Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

2004:03:21 23:00 ATL

After watching Robert Redford's masterful adaptation of a masterful memoir for the fifth time tonight, I fish these words again to the surface.

The feel of the rainbow trout, the way a river, deep in the woods, glints, as it passes over moonlight rocks. And I am haunted by Redford’s ‘A River Runs Through It’. Some movies change the perception of how one looks at the world and in that change become deeply embedded in memory of sight. And this movie set in Montana is one such shape shifter – the shapes being that of a field of tall grass with flies hovering over it like golden dust motes, the feel of a railway tunnel as it bites its way through the heart of a mountain, the rusts of a sunset that I saw this evening framed by trees and the raw power of wildness.

And I am again taken to that pine log straddling a small mossy stream, to which I go with my worn heart and sometimes a book of poems in hand, to pray and to celebrate. There my loneliness is transformed to solitude and my breath takes on the rhythm of water slapping on the rock. I see sun glinting off the lake in the distance, a posse of geese flying by honking, a cardinal calling insistently and upstream of me, the stream teasing itself out of a cleft of land, full of mystery. I don’t fly fish as the narrator in the movie does and the stream is too small to hold fish anyway. But when he ends by saying ‘I am haunted by waters’, he sets off a sympathetic vibration deep within this imperceptible and vanishing body.