A river runs through it

Re-reading my essay, it's clear that I don't just need to tweak it, I need to cannibalize it. When I wrote it, I thought that I was writing about my father, about the choices he made and about the choices that he couldn't make. I thought I was writing about how my father lacked the freedom to follow his heart out to the headwaters of the Madison River - about how the things of life (my brother and myself, to name just two, and my father's deep belief that his number one job was to send us to college) made such a choice too risky, but also, if I were to be honest, about how he lacked the courage and the imagination to really dare to find out if it would have been possible. I thought I was writing about how my father lived out his life many miles from the place his heart called home.

I sort of did that.

But I also wrote a lot about all the summers of my childhood, summers spent bathed in the light of my father's long love affair with the great trout streams of the American West. About how I have inherited that love. About how the waters of those rivers - the Yellowstone, the Big Lost, the Big Wood but above all the Madison, God's most perfect river - are in my blood.

I was packing too much into one essay, and as a result I did justice to neither theme. And for right now, it's the second essay that I want to write. Because the other night, I was watching my son sleep, and my son looks so much like my father. And I realized that those rivers are in my son's blood too. They are his legacy, a gift from the grandfather he will never know. One day I will take my son to the headwaters of the Madison River, and I will say to him "Your grandfather was a fisherman. He fished this river until this river was in his blood. This river is in your blood. This river is your birthright." And my son will roll river rocks in his hands, the way I did as a child, and although he will never meet the man, he will grow up bathed in the light of my father's long love affair with the waters of the American West. And in that way he will come to know my father, who he resembles so strongly. And the circle of generations will be closed.

And that's the essay I need to write. Because I need so badly to believe it can be that way.