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This past July I was fly fishing a particularly beautiful stretch of the Conejos River in South Central Colorado. Up above 10,000 feet elevation, the canyon water, mostly melted snow from the towering peaks all around me, rushed hard and fast downhill, crashing into one bend and then crossing over itself and slamming into the next like a stir-crazy kid stuck in his bedroom. Breaking the pace from time-to-time, it would slow down enough to speed-walk through a short meadow until it eventually lagged and loitered into what is Platoro Reservoir just a few hundred yards below where I was stationed. Up in the canyon all civilization ceases to exist. The smells and sounds of city life are replaced with the fragrance of fresh mountain rain and the whisper of innocence.

Just looking up at the remains of snow-capped peaks, you could just swear that you could touch the last spindly trees that made up the tree line if you reached far enough. Just out of reach, that romantic idealism makes you swear it would be but the work of a few minutes trek uphill to be the king of the world. As it is, at 10,000 you are at least a prince. That lack of oxygen that affects the trees also has a profound effect on the lungs of this man used to fishing muddy water 9,000 feet closer to the elevation of the ocean. So casting away my romantic feelings toward altitude sickness, I settled instead for a lesson in hard-nosed brown trout and what turned into a great lesson in life.



I was working a fascinating bend. The water, in its crash course, ran hard against a ledge rock that stretched straight up into the sky for forty feet, a beautiful ambush spot for any cougar with a taste for ignorant flatlanders. The water that rushed past the ledge couldn't have come up past my knees, yet it held a few selective brown trout that had, to that point, passed up my offerings. Despite swearing that I was matching the hatch of mayflies that presently buzzed the water (and many of which became trout food for the eager fish swirling around the run) my imitations possessed a quality that these educated fish deemed unacceptable.



Now it's during these moments where fish are eating, just not what you are feeding them, that a fly fisherman's mind goes to work. All thoughts of the job back home, bills, affairs of the heart, or anything else which causes tension in the shoulders seems to leak out of the fly fisherman's brain, out his ears, and disperses into thin air. To fill the empty vacuum, primal thoughts filter in. Mathematical equations subconsciously manipulate statistics present to the situation: air temperature, water temperature, sunlight or shade, dew point, air pressure and the like. These, the brain quickly cuts and pastes into a Pythagorean Theorm which will not tell of the length of the third side of a triangle, but more importantly, why in the heck a fish isn't biting down on your hook.



So as automatically as I am breathing right now, I casted, picked up my line, and re-casted, all the while, going over the inventory of my fly box in the hopes that I might have a more suitable offering, knowing that it wasn't in the stars for me to catch the monster brown who glided through the run, taunting me. It is also during these primal moments that the brain begins to wander from the water up the cliffs to the mountain tops like one singing and dancing through a musical with high-mountain meadows which are full of the sound of music. And it was in the motion of looking up that I noticed what was blatently staring me in the face: the aforementioned life-long lesson.



Not five feet above the water, nestled in a crack in the rock monolith, sat a nest of twigs, dried grass, and three chirping baby birds whose music could wake the dead. For all my concentration I hadn't noticed them in the twenty minutes I had been pounding the water, but there they were, sticking their heads out of the crack and incessantly crying like a group of boys on a playground when a bully takes away their ball. Now at first I thought that I was the cause of such commotion and as a fisherman first, I considered that they might have been doing this for quite some time, alerting the fish to an intruder much the way the cawing of a damned old crow interlopes between a stalking hunter and his massive whitetail. But in the matter of a second between nano thoughts, my theory was blown up and the resolution of my lack of fly-fishing prowess returned; they couldn't care about me because they had seen their mother come flying in with lunch.



I call it lunch, but it was more of a tiny snack than anything. She opened her mouth and the three little mouths were silenced for the better part of a thought before she flew away again. It struck me as an opportune time to sit down and eat my own little snack, a package of cheese crackers. Back on solid ground at the edge of the water, I watched the nest with particular interest. The three chicks kept their heads poked out of the crack in anticipation, and after no more than two crackers of my own, she returned to the cheers of her little ones.

I tried to refocus on the task at hand, possibly waiting for the dirtied water to "re-virginize" in my absence, but no matter how long I looked up into the sky at the fluttering of mayflies and back down into my box for their proper imitation, my attention was always returned to the crack in the wall and the joyous cheers of three little ones as the mother returned every two minutes with more food. This went on for thirty minutes, the mother never tiring, never sitting down, never ceasing. When I did pick up my tired old bones, I walked upstream to a new hole, a new hope, and a new beginning, but my primal thoughts didn't return the science and math of tricking a wise old brown trout. All I could think of was the connection between this tireless mother and to my own life, and to the lives of children and parents everywhere.

What if human parenthood were spent in the same ratio of service to our children as opposed to the service of our own selfish pursuits as this mother bird's had?