I count all of these worlds and think of a scripture: “And worlds without number have I created.” I begin to understand something that had been around me all of my life yet I’ve never recognized before. Worlds without numbers could mean galaxies and universes and stars and planets, and that is probably what most of us think; but it could also mean the handful of soil that I hold and the world contained therein. And for a moment, thinking these thoughts, I am happy that even a man my age can learn something new and basic and be thrilled and pleased by it all.
This bodes well, I think, of what the promise of creation and the promise of forever and the promise of worlds without numbers hold for me. So I look out at the stream and say softly, “Thank you, fish, and thank you, water. This I know now. There are more worlds than we can even begin to count.”
And I think of all these things while my great-nephew Levi suns himself on this brilliant morning, alongside a stream I was fishing although I had yet to catch a fish, nor had I even had a simple bite. But in my short time fishing, I already recognized that you do not have to catch lots of fish to be a good fisherman. I hope I’m on my way to becoming a good fisherman.
A mosquito comes by and buzzes and lands on my arm, and I slap him, and his world comes to an end. Or at least it changes dramatically and rather quickly.
“Are you rested? Ready to go again?” Levi sits up and looks around. “Fish stop biting toward the middle of the day. Gets too hot, and they just go to deep water and hang out. We only have a couple more hours before they get lazy and decide they’re not hungry.”
“Then let us fish again,” I say, and I pick up my pole and he picks up his rod, and he slips his arm around my back, and we teeter and wobble into the swift waters again.
We didn’t catch any fish that morning. Not a one. Casting, I recognized, is an act of faith. Sometimes, when I laid the line out too far or it wafted behind my head into the branches of a tree, I caught a stick or a branch or a leaf, but I never caught a fish. When you go fishing, you never know what you will catch, what you will pull out. I think, “We all cast. We all cast every day. But only a few cast for fish.”
Levi, I think, probably only cast about two-dozen times. Yet he is content. It is the most serene and peaceful I have seen him on the trip. There are layers to this young man, I thought, and the more I peel them back, the better I like what I see. The fast red car coming down the street of my home in North Dakota seemed as far away from me then as the North Pole. A different day. A different time. A different young man. And a different old man too.
He lets me cast into the deepest and best holes. Only once or twice is he not within an arm’s length of me.
The rest of the time he is near me, keeping watch. Had I slipped, he would have been there in an instant and, no doubt, caught me or helped me break my fall. More than once, I did briefly lose my footing.
And when I did, he reached out and steadied me and always said just one word.
“Here.”
And after I was straight on my feet and balanced, he always just said a second word.
“There.”
Finally, I grow weary, and I say that I want to just sit on a log or a rock and rest. I tell him he can go ahead and fish upstream for a while and that I will be happy to just be still. I tell him he can have my waders because I would not need them while I sat on my rock or log.
“Are you sure? My legs are numb, and I’m used to it.”
“Yes, quite sure. I will be here. When you are done fishing, just come and get me, and we will walk back to the car and then drive to the cabin.”
“Well, okay. If you’re sure.”
“Absolutely. I hope you catch a big fish.” I look around again. It is a day of incomparable beauty. I am a man of the plains, but I think, with a change of a few degrees in my life’s compass, I could become a man of the mountains. I like it here. A little grassy knoll wedged between two boulders beckons me. I point it out to Levi and say, “That’s where I will be. Fish as long as you like.”
He says, “You’re sure?”
I say, “Yes, I am. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in about an hour. Here is my cell phone and the keys to the car, and if something should go wrong, you can always hike back to the car and call out. But I’ll be back.”
I see what I suppose most people would describe as a glint in his eye, one that told me that he wanted to fish fast and hard up the canyon, that there was magic for him in this canyon, and that while he had been unfailingly considerate to me as we fished, he is ready to strike out on his own and see what these Montana fish have to offer. He tugs on the waders and soon is in the river. I watch him fish the first hole, and again I’m struck by the grace and art of someone who fishes well.
I walk over to the grassy area and find a place to sit down, my legs stretched out, my head tilted back on a small stone. Though it was hard, there was a nice little crook to it, almost perfectly shaped for the head of a tired old fisherman. I cast my eyes upward again, hoping to see the red-tailed hawk. A puff of wind, this time warm, came down the canyon. Then my thoughts become slurred, my vision blurred, and I find that if I pull my fishing hat over my eyes it provides me with just the right amount of shade. I’m asleep within minutes.
I don’t know how much time passed by. I rejoice in the fact that it seems we will not count time in the next life, that it is only a silly, weak man who does so now. Somehow, I hear the sloshing and trickling of water, and when I open my dreamy eyes and my thoughts have a chance to clear, I see Levi in front of me, grinning, a little like a big, wet, playful hound.
“Any luck?” I manage to say when just enough of my senses come back on the job to enable speech.
“Nope. Not a thing. I got skunked. But what a nice place and good day to get skunked.”
We gather our gear and hike the mile or so back to the red car.
We follow the dirt road back toward the paved county highway. As we pull out of the canyon and back toward the cabin, I watch the small stream we had fished disappear from view. I feel as though I am bidding a friend good-bye. I will never come this way again. I know that.
Levi said he got skunked, but I have been around long enough and fished just enough to know that a North Dakota bass and a Montana trout probably smell very much the same.
Levi turns on a scratchy radio station, one that fades in and out, sings along when he knows the words, occasionally sings along even when he doesn’t know the words, laughs aloud for no apparent reason more than once, and I can’t help but notice how much his hands smelled like Montana trout.
Chapter Twenty
Love Can Make You Feel Dizzy
I think Uncle Loyal enjoyed fishing. He sloshed around the stream and cast his fly every which way but where it should have been, and he was so noisy that fish in the next mountain range over could have heard him coming, and they booked it for deep water. Kept me on my toes, though. The fly on the end of his rod came uncomfortably close to me more than once. One thing I didn’t want to do was have Uncle Loyal perform fly-removal surgery from my ear or hand or worse. I never let him get much more than arm’s length from me, and there were a couple of times he might have tumbled and taken an unscheduled bath if I hadn’t reached out and caught him. I did not want to call Aunt Barbara and explain that her father had slipped, fallen, cracked a rib and a hip, and that’s why she had the bill from the search-and-rescue folks that included two thousand bucks an hour for helicopter time.
But he liked fishing. I could see that. He enjoyed being in the mountains, looking at the scenery, standing in the cold water. Okay, I’ve got to say it, here it comes, you’ve been warned—I think he’s hooked on mountain creek fishing.
He ran out of gas late in the morning. He told me to go ahead and fish upstream on my own. He told me he’d be fine, he just wanted to rest. It took a little convincing, but eventually I gave in. I looked at him over my shoulder before heading around a bend in the creek, an
d his eyes were closed, a smile on his face, and I bet he was dreaming of big fish.
Speaking of big fish, once I set out on my own, I absolutely and positively killed that creek. It was ridiculous. For a while there, about every other cast, I pulled one in. I let them all go—no reason to keep them, better to let them go back home and grow up a little—but it was one of the best fishing streams ever. Big fish, too. Most of them fourteen to sixteen inches, a couple that nudged up to eighteen. It was bliss. It was righteous. The fish would come out of the water and sort of glub at me, their little fish lips saying, “Okay, you got me. You gonna let me go or what? Please, mister? I got a wife and kids and a job finding insects . . . and, say, it’s getting kind of dark out here, and I can’t breathe so hot. Please?”
So in they went. I got back to Uncle Loyal early in the afternoon. He asked me if I caught anything, and I told him a bit of a lie—okay, it was a straight-up whopper—and said no, the fish just weren’t biting that day. I didn’t want him to feel bad. I think he believed me. I think he didn’t know that my name would long be remembered by the fish in that little Montana stream: Levi, king of the creek fishermen.
We don’t do much else that day, although we manage to fit in a couple of loads of laundry. We eat the leftover food that we bought the night before, except for the jerky, because I bought like twenty pounds of it, and by late afternoon, we are both back at Marty’s cabin, taking a well-deserved siesta.
I wake up long before Uncle Loyal. He is sending big Z sounds toward the ceiling. I lay there a while, thinking about the day, the fish, the gorgeous stream and mountains. I am feeling good, feeling happy. I am also feeling lucky.
Maybe that’s why I decide to sneak out of the cabin and try to dial up Rachel.
“You’ve got to know,” Uncle Loyal told me, and he’s right. I gotta know. I hike up a small rise in the late afternoon light and hope that somehow I’d get decent reception. I try to fool myself a bit, wondering if I have Rachel’s phone number. Of course I do. I had it memorized. I saw it at night when I closed my eyes. I had looked at it on the scratch paper she handed me the last day of school in the spring a hundred times, loopy numbers in her thin, pretty handwriting.
“Can I get your phone number?” I had asked.
She seemed surprised. Maybe stunned is a better word.
“Sure, yes. Of course, Levi. Here. Wait. Let me pull a sheet of notebook paper out of my binder. Here it is. And my e-mail address. This is fine. Thanks.”
“Are you sure? We’ve just hung out and dated once. Are you sure this is okay?”
“Yes, it’s okay. I’d like it. Let’s stay in touch this summer.”
“Okay, we will.”
I stayed in touch, sort of. I wrote her a few light e-mails that didn’t say much, text-messaged her about once a week and certainly didn’t tell her about my summer job. She wrote back the same kind of light, vacuous e-mails and didn’t tell me much about anything other than it was really hot in Arizona, as if I didn’t already know that. But I thought of her often. Correction: I thought of her all the time. I practiced what I would say to her when I talked with her. How clever I would be, how she would think, after one of my displays of brilliant conversation, “He is the man for me. I want to create worlds with him.”
But I never quite could work up the courage to call Rachel. It’s a lot easier to hide behind a text message, an e-mail, Facebook. More than once, I had the cell phone in my hand in a place free from my younger siblings, ready to talk and dazzle. But my fingers mysteriously failed to work, my brain suddenly stopped, and the only thing in my entire system that seemed to be working properly were my sweat glands and my thumping heart.
Is this love?
The room would light up. I would know that I would know. That’s what Uncle Loyal said.
Could the sound of her voice light up the darkening skies of Montana?
“Only one way to find out, Levi.”
Great. I was beginning to talk to myself. By the time we arrived in Utah, Uncle Loyal would have more marbles than me, and I’d be the one needing a rest home.
My heart is banging hard in my chest, my stomach, my legs, everywhere, and I have to be honest, my fingers are anything but steady when I flip open my cell phone, dial the number, and wait as the beep, beep, beep rang in my ears. An answer. A little kid. A little brother.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is Rachel in?”
“Yeah. I’ll go get her.” And then I hear a shriek. “RRAACCHHEELL! It’s a boy.”
A few agonizing seconds go by. My heart rate goes up even more, probably pounding away at, oh, a nice steady two hundred beats per minute. My mouth goes dry. I could hang up right now and she’d never know.
And neither would I.
That’s the thought that gets me. Steady up, Levi. I need to know.
“Hello?”
“Rachel! Hey, great to talk with you.”
Nice, Levi. You’re sounding like an elders quorum president greeting a black sheep who makes an unexpected appearance at priesthood meeting.
“Oh. Thanks.”
“You’ll never guess where I am. In Montana. Standing on a hill. It’s almost dark, and I went fishing with my great-uncle, a guy named—ready for this—Loyal. What a crazy few days I’ve had.”
We’re not clicking. I can feel it. This is not the misty-eyed moment of magic for me. There is a void. Maybe she is engaged. Maybe the invitation is waiting for me at home. The evening air suddenly feels chilly.
“Excuse me?”
What? Here it comes. Be classy. Wish her happiness, success, health, and beautiful babies. But they could have been my babies! Our babies!
“But who is this?”
Oh no! She doesn’t even know who I am. The next sound you hear is the hissing from my pretty balloon as it deflates. She’s forgotten. I waited too long. She’s engaged. Yes, that’s it. Maybe she’s married. Maybe she has a kid. No, wait. It’s only been three months.
“Levi. I’m Levi. Levi Crowne. From Bountiful. Remember me?”
Of all the pathetic words ever spoken in the history of the world, and I exaggerate not, they must be remember me uttered in sheer desperation from a male who thinks he might be in love to the girl he thinks/hopes/fantasizes might be in love with him.
“Levi. Oh, Levi. I’m so sorry. We were eating, and it’s kind of noisy here, and I guess I just didn’t expect to hear from you right now.”
Okay, get centered, Levi. She apologized. She didn’t have to. A good sign. Take it, buddy.
“Where did you say you are?”
“Montana.”
“What are you doing there?”
“It’s a long story. The short version is that I flew to North Dakota, and I’m driving my great-uncle back to Utah so that he can live in a retirement home.”
“That sounds very kind of you.”
Kind? No. Very mercenary of me. Six hundred dollars worth of mercenary.
“He’s a great guy. He’s in his eighties. But he’s smart and kind of funny. We’re getting along great. I taught him to fish in a stream today. He seemed to like it. A lot.”
“That’s nice. Fishing. Wow. Fishing.”
I can sense a critical juncture in the conversation. Another one. She does not want this conversation to veer off into the Levi Huntin’ and Fishin’ Manly Outdoors Show. Quick, Levi! Talk to her about something else. Save this conversation! Rise from the depths of loserville!
“How is your summer going?”
“Fine. Good, I guess. Not much to do here. What are you doing? Are you working?”
It was the question I dreaded. No internship. No clerking in a law office. No jumping out of airplanes to fight forest fires. What I am is—alright, philosophers of the world—what I am, which is what Popeye the Sailor Man used to say. At least he had his spinach. And Olyve Oyl.
“I’ve been working at a grocery store. It’s not what I wanted to do, but the hours were good, the people were nice, and I earned enough
money to get me through my senior year. I’ll probably need a job on campus, too, but that’s okay. I know how to work and I don’t mind it.”
That’s it. The truth. I bagged groceries and swept the aisles. I cleaned up the messes little kids left behind. And I’d need to work my way through my senior year. My father is a portrait photographer who charges half of what he could get. That’s why I need to work. Would it matter to Rachel?
If so, she didn’t show it. There is a pause for a couple of seconds and something fairly amazing happens. I stop worrying. I don’t know why, but I stop worrying and I stop trying to think of something clever to say to her. I just stop trying so hard. And the tone of our conversation changes, and the skies seem a little lighter and the air not quite as sticky.
“Do you wear a grocer’s apron?”
“Yes, I do. And I look good in it.”
“I’m sure you do look cute in it. It’s probably a boring job, but if it will pay your school costs, it must be a good job.”
“You’re right. These days, almost any job is a good job. It meets my needs. Like they say.”
“Then it doesn’t matter.”
I liked that answer. It doesn’t matter.
“No, it doesn’t. That sounds like something my Uncle Loyal would say. He’s got a lot of wisdom. I think you’d like him.”
“I’d like to meet him. Loyal. That’s a name of someone who sounds wise. Loyal. It’s a good name. I can’t imagine anyone not understanding life with that kind of name. It just sounds that way.”
I take a risk. “Someday you will meet him. I can work that out.”
I couldn’t quite believe it. I was using Uncle Loyal to score points with a girl. Shameless! Selfish! Trading in on one man’s honor! But I didn’t think he’d mind. And it seemed to work. Note to self: women dig Uncle Loyal.
Road to Bountiful Page 13