This creek and I go way back. When I first moved to Idaho 25 years ago, it was one of the first blue lines on the map that I searched out. I found its subtle course through a lodgepole forest in what was then a crisp new copy of DeLorme's Atlas and Gazetteer for the Gem State. That same collection of maps is now a dog-eared, faded compilation of a quarter century’s worth of adventure. The adventure started here. On this modest little willow-shrouded, beaver-dammed trickle through the Targhee National Forest, just outside of Yellowstone National Park.

It’s possible we’ve taken our passion for native trout a bit too far. Not that North America’s native fish should be held in disdain. Far from it.

In putting the notion of Manifest Destiny into practice — first by identifying it as the inevitable future for European Americans in the mid-1800s and then by actively pursuing it as an ideal — our predecessors doomed more than just the Indigenous people of our continent.

Carl Jung coined the term “synchronicity.” The term applies when multiple, unrelated events play out in a way that makes them seem intertwined, even when there’s no evidence that they are linked in any way.

In February of 2016, I was in tiny Punta Allen, Quintana Roo, steeped in Mexico’s wild and jungly Yucatan. I’d spent a perfectly lovely Sunday prowling the flats for bonefish and permit, catching the former and getting an abrupt middle finger (fin?) from the latter.

Sometimes the enemy of good isn’t evil. Sometimes the enemy of good is perfect. This may be the case on Buffalo Creek, a wild trout stream that runs through the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness of southern Montana before crossing into Yellowstone National Park. Buffalo Creek is a tributary of Slough Creek and, eventually, the Lamar River. It’s also been identified as the source of the non-native rainbow trout that have persistently been showing up in both Slough Creek and the Lamar.

My fascination with Labrador started sometime in the late 1990s. Having grown up in the mountains of Colorado, where seemingly every little creek and beaver pond was stacked with non-native brook trout that topped out at about eight inches long, I yearned to feel the tug of a real brookie — a five-pound behemoth that swam where it was supposed to swim. That place, of course, was Labrador. The far-flung Canadian province might have been on the same continent, but for a young angler with limited means and designs on a somewhat normal existence, Labrador might as well have been on the moon.

I don't want to live on that kind of island
No, I don't want to swim in a roped off sea
Too much for me, too much for me
I've got to be where the wind and the water are free.

— Jimmy Buffett, Cowboy in the Jungle

It had been a weird summer, which should have been predictable, seeing as how it followed a long and brutal winter and a short spring that seemed to last just a couple of weeks. It’s not all that uncommon in Idaho — this winter-turns-into-summer thing. One day, it’s 26 degrees and snowing sideways, and then, a week later, it’s tickly 80 and the lawn needs mowing. Badly.

Fifteen years ago, I and a group of anglers spent three unscheduled days loitering around a southeast Alaska fishing lodge waiting for the weather to lift so our float plane back to Petersburg could make the flight across the salt to pick us up. But the weather in southeast Alaska is a finicky bastard, and it refused to cooperate. For most, the idea of being “stranded” in an Alaskan fishing lodge doesn’t sound too bad.

Several years back, I had three vertebrae fused in my lower back, the “solution” to nagging sciatica that, when the surgeon reported to me, post-op, was caused by my S1 vertebrae cracking and slowly splitting.

“I bet you didn’t know you’ve been walking around with a broken back,” he said, noting the crack and split hadn’t shown up in the pre-surgery imaging. “Probably for a few years.”

We drove in silence, well out into the farm country of the Snake River Plain. It was Memorial Day, and we were supposed to be heading to a family cemetery to meet Toni’s parents at the gravesite of her younger brother, now gone some 30 years.