Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar

Richard Brautigan

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9780547525532
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Collected in one volume, three counterculture classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s. Included here are three great works by the incomparable Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that wanders from San Francisco through the country's rural waterways—a book "that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America... An instant cult classic" ( Financial Times ). The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of nearly one hundred poems, first published in 1968. And In Watermelon Sugar expresses the mood of a new generation, revealing death as a place where people travel the length of their dreams, rejecting violence and hate. During his lifetime, Look magazine observed, "Brautigan is joining Hesse, Golding, Salinger, and Vonnegut as a literary magus to the literate young." A uniquely imaginative writer of the Beat movement who became an icon of the hippie era, he is still a favorite of readers today.

Knock on Wood (Part One)

As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.

Summer of 1942.

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I’d like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

 

The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:

I remember with particular amusement, people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn.

Knock on Wood (Part Two)

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. Then there was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.

There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.

Trout.

At last an opportunity to go trout fishing, to catch my first trout, to behold Pittsburgh.

It was growing dark. I didn’t have time to go and look at the creek. I walked home past the glass whiskers of the houses, reflecting the downward rushing waterfalls of night.

The next day I would go trout fishing for the first time. I would get up early and eat my breakfast and go. I had heard that it was better to go trout fishing early in the morning. The trout were better for it. They had something extra in the morning. I went home to prepare for trout fishing in America. I didn’t have any fishing tackle, so I had to fall back on corny fishing tackle.

Like a joke.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

I bent a pin and tied it onto a piece of white string.

And slept.

The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillean hook.

I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill.

But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.

The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.

I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.

Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.

I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.

 

The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:

There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t change a flight of stairs into a creek. The boy walked back to where he came from. The same thing once happened to me. I remember mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I thought you were a trout stream.”

“I’m not,” she said.

Red Lip

Seventeen years later I sat down on a rock. It was under a tree next to an old abandoned shack that had a sheriff’s notice nailed like a funeral wreath to the front door.

 

NO TRESPASSING

 

4/17 OF A HAIKU

 

Many rivers had flowed past those seventeen years, and thousands of trout, and now beside the highway and the sheriff’s notice flowed yet another river, the Klamath, and I was trying to get thirty-five miles downstream to Steelhead, the place where I was staying.

It was all very simple. No one would stop and pick me up even though I was carrying fishing tackle. People usually stop and pick up a fisherman. I had to wait three hours for a ride.

The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, “Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,” and put the coin in my hand, but never came back

I had walked for miles and miles until I came to the rock under the tree and sat down. Every time a car would come by, about once every ten minutes, I would get up and stick out my thumb as if it were a bunch of bananas and then sit back down on the rock again.

The old shack had a tin roof colored reddish by years of wear, like a hat worn under the guillotine. A corner of the roof was loose and a hot wind blew down the river and the loose corner clanged in the wind.

A car went by. An old couple. The car almost swerved off the road and into the river. I guess they didn’t see many hitchhikers up there. The car went around the corner with both of them looking back at me.

I had nothing else to do, so I caught salmon flies in my landing net. I made up my own game. It went like this: I couldn’t chase after them. I had to let them fly to me. It was something to do with my mind. I caught six.

A little ways up from the shack was an outhouse with its door flung violently open. The inside of the outhouse was exposed like a human face and the outhouse seemed to say, “The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he’s dead now and I don’t want anyone else to touch me. He was a good guy. He built me with loving care. Leave me alone. I’m a monument now to a good ass gone under. There’s no mystery here. That’s why the door’s open. If you have to crap, go in the bushes like the deer.”

“Fuck you,” I said to the outhouse. “All I want is a ride down the river.”

The Kool-Aid Wino

When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as the result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn’t because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn’t even enough money to buy him a truss. So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.

One morning in August I went over to his house. He was still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet in his life.

“Did you bring the nickel you promised?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s here in my pocket.”

“Good.”

He hopped out of bed and he was already dressed. He had told me once that he never took off his clothes when he went to bed.

“Why bother?” he had said. “You’re only going to get up, anyway. Be prepared for it. You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.”

He went into the kitchen, stepping around the littlest children, whose wet diapers were in various stages of anarchy. He made his breakfast: a slice of homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We left the house with him still eating the sandwich. The store was three blocks away, on the other side of a field covered with heavy yellow grass. There were many pheasants in the field. Fat with summer they barely flew away when we came up to them.

“Hello,” said the grocer. He was bald with a red birthmark on his head. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. He automatically reached for a package of grape Kool-Aid and put it on the counter.

“Five cents.”

“He’s got it,” my friend said.

I reached into my pocket and gave the nickel to the grocer. He nodded and the old red car wobbled back and forth on the road as if the driver were having an epileptic seizure.

We left.

My friend led the way across the field. One of the pheasants didn’t even bother to fly. He ran across the field in front of us like a feathered pig.

When we got back to my friend’s house the ceremony began. To him the making of Kool-Aid was a romance and a ceremony. It had to be performed in an exact manner and with dignity.

First he got a gallon jar and we went around to the side of the house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.

He opened the Kool-Aid and dumped it into the jar. Putting the jar under the spigot, he turned the water on. The water spit, splashed and guzzled out of the spigot.

He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious Kool-Aid spill out onto the ground. When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination. Then he screwed the lid tightly onto the top of the jar and gave it a good shake.

The first part of the ceremony was over.

Like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the first part of the ceremony well.

His mother came around the side of the house and said in a voice filled with sand and string, “When are you going to do the dishes? . . . Huh?”

“Soon,” he said.

“Well, you better,” she said.

When she left, it was as if she had never been there at all. The second part of the ceremony began with him carrying the jar very carefully to an abandoned chicken house in the back. “The dishes can wait,” he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.

He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars. He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling a drop. He screwed their caps on tightly and was now ready for a day’s drinking.

You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup

And this is a very small cookbook for Trout Fishing in America as if Trout Fishing in America were a rich gourmet and Trout Fishing in America had Maria Callas for a girlfriend and they ate together on a marble table with beautiful candles.

Compote of Apples

Take a dozen of golden pippins, pare them nicely and take the core out with a small penknife; put them into some water, and let them be well scalded; then take a little of the water with some sugar, and a few apples which may be sliced into it, and let the whole boil till it comes to a syrup; then pour it over your pippins, and garnish them with dried cherries and lemon-peel cut fine. You must take care that your pippins are not split.

And Maria Callas sang to Trout Fishing in America as they ate their apples together.

A Standing Crust for Great Pies

Take a peck of flour and six pounds of butter boiled in a gallon of water: skim it off into the flour, and as little of the liquor as you can. Work it up well into a paste, and then pull it into pieces till it is cold. Then make it up into what form you please.

A Spoonful Pudding

Take a spoonful of flour, a spoonful of cream or milk, an egg, a little nutmeg, ginger, and salt. Mil all together, and boil it in a little wooden dish half an hour. If you think proper you may add a few currants.

And Trout Fishing in America said, “The moon’s coming out.” And Maria Callas said, “Yes, it is.”

Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup

Take green walnuts before the shell is formed, and grind them in a crab-mill, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Frontispiece
• TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
• Dedication
• The Original Cover for Trout Fishing in America
• Knock on Wood (Part One)
• Knock on Wood (Part Two)
• Red Lip
• The Kool-Aid Wino
• Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup
• Prologue to Grider Creek
• Grider Creek
• The Ballet for Trout Fishing in America
• A Walden Pond for Winos
• Tom Martin Creek
• Trout Fishing on the Bevel
• Sea, Sea Rider
• The Last Year the Trout Came up Hayman Creek
• Trout Death by Port Wine
• The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America
• The Message
• Trout Fishing in America Terrorists
• Trout Fishing in America with the FBI
• Worsewick
• The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren
• The Mayor of the Twentieth Century
• On Paradise
• The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
• The Salt Creek Coyotes
• The Hunchback Trout
• The Teddy Roosevelt Chingader’
• Footnote Chapter to “The Shipping of Trout Fishing in America Shorty to Nelson Algren”
• The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin
• Room 208, Hotel Trout Fishing in America
• The Surgeon
• A Note on the Camping Craze that is Currently Sweeping America
• A Return to the Cover of This Book
• The Lake Josephus Days
• Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity
• The Towel
• Sandbox Minus John Dillinger Equals What?
• The Last Time I Saw Trout Fishing in America
• In the California Bush
• The Last Mention of Trout Fishing in America Shorty
• Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace
• Footnote Chapter to “Red Lip”
• The Cleveland Wrecking Yard
• A Half-Sunday Homage to a Whole Leonardo da Vinci
• Trout Fishing in America Nib
• Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter
• The Mayonnaise Chapter
• THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE DISASTER
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
• Horse Child Breakfast
• General Custer Versus the Titanic
• The Beautiful Poem
• Private Eye Lettuce
• A Boat
• The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem
• Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4
• Oranges
• San Francisco
• Xerox Candy Bar
• Discovery
• Widow’s Lament
• The Pomegranate Circus
• The Winos on Potrero Hill
• The First Winter Snow
• Death Is a Beautiful Car Parked Only
• Surprise
• Your Departure Versus the Hindenburg
• Education
• Love Poem
• The Fever Monument
• At the California Institute of Technology
• A Lady
• “Star-Spangled” Nails
• The Pumpkin Tide
• Adrenalin Mother
• The Wheel
• Map Shower
• A Postcard from Chinatown
• The Double-Bed Dream Gallows
• December 30
• The Sawmill
• The Way She Looks at It
• Yes, the Fish Music
• The Chinese Checker Players
• I’ve Never Had It Done so Gently Before
• Our Beautiful West Coast Thing
• Man
• The Silver Stairs of Ketchikan
• Hollywood
• Your Necklace Is Leaking
• Haiku Ambulance
• It’s Going Down
• Alas, Measured Perfectly
• Hey, Bacon!
• The Rape of Ophelia
• A CandleLion Poem
• I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t
• Cyclops
• Flowers for Those You Love
• The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
• It’s Raining in Love
• Poker Star
• To England
• I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment
• Hey! This Is What It’s All About
• My Nose Is Growing Old
• Crab Cigar
• The Sidney Greenstreet Blues
• Comets
• I Live in the Twentieth Century
• The Castle of the Cormorants
• Lovers
• Sonnet
• Indirect Popcorn
• Star Hole
• Albion Breakfast
• Let’s Voyage into the New American House
• November 3
• The Postman
• A Mid-February Sky Dance
• The Quail
• 1942
• Milk for the Duck
• The Return of the Rivers
• A Good-Talking Candle
• The Horse That Had a Flat Tire
• Kafka’s Hat
• Nine Things
• Linear Farewell, Nonlinear Farewell
• Mating Saliva
• Sit Comma and Creeley Comma
• Automatic Anthole
• The Symbol
• I Cannot Answer You Tonight in Small Portions
• Your Catfish Friend
• December 24
• Horse Race
• The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
• After Halloween Slump
• Gee, You’re so Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain
• The Nature Poem
• The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead
• The Harbor
• The Garlic Meat Lady from
• In a Cafe
• Boo, Forever
• IN WATERMELON SUGAR
• Frontispiece
• BOOK ONE: IN WATERMELON SUGAR
• In Watermelon Sugar
• Margaret
• My Name
• Fred
• Charley’s Idea
• Sundown
• The Gentle Cricket
• Lighting the Bridges
• iDEATH
• The Tigers
• More Conversation at iDEATH
• A Lot of Good Nights
• Vegetables
• Margaret Again
• Pauline’s Shack
• A Love, a Wind
• The Tigers Again
• Arithmetic
• She Was
• A Lamb at False Dawn
• The Watermelon Sun
• Hands
• Margaret Again, Again
• Strawberries
• The Schoolteacher
• Under the Plank Press
• Until Lunch
• The Tombs
• The Grand Old Trout
• BOOK TWO: inBOIL
• Nine Things
• Margaret Again, Again, Again
• A Nap
• Whiskey
• Whiskey Again
• The Big Fight
• Time
• The Bell
• Pauline
• The Forgotten Works
• A Conversation with Trash
• In There
• The Master of the Forgotten Works
• The Way Back
• Something Is Going to Happen
• Rumors
• The Way Back Again
• Dinner That Night
• Pauline Again
• Faces
• Shack
• The Girl with the Lantern
• Chickens
• Bacon
• Prelude
• An Exchange
• The Trout Hatchery
• inBoiL’s iDEATH
• Wheelbarrow
• A Parade
• Bluebells
• Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again
• Shack Fever
• BOOK THREE: MARGARET
• Job
• Meat Loaf
• Apple Pie
• Literature
• The Way
• The Statue of Mirrors
• The Grand Old Trout Again
• Getting Fred
• The Wind Again
• Margaret’s Brother
• The Wind Again, Again
• Necklace
• Couch
• Tomorrow
• Carrots
• Margaret’s Room
• Bricks
• My Room
• The Girl with the Lantern Again
• Margaret Again, Again, Again, Again, Again
• Good Ham
• Sunrise
• Escutcheon
• Sunny Morning
• The Tomb Crew
• The Dance
• Cooks Together
• Their Instruments Playing
• About the Author