Clear Water
Lakes & Tears
PAST
Last minute fishing supplies. I approach checkout at the local Ace Hardware and realize the high school retail clerk shares a name with my daughter and is a couple of years younger. My daughter left for the summer to work and then to attend college in August.
I write letters to my daughter, and I’ll do the same for him when he’s away. At their age, I would have hoped for something in the mail, not just a letter. They’ll get words, pictures, and leaves from me.
By 12:30 PM, we’re stuck…down to the left side of my truck's running boards. 2 PM: We’re free. Detached mud flap is the only casualty. Europhoria.
I consider these moments and their fragility. How lucky I am to be here with my son, and how I don’t want the time to end, like it has in many ways with his sister.
What can I do? Say? To embrace it more? To teach him more, prepare him? Resilience, agency, accountability, courage. My laser focus, but how can I convey these? In actions? In thought? Is the die cast or still being molded?
We’re about six hours from home. The bioregion is now familiar, a taiga-like environment, with skinny spruce trees and scrubby forest.
No music, no dogs barking, no motor or road noise, or thumping music.
Modern ills fade. The seized muscle behind my left shoulder blade releases. Hip flexor injury? Tight scar tissue from finger surgery six months ago? Computer and desk-induced neuroses all disappear as we navigate a pond, then a trail, then another pond. Portage, bugs, rough bark that removes skin, and broken branches from those same trees that puncture my hand as I grab hold.
Dried mud and blood stain our hands, cuffs, and sleeves.
Go on for days, with purpose and focus. The closest I’ll get to an explorer’s life. Can I reside in this Wi-Fi world?
A bloodlust? A passion? Those meld and morph with newfound patience. Pursuit becomes both tactical and spiritual; the chase is with purpose, not unlike that of all hunters before, but they knew it at a younger age, taught it from the beginning.
Reaching areas for waters that are as untouched as possible, where others choose not to go because of the time. To the end of the lake.
Water is clear, down to twenty feet. The brook trout emerges from the depths, likely the thermocline, to snatch my streamer. Fly rod bends.
FUTURE
Reading a memory in the making. An acknowledgement of growth, time, and release.
Loved this prose Jesse. Glad to see the fish at the end!