The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.
At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.
I am haunted by waters.
Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.
Ahead and to the west was our ranger station – and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.
If our father had had his way, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.
Slowly we became silent, and silence itself if an enemy to friendship.
When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say “more perfect” because she said if a thing is perfect it can’t be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.
The hardest thing usually to leave behind, as was the case now, can loosely be called the conscience.
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.
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.
As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth’s crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.
It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.
Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn’t think. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
If he comes back,” she nodded. I thought I saw tears in her eyes but I was mistaken. In all my life, I was never to see her cry. And also he was never to come back. Without interrupting each other, we both said at the same time, “Let’s never get out of touch with each other.” And we never have, although her death has come between us.
But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren’t a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It’s something like the gift all men wish for when they or young – or old – of being able to look through a woman’s clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.
It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren’t good enough to follow her.
Nobody,” he said, “has put in a good day’s fishing unless he leaves a couple of flies hanging on the bushes. You can’t catch fish if you don’t dare go where they are.” “Let.
I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.