We’re All The Trout

We’re all the Trout

By Matthew Allen Thornton

Life’s not always easy, you know? Before I could form a proper sentence, my folks split up, before I could even talk. I grew up not knowing my real father. Out of that came aggression and fear. I didn’t know how to act, really, how to be. A boy raised by a woman, something deeper than time, some sort of instinct led me outside. Innumerable days were spent chasing lizards, hunting birds, and burning up the energy of my youth. As I grew, so did the darkness of my past. It turned into more aggression. I was angry. I didn’t fit in with kids who had parents. We were poor and broken, half a family at best.

At age five, Mom married my stepdad, David. David was definitely in over his head. Coming along, marrying a woman with two kids, and we were wild. My sister hated him. I was glad to have a male role model, but was still full of the ramifications of my early years. Things began to stabilize in our outside world but trouble stirred in the current below the surface.

At around age ten, things started boiling over. I was on a bird-killing rampage with my Red Rider BB gun. I was experiencing emotions of remorse. Not knowing what to do with my power, my rage, or just any of it. David, was working hard as ever to financially support the family and had no time to show me, but it was still great to have him around. He was young and trying to figure out how to carve out a living.

Ultimately, we moved to Oregon where David remembered, maybe from his youth and his youthful angst, that he would burn off the energy in New Zealand by mountaineering and fly fishing. Which to him meant climbing up on his belly and dabbing a fly for a large trout. Maybe he saw the same thing in me that was in him all of those years, that is maybe in all of us. That causes us to enact suffering and then in the same moment experience joy and elation.

So he began to take me fishing. We didn’t talk much back then. We never really did. We just aren’t that family. Maybe it’s our lack of blood relation or maybe just a style thing. Regardless, there on the banks of the Santiam River, I got to experience what I needed most. I got to see my idol, this mountain of a man, David, melt into a little boy. To play again, to whiz line & hurl deceptive bundles of feathers and fur into moving water. To try to trick a pea-brained animal by triggering its prehistoric instincts.

I’m older now and after having thousands of wild trout dance for me, I’m looking for the through line. I have decided that we’re all the trout. We’re all the suffering. We’re all the bugs. We’re all the river. We’re all the mountains. We’re all the air. We’re all the panic & glory. We’re all the ego, all the soul.

I am so lucky to still have a choice. So grateful to still have a choice. I’m so wanting to listen well. To enact restoration just like those that came before me.

Bringing home the wilderness

This is a new way of being. Not just today but always. It can not be learned but it can be experienced. Through love, through discipline through wilderness emersion. 

You feel the wild call. It can hardly be captured by words. The binary fails to articulate. The life threat. The smallness of self. The humility taught through experience. Go, get your ass handed to you by a steep cliff, a rock wall, by a rapid or a wave. You may in that moment only for a second understand humility. Embody it. Know it through body. Which is the only way to really know anything. This is not a revolution of idea or intellect, but a revolution of whole being. At onement with yourself and all creation. Stop attacking anyone, for anything, least of all yourself. Sit, near a river, breath, and be and play and laugh and cry and sing and dance and sweat and shout with all the you are. The tender moment, being broken is what brings the change. Is where the power of impermanence thrives, shines, emerges, shows up. Decentralized experiential hive mind. Lay haggard on a mountain side, close to death. Swing yourself to total physical depleation. Then listen to your body there. You’ll come to know yourself in spirit and in truth. To love yourself without distraction.

The revolution is at hand. The revolution is within.

Faith And Fishlessness

Yesterday, after a long hike on a secret river, I came to a run, deep, bouldery, and fishy. This was my third trip to this hidden gem and I'd been skunked each trip. Gin clear water, the need for exercise, and fabled monster steelhead keep me coming back. This particular run was as far up as the Boom dog and I have ever been. My past failures ever present in my mind, I swung the run casually, no real ambition, just kinda watching the line get swept this way and that, willing it over and around the rocks. The occasionally obligatory hang up. Half way down the run, right where the fast water meets the slow I sloped out a tired, half hearted double spey and watched the fly get swept under, trail out of site. Mid swing, half a second before it straightened, three hard heart throbbing tugs and “hoot hoot”! Her scales glinted in the sun as the fish came fully out of the water. I swear, we made direct eye contact. She looked at me as if to say, " theres no way in hell you’re taking my picture". Turned her head and bombed down stream. In a split second she was a couple hundred feet down stream. I clumsily gave chase, slipping, thrashing about and trying to gain some ground. The power of her fin wins again. That fish spat my hook. Left me stunned and staring at the boom dog, asking him what happened?

Maybe I should have risked braking her off. Maybe I should have battled to keep her in the run. Honestly, I think I gave up hope that I would hook a fish. Kinda forgot I was fishing and just acted as if I where hiking and practicing casting. I missed it. I had her, she shook me, I missed it. After three decades of fishing, I should have known, I should have stopped that fish. Sometimes they just get away and there's nothing you can do. This time I think I could have managed a little better. With a little more hope, with a little more poise. I want a nice calm even tension. To live the paradox that I love. To expect but relax. A faith in fishlessness. Cast swing step, hope, believe, feel disappointed, feel gratitude, feel cold, feel wet. Love the animal but chase it and pierce it. Let it go, catch it again then let to go. Spend time money and energy, on a bush plane on a jet boat and get there and stand there and get nothing and be happy. Hike for miles, even days to find the right spot, get nothing, do it again. Check the tide charts, up at 4am, travel travel travel and when the moment comes, your mesmerized by the place. How to stay present? breath deep, in the chest and the belly. look around though thick forest in tepid water, you stand, observe yourself. Bring a friend, laugh and play.