The sun was a smoldering orb sinking beneath the jagged peaks of the Rockies when Alex finally felt the tug.
It wasn’t the ferocious jerk of a trophy trout, the kind he’d half-dreamed of in the stifling office cubicle that was his real life.
This was something less urgent, persistent, the questioning nibble of a fish unsure of its prey.
This first strike wasn’t about glory; it was about proof. Days of casting his carefully tied flies into these frigid mountain waters had yielded nothing but sore shoulders and dwindling optimism. Every fly fisherman knew it could be like this—that the pursuit could sometimes outweigh the catch. But he’d needed this win.
Alex tightened his grip on the rod, a family heirloom passed down from his grandfather, who’d sparked this lifelong obsession.
At that moment, with the line growing taut, Alex didn’t feel the biting mountain wind or the ache in his muscles. It was just him, the river, and the promise of battle.
“Got you,” he chuckled under his breath. Now, it was about finesse.
Ten minutes later, Alex knelt by the water’s edge. The rainbow trout, no monster but sporting vibrant flanks striped like sunset, wriggled hopelessly against his net. With a strange tenderness, Alex unhooked it, admiring the creature’s determined eye for a moment.
He hadn’t conquered these mountains; he’d come to prove something to himself. To chase a sliver of that focused joy, he never found back in the city.
With a flick of his wrist, the trout splashed back into the river, dissolving into the dancing reflections of the fading light. Exhausted but a different kind of exhausted, Alex sat back on the smooth pebbles of the bank.
That night, he slept dreamlessly beneath the vast expanse of the Colorado sky. No emails buzzed, and no deadlines hounded him. Just the river’s soft symphony and the occasional hoot of an owl. Alex drifted off, wondering how such a small fish could carry such a weight off his shoulders. circle
Alex stood alone in the swirling currents of the Slate River, a fly fisherman in a cathedral of mountains. The water, ice-cold in the thin air of the Rockies, danced around his wader-clad legs like a silent welcome. This was where he needed to be, not under buzzing fluorescent lights, but the city’s roar, a siren song dragging him toward a burnout he couldn’t quite get out of.
This trip had been about escape… and also about a challenge. Two years ago, the email had hit his inbox like a depth charge. His father is gone. Not ill or in an accident, just out of Alex’s life. It wasn’t just the abandonment but the silence it left in its wake. Alex, ever the dutiful son, the quiet understudy to his more charismatic father, couldn’t even find the words to ask ‘why.’
Today, as his weathered hand tightened around the cork grip of his grandfather’s worn fly rod, the questions came not in words but in casts. With each flicker of the line, each meticulously tied fly dipping to kiss the water’s surface, he wasn’t chasing fish, but whispers carried on the wind.
The first pull on the line wasn’t a trophy catch, but a spark of joy Alex hadn’t felt in ages. As he battled the surprised rainbow trout, he imagined his father on the opposite bank, not the dismissive businessman of his adulthood, but the younger man from old photo albums. One who’d built treehouses enthusiastically and spent long summer days teaching Alex to tie the perfect Elk-hair Caddis.
Releasing the fish was both a victory and an offering. His father might never find his way back, but Alex felt something unclench beneath his ribs. The Rockies towered over him, but the weight of unanswered questions didn’t.
Days blurred into a rhythm of casting, untangling knots, and watching the light shift over the valley. Once, in a tiny mountain diner with creaky floors and faded fishing photos, an old-timer slapped Alex on the back and shared a tale about a legendary brown trout hiding somewhere upstream.
That night, dreams of the monster fish wrestled with memories of his father, not the one who vanished but the one who’d shown him this world.
He never caught the monster trout. On his last day, as the dawn tinged the peaks pink, his line snagged hopelessly on a submerged tree branch.
Tears of frustration pricked his eyes. Just when he was ready to yank and risk breaking the rod, he saw it – the fly that meant everything. His grandfather’s lucky Woolly Bugger was lost by Alex years ago on a family trip.
As he retrieved his treasure, it was clear—no big fish needed to be hauled in as proof. His reflection in the clear water was enough out here, beneath the indifferent mountains.
Not Alex the overlooked son, or Alex the cubicle-dweller, but Alex the grandson, the fisherman, the man connected to something greater, and something achingly simple simultaneously.