Khwaja Khadir

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

     In the late 1990s the editor of a renowned fishing magazine sent a letter asking me to pen a portrait of my favorite fly fishing guide. This portrait was to take its place among “a celebrity compendium of great Western fly fishing guides.” A color photo of my guide was also requested.
     I’m no celebrity and plan to keep it that way, but I do have a favorite guide—an
exceedingly quiet fellow of mixed Middle Eastern extraction, named Khwaja Khadir. I wrote a glowing profile of him, then found a color photo of a stretch of empty Montana trout water where Khadir had several times given me superb advice. But since Khadir happens to be an Islamic immortal precisely as photogenic as the Holy Ghost, a photo of seemingly deserted water was the best I could do, portrait-wise.
     A week after I mailed this package to the magazine the editor phoned. His first words, delivered in the for-some-reason ubiquitous deeply southern drawl of fishing magazines in which bass fishers belabor their sport were, “Ah lahked your gahd po’truht veruh much.”
     (Pronunciation key: “Ah” = “I”; “gahd” = “guide.”)
     I replied, “That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to print it.”
     Since the editor had given no hint of rejection yet rejection was impending, he was
flabbergasted by my clairvoyance, but it was really just conditioned response. Years of
interaction with magazine editors have taught me that the phrase “liked it very much” is often as close as they’ll come to saying, “I wouldn’t print this if it was the last skein of sentences on earth.” And even the phrase “I’ve GOT to publish this!” doesn’t mean your story will be published. And even publication doesn’t mean you’ll be paid.
      But I digress. What the editor said next was, “Ah loved your strange po’trayal of fly
fishin’. But Ah was troubled by your gahd concept raht from the openin’ lahn.”
     I said, “You mean the line, ‘For the past three decades I have rarely gone fishing without my favorite guide, Khwaja Khadir, whose chief virtues are that, being silent and invisible, he is the closest thing on the river to no guide at all...’?”
     “Preciseluh,” the editor said. “How can Ah include in mah profawls o’ great fishin’ gahds a profawl that in awfect tells us not to hahr gahds at all?”
     “I didn’t recommend hiring no guide,” I said. “I recommended hiring an invisible guide. The difference between invisible and visible is as different as differences get.”
     “Not in your photo o’ Mr. Khadir it isn’t,” the editor countered. “So listen. Ah do love the fishin’ part o’ this. That’s whaw Ah cawled. Ah’d like us to cut the refer’nces to invisible Arab fellas, bandage up the cuts, and publish the result by its lonesome. Ah’d pay twice what Ah could for your gahd po’trait.”
     “But I wasn’t alone,” I said. “That’s why the fishing was so good. What kind of thanks am I showing my favorite guide if I flaunt my catch but don’t mention his crucial guidance?”
     Even the editor’s sigh had a drawl. “Ah’m runnin’ a fishin’ mag here, son. Evinrudes ‘n’ Eagle Claws. Hawgs ‘n’ crank-baits. Meet me half way is all Ah’m sayin’. Turn the woowoo down a few notches an’ you got yourself a payday.”
     “And a betrayed guide,” I said. “Please just toss my story. Don’t feel bad.”
     “Big mistake, son,” said the editor.
     “Not my first,” I replied.
     “Ah won’t forgive you,” he warned, “till you mahl me a fishin’ yarn fahn as this one but free of woowoo.”
     I said, “Compared to hawgs ‘n’ crank-baits, my whole life is woowoo.”
     The editor laughed. The editor signed off. And the editor returned my “Great Western Fishing Guide Portrait” with its great guide intact. Here it is:
     For the past three decades I have rarely gone fishing without my favorite guide, Khwaja Khadir, whose chief virtues are that, being silent and invisible, he is the closest thing on the river to no guide at all. I first learned of my guide not in a fly shop, a fishing magazine, or by word of mouth, but in a collection of essays on the ecstatic utterances of Sufi saints. Midway through this book I stumbled onto the Arabic word, al-Khizr. I don’t speak a speck of Arabic. I’d never seen this word before. So when, at the sight of it, an unfounded thrill of recognition shot up my spine, I paid attention.
     Investigating further, I learned from a scholar who’s studied Sufism in depth that al-Khizr is a bodiless divine servant so close to Allah in essence that to be accompanied by the former may be to stand in the hidden presence of the Latter. I further learned that Khizr is both the guardian and the purveyor of “the Waters of Eternity, “which makes Him the caretaker/ bartender, so to speak, of the elixir of secret knowledge and everlasting life. To top it off, I learned that al-Khizr is also known as Khidr, the Green Prophet, Khwaja Khadir, and other aliases, and that he’s as famed in the Islamic world as is the Holy Ghost in the Christian world for his omnipresence, perfect wisdom, and perfect invisibility.
     In this age of global tyranny by short-term economic thought, Americans have an
addiction to confusing what is desirable with what is simply profitable, and what is invisible with what doesn’t exist at all. My flyrod-in-the-office, wisdom-literature-in-the-fishing-vest, love-for-rivers have caused me to reject this banal tendency. Love is mostly invisible, intuition as well, not to mention that before I was born I was invisible to the fellow I am now. To be repelled by invisibility is, then, to be repelled by love, intuition, and my former and future selves. I have, on the contrary, spent my life endeavoring to befriend that invisible foursome, and these efforts have included my fishing life. Upon learning a bit about the invisible al-Khizr I did not therefore think, “Weird.” My thoughts instead ran along these lines:
“Invisibility? Omnipresence? Perfect Wisdom? Guardian of Eternity’s waters? Holy hesychia! What incredible qualifications for a fishing guide!” I then began trying to figure out how to get this elusive being on a river with me.
     I didn’t expect results. I didn’t expect anything. But I didn’t rule out the possibility of contact either. Fly fishing, successfully undertaken, is all about one’s ability to make contact with unseen beings. When you have repeatedly accomplished tasks as unlikely as slinging a size 22 dry fly on a 6X tippet toward an aquatic creature rising eighty feet away, only to hook, battle, and coax that shining creature into your hands, you grow reluctant to say what is or isn’t possible in terms of encountering the Unseen, invisible fishing guides included.
     I won’t fib. The first time I plied Oregon’s high desert Deschutes River after learning all I could about al-Khizr, I fished with predatory lust for a full day and a half, forgetting all about him. Deploying ordinary perceptions and movement, curses over missed strikes, and whoops over hook-ups, I battled current, glare, brush, wind, and mystery until my predatory energy guttered out. The fanatic in me resisted this guttering, but sooner or later even the most driven fly anglers find their eyes glazed and out of focus and their brain silenced by having printed out so much fishing data that their mental cartridge has run out of ink.
     But thanks, I believe, to Khwaja Khadir I’ve come to love this transition from fish-lust to inner stillness. It brings to mind the Tai Chi sequence “Embrace tiger. Return to mountain.” Nothing strained or overtly “spiritual” about it. I just lose all interest in making another cast. Far better to stand waist-deep and aimless in cool river current, bask my aching back in sunlight, let the wavelets lap my legs, and listen to unseen chukars calling in the rimrock.
     A magpie wandered idly across the river. A blissful, no-reason chill wandered idly up my spine. Tied like a tail to its dog, the Rumi line, “Love has taken away my practices” whispered inside of me and I was suddenly gasping with gratitude for every last thing I was feeling, smelling, intuiting, touching, and seeing. High desert all around. Fragrance of sage, juniper, and current caressing basalt-canyon walls. Nothing out of the ordinary. But too many humans
greet these detonations with their Throw-Away Consumer reflexes: “Wow! What a feeling! But now it’s fading. Oh well. Goodbye.”
     When this particular chill struck, I did not say goodbye. Instead, thanks to Rumi, I
whispered: “Khwaja? “And just that fast a bolt of intense yearning pierced me.
     “Is this really you?” I asked the air.
     And something about the light over the rimrock, liquidity of the heatwave mirages over the road, emptiness of the canyon, and current gently massaging me left me feeling the answer, silently yet emphatically, was, Yes. It is I.
     I don’t know what got into me then, but I began speaking to the canyon, the yearning, and the air as if to a friend, referring to him by name. “Since you are all-wise,” I told Khwaja, “you already know I love rivers and fly fishing the way the scruffy old Druids loved their Scottish salmon gods. And as the guardian of eternity’s waters, Khwaja, I feel you might be as fascinated with fly fishing as I am, but can’t engage in it for simple lack of a physical body, fly rod, and flies. So, my immortal Green Friend: if you like, you’re welcome to come fishing with my body, rod, and flies.
     Boy did my rational mind kick up a fuss at this proposal! “You imbecile! Al-Khizr is a divine mystery! An intimate of Prophets and ecstatic sages. You’re just a dopey young American fly flinger. Why would the Green One borrow a nobody like you!?”
     I understood my reason’s position. But even in those days I’d read too much wisdom
literature to take that kind of shit from the hired help. “If I’m just a dopey fly flinger,” I fired back, “you’re just that fly flinger’s doomed mortal brain! So pipe down. I’m talking to the Green Prophet here. Khwaja? Ignore that loser. I know I’m in many ways unworthy of your company. But I also know that the Prophets and ecstatic sages I’ve read don’t fly fish a lick. Whereas I do. So if you’re curious to try it, my offer stands.”
     I stood quiet for a while then, standing in mid-river waiting to be “borrowed” or some such thing. But nothing happened, so my mind of course yammered, “Whoever or Whatever you just spoke to wasn’t there in the first place!” Not long after issuing my invitation, however, I felt an urge to leave the serene glide I’d been fishing and hike, despite the heat, to a fierce, boulder-strewn rapid a half mile downriver. Upon reaching that rapid I then felt a second urge—as strong, clear, and absurd as any in my entire fishing life—to tie on a much stronger leader, smear a big Dave’s Hopper with floatant, cast it into the whitewater, hold my rod straight up over my head, and skitter the hopper back against the crashing current as if in imitation of a six-legged two-and-a-half-inch-tall water-skier. This strategy duplicated no insect behavior I’d ever seen or heard of. Yet as soon as the water-skier began fighting current so fast it caused
the hopper to bounce up and down like a kid on a trampoline, it was engulfed by a beautiful big rainbow. The trout flew repeatedly skyward, and I felt a joy in the take, blazing runs, ceaseless roar of the rapid, and sunlit spray haloing the leaps far greater than any fishing pleasures I’d felt over the day and a half previous.
     “Jeez, Khwaja!” I exclaimed as I released the green-backed twenty-inch trout back into the roiling green depths. “Thank You!”
     That was the first encounter. And scoffers and doubters, feel free to scoff and doubt: I’m not selling anything. I just feel compelled, in response to the topic of favorite fishing guides, to say that the being I’ve just described is mine.
     As said, since I issued that first invitation to al-Khizr four decades ago. I’ve continued to issue invitations ever since. I have yet to hear an audible reply, but what I do sometimes receive, if I’m quiet and patient, is a post-invitation urge as palpable yet indescribable as a river’s speech involving a very specific, hitherto-unthought-of fly fishing strategy. These strategies can be so bizarre that my mind gets exercised about their inanity, and I feel embarrassed when I obey Khwaja’s guiding within sight of other fishers. But I do obey him. Paying careful heed to all such impulses year in and year out, I’ve ended up fishing in many exceedingly odd places deploying equally odd techniques, and in so doing have caught way more than my share of magnificent trout. So go figure.
     A number of people who’ve glimpsed the results of my surrenders to such impulses have declared me a “fly fishing genius,” but to accept that compliment is to lie. In my honest experience, the genius in these piscine encounters is Khwaja Khadir, so here’s the info I’ve gathered on how to locate and hire him:
     Khadir’s address, ecstatic poets and Sufi scholars agree, is “the cusp between the
Unseen and the Seen.” Since there is no way to phone, write, or e-mail this cusp, the sole method of contacting Khwaja is via direct belief. Though Muslim mystics have for centuries excelled at this, most American anglers find it an insurmountable barrier. If you’re the type who needs references, know that Khadir was and is an intimate of the Prophet Muhammad, that he also served, according to Sufi tradition, as a guide to Moses, and that he’s been written about glowingly by some of the greatest Sufi poets and visionaries on earth—Rumi, Hafiz, Ibn al-Arabi, Ruzbihan Baqli, al-Bistami, and al-Hallaj to name a few.
     If and when you meet the Green One, you’ll notice he is way more invisible than green, that he speaks an inaudible language, and that his guidance becomes comprehensible solely in solitude. His aeons of experience, however, make up for his marked resemblance to thin air. Confining myself to just four of Khwaja Khadir’s skills:
     1) Because he’s invisible, he has never spooked a human angler’s fish, ever!
     2) He has been on the job for all eternity—which is longer than all mortal fly fishing
guides put together. That’s experience!
     3) If, like Muhammad, “poverty is your pride,” you can’t beat the invisible Khwaja’s equally invisible guide rates!
     4) Given his omnipresence, intimacy with Allah, and knowledge of waters, Khadir knows where every single fly-fishable fish on Earth dwells, knows in advance whether you’re going to catch it, knows (karmically speaking) whether you should catch it, knows who you and the fish were before either of you were born, who you’ll become after your current life ends, who you were in all previous lives, who you’ll be in all future lives, Who created and sustains you, and Who promises to eventually unite with you. Despite the extreme subtlety of Khwaja’s guiding style, these limitless abilities, for me anyway, make him unsurpassed company!
     I took a trip with the Green One just the other day that nicely illustrates some of his techniques. The adventure began with me in my Montana study, feeling too restless and word-jaded, at the end of a three-week work binge, to cloister myself on a beautiful July morn. Knocking on the door between the Unseen and Seen, I remarked to Khadir that I’d heard a seven-syllable rumor concerning a creek not terribly far from my study, and asked if the rumor was worth investigating. I then dangled these seven syllables in front of him:
     Big West Slope Cutthroats in Small Water.
     My guide responded with the usual silence, and he is not just poker-faced, he is no-faced, so his reaction was hard to gauge. I nevertheless mentioned that if we left at once, I had the time and would be willing to pay the physical price to check the rumor out.
     Lacking a corporeal body, Khwaja showed no interest in this physical price. But if we mortals are to relate to Khizr’s immortal body-lessness, I feel he in return should relate to our doomed physicality. So I described my impending ordeal: “Ninety degree heat over eight miles into high wilderness, some intense fishing over perhaps two miles of small water, then ten miles back downstream to my truck. Two thousand feet up, two thousand down, with only today to do the hike and the fishing. By sundown you can watch me suffer if that interests you at all. And, thanks to your silence, I have no guarantee that the Big Cutts rumor is even true.
Sound like fun?”
     He remained inaudible, imperceptible, and beyond imagination and conception, too. But in all the years I’ve known him Khwaja has never, to my knowledge, even once refused an invitation to go fishing.
     We were in my old Toyota pickup in minutes, my companion withholding comment on the Richard Thompson tapes I blared all the way to the trailhead. We then hiked the eight miles in and two thousand feet up, me sweating, panting and working like a mule while Khwaja remained as untiring and unseen as ever.
     Deep in wilderness, we reached the creek of rumor. The completely new water to me, running cold and clear as air, was of course completely familiar to Khwaja, he being who he is.
     I began reading the situation. A small stream, twelve to twenty feet wide, and only a foot deep in most places. A lot of velocity but little depth. Far from my idea of good trout water. “Khwaja?” I whispered, beginning to doubt the seven-syllable rumor. “A little help here?” But straightforward Q & A is not Khizr’s way. He guides when he chooses, not when he’s asked—and that’s one of the things I respect about him. William Blake once said, “Intuition is Christ,” and worshiped it as such. Khadir’s guiding style leaves one little choice, while fishing, but to grow increasingly well acquainted with William Blake’s Christ.
     By a tiny, sunlit pool on a side-channel of the creek, I rested from the long climb, rigged my rod, traded my hiking shoes for wading sandals, and studied the insect life over the pool. By the time I’d geared up I’d seen several fat golden stoneflies, three hues of small mayflies, two colors of caddis flies, and a random smattering of midges and duns, but no single species dominated. Since Khwaja continued to offer no hints, I chose not to pick a fly pattern till I found fishable water.
     As Khadir flew, or emanated, or whatever the heck he does, I splashed right up the creek to avoid the nearly-impenetrable thickets on both banks. The stream veered up a majestic, granite-sided valley choked with wildflowers, stream-side willows, and stands of stately, blond-barked larch trees. The initial shallow runs turned out to be characteristic, and I felt disappointed by that. When al-Khizr’s with me, though, I get almost as stubborn as the forces that create creeks and depth, and keep seeking the kind of water I yearn for, scarcely caring whether I’ll find it.
     Small sandbars formed in the creek each time it changed direction. I noticed elk, beaver, black bear and deer tracks on each of these bars. “No griz or moose tracks,” I remarked loudly, though either could have lurked round the next bend. Khadir, being disembodied hence inedible, couldn’t have cared less.
     A solitary sandpiper began flitting from sandbar to sandbar just upstream of us, singing a song I began to translate for Khwaja like so: I hate to complain, Mr. Fly Fisher, but these high mountain creek sandbars are tiny, and this is embarrassing to admit, but true. Somehow, in rainy gray weather when I was migrating north earlier this spring, I somehow lost track of the entire Pacific Flyway! I’m really pining for the ocean’s far more satisfactory-sized sand bars and beaches. Would you mind
pointing me in the right direction?
     Pointing with my flyrod, I called out over the rush of the water, “Several days due West!”
     Beeping its thanks, the sandpiper shot away.
     A few hundred upstream yards later, Khwaja and I reached the first promising water: a long run, four feet or more in depth, with overhanging willows and broken boulders for cover. The wilderness-born creek had amazing clarity. Even stones four feet submerged were darker in color and swirly-looking, but no less visible than the stones on dry land. The run appeared barren, but no trout are better camouflaged than West Slope cutthroats. I treated the seemingly barren water with utmost respect.
     Kneeling in the run’s downstream tail-out, I tried to be analytical about choice of fly, but the only visible insects at the moment were a jillion of those tiny, sunlit, mote-sized buglets which, if you focus your eyes one way, are all flying from left to right over the water, and if you focus another way are flying right to left. Much to my surprise, Khadir suddenly gave me to know—via a wave of goose-bumps and a sudden urge to laugh—that he cherished these tiny creatures. His first communique of the day had been as unexpected as ever.
     “Buglet-love from the Primordial Keeper of Eternity’s Fountain?” I teased. “How long do these flying commas and periods even live? Half an hour?”
     Look at them, I felt Khwaja urge. So I did, and at second glance began to get the picture: if the ethereal al-Khizr were ever to sire anything so earthly and tangible as children, these deft, silent, nearly invisible zippers might be just what they’d look like. For all I knew they were his children.
     Another animate life-form, a majestic six-point whitetail, stepped out of the trees fifty yards upstream and began drinking from the geometric center of the creek. Big bucks are usually the wariest of deer, but this fellow, after one brief glance, decided my fly rod and I were no threat and bent back to the water.
     “You can tell it’s Montana,” I remarked to Khadir. “Even the deer are serious drinkers.”
     No response. My guide does not, I fear, have a sense of humor about drink. Perhaps this is due to his bartending job at Eternity’s Fountain. Or maybe it’s an Islamic thing.
     Having failed to spot the dominant insect, I tied on a prospecting favorite: a plump dry fly called a stimulator. I then crouched low, tiptoed to the base of the run, made a long upstream cast, dropped the fly above the belly of the best water, and let it drift all the way down to me.
     Nothing. And no advice from my guide. I made four more perfect casts. More nothing.
     Taking a seat on a boulder to reassess, I noticed the buck, after all this time, was still drinking, realized therefore that he wasn’t drinking at all, and noticed the tasty-looking watercresses growing on the sides of every large rock including the one I was seated upon. The buck was no drinker; he was feasting on cresses.
     I changed strategies, dead-drifting a hare’s ear nymph through the depths of the run. Four times, eight times. More nothing. I tried a black wooly bugger. Nothing. Added leech-like twitches. Zilch.
     Tying on my other prospecting favorite, I told Khwaja, “This is a mayfly imitation called a crippled emerger, which isn’t a bad name for the mortal you’d be teaming up with if you borrow my body and do some fishing with me. But that’s it for this spot. Let’s head upstream.”
     He didn’t say boo to this. But the browsing buck was so beautiful up there in mid-creek that I wanted to delay the moment I scared him off. I fetched the water bottle from my day-pack and took a drink. The buck watched, then took a drink, too. I browsed on fig bars. The buck browsed more cresses. I took a leak in the creek. So did the buck.
     Figuring male-bonding had reached its zenith, I said, “Here I come, big fella,” and started upstream, false-casting as I strolled, but the buck was so serene he didn’t spook when my fly came within twenty or so feet of his head. He seemed fascinated by what I was doing.
     I’d planned to cast the cripple into the uppermost tip of the run I’d just fished. But this riffle-tip, I saw as I neared it, was so shallow and sunlit that I could make out every drowned twig and pebble on the bottom. Obviously fishless. I reeled in my line, intending to splash on past—when the quintessential Khadir moment occurred:
     To get as technical I can, it was actually nothing that stopped me, but when fishing with Khwaja one learns to trust certain nothings—such as no-reason starts and stops. An urge rose up that I knew was not my own: Show this barren riffle-tip the same fly fisherly respect you showed the promising run.
     I could have asked this urge, why?, but knew from long experience that Khwaja doesn’t dither around in Whys. He zaps you with a pure naked impulse. No-reason chills and naked impulse are the two most reliable noumenon that Khadir transmits.
     My next task, also learned from experience, is unquestioning obedience to the impulse in defiance of reason. Especially in defiance of reason. I saw the tip-riffle to be as troutless as a city sidewalk. Khadir saw otherwise. Don’t be ridiculous! my brain huffed. But as Khwaja and I both know, my brain is not my identity, spirit, atman, dharma, soul, buddhi, anam, nous, or fishing guide, so forget that cocky little lap dog to Reason.
     Behaving as if the barren sidewalk held the fish of my dreams, I dropped to my knees to lower my silhouette, inched silently into casting position, stripped enough line from the reel to preclude a need for fish-spooking false-casts, took another glance at the cress-eating buck, and tried to mimic his calm as I made—with a single stroke of the rod—the lightest possible cast up into the riffle-tip.
     My fly alit on clear-as-air water no more than a foot deep. It had floated a yard or so back toward me when one of the cantaloupe-size, cantaloupe-colored stones plainly visible on the bottom turned its entire upstream edge into an enormous white mouth that gaped clear out of the water, engulfing my fly and a stiff dram of stream with it.
     I lifted my rod in reply. An animal so large and strong I could not believe in its existence began to shake its head, equally unable to believe in me. But the hook burrowed and the rod throbbed hard. Belief was simultaneous for us both.
     The trout shot straight toward me, forcing me to stand, run backwards, and strip line madly to keep things taut. It then writhed round the far side of a midstream boulder, forcing me to pay out line, dash out into the creek, un-lasso the rock. The rest of our combat was comparatively uneventful if ten or so minutes of sheer wonder can be considered an unevent. The glowing peach, red, and gold trout ripped tirelessly up and down the identically peach, red, and gold pool. The cress-eating buck chewed his cud and watched us. Another sandpiper zipped by, beeping, My friend says to say THANKS!
     As the trout finally drew close, its thrashing body was so big it created wakes. When these wakes lapped at my legs, blissful chills rose at the intimacy and somehow I felt these chills were as much Khadir’s as my own. Desperate for cover, the big cutt finally sought it in our shadow, Khwaja’s and mine, hovering long, by choice, between our knees. Khwaja’s tiny bugs kept moving left to right and right to left in sunlight. The buck remained interested but serene. Fragrance of pine, fragrance of wilds, and such a flood of tranquil beauty neither time nor I could move. Then the seven-syllable rumor—Big Cutthroat in Small Water—entered my hands in the form of a female West Slope as beautifully plotted, thick through, and long in the making as a Tolstoy novel. I held this beauty because a reason-defying impulse urged me to fish empty sidewalk. But year after year of fish after fish is not reasonless.
     “Geez, Khwaja!” I said to the meta-reasonable cause of its capture: “Thanks!”
     Once the Green One starts transmitting he is sometimes wondrously slow to stop: the way that beautifully plotted West Slope, upon release, did not so much swim as dissolve back into the elements that created her; the way her dissolution then made every sunlit, seemingly barren inch of clear-as-air creek feel rife with invisible life; the way that rifeness filled the clear-as-creek July sky and canyon with intimations of beings unseen until the no-reason chills washed through me in wave after wave and my identity swamped and capsized, but left just enough dissolved humanness to wade, work a fly rod, and forget how to work a pronoun as Not-He and He and not-I and I wandered the cusp between inner and outer granite ridges, aspen groves, crimson paintbrush, towering larches, cottonwoods, ponderosas, and no-longer-feared bear- or moose-sign overwhelmed by the whole lit-from-within confusion of it. And all
of this, I say with helpless gratitude, came of the guidance of the one I call Khwaja.
     Not-He and He and not-I and I then landed four more West Slopes, all preposterously large for such small waters; all invisible in the beginning; peach, pink, gold, and glorious in the end; all hidden in “barren” tip-riffles so that, for the duration of the day, my eyes were fed the sight of stones suddenly possessed of mouths, fins, tails, beauties made of invisibilities, and strength, form, and colors too lovely to do anything but briefly hold, then let go.
     The long miles out sure as hell hurt and my guide sure as hell offered no condolences or comments. But after five trout like those even that braying donkey, my body, had grown soulful enough that a feared hiking inferno barely dipped into purgatory.
     We reached my old blue Toyota.
     I paid my guide with the elated syllables, “Man, did that beat church! Thanks, Khwaja!”
     And that was the entire guide/client transaction.
     “Lovers,” said Jalal al-Din Rumi, “don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” That may explain why the best guide I know is invisible: he’s not external. My mind still says: Did anyone really guide my fishing? Is anyone but me ever really there? My mind will say this forever. But Khwaja and I fish streams and rivers in which unsteady flux is the steadiness, everything flows around, through, and beyond us as it escapes unscathed, and what do I love more than the feel of flowing wholeness as I stand, effaced, in every drop of what is so beautiful to me, so close, and so exquisitely impossible to grasp.