Our writers’ group assignment today … We each took a book and found the fifth word on the forty-seventh page of the book. We wrote down each of these words, eleven words in all. Then we wrote pieces that had no requirements other than they must contain these eleven words. The words: the, the, Scioto (a river), was, his, fisherman, impressive, hill, livings, front, edge. Here is my piece …

He stood on the knobby edge of the granite escarpment, gnarly limbs of stunted spruces dotting the steep rise of the familiar hill behind him, far from the first time he had stood here, just here as he stood now, wordless and transfixed, his eyes following the tumultuous freshet twisting and turning beneath his feet, its waters shrouded in morning mist, heedlessly bent on its one purpose: to spill itself into the sea.

The name of the stream, if you must know, was the Scioto, but the name meant little to him, merely an epithet rather arbitrarily attached by men who hardly knew the river, who could hardly know a river that lived and moved and had its being centuries before they had theirs. They borrowed the word from the Wyandots, another affront, naming a river not theirs with a word not theirs, stealing from the peoples who had made their livings for generations from these fertile waters.

He hardly knew the river, though undoubtedly better than most, the best moments of his now long life spent here watching its moods, spring and summer, fall and winter, walking its stony banks, wading its stiff currents, trailing fingers in the frigid waters. He always came here alone, in the commonly understood sense of the word, though he knew with absolute certainty, that in this hallowed place he was never alone. Given the constraints of his delimited body and his oh so brief lifespan, he was sure the river knew him better than he knew it.

He watched now as a lone fisherman stepped in front of a mid-stream boulder, carefully moving in the direction of a smooth run along near bank. Pausing in the eddy, the stranger raised his rod tip and, after two or three false casts, set the fly at the end of his leader gently into the seam between run and eddy. His steady retrieve was abruptly interrupted, rod now bent, line spooling off his reel, and then the head-shaking leap of an consummately impressive rainbow trout.

The fisherman took back line, steadily and surely bringing the fish to net. After admiring the exquisite silver and pink flanks of this inimitable creature, he held the fish beneath the babbling surface for the stream for a few short moments before releasing it to its proper home, which he, not the fisherman, but the one watching the fisherman from the granite escarpment, which he hoped too was his own proper home, because when the fisherman lifted his eyes from the waters looking upwards to where he himself stood, he realized that watched and watcher were the same.