Upstream from Forgetting

For thirty years, Tucker Benton never once complained about going fly fishing. I’d seen him cast with a hangover, a torn hamstring, even the week his dog died. That was the week, of all weeks, I thought he would have called it off. Now, this morning, even with the perfect weather for trout to rise, he was already muttering under his breath as he climbed into the passenger side of my ’92 GMC. The knee he’d busted years ago, slipping on wet rock, was giving him hell again. He slammed the door hard enough to drown out Sinatra, who was halfway through that song about a girl from some place called Ipanema. Not even his favorite singer could settle him. He wrestled with the seat, back and forth, and then back again until it clicked and stayed in place.

His bad days were coming more often now. I noticed it, and he knew I noticed. We didn’t talk about it.

He took his faded blue baseball cap, the one with the Orvis patch he’d stitched on back when his hands were steadier, and brought it close to his face. That cap was on his head the day we landed that 20-inch rainbow in ’98 and went with him on every trip since. He sniffed the sweatband and his nostrils flared. It carried old sweat, river water, and now the faint chemical edge his pills seemed to give everything.

“Smells different,” he murmured, resting it on his knee.

These days, the river was the only place he still felt like the man he wanted to be remembered as.

By the time we hit gravel, he finally stopped shifting, but the truck kept bouncing. I eased us through the worst of the potholes. His head bumped the roof, and each time, a “goddamn” tumbled out, one rolling into the next. I snuck skittish looks his way, even though he wasn’t really talking to me. He was just filling the cab with the kind of noise that kept everything else quiet.

The sunlight caught his hands as we rounded a bend. They looked like a tackle shop owner’s, scarred from his work, with a permanent groove in his finger from forty years of tying flies, line, and backing. They trembled now in a way they never used to. He rested them on his knee, fingers slightly spread, like that might be enough to keep the shaking in check.

The road narrowed after we passed the turnoff for Johnsrud Park, where weekend warriors in rented rafts liked to launch during the summer. Their season was long over now. The lot sat empty, with picnic tables bleached and leaning. We followed the current upstream, past the confluence with the North Fork, deeper into country that still wore the names of men like Meriwether Lewis, who passed through here in 1806 looking for the headwaters.

“Where we going?” he asked, eyes fixed on the tunnel of lodgepole pines.

By now, the asking came more often, and I answered even when nothing had changed. The forgetting had started five years ago, the day he called from the shop and couldn’t remember how to tie an improved clinch knot. That’s when it became real, more than anything the neurologist said. Early onset Alzheimer’s. As if giving it a fancy name made it less of a thief.

He’d run Tucker Benton’s Fly & Tackle back when shops smelled like pipe tobacco and deer hair. They called him Bulldog Benton, not because he barked, but because once he latched onto something, he never let go. I’d watched him transform from a proud catch-counter to the fiercest catch-and-release advocate in Montana, hanging “No Kill” signs when limits were still the bragging right of choice. He kept his shop going for decades, until his brain started giving things back without permission. First came forgotten orders and mislabeled drawers of hackle and dubbing. Yellow notes bloomed everywhere and stuck to his vise, fridge, and tackle box. His handwriting, once as precise as his fly tying, dissolved into trembling, uncertain lines. The disease took him in pieces. Now, at seventy-six, he couldn’t remember who I was on his bad days, but his arms could still double haul a five-weight better than the bearded Instagram showboats who lined the Blackfoot each summer, clutching fish like they were props. That’s why we kept going back to the water.

We had thirty-eight years of river history between us. I still remember the first time I pushed open his shop door, dead set on buying my first real fly rod. The cheapest one cost five dollars more than I had. He took one look at my duct-taped waders and offered me a job sorting hackle to cover the difference. I walked out that day with a rod and my dignity. I stuck with those wooden bins all through high school, learned to build leaders in precise tapered lengths, and to read water by foam lines. “Cordel, you got the eye,” he’d told me after I’d called a massive brown’s feeding lane on a flat stretch of the Bitterroot that most anglers dismissed as dead water. His praise pushed me toward guiding. We were fishing partners by default, years later, when I moved into the empty house next to his. The Blackfoot became our home water, the river where he taught me catch restraint and proclaimed my generation as the next guardians.

“Where we headed?” he asked again as he unscrewed the lid of his thermos.

“Up near Slate Bend,” I answered. “Where the brookies get smart in June.”

He nodded like that meant something. Maybe it did.

The river finally appeared through the trees, silver-blue and low, running over the distinctive black rocks that gave it its name. We parked under a leaning paper birch tree. The pull-off we’d chosen was unmarked but significant. It was one of the access points Tucker had helped secure for public use in the early ’80s, when out-of-state landowners began posting no-trespassing signs on stretches that locals had fished for generations. He’d worked with Montana’s stream-access laws when they were still being written, insisting that water belonged to everyone, not just those who could afford to buy its banks.

“This isn’t the Blackfoot,” he said.

It was.

“Different water,” I said, the half-lie slipping off my tongue. “Same fish, though.”

He grumbled about “not being dead yet” when I offered to help with his waders. His hip cracked loud enough to spook a merganser. He made it down the slope, dragging his boots, unsteady but determined.

He stood at the edge for a long time, squinting downstream. Sunlight filtered through Douglas fir and ponderosa in slanted beams, illuminating clouds of midges and mayflies like dust in a forgotten attic. The river was low and rust colored. Every freckle on the bottom showed. Each quartz pebble, each green-furred log. The air smelled of river mint and warm pine. A pair of ospreys worked the valley, their whistles sharp above the canyon walls.

“You sure this is where we caught the double?”

I hesitated. That had happened on the Missouri, not here.

“Yup,” I said.

He nodded. “Figured.”

His left leg trembled a bit as he stepped into the Blackfoot. When he raised the rod, his line rolled out smooth across the current. There was no hesitation. That loop, that perfect, tight loop, still lived in his bones even if his brain kept misplacing Tuesdays.

I kept to the bank, letting him have the run. He liked it that way. He said he could hear the river better without conversation. The Blackfoot seemed to slow around his legs, as if recognizing a favorite waltz partner.

He false cast twice, three times, the line hissing through titanium guides. Each cast sent water droplets spinning from the line like tiny prisms catching the morning light. Forty feet of line, fluorocarbon leader, and tippet turned over perfectly, dropping his fly, a sparse-bodied Comparadun with CDC wing and a hint of Adams gray, his customary pattern for selective Blackfoot trout during midday hatches. The fly landed so softly it might have been an actual insect. Twenty feet upstream, ten feet off the far bank, right where the current rumbled against a half-submerged boulder. Perfect. I watched his hand hover near the line, that old reflex alive and ready to set the hook the second reality twitched. Nothing rose.

“Too early in the day,” he muttered, though his eyes stayed on the fly.

We worked our way upstream, one cast at a time. We weren’t there for numbers. Hell, we weren’t even there for fish. We were there for the water, line, and the slow ticking of a man.

Tucker spotted something near a downed cottonwood, where the current cut deep against the far bank. His posture changed to a light tensing of the shoulders and a slight tilting of his head. The stillness reminded me of the great blue herons that stalked these banks. He lifted his rod tip and began to strip in line, preparing for a longer cast.

The cast unfolded across the river, clean and fluid. The line straightened above the shadowed water, and then it happened. The rise. Not the splashy, careless attack of a small trout, but the deliberate, almost arrogant head-and-tail rise of a fish that had seen enough to know better. The surface barely dimpled. It might as well have been an explosion. Tucker’s wrist flicked, setting the hook with perfect tension. His rod bent, creating that perfect arc that has seduced anglers since Izaak Walton. I could hear each click of the pawl like a heartbeat, urgent and alive. His weathered hands cupped the cork grip with the perfect pressure. His face transformed. There was no confusion, no hesitation, no fog that had clouded his features for months. In its place was clarity, purpose, a connection to something more ancient than memory.

“There you are,” he whispered, though I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to the fish or to himself.

It was a westslope cutthroat—the Blackfoot’s signature native species— that broke the surface. A native, 16 inches maybe, with that crimson slash under its jaw like war paint. The fish dove, taking line, its weight bending the rod almost to the cork.

“Gorgeous,” I said. “Pure strain.”

He nodded, his eyes never leaving the fish. “Last of the Mohicans,” he murmured. “These westslopes were here before us, survived the mining waste that nearly killed this river in the ’70s. Not many native cuts left. Gotta protect what we got.”

The cutthroat surrendered after three more runs, gliding into the shallows. He crouched and wet his hands before cradling it. His fingers worked with gentle precision, easing the barbless hook from the corner of its mouth without lifting the fish from the water. He held it there, facing upstream, letting the oxygen-rich current from the deep channel—one of the few refuges left since snowpack started vanishing from the high country three weeks earlier each spring—flow through its gills, reviving it. When it finally darted from his hands, disappearing into the depths with a flick of its tail, he smiled.

“One more year,” he said. “One more spawn.”

We continued working our way upstream. An hour in, he froze midcast. His rod tip raised, line still hanging in the air.

“Tucker?” I said.

Nothing.

His lips parted like he was about to speak. No sound came. The rod trembled in his hand. I stepped into the water, felt the cold push of the Blackfoot against my shins.

“You’re okay,” I said.

He looked through me, his eyes vacant and distant. Then he blinked.

“Lost it,” he said, quiet as a fish returning to the depths. “The thing I was chasing. Forgot what it was.”

I guided his rod hand down, helped him reel in the slack. He didn’t resist.

“It was the cast,” I said. “You were chasing the perfect cast.”

He chuckled. “Did I land it?”

“You landed it clean.”

That made him smile as he exhaled and looked back toward the water.

The Blackfoot continued flowing, unmoved by our moment. It had seen worse—flash floods, forest fires, mining waste that had once poisoned its upper reaches, and the endless parade of bucket-listers who came and went. The river remembered what we fought to protect. It carried the ghosts of every conservationist who’d stood against those who saw it only as a resource to exploit rather than a living entity deserving respect.

As the afternoon stretched on, we made our way back to the truck. We sat on the tailgate like we had a hundred times before, boots muddy, backs sore. The sun dropped behind the mountains, casting that kind of golden Montana light that makes everything seem significant. Downstream, where the river bent around a cliff face of orange-stained rock, you could see the evening hatch beginning, the pale mayfly spinners dancing above the water and trout dimpling the surface with methodical rises.

I cracked two PBRs. He took his without a word. He sipped slow, wiped the foam with the back of his hand. His eyes stayed on the Blackfoot.

“You remember this place now?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away. A small eddy formed where the current pushed against a deadfall.

“Nah,” he said finally. “It feels like I should, though.”

I nodded. That was enough.

We sat and watched the Blackfoot drift by. A kingfisher burst from the willows somewhere downstream, sharp as a whipcrack. Tucker flinched, then grinned.

“Damn bird’s still here.”

“Always is.”

He leaned back, eyes half closed. “I ever tell you I taught my boy to cast here?”

I hesitated. Tucker never had kids. That fly shop was the only thing he’d ever raised from the ground up.

“You didn’t.”

“Guess I didn’t.”

He looked off again, as if trying to find that phantom memory in the current, like maybe it would float back to him if he sat still enough. The Blackfoot didn’t correct him. It kept flowing, the way it had when Lewis and Clark passed through, the way it would when both their names were worn smooth by time.

“This river,” he said suddenly, his voice clearer than it had been all day, “it’s like a prayer book, ain’t it? Written in current instead of ink.”

I looked at him, surprised.

“Guess I never thought of it that way.”

“Used to think we were taking from it,” he continued, gesturing vaguely with his beer can. “All those years. All those fish. Maybe it was giving to us instead.” He tapped his temple. “Stuff in here gets lost. The river remembers.”

We didn’t say much after that. The Blackfoot did the talking.

When the light started to fade, I helped him into the truck. He moved slower now, like something inside had slipped a little further out of reach. I handed him the rod tube. He held it close, like a talisman.

“I built this one,” he said suddenly, fingers tracing the Winston logo. “Nine-foot, five-weight. Graphite III.”

He hadn’t built it. It was off the shelf, a retirement gift from his distributors five years ago. I nodded anyway.

“Best rod on the river today,” I said, because some lies are kinder than what remains of the truth.

On the drive back, he tapped a rhythm on the window, which sounded vaguely familiar. I drove slower than necessary, taking the long way around the mountain. The Blackfoot appeared and disappeared through the trees, a silver thread stitching together pieces of our shared past.

His doctor had used that word “stitching” at our last appointment. How the brain creates stories to fill the gaps. “He’ll start to confabulate,” she’d warned. “Invent memories. Don’t correct him. It only causes distress.”

As we pulled up to his house, he stirred, blinking at the dashboard like he was trying to place it. He looked at the rod tube in his lap, confusion washing over his face.

“This mine?” he asked, fingers tracing the logo uncertainly.

“It is,” I said. “You used it today.”

“Caught something,” he mumbled, not a question, more a memory trying to surface.

“A cutthroat. A good one.”

His eyes cleared for a moment. “Native,” he said.

I helped him from the truck, steadied him on the gravel drive. His legs moved with the same uncertainty that clouded his gaze, his usual swagger now worn down to careful, measured steps.

At the door, he paused, hand trembling on the knob. “You coming tomorrow?” he asked, though we both knew he wouldn’t remember asking.

“Same time,” I promised.

He nodded once, then disappeared inside.

Through the window, I watched him set the rod tube on the table, stare at it for a long moment, then turn away, already forgetting its significance. I’d find his supper in the morning, untouched. Beside it, a tangle of hackle and deer hair he couldn’t remember how to use, next to a notepad where he’d written “ELK HAIR” in shaky capital letters, the only part of the pattern name he could still retrieve. I’d also find something else—his old logbook, opened to an entry from 1998. A day when the caddis hatch had been so thick it looked like snow on the Blackfoot. The page was dog-eared, corners soft from being turned again and again. His fingertips traced the ink that preserved what his mind could not.

We would return to the Blackfoot next month. And the month after that. I would take him back as long as his legs could carry him into moving water. Not because I believed the river could heal what was breaking inside him, but because when his feet touched that current, something unbroken inside still recognized its song. In those moments, standing midriver with rod in hand, Tucker wasn’t a man forgetting. He was simply an angler remembering. He just needed the perfect, eternal present of the cast, a connection worth fighting for, even when memory fades and rivers change.

Michelle Oxford is a children’s book author based in Michigan and a former court reporter. Her most popular children’s book, I Am a Little Different: Speech Delay (2022), reflects her passion for creating stories where education meets music. Her favorite pastime is returning to Jamaica each summer to fish with her brothers and reconnect with the island. She also loves dancing to old school music, which often finds its way into her stories.