For a boy to know his father he must travel upriver, far upriver—until the upping and the river become one, until the boy is the river and the father is no longer the source.

Able and his father loved rivers, loved being near them, loved to talk about them, loved finding the beginnings of them, looking at the ends of them, watching their currents, discussing their depths, asking others about them, watching them bend in sunlight, talking about what they must have looked like at night.

“The Snake doesn’t look like one at night,” Able the man said.

“No, I expect it doesn’t,” said Able the boy.

When he was in college, Able took his dad north to Minnesota on a vacation and they watched the Mississippi flow on their long drive north. In Dubuque, they stopped at a hotel, but when they realized they couldn’t see the river, they moved on. It wasn’t that they were particular or fussy or demanding. The conversation might have gone like this:

“It’s nice, what do you think?”

“Yeah, it’ll do. Is the price right?”

“Yeah. I just think—wasn’t there one we passed a little while ago—you know, the one next to the pancake house? Didn’t that have a view of the river, cause it was kinda up a hill?”

“You’re right, it did. Let’s go back.”

Because being a child meant going back to the man and being a man meant going back to the child, they criss-crossed paths as they criss-crossed rivers. Truck drivers behind them might have discussed, in afternoon banter, which was the father and which was the son.

When they got to Lake Itasca, they parked the car, got out, took pictures. They stood in the snow for a long time, and they watched the miracle of it all: water flowed from that lake into that stream, and from that stream the river came. The boy stood on the one side of the river—the side that would fill out Iowa, and Missouri, and Arkansas, and the father, who always stood in the past, on the east side, full of his Wisconsinness, and Illinoisity, and Tennessee sternness. How the river flowed.

On the Maine coast that summer, they plumbed the depths of the Sheepscot, the Kennebec, the Damariscotta, the Penobscot with their fishing lines, standing on the shores of them or dropping a line from the boat. An afternoon conversation might have run downriver thus:

“I’d say it’s two hundred feet here.”

“How do you figure that? The chart only says a hundred forty.”

“I’ve dropped nearly half my line, and it’s five hundred feet.”

“But the tide’s going out, remember. And the wind’s to the south. Your line’s probably been on the bottom for fifty feet or more.”

“Right.”

It wasn’t an argument. It was rivers and they were a man and a child. It was hard to tell who was speaking sometimes.

Always, they came back to the river of their youth. It was a long brown river. It was called the Brown River. It ran twenty four miles from its source on Mt. Mansfield to Essex where it emptied into the Winooski. They knew the length of it backwards and forwards, knew every section of falls and every peaceable passage through meadows too; knew where it iced over and could be crossed in the wintertime and where it was best for rainbow trout. They’d stood at its crookedest bends and watched the ice flows in the spring back it up and cause the farms to flood.

“It’s high this year,” Able said to his father.

“Not higher than ’91,” his father said. He was careful not to mention flood years that his son wouldn’t remember, the years he and his father had watched it swamp the cow pastures and damage barns—and the very special year his father and he had paddled in their 1959 Old Town Canoe. That was a sturdy one, the first year they made fiberglass, and Able and his father camped two nights on the river. It was so slow and steady then, the years slow and steady.

“You can see the corn stalks are higher in the area that flooded last season,” Able said, because there was still a field of stalks mowed down to make feed from the previous harvest.

“That’s rich soil,” Able said, pointing downward into the valley that sloped westward to Lake Champlain.

Down the valley of a decade or two they explored—Hudson, Colorado, Potomac, Woonasquatucket, Columbia, Susquehanna. When Able would travel for business or with his wife, he’d call home and tell his father the news of the rivers.

Able’s father grew old.

One afternoon in Florida, they took a ride on the Everglades, the river of grass, near its hundred-mile wide source in Belle Glade. Afterward, they walked up the bank to Lake Okeechobee. The ibises and egrets stood as stock still as father time in the millennia-old lake.

It had been quite an outing. Two days on the Everglades, with a stop at a ranger cabin run by a friend of theirs from the north. Able knew it might be their last trip together—his interests abroad were picking up and Able’s mother had been confined to a home; his father might need daily care soon, too.

As the sun went down on Lake Okeechobee, Able began to speak. But his father preempted him.

“I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,” he said.

“Hmm?” Able said. But he didn’t mean it. He knew exactly what was at hand. It was the reciting of their favorite poem. Able had taught it to his father—or his father to him—years before, on a day when no fish bit, perhaps.

Able continued, father or son. “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.”

“I’ve known rivers. My soul has grown deep like rivers,” the other concluded.

Father looked at son the way night looks at day, the way the ibis was studying the water beneath it, the way the water was slowly watching its own movement into the river of grass that stretched ahead for a hundred miles. A moment or two passed, in which things might have been deeply contemplated, in which the secrets of rivers might have finally been figured out for good.

Able picked a stone up from among the reeds in which they stood. An alligator, disturbed by him, slid underwater into the darkness. “Betcha I can skip this six times,” Able said.

His father studied the stone. “I could skip it seven, I bet.”

Able reeled it from his svelte arm with perfect fluidity. It caught a sudden gust of air that spun it off its trajectory and instead it made one simple splash in the lake, only a few feet from where the glorious boasting had begun.

“Oh well,” Able laughed. “One’s enough.”

Joseph McGonegal teaches English in Boston, MA and is a freelance correspondent for several local newspapers. Some of his creative writing has appeared in McSweeneys (online), Salvage Magazine, and The Vermont Times.