When I was a kid, my dad would sometimes take me fly fishing with him. Our go-to spot was a slow stretch of water on the South Platte River called “The Dream Stream.” So called, I have always presumed, because of the legendary success awaiting anglers there—but in all the times I’ve been, I’ve never once caught a fish.
Anyways it would go like this. My dad would ask me on a Friday night if I wanted to go fishing with him the next morning. Then, he would wake me up very early (you have to get up early to have enough time to load up the car, drive into the mountains, set up your rig, and be on the water around the time the sun comes up), and he would ask me, “Do you still want to come fishing?” as if he thought I might have preferred to stay asleep.
But those dark mornings were charged with energy. I could lose myself in the anticipation as we sat sleepy in the kitchen, the only light in the house, eating cold cereal; as we brought gear up from the basement into the car; as we set out into the empty suburban streets and the ethereal stoplights. We would always stop for coffee and it would be surprising that there was anyone working in the drive-through because you would think that everyone should be asleep. Eventually, we would make it out of town, beyond the reach of the streetlights, and continue for hours through unresolved shadows. Then we would come over the mountains and then down into the the valley of the river, finally light gray in the pre-dawn. We would pull into the dirt parking lot and start rigging up our rods, and the excitement would be culminating in all the gear and the strategic discussion and the timbre of our voices and the milky dawn air and the light of the sun finally bursting onto the valley and igniting the sky—but as soon as we were on the water and the anticipation faded, I would notice that I was waiting for it all to be over.
One time, it was snowing as we pulled into the dirt parking lot. As we were rigging up, the keys got locked in the car. We were trapped outside in the cold.
My dad called a locksmith but they said it would be at least a few hours before they could get out to us. We stood out there, shivering, our eyelashes covered in snowflakes, for something like an hour and a half. We finally saw another angler walking back from the river. He was a twenty- or thirty-something guy, out there alone, and I remember the way he looked walking towards us from the river through the blowing snow. I was thinking “Why is this guy out here?”
We asked him if we could warm up in his car. He said, “Yes, of course,” and we sat in his backseat and took our wet socks off and he even shared some snacks with us. Fly fishermen and -women are profoundly nice.
We didn’t get into the water that day.
I remember once overhearing my dad talking to one of his fishing friends about taking me along on day trips, and he said something like:
“Yeah, he gets bored around lunchtime, but”
This is just the way kids are—they get bored easily. And this is all my dad was saying. But it produced an awareness in me that I was failing him, that I was failing to fully commit to the fishing, and apparently so transparently that it was obvious. I felt terrible about it. I knew fishing was important to him, and I was not appreciating it. I was not allowing myself to be immersed, not cherishing the gift of the fishing, of his time and attention.
(In my defense, the fishing really does get pretty boring once the sun is a quarter of the way up the sky, and the nighttime cool that hovers over the river in the morning has burned off. The fish basically go to sleep for the rest of the day. Then, in the evening, long after we eat our sack lunches and leave, “magic hour” occurs—the hour before sunset, when the sun takes its low angle on the other side of the sky, hitting the evening hatch, so that you can see millions of bugs like embers swirling around over the water; and as the fish start feeding again, they create colliding concentric circles that play out the last sunlight all over the water in a dance of black and gold.)
When I graduated high school, I asked my dad for a fly rod as a graduation gift. I took it with me to college, in Northern Colorado, and I would drive just out of town to the Poudre River (which is a nice river, but not as pretty as The Dream Stream) to do some fishing on days when I had no morning classes. I didn’t have to wake up so early because the river was only twenty minutes away.
(My dorm roommate was also an angler, and we went to the river together exactly one time. At one point while we were on the river that day I realized that he was no longer just downstream of me. I looked around a bend and he was sitting on a big rock in the middle of the river, eyes closed, cross-legged.
I river-walked over the river rocks until I was close enough that he could hear me over the water. “What’s up?” I said.
“Nothing, man, I’m just relaxing.”
“Okay, yeah, uh, why aren’t you fishing?”
“My line got tangled pretty bad.”
“So how long have you been sitting there?”
“Like fifteen minutes.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry man. Should we go?”
“No,” he said, “you keep going. I don’t want to ruin your fishing.”)
When you’re fly fishing, you typically stand in the water, at least shin-deep. It’s just easier to get your bug out to the specific spot you’re trying to hit. You also typically wear waders, which are synthetic overall-type things that keep the bottom part of your body dry and warm. When I was a kid, I used my dad’s extra pair of waders. But in college, I didn’t really have the spare cash to get myself a pair of waders, so I just went out in shorts and sandals.
River water in the Rocky Mountains is cold. When you first step into the river it is bracing; nigh unbearable. You think it is unbearable, that you must leave the water at once, but you stay in, and the cold realizes your feet, and it becomes Good, it becomes sweet, and eventually you get completely used to it, and you can stand there with the snowmelt running through your toes and it’s like nothing at all.
I’ve taken my fiancée fly fishing a few times.
Here’s the thing you have to understand about fly fishing: it’s magnificently difficult. Without my dad with me to suggest what bugs to use and what spots to hit, I only manage to catch something about one in every ten times I go out.
So, as you can imagine, it can be very frustrating for a beginner. It can be very frustrating for a teacher (especially if you go in with the wrong expectation: that you’re going to have a nice, peaceful morning on the river, and you’ll get some good time in, and you might even catch something!, and you’ll just have to give the beginner that came along with you some basic instructions and some tips every now and then.) The teacher finds that it’s not about themselves anymore. It’s about the beginner. The beginner requires all of your attention, and all of your patience.
The experience of teaching her made me feel like such a small person (what capacity for selfishness I have, what pitiful patience I have), and feel such deep gratitude for my dad. It is amazing that he was able to set himself aside so decidedly and make it about me, so that I could have the chance to enjoy it.
I never arrived at the Dream Stream.
It wasn’t exactly boredom. It was different from that almost painful discomfort that you get—especially as a kid—when you’re bored. It was passive. I wasn’t actively, mentally, trying to resist the experience; I just found that rather than settling into the day and the valley and the water, I was waiting for the sun to move across the sky, for the fish to go to sleep, for my dad to say it was time to pack it up. Because as soon as I was standing in The Dream Stream, I was anticipating something else.
As a kid, I was too restless. Too profane. Now all those day trips, all those dark mornings, are lost. Their continued existence in me as memories is but a comforting illusion. Yes, I could go back to the Dream Stream, but it wouldn’t give me another chance to arrive. It would be something different (Heraclitus etc, etc). Besides, I am still restless, I am still profane—were I to drive out there again, over the mountains, and make it to that slow stretch of water in that golden valley, and immerse my feet in the cold water, I’m afraid I still wouldn’t arrive.