Teach

Deschutes River Canyon, Oregon, 2019.

I stepped out of the river after more than an hour, studying currents, balancing upon and between slippery rocks, tossing steel-hooked bits of feather and thread into likely looking places. Flyfishing for trout is a full-mind experience. It engages every bit of who you are. Physical acumen, mental awareness, deductive reasoning, pattern recall. All of this and precision casts. Motion and balance. Empty mind and completely full. And a sense of feel, that feel, …that intuition that only comes from a thousand close dances with sipping, darting, ambushing, head shaking, tailwalking trout.

If you are angry or resentful, fretful, they will know. They will sense it. That grounding connection between you and the fly you have sent ahead as emissary and temptress, river-wet fly line and leader, tippet. Your electricity. Your energetic calling card and churn. I swear they can feel it, avoid it. Turn away.

So you learn to release, let the currents tug and pull, push and tumble; you learn to surrender your grudges and resentments, your slights and hurts. Forget scorekeeping. Let the river wash you clean until the fish no longer feel your storms…

My legs were tired, wading upstream against the current and balancing precariously atop submerged boulders, casting. Wading a big river in your sixties asks more of you than it did at forty. I wanted to rest for a few minutes, sitting on dry land, leaning back against a rock and taking it all in from the cover of cooling shade.

“TEACH!” said the tree without speaking.

What crisis? What newly gained insight? What touch of some prophet’s guardian angel had inspired this sentence, this single word command?

There is, implied, a silent verb to accompany this verb—a verb that predates it.

‘Learn’ necessarily comes before ‘Teach’ is even possible.

I immediately thought of my dad, one of those rare, one in a thousand teachers who used to say, self-deprecatingly, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach teachers.” It was his funny, little ‘Ha-ha’ joke, used to deflect praise and keep himself humble about the work that truly, he loved more than any other.

Dad (aka, Batman), teaching teachers. High School Biology teachers, summer refresher course; Field Zoology Techniques at Ole Miss, sometime around 1968. Yours truly, far right.

I was tempted to make this hand-carved message into some kind of sign, an omen written just for me, a whispered command from unseen gods. I’ve done that sort of thing before, more times than I can possibly be proud of. Occasionally now I am able to step outside my own self-absorbed, fretful state of awareness just enough not to ask what this is trying to say to me and instead, try to imagine the story of the person who carved it at the time. What is this telling me about her? Or him?

Someone deliberately took out a knife and engraved a message into the tender skin of a tree. There is most certainly a story here, but what?

“Who are you?” I asked this absent carver, sniffing the riverine air and listening to each fluttering leaf.

“What crossroads were you standing within on that portentous day?”

“Was it a blistering, summer afternoon or were Steelhead jumping and rolling out there at the edge of the fast water, rising into the crisp air of late autumn? Was there snow?

“Were you walking away from something …and toward something else?

“Teach what?”

“Were you trying to convince yourself, or someone who might come upon it later?”

The river burbled and muttered as it always has when questioned. Sunlight fluttered and flickered between shuddering leaves. An insistent magpie pontificated from a snag at the edge of the water, far side, while behind me, out in the bake of the canyon, a rust and clay trimmed, turquoise troubadour sang his own version of the Lazuli Bunting song, marking his chosen place in the world from the tip of a sun-bleached, treetop branch, joyous musical commentary on the unfolding day.

Teach, the commandment read.

But what message did its author intend?

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