Cheerful.

It was a time of good cheer, bounteous generosity and well-met fellow feeling, but amid the splendors, there was occasion for private recollections and somber memories. In my case, recollections of two decades of friendship reeled through my head, from my first meeting with Jim at a nature writing conference in Key West in 1996 to our last meal together seven months before he died. From 2002 to 2015, we fished together every summer in Montana. I was with him in May 2009, in an adjacent room at the Sportsman Motel in Melrose, Montana, on the night a waking moment took place that Jim describes in “River I,” a poem that appeared in 2011’s Songs of Unreason. He wrote: “… the moon fell into the window/frame and was trapped there too long.” The next morning over breakfast at the Hitchin’ Post, he talked about his dream vision, the mystery woman he saw astride a “beauteous white horse” and the poem’s concluding line: “I decided we were born to be moving water not ice.”

A week later, he sent me a copy of the poem. It was almost verbatim from the version he had recited. His dream life was generative and propulsive to his writing. Everything was grist for his writerly imagination.

The moon came in my window that night, too, and lit up my memory. One snapshot moment of our Big Hole road trip appears in Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing, which I published in 2012 and for which Jim wrote an essay called “Older Fishing,” an uplifting piece that ends with his cheerful admonition: “Just keep fishing and you’ll have a nice life.” In the photo that accompanies Jim’s chapter, he is at the oars; holding a brown I caught is our friend Dan Lahren, Jim’s longtime guide, driver, fixer, sporting companion, aide-de-camp and spiritual son. Dan’s French Brittany, Jacques, had just given the trout a kiss before it was about to go back in the drink.

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