Later Rivers

In the middle of a deep clinical depression many years ago, when I would go for nights on end without good sleep, I dreamed of a deep azure blue stream bending around a log cabin in green woods with tall snow capped peaks in the background. The water was so blue, and clear, the air so pure, and there was a delicious humming in my heart as I slept. I felt it. I felt the gold glowing in my body, like an intense opiate high. I knew I was asleep, and dreaming, but I was there, in that scene, and I was achingly happy. It occurred to me as I slept that I had died, or was attempting to, and here was heaven. It was the warmest feeling that I have ever experienced, and the dream has stayed with me for decades. Many years later I dreamed of Vietnam again, after years of nothing. I remarked, that next morning, to my wife as we sipped coffee on the deck watching the sun rise, that my nightmare had been a field of charred bodies, burning in the jet fuel fire of a Chinook helicopter crash that I had witnessed so long ago. She was silent for a full minute before she asked if we should invite the neighbors over for dinner that night. I said that would be fine. I don't remember what we did the rest of that day. Some months later we were watching TV with some friends, and a particularly graphic moment of Vietnam combat was aired. My buddy’s wife just shook her head, and asked no one in particular, “can you imagine”?

I like to read fiction that is prose of the finest art. And I like to fly fish in clear green rivers. I like to share both of these things with my closest friends. Little else interests me these days, other than the safety of my family. I find this prose occassionally, but seldom have the opportunity, or inclination anymore to share it. It is my friend. I have not fished since leaving Colorado and moving to Tennessee ten years ago. The water is not the same here, and it is not about the fish.