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Show 730 of otherness had been lost somewhere, left on the roadside leading from Salt Lake City. The streams and rivers were rich with trout. Brian had to stop at least once a day to flick a dry fly across the learned ever-changing water. He had caught the fishing-madness from my brothers, who had inherited it from my father. I doodled with a stick in the sandy banks or looked for smooth stones to skip behind him - never ahead, wtere the fish would scare. Saul had taught me well. I tried to identify plants and wildflowers so from comments made by my fathers long ago. He had learned most of them - part of the herbology he studied for his naturopathic degree. I didn't mind waiting in the wilderness as Brian fished. My mind teemed with the sense of arriving, of being near the end of a very long journey. Sometimes I wrote. The words were not dead bones, but flowering branches, slim, bright children playing in the sunshine. The warm feeling grew as we crossed and recrossed the Columbia River. Sometimes we stopped the car to revere its full azure, its uncommon width, its sharp and colorful gorge. "I've been here," I whispered to Brian. He looked at me sharply, "w i t h w h 0 ?" "I...I don't know. I can't remember. I...I know I've never actually been here, but. ..." He pulled in breath as though hooking a fish, quick and sharp. "I know. I feel it too." As we moved along the highway it became a narrow strip Kith ravines on either side and I had the sense of tightrope - walking or of mincing at the edge of a volcano, staring into the hot secret spaces of hell and nothing behind me to fall back o^^^^m^approaching the place where my family's |