The Clearwater

I take the river a step at a time. My feet slide from the shoulders of rock; my toes wedge between boulders. I am timid about this, moving out toward center, where the water is deepest, where the big fish might lie.

Here, at Lenore, the Clearwater is not easy. Too wide to cast from shore, too swift, too pocked with hidden currents and sudden holes. I go at it anyway, still without waders, determined to find my place of stability, the water at my belly, my thighs numbing with cold.

My husband fishes below me. On shore, our daughter and son dig pools in the sand. I watch as they flash in the sun, and I feel a rush of gratitude, the joy of living only minutes from water, the same water my brother and I played in as children. It is as though I am reliving my own young life, there on the banks of the Clearwater, as though I exist in two dimensions and know the pleasure of each—the child’s pure delight in the moment; the woman’s recognition of continuance, of nostalgia, of the water around her and the sun on her face.

I choose a fly I think the fish might favor, its color the color of the day’s light and leaves and wings. I praise its tufts and feathers, its hackle and tail. I load the line, thinking not of the S I must make through air but of the place above and where the water eddies, the V above whitecaps, the purl below stone.

I do not think of the line or the fly or the fish as much as I think about the water moving against and around me, how the sky fills my eyes and the noise-that-isn’t fills my ears—the movement of everything around me like the hum of just-waking or sleep, blood-rush, dream-rush, the darkness coming on, air.

I forget to watch for the fish to strike, forget to note the catch, the spin, the sinking. I pull the line in, let it loop at my waist, sing it out again, and again. The trout will rise, or they won’t. The nubbin of fur and thread will turn to caddis, black any, stone fly, bee, or it will simply settle on the water and remain a human’s fancy. Either way, it’s magic to me, and so I stay until my feet are no longer my own but part of the river’s bed. How can I move them? How can I feel my way back to shore, where my family is calling that it’s time to go home? They are hungry, and the shadows have taken the canyon. They are cold.

From my place in the water, they seem distant to me. I must seem like a fool, numb to my ribcage, no fish to show. But I am here in the river, half-in, half-out, a wader of two worlds. I smile. I wave. I am where nothing can reach me.

North Fork, Middle Fork, South Fork, Main: see how the flow of the sounds is smooth, so lovely. The rivers themselves flow together this way, spilling down from the mountains. They drain the north Idaho land my father and others like him logged and loved so easily in the years before it seemed to matter.

And now it matters and we all know it, though we may come to our understanding in different ways. The timber companies worry about access and shareholders’ profit; the mills worry about viability and foreign markets; the loggers worry about the land and life they know and ways to feed their families; the foresters worry about the politicians; the politicians worry about the timber companies; the environmentalists, some more, some less than radical, worry about the whole of it. Meanwhile, while the sales are being staked and the trees are being spiked, the land slumps from beneath its covering of burned slash and razored stumps, slides off the hills and down the draws, sloughs off its dying skin like an...