The sound of white water passes beneath, like the static of a radio that won’t turn off; I no longer feel my feet as the freezing current of water tries to throw me down river. I’m knee deep, standing six feet out, unrecognizable in my waders. My hand aches and my wrist is locked in place after hours of holding the cork handle to my four-weight Sage rod. A distant eagle surveys the brush. I take a few steps forward, my boot ungluing itself from the bottoms of the sticky rocks. Reaching down to my waist to tighten my belt, I twist my body one way and tug the black strap through the harness. A mile down river, an abandoned brown farmhouse stands resolute, a reminder of the farmers and pioneers, horseman and adventures, who pushed west. I feel wild, forgetting how I got here, as the harsh wind whips snow off the steep faces of the Tetons, a fortress of rock that encloses the river valley. I roll cast to the left, letting the line twirl on top of itself. My fly hits the water without a splash, dancing to the beat of the ripples that flow forward off the protruding rocks. The thin rod sends acute vibrations down to my cold fingers; a small rainbow trout surfaces and the sun reflects gently off the sides of its freckled green and pink body, like the stream-light of dawn through edges of a window shade. I strip the line in and pick the belly of the trout out of the water, its body warm on my hand. The indefinable vastness of Jackson Hole lies within the core of the trout’s black eye.