Autumn’s breath dots a single portal of sands abstracting the wild symphony incomprehensible but for my window.
Excitement bubbles in my father’s waking call like the thriving mildew’s odor oddly welcoming to any child of that garden valley blessed to own all that he saw.
Adventures long dreamed loom like the swirling wedding dress draped upon the trickle where many larvae wiggle in the mire waiting for the world to unfold upon them.
Braided roots more enduring than the cottoned timbers upstream ensnare the seething muck and soggy mulch and marbled algae through which all life passes.
A nest—my own son one day would perceive on a different bank as braking from his own cocoon the angling would be for dreams my own.
That morning though, it was the silvery myth that drew us from our windowed cave into the foggy morn down ditch to stream to creek to river.
Not an angler of accomplishment my father the explorer ever enchanted by the waters untasted yet waiting and wandering on their own coursing dreams of destiny imagined.
Forgoing sleep to exhaustingly prepare lest he simply wander with nothing to catch and nothing to ground that wondrously nervous mind like those million roots of cottonwood knotted impossibly.
We stumbled down a slippery intimation of a trail nature’s greenest opportunists laden with baits and glassy switches and fibers stronger than those of the dusky widows our unworn boots ignorantly disturbed.
And in that nadir and apex I did finally find the salmon we would never have the wisdom to catch resting in a vast hole drilled over countless winter storms and spring thaws into the otherwise implacable basalt.
I found the prize while wandering, pole long discarded somewhere on a bank where only mosses and slime might change from season to season, my own wings unfurling to fly from my father’s side into wisdom and searching my own.
Explore! I advise my son; wander along the bank; see what has changed since last we were here, do not seek anything; there is nothing to learn or master; enjoy this moment and see where this river might lead you.
When first I beheld my father’s final, long awaited impulse navigating its sandy shores, the choking glacial silts of August and blur of sieved andesite hardballs and rounded dacite tumblers scared the child who knew and craved more constant beds.
Only as my son turned his back on my blissful moment and corralling suggestion to wander or seek of his own on that Sandy river, did it dawn in the afternoon’s sun that we might not seek the river or shape it.
Let the rivers shape us, as they will, and our courses will be one and many unique as the children we hatch and different as the fathers from upon whose backs we take flight then return to the silts where they too dreamed of fishing and flying.
