LEFT TO RIGHT Bellingham, WA, attorney and salmon conservationist Bret Simmons (pictured here with Duncan in Montana) was a friend and fishing partner of the late Liam Wood, who perished while flyfishing in the 1999 Whatcom Creek pipeline tragedy. Simmons and Duncan were the visionaries and early functionaries behind the creation of the Liam Wood Fly Fishing and River Guardians School at Bellingham’s Western Washington University, now entering its 18 th year. Photo: Jimmy Watts Duncan strolls along his backyard creek near Lolo, MT. Photo: Chris La Tray “We’re here for a little window,” Brian Doyle said, “and to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.” “What’s next?” I ask. Duncan replies with the ex-pected itinerary of an author with a completed book— the back and forth with the publisher, book tours, readings, etc. He has other works on the back burner. But that’s not what I’m asking about, and he knows it. “In response to Barry’s insight that the great questions have no answers,” he says, “I find the Unanswerable to be a reminder that I was born lost, but in creeks and rivers began to be found. Watersheds remain a place of pilgrimage, wild salmon an interior compass, rivers prayer wheels, industrialized rivers blues tunes, dying birds prophets and guides, wild places as small as weeds blooming in the cracks of city sidewalks a momentary home.” Before retiring for the night, I try to describe to Duncan an experience I hold dear but can’t very well express. “Either I don’t have the words,” I tell him, “or by putting words to it I’ll diminish the experience. I’m not sure which. It’s both.” David encourages me by saying what his late friend William Kitteridge said, that “secret” and “sacred” are basically synonymous. “I see a woman,” I try to explain, “sometimes in dreams, sometimes awake. I once even saw her in a house on fire. But most often she appears on the far banks of rivers, ankle deep, holding a fistful of field daisies, smiling beneath chestnut eyes and long brown hair. It’s silly,” I admit. “It’s an image or an imagination, an apparition or an angel. I just know that I love her, and always I drop my fly at her feet with the hope she’ll pick it up.” “One of the heroines of Sun House might tell you,” David answers, “that words aimed at such an event are trying to catch a thunderhead in the gopher trap of American English. From your long, sometimes impossibly intense friend-ship with fire and water, Jimmy, you know as well as anyone that the greatest love de-selfs us, making of us itself…So the storytelling problem you face here is wonderful: There are mysteries far greater than words or stories can contain.” 060 DAVID JAMES DUNCAN
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 60
