OPEN WATER Words: Michael Garrigan WHY PURPLE? right behind the cabin, dark huckleberries. I picked a handful and ate, something I’d end up doing throughout each day. Leaning down, sifting through the shrubs, gathering a handful, my palms stained purple so every-thing I held was smeared with that dark shade. And again, there it was when I hiked up to Spruce Point. Looking out across the Charlie Creek ravine up to Mt. Baptiste, a cluster of lupines around the base of an old fire tower. A peak of purple. I’ve never followed a color before. Each day dropped another magenta morsel that I picked up and held and sometimes I think it was the only thing keeping me from falling down that steep slope of loneliness, or just going completely feral and los-ing any sense of who I am or who I’d be going back to when I eventually left the wildness. For two weeks, alone in the backcountry, I followed those indigo crumbs into water and onto mountains and through burnt-out mead-ows and to a dead elk, wondering where they’d lead me, wondering what I’d find at the end of the trail. It’s not so much the clear water or the vast wilderness or the too-close-for-comfort grizzly or the extreme isolation or the hundreds of cutthroats that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s the purple. I first noticed it on the hike into the Great Bear Wilderness—purple clematis gathering around ancient larch, the last survi-vors of a fire 100 years ago. You can still see the burns around their bases. Imagine holding a scar that long, growing into it, forming it into the foundation of your existence—dark bark mottled with violet flowers nod-ding in thick understory. Surrounded with color, we become more than what we were. I saw it again when I finally got to Spruce Park—a small toolshed and one-room cabin in a little meadow with a lodgepole fence on three sides opening to a steep ledge looking downstream along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. A piece of mauve tinsel hung from a pushpin on a windowsill. Once I’d unpacked and settled in, I hiked down to the water to take a swim and there, BELOW In northwest Montana, the summer of 2021 brought a long and smoke-filled fire season. High up in the Swan Range, lupine popped against muted colors from the haze of fires below. Photo: Aaron Agosto
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 102
