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Coevolving with the structure of the brain, language freed the mind from the animal to be creativity, thence to enter and imagine other worlds infinite in time and space.
—Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity
The truth is, I am a dreamer. This used to be a well-known fact about me. It was a frequent criticism. My father claimed I daydreamed in the crib. “What is he thinking about?” Mark daydreams in school. Daydreaming is not considered good. I suspect that my accusers had no idea the extent of my daydreaming. I was in an alternate universe most of the time. Only those who do daydream understand that this is strength, not a weakness.
I enjoyed the real world, but enjoying the other one is how I became a writer. I had conversations with myself about ideas, about people, about many things, and I enjoyed these conversations with myself.
Now you may be thinking “This is why he spends so much time fishing, because it gives him time to be alone daydreaming.” That is the complete opposite of the truth. The wonderful thing about fly fishing is that it affords freedom from thinking. It is the only time when the dream stops.
A good fly fisher is utterly thoughtless. The mind is working but you are thinking about what insects are hatching, what is floating in the river, where is the river swift and where does it break into still pools. Your mind turns into nothing more than a fish brain. You try to think like a trout. Fly-fishing requires that kind of concentration. A trout is focused on survival and I assume it has no time for abstractions. Neither does a good fisher.
I fish the Big Wood in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter when few other fishermen are there to disturb my concentration, unbothered by the beavers stripping black bark from the cottonwoods. or the elk staring down at me from the steep sage brush mountains, or even a giant moose wandering down to the river to eat willow buds. My interest is rainbow trout, as beautiful an animal as nature has ever offered.
In the winter of 2012, I had just turned 63—I was watching my artificial black spikey midge drift in the Big Wood trying to lure a rainbow trout along a deep trench on the opposite bank. Maybe it would work better with a drop, a second fly—perhaps a larger dry fly floating on the surface where I could see it. Then I thought about how Hemingway fished the Big Wood with two drops, three flies in all.
Now I was lost. My mind had slipped into that other world. It is true that to be in Ketchum and never think about Hemingway is as unlikely as being in Sherwood Forest with not a thought of Robin Hood. I thought not about the rainbow trout but about the fact that only a half mile upriver along the bank Hemingway had stood behind his house and blown his head off with a shotgun—literally nothing left of his head but fragments along the black-trunked cottonwood bank, maybe some even in the river where trout and merganser ducks might feed on it.
Then came a shocking revelation. I was older than Hemingway ever lived to be. I was now older than the grizzled old man who called himself Papa,— older than that battle-worn, thinning white haired, stooped old Papa ever lived to be. This made me feel quite old, realizing that the old man in all the pictures around town was actually younger than me. But it was not an entirely negative feeling. I also had a feeling of liberation, as though I had outlived his ghost. I had a whole life ahead of me that Hemingway never had.
I had post-Hemingway years—decades, I hoped.
Until then, it had felt like Papa had followed me everywhere. He was certainly an inescapable presence here in Ketchum, where every bar and restaurant had Hemingway memorabilia.
I started thinking about how many of the places that were important in my life had also been Hemingway places. I had spent much of my life not only with the ghost of Hemingway, but around people who were still obsessed with that ghost and a few who had even been with the actual living Hemingway and would never forget him.
