The moon is up. It’s a full moon, and it lights the open field as if in a science fiction story. It’s white silver, and the evening dew simmers on the grass lying flat like long hair. Cold rises from the earth. It’s a good feeling, because the cold helps me tell the difference between the body and what’s outside of the body – like when you can see your breath. It’s proof I exist and also that there is a real world outside of me.

Soon I must build myself a fire, something I’ve enjoyed since boyhood. I tear the label from a can of chili, take the classified section from this morning’s newspaper. I can find a few twigs that aren’t wet with dew and I arrange them over the crumpled paper and light a match.  
The small flames climb and gradually I place bigger and damper pieces of wood over the smoking fire. The moon rises now above the tallest tree on the edge of the field so that the light is a solid field over the field, unbroken now by the jigsaw shadows of branches. The water in the stream pours over rocks and down its course, making a sound that is not at all musical as the cliche would have it. The sound is formless, random, and inevitable. Music, in contrast, has form, the product of human agency. The sound of the stream is beyond human control. Thus it is superior to music, and since music is the greatest sound human beings can codify, there can be no name for this water sound in mere human terms.

Trout fishing is best carried out alone, so if you are your own worst enemy, as my mother always told me I was, you will need to sign an armistice, or negotiate a cease fire. The land is most itself when no one is present to take it in. With even one person there, it is violated, but that paradigm – one fisher, or one hiker, alone – is the closest the human animal can know to real solitude, of not existing except as part of the land. Perhaps if you’re lucky you’ll know that after death.  

Getting There

My car climbs a hill through a rock cut, and down the other side lies the village of Colfax, with its white water tower like a golf ball on a tee at that country club a few miles back.  It appears against a green hilly background. Across the way a herd of dairy cattle takes its time to be itself. In Colfax you can find “Karaoke with Dave: 5 pm” at the Viking Bowl. You can find at least seven churches, the names of which are listed on the sign at the edge of town: United Methodist, First Lutheran, Church of Christ, and four more names I would have to stop moving to read. The Outhouse Bar lies a half a block from Railroad Street. “Colfax: Half Way Between the Equator and the North Pole. 3186 Miles.” It’s one of many towns to boast of this. I wonder, if they had to leave, which way the residents would go, pole or equator? I like to think they’d go north. Just as Minnesota and Wisconsin carry meaning in my personal mythology, so do the concepts of north and south. North is fewer people, in more space, and weather designed to keep them out. North is a short growing season so that you can better appreciate every day of it. We shouldn’t be able to control the weather. The weather is not supposed to be nice most of the time. Do I sound WASPy in this? Do I care? This is what North means, and thus exactly what South means is not very important because it can’t mean this. Perhaps in Argentina, South means this.  But Buenos Aires is a long way from the Halfway Bar and Karoke with Dave.

Something about turning off a road onto a smaller road opens up possibilities, or gives the illusion of doing so. As I head towards the Singing Hills, the trees seem lighter in color, the season a bit behind up here, this little further north. It’s like going back in time to earlier in the season, like being able to live a piece of life over again.

The Singing Hills don’t sing to me, and in fact these hills are not really called the Singing Hills. I’ve seen a sign for a place in Southern Minnesota (“south” “Minnesota”) called the Singing Hills, and although I like the name, I’ve never been there. It’s probably flat and redolent of soybeans. This place in Wisconsin is called something else, but I’m not going to tell you what it is, because this is the place I turn off the road onto a smaller road. I don’t want you around.  

Most people do want you around, so stay with them. I want to keep my own company for these two days. The reason people are afraid of their own company is not loneliness, but that they’re afraid of what they’ll find. Having no companion to accommodate or annoy, they’ll have to consider, just for a day or two, the person they’ve become. There will be no note to play off a lower note. I have a lot of sympathy for this brand of terror. The Singing Hills are a mirror in which you may not wish to see yourself. 

Richard Terrill is a former student and instructor at UW-Eau Claire. He is the winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry and the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. “Trout Fishing: A Manifesto” first appeared in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. His new collection of essays is Essentially from Holy Cow! Press. Find a link at richardterrill.com.