Exploits River

We went salmon fishing on the Exploits River. You think salmon fishing will be one thing but it's the other. Everyone telling you what to do and where to stand. Don't cast there, cast there. You're standing in the salmon run. In the woods behind the sand bar is a clearing where everyone shits, squatting with their chest waders down around their ankles. They say it takes two seasons to catch a salmon on a fly. Twenty thousand salmon an hour went through the fish ladder while we stood flicking to and fro. An old man in polarized sunglasses caught one while smoking Players cigarettes in the rapids above a bridge. They say it takes the right fly on the right day in the right pool with the right salmon. I could work out the odds but why bother. They say the salmon have to want to be caught. On the Gander River pink makes them crazy but on the Exploits it's white and orange. I saw a man drop his rod into the river when he fell backwards in his boat, drunk as a skunk. His rod disappeared forever and he sat with his head down thinking on it for a while. Another man walked slowly up over the bank scratching his head as if in a trance. Poachers hurried their catch into the woods and when they returned they washed their hands in the river. Pop cans and chip bags floating past. The sound of a bottle smashing. Transport trucks flew over the bridge blowing their horns. On the last day I fell off a rock between two other rocks and I was battered, bruised and soaked. I looked over at my beloved standing on the bank and she closed her hand over her mouth. Go ahead and laugh, I said, but we were deaf from the quiet roar of the river. At night in our tent we heard the river in our ears. When we got back to St. John's we heard on the radio that a man had fallen out of his boat and drowned.