Now Nearly All Those I

It Is Those We Live With And Love And Should Know Who Elude Us.

In Our Family, There Was No Clear Line Between Religion And Fly Fishing. We Lived At The Junction Of Great Trout Rivers In Western Montana, And Our Father Was A Presbyterian Minister And A Fly Fisherman Who Tied His Own Flies And Taught Others. He Told Us About Christ's Disciples Being Fishermen, And We Were Left To Assume, As My Brother And I Did, That All First-class Fishermen On The Sea Of Galilee Were Fly Fishermen And That John, The Favorite, Was A Dry-fly Fisherman.

Yet Even In The Loneliness Of The Canyon I Knew There Were Others Like Me Who Had Brothers They Did Not Understand But Wanted To Help. We Are Probably Those Referred To As "our Brother's Keepers," Possessed Of One Of The Oldest And Possible One Of The Most Futile And Certainly One Of The Most Haunting Instincts. It Will Not Let Us Go.

Unless We Are Willing To Escape Into Sentimentality Or Fantasy, Often The Best We Can Do With Catastrophes, Even Our Own, Is To Find Out Exactly What Happened And Restore Some Of The Missing Parts.

We Can Love Completely What We Cannot Completely Understand.