Road to Bountiful (16 page)

“Yes. I think so. I believe you. But what of you? You will be cold, your feet will freeze. This river must be like ice. You only have a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on.”

“Yep. I’ll be cold for a while, but then you get used to it. You never feel anything after you go numb, one of the nice things nature did for us. But I don’t really notice because I’m fishing.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ve done this a thousand times. Let’s get to the water.”

We pick our way down a small slope and stand on the edge of the stream. I can see insects hovering and skipping near the water’s surface. Little wonder that fish rise and feed at this time of day. Levi motions to a spot in shallow water and says, “Go there and then cast toward the other side of the creek. Cast it just by flicking it. Let the fly drop on the water without creating a splash. You create a splash, and the fish know that someone or something is near and they will not bite. Fish are dumb, but they aren’t stupid. Now wade out and try.”

Wade out and try. I gingerly step into the water. It swirls around my legs, and the waders suck tight against my legs and hips. I look down for a moment and feel slightly dizzy. I am in water, I think. In the mountains with a fishing pole in my hand. A fishing
rod
in my hands.

“That’s where you need to cast. Good job, Uncle Loyal. Cast over there, where it’s dark.”

I waggle my pole back and forth. The line gets tangled in itself, and the fly ends up pricking my left hand. I am confused. This is not how I imagined it. This is not what I thought the outcome would be. There is no magic in fishing.

“Here,” Levi says.

He walks to me, sloshing through the creek. “Here,” he says. And he takes my line and gently undoes the knots and loops. “Here,” he says. And he stands behind me and puts his left hand on my left shoulder, and he takes my forearm in his strong right hand. “Here,” he says. And with his right hand, he pulls my arm back. Gently. I feel the rhythm of his motion coursing through my shoulder, my arm, my hand, my fingers, to the whippy rod. “Here,” he says. And we rock a little, back and forth, and the line splits the air, and I think I can hear a
zizzing
sound. “Here,” he says, and he stops the forward motion of my hand and arm, and I watch the tiny fly float on unseen currents of air, dainty in its arc, the white speck of feathers settling on dark waters.

“Here,” Levi says. And the fly lands. I wonder what a fish thinks in its watery world, if a fish can think at all, of the old man and the young man, close to one another, swaying in time with each other, while the cold water swirls about them.

“Nice, nice. That’s how it should be done. Nice. Very good, very good, Uncle Loyal.”

And then he says, “Here,” again, and he pulls back on my arm and the line whips out of the water, with drops sparkling in the early morning sun.

And in the chilly morning waters, standing in the dizzying current, a young man, arm on my shoulder, speaking to me softly, I think of a parable.

We ride. We all ride on dark waters, bits of feather on a current. We are not strong, but strong enough. Strong enough to float, no matter how deep the water, no matter how swift it flows.
Here.
That is what He did for us. He took us in His arms and said, “Here,” and there is a line that He provided. We ride the currents
here
, a slim connection of twine between us, among us. But it is a line that will not break.

I think of Daisy and my daughters. I think of my old brown house and of Carl and Harriet Van Acker. I think of John Jannuzzi, and John Fetzberg and his children on my sidewalk on snowy North Dakota mornings. I think of Glenn and the Hecht sisters. I think of Floyd McKay, and I think of slim lines and dark waters. I see their many faces on the water and think of how they are part of me. I think of strength, and it is all I can do to not simply lay my rod down in the water and turn and walk to shore and tell Levi, “I know what it is to fish now. I know.”

I watch in fascination as the tiny fly bobs and floats downstream. Levi eases his grip on my arm. His left hand stays on my shoulder.

“There,” he says. “There.” He strengthens his grip on my right arm and helps me pull back the line and fly. I know there is something to the words he used,
here
and
there
, but I cannot think of the meaning. It doesn’t come to me. “There,” he repeats. “We’ll do this again.”

And we do. Again and again. We carefully move upstream a little, Levi holding his arm under my arm and around my back, and we try another hole, this dark place in deep water where fish stay still in the morning.

Soon, his left hand drops from my shoulder to my back and his right hand barely touches mine. Then he steps back, and our link is broken.

I am fishing on my own.

This is what Levi wanted to show me.

I know how to fish now.

The water feels cold, but the cold makes me feel alive, the way frigid air made Daisy feel alive when pellets of ice and grainy flakes of snow blew hard from the north.

Levi is never far from my side. He watches each of my movements with the care of a young father watching a child on a bicycle for the first time. Had I slipped, he would have been there, a strong hand pulling me up. I lose track of time. A vague awareness that the sun is higher in the sky and the temperature warming are all that tell me another day has taken flight, hurtling toward its sure conclusion. Levi does little fishing. A cast here and there, always with his head half cocked in my direction. I can tell he’s a very good fisherman by his grace and his rhythm, the places he put his dry fly, the glowing intensity of his eyes when the fly touches water.

Then I know just enough to understand there are good fishermen and there are bad fishermen, and there are people who fish but don’t care much. I also understand that the gear does not make the fisherman and you could be a good fisherman with no gear at all. I hope to be a good fisherman.

After a while and I don’t know how long, an hour, maybe two, we come near a small rocky beach, and he guides me toward shore.

“Time to rest,” he says. “You’re wearing me out. I can’t keep up with you.”

“You’ve been good to me. I like to fish this way, wading in a stream with a light pole in my hand.”

The sun feels good, shining hard on the pebbly beach where we sit. The rush of the water is musical. In the sky a hawk, maybe a red-tail, floats on the updraft from the canyon.

“But,” I tell him, “I am afraid that I am not a good fisherman yet and that I am keeping you from enjoying your day.”

Levi leans back, flat against the smooth stones, his feet wide apart, his arms stretched.

“Are you kidding me? You’re killing me, Uncle Loyal. Any day in a place like this is a good day. Anytime you fish it’s a good thing. I don’t care what you fish for. It’s just that you are fishing. You’re
participating.
That’s what counts, that’s what matters. When I fish, I don’t have a care in the world. I don’t even care if I catch a fish, and if I catch a fish, I put it back.”

I think about what he said. I liked what he said. I think again about worlds and how there are different worlds right here in front of us. I counted the worlds. There was my world, and Levi’s world, the world of fishes. There was the world of the canyon and the world of the sky and the world of the sun and the world of the rocks on this beach. There was the world of the red-tailed hawk matted against the blue sky. And there was the world of the little bugs that crawled across the rocks and lived near the edge of the water. I scoop up a handful of soil.

I count all of these worlds and think of a scripture: “And worlds without number have I created.” I begin to understand something that had been around me all of my life yet I’ve never recognized before. Worlds without numbers could mean galaxies and universes and stars and planets, and that is probably what most of us think; but it could also mean the handful of soil that I hold and the world contained therein. And for a moment, thinking these thoughts, I am happy that even a man my age can learn something new and basic and be thrilled and pleased by it all.

This bodes well, I think, of what the promise of creation and the promise of forever and the promise of worlds without numbers hold for me. So I look out at the stream and say softly, “Thank you, fish, and thank you, water. This I know now. There are more worlds than we can even begin to count.”

And I think of all these things while my great-nephew Levi suns himself on this brilliant morning, alongside a stream I was fishing although I had yet to catch a fish, nor had I even had a simple bite. But in my short time fishing, I already recognized that you do not have to catch lots of fish to be a good fisherman. I hope I’m on my way to becoming a good fisherman.

A mosquito comes by and buzzes and lands on my arm, and I slap him, and his world comes to an end. Or at least it changes dramatically and rather quickly.

“Are you rested? Ready to go again?” Levi sits up and looks around. “Fish stop biting toward the middle of the day. Gets too hot, and they just go to deep water and hang out. We only have a couple more hours before they get lazy and decide they’re not hungry.”

“Then let us fish again,” I say, and I pick up my pole and he picks up his rod, and he slips his arm around my back, and we teeter and wobble into the swift waters again.

We didn’t catch any fish that morning. Not a one. Casting, I recognized, is an act of faith. Sometimes, when I laid the line out too far or it wafted behind my head into the branches of a tree, I caught a stick or a branch or a leaf, but I never caught a fish. When you go fishing, you never know what you will catch, what you will pull out. I think, “We all cast. We all cast every day. But only a few cast for fish.”

Levi, I think, probably only cast about two-dozen times. Yet he is content. It is the most serene and peaceful I have seen him on the trip.
There are layers to this young man
, I thought,
and the more I peel them back, the better I like what I see
. The fast red car coming down the street of my home in North Dakota seemed as far away from me then as the North Pole. A different day. A different time. A different young man. And a different old man too.

He lets me cast into the deepest and best holes. Only once or twice is he not within an arm’s length of me.

The rest of the time he is near me, keeping watch. Had I slipped, he would have been there in an instant and, no doubt, caught me or helped me break my fall. More than once, I did briefly lose my footing.

And when I did, he reached out and steadied me and always said just one word.

“Here.”

And after I was straight on my feet and balanced, he always just said a second word.

“There.”

Finally, I grow weary, and I say that I want to just sit on a log or a rock and rest. I tell him he can go ahead and fish upstream for a while and that I will be happy to just be still. I tell him he can have my waders because I would not need them while I sat on my rock or log.

“Are you sure? My legs are numb, and I’m used to it.”

“Yes, quite sure. I will be here. When you are done fishing, just come and get me, and we will walk back to the car and then drive to the cabin.”

“Well, okay. If you’re sure.”

“Absolutely. I hope you catch a big fish.” I look around again. It is a day of incomparable beauty. I am a man of the plains, but I think, with a change of a few degrees in my life’s compass, I could become a man of the mountains. I like it here. A little grassy knoll wedged between two boulders beckons me. I point it out to Levi and say, “That’s where I will be. Fish as long as you like.”

He says, “You’re sure?”

I say, “Yes, I am. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in about an hour. Here is my cell phone and the keys to the car, and if something should go wrong, you can always hike back to the car and call out. But I’ll be back.”

I see what I suppose most people would describe as a glint in his eye, one that told me that he wanted to fish fast and hard up the canyon, that there was magic for him in this canyon, and that while he had been unfailingly considerate to me as we fished, he is ready to strike out on his own and see what these Montana fish have to offer. He tugs on the waders and soon is in the river. I watch him fish the first hole, and again I’m struck by the grace and art of someone who fishes well.

I walk over to the grassy area and find a place to sit down, my legs stretched out, my head tilted back on a small stone. Though it was hard, there was a nice little crook to it, almost perfectly shaped for the head of a tired old fisherman. I cast my eyes upward again, hoping to see the red-tailed hawk. A puff of wind, this time warm, came down the canyon. Then my thoughts become slurred, my vision blurred, and I find that if I pull my fishing hat over my eyes it provides me with just the right amount of shade. I’m asleep within minutes.

I don’t know how much time passed by. I rejoice in the fact that it seems we will not count time in the next life, that it is only a silly, weak man who does so now. Somehow, I hear the sloshing and trickling of water, and when I open my dreamy eyes and my thoughts have a chance to clear, I see Levi in front of me, grinning, a little like a big, wet, playful hound.

“Any luck?” I manage to say when just enough of my senses come back on the job to enable speech.

“Nope. Not a thing. I got skunked. But what a nice place and good day to get skunked.”

We gather our gear and hike the mile or so back to the red car.

We follow the dirt road back toward the paved county highway. As we pull out of the canyon and back toward the cabin, I watch the small stream we had fished disappear from view. I feel as though I am bidding a friend good-bye. I will never come this way again. I know that.

Levi said he got skunked, but I have been around long enough and fished just enough to know that a North Dakota bass and a Montana trout probably smell very much the same.

Levi turns on a scratchy radio station, one that fades in and out, sings along when he knows the words, occasionally sings along even when he doesn’t know the words, laughs aloud for no apparent reason more than once, and I can’t help but notice how much his hands smelled like Montana trout.