Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

it from my sight,
returning it to the Seventeenth Century where it belonged on the easel of a man named Rembrandt.
"Carthage Sink"
    T HE Carthage River came roaring out of the ground at a fountainhead that was like a wild well. It flowed arrogantly a dozen miles or so through an open canyon and then just disappeared into the ground at a place that was called Carthage Sink.
    The river loved to tell everybody (everybody being the sky, the wind, the few trees that grew around there, birds, deer and even the stars if you can believe that) what a great river it was.
    "I come roaring from the earth and return roaring to the earth. I am the master of my waters. I am the mother and father of myself. I don't need a single drop of rain. Look at my smooth strong white muscles. I am my own future!"
    The Carthage River kept this kind of talking up for thousands of years. Needless to say: Everybody (everybody being the sky, etc.) was bored up to here with that river.
    Birds and deer tried to keep away from that part of the country if they could avoid it. The stars had been reduced to playing a waiting game and there was a dramatically noticeable lack of wind in that area, except of course for the Carthage River.
    Even the trout that lived there were ashamed of the river and always glad when they died. Anything was better than living in that God-damn bombastic river.
    One day the Carthage River in mid-breath telling about how great it was, dried up, "I am the master of my .. It just stopped.
    The river couldn't believe it. Not one more drop of water came from the ground and its sink was soon just a trickle dripping back into the ground like the runny nose of a kid.
    The Carthage River's pride vanished in an irony of water and the canyon turned into a good mood. Birds suddenly flew all over the place and took a happy look at what had happened and a great wind came up and it even seemed as if the stars were out earlier that night to take a look and then smile beatifically.
    There was a summer rainstorm a few miles away in some mountains and the Carthage River begged for the rain to come to its rescue.
    "Please," the river said with a voice that was now only the shadow of a whisper. "Help me. I need water for my trout. They're dying. Look at tie poor little things."
    The storm looked at the trout. The trout were very happy with the way things were now though they would soon be dead.
    The rainstorm made up some incredibly elaborate story about having to visit somebody's grandmother who had a broken ice-cream freezer and somehow lots of rain was needed to repair it, "But maybe in a few months we might get together. I'll call you on the telephone before I come over."
    The next day which was of course August 17, 1921 a lot of people, townspeople and such, drove out in their cars and looked at the former river and shook their heads in wonder. They had a lot of picnic basket? with them, too.
    There was an article in the local paper with two photographs showing two large empty holes that had been the fountainhead and the sink of the Carthage River. The holes looked like nostrils.
    Another photograph was of a cowboy sitting on his horse,
holding an umbrella in one hand and pointing into the depths of the Carthage Sink with his other hand. He was looking very serious. It was a photograph to make people laugh and that's exactly what they did.
    Â 
    Well, there you have the lost chapters of
Trout Fishing in America.
Their style is probably a little different because I'm a little different now, I'm thirty-four, and they were probably written in a slightly different form, too. It's interesting that I didn't rewrite them back there in 1961 but waited until December 4, 1969, almost a decade later, to return and try to bring them back with me.

The Weather in San Francisco
    I T was a cloudy afternoon with an Italian butcher selling a pound of meat to a very old woman, but who knows what such an old woman could possibly use a pound of meat for?
    She was too