Good Grape Wine Company

March 11 2007

Arm Chair Travel:  The Smell of Rainbow Pt. II of III

A continuing short story from my close friend, “Easy” Ed Vodrazka, while he was in New Zealand.  Some people are born with the ability to draw people in and lift spirits.  Ed has that gift.  He has been a California lifeguard for almost thirty years and is something of a California State Park legend.  He doesn’t carve notches on the belt but he measures good summer days by the amount of “saves” he makes, numbers that can reach double digits.  Ed is my wine mentor and whenever I stay with he and his wife Jen (whom he met on the same trip that he and I met when we were camping for 10 days in Baja California) at the Guy Fleming house at the Torrey Pines State Reserve in San Diego, we frequently enjoy lobster that he has hand caught while free diving off the craggy shore.  We always enjoy a bottle or three of wine—a crisp chardonnay or a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, perhaps a Zin mixed in because we drink what we want regardless of what’s on the plate.  We share stories and laughs.  He marvels at the relative simplicity of my living in the Midwest compared to California and I marvel at his freedom from the pull of materialism and his zen spirit that is infectious.  Ed is the only guy that I know of who has met both the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa, not to mention having spent the better part of 20 years living in a van working on the shores of California beaches.

The Smell of Rainbow Pt. II

I was awake by 5:00, but stayed in the warm bed waiting for Greg to wake up.  A few minutes later I could hear him stirring around in the kitchen, and soon the smell of fresh coffee drifted into my room.  It seemed that he was as excited as I was to get going.  We had a cup of coffee and a quick bowl of oatmeal then filled a thermos with the coffee that was left in the pot.  Greg said something about fishing being more important than breakfast, and he certainly didn’t get an argument out of me.  It was still dark as we began loading our gear into his car.  There was a definite chill in the pre-morning air, and it felt more like early winter than early spring that morning.  There was a warm light pouring out from his open kitchen door as we loaded up the fishing gear, and each breath that I released sent a warm plume of mist into the cold air.  We drove out of his long dirt driveway, and the only sound that broke the silence was that of his car tires gently rolling over the gravel.  Daylight was still just a faint glow on the horizon.  Our headlights shone two long beams of light through the thin layer of fog that had settled onto his farm overnight, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere.

We drove for about an hour up from Marinara and into the denser bush.  We entered the Urewera forest just as the morning was upon us, and Greg drove on along the ever narrowing dirt roads.  Twice we came upon wash outs in the road and had to back track to find alternate routes.  We passed countless little streams and small rivers, all of which looked great to me, but Greg continued along the shrub lined forestry roads until we came to a sparse and undeveloped camping area known as Te Ara, and Greg’s favorite river…the Rangatiki. 

Averaging around 60 feet across in most areas, the Rangatiki flowed strong and steady about 10 feet deep.  The water was cold, crystal clear, and clean enough to drink.  There were areas of gently cascading rapids and countless promising pools with bushy hiding areas from where one could cast.  Greg and I shared a mutual respect for the quietness and solitude that comes to the fisherman naturally when he finds himself in such places of beauty, and we rarely spoke to each other on that cold morning.  He generously suggested that I take the lead in fishing the undisturbed pools as we made our way upstream, and he stayed well below me.  I used one of his casting rods with a silver Panther Martin spoon, and Greg had chosen his split bamboo fly rod.  He gave me so much space to fish that I only caught sight of him several times all morning.  But there was one time when I followed the river around a fairly sharp bend and hiked up and over a stand of large boulders.  Being well above the waterline gave me an unobstructed view of the river’s downstream path, and there in the distance, standing on a large smooth boulder, was the old fisherman.  His weighted green line danced gracefully across the sky, gently turning in perfect response to the old man’s will.  I stopped to watch him for awhile.  His line flew freely out over the water, and then gently followed back over itself in a perfectly controlled pattern of a wide figure eight.  Just shy of seventy years old, the site of Greg Flood dancing his delicate dry fly out over the Rangatiki was sheer poetry. 

To be continued ...

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