Jim Maffett and I were casting into a small Montana trout hole almost 30 miles from the nearest road. Specifically, we were standing beside the South Fork of the Flathead River, in a million-acre refuge called the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Jim unfurled a perfectly undulating line across the water, a line that didn’t hit the surface until the fly itself settled lightly down.

Jim wears an impressive handlebar mustache and can tell you about the time a then-unknown band called ZZ Top played his high school prom. He’s my next-door neighbor back in Woodford County, KY, and since my wife and I moved to the country 10 years ago, he has been a kind of mentor to me in many things rural, from repairing riding mowers to spotting oriole nests. He stopped fishing, observed my shaky casting for a minute, then said, “You’re arcing your rod too much. You want it to follow a straight line. Imagine your rod and your line forming a T. Move that T back and forth.” Then Jim reminded me, as a form of encouragement, that he’s been at this for 50 years—“as long as you’ve been alive.”

It’s true I only recently took up flyfishing, and I often feel that I’ve come at it too late to get any good. There’s so much to know about technique, about flies, about how trout think and where they do their thinking. But the Westslope cutthroat trout is a forgiving fish, and on the Flathead, anglers have caught upwards of 80 a day, or at least they’ll tell you they have. The propensity for prevarication is of course legendary when it comes to the subject of men and fish. But even given that, Jim and I were landing trout on nearly every 10^th cast. It isn’t that cutthroats are the dunderheaded cousins of the trout family; it’s just that few people make the effort—and it is an effort—to come this far into the backlands of our nation, armed with bear spray and fishing rods. So, when an artificial fly does land unexpectedly on the surface of the water, the cutthroat tends to pounce.

About 100 million years ago, molten rock began thrusting upward from the west, forcing tectonic plates to grind and fold this land into mountains that rose along north-south fault lines. The result was what we now call the Rocky Mountain Front, which runs down the eastern spine of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, known to many simply as “the Bob.” For nine hours, Jim and I, along with two other men, rode four Tennessee Walkers—agile mountain horses—over that range and down into a wide rift valley scoured by glaciers. In some places, the trail was a foot wide and dropped with precipitous alarm into steep hanging meadows filled with asters, columbine and Indian paintbrush. Nowhere had I ever seen beauty and the specter of death jostle one another at such close range. And as we descended around brilliant alpine lakes and across spring-fed streams, I thought: This is the way to truly see this country—slowly, on horseback, without a human-made thing in sight.

I had come to the Bob for many reasons, one of which was the absence of liquor stores and bars. I took up flyfishing in part because I thought it would be a good substitute for drinking, and I really needed to quit drinking. Many people said so: my wife, Melissa; her twin sister; my gastroenterologist. But one of the great problems with kicking booze is all the time it leaves on your hands, all the hours you used to fill letting one vodka soda slide unnoticeably into the next until it was time to pass out. But fly casting helped fill the hours. In a field in front of his house, Jim drove wooden stakes into the ground, demarking 30 feet, 40 feet, on up to 80. When Jim first tried teaching me how to cast, he could hit 80 with ease; I could barely hit 30. But when I was jonesing for a drink, or just needed to fill some time, I went up to Jim’s and casted. And I got better. Slowly.

I attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and tried to ignore, as an agnostic, all the messaging about how only God could save me from myself. I did, on some level, want what those people had: a second chance, an attitude that sobriety was a gift, not a punishment, and the ability to look someone else in the eye. But I didn’t quit drinking, not altogether. Then one night I crashed drunk into Melissa’s favorite piece of furniture, our Noguchi coffee table. When the noise woke her, she came running into the living room to find me lying in a pile of shattered glass, bleeding. She used the one word I had always feared: embarrassed. Things had to change. I agreed to a week at a local detox facility. After the heavy doors slammed shut behind me, a male nurse examined my anal cavity for contraband, then took away my shoelaces and belt. He even took my watch, explaining that I might pry off its back and try to slit my wrists with the inner workings. My roommate was a former jockey who loved meth and had even loved his stepmother until he grew to suspect she was behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. “Let’s go to sleep and not think about that,” I suggested.

When the noise woke her, she came running into the living room to find me lying in a pile of shattered glass, bleeding. She used the one word I had always feared: embarrassed.

There were no windows, and yet I felt a painful flow of traffic moving past the unit at all hours, drivers oblivious to our damage, our cravings, our presence. The nurses took our blood pressure four times a day and monitored how badly our hands shook; the pharmacist dispensed phenobarbital to make sure I didn’t seize or generally crack up. When Melissa finally came to collect my sorry self, I emerged into the sun carrying a pink plastic mug the nurses had written my name on. I filled it with lime LaCroix and we headed home.

“Can you do it?” Melissa asked hopefully.

“I can do it,” I replied. “There’s no other choice.”

But my exposure to burned-out counselors and their rather obvious advice had convinced me I wasn’t going to spend the next two weeks in IOP—intense outpatient rehab. I decided to create for myself the best rehab I could imagine: two weeks of flyfishing in Montana.

Jim had invited me on the trip months before. His friend Chuck, an architect who had built Jim’s house decades earlier, was organizing the adventure. I had hedged at first, thinking I’d be out of my depth, and that I would embarrass myself as a greenhorn angler in front of real fishermen. But after the coffee table incident, I told Jim I was in. A week after leaving detox, I got on a plane with him and flew to Missoula. One day later, we were hauling cutthroat trout out of the Flathead River, and I wasn’t thinking about a drink. I was thinking about how to get my fly into the seam between faster moving water and the shallow pool created by a small boulder. I was thinking about Jim’s casting instructions. I was thinking about the Merle Haggard song in which a big city, with all its habitual harassments and temptations, finally sets the singer free “somewhere in the middle of Montana.”

Life-long liberals now in their 70s, Jim and Chuck had decided months before that there would be no MAGA Republicans invited on this trip. They didn’t want political strife distracting them from this rare experience in the American wilderness. Nevertheless, Chuck showed up with a full-throated Donald Trump supporter named Canio, a young Italian-American who had the stars-and-stripes emblazed on his fly reel and a Glock on his hip. Jim and I mentioned our reservations about the former president, and Canio, perhaps feeling outnumbered, allowed that he only liked the $20,000 that fell to him through Trump’s capital gains cuts. I muttered something to Jim about how that wasn’t money earned, but I said nothing to Canio, who after all was packing heat.

At the end of that first day, we had crossed the Flathead River on horseback and made camp on a high bank that turned our gaze up to a jagged eminence called Bartlett Mountain. In camp, every day was more or less the same. There was something satisfying about that, just as there’s something satisfying about waking up clear-headed and thinking, “I didn’t drink yesterday and I’m not going to drink today; I caught some fish yesterday and I hope to catch some more today.” Modest but important goals. Modest but important satisfactions. Canio’s youth, along with his deference to Jim and Chuck, proved useful. By the time the three of us limped out of our tents in the morning, he’d gathered driftwood and lit a crackling fire in the pit that sat like a fulcrum above our bend in the river.

The next morning Chuck announced that he was determined to punish the cutthroats of the Flathead, in sheer numbers caught, for all the brown and rainbow trout that had eluded him throughout the year on northeastern rivers. “Fuck yeah!” agreed Canio. That rapacious attitude struck both me and Jim as unseemly, so we ventured off in the opposite direction. Jim pointed out deer and elk tracks as we walked along the sandy flats. He marveled at the water-sculpted contours of this coulee, the amazing colors of the sedimentary rocks. Massive clouds moved slowly across the blue sky like island nations. At a wide, shallow run we clambered down a scree bank and started to strip out line. Jim immediately caught two nice trout, then reeled in his line so I could have the stretch to myself. At some point, I quit overthinking my casts and, just as Jim said would happen, muscle memory took over. Suddenly, my line was sailing across the water with something that resembled grace. It felt good. It felt like my rod and I were finally becoming friends.

I quickly yanked my rod up, and by the time I scampered down to the edge of the water, reeling as I went, there were two silver cutthroats pumping their gills against the rocks—one on the hopper, one on the dropper.

“Now you’re starting to look like Brad Pitt out there,” Jim called from the upper bank. It wasn’t true, but I appreciated the sentiment. Pitt and I are the same age, and I had read that he too recently quit drinking.

I tried as best I could to watch my tiny fly drift along the current. Slowly, I stripped in line, and then suddenly I felt the tug of something large. I started to pump my reel furiously. I could see the trout’s silver back raging against the tension of my rod. This was by far the biggest fish I had hooked.

Jim grabbed his net and said, “Do you want some help?”

“No,” I replied with idiotic hubris. “I got this.” The power of the creature at the other end of this fight felt thrilling, as if it was shooting adrenaline up the line, through the rod and into me.

“Let it run if it wants to,” Jim cautioned.

But I was too intent on finally landing a trophy. I reeled harder, giving no slack. And then, as I lifted my arced rod in one hand and reached for my net with the other, the cuttie was gone, juking away over the skinny water.

“Damn, damn, damn!” I thundered, smacking the water with my rod.

“It didn’t get that big by getting caught,” Jim said.

Flyfishing and sobriety have this in common: you don’t get good at either right away. There are thousands of bad casts, hundreds of days you drank when you swore to yourself you wouldn’t. However, when the decision finally gets made to embark on the arduous path to sobriety, you have to tell yourself, as with flyfishing, that the goal is progress not perfection (a phrase you’ll hear in almost every AA meeting). The future will be strung together with better days. The fly will land lightly on the water and a trout will rise to it. Your wife will call to say her mother has been readmitted to the hospital, and you won’t make five-drinks-in excuses about why you’re indisposed. You’ll say—with your decency and empathy once more on display— “I can help.”

Jim and I moved downstream to a pool we called the Vortex because of the way the rushing water swirled against the curve of the left bank, bounced to the right, then settled into a calm, deep eddy. Jim said, “Let’s try a hopper-dropper.” We each tied on a terrestrial. Then Jim handed me a pheasant tail nymph and we both commenced tying a clinch knot. On such a tiny fly, both of us were having trouble with the task.

“Your hands start to shake when you get old,” Jim said.

“Or when you’ve abused alcohol for most of your adult life.”

Without looking up at me, Jim said, “I’m proud of what you’re doing.” Then he added, “It’s good to have you back again.”

When I was in detox, Jim came by the house a couple of times looking for me. Melissa told him I was out of town camping with some friends. When I got back home, I walked over to Jim’s workshop where he was rebuilding an old motorcycle. I said he was a good friend and I didn’t want to lie. I hadn’t been camping, unless having someone wake you up every 20 minutes to make sure you’re not dead constitutes time in the wilderness. He said thanks for telling him. He said he’d known for a while that something wasn’t right. “You just haven’t seemed present,” he said.

It’s true, presence is one of the first things alcohol snatches away. During stretches when I wasn’t drinking, I would sit on a flat rock down by our creek and try to meditate on the flow of the water, the beauty of spring wildflowers. I’d concentrate on simply trying to stay in that moment, a moment measured by one breath, when I didn’t have to fear the future or regret the past. It felt good, it felt real, it felt restorative. But that all went away when the booze crept back in. Even when I was having a drink—which I had longed for all day—I wasn’t really enjoying it. I was already thinking about the next one, and the one after that. But what Jim said about presence made me realized that flyfishing has much in common with meditation, with attempting to stay in the moment. You try to make the best cast you can without worrying about all the terrible ones you made before. You try to follow your fly on the surface of the water, knowing that any minute a trout could snatch it. You try to be ready for that stupendous encounter. Nothing else matters in that moment and nothing matters except that moment. That’s important for a drunk in recovery. If I stay in that moment, the past can’t harm me and the future can’t scare me to death.

When we were finally rigged up with our tandems, Jim said to make a short cast, so I didn’t tangle my flies. I did as he said and dropped my line into the current. I watched the hopper drift by and suddenly vanish. I quickly yanked my rod up, and by the time I scampered down to the edge of the water, reeling as I went, there were two silver cutthroats pumping their gills against the rocks—one on the hopper, one on the dropper. They displayed a light pink smudge of breeding color along their abdomens, their coppery backs and fins spotted in black. My mind hummed with the dopamine jolt I had come all this way to feel, the narcotic spark I hadn’t known since the day I put the bottle down.

“You knew, man!” I called up to Jim, as I knelt to release both fish back into the pool. “You knew.” He smiled in such a way that the handles of his mustache rose up to his cheeks like a great, grey bird about to take flight.

There were many gloriously sunny, 80-degree days that made me never want to leave this camp, this river, these mountains. On one of them, Jim decided to take leave from fishing so he could sunbathe beside his tent in the altogether. “I’ll jump up and scare off any other fishermen who float by,” he assured me. I laughed and set off alone. But all day I suffered the beginner’s frustration of lost flies, wind knots, hooks hung in trees, and watching from a distance as other anglers netted fish. Then I stumbled in the middle of the river, and my rod went flying. That meant I had to lunge for it before 14 ounces of expensive graphite disappeared downstream forever. As I grabbed the cork handle, my right knee crashed against another rock and a wave of pain ricocheted up my leg.

At this point the sensible thing to do would have been to chuck this byzantine avocation and take up something less frustrating, like golf. The logical thing to do would have been to take apart my rod, pack it in—and have a drink. A strong drink. And in fact, when I finally returned to camp full of frustration, I saw Chuck sitting in the shade of a cedar, sipping bourbon from a small blue camp cup. His eyes were closed, and he had the look of someone who, after a long, tiring day, was enjoying his just desserts with slow, profound satisfaction. I felt a pang. I knew that feeling well and I wanted terribly to feel it again. Of course I could have asked for a drink, or I could have just secreted away his flask for a moment and taken a quick pull. But I did neither. I poured a packet of lemonade mix into my water bottle and filled it up at the river. People had told me: You’re going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

As I sat around the fire pit feeling sorry for myself, Canio called out to me from what we had come to call our home hole down below. He had sensed I was having a terrible day.

“Grab your rod, man,” he said, “they’re really hitting now.”

I instantly felt ashamed of the ill will I’d directed toward the young man because of his New York bluster and his MAGA tendencies. Here he was catching his own dinner and making way for me to hook mine. Well, alcoholics are full of resentment. We blame others for our problems and let the booze assure us that we’re right. I was blaming Canio for this country’s failure to remain a viable republic, and all he was doing was trying to help me catch a fish. I grabbed my rod and started casting. After a few attempts, the line went taut and the rod came alive in my hand. With that, the entire frustrating day was erased by the fighting fish.

After the others had turned in for the night, I sat up in my tent reading by headlamp. I had brought along a slim volume written by the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius while he was commanding troops along the Danube in the middle of the 2^nd century C.E. The Meditations is made up of Aurelius’ ruminations on what comprised a fulfilling, ethically sound life. He adopted from Plato the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, wisdom and self-control. From the philosophy of Stoicism, he took two central ideas: First, we should stake our well-being on what we can control and not waste time fretting over what we cannot; Second, what we can control is how we react to life, and we should react with character, or virtue, if you like.

The Serenity Prayer that is so pervasive in recovery programs—“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—is really a perfect distillation of Stoic philosophy. Through courage and wisdom, we must seek to change things that need changing, both in ourselves and in the world. And we must simultaneously accept what we cannot change—damage we have done or that others have done to us. At the end of the day, said Aurelius, all any of us really have is our integrity, and it is wholly within each of us to exercise that integrity in the one time and place we can control—the present.

The Meditations spoke to me in Montana. I couldn’t change my past and all the collateral damage it contained, but I could make a decision to henceforth conduct my life with dignity, empathy and unselfishness. I could, in short, become a better person. All that, wrote Aurelius, was wholly within my capacity and my control. I simply had to stay sober to do it.

By the end of our stay at the Bartlett Creek camp, Jim had assembled on the ground outside his tent an impressive portion of an elk skeleton made from bone fragments he’d picked up over the past two weeks. I’ve never met anyone with such an eye for the details of the natural world, nor such a curiosity about it. I felt that curiosity too until booze took possession of me. One of the worst things about being an alcoholic is that it makes you both less interested and less interesting. When I was younger, I thought hard drinking made a person more interesting—unpredictable, unconstrained, unconventional. It gave one a layer of darkness and mystery I thought all writers needed. But addiction is the opposite of all that romantic vision. Because if you’re not interested in what’s going on around you—if booze has your undivided attention—then you will have little interesting to report as a result. And what you do report will often sound muddled and more than a little pathetic. In Montana, I could feel my curiosity slowly coming back.

“Look,” I said to Jim, pointing to a cottonwood tree as we walked downstream on the morning of our last day. On the top branch perched a yellow bird with a bright orange head. It was beautiful. “You know what I think that is,” Jim said, “I think that’s a Western Tanager.”

We stopped there at a sharp bend in the river where its contours had created a huge log jam whose shade and protection from predators created perfect trout habitat. At first, we just watched our attractor flies drift untouched downstream. Then Jim slapped at a black ant that landed on his forearm.

“Let’s fish with ants,” he said, reaching for his substantial fly box. He clicked it open and handed me a #12 black fur ant. I noticed my hands weren’t shaking so badly as I tied it to my tippet. On my third cast, just as my ant was entering a tailout, it disappeared. The fish was big, and this time I let it run. It raced upstream to the end of my line, then darted back into the current. My rod, the trout and I were now all one electric current. When the cuttie was somewhat spent, I raised its head out of the water to freeze its fight. Jim reached out his net and the 16-inch Oncorhynchus went still in the black mesh. A beautiful ocher colored its flanks and a scarlet streak ran from its gills to its tail. I retrieved the hook without touching the fish, then watched it quickly fin downstream. That was the last fish I caught in Montana, and it was a nice one.

Fly anglers have a great arsenal of metaphors when it comes to comparing their art to the more pedestrian pursuits of bait fishermen. It’s chess versus checkers, bridge versus poker, ballet versus walking. The way Jim fishes—the seeming effortlessness of his long, looping casts, the precision with which he places his fly on the water—really is ballet, at least from the waist up. And I found myself wondering, what if all our daily actions—what if all of our lives—could be conducted with such artistry, care and accomplishment? To be so attentively and fully in the present—that would indeed be the art of living, the point of sobriety.

When we returned to Missoula for our flights home, I took a long look at my face in the motel mirror. I hadn’t seen my own reflection in two weeks. It had been 30 days since I last had a drink. It wasn’t much in the span of a life lived sober, but it wasn’t nothing, either. It was a start, is what it was. And I looked better. My cheeks didn’t seem quite as bloated or my nose quite so carbuncular. My eyes were more alert, less glazed. I turned away from the mirror and looked out my window at the combination casino-liquor store that sat right in the middle of the motel parking lot. It seemed like cruel trick of fate, a last temptation. I thought about the words an old-timer had spoken once at a meeting, and I said them out loud: “Not today, alcohol. My dignity and self-respect aren’t for sale.”

The last vestiges of winter and the last light of a summer day linger on the southern face of Great Northern Peak, MT. Photo: Aaron Agosto

PostScript: It’s been more than a year since my last drink. Now I’m back on the Flathead River with Jim and the boys. My presentation has improved, and I can now better track even my smaller flies in the glare and the current. My hands don’t shake anymore; I can tie a surgeon’s knot, a blood knot, even a Palomar knot, with ease.

After a year away from Montana, it’s a pleasure to be fishing again with Jim and watching him effortlessly lay a sinuous, flat line across the water. I take a seat on the riverbank, light a small cigar and once more try to absorb this lesson of the perfect cast. Jim gets a hit and his rod arcs like a willow branch reaching for the river. When he wrestles the fish to the shallows, I scoop my net under the glistening, 15-inch cutthroat.

“Nothing feels as good as that,” Jim says.

And Jim’s right. I am beginning to feel things like gratitude, empathy and patience creeping back into my being, replacing the all-consuming selfishness and self-pity that defines the alcoholic. I can feel that small, mean self growing larger, lighter, kinder.

16.2 Issue Features

COLOMBIA, ME GUSTA

GUIDE INTIMATIONS

WHY WOULD ANYBODY DO THIS?

UNHOOKED

CLEAR INTENTIONS

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