Trout Streams In Heaven?

Part Two: Best I could tell, my friend's lived religion was never about 'someday,' but instead, about right here and right now.

Metolius River, Oregon. Mid June, 2024. Gary, tossing big dries and busting my ass. “Wait, are you trying to make some kinda memorial portrait of me? …for when I’m gone?” he asked, a little cynically. I gulped, squatting there with my camera at the edge of the water. I kind of was. And I was not at all used to him talking directly about his approaching fate. He’d totally busted me. “You ok with that?” I asked. He said nothing but didn’t object, then lifted his fly off the water, false casted a couple of perfect, lazy loops and dropped it back into the seam.

We hadn’t fished this piece of water together for eighteen or nineteen years, but it was important to my friend that we fish it together again one last time, and so it became important to me. It was one of Gary’s favorite places and he had invited me, that first time to meet him in Madras then drive an hour or so west before donning our packs and hiking in, three days along a lonely, wild stretch of river that simultaneously inflamed his imagination and soothed his soul. I don’t recall seeing even one other person while we were in there. We had been fishing and photographic buddies for years, but we came away from that trip, much, much closer friends, bonded by a shared adventure in one of the most beautiful and one of his most beloved places on the planet.

So much younger, so much less cautious and worn. So much less aware that there might be a number to our days.

Gary as a much younger man with a nice Bull Trout he caught deep in that very same, beloved stretch of water he’s fishing dries in, in the picture above.

Best fishing picture anyone’s ever made of me. Gary shot this from shore nearly twenty years ago as I fished a tricky, fast water stretch just a mile or so upriver from our camp.

In addition to many, fat, feisty trout, which were sometimes plentiful and sometimes mysteriously elusive in places that seemed like they should have been fishy as hell, that backcountry trip was also the first time either of us ever met and subsequently dropped to our knees, mystified and agog beside a wild, blooming, Mountain Lady Slipper (Cypripedium montanum), which, I swear awakened and flipped some kind of endless awe switch in both of us, an enchanted, chance encounter with a mysterious, intelligent, botanical being that, subsequently lead to many, many other, “I’ll meet you there…” wildflower and photography adventures.

A few years after that first Metolius trip, during the depths of winter, Gary called one day and said "I figured out what that flower was and maybe where we can go to see more of them. I knew immediately which flower he was referring to. Then he sent me a link to an Oregon Public Broadcasting outdoors show that featured a man called Andy and a place called Growiser, which, as luck would have it was situated right next door to my dear old friend, Larry's property in the Blue Mountains. Larry and Andy were neighbors, and better yet, friends. So calls were made and plans laid, and come that next Spring, late, we met up at Larry's cabin during 'peak wildflower' and spent the next three days in the company of Larry and Andy and the land they both loved in a haze of wildflower wonder.

My dad who was born and raised in Central Oregon absolutely adored Gary’s sensitive images of many of his favorite old talismans and haunts (they were Facebook friends, and occasionally left notes for one another, but never actually met in person). I sometimes teased Gary that he was the son Dad wished he’d gotten, which seemed to please them both, and when Dad arrived at that ‘time to give everything away’ stage of his life, he wanted his friend Gary to have his coffee table book on beloved, Steens Mountain, a wild and holy place they both completely revered.

Both are gone now… but I can almost picture the two of them, finally hanging out together, leaning back against some rocky outcrop in Oregon’s high desert, watching the play of light, the lengthening of shadows and not needing to say a single word to understand much of what the other was feeling.

It’s normal, I guess, to want there to be something more, to hope that another set of chapters might exist for us and for those we loved …on some not so distant, far side of that mysterious veil.

Truth is, though, none of us actually knows a damned thing about such matters.

Not really.

Sure, some claim to.

And some of those who claim,

perhaps even many,

truly BELIEVE they do know.

Some are even willing to punish those who don’t agree.

But at their core, they almost always find themselves borrowing,

cribbing their ‘proofs’ from others who came before,

others who told stories,

claiming to explain

or struggling to understand

just what was going on way back ‘then,’

when events,

feelings,

unexplainable things,

jolted them enough to stop what they were doing and mull things over,

and write them down.

Each story was seen

…or imagined

through the eyes and limitations, and prejudices of their tellers,

or through the crooked pathway of some, “I know a guy,” that the teller paraphrased, assuring his listeners it was “swear to God,” gospel truth.

But that isn’t really ‘knowing.’

It is postulating.

Wondering out loud.

Hoping against hope.

So, into those hollow spaces left behind I give myself permission to smile,

to imagine those souls who touched me so profoundly while they were here,

free of pain and perhaps in one another’s company,

looking out over places they learned to love,

couldn’t help but love while they were here.

If they can still love those places from somewhere beyond that veil

then maybe they can still love me, as well,

as I still love them,

miss them,

love those things and places they loved,

introduced me to,

shared…

taught me to see;

borrowed glimpses through their uniquely attuned eyes.

The religion I was raised up in tried to teach me to fear such fond imaginings,

temptations of the devil,

avenues through which he might enslave me,

but it failed.

I’m not all that concerned about whether there might be trout streams in heaven,

or if there even is a heaven.

But I do think about how I show up here while I can.

And if I pray for anything as I think about my friend,

it is not that he’ll escape some malevolent punishment,

or be saved someday,

it is that I too will find a way to keep a candle burning within my own soul

full of love for the people and places that lit that flame in the first place,

that I’ll still be capable of awe and wonder,

as he was

until my final day.

That, to me seems like the miracle.

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