Our paths would normally not have crossed. It's a funny thing, an airplane. Whoever you are sitting next to provides personal time with a total stranger you probably would never meet otherwise.
And that is exactly what happened. Both of us, excited at the circumstance of being seated in the front row of the plane with extra leg room, plus an empty seat in between us for even more space, somehow got to talking.
The young man in his late 20s on my left began telling me his travel woes: having his flight cancelled and rescheduled with a 10-hour overlay at the airport — and how this will cause him to miss an important meeting in Vermont with his fly fishing business partner.
Fly fishing?
I know nothing about fishing, nor fly fishing and certainly no one who actually fly fishes. I tell him so, but vaguely recall, years ago, viewing parts of a profound film about fly fishing in Montana’s magnificent and exquisite, calm beauty, about limits in being able to help people, about learning how to accept help, about the complexity of family relationships with people you love, about moving closer to ?G-d . . . what was it called again?
A River Runs Through It, he immediately says, his eyes expressing a certain intimacy with the work, a smile spreading across his face.
Indeed, he re-reads the short story by Norman Maclean twice a year, and his eyes well up with tears each time, still.
“I re-read it for inspiration,” he says.
“The story is more about how fly fishing is a metaphor about life and people, relationships and family.”
He hesitates, pauses, you could tell he is on the cusp of letting me know why he cries at reading this book, what the tragedy in the book is. But then, after a few false starts, he holds back, takes it back and doesn’t reveal it. “You have to read it.”
By now, after circling in the runways, the plane is taking off, and I pause and open the siddur, the prayerbook, that has been cradled in my hand this whole time. I murmur tefillat ha-derech, the travelers prayer, to myself. Then I turn back to our conversation.
“I’m not really formally religious in the conventional sense, but for me, nature, when I am out fly fishing, that is my church,” he tells me.
“My father began taking me out fly fishing when I was five years old. That’s when I really began sensing there is something of a power above, a power beyond.
“Many times when I am out on the river fly fishing, I don’t end up fly fishing at all, I just sit there for hours, one with nature, its rhythms, at peace because of its restorative power.”
He goes on to detail some of his inner life and experience of being so close to nature. Originally from a farm in Minnesota, this young man visited Colorado for the first time as a sophomore in college, and he just knew then, he was home. Something felt right. He fell in love with Colorado.
Despite his parents’ reluctance, he transferred from Minnesota to a mountain college in Colorado that very fall. Summers, he went onto complete the Colorado trail and, inspired by this journey — that, he says, is where he began finding out who he really is — he pledged himself to climb all of Colorado’s 14ers, the centerpiece of Colorado’s pristine peaks that paint our state’s view.
As of last night, he was on his way back from conquering another one of these climbs. He has climbed 40 so far (there are 54).
Through the years, he became a fly fishing guide on Colorado’s rivers with his fishing partner, his beloved German shepherd dog.
“A River Runs Through It” begins: “In our family, there was no 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 fisher who tied his own flies and taught others . . . ”
Now, I am Jewish. I am from the people of the book. Unlike the times of Biblical Judaism that were more in sync with the cycles of nature, today, Judaism’s infrastructure and spirituality are mostly mental or behavioral, a process of growth from study and actions.
Yet, Maimonides teaches that appreciating the grandeur of nature is a way of drawing closer to loving G-d. I told my new found friend this. We talked about it. I could sense, he really lives this teaching.
I was mesmerized by this fly fisher talking about his journey, his experiences. A natural flow of depth of emotion, an awareness, a pureness and freshness; a warmth and directness, no guile — like a piece of nature itself, his personality had integrated these very traits. So much so that re-entering city life — or an airport — is challenging. At times even anxiety provoking for him.
It is Holocaust Memorial Day while we are traveling. Somehow the topic comes up. I think I mentioned it. I tell him about a gripping, surreal, Holocaust memoir I just read, The Girl With the Green Sweater. He seems fascinated by it. We decide we will each look out for the other’s book. I, for A River Runs Through It. He, for A Girl in The Green Sweater.
He had tried to explain to me what fly fishing is, “you cast a rod, angling with an artificial fly, it is camouflaged, or matches the local aquatic insects that are attractive to the fish in their natural environment.”
“Oh, so you basically trick them,” I say.
Most times, when he fly fishes, he sends the fish back into the river, not killing them. Also, over time, he has noticed that fish have an intelligence of sorts, and can sometimes be seen coming near the artificial fly over and over, eyeing it, and then swimming away.
“You mean like a kind of fish intuition?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says.
He tells me about his beloved dog, “the queen of his castle,” he says.
I tell him some of my thoughts about the New York pets I see around Manhattan, how they are confused for human beings, and how that disturbs me. We are of the same school of thought on this one. And, he adds, he thinks sometimes these tiny dogs for city owners are toys, too.
He then goes on to talk about why his dog is so beloved, and makes me understand the meaning of what a pet could be.
“After certain losses in my life, if it were not for my dog, I could not have gotten out of bed in the morning. Having my dog literally forced me out of bed, in order to care for her.”
He has trained his dog, as he trains others mountain dogs, to understand and respond to boundaries between their owners and themselves. He loves letting his dog run wild on the acres of land where he now resides in Vermont.
A river could be that line that separates people from one another. Or, like this unlikely meeting between us, me walking away with my siddur in hand, but more open and appreciative of his fishing rod, and vice versa, a brief connection between two very different human beings, well a river runs through it.
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