A conversation that I surely never had with my dad (father and thirteen year old son hiking in Alaska):
It was overcast and drizzling, the waves indistinct, the waters shifting, surging. They walked along the steeper coast that they rarely hiked along, around the opposite point and on farther to the next in silence until his father said, I don't think I can live without women. I'm not saying it isn't great being out here with you , but I just miss women all the time. I can't stop thinking about them. I don't know what it is. I don't know how it is that something is so thoroughly missing when they're not around. It's like we have the ocean here and a mountain and trees, but actually the trees aren't here unless I'm fucking some woman.
-David Vann, from the short story Sukkwan Island
Slightly sadistic, but a beautiful allegory:
Late night, I wandered. At the gates of the hatchery, I spun the lock, slipped inside. I took hundreds of fingerlings by net, dumped handfuls in my pockets, walked along cliffs above the roadway, bare rock cut in grooves, and held out the fish one by one in an open palm. The miniature salmon leaped each of their own accord, a tail flash into the night, glint of silver, sixty feet of twisting, and an inaudible slap to the pavement below. Waiting, then. For water, for some new rule, new possibility, that could make pavement not pavement, air not air, a fall not a fall.
-David Vann, from the short story Ketchikan
