Knee deep in shared water
ALTHOUGH I WAS BORN IN New York City and caught my first fish in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I have spent more of my adult life in Montana than in any other state. Perhaps because our kids were born there, it feels more like home than any of the other places we’ve lived and worked: Aruba or Morocco or Mongolia or Japan, for example, countries with their own consolations and contradictions.
In the summer of 2019, however, something happened to me, only a few miles away from the Bitterroot Valley house that my wife and I had purchased 25 years earlier. For many months after this incident, I wondered if I would ever think of Montana as home again — or even think of it at all without an accompanying deluge of shame and anger.
Perhaps the timing had something to do with it: midday, on the Fourth of July. I’d just finished mowing the lawn and was ready for a break from yardwork. Because the weather was sunny and warm, I grabbed my fly rod and drove to a favorite spot — Poker Joe,
