Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it’s too late.

We’ll keep track of this little rill. Of tying on fresh tippet and the tufty fly, and we’ll blow on it for luck. Of this cast and the next and if we ourselves are lucky it will add up to nightfall.

but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away.

Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself. My attention and carefulness, my willingness to risk, and my love. Patience.

The night is without weight: the dark weightless now in its immanent passing like a deer about to bolt. The morning light a thought that is just occurring. Still and quiet, high stars, no wind.

The sun overwhelming eyelids, pouring down like heavy water. If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small

Melissa is not coming back, the trout aren’t, and neither is the elephant nor the pelican. Nature might invent a speckled proud coldwater fighting fish again but she will never again give the improbable elephant another go.