Email this page  Print this page  Comments

The Shining Path

Winner of the 2008 Robert Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award.

Mark Yuhina

(page 1 of 3)

In 1984, seven Shining Path rebels held up a busload of tourists on their way to Machu Picchu. Their haul proved modest—a handful of digital and other watches, some traveler’s checks, credit cards, a multitude of small denominations of various currencies and some simple rings. In one purse they might have found instructions, a key to a safebox and an address to a place they would never visit: Cle Elum, Washington.

That purse was Jennifer Robinaut’s, and she would gladly have given it up, if she had a little more time. She was in no hurry. Her pilgrimage to this place, like the wonders she had seen before—the Great Barrier Reef, Petra, Easter Island, Mount St. Helens—left her with a greater sense of omnipotence, youthfulness and vigor. She traveled light, two sets of shirts and two sets of slacks, interchangeable, and of muted duns, blacks and olives. What else? A small camera, a money belt, clean underclothes, a wetpack, some novels and her good sense.

Now gray and never married, she carried herself well and struck one of the bandits as elegant and most definitely rich, in part because she didn’t slouch or show fear. She was not afraid, and had long ago concluded these men—all men, really—were vessels, experiences and nothing more. Just minutes before the bandits’ attack, she’d admired the twilight of the southern solstice, itself a calming milestone. A moment during which she told herself again that travel broadened the mind and the heart, and leaving a place could be just as enlightening as finding someplace new. Here she was, far from the Yakima River, far from Cle Elum, her childhood home, on the roof of the Andes visiting a sacred place.

She found the bandits’ impulsivity intoxicating if not a little erotic. This was a most primal experience, perhaps only trumped by what her first and only boyfriend had done with her one afternoon on a runoff bank of virgin gravels, below a meadow on the banks of the Yakima.

One of the rebels saw her thrust chin, her squared shoulders and confident demeanor as insolence. Prone to poor judgment, and in need of close supervision, this bandit grew impatient. He barked commands at her, asked her to speed the emptying of her purse. She smiled at him.

Without the calming influence of his marginally brighter colleagues, the bandit drew his knife and moved it in an arc through the air. His arm blurred, a rainbow whirl of his striped cotton poncho, fast moving, and at the end of it, a new cut, a bad one, a fatal one, across her throat. The rapture Jennifer had learned of at Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the Holy Cities was finally about to come. And with it, she would move from her great loneliness to a world of the pure and young. She was not afraid, she would be led into the bright light, to green pastures, beside sapphire pools on mountain rivers, to the boy she once loved….

My Father and His Love for Cle Elum
When he learned of Jennifer Robinaut’s death, my father took me to the Yakima River, to his favorite stretch. I was maybe 14 or so; it’s where he taught me to fly-fish. In that low water, gentle cascades formed braids and pools, and cut-away banks were overhung with tangled woods. This was our version of the great wonders of the world, the Yakima not far from Cle Elum.

He sat on the gravel, his bamboo rod beside him, and never fished a minute. Head hung, yet still encouraging when I showed him the fish I brought to hand. These were solid, young rainbows, confident in their strikes and precise in their fighting. These were my favorite Cle Elum things—the mountains, this great river, him, the pools and runs, the fish with all their brilliant colors.

After I was done, he told me the story of Jennifer Robinaut, in part because he was once her boyfriend, the one who made a move some 30 years earlier on the banks of the Yakima. In part because he needed someone other than my mom to confide in, that he lost a friend he cared deeply for, although he hadn’t seen or heard from her in years. And in part because he hoped I would never take such journeys. “Follies” he called them.

“All you need to know about the world can be found within 50 miles of Cle Elum, or up here.” He would tap on his head with his index finger, and make a clicking noise when he did it.