It is winter in Jackson. Sarah and I start behind the barn to ski the road down to the Intervale. After stopping to open the gate by the big maple tree, I ski ahead of Sarah. By the time I reach the upper field I am moving very rapidly and am feeling somewhat unstable on the slightly furrowed snow but I manage to maintain my balance. At the entrance to the run, I step through a sagging barbed wire gate and looking behind me, do not see Sarah so I assume that she has stopped to pee behind a bush.

Cows are grazing in the run and in what is now Sarah's field. A shaggy yellowish cow with short horns glares at me but does not come after me as I cross the run. A small bull is grazing at the entrance to Sarah's field but also leaves me alone. Instead a frisky 2-year-old charges at me but stops short. Partway down the field another one charges me and this time I run towards it waving my arms, causing the animal to screech to a halt, hooves sliding in the dirt. It stops just a foot short of running into me.

At the top of the short hill down to the lower pasture is a gate, and to the left of the gate a smooth wall, like the wall of a room. Sitting against the wall are two men and a woman and to me they feel slightly aggressive, like the cows, particularly the woman who is in the corner. Grabbing a dark blue and perhaps translucent frisbee out of the tumbleweeds which are caught in the gate, I throw it fairly aggressively towards the woman, who catches it and tosses it back at me as if challenging me in turn to catch it, which I do.

Continuing through the gate and over to the entrance of the north field, I have to climb up a waist-high step to reach the level of the field. Silas is with me and together we climb the step then turn around to help David and Daniel get up the step. I pull David up by one arm then Silas and I each grab one of Daniel's arms and pull him up too.

The river runs down the east side of the field where the slough now lies, and along the near bank sits a two-story house built of wood and glass with picture windows overlooking the water. David and I are looking out at a small beach below the windows when a Chinook salmon noses partway up out of the water onto the sand, then slips back into the water again. I look to see if it is still healthy but it has apparently already spawned and is drifting listlessly in shallow water spilling gently over the brown cobbles of the riverbed. On the far side of the pool I notice a sort of pillow knitted or crocheted out of white and pink wool and shaped like an oversized salmon sitting under the water up against the bank.

In my understanding of this dream, the setting is as significant as the characters and events. The dream takes place at my childhood home in Jackson but not as it is now, or even as it was when I grew up there, but rather as I imagine it might have been a generation or two earlier. Bob Davis grazed cows in the Intervale fields when I was a boy but the gates and fences were mostly no longer functional by then and the river has not run along the east side of the north field since my great-grandfather farmed the property, and perhaps not since long before that. At least four generations have been associated with the property; they have lived their lives, lives as real and engaging to them as mine is to me, and now they are gone and little trace is left of them, and soon I will be gone as well. And of course long before them were other people of other cultures with other beliefs and also with homes, friends, loves, thoughts and fears, no doubt familiar but now forgotten. Somewhere in that reality is a compelling mystery which provides the backdrop for the activity in the dream. Other people, generations of people, have walked this path before me and for what purpose? I have no answer, neither within the dream nor without it.

Skiing with Sarah is an activity I associate with her visit to Colorado when I was in college. We began skiing as children, siblings growing up in Jackson together before our paths diverged. My instability on my skis may represent the confusing period after college when I struggled to move into adulthood, on my own.

If the gated sections of the property through which I pass in the dream represent periods of life then Sarah's field would represent adulthood, through which I worked and married my ex-wife and raised a family with her, and the somewhat threatening but ultimately harmless cows would symbolize challenges I faced and overcame in one way or another along the way. The incident with the Frisbee and the woman, following which I pass through the next gate to leave Sarah's field, probably represents leaving that life behind when I left my ex-wife. Blue is a color I associate with her; throwing and catching the frisbee may represent asserting myself to leave and accepting the consequences of that choice.

The presence of my nephew Silas, the first of his generation of the family to get married, suggests that this section of the dream relates to marriage and long-term intimate relationships. After leaving my ex-wife I married Darchelle and with her have found the relationship that I had hoped that marriage would be. It is the type of relationship I long for Daniel and David to find as well. I think that helping them up the challenging step into the North field, the next stage of life, represents both my desire for them as well as the hope that my second marriage could be a better example for them than my first.

The final scene is about my death. David is there, perhaps becausel It was to David that, a few months after my diagnosis with ALS over pizza at Farrelli's, I revealed my plans to suicide that winter and explained how I evaluated different alternatives and settled on hyperthermia. In The dream I am not so explicit. The salmon symbolizes me. It grows to adulthood, produces offspring then withers and floats helplessly downstream to die. It symbolizes all of us in every generation; we do not all reproduce but we do all die to be eventually forgotten. The crocheted pillow in the shape of a salmon represents those prior generations, grandparents and beyond, who have perhaps left us a few mementos of their lives.