I Am the River

I Am the River

I read the river, forty years ago, like I would read a great poem.   I wanted to fasten all the words of the river to my brain.   I wanted them there for as long as I was conscious—every bend, riffle, and run; how the river looked on those early mornings when I met it, a supplicant, when mist rose from the pool at the second bend, when the air vibrated everywhere with caddisflies at dusk.   I came to know its moods and many of the secrets below the surface—and I had grown to know its trout, mostly brown trout that had been born in the river for five or six generations.   The river had taught me to be patient and conscious of all its singularities—where and when the trout would be rising to lunch on the delicate Pale Morning Duns, which floated so proudly like little sailboats, how they would lunge for Green Drakes.

And then I heard it had been rehabilitated and then, not long ago, I heard that the son of my late friend, who had loved the river and invited me to share it with him, had sold the property.  I knew at once that I would never fish it again.   It had changed me as great poetry had changed me, and now it had changed forever.

And now I am an old man and even the poems I have loved are slipping away, leaving only scant phrases, like “tattered coat upon a stick,” “Glory be to God for dappled things,” “consume my heart away,” “a moment’s thought,” “all flat maps,” “season’d timber,” and dozens more fragments, shards.    The whole is gone.   But somewhere the river remains inside me as it once was—cold, clear, bright, where it rose from the earth, where I knew every eddy and undercut bank, when flies hatched, particular trout I had caught, the freshness of the mornings and the warmth of close friendship.

I wrote a book about the river and can find some of what was then but can be no more, and the book might last or not.    And some day my memory will break away as those poems have begun to shred and drift away. But there is something beyond memory, that will last as long as I last: what the river has wrought in me, and of me, and then only some words of mine will remain of the thing that was and that could not be separated.    I am the river.

English professor, publisher and acclaimed fly-fishing author, Nick Lyons has written over twenty books and hundreds of essays, which have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, National Geographic, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Big Sky Journal, and The Pennsylvania Gazette. His memoir, Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life, was published in 2020 to broad acclaim. He divides his time between upstate New York and Manhattan, and still occasionally casts a line.