The Snowfly Read Online Free PDF Page B

sleep. I had an apartment leased, but was too early to take possession. I felt empty without Rose. There had never been anything like what I imagined to be love between us, but we had been fine companions. The last thing Rose said to me was that I would never be comfortable again sleeping without a woman at arm’s length. She laughingly called it her legacy. She also said that wherever life took me, no matter how many women I loved, I would always think of her.
    I slept for twenty-four hours after I got back to East Lansing and then went to claim my apartment, the top floor of an old house on Michigan Avenue. It didn’t take long to unpack, but it was another day before I found the envelope stuck between two shirts. It smelled of Rose and made me smile.
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    Sweet Bowie: I guess I get the last word in. I know how bad it was for you on the Bitterroot fire. It changed you. I like to think I changed you, too. You changed me. I guess that makes us even. While you were in the Bitterroots I went to see Red Ennis. He says the snowfly legend is probably baloney, but here it is. The snowfly hatch takes place every ten to fifteen years. Nobody knows where it will happen or when. Never the same place twice. You know that trout don’t live that long. That’s what the fish biologists say. But Red says they do. He says some fish with particular genes can live forty, fifty years. They find themselves a great place where nobody can find them and grow fat and old. Only the snowfly brings them out. They risk their lives then. Nobody knows why, but it’s prolly no diff than college boys trying to keep a bunch of trees in nowhereland from burning up. Knowing you, there’s a hundred questions you’d like to ask, but I’ve given you all that Red gave me so it’s in your hands now. I worry about you, Bowie. I keep thinking what Red told us about Grizzly Rhodes and I wonder if the blood of that family flows in you. You have certainly got a fire in your heart and it’s a thing that keeps people from ever getting too close. I suppose that will never change, which is sad. We are all who we are. I won’t say be careful because I know you will, to the extent you can, but I also realize that when a man so young seeks out fires to fight, he will probably be fighting one sort of fire or another for the rest of his life. I wish you a great life, Bowie. And true happiness. I don’t know about this snowfly thing. Please know what it is that you want, my darling. Life is too short to waste. My love forever. Rose (P.S. We sure didn’t waste our summer!)
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    I spent the day in my front window watching the traffic pass. I wanted to know more about the snowfly. During the next few years I didn’t think about it all the time. But there were moments. Which is how an obsession takes root.

2
    Long before I arrived at Michigan State I knew I wanted to write. I didn’t tell people about it, but I knew and the Markham Award had strengthened my conviction. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my writing, but I had bested Raina Chickerman at it, which reinforced both my interest and my resolve. I did not resent the life our parents had given Lilly and me, but neither did I want to relive it. They were happily rooted to Michigan, but something inside me wanted more and to have a job that gave me the means to enjoy it. I settled on journalism as a major and in my junior year at the university I signed up for a course in science writing; it turned out that I was the only student and I figured the class would be canceled, but Professor Luanne Chidester was a woman with a mission and if there was only one student, so be it.
    â€œPeople lose interest in science,” she announced to me at our first session, “because too many teachers learn by rote and pass it on the same way and that’s a shame. A newspaper’s a business,” she added.