Place ties us to one another, stitches our memories together with a fine hand. It stands, like a witness tree on a long-ago family farm, marker to love and death and loyalty.

For the last decade, we’ve made a pilgrimage together, father and son, to a stream in Montana, a mountain tributary miles and miles away from the valley and the river it eventually feeds. Willows and dogwood drape the banks. The undergrowth too thick to consider bushwhacking because the drainage is plentiful with grizzly bears.

Father (left) and son work their way upriver through the scar of a fire that burned more than 100,000 acres.

There are pools where the water is forced downhill at breakneck speed, where light refracts, painting the surface turquoise. Here, snowmelt runs clear as a grandmother’s window in spring, blue-veined hand having wiped away winter with vinegar and water. After months of snow and ice, the cutthroat wake to a long-dormant hunger, aggressive and opportunistic, so most any dry fly lures them to the surface.

We love to watch each other cast in the heat of July. The languid motion of the line covering the afternoon with its script. The beat in our head marking time with the line and the fly settling softly, as if it flew through the air under its own power and decided to dip its wings in the water. Then the balletic leap of a trout that has seen the fly and believed in it.

Belief, and its cousin faith, have been rewarded here many times. We’ve whiled away hour upon hour on this stream, catching cutties whose pink and purple sides are so tall our hands fail to grasp them, so long our nets struggle to hold them. On more than one occasion, we’ve bowed our heads to the power of bull trout that lurk in the deep recesses, behemoths whose quickness seems impossible when you consider the length and girth they carry as they chase smaller fish into their jaws.

And all of this swept away one summer nearly a decade ago, only a week after we last fished it, by a fire so fierce that the mountain was reduced to ash. Water that was cold enough to ache fingers, now tepid as bathwater. All of it erased. Replaced with the worry that if place ties us to one another, can fire burn through the rope of familial love, leaving us at the end of a frayed tether, wondering where the other might have been lost in all that smoke, calling “Father?” shouting “Son?”

The first year after the fire, we broke out into the burn. With all the trees shaved to poles, the sky filled the void they’d left. Each step sent ash toward our faces. It settled on our waders, caked the bottoms of our boots, caused us to cough and ask for water. But there’s no rinsing away grief. For the first time, we were watching the woods more than the water.

Fire makes for an open canopy and tough casting around downed logs.

Uncomfortable with each other in the wake of the fire that destroyed what we loved, we set our hands on the cracked and blackened bark. The fire burned from July until the third week of October, when a hard, three-day rain extinguished it. The flames had stretched underground, consuming roots and leaving tunnels. As we walked, quieted by the overwhelming absence, our feet broke through the weak soil.

Despite the destruction, we cast to the water with a precarious hope. Not blind optimism, but an anticipation of the possibility of life after catastrophe. Forest fires are older than humans. Yet this was a calamitous fire, one helped along by climate change and a century of fire suppression policies. But individual catastrophes do have a beginning and an end. Possessing the wisdom to know which is which is hard to come by, and on this first visit, we worried it was too soon.

And it was.

No trout rose.

Water too choked with ash for anything to swim.

There is healing in time, for the flowers and the stream.

So we sat on a downed log and marked our faces with the soot of its skin. Our version of an Ash Wednesday service. We asked for forgiveness. Prayed the place would heal.Then, being anglers, we listened to the thick current and tried to guess what drainages might be worth exploring, what nearby mountains might have been spared the worst of the searing fire. Two miles up and across the mountain, we found another stream — a place others would ignore because the line on the map was so small. As we hiked this new water, we counted every red rock on the bottom, thankful for some clarity as we watched ash from our boots and waders wash away.

We caught fish so native to the place that we found the cousins of their colors on the banks in lupine and paintbrush. A bit of sustenance and grace for our imaginations, a connection to the possibility of healing.

After that day, we left our stream for five years. We heard from others about landslides after heavy snows or torrential rains. Some of the mountain is so steep and eroded that grasses and bushes struggled to find any grip.

Inevitably, our talk would turn to when we might come back. Questions full of fretfulness: Will the first succession trees ever take hold? When do you think the cutties will move back in? How long before the bull trout follow?

This past year, rains lingered in the valley, and there was no sign of ash flowing from the tributary into the big river. Anxious, we drove to one of the bridges that crossed the stream and saw what appeared to be a memory of water: clear, the deeper pools aquamarine, the rocks at the bottom of the stream stripped of the gray coating, their red-and-pink and blue faces scrubbed, their bottoms crusted with caddis casings. In this way, we returned to the stream that joined us, that made our love for each other and this place even stronger.

As waters returned to their clear, natural coloring, the fish began to show up as well. 

We strung our rods, wary as coyotes along the edge of a field. After hurt, hope is a difficult thing, a skittish animal unsure about what to trust. But as we began to hike through the new grasses grown tall with an unusually wet summer, as we praised with our eyes the magenta of fireweed, the young willow and dogwood shoots, our sights turned from the husks of trees that still stood, and we noticed over the stream a hatch of lime sallies, some caddis, too, and the pursed lips of a trout touching the surface.

On our first cast, a fish rose, natural and right, and we realized we’d been holding our breath. We longed for, with aching chests, a return of not only the bugs and fish, but our relation to them and to each other. Natural and right, after all, is what any animal wishes for.

We smiled at one another as we peered at the pinks and purples that elided the side of the cutthroat, all 10 inches and rounded belly. We laughed as we laid down the fly softly on the water’s surface, and another slurp produced another trout, this one a bit bigger, the red-orange mark along its jaw brilliant and sparkling with clean water in the noonday sun.

To see the rebirth of a stream is a gift.

The rest of the day was magical, maybe miraculous, in its healing. The stream showed sign after sign of restoration. Fry in the shallows and inlets. Fingerlings swimming with an alacrity born of fear of predation, as well as with a zest for movement, learning how their bodies glide through water, how they belong in the currents. The big fish have yet to return this far upstream, but it’s only a matter of time.

We imagine these fish we’ve caught growing by the month, how their bodies will lengthen. In a year or two it will be impossible to hold them in one hand.