We’re All The Trout

We’re all the Trout

By Matthew Allen Thornton

Life’s not always easy, you know? Before I could form a proper sentence, my folks split up, before I could even talk. I grew up not knowing my real father. Out of that came aggression and fear. I didn’t know how to act, really, how to be. A boy raised by a woman, something deeper than time, some sort of instinct led me outside. Innumerable days were spent chasing lizards, hunting birds, and burning up the energy of my youth. As I grew, so did the darkness of my past. It turned into more aggression. I was angry. I didn’t fit in with kids who had parents. We were poor and broken, half a family at best.

At age five, Mom married my stepdad, David. David was definitely in over his head. Coming along, marrying a woman with two kids, and we were wild. My sister hated him. I was glad to have a male role model, but was still full of the ramifications of my early years. Things began to stabilize in our outside world but trouble stirred in the current below the surface.

At around age ten, things started boiling over. I was on a bird-killing rampage with my Red Rider BB gun. I was experiencing emotions of remorse. Not knowing what to do with my power, my rage, or just any of it. David, was working hard as ever to financially support the family and had no time to show me, but it was still great to have him around. He was young and trying to figure out how to carve out a living.

Ultimately, we moved to Oregon where David remembered, maybe from his youth and his youthful angst, that he would burn off the energy in New Zealand by mountaineering and fly fishing. Which to him meant climbing up on his belly and dabbing a fly for a large trout. Maybe he saw the same thing in me that was in him all of those years, that is maybe in all of us. That causes us to enact suffering and then in the same moment experience joy and elation.

So he began to take me fishing. We didn’t talk much back then. We never really did. We just aren’t that family. Maybe it’s our lack of blood relation or maybe just a style thing. Regardless, there on the banks of the Santiam River, I got to experience what I needed most. I got to see my idol, this mountain of a man, David, melt into a little boy. To play again, to whiz line & hurl deceptive bundles of feathers and fur into moving water. To try to trick a pea-brained animal by triggering its prehistoric instincts.

I’m older now and after having thousands of wild trout dance for me, I’m looking for the through line. I have decided that we’re all the trout. We’re all the suffering. We’re all the bugs. We’re all the river. We’re all the mountains. We’re all the air. We’re all the panic & glory. We’re all the ego, all the soul.

I am so lucky to still have a choice. So grateful to still have a choice. I’m so wanting to listen well. To enact restoration just like those that came before me.