Fathers, Sons and Dust in the Wind

The reason for the journey was for two old friends to do again together what they had enjoyed doing together for some 30 years. Since much of what they had come to love in life had been taught to them by their fathers, the fathers came, too. There were Rick--whom I first met when I was 5--and his father, Bill. There were my dad, Robert, and I. When it was over, there were 2,200 more miles on my truck, and who knows how many more miles of the invisible deepenings between fathers and sons and between friends.

We arrived at the mountain vacation home outside Bend, Ore., late in the evening. Outside, the pines rose against a terrifically blue sky, and the local deer--long inured to human activity in this neck of the woods--browsed the local grasses and gardens. A goose flew by so low overhead you could hear its wing joints squeaking.

Inside, the call of the evening was poker. Bill sat at the head of the table, dressed in the red velvet coverall that had been his favorite for the last couple of years. Rick sat down a drink in front of his dad--vodka martini on the rocks, two olives. We toasted and started the game.

My father had taught me the basics of poker when I was a kid, and they have put me in decent stead, so far as poker is concerned, ever since. Dad’s basic stance: make ‘em pay to see your cards. Sitting across from him at the table, I admired his customary bravado with the cards and money. I also noted his uneasiness with the somewhat wild games that Rick and I began to call--evolutions from weekly poker parties that began for us in high school.

Due to intricacies too complex to explain here, Dad lost a game--and a sizable pot--with an ace-five straight flush. After much argument and explanation, he surrendered the loot and vowed not to play that game again. Rick grinned, harvesting the chips.

“What d’ya think of that, Bill?” asked his son.

Bill, squarely positioned behind his drink, said nothing.

Although I had been observing Rick in poker games for some 2 1/2 decades, I was impressed again by his nearly infallible memory for which cards had been played, which ones were still in the deck, and his penetrating sense of who was going to do what next. I could almost hear the binary whirrings in his brain as he sat to my left and--somewhat like Magic Johnson used to do--seemed to sense the play before it happened. His poker face is good, though occasionally betrays a winner through the hyperfocus of his eyes. This is when you fold.

The game went late, as poker games tend to do. When it was over, no one had won or lost significantly, so spirits were genial, and well-lubricated by Bill’s hallmark martinis. In the wide silence of 3 a.m. we departed to our separate beds.

“We’ll do Bill tomorrow,” said Rick.

“OK,” I said back.

Tomorrow found us on a huge patch of land, participating in another sport taught to us by our fathers--shooting. Bill, unable now to handle firearms, sat on the hood of the truck. Rick set up his bird thrower--a springed contraption anchored to a car tire--and we opened up our cases of bright orange clay targets and got out the shotguns.

There is a singular thrill to tracking and knocking down a flying disk at 60 yards. Trap is a game of geometry and anticipation. All those Euclidean truths we labored to grasp in high school manifest themselves plainly with one good shot.

Again I observed my father, who had taught me to shoot when I was perhaps 10 or 12. Although he long ago lost most of his interest in the sport, it was easy to see the almost native grace with which he can swing a trap gun, acquire his target, and, with patience and concentration, turn the clay bird from a bright orange saucer to a puff of black smoke against a blue sky. He was a gunner on a bomber in the Korean War and became so proficient at it that he was tapped to teach the skill to other servicemen.

Something of that old dark talent is still in him, tempered--beautifully, I think--by a mature man’s knowledge that guns kill and are never to be taken lightly or without full appreciation of the tragedy they can abet.

“Too bad Bill can’t shoot,” Rick observed.

“He’d have loved this,” I noted.

“Remember that kind of jump-up style he had? Shooting trap like he was popping up from cover?”

“He looked like a jack-in-the-box.”

How many shoots had Bill guided us on? How many safety lectures had he given us?

“We’ll take him up to the headwaters of the Metolius,” Rick said. “It’s his favorite place.”

The Metolius River is famed in angling circles as one of the finest in the country. It is also one of the most gorgeous rivers in the state of Oregon, and it was fast and heavy then with runoff from Bend’s brutal winter.

What is perhaps most amazing about the Metolius is that it springs from the earth from a source that scientists have still been unable to locate, some underground river too deep and mysterious to track until it spills out at the headwaters, gurgling clean and pure from the ground.

Here, the Metolius begins. A scant quarter mile from these springs, the river flows fully born, winding its way through the forest. We stood there at the headwaters, four men rendered silent by the continuing birth of this river. It was a place of life and of beginnings.

Rick held his father now. Rick opened the red velvet coverall, reached his hand into the box inside it, and tossed a handful of ashes into the water easing up from below the earth.

“Well, Bill,” Rick said. “You were great, and I loved you. Thanks, Dad.”

Many handfuls followed. Some of the dust vanished into the breeze, but most of the ashes settled into pools or onto the dark rocks. Human ashes are heavier than you think, not like what’s left over in the bed of a campfire. There’s a heft to them, a graininess.

Someone read something from the Bible. Some of Bill stayed right there, hunkered in the birthing Metolius. Some of him joined the building current and moved downriver into the open water.