know that this day
this sweet golden day
this bright manly day
is like the clear river
There’s a light in the western mountains at the end of the day. After the heat of the afternoon and before the sage turns purple and black in the last of the light. It’s then that the day puts away its expectations and the air becomes suffused and golden. The light that spreads is the light of memory.
It’s been twelve years now since I took a trip with our two boys, then ten and fourteen — a winding, ten-day road trip, free from care and filled with play through the borderlands of Montana and Idaho.
Lewis and Clark country; perfect for dreaming, for shooting slingshots and skipping rocks, for making snares and bows and arrows from green branches. Imagining ourselves as scouts for that Corps of Discovery. Setting camp by the very same creeks as they, in the very same valleys as they, now two hundred years past. The land is little changed since. Only we have changed.
Sawtooth, Bitterroot, Teton. Ranges that pierce the azure of that July summer. Ragged peaks that contend with the timeless sky. The mountain west, my love for over forty years now. Ever they stand at the edge of my mind; ever reminding, never forgetting, always asking.
The poet David Whyte speaks of questions that can make or unmake a life, “questions that have no right to go away”. There are also questions that only I have the right to ask of myself and, harder by far, that only I can bear to hear the answer. Am I a good man… am I a good father?
Towards the end of the trip, at the close of another golden day, we stopped to rest on the shore of the Snake River. There, near Idaho Falls where, just to the east, the Snake takes its long course to the north where it joins the mighty Columbia, and then to the sea. A river that drains half a continent.
The boys, as boys always will, threw rocks into the river. And they threw sticks, then rocks at the sticks — and I, as fathers always do, stood guard behind. Watching the river. Ready for action should it leap its banks and endanger my boys, my treasure. Am I a good man?… Am I a good father?
There are memories which fuse themselves into permanence. This scene, this not-yet-evening is one of them. My journal from July 27, 2012 reads:
Stopped for a break on the Snake River near Swan Valley. Caleb and Ben walked down to the water and into the river up to their ankles, throwing rocks.
The river there, especially as seen from the level of the water, is broad and muscular, about a third of a mile wide and flowing inexorably, at a speed and power which cannot be contested.
As I look at the boys from behind while they play in the water, embraced within the amber light of evening, I realize I am seeing a metaphor. The mighty river will take them. It will not be denied. Soon enough, they will enter its course and make their own way down its course. And I cannot go with them. This is the way of things.
There are questions that change us in the asking. answers that mold us by their obscurity. Answers that are generations in the making, yet give only half-assurance and thereby become questions in themselves.
There are memories that bring us joy and grief and longing, all in equal measure. This is the way of things.
We live in the in-between. Between the scenes that make up our stories and the scenery that makes up our days. Between memories that rise from the plain and questions that dwell in the borderlands.
Am I a good man? Yes, as good as any.
Am I a good father? Yes, for all my faults, yes.
