Storms rage, trees stagger and crack, rivers surge, and all most of us can do is cling to something familiar in an effort to keep afloat.

I don’t remember what we began to talk about in our morning circle exactly, but given the nature of our gathering it was likely something about writing, likely something about paying attention, about activating one’s senses. I remember La Tray sat still as stone, unsmiling, his eyes gazing beyond the rainbow of puffy jackets that defined the circle’s perimeter. Some minutes into our conversation, he raised an arm and motioned across the river. There, on the old railroad grade that parallels the Blackfoot for much of its course, stood a mountain lion. She stared at us, in the broad morning light, frozen, brazen, in full view. I was breathless. I’d not had this experience before. I had no relationship to mountain lions, had never seen one, although I was told they knew me well by now, that they saw me each time I went into their woods. It was a unidirectional knowing.

La Tray managed to capture a photo with his camera (an actual camera, not a phone) before the lion sauntered off into the plain-sight places where cats, like secrets, become invisible. He would later give a copy of that image to Duncan, who is certain that La Tray called that cat in to us. I imagined something more problematic, that the mountain lion must have been trapped between river roads, or between fences, that she wouldn’t have visited us in that way, in such clear sight, unless circumstances forced her to. La Tray, for his part, simply remembers, with uncomplicated gratitude, that it was a gift to see her.

In 2019, Duncan assembled a mosaic of Doyle essays, or “proems,” as they are sometimes called, delightful swirls of prose and poem folded into something as elegant and digestible as a piece of sake sashimi, or as a delicate nymph, tied and twisted to perfection. The collection, which Duncan curated along with Orion Magazine editors Chip Blake and Katie Yale, is a beautiful posthumous volume called One Long River of Song. (I take the hardcover version with me on every river trip now. The stories within it are love songs and also medicine: To treat what pains you, take in one Doyle essay per day, read aloud on the river, until there are no more left to read – and then start over again.)

In his forward to One Long River of Song, Duncan, whom so many of us affectionately call DJD, tells us he called his dear friend “BD.” He describes Doyle’s courageous sentence crafting as making “timid readers feel as though they’d been thrown into a kayak and sent careening down a literary equivalent of Idaho’s Payette River at spring runoff.” DJD says that he shared with BD a bold “willingness to speak of almost anything we perceived as spiritual truth.” He celebrates BD’s fearless, experimental use of words as a mode of awakening the linguistically trepidatious to the wild possibilities of language.

Anyone who questions the notion that “water is life” has never felt a wild river moving in their body days after physically leaving it behind.

In a footnote to Doyle’s essay “The Lair,” Duncan recounts a drive up the Blackfoot with his friend, Peter Mattheissen, in eventual pursuit of trout. In the vehicle, Mattheissen told Duncan a story—the same story that Doyle recalls in “The Lair”: At Auschwitz and Birkenau, sometime quite recently, more than 100 people were gathered on retreat. They were there to dwell, be silent and pray within that “dark scar” of evil. These people were visiting the camps intentionally, with Matthiessen and at least one “rabbi”—who was, Duncan’s footnote reveals, Tetsugen Bernard Glassman, a Zen Buddhist roshi. They spent a week there, setting themselves down in the darkest of places, among the ghosts of the tortured and murdered, and among the ghosts of those who tortured and those who murdered. Then, consecutive days in the place, they were one night “assailed by a sustained joy that moved those who didn’t flee to join hands and gently dance.” There is no conceivable possibility of joy, of dancing, in a place so drenched in darkness—and yet Duncan and Doyle report, as Matthiessen maintained, that it happened.

Entangled in phantom threads of sordid histories, these witnesses—visitors, ancestors— wept together, shoulder to shoulder within the deepest well of discomfort. And yet, these three literary grandfathers—the younger two, Doyle and Duncan, retelling the tale of the elder, Matthiessen—maintain that a collective and gentle swaying to the silent song of an unambiguous elation, happened.

“We are capable of unspeakable evil, every one of us,” Doyle writes in “The Lair.” And yet, he postulates that perhaps our moral evolution has sped up, and, “What if this evolution sometimes feels like reasonless joy?”

In June 2024, five years after meeting the mountain lion on the Blackfoot and now the poet laureate of Montana, La Tray taught another river-based workshop on Idaho’s Main Salmon, and this time to a cohort of all women. This gender homogeneity was not by design; it was unplanned. As we stood together watching evening sunlight sparkle on the water’s surface, one young participant asked me, “Do you think women are evolving faster than men? Is that why only women signed up to take this course?” Perhaps a shift in polarity is imminent. Perhaps we are on the verge of an evolution in leadership and influence, edging ever toward the feminine. This theory is buoyed by the work of leaders like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Joy Harjo, Rebecca Solnit and CMarie Fuhrman, who teach more feminine ways of knowing and relating—ways of the land, of water and heart—and who use intuition, science and their own soft power to offer an alternative path through and out of the darkness.

One time deep in winter of 2019, at the Missoula bookstore where La Tray worked back then, a handful of Montana writers gathered to read from One Long River of Song, in remembrance of and reverence for the recently departed BD. La Tray (whom I like to call CLT) read an essay called “Dawn and Mary,” an account of inarguable tragedy and a potent acknowledgement of courage. The piece closes with a warning that, if we ever allow ourselves to forget the names of our heroes, or to forget what they did, or to forget “that all children are our children, then we are fools who have allowed memory to be murdered too…” Tears pooled in CLT’s beard as they do when he speaks on things that activate his heart, when he speaks on things he perceives as spiritual truths.

On a page preceding the first chapter of his book The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen stamped a quote from Austrian poet Ranier Maria Rilke:

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world,’ death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”

The River Poets teach us to keep our senses activated and practiced. To stay alert to the possibilities of mountain lion on the Blackfoot, snow leopard in the Himalaya. In order to open to the joys of this sweet world that we inhabit for only a moment, for only a wing-beat, we must be courageous. We must welcome the ineffable, the wonders that defy explanation, the miracles hidden just beyond the edge, just on the other side of discomfort. We cannot let our senses atrophy. We cannot be afraid to sway gently in joy adjacent to darkness, even if only the joy itself knows why.

Chandra Brown is a Missoula-based writer, educator, and river guide. She is the founder and director of Freeflow Institute, which builds arts- based outdoor learning opportunities.