Unconditional

nonfiction

     On a September river walk, fly rod in hand as always, I had slipped across the Montana border into Idaho. I’d been casting to West Slope cutthroats and the fishing was good, the trout deep-bodied, beautiful, strong. But as I strolled knee-deep through a long glide of water clear as air, my heart did a somersault as I sighted, not thirty feet in front of me, two fish easily twenty times the size of the trout I’d been happily catching and releasing.

     They were hard to accept as real. All day I’d been engaged with aquatic life-forms no heavier than a pound and a half. Now the river houses two beings the size of my three-year-old grandson. Where had they come from? The answer sounds like a fairy tale: the far reaches of the sea. How had they arrived? Another fairy tale: by swimming 550 miles against one of the most powerful rivers on earth, past eight deadly dams and reservoirs, all the way from the Pacific. Why had they made this insanely dangerous journey? Another wonder: these colored stones and clear currents, so high and far from the sea, once gave them life, so though they possessed no legs, no hooves, no wings, they became mountain climbers, surging their way up into the Rockies at the certain cost of their lives to the pebbles of their birth-stream.