Back Story: Why the Yellow Leaves Fall by Nels Hanson
The central image or “character” in my story, “Why the Yellow Leaves Fall,” is a yellow-and-purple-striped tropical fish caught in an Oregon salmon boat’s net. The fish is a real fish, though of a slightly different color and heavier shape, which I saw caught on the Central Coast off the Cayucos, California, pier when I was nine-years-old.
In the early ’60s there were many more fish along the California coast, and in summer the 19th-century, 100-yard-long Portuguese pier was crowded with hundreds of fishermen who lined both railings from just beyond the surf line out to the pier’s end that swayed with the waves. My brothers and cousin and I fished a week each summer and watched with excitement what each fisherman’s bending pole brought to the surface. My family were “flatlanders” from a small farm in the hot and dry San Joaquin Valley, between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range, and were fascinated by the sea.
The most amazing catch I saw was a rock bass, a fish I’d never seen before. It did look like a dark rainbow, with bright but muted yellow, orange, and blue stripes against an orange-brown background of scales like aged wood that made it appear almost “ancient.” The fish really seemed a visitor from another world and, to my child’s imagination, brought to mind Spanish shipwrecks, treasure, and an undersea kingdom.
I’d recently visited the mountaintop Hearst’s Castle, just up Highway 1 at Cambria, which resembled God’s house—I knew nothing then of Hearst’s unattractive story—and the rock fish and the castle had some connection for me. South of Cayucos in Morro Bay, in sight of the pier, stood ship-shaped Morro Rock, the huge inner core of an extinct volcano known as the “Gibraltar of the Pacific.” It was named by a 16th-century Spanish galleon’s captain and, to my young eyes, rivaled the size of the moon.
There was something “Moorish” and timeless about the rock, castle, and fish that together deepened the fish’s mystery.
The fish remained one of my most vivid memories—what you might call an “eidetic” memory— as the decades passed. When I wrote “Why the Yellow Leaves Fall” it seemed the right image for the beginning of the Sleeping Child’s dream of Bill Ryder, the protagonist, who is fired from the fishing boat for saving the fish and, ultimately, will reach Sleeping Child Lake. The “random” appearance of the tropical fish in the Blue Fin’s net set the story’s “plot,” which has to do with synchronicities, meaningful coincidences which at first appear pure chance but are actually somehow fated occurrences.
The fish far out of its natural range; the bully Roper who wants to spear the fish; Bill’s conversation with Rick Speaks, the adamant and worried ecologist; and Bill’s pink slip all lead Bill to Montana. That’s where he’ll meet the bartender, Hugh, who like Rick is obsessed with the recently extinct Dusky Seaside Sparrow, and Emma Little Bear, who is looking for her lost boy, in reality the Sleeping Child.
Each character, human and animal, is a link in a chain not governed by logic but by some underlying sympathetic correspondence, which Charles Two Hats insists is the Sleeping Child’s dream. It is the Sleeping Child, beset by nightmares of the Earth’s destruction and man’s inhumanity, who waits by the green river that feeds the deep lake, desperate for us to change so he can wake and return to the renewed Earth he longs for.
In “Why the Yellow Leaves Fall,” nature itself—the yellow leaves, the falling snow, the Dusky Sparrow, the flying raven, the moose in the Vermont road, the rabbits who escape the wolf—are sending messages for us to relent, to honor and save a dying Earth, for which we each bear responsibility. The Sleeping Child is the suffering conscience of our world, registering our every action and yearning for us to wake up, to finally become truly human and discover our appropriate place in a nature that is larger than ourselves but for better or worse is in our keeping.
Nels Hanson’s fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Long Story Short, The Montreal Review, and other journals. Read “Why the Yellow Leaves Fall” in the summer 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Really enjoyed the back story on your story.
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