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This River

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James Brown is the author of four novels and the memoir "The Los Angeles Diaries" (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2003).

This river is more than 800 miles from my home in Southern California. This river is wide and passes through steep, mountainous terrain. In the winter salmon fight their way upstream to spawn here, and then die. I come in the summer when the migration of the salmon has passed. I come with my sons, Logan and Nate, driving more than 10 hours to reach this spot on the Chetco River in Oregon where I spread my father’s ashes 12 years before. In a few days, I will spread my brother’s ashes along these same waters.

Nate, only 9, finds the box in the bed of my truck while we’re setting up camp. He holds it to his ear and shakes it.

“What’s this?” he says. “Something’s rattling.”

“Those are bones,” I say.

He makes a face, putting down the box.

“That’s your Uncle Barry,” Logan tells him, “the one dad always talks about.”

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK,” I say. “Just put the box up front in the truck.”

Though I have my responsibilities, this trip is not a simple sojourn for the dead. It is instead as it should be, about the living, about teaching my sons what my father taught me.

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This is not your usual campground. there are no bathrooms. No picnic benches. Out here you are alone. During the day my sons strip down to their swim trunks and play in the river. I watch them from a portable chair, glancing up now and then from the book I’m reading, a memoir called “Running With Scissors.” It’s about a boy and his unfortunate childhood. I look at my own boys, knowing they too have suffered. For them it was the unnecessary and sudden death of their mother. For them it is my struggle with mental illness, alcohol and drugs. I would like to tell them that there will be no more episodes, no slips, that the other father, the sick one, is gone. I would like to promise them the stability that all children deserve. But there are no guarantees for people like me, and I know I will let them down again.

Toward sunset we gather the fishing gear. The evening is warm and the smell of the surrounding ferns and redwoods is thick and sweet. Logan is old enough to bait his own line, but this is Nate’s first time and he needs help. I show him how to thread a night crawler onto the hook. I show him how to cast it out, over the shoulder, as my father taught me.

“Keep your line taut,” I say, “and when you get a bite, jerk up on it.”

“What’s a bite feel like?”

I notice the tip of his pole dip.

“That’s one,” I say.

“Should I pull up?”

“If it strikes again. Be ready.”

“I’m ready,” he says, and he says it seriously. He stares at the tip of his pole, all focus and concentration, and with the next bite he pulls up and hooks it.

“I got it,” he says. “I got it. I got it.”

It’s a classic moment for any father--watching your child excited, reeling in his first fish. Unfortunately, this one is hardly more than a minnow, and Logan feels compelled to point out the obvious. It is the job of all supportive older brothers to squelch the joy of younger siblings.

“Yeah,” he says, “you caught a sardine.”

“Shut up,” Nate says.

“You shut up.”

“At least I caught something.”

I am, at this point, struggling to remove the hook from the fish’s tiny mouth without killing it, and I don’t need any distractions. In the minute this process takes I’ve worked up a sweat, and it is with considerable relief that I toss the baby trout back into the river, only to watch it float belly up.

“Damn,” I say.

“We should’ve kept it,” Nate says.

“You wasted a life,” Logan says.

“I didn’t. Dad did.”

“Knock it off,” I say. “Both of you.”

The current catches the fish, pulls it under and away, so that soon it’s out of sight. But there are more where it came from, and larger. Inside of an hour they’ve caught their limit and we’re headed back to camp, the boys eager for their first fresh trout dinner.

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This is the third and last afternoon that we spend on the Chetco River. Logan is taking a nap in the tent. Nate is at the river’s edge stacking rocks in a circle, building a prison for the salamanders he catches. At last count he had 29, but they keep escaping. While he’s reinforcing the walls of his salamander prison, I go to the truck for my brother’s ashes. Taped to one side of the box is an envelope, and in it I find a document, a Permit for Disposition of Human Remains, the decedent listed as Donald Barry Brown. Age: 27. At the bottom is our father’s signature, acknowledging receipt of this document, and I wonder what it’s like to sign off on your son’s remains. I have saved my brother’s ashes all these years, hoping my sister and I could make this trip together. But I let too much time slip away. She, too, is gone.

I walk to the water’s edge.

I close my eyes.

I pray for my brother. I pray with gratitude for the time we had together, however brief, and I tell him that I love him. That I never stopped loving him. Then I open my eyes. I open the box and walk into the water.

Cancer took our father at 76, and for Barry, depressed and alcoholic, it came by his own hand, a single shot to the head. The ash and bone are a dull white. I wade into the water up to my waist and slowly spread this ash, this bone, a handful at a time, watching the current pull it down and away.

“Hey ..., “ Nate shouts.

I turn around, but he’s not calling out to me. His brother has just emerged from the tent, still groggy from his nap.

“Hey, I got 31 salamanders.”

This winter the salmon will travel thousands of miles across the ocean to reach the freshwater breeding grounds of their birth. They are guided, my father told me, by the sun, the stars and the magnetic pull of the Earth. As a boy he fished here with his father at the mouth of this river, when the salmon came. Like the Chetco Indians hundreds of years before, my father and his father used spears to stab the fat 30-pounders and snatch them out of the water. Someday I’d like to try that.

These are my thoughts as we’re packing to leave, rolling up the sleeping bags, taking down the tents. It’s early in the morning now and a light rain has begun to fall.

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On the long ride back, I will tell my sons stories about the grandfather they never met, the uncle they never knew. I want them to remember. I want all of us to remember, and I hope to return to this place. I hope, someday, for all of us to stand on the banks of this river, spears in hand, poised to throw, as the rush of salmon make their final way home.

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