Catching big fish in Idaho was too easy for Gary Willman. Back when the steelhead limit was 30 per year, he would put 29 on the grill or in the freezer, then catch and release # 30 repeatedly. He stopped using any equipment except a fly rod and flies he tied himself. For trout he limited himself to one pattern, a wet fly with dubbed muskrat body and soft pheasant hackle.
Normal life in the US was too easy for Gary. He loved rural Korea and rural Mexico, and hated technology. He wanted to live in the French Marquesas islands like Thor Heyerdaal had, and researched them diligently. When he discovered that Fatu Hiva had a cell tower, he was distressed. He did not have a regular job after about age 40 (too easy) and lived on hunting, fishing, gardening, foraging, and salvaging. He put away his rifle and compound bow (too easy) and most years harvested deer and elk with a recurve and wooden arrows.
When we met, Gary was training for overseas service with New Tribes Mission in Jackson Michigan. I was a recent college graduate, just about to start an engineering job, in enthusiastic pursuit of Gary and Emily’s beautiful oldest daughter. Kim and I were crazy about each other, I treated her respectfully, and everyone I knew thought we were a great match. With youthful pride, I thought Gary and Emily would be happy that we were together.
Kim and I flew back to Michigan. Gary was not enthusiastic to meet me. His condescending tone was one that would normally be reserved for a junior high student who is having difficulty following simple directions. Later, when I asked him for his blessing prior to my proposal to Kim, he said without apparent interest, “Sure, whatever, it’s up to her.”
(Two digressions, told from a present-day perspective, will help explain. 1) I’ve learned that for many young men, this blessing conversation doesn’t go well. Gary’s flat response was probably in the middle of the future father-in-law bell curve. 2) I found out 30 years later that Gary believed Kim and I had been sleeping together, and that had dominated his first impression of me. Actually Kim and I had not, and we later had an awkwardly wonderful honeymoon backpacking in Canada. (But now I am two digressions removed from the story, and remembering that tent in the rain makes it unlikely I’ll return at all unless it happens with a full stop right now.))
As the years passed my yearly visits with Gary in Riggins grew increasingly tense. It seemed that prior to our arrival he would choose a topic designed to teach me a lesson. The conversations would start with him asking me a leading question: “Do you think the Bible means what it says?” “Do you think Catholics are saved?” “Who do you think is behind wolf reintroduction?” and follow on to hours of one-sided discussion about 6-day creation, the worship of icons, and liberal conspiracies. Perhaps for him these arguments were merely amusing recreation; for me they were exhausting. Recalling these yearly harangues, I can’t remember a kind word that he said to me or about me. Our yearly visits shrank from three nights to two, and I spent more time on runs.
I admired Gary’s intelligence, faith, and parenting. He had raised Kim to be an energetic, intrepid, clean-hearted young woman. He was skillful with tools and engines. I liked him and wanted to be more like him. Sometimes we fished, and one Thanksgiving morning he put me on to two nice steelhead. But our relationship just kept getting further off the rails, and neither of us showed the courage or initiative to correct the course.
After a couple decades of tension, to my shame, I gave up. I smiled and gave evasive non-answers to whatever topic Gary chose. Nothing he said could get me to engage or care. I became the condescending one; in a college-educated, old-earth, ecumenical, wolf-tolerating sort of way. He was the one getting exhausted now.
In 2016 I attended a men’s retreat taught by my friend and mentor, Dave Gibson. His topic was the stages of relationship that men often have with their fathers. The stages are something like: Expectation, Disappointment, Anger, Disengagement, Compassion, Reconciliation. Dave told of how his relationship with his own father had followed this pattern all the way to reconciliation, and the joy this had brought both of them. I thought “I’m 50 years old but I’ve been acting like a child. I can take the initiative to reconcile with Gary!”, and my heart beat with anticipation.
I never spoke with Gary again. A few months later, on my next trip to Riggins, I picked up a cardboard container with his ashes from the funeral home. He had suddenly died at age 73.
But all of this angst has merely been the preamble; the backstory. Now the real story begins.
Last October I spent 10 days in New Mexico, working in the Los Alamos office, and taking local photos, while Kim stayed in Idaho. One evening after work I parked at the almost empty trailhead to Cerro Grande to take a fast evening hike to the summit and a few photos. I caught up with a trail runner who had shoe problems. “Want to hike together?” “Sure.” “You are pretty comfortable hiking at 9000 feet,” I said. “It’s no problem,” he said, “I’m a trekking guide in the Chinese Himalayas.” “Really,” I said, “which part?” (I had lived and hiked in the Chinese Himalayas for six years.) “Oh, down around …” he said.
After reminiscing about mutual friends and places we knew together, I said “Let’s keep in touch.” “Sure,” he said, “could I have your contact info?” After I gave it to him, he looked at me incredulously and said, “You are already in my phone!” (My contact info is in very few phones.) Two people who had connected because of a shared interest in an obscure Chinese minority group were now 10 years later the only two people on a trail in New Mexico, and a blown out trail running shoe had caused us to hike together.
The China connection and the New Mexico connection had nothing in common. The chance of our meeting randomly was astronomically low. We both felt as if God had arranged the meeting, but we had no idea why. Later a friend said, “Sometimes God does things like that, just to remind you that He exists, and that He can.”
That night, conscious of God’s existence, as I slept alone in the company condo in Los Alamos, I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life.
Gary Willman and I were both about 30 years old, in the prime of life, fly-fishing on the same trout stream. He looked remarkably like the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It. We looked at each other, nodded, smiled, and casted. We were totally at peace with each other, and genuinely happy to meet. Just like in Idaho, I could cast further, but he caught more fish. He had a nice one on now. “Joe,” he said, “come look at this!!” It was a brook trout, about 16 inches, blocky, square-tailed, a soft-hackle in its lip, glistening underwater in the sun. “Look at the colors on that guy!” he said, as he released him. Gary and I were completely in the moment and completely satisfied, as friends who have just caught a great fish together can be.
I woke up. I smelled the pine trees outside the condo. I thought, “That was Gary and me in heaven! That was our relationship as it will be, and as it was supposed to have been on earth, if we hadn’t both been such buttheads!” God in heaven was still on my mind, so I self-edited: “...I mean, hadn’t both been such blockheads!”
Thirty years of chronic low-grade family conflict has been cured by a miracle and dream.
Gary, I always respected you more than you realized or that I let on. I’ll bet it was the same with you. I am not surprised that you are in heaven. I am happy that there are brook trout there. You probably are aware of this, but Emily is doing great, and your daughter is an amazing wife and mother. Thank you! I am looking forward to seeing you in heaven. If I die tomorrow, I’ll see you tomorrow.
Joe
PS - Sometimes in the fall, wolf packs will hang around streams to pick off spawning brook trout, watch your back! (What’s that? Too soon in the relationship for a joke? Yes, sir, you are probably right.)