Between the Lines of Drift

                 The last time I hiked up the creek with my father it was a summer day in July.  He was sick then, and had been for some time.  The winter previously, he had nearly died from the cancer that had been festering for several years.  A new regimen of powerful chemo had given him a new lease on life, or so it seemed.  So he told us.  Like the High Sierra summer sky which, even at its brightest, always seems to be threatened by unseen clouds hidden just over the peaks of the eastern mountain ridges, his newfound vivacity had a transitory, untrustworthy feel.  I didn’t want to allow myself trust to it.  He didn’t say so, but I could tell he didn’t either.

                    We moved slowly, both for my dad’s sake and for my two boys, then under about three and four years old.  As always, I had my flyrod and I made a point to walk ahead of the group to hit the likely pools before they were spooked by rock throwing and impromptu wading.  The forest around this particular creek had been destroyed in the huge Creek Fire of 2020 – only two seasons previously.  Much of the ground was still moon dust that puffed lazily into the air and hung there after every step like talc.  Some of the hardier vegetation was beginning to grow back in close proximity to the water, but the overall feel of the place was a trichrome of greens, blues, and black.

                    I stopped to look back at my dad and the boys frequently.  My dad was hurting but the joy he felt in being with his grandsons was evident on his face.  He patiently held my youngest son’s hand to get him up the tougher spots, and indulged my oldest as he demanded his attention to every rock, stick, and piece of grass he could get his hands on.  When scrapes and bruises set both boys into the inevitable paroxysms of tears and wailing, he was tender and comforting as I had rarely known him to be.  It seemed that he was almost thankful for a reason to hold his grandsons close in the place he loved so much.

                    I think about that day a lot now.  My dad passed less than a year later, on a cold, rainy March day at the tail end of the worst winter on record for 100 years.  I held his hand as he breathed his last, past the point of speech for many days.  That summer hike up the creek was the last time he ever took a walk just for the fun of it.  It was the last walk we took together.

                    It was far from the first walk, though.  My father loved the mountains of the Central Sierra with an artist’s love; attentive to the little beauties overlooked by most that, when taken as a whole, form the mosaic of splendor which characterizes the region.  As far back as I can remember, he took me (and my sister, and sometimes our mother) on walks up and down various creeks throughout the Sierra.  That was just what we did on a weekend afternoon, or a summer morning.  It was normal.

He was not a fisherman.  I don’t think he ever really understood the pull of the fish that I have felt so strongly since I was a child, but he certainly loved the water, and especially the water’s edge.  The edge of the water is where the most beautiful flowers grow (I think particularly of the Tiger Lillies he loved so much).  It also is a transitional zone where little stability is found and where change is constant – from the change of the shape of the stream as it winds out of view beyond an alpine meadow, to the erosion found in familiar banks after a hard winter.  His life was like this – lived in the transitions.  Lived in eager expectation of the next change, whatever it was, which he always believed would be good.  This wasn’t always good for the family.  For the many intangible things he passed to my sister and I, he never provided financial stability.  My own life was defined in some ways by this lack of stability and my relationship with him as I entered my thirties was difficult.

But as I think back to the pleasure I saw on his face as he walked the creek with my boys on his last trip, I realize that he did not feel the lack of stability or view it as a negative.  I think he felt the free, unpressured excitement of wandering upstream without any plan to return, and he felt the joy of doing it with those whom he loved best.  I wish I had understood that better before he passed.