father and of myself cleansed my mind and my need to drink, but soon the good thoughts wore off, like a drug. The horrific sights and sounds of the war again and occupied my mind. I surrendered to drinking. Still, I often couldn’t sleep.
One sleepless night I got out of bed, poured myself a tall drink and sat in my father’s old chair. I lifted the glass to my lips and saw my father’s framed fly-casting techniques. Suddenly, as if he were right in front of me, I saw him making a perfect, tournament-winning cast. I smiled, and then I saw something for the very first time: My father’s casting techniques were really a set of ideals that, unlike the ideal of fighting Communism, could never be dragged through the mud. I wondered why a man who was such a great fly caster was also an alcoholic, and then I wondered why I was one too. In my case, I told myself, it was because I couldn’t escape the horror of the war. What horror could my father not escape? Certainly, it was something he never talked about, maybe because it was a horror that he had buried, or tried to, deep in his past.
I put my drink down. Sunlight, I noticed, shined though my window and brightened our living room. The night was in retreat. Grateful, I got dressed and then took my father’s handwritten notes out of my desk drawer and his fly rod out of the closet. I told myself I would study the notes, practice and win the next tournament for my father.
After a month of practicing, however, I couldn’t cast farther than ninety feet. Discouraged, I cursed myself for not being a great caster, and then—I guess I needed a good excuse—I told myself that the time I spent practicing fly casting ate away at the time I needed to study and maintain good grades, like the bright students I envied.
I put my father’s fly rod back in the closet and out of my view, but weeks later, as I again stared at my father’s fly-casting techniques, the vision of Shane Riley making that long, beautiful, hundred-foot cast came into my mind. That night, as I studied accounting in the college library, I wondered why Shane, after sacrificing so much to become a great fly caster, had forfeited his chance to compete in a tournament just so I, a boy he didn’t know, could hold on to an idealized image of my father. It just didn’t make sense. Suddenly, reasons crystallized in my mind, and I realized that maybe, in Shane’s eyes, forfeiting his turn wasn’t about a helping a boy hold on to an image of his father, but about helping a boy hold on to an image of himself, an image he would need to find a way through the often dangerous and whirling currents of life and of war. Then I remembered how my father—like Shane, probably—never gave up trying to find the techniques of making a perfect fly cast.
The next morning, I took my father’s fly rod out of the closet, walked outside and resumed practicing. But I didn’t just practice. I also experimented, like a scientist, and tried to discover new casting techniques.
A few months later, at that year’s tournament, I sat with other fly casters on a pew. I scanned the bleachers and saw my mother. She smiled. I smiled back, and then I looked to my left and then to my right, at the faces of the other casters. Suddenly, some answers became as visible as the event happening all around me, and I saw why imperfect men—me, my father, Shane Riley, perhaps—spent so much time and energy chasing something that would always be outside of them: a perfect fly cast.
My name was called on the megaphone. I walked down the short dock and, without looking at the people sitting in the bleachers, I started my first back cast the way my father taught me: slowly and straight back. I kept my casting elbow in and hauled down straight and hard. Just before the line unrolled, I cast forward, and then I cast back, this time turning my rod hand outward so that my palm faced straight ahead. As the line unrolled behind me, I broke my wrist backward and pointed the fly rod to two o’clock. I accelerated the rod forward, faster and faster, and then—the way I had experimented—I sharply twisted my wrist and then abruptly stopped the fly rod. On my first cast I became the second caster in our state to break a hundred feet. The crowd cheered wildly, just as I always dreamed they would.
And I never drank or cast in a tournament again. Instead, I devoted a lot of time to becoming the best accountant and then the best husband and father I could.
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