Salvation is a vexing thing. Some people seem to find it in the familiar comfort of the shared liturgical experience, immersing themselves in those codified rituals and behaviors that promise it. Other people seem to find it where no one else is looking, in things no one else sees; private little salvations known only to them. Still other people—the majority of them, really—search all their lives for it, but don’t know where to look for it, or how to recognize it when they find it. So they drift, seeking balm for a despair they feel deeply, but cannot quite define.

When you are young, poor, alone, angry, and drifting, you have no idea where the current of that despair will eventually take you, what fate the tug of circumstance and consequence will push you toward. Then one day you drift up on a beach, one only vaguely of your choosing, if at all. It may be good, it may be bad, but whatever it is, that is your life, that is what you are. You fish the waters that choose you. If there is salvation to be found, you find it here, or you find it nowhere.

My salvation was found in the sight and sound of moving water, in the worlds it held, so inexplicable and wondrous and infinitely beyond my own. I was a suburban latchkey kid, a product of divorce and bitterness and the constant feeling that somehow it was my fault, my doing. My parents split when I was 10, leaving me to search for such answers as I could find in tiny little slivers of neglected and forgotten water that held few fish, but universes of wonder and escape.

Whatever good is in me, whatever empathy for and curiosity and awareness of the natural world I possess, was discovered, developed, and solidified long ago when my young feet first met water on the banks of a prairie river.

We are all the products of such character forgings, of course, and it is not my place to judge one against the other simply because it may be different from mine, but it’s hard not to look at some people and wonder about the fires in which their worldviews were tempered, and how they could be so different from my own.

How, I have always wondered, and by what circumstances and experiences, could someone be shaped into such a joyless, miserable, profoundly callous soul possessing not one spark of love, interest, or concern for the wider world around them? What tortured path must one trod through life to become so detached from caring about beautiful things, to take such pleasure in laying waste to what little around us we haven’t yet destroyed?

And how, I wonder, after these people have become so twisted and grotesque in how they view the world around them, do they always manage to worm their way into positions of power and influence?

I’ve been pondering these questions quite a bit lately. I suspect many have. I ponder it most frequently, and fervently, when I find myself on one of those same prairie rivers upon which I found my salvation and my grace all those years ago.

By most standards these little rivers are utterly forgettable things, laughable even, to those used to the more conventional notion of the word. No one is ever going to go to bat for them, or rhapsodize about their beauty, or fight for them, or give them anything other than a dismissive glance from a vehicle. Most people sure won’t try to fish them.

I still live on the plains, and although my salvation is now found in other things; the sight of my dogs crashing into a point, the pungent aroma of sand-sage after a storm, the haunting sound of sandhill cranes tracing their ancient pathways in the sky, the primacy of moving water still grabs me with the most force, and the magic it conjures still works on that kid still buried somewhere within me.

On restless days tinged with the sense of the elegiac, of something passed and not returning, I will grab a 3wt and make the long walk to a small sliver of tepid, sluggish liquid flowing through a piece of public land that will always see far more hunters than it will ever see anglers.

This river, which lies braided across an arid shortgrass landscape soaked in blood, history, and heartache, will rarely make it above my knees, and looks like it harbors nothing more substantial than cowshit, giardia, and mosquito larvae.

I walk up and down this thin, lonely ribbon of sand, probing holes and undercut banks, trying to connect with both fish and answers. There are fish here, but—like answers—they are skittish, and few and far between.

And, as always, answers are more rarely found than fish, but what fish there are will generally be small and wonderfully varied for such a tiny slip of water; a mix of largemouth bass, channel cats, bullheads, carp, spotted and shortnose gar, bluegill, green, redear, and longear sunfish, and the occasional flathead that will immediately break off.

It's not great or even decent fishing, but it's the only nearby fishable moving water I have, and I’ve learned to make do and divine what I can from what I’ve got; fishing as an act of both solace and improvisation.

And if I’m honest, that’s probably why, if I had to choose one place to fish for the rest of my life, it would be this overlooked, nameless little prairie river with the mediocre-at-best fishing that offers me nothing but everything, absolutely everything, I am looking for when I pick up a fly rod and step into moving water.

It's no pristine mountain stream, and it will likely never see another fly rod but my own, but it’s here when I need it, it’s public, and it stubbornly—if tenuously—persists in the face of the destroyers of the world who see only dollar signs or dumping grounds where those with a soul see beauty and life and redemption.