Miles from any town, fishing alone on a small stream of no significance to anyone but us, we hear the first, faint rumble. I ignore it, tell myself a waterfall ahead must be sending the sound down. The sky to the east remains clear, so I look in that direction.
My son Noah, conditioned from years of playing college basketball, moves confidently through pools and over boulders the size of small cars. We wade the center of the stream, focused on our casts and the curling water around us. Then another thunderclap, just over our shoulders.
A mountain ridge to the west blots out the sky. The weather here tends to follow that path. Every few seconds a bright flash illuminates the interior of the dark clouds above its highest peak, followed by more rumbling: a pervasive growl that travels toward us, then over us, and afterward falls apart on a mountain to the east—the sort of disruption that drives vibrations through the chest and raises hairs along the neck.
Half a mile away, on another peak, rain already washes the sky, muddling the air like a fogged bathroom mirror. We won’t make it back to the truck before the worst of the storm hits.
I don’t want to get caught in the open. We’ll be drenched, and the wind tells me the temperature will drop more than twenty degrees as the front moves through. There’s also the always-fresh memory of having been struck indirectly by lightning twice before. Each time I was knocked to the ground and left dazed by the sky’s energy. No wonder we humans associate such power with gods and look to the heavens for mercy.
No more than thirty yards away we spy a clump of willow, aspen, and dogwood. A few spruce poke their crowns above the heavy canopy. I nod to Noah, and he nods back.
By the time we reach the entrance to this green cave, wind pushes hard enough that it’s difficult to hear each other. A game trail leads into the alcove. Noah hollers, “Hey, bear!”—a warning to any animal that might be inhabiting it—and likewise I blow my whistle in three short bursts. Noah disappears between dogwood and willow leaves as another whipcrack of thunder ricochets overhead.
Inside, the noise of the storm immediately softens. The rain falling on the leafy roof feels distant, part of another world. Noah points to a far wall of bushes, and I see we’ve stepped onto a small island. At the tip of this spit of land the stream parts, sending a braid to the left, another to the right. Our new home is twenty yards wide and thirty yards long, surrounded by rushing currents but somehow quiet: a moored boat.
We each find a tree to rest our back against. I offer Noah some venison jerky. He holds out a water bottle, and I take a swig.
I wonder what he sees in my face.
When I look at his, I see the open trust of a child who was born on my thirtieth birthday. A three-year-old who clung to my leg when I came home from work, begging to play circus or to wrestle. We share similar features, so I also glimpse my high school self, and the man I was when I first married. So much of the energy and outright glee that Noah possessed as he left to ride the bus to first grade I can still hear in his voice when he catches a fish or glimpses an elk.
Because he’s not even thirty, he likely doesn’t see much of my face in his when he looks in the mirror, but almost every time I do, I see my father: his face at sixty, hair gray, lines edging eyes and lips.
Every few years I go back to family photo albums to look at pictures of my dad at twenty-five, at thirty-five. There’s one of him at forty, sitting on a rock in a stream. It’s late October. Most of the leaves are down. The water’s gray, and he wears a red-and-white stocking cap. I would have been four years old. He worked long days at the animal hospital, getting up at 4:30 AM, coming home for dinner at 7:00 PM, and then going back for a few more hours to care for animals being boarded or recovering from surgery.
I like to be reminded—need to be reminded—that my father was young once, that he had a crush on a girl in his one-room schoolhouse near Ladies Chapel, that he looked forward to helping his aunt Alverdia tend bees or pick watermelon from the large patch near the creek, his feet smeared red with clay.
As Noah and I talk, I remember places I fished at his age, the mountains I climbed. On one backpacking trip with my college roommate, we set up our tents in an area with a nuisance bear, which we learned about only after we’d hiked in and were told by a ranger. For two nights we stayed up and fed the fire, talking to discourage any encounter. We could hear the bear moving beyond the fire’s illumination. We imagined the animal’s strength, its speed in a sprint, its jaws and claws perfectly formed to rend flesh from bone. The bear’s presence was both feared and welcome—the primal and uncontrollable connects us to the greater-than-human world.
Today, as the rain gathers strength, I worry about the possibility of a flash flood. Warm and dry in our shelter, Noah nods off. A snore snakes from his mouth. His whiskers still don’t connect to make a full beard.
I stand to pace off my anxiety. The island is just a few feet above the stream. During snowmelt I’m sure this refuge is fully submerged, but there’s no evidence that water has overwhelmed it recently, and we’ve had some big storms. The sun peeks through the cloud bank, and I settle back and eat an apple.
The creek’s music hasn’t changed, but the rain is softer, with only the faintest hint of thunder to the east. I want to extend the moment, want some impossible assurance I’ll be able to hike streams like this for another twenty years with my sons. My father and I climbed Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the state of New York, when he was sixty-six. He’d tried to summit Marcy two times before: once when he was in his early forties, but that climb ended in several feet of fresh snow, and the other time when he was fifty-eight and got thwarted by rain that caused a stream to flood dangerously.
I was thirty that July when he finally made it to the top. Our approach took us by Lake Tear of the Clouds, nascent source of the Hudson River. As we took in the still pond, my father spoke with reverence about the miles the water would travel, the tributaries that would add to it before it became that other, bigger, river, which ran through cities and eventually to the ocean. He quoted Robert Frost as he cupped the water, letting it stream through his fingers and marveling at how “way leads on to way.” Despite the warmer temperatures at base camp, on the peak snow showers fell, and sixty-mile-per-hour wind gusts tore at our clothing. We clutched each other for warmth and to keep from toppling over.
Now rainwater drips from limbs and leaves, sun fully aglitter on the stream. I place my hand on Noah’s shoulder and ask if he’s ready to fish a little more. His eyes open, but he’s groggy. I can tell he’d be happy to sleep another thirty minutes. I think I’ll let him.
