitary manner, Armen sought to become less of an alien, and more intimate with the world.