1.
Uncle Stan handed me the rod. It was light, the cork and bamboo so worn it had molded into the shape of his hands. It felt like putting on someone else’s shoes.
“Now, cast thataway,” Stan said. The unlit cigar in his mouth made ‘now’ come out like ‘maow.’
“Like this?” I asked. The neon lead line flopped in the dust, the bright pink fly sitting barely three feet away. It was as far as I’d gotten that day on the river, and after many bush tangles, I was relegated to the parking lot, a humiliating reality for a twenty-year old when her fifteen-year old brother could fish from anywhere.
The sun was setting in a beautiful orange, fueled by the wildfires, and everyone who already knew how to fish, which was everyone else, was inside playing poker.
“Not really, like that, no,” Stan replied. He leaned heavily on his cane and surveyed me over his glasses. It was one thing for your uncle to teach you how to cast. It was another thing when he was also seventy-five and the world’s foremost expert on making bamboo fly rods. He’d fished with the best people there were, and remained unimpressed by any of them unless they were interesting and treated the fish with respect.
Even with this resume, I still groaned. “What am I doing wrong?”
“Enough,” he said, chewing on the cigar. “But focus on one thing at a time.” He grabbed the rod and began stripping out line and it spun around his head like a shiny gossamer crown. It must have been twenty feet of line, floating weightlessly, the arc of the rod smooth and beautiful. Back and forth and back and forth. He didn’t look at it as he spoke.
“Don’t cast with your wrist,” he said. “Don’t cast with your shoulder. Make an arc with the tip. Let the weight of the lead carry the line.”
My arm was already sore. I was tired. “Do I have to remember all that at once?”
“Eventually, yes. You have the makings of a great fly woman, but you have to practice. For now, pick one of those things and focus on that.” He took most of the line and handed the rod back. “Try again.”
I didn’t want to. I mean, I had asked him for help. I’d lost three flies that day trying with my dad, and he suggested I come to Stan for help. The only reason I even let my dad try to teach me in the first place was because fishing was one of his favorite things. He’d spent all of my childhood learning whatever I was interested in—running, weight lifting, mountain biking, kayaking, skiing, The Hunger Games, and baking. As I turned twenty, I wanted to do something he loved, on his terms.
But I was still only twenty, and there was something demoralizing about casting onto gravel.
“Just focus on the arc,” Stan said, sitting down on the bench with a grunt. “I’ll be here.” His head tipped toward his chest, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking under his hat.
“How long does it take to learn this?”
“Long time.”
“How long did it take you?”
“Long time.”
I sighed. The sun dipped a little lower. I grabbed the line with my left hand, lifted the rod with my right, and cast again.
2.
The picnic table was the closest thing Ovando had to a town hall. It was lopsided and splintered, but it was under a tree and right next to the grill, just a few feet away if someone got it in their head to cook up a few hot dogs. I suppose it was more of a town hall for outsiders, all the fishermen and cyclists and drifters who found themselves fifty miles east of Missoula.
The picnic table was just outside the inn, which doubled as a general store. Sometimes I’d be sitting in the living room and someone would walk through to the kitchen, grab a beer from the fridge labeled NOT FOR GUESTS and walk back out. The living room was nice, with deep leather couches, but unless it was over a hundred degrees outside, the picnic table was nicer.
You could see most of the town. The general store, the outfitter, the cafe that served breakfast and lunch, but not dinner. Two free-standing tents that the bikers used. Though one year they were empty for a while because a woman was killed by a bear in the tents. That’s why they say you can’t even have toothpaste in your tent—bears can smell just about anything. The year that happened, my mom didn’t want us to go out, but we promised to be careful, that refrain of overconfident children everywhere.
The bikers usually knew better than to keep food in a tent, these men and women who decided to ride the Great Divide, a cycling route from Alberta to New Mexico. Ovando, Montana was a popular stop along the way, and I got used to asking “Northbound or Southbound?” to sweaty, spandexed cyclists. Though I could usually tell. The Southbound ones were fairly clean and happy. The Northbound ones had dirt in the creases of their faces and all but collapsed at the picnic table under the tree.
It was a good spot for talking. There’s no service in Ovando, and sometimes it’s too hot to read. My grandfather in particular loved to tell me stories while he smoked a cigar and tied flies, peering through his double lenses. He told me about his childhood in Galveston, Texas, and how he worked every summer since he was twelve. Apparently, you didn’t need a license to drive a forklift back then, and as an eighth grader he was whipping around the lumberyard and could pick up a quarter with the forklift. He told me how he was driving a semi truck at twenty, taking garbage dumps to the landfill.
“It was out in the bay, really, all that garbage on four feet of water.” That deep Texas voice accented some words more than others, the diphthong of water deep enough to make a well. “You’d drive on and the whole thing would tip a little. Every time I was convinced I’d be able to flip it.” In the height of summer, he said, he once jumped out of the truck and right into a dead dog. It was squishy and crunchy at the same time.
I ran my nail along the edge of the table, finding grooves and splinters. Compared to mine, his childhood was rough-and-tumble, like a dryer on a high setting. I never tired of hearing him describe the humid Galveston heat, how it baked against the school walls and seemed in under the floor, how he went to high school right as integration started and got used to fights, muggings, and stabbings on the way to Algebra, how he never kept money on him, and how “you didn’t use the boy’s bathroom on the second floor.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You’d get all your money stolen then you’d be thrown out the window.”
I think that’s why I started going on the fishing trip in the first place, even if I didn’t know it yet. There were certain things I’d find out about my family members over the years that could only be said on the river. Or at the picnic table.
Everyone would find themselves at the picnic table at some point, both outsiders and the town’s citizens. Fred, who owned the general store, TRUMP 2024 hat crisp and new. I’m certain that one year he was convinced I was a lesbian because I showed up with a “women want me, fish fear me” shirt; I overheard him ask my dad where was I going to school again? and when dad replied, “California,” Fred nodded sagely like that explained it. There was his son John, who had a black dog named Maisy who followed him around everywhere, tongue lolling out of her mouth. There was the owner of the outfitters store also, Cathy, a bespeckled woman with tan skin who I’m convinced could kill me with a look. One time, when I was buying my fishing license, someone asked her which rivers were closed. She looked at him like he was stupid, said, “are you stupid?” and pointed at the listed taped to the counter. Quite frankly, any serious fly fisherman would check the Department of Fish Wildlife website to see which sections of river were closed or under hoot owl (closed after 2pm).
Sitting at the picnic table, I could experience the smallest of slices of the town’s summer. During peak tourist season, anything could happen. Lightning storms, wandering bears, broken-down RV’s with aimless retirees asking wait, how far is the next town? One year I cut my 23rd birthday cake on the table, ants already amassing in anticipation. Another year we lost power for three days, and on the third day we brought out all the food we couldn’t save, grilling a hot dog and hamburger feast that had folks sitting on the front steps, in folding chairs, and leaning against the railing, grease slicking our grubby hands. The next morning, I sat on the splintery bench and watched an enormous commercial truck roll into the main square, the vehicular equivalent of a horse in a dog park.
“What’s that?” my dad asked, bleary eyed as he came out of the inn.
“I dunno,” I replied, setting my book down and following him over—still in my pajamas—to where three women in long prairie dresses and bonnets were getting out of the truck. They were selling pies, fresh produce, and honey, along with perishable goods like meat. Bemused, my dad declined, and we watched them drive away like agricultural vigilantes.
Ovando itself is just one part of the fishing trip, all my male relatives and I piled into one inn, traipsing over to the Stray Bullet in the morning to eat breakfast and compliment Leanne on how the cafe was doing.
There is an element of observation, both being a part of something and not, of listening when I feel like speaking, of hearing something between the words, of seeing something between the splintered slats of a picnic table.
3.
I crouched in the shallow part of the river, resting my hands on my knees and my chin on my hands. The slow movement of water would become faster a little downstream, but here it only distorted the river bed a bit. Like someone had just walked by. My feet were growing numb but the sun was hot on my back. The microcosm of the river bed held infinite fascinations for me. I knew it was only because my loneliness was starting to feel like grief, though I knew not for what, as if I were grieving for something that hadn’t happened yet.
A flash of color under the water’s glare. I grabbed a large rock with a stripe of purple running through it. It wasn’t as heavy as I thought it would be; it came out of the water willingly, like a congregant baptized.
“Fish on!” a male voice yelled.
Downstream, my youngest brother Coleton leaned back, his rod curving into a perfect capital ‘C’. Our cousin Lucas, looking like Aquaman with his long hair and beard, came splashing over, wielding a net.
“Don’t let it get away!”
“I’m not!”
“Keep tension on!”
“I am!”
“Bring him here, I got it, I got it—”
Water sprayed around them in crystal drops. I was close enough to see without interrupting their moment; I was a watcher filled with something like love. A spirit, outside myself, whispering watch, like it knew a holy moment when it saw one.
The boys were laughing, the sound ringing through the forest loud enough to ward off any nearby bears. All the normal background was overtaken: the hum of bees around their hive, the branches breaking under a deer’s foot, the lone truck engine rumbling over the bridge, the gurgling of water around a rock. Laughter was a crystalline sound, holy and perfect.
The fish, safely in the net, was measured carefully. A few inches were added: “it must be eleven inches!” “No, thirteen!” The photo was dutifully taken. Then the trout was launched back home, zipping away faster than the water can follow, only a ripple left behind.
The rock in my hand dried quickly in the summer sun. Brother and cousin downstream high fived and laughed again and I wondered if they were thinking about the holiness of water and the holiness of mourning the future.
I pictured John the Baptist knowing the seriousness of his cousin appearing at the riverside. I pictured John the Baptist laughing anyway. I pictured them embracing after so many years, the water of the river wetting their robes. I pictured Jesus spreading out the Spirit like a net in that place. I pictured Jesus knowing how it would end, the beginning of this Gospel—served up on a platter, nailed in place.
The purple stripe in the rock disappeared, dust in its place. I dropped it at my feet and it plunked back into the river, its color appearing in an instant, like a miracle.
4.
The first year I went to Montana, my mother came as well. Neither of us were interested in fishing, but COVID had put a stop to all of our usual summer plans, so we took two cars and drove east, dog sitting between me and her. My brothers were ecstatic. They’d been going for years already, and every July they’d begged us to go, but we’d always said no. Summer was peak racing season for me so I’d never been able to. My desire to go (or lack of) never factored in. But I wasn’t racing that summer. No one was. The glorious and marginal sport of sprint kayaking had ground to a halt, all races canceled, and I’d just made the decision to quit. Five years, three international races, seventeen national medals, and I was done.
I treated the books in the bag at my feet like a cure. They would make me whole again. I needed something to do and I knew that I’d loved reading at some point. I could love it again.
Also, I didn’t really like fishing. I planned on spending my time reading, and the first book on my list was The Scarlet Letter. I was heading into my sophomore year of college and had declared a literature major, and I figured it was the kind of book a literature major should have already read.
I used to like to read. Before I started kayaking, I read every book I could get my hands on. I reminded myself of this like I was trying to convince someone of it. I liked to read.
“Alright, we’re here,” my dad said. The tiny town—one paved road and maybe six or seven houses, an inn and general store, and a diner that served breakfast and lunch—seemed quiet in the way that a house is quiet when all the children have left. The outfitter’s store was closed, shirt and reels of line hanging dead in the window, and both my brothers were devastated they couldn’t get more flies.
“Where’s Cathy?” Coleton asked. Jackson scuffed his boots on the porch and yelled at the dog to stay close.
“I’m not sure,” my dad replied. “I think Fred said she has people further east, or something?”
The rest of the family was coming in later that evening, and we unloaded the car into the inn. Even though I’d never been there before, I felt a sense of loss, like the pandemic had made a quiet town somber.
“Are you going to fish?” I asked mom, opening the fridge and lining up beers..
“No,” she replied. “Are you?”
“No. I’m going to read.”
I’d said as much before, but that summer my parents treated me gently in a way I couldn’t recognize until later. I thought I was handling the end of my athletic career and a global pandemic with grace. I wasn’t. I was holding on with the blind panic of someone who couldn’t bear to look around the corner.
The next day, once we—Andy, Laurel, Rylan, Lucas, Anna, Nathan, Mike, Jon—woke up and ate, we headed to the river. We started at the Scotty Brown bridge, which I’d heard of for years without ever seeing it. Picture this: July, dry brush, long grass, pine trees, shallow blue water, and dust everywhere. I set up my camp chair near the bridge, but close enough to the river to put my feet in. It was frigid, glacial water, and I could only stand a few minutes at a time.
Mom and Aunt Laurel sat with me, and I read. I could only stand that for a few minutes at a time.
“Why are you sighing so much?” my mom asked from under her sunhat.
“I’m not sighing.”
“Do you want to throw rocks at that log over there?”
I did. Picture this: rocks lined up on an old, dry log, and three women throwing stones at them until they all went tumbling to the bank. Upstream, my brothers laughed as the dog shook herself clean of river water. For a moment, the river looked like a racecourse, the kind of water I was used to. Then the texture came into focus, how the water ran over rocks, became shallow than deeper, curved around log jams and huge boulders.
“I know you miss it,” my mom said.
I sighed and looked at my book. I wasn’t in college, and I wasn’t an athlete either. I was in Montana where I’d never thought I’d be with gravel in my sandals and the long curve of the river winding away and away.
The sun was hot on my neck. Picture this: an eighteen-year old picking up a rock, the arc through the air, the small splash it made in the river, both insignificant and something.
5.
I unfolded my camp chair, settling it among the rocky bank and stretching out my legs. My book sat unread in my lap. The air was warm and bugs swirled in a cloud under the bridge, dispersing when a semi-truck roared past. If I closed my left eye, blocking out the thin freeway, I could pretend I was in the middle of nowhere.
This was how it often was in Montana. That year, I couldn’t really fish because my knee was bending the wrong way and every step promised twinges of pain. I loved fishing, yes, but it wasn’t a great hardship to sit and watch. It wasn’t my favorite part of packing up the truck and driving across three states. I loved my camp chair and my folded paperbacks. I loved hearing the river and watching my brothers and cousins and uncles wade by, cigar smoke trailing behind like a bridal train. I loved hiking, bushwacking, sliding down ravines to get to the perfect spot, climbing over log jams to get further than anyone else.
My camp chair slid a little in the rocks. I watched a solid gray sky roll in over the freeway. I could taste ozone in the air.
My chair slid more, and I jerked forward, grabbing the chair and settling it somewhere safer. I thought about falling—how as a child I could fall like it was nothing, tumbling into the grass or smacking the hardwood. Sliding into home base and streaking my entire side in dust. Jumping from the monkey bars, landing on another kid and rolling.
Back then, falling was a law, like gravity. Tackling or slipping or losing your grip was playground simplicity. It didn’t hurt then; or at least I never remembered it hurting for too long. One moment in particular stands out: I was five or six, and my dad was coaching the kid’s soccer league, running among us like a giant who yelled things like “pass the ball! Look upfield!” We were playing a game and another kid ran into me hard enough to send me flipping in a backwards somersault. I remember looking up and seeing my dad on the sidelines. His face was a blur to me, but I waved and got back up. Back then, I always got back up.
Falling is a concern now. It can be fatal, if you want to be dramatic. Falling as an adult is painful, and a cause for concern. In most cases, it stops you and demands you check in. Think about it: stumbling drunk from the bar and tripping on the curb; getting knocked over in pickup basketball; standing up too quickly and blacking out; hiking and slipping on a root. Falling hurts more now than it did then. Many things hurt more now than they did then.
Then again, some things hurt less now than they did then. Not falling, but other things. Like chores, making my bed and grocery shopping and the like. It felt like it hurt when I was a child, but now I like having things. Or fighting with a friend. I can do that better now. Or loneliness. It’s not so bad—I have words for it now, and words for pain, and that makes it better in many ways.
I felt the first hints of rain on my legs. The gray line had gotten closer, and I could make out the hazy sheen that meant a rainstorm. Thunderstorm, I corrected myself as it rolled across the river. I thought about the previous summer, when I’d been standing knee-deep in glacial water and a dying bee had gotten wedged in my sandals. Drowning, it still could sting. The rocks hurt as I fell, cursing, my dad trying to find where the pain was coming from. We laughed later over my swollen foot because we could laugh, because it was all okay.
“Let’s go!”
Downstream, my dad, cousins, and youngest brother were running along the bank the best they could. I heard the first crack of lightning and it briefly split the sky into three. Rain came harder, and I folded the chair and smushed my book in my bag. No more fishing. No more reading. The rain was warm and the bugs were gone and the river was very cold.
My dad came and helped me walk across. I went as fast as I could on my knee, the joint in the wrong place, cartilage scraping thin with every step. In two days, my dad would fall in fast-moving water and bash his knee against a rock. In three days, I would drive him across three states to an orthopedist to stop the internal bleeding. In three and a half days, I would realize I shared an orthopedist with my father and laugh. In four days, I would get a picture of him in a brace, giving a drugged-up peace sign. There is something animal in seeing your father in pain, wounded and beyond your help.
But in that moment, in the river, I almost forgot my own pain as the two of us tried to outrun the thunder, conscious of every slick-rock step.
Emma McCoy has two poetry books: This Voice Has an Echo (2024) and In Case I Live Forever (2022), and a nomination for Best of the Net 2023. She’s been published in places like Stirring Literary and Thimble Mag, and reads for Chestnut Review. She’s probably working on her novel right now. Catch her on Twitter/X: @poetrybyemma.