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Trout Fishing on Blackfoot (with Accidental Salvation) My meditation teacher had a summer cabin somewhere upstream from Bonner, Montana, where the Blackfoot pretends to be a philosophy. He grew up here, which explained his confidence. His mother was a judge in Bozeman, which explained the rest. Later he moved to California, where money breeds faster than trout, and by twenty-five he had made his first million and lost his second conscience. As a person he was wretched. Not in a poetic way—no noble suffering, no metaphysical limp. Just wretched. He could quote sutras and receipts with equal devotion and believed both were refundable. He taught compassion the way a man teaches swimming by describing water. Still, Amazing Grace existed for a reason, and reasons have a habit of showing up uninvited. The cabin smelled of pine, old coffee, and decisions already made. The river ran past like a witness who refused to testify. Trout rose occasionally, not for insects, but out of boredom. I tried to meditate. The teacher tried to explain silence. Silence did not apply. He told me the story as if it were a balance sheet. One summer, years earlier, he had been driving through Montana in a car that felt guilty about being expensive. He picked up a hitchhiking hippie because grace often looks like poor judgment. The hippie had hair like a thesis and eyes like a footnote. They drove. They did not agree about music. They agreed about nothing. At a turnout near the river—this one, perhaps—the hippie said, “Try this,” and offered him LSD with the casual generosity of someone offering gum. My teacher took it the way men accept promotions they don’t deserve. The mountains leaned closer. The river spoke in complete sentences. His moral compass spun, then broke, then dissolved into directions he hadn’t known existed. He said the trout were no longer fish but ideas that refused to be owned. He said he cried, which surprised him more than enlightenment would have. He said he saw his life laid out like a ledger and laughed because the numbers were ridiculous. He said the hippie disappeared, which I believed, because that’s what agents of grace do when the paperwork is finished. Afterward, he didn’t become good. That would have been unrealistic. He became permeable. Things got in. Regret, wonder, the occasional mercy. He still made money. He still taught. But sometimes, standing by the Blackfoot, he would go quiet in a way that couldn’t be monetized. We fished. We caught nothing worth measuring. The river accepted this. In the evening, the teacher hummed Amazing Grace and got the words wrong. The trout continued rising for no reason at all, which felt like instruction.
