In the summer of 1978, just a year into my lifelong obsession with fly fishing, I badgered my father to take three trout-addled middle schoolers on a trip to Yellowstone Park. Our destination was a remote lake reachable only by canoe and portage, the back bays of which were full of big and hungry fish. Or so the magazine claimed.

We headed east from Missoula on I-90, the canoe strapped precariously to the roof of a brown VW Rabbit whose every corner was stuffed with camping and fishing gear. We traveled southeast through Ennis and up the Madison Valley, eventually reaching the Madison’s origin and turning right to follow the Firehole’s serpentine and occasionally steaming course. Past Old Faithful, over Craig Pass where we got a brief glimpse of our ultimate destination, and on to the shores of Lewis Lake.

The trip began with crossing that lake, where sudden winds turned a glassy passage into moments of rising fear as waves lashed at our bow. My father’s calm did not break, but his face tightened while he dug hard with each paddle stroke. Then it was up the Lewis River to Shoshone Lake, a pine and meadow-lined treasure shaped vaguely like a hammer. The river dropped only a few vertical feet between the lakes, turning most of its course into a crystalline fjord whose borders of lodgepole forest and basaltic outcrops blocked the wind. In the last half mile, you could no longer paddle and were forced to attach a bowline to the canoe and drag it upstream to Shoshone’s southeastern corner. We tried to help, but my dad did most of the work, as he did once again in propelling us along nearly ten miles of Shoshone Lake shoreline to where the magazine said the fishing was best.

Those fish proved elusive. They dimpled the surface near our campsite but would not eat anything we offered. And so we convinced my dad to steer us through bay after bay, any pretense of real fly fishing abandoned in favor of trolling inch long flies with olive yarn bodies and splayed rubber legs. He provided our motor with stroke after stroke and a hint of a bemused grin while our hopes faded for a single Shoshone trout, then he restored our morale with cups of hot chocolate as stars filled the sky. The next day, he took us out again. My father did not fish.

The following summer, he sat peacefully on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Hayden Valley, alternately reading a book and watching me make awkward casts. When I finally landed a golden fish with a red slash on its jaw and a spray of black spots near its tail, he stood in shared triumph until the trout was released, then smiled quietly as my words tumbled forth. I’ve never told him that my first choice for my son’s name was Hayden, because of the memories the valley holds. Memories he wrought.

Ones of searches along the valley’s forested edges for the rolling gait of a grizzly bear, of a family of otters sliding down a grassy bank, of the very first time we drove into this luminous stretch of land in the slanting light of a September afternoon. I was not yet six. Determined to spot any animal before my him, I identified no shortage of rocks and bushes on the distant hills as animate in the first few miles. But then we rounded a corner and there was no mistaking the sight: a hundred or more bison in the midst of crossing the water, cows encouraging that spring’s calves, shaggy bulls with massive shoulders unperturbed by the river’s deceptively powerful current.

Forty-three years later, he moved into our house as my wife faced death. His arrival brought near daily moments of staggering heartbreak and sweetness. A tiny girl and her 76-year-old grandfather jumping ceaselessly on the trampoline, Diana somehow willing herself to join them one day for a few brief leaps. Her smile no longer full as the brain tumor’s paralysis now reached her face. Daily walks on a campus path across from the house, my wife determined to make the circuit, my father alongside to ensure she would not fall. Diana swinging her right leg stiffly in robotic arcs, her foot often dragging along the gravel path. My dad holding her left arm.

The day she died, he sat quietly beside me, making space in his own pain to absorb mine.

Today, he turns eighty. He’ll drive up the canyon that has been home for nearly five decades and park his ancient Prius in a small clearing ringed by pines and firs. He will run alone, the pandemic walling me off from being there. Yet I’ll feel every one of his footfalls from a thousand miles away. Each of them both bruising and lifting my heart.

It is fitting that this milestone birthday falls upon a day reserved for others. He will downplay his own moment to celebrate my mother, as he has for more than half a century. But perhaps a few reflective tears will come, for in his later years the emotions flow freely. Now and then, his voice will halt and his eyes will fill. I suspect he knows what I am only beginning to see. That as we age, the beauty of life is rendered more sharply, as though compressed by time from unremarkable rocks into a series of shimmering gems.

He was not a father who pushed me to be tough or strong in typically masculine ways. There were no exhortations to win, or to punch my way out of something. To, in effect, elevate my own stature at the expense of others. Eventually I came to know that the strength he modeled was forged from something precious and rare. The strength to be an unshakeable foundation on whom others can stand.

Upon hearing of his plans for an 80th birthday run, my new wife Sue — who he has also come to love — said he’s just so alive. We may move back to Missoula at some point, where she hopes to build a home that would bring mom and dad in with us. I’m going to get chickens and goats and plant a huge garden and do all of it with your dad. Because you know he’d dive right into that.

He would. Her words took me back to when he was past sixty and decided to tackle a life goal not yet met. A unicycle appeared, first upon the living room carpet where he could put a steadying hand on the wall. Soon after, a certain notoriety spread across the University of Montana campus when he would pull the unicycle from the trunk of his car, shoulder a backpack and finish the commute with a ride to his department office.

At 77, he climbed atop a stand-up paddleboard for the first time. After a few tentative laps around a gentle eddy, he pushed into the main stem of the Bitterroot River and continued downstream for another twelve miles. His granddaughter, now seven and still battling a brain tumor of her own, let the river cleanse the wounds of a gutting year as she happily swam between my board and his. At one point we paused on a spit of mid-river gravel and ate lunch, where I watched him as he did her. And it struck me that the balance required for these moments upon unicycle or paddleboard went far beyond the simple physics of remaining upright.

Today, I still fish and he does not. But each time I wade into a river, each time I slip for just a moment but then find purchase on the timeworn rocks below, I feel him there.

Bedrock was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.