When I was twelve – fifth grade – my folks bought a little cabin in the mountains on Chinook Pass Highway 410, on the east bank of the Naches River.

My father, William – though everyone called him Bill except his mother, a stocky Pennsylvania Dutch mama who bore 11 children and pronounced his name “Wee-yum” – had just had his first heart attack at 38 and nearly died.

The cabin was a concession to a quieter and calmer lifestyle, which would materialize as if from the clapboard walls or the dim interior where steel wool was shoved into the spaces in the corners of the ceiling rafters so the mice would stay in the attic.

It was paradise.

Us kids, my sis and I and friends, built two rickety platforms attached to the cottonwoods over the river about 20 feet apart and rigged up a clothesline with pulleys so that we could send messages on clothespins back and forth to each other.

In the fall, the salmon thrashed up the river, their green backs gliding or wiggling just under the surface of the water; then floated, bloated and red, back down.

I don’t remember how dad became a fisherman but he did.

He would get up early in the morning, long before I rose, – I was always a night-owl, reading into the wee hours on the screened in porch – and arrive home at a more reasonable hour with a string of trout for breakfast.

Speckled, spotted, yellow, silver, pink, and perfect.

Mom would clean them and with a little coat of flour they went into the pan – curling up immediately as if they wanted to jump back into the river.

Their meat was always different depending on the type of fish. Some were white-fleshed and dense with a rivery-mossy flavor. Some were pink or apricot colored and sweeter.

You’d lay them on your plate and turn them so that their backs were facing you. Take off their little top and side fins first, then run your knife down just at the middle of the spine behind the head and lift off one flank of meat and plop it onto the plate. Then pull the ribs and spine out of the other side carefully by slipping the knife under the ribcage starting at the head end and working your way to the tail.

(Tails were always left on and were my favorite part – they’d get crispy in the pan coated with a little flour.)

I don’t know that dad was a particularly religious man but I think he was spiritual.

He sang all the solo tenor parts in the Central Lutheran choir – a nearly professional group that on church occasions tackled such classics as Verdi’s “Requiem,” Handel’s “Messiah,” and the “Seven Last Words.”

I don’t know what he believed – we never talked about it. But I don’t doubt that trout fishing was his meditation, his time for reflection and communing in nature’s cathedral.

Driving to Portland the other day to retrieve my stolen computer (a story for another time), I heard James Prosek on the ‘Speaking of Faith’ radio program produced by Krista Tippet for American Public Media and was reminded that there is something mystical, nearly sacred, about fishing.

Prosek, who at nineteen and a Yale student published his first book, “Trout, an Illustrated Story,” says “The trout in its stream is the essence of life, encompassing survival and beauty, death and birth.”

Though not a member of any formal religion, Prosek says he has always “found God through the theatre of nature.”

I know exactly what he means.

Who can walk beside a river and not be captivated by its radiance and music, not marvel at its rushing, destructive and life-giving power, and not question how all this came to be?

The cabin, and the river that it sat on, did give dad – it gave all of us – a place to breathe deeply and slow down. Thinking back on those days, they seem to have a certain glow, they do bring up in me a sense of reverence.

Leonard Cohen tells us “Jesus was a fisher, who walked upon the water.” And why did he call fishermen to him? He filled their nets with fish, then sent them out to be “the fishers of men.”

And Norman Maclean, in “A River Runs Through It,” puts his finger right on it – “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies…He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

In our family, we used salmon eggs and lures.

Dad spent many hours fishing the Bumping, the Naches and the Little Naches Rivers. He always had a fishing pole in the trunk of his car and, often returning from a sales trip up Spokane way, would pull off the road along the Yakima River where it runs through the Ellensburg Canyon just to try his luck.

I remember one time we were touring his visiting eldest sister Dorothy – “Dot” – and her husband Frank around Rimrock Lake (everyone in dad’s extended family stayed within miles of New Oxford, Pa, the little town where he grew up), when Uncle Frank said “I bet you can’t catch a fish here.” We were out of dad’s territory.

Dad took the dare and by gosh if he didn’t have a trout on the line within about ten minutes.

I have a photo of him beaming sheepishly.

Fishing, feeling that magical tug on the line, and ending with a browned trout, “rose moles all in a stipple” (from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”) upon the plate, may be as close as I come to believing there is a God.

In “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau muses, “Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day’s dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight… communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond.”

“…It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.”

In Richard Brautigan’s classic, “Trout Fishing in America,” one of his whimsical characters says, “‘Write with this, but don’t write hard because this pen has got a gold nib, and a gold nib is very impressionable. After awhile it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it. This pen becomes just like a person’s shadow. It’s the only pen to have but be careful.'”

“I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river’s shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.”

I think dad was a fisherman to express his inimitable faith and, likewise, I became a writer.