seam between heavy weeds. Ninety minutes later I kicked back. Score: two takes, one hook up with an instantaneous weed release. On Silver Creek under those conditions one should actually feel good. Under other circumstances. I pulled my tube up on the bank, slipped off the waders, and pulled out the valve stem to deflate the tube. Dreading getting into the car and driving again, I sat beside the slowly shrinking and wrinkling tube rather than sit on it as I would usually have done. A cloud of dust up the road caught my eye. Someone was driving down the dirt road from Sun Valley and Hiway 20 toward the bridge hell bent for leather. As the car came closer I could see it as a gleaming silver Mercedes, doing about 70. It skidded to a stop next to the bridge five feet in front of where I sat, and it's lone occupant jumped out. She, yes of course SHE, jumped out and ran around to the trunk. She was about 22, brunette, a model perhaps and as spotless and flawless as the 450SL. And SHE was in one big hurry. Nothing else existed but her mission. She reached into the trunk and threw out a fully inflated float tube to bounce in the dust, then waders, vest and boots. She pulled out a leather rod case and quickly tipped out and connected a two piece Orvis bamboo rod, tightened on the, inevitable by this point, Hardy reel, and strung it up. She then hesitated a second in thought, staring absently at the hills behind me, and with a half shrug to herself stripped off her pants down to lace panties, long brown legs climbing from the gravel to the end of time, climbed into the waders, tied on the wading shoes, leaned into her vest, hitched up the float tube, plopped in the water, and drifted downstream out of sight. Gone. 120 seconds flat. Gone. Lace panties. Gone. She knew something I didn't know, probably many things I didn't know, something downriver. Gone. I sat on my tube long after all the air had gone out, staring east and downriver where the last current tail had carried away that vision, questions still hanging on my tongue. Did I just see what I just saw? And what was her hurry? Late for a secret hatch downstream, meeting someone, or maybe just having 90 minutes to fish? Only her Mercedes sitting there in front of me testified to the reality of the vision. My wife stopped reading her book, rolled down the window, and asked from above me, "well, did you enjoy yourself?" I almost blurted out uncontrollably, then froze, catching myself. Was this a trick question as so many had been that day?
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