The Bend

“The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.” ~ Jean Piaget

If nothing else, The Bend is a transformative place.  It took me quite a while, but over time I learned what a jerk I had become, how selfish, how conceited and how ignorant. It took an aging man time to realize those things. Things have quieted down for me again. As I have grown older and wiser, I have become increasingly aware of the need to practice humility, to retrace that child’s perspective, eyes wide open and mind clear, once again discovering moments of small miracles during my time at The Bend.

I have evolved from a fisherman to a naturalist, from someone whose mission it was to bring home a full creel to someone whose desire it is to simply describe the single trout I may have danced with that day. I go there now because I’m grateful for the solitude. I go there to experience the changing light and changing seasons. I go there to evoke the wonder and fascination of my childhood. I go there because I will inevitably see an otter, a moose, or a merganser winging low over the water around the turn of The Bend.  I go there to remind myself of the transitory nature of living things.

I no longer go to the river to fish. I fish to go to the river.

Silent Forest

From a few yards away, I belly to the bank and pause. Not even seven feet across but deep enough below to hold at least the promise of a small brook trout, the stream entices. My fly has little logic, as the decision on size or color or the stage of the short life-cycle of the insect I’m attempting to imitate is not based on any specific experience in these woods, and I resign myself to believing that whatever I choose will appear too alien to bring a fish to the surface anyway. Or perhaps these little, skittish fish, who, frankly, are miraculous examples of high-country survival, will see anything resembling a meal as a signal to strike. I decide smaller is better, with just enough color and white wings.

Slowly I unfurl the line without rising from my place and swing the leader over the far edge of the pool, dapping the fly on the water’s surface. The take is immediate, and I slowly and protectively play the little brookie to the bank on my side, careful that my nine-foot fly rod doesn’t catch up in the overhanging branches. If you ever want to be truly amazed at the universe, study the markings of a brook trout—marbled shades marked by a sprinkled pattern of red dots encircled by mystical blue halos, and an underbelly impossibly orangish in hue leading downward towards fins edged with white.

I wet my hands as to not wipe the slime from his skin, gently hold him to remove the hook, and cup him back into the pool. No man will ever put his eyes on him again, rest assured.

The sun lifts higher, the heat drawing a few beads from my nape to trickle down my back, and I drink from a pine needle-tinted eddy of winter’s rime and mountain seep. I stand to walk back through the towers of Silent Forest satisfied that I have lived this day in God’s unwarranted favor.

A boy and his dog

I was certain he was content returning to this spot. It’s where we most often fished together, both of us spellbound by a trout on the line.  It’s where he shared his boyhood summers with his siblings, splashing in river water chilled by mountain springs and winter runoff. If given the opportunity, he would have fetched sticks from the current until he died of exhaustion. When he shook off the water, he smiled with joy, spraying droplets on the sand and on the rocks and on us. The best days at the bend were the midsummer ones when the Colorado sky pulsed a deep and penetrating blue and the sun cut through directly and purposefully, the warmth knocking down our goosebumps. We would lie on our towels and go quiet, the bubbling, gurgling stream cradling us in its bosom. Those were the days Keith beamed most broadly, the days we all felt connected to the ground, the sky, the whisper of the wind in the branches of the cottonwood and willow and spruce.

When the hole I had been digging was large enough, I sat on the edge of the sentinel rock on the bank above the current, pensive and reflecting. I wondered how the water just kept flowing. Why didn’t the river run out or become so skinny it just seeped into the pebbles and broken limestone and shale of the riverbed, reclaimed by the earth? I’ve seen the river rage with power in spring as the high-country snowpack melted, pushing glacial debris and fallen trees and foamy, frothy silt. I’ve seen the river at a near trickle in late fall, barely able to pull the downed aspen leaves along with it. And I’ve seen the river stopped in the dead of winter, frozen over bank to bank, but even then, under the shelf of snow and ice, it moved, it breathed. I believed the river would live forever and I was envious. I pondered my own mortality, then reached out to stroke Keith’s neck but came up empty. Muscle memory is a funny thing.

I picked up the ceramic bean pot that had belonged to my grandmother and in which I had placed Keith’s ashes and laid it at the bottom of the hole, then quietly covered it with the ancestral soil of a thousand years.  I thought about how different it might have been if Keith had died here in the mountains rather than the sterile veterinarian’s clinic 900 miles away in the desert. Instead of burying his ashes I would have been able to hold him close, hugging him one last time, nuzzling my face into his fur, and burying his whole body in the soft blanket of ground here at the base of the rock in the corner of the mountain meadow above the bend in the river.