The River

by Peter Heller

Sometimes they boiled all night. At dawn the sun washed the patchy snow in a rose light, and the daybreak wind rattled the dried leaves of the oaks and the bare branches of the maples, and he heard the rush of the snowmelt brook, the songs of the nuthatch. The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn’t say much, but he was aware enough—he’d read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.

Overnight it seemed summer had surrendered to fall. It was beautiful and it scared them both.

Wynn was crazy about Goldsworthy, the environmental sculptor, and was in awe of the ethic of ephemeral art, from Buddhist sandpainting to the sapling moons of Jay Mead. The untethering of ego: the purity of creating something that wouldn’t even be around to sign in a matter of hours or days. What that said about ownership and the impermanence of all things. He was less impressed with the extravagant shroudings of Christo, which he thought were grandiose and domineering.

For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul.

There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice.

What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

Nothing on earth he loved more than to be the first one up, cracking sticks for a fire, making coffee.

Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.

“Hunting and fishing’s so much fun,” he said, “only a pissant needs to lie about it.”

there was nothing really more important other than treating animals and people with decency and respect—but not a lot of people had to know about it.

He eschewed team sports—he felt like they were a bunch of kids showing off—and he kept most of his reading to himself.

a literary way of looking at the world. Or at least a love of books, poetry or fiction or expedition accounts.

They were best friends from that first day, and whatever else they were doing, they never went very long without trading books.

The classics and the canon were one kind of animal, but sometimes a trashy yarn that ran headlong with no pretensions was just as good. Or at least as fun.

“Paulson said there was a principle in aesthetics: the more you prettify something, the more you risk undermining its value. Its essential value.”

Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

Rich people are another species. Sort of lost in their own way. It’s a good thing they have country clubs and shit because it keeps them kinda corralled up in one place.