Lying in bed at night, after we made love, he stroked the long off-white fur of the caribou that hung over his bed. I wondered if he could love anything without hurting it. In between duck-hunting trips to the Rio Grande with Kody and Lexie, we stayed home and he talked about water. It was nothing a Midwesterner could know. He taught me about trout, the sign that the water is truly and deeply alive.
Trout are fragile creatures that can live only in the most pristine of places, in cold pure waters.
They are easily harmed by chemicals or other impurities in water, and can survive only in a narrow temperature range. There are few trout left in the Gila River. Although the Forest Service restocks it annually with rainbows, few remain after each bait fisherman catches his limit during Memorial Day weekend. And it's just as well, because no trout could survive the lukewarm temperatures of the Gila in late June. Fly-fishing, I began to understand, is a quest for a holy grail, a quest for the most perfect, pristine, untouched place, in which the most perfect of fishes can live.