Conscious Choice: Sandstorms and Tall Tales

April 2007 | Life, the Universe and Everything

Sandstorms and Tall Tales

By Alastair Bland

To the modern city dweller, the Native American is largely a fictional figure of literature and film. So it was a matter of some wonder when we learned that we would be having a Native American fellow as a guest at Christmas dinner. He was the new boyfriend of our cousin. Other than that, we knew nothing of him except that his name was Sandstorm.

My dad, my mom and my two brothers speculated on which tribe Sandstorm belonged to as we drove north on I-5 from San Francisco to my grandmother’s home in Chico. The man’s name produced in my mind Hollywood images of whirling sand and mesa country populated by cowboys and tumbleweeds. “He must be from one of the Southwest desert groups,” I said.

When we arrived, excited pets and relatives met us as we entered the warm house. I made my way past the volley of hugs, on the lookout for the Native American. I found him in the living room, a long-haired man of about forty-five years seated on the couch, deeply absorbed in his own quiet thoughts. He wore a long, stoic face, with tight lips and a thin wiry beard.

I approached him and introduced myself. He rose proudly to his feet and stared me in the eyes. He took my hand and shook it with a deliberate, unsettling effort.

“Sandstorm,” he said curtly, in a deep voice.

My grandmother and aunt tended to the kitchen while the rest of us gathered in the living room by the fireplace. The whole house smelled of good things cooking. I sat on the couch with my older brother, Michael and Sandstorm. I asked where he came from.

“In the forest,” Sandstorm declared, “on the Klamath River.”

This puzzled me. Deep green forests grow in the Klamath region, it rains meters each year, and there are certainly no sandstorms.

Sandstorm’s big thing was fishing. He had fished all over California, catching trout, catfish, salmon and bass. My brothers and I are fishing people, too, and we began to trade fish stories.

Sandstorm told us about fishing in the Klamath. He said that in the shallow rapids they used to scout for large, log-shaped shadows moving upstream: sturgeon. Sandstorm told of tail-roping them and hauling the big fish out backwards onto the beach. There was a place in the river, too, where bigger monsters dwelled. He described a rock ledge, which gave way to a deep and evil pool of backwater under the mountainside.

“Guys dive down there with masks,” spoke Sandstorm in a low, shadowy tone. The fire crackled behind him as the night fell outside. “They see things – big things – and they never go in the water again.”

I enjoy monster myths, but I also think that people who really believe them are silly.

Sandstorm went on to tell us that he once caught a seven-foot Chinook salmon. The largest Chinook salmon ever recorded by Western science came from Alaska, and measured four feet and ten inches and 125 pounds. Sandstorm’s seven-footer would have weighed nearly 300 pounds.

If I was a liar, I also could tell great fishing stories. I always limit my listeners to the truth, however, and I told Sandstorm of a channel catfish that I pulled from the Rio Grande one morning several years ago with a trotline. It weighed 15 pounds.

“That’s nothing,” whispered Sandstorm darkly. “There are 500-pound channel cats in the Feather River.”

Western science penetrated the depths of the Feather River long ago. Science has also penetrated the depths of the Colorado, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Mississippi and every other murky American river and the biggest channel catfish ever recorded was a 58-pounder.

Sandstorm also hunted. Deer, elk and pigs were his staples – but he would not shoot a bear.

“They are my brothers,” he explained.

At the dinner table, over the roast and the yams and the piles of rolls, my 89-year-old grandmother accidentally called Sandstorm “Sandstone” at least four times while offering him gravy or salt or apple juice. During dessert she chirped with genuine interest, “Sandstone, what do your people do after a big feast?”

Without missing a beat the man said, “We play war games.”

Classic, I thought: “War games.” But then my family plays Monopoly after big feasts. With heart and vigor we liquidate bank accounts, acquire properties and send each other off to the poorhouse. Sandstorm resided on the couch while we played, musing on some mysterious subject with a long face.

We live in a dried-out world. Western science has cleared the rivers and the woods of all their mysteries, and for many of us it has wiped the sky clean of a god. Yet some manage to maintain faith in the supernatural. While it’s easy to find fault in a man who comes from the temperate rainforest and calls himself Sandstorm, I do wish sometimes that I lived in the exciting world that he does, a world with river monsters, quarter-ton catfish and bears for brothers.

Alastair Bland is a journalist in San Francisco. He frequently writes of travel, food, fishing and ecology in newspapers and magazines throughout the West. He may be reached by email.

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