A River Runs Through It

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.  We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.  He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."
                  --Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

As a callow youth, I spent five seasons
as a halibut fisherman in Alaska.
People assumed that I knew something about fishing.
I didn't; not if that meant a wimpy, little pole
with a reel and a monofilament nylon line
with a calculated sinking rate.

I spent secular hours one summer
trying to learn to fly fish.  I bought
good equipment, although the pole
was too long, studied manuals on tying
proper knots, on technique, and read
learned treatises on the psychology
of trout and their preferences for flies.

It did not work.

It was, I have since become convinced,
that I never accepted the premise
about their being no clear line between
religion and fly fishing, and there isn't.

And that is how I lost my religion.

I have a summer's evidence--nay,
a lifetime of evidence--that there is
a bond formed in the womb of existence
between being properly religious,
and being able to catch fish.

And I have never been a Presbyterian:
in our family, God preferred boiled cod.
We didn't.  God did.  And Dad did.
In our family, God was a Lutheran
and as a Lutheran, God did not agree with
anyone, except in the goodness of cod.

The inexorable logic of my upbringing,
together with my ineptitude at sport fishing,
has brought me to Tucson, where all the rivers
run dry, if they run at all.  I sold my boat
before we moved back to Tucson:
I am no fool.  I know that cod can fly--
although they do not rise to dry flies--
and that they land in supermarkets.

We have a river in our backyard.
It is dry, of course, almost always,
but when God is brought to his (sic) knees
by Presbyterian logic, sometimes it rains
down as if every angel were weeping
at our dusty sins, and monsoons happen.
Then, and only then, the rivers run full.

We have seen that once in our backyard.
It rained as if rain were punishment!
In the desert, lime hunkers down into the soil--
it is called "soil" by those who have never seen Iowa--
where it forms caliche, a veritable layer of concrete.
When rain thunders down, it soon has no option
but to run off somewhere.  We watched it.
First, heavy drops, disappearing into the soil.
Soon, mud forms.  Water oozes.  Then it runs.

The small, rock-lined dry river,
collecting runoff from the hill,
filled up and, inadequate to the task,
ran over, barely able to direct the stream
down the hill.  It was magic.

Contrary to all the logic of a dry-fly fisherman,
the dusty, rock river through our backyard
has been re-built and enlarged in a most
Calvinistic fashion, innocent yet of a drop
of water or ounce of silt to settle its stones,
but that will happen--they will come--and
a river will run again through our back yard.

Sometimes a river runs through our yard,
and I want be here when it happens again,
fly rod in hand, half-sheltered by
the Texas Sage bush, drifting a dry fly
down as if rain-pelted into the stream.

There is a chance, however slim
and undeserved, that I might become
religious again, and a favorite.