home

Wondered awhile about Home.  If I can find my way back.   If I ever left.  Or, where or when Home ever isn’t.

Then I wondered about Heart, and thought maybe Home’s broken all over the West and falling down to the Pacific and rising to rain.

I’m sure a  drop of it’s on a freestone gravel bar high up on the Skagit, bleeding off the red flank of a 18″ rainbow cradled in a benediction, recieved from the last hole on a long stretch.  Heavy water pushed fast around a log jam with a tail out to a quiet and deep pool.  I dropped a wet fly well subsurface and ahead and swam it dead through the elbow where the fish took.

It took with a confidence that let me know I’d be landed and with the security of a connection fated and unbreakable and outside of time.   The line and leader not a leash, but a tie rope and a guide.

There wasn’t a struggle, only tension from the depth and the pull of an embrace. Four-ounces and seven and a half feet of split-cane nodded to the river, and I kneeled at the fish.  The heart on my sleeve broken wide open and grateful, spilling blood red and bright into her colors.

Some fish have a way of that.  A way of welcoming you Home, with all the honesty that Home requires.  Stipped naked and open and bleeding, the place knows you too well for charades.