White Wasteland by Jeff Kirkham (best color ebook reader .txt) 📕

landed one hand-span trout after another; rainbows, brookies and skinny cutthroats. He caught and released at least two dozen adolescent trout, pausing only to dab Gink on his fly when the churning water drowned it.

After he’d stung every fish in the holes several times over, Evan shivered, soaked in the mist, and decided to beat his retreat before the overhead sun completely abandoned the chasm.

Hours later, as the sun crept earthward, he found his dad lounging on a gravel bar in the middle of three braids of the Bechler, smoking a cigar and tending coffee over a pine twig fire.

Evan waded across the river and joined his old man, the cigar smoke seasoning the air.

“How’d you do at the falls?” his dad asked with a twinkle in his eyes. Evan didn’t carry any fish on a stringer, but that wasn’t unusual. They normally ate only one or two trout the entire trip, so any fish they put in the pan had to be special.

“Outstanding. I caught thirty or forty pan-sizers. How about you?”

“Just one.” His dad pointed the plump cigar toward the water’s edge.

Evan walked closer and saw color in the water. He lifted the willow branch stringer his dad had carved and threaded through the trout’s gills.

The fish bent the stringer in half when he raised it, an absolute beast of a fish. The red, yellow and green racing stripes sparkled all the way up into its emerald, black-spotted head. The snout of the fish hooked like the snotty nose of a pitbull and his belly bulged thick as a coal car. Evan had only seen one or two trout like this in his entire life as a fly fisherman, and never in the Yellowstone backcountry.

“Damn, Dad,” Evan beamed. “You caught the mack daddy of ‘em all.”

His dad took a leisurely drag on his cigar, obviously pleased with himself. Then he said the words that would bedevil Evan for the rest of his adulthood.

"To catch the man-fish, you gotta let the boy-fish be.”

They’d both chuckled at the time. With the setting sun and the sweet stink of the cigar, the moment could hold only grace. But in a thousand quiet moments, particularly after his father’s death, Evan felt the portent of those words, and the weight of his last moments with his father.

In one sentence, his dad had planted time-tempered words of a tribal elder. He both acknowledged Evan as a man and painted the future with aspirations of diligence and humility.

His dad would soon die, and Evan would go on to “become something” in the army—a Green Beret, a special forces operator and then a warrior with broad-ranging license from the CIA itself. After special forces selection, there was never any question in anyone’s mind: Evan had become a man, in every dimension of the word. But the bit of homespun on that gravel bar in the Bechler valley drove Evan toward something more than being just a master at arms. Someday, he would transition from a man to a master, and his dad had given him the roadmap.

To catch the man-fish, you gotta let the boy-fish be.

With equanimity and style, Evan set his heart, in his career as a special forces operator, on the man-fish. He would do the hard thing, when the hard thing needed doing, and leave the easy wins, the petty conflicts and the cheap shots to lesser men.

As Evan sat on the edge of his cot in the dim, cavernous expo mart, in the eye of the storm of the American apocalypse, he felt the weight of his commitment to doing the right thing, and doing it well. But the time had come to face something far more daunting and eternal than war fighting or fly fishing. He had found “the one,” and odds were heavy that he’d already screwed it up.

They’d made a circle of vehicles around the camp area in the exact center of the Expo Mart—the Ferret the up-armored OHVs plus three new Ford Raptors they’d scored on their sojourn down State Street. The trucks formed a wagon circle, set and primed for the “Indians” to attack across the expanse of the empty exhibitor floor. So far, no Indians had come. But Evan felt under siege, even so.

Tanya sat on her cot, with the baby in one arm, stroking the hair of the little girl—Berkley—and laughing about something the girl had said. To Evan, this woman was the ultimate man-fish—the big win. The forever-good-thing. But even after all his wins with a gun, this win might be beyond his capability. The little family had come to mean much more than a romp with a hot mama to him. He could see it now: how these three people could unlock for him a universe of new worlds and the soulful, balls-deep challenge to feed and protect one’s own.

Evan had never seen it before, but the survival of a family—his own family—would be the ultimate bellwether of his manhood; his star Arcturus burning in the night sky, forever north; the final garden, beyond which loomed the gates of immortality.

That night, in Yellowstone backcountry, they’d eaten his father’s trout. They were forced to cut it in three sections to get it to fit in their backpacker’s frying pan. Evan’s dad sprinkled his own seasoning blend from a tiny Ziploc bag over the chunks of sweet meat. The skin browned and curled at the edges, sizzling faintly. Maybe it was just the firelight, but Evan thought he saw something dance in his father’s eyes as he fed his son. Ten thousand hours of roll casting, a hundred trips into the wetlands, and four hundred thousand decisions to pursue meaning over self—all those hard choices landed his father in that moment, with his son, serving him a momentous meal.

The photo of his dad, the one over Evan’s mantle when he returned home from deployment in the Middle East, was taken that afternoon on the sandbar; his dad holding a rainbow trout that culminated a father