On to Goldeneye
Part 1 - The Quest
Dad sounded worried. He was talking quietly with George outside our tent.
I was lying inside, weak and fuzzy. We had bivouacked beside a large mountain lake.
“I have to take Davy to the hospital,” Dad said.
When I heard that, I rolled over onto my side, wiping sweat from my forehead. How were we ever going to get back to the car, I wondered.
I must’ve been around 10 years old when it all started.
We lived in a house on a dead-end street on a forested hillside near Portland, Oregon. There was me, my mom and dad, and my sister, who was five years younger than I was.
One of the big reasons we had moved to Oregon from Massachusetts was Dad’s interest in outdoor adventures. He loved hiking and fishing—especially fly fishing.
Watching Dad fly fish was like watching the slow, graceful flutter of a bird’s wings. He’d stand on the lakeshore, a round fly box clipped to his belt loop, choosing from an assortment of dry flies he had tied himself.
With each cast, his rod bent forward and back. Thrust—Pause. Thrust—Pause. The line snaked out in a long, graceful arc. Then, suddenly, everything stopped. The line unfurled, falling gently on the water. The fly was the last to touch the water where an unsuspecting rainbow trout might be swimming below.
The goal, of course, was to catch a fish. I realized that for Dad, the beauty of the cast was part of the reward.
Our next-door neighbors weren’t really next door. They lived down the hill and also had two kids: Don and Jim. It was fun having them to play with in the woods, especially Jim, who was my age. Their dad, George, also liked hiking and fishing, so it was natural that we all went exploring together on outings to faraway places.
Don was older. He seemed smart. I could tell because he was always reading a thick paperback book. Seems like it had something to do with war. And peace.
Dad said, “I know somewhere over in Central Oregon where the fish practically jump right into the frying pan. Let’s all go there on a camping trip and see if we can catch some trout.”
Dad had loved summer camp as a boy. Hiking, fishing, and sleeping under the stars had become part of who he was. Looking back, I think he wanted to give us those same experiences.
Our destination was the Three Sisters Wilderness, deep in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.
My mom and sister, and Jim and Don’s mom, stayed behind, since what Dad had in mind wasn’t car camping. It was backpacking, where we had to carry all our food and equipment on our backs.
We drove and drove. Dad and me, plus Jim and Don, their dad George, and another boy we’d invited named Mike—six of us altogether, traveling in two cars.
The first trip worked out really well. We found a campsite close to the shore of Doris Lake, one of a chain of lakes in the central Cascade Mountains, just a few miles up the trail from the parking area. George fried the fish we caught over a glowing campfire.
After lunch, we explored along the lakeshore, and that’s when we found it—a big raft of logs all strapped together and tied to a bush, as if somebody had left it there just for us. Perfect for getting out where the trout were.
Splash—sploosh!
“Whoo-hoo!” George let out a gleeful holler. He and Dad had jumped into Doris Lake and were trying to push the raft we were on back to shore.
“It’s cold!” Dad yelled.
The trouble was, we drifted farther than we meant to.
“I can’t touch bottom,” Dad said, pushing a long wooden pole as deep as he could.
“Me either,” George said.
That’s when the two men realized they’d have to take off their clothes and swim us back.
“Come on, you guys—kick your legs harder!” Mike yelled, laughing at our slow progress.
Finally, we nudged into shore and jumped onto the sandy beach. Dad and George grinned as Dad held up two trout he’d caught near the middle of the lake. They were pretty big, too.
Back in camp, I looked over at George and saw him smiling at his reflection in a shiny spatula as he combed his hair. He was our camp cook. Once in a while after dinner, I’d see him take a swig from a metal flask and wipe his lips on the back of his hand. It seemed to make him happy.
Gradually, our food supply got smaller and smaller. We were down to dried food—powdered eggs and lentils. The lentils were boiled in a pot, served on an aluminum plate, and smothered in ketchup.
“Come on, boys,” Dad said. “Down the hatch.”
Breakfast was usually oatmeal with canned fruit juice we kept buried in a patch of leftover snow nearby. One night it rained so hard that everything got soaked, including our sleeping bags and canvas tents. Dad and George took turns stoking the fire through the night.
One afternoon, some Forest Service men came by, leading a couple of horses loaded with heavy packs. They’d been to a remote lake far ahead of us. They told us it was off the trail system, so very few people ever visited it. In fact, they said it had been stocked with trout that were hardly ever caught because almost nobody knew the lake was there.
That got Dad’s attention.
“What’s the lake again?” he asked. “What name did you say?”
“Goldeneye,” one of them replied. “But it’s not on most maps. We stock it by dropping fingerling trout from a plane.”
Even to me, that sounded exciting—a secret place waiting to be explored. For Dad, it became a puzzle he wanted to solve.
Later that year, he went to the Oregon Forest Service office and asked for help finding Goldeneye Lake on a map. Sure enough, it was there. That’s when the whole idea began to turn into a plan.
But wait—I wasn’t sure I liked fishing that much. We had to carry heavy packs in hot weather and hike miles and miles through the forest. And catching fish meant touching their slimy, wriggling bodies to take them off the hook.
Yuck.
Dad was determined, though. We had to go. It was that simple.
Over the winter, Dad and George collected food for six people. Most of it was powdered. They called it “freeze-dried,” whatever that meant.
Our packs were dark brown canvas stretched over wooden frames with padded shoulder straps. Each of us carried food, an aluminum cup and plate, a surplus Army canteen, a sleeping bag, and a hooded jacket. It was a lot.
The grownups got together to plan the trip, and Dad added two more ideas. First, he said we should each get a tetanus shot to protect us.
“We also need a blow-up raft,” he added, “so we can get to the hard-to-reach fishing spots.”
He pulled out the Forest Service map and pointed to Goldeneye Lake.
“There it is, boys.”
“On to Goldeneye!”
At the time, I had no idea that journey would stay with me for the rest of my life.
Tomorrow in Part 2: The search for Goldeneye begins—but we end up somewhere else entirely.