SMITH RIVER, MONTANA

      There are mountain lions here, but I am a grown man. There are bear tracks on the shore. There is a beaver in the shallows, watching me. This river, the Smith River, is thirty feet wide, with boulders strewn. But they won’t last long. The water is icy and steadfast. It has cut this gorge with a purpose. It is cutting still—a saw-tooth line between the Little Belts and the Big Belts under an enormous sky. The literal descent of water is visible, an uneasy surge. The entire world is on tilt here, and there is a rush to go somewhere—Great Falls—through pine and earth and entire mountain ranges.
      Think of the spear of fish suspended in these waters: rainbow or cutthroat. Think of the full, body-length muscle, the power it takes to hang still against this stream. Or the whip of the fly rod, the arc of the line, the wet fly that hesitates above the waters, the violent strike, and the sudden realization that there is something mysterious at the end of your line. What finally breaks the surface, as it must always do, what finally breaks the surface is like love, something greater than itself. And what I want, what I need, is a kind of disintegration: the calm turned violent—a lightning struck pine, the scream of a mountain lion, the gun-shot slap of a beaver’s tail in this canyon. Or the breaking of the surface, the explosion of water. The opening of some cosmic chasm and the entering. Landing the fish. The immediate power you have over it. Death. A knife. The gutting of something alive. Or the real possibility you might let go.