Chapter 3 #2
That was the same year the headmaster called Clay into his office to inform Clay that he had to make a choice.
Soccer or violin. There was too much overlap in time commitment.
Dorset-Cornwall was not a public high school.
It was not there to serve the general well-being of its students.
The school existed for one reason: to develop its students so that they could achieve at the highest level.
For Clay, that meant he had to choose: violin or soccer.
Clay chose soccer for the practical reason that there are about ten times more professional soccer teams in the world than there are orchestras.
That meant a ten times better chance of leaving Riverwood and never coming back.
Besides, Clay liked wearing shorts and a jersey more than he did black tie.
And he liked the way girls responded to his scissor kicks more than the way they responded to his double stops.
Clay broke it to his dead mother while fly-fishing the Root River. That’s where he did his best thinking. Where his voice was so clear and present in his head he had to wonder if he was talking aloud to himself.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he thought or said under the babble and bubble of the river.
She answered by swelling his heart and his eyes. He felt her presence and her affirmation. She wanted him to play soccer. Soccer would introduce him to the world.
“I’ll take you with me,” he whispered. “I promise.”
Offers to play after Dorset-Cornwall poured in.
But to everyone’s surprise, especially Judd’s, Clay chose to play for West Point.
To this day Clay isn’t quite sure why he made that choice.
Maybe it was to appease Judd and alleviate his own guilt for leaving Minnesota.
Maybe it was to best Judd at his own game. Tough guy. Law and order.
Five years after the day Clay sprinkled his mother’s ashes in the stream behind their house, he took a second tablespoon of ash from the urn.
He funneled the ash into an empty fountain pen.
A fountain pen gifted to him by the governor of Minnesota as a congratulations for his acceptance to West Point.
Eight years after graduating high school, after leaving the army to play professional soccer in Europe, Clay took that fountain pen to Germany, where he finally spread his mother’s ashes in the land she had so longed to visit.
Today Clay Hawkins stands in the Root River, thigh deep, reading the water for where trout are holding.
Uncle Teddy taught Clay everything he knows about fly-fishing.
How to cast without spooking the trout and how to mend line so the fly drifts naturally in the current.
How to read water, like he’s doing now, so Clay knows where the fish should be even if they aren’t rising or flashing their buttery flanks below the surface.
The trout lie in the seams between fast and slow water.
In the deep pools. In the undercut of a grassy bank.
In a fast-moving riffle on a hot day where the water churns with oxygen.
Uncle Teddy taught Clay the difference between mayflies and caddisflies.
About their larval stages underwater and how they morph and rise through the water column to become adult flies on the surface, drying their wings in the sun before taking flight for the first time.
And about stoneflies that crawl out of the water in their larval stages and then morph into an adult fly on a rock or tree.
That is if the trout don’t pick them off first. Teddy taught Clay how to fish terrestrials in late summer and early fall.
Mimicking grasshoppers, ants, and beetles that get blown off course and into the river, or fall from an overhanging branch.
These are technical skills. But the most valuable things Uncle Teddy taught Clay were how to find peace on the river.
How to stay out of the house for hours at a time.
And how to do so in places where Judd could not find him.
That’s how Clay survived his mother’s illness and his father’s ill temper.
Judd was never abusive. Nor was he warm.
Or supportive. Judd could not overcome his own grief to comfort Clay in his.
It’s mid-June, and Clay is six weeks away from starting his new job as the director of soccer and boys U19 head coach at his alma mater, Dorset-Cornwall. The school courted him for years before he finally agreed to leave Europe and move back to where he grew up.
Clay squeezes the water out of his fly with his amadou patch and applies a fresh glob of floatant, then massages it into the feathers and fur.
There’s something primeval about fly-fishing, thinks Clay.
Something that takes us all the way back to when the first humans walked the Earth.
Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. The concentration of reading the river is meditative.
Healing. Maybe not for the fish, but certainly for him.
When Clay was a cadet at West Point, he made a point of fishing the Hudson Valley, the birthplace of American fly-fishing.
When he had a day off, he’d wade Willowemoc Creek or Croton River.
After graduating, he didn’t see active duty unless you count bouncing around between US Army bases in Europe, where he fished the chalk streams of England, the freestone rivers in the Bavarian Alps, and the same waters in Northern Spain that Hemingway had frequented.
Learning those waters came in handy after Clay left the army to play professional soccer on the Continent.
When traveling to away games, Clay carried a six-piece rod that fit into his luggage along with a fanny pack of flies, leaders, tippet, nippers, and forceps.
And now, at forty-two years old, Clay fishes the rivers and streams of his childhood.
He hadn’t planned on fishing today but he woke up with a want—no, a need—to be on the river.
Had no idea why. But now that he’s standing in the current, he wonders if it’s providence.
Because there is no better place to think about where Teddy might be.