Back in my grade-school days, everyone was treated to a basic music education that included something about notes, scales, timing, and melody. I can only vaguely remember that class, but I am sure there was a piano in the room and that the room still exists in the repurposed Liberty Street School building in Glasgow. Beyond that, everything about that segment of my education is fuzzy. But I feel sure that was when I was first introduced to the concept of the four-count rhythm and that rhythm has followed me for all the ensuing decades.
Like most things we were taught in our pre-teen years, that rhythm is a part of the fabric of my understanding of everything, though it is rarely front-and-center in my consciousness. Still, it is there. I also never really think about my pulse, but thankfully, so far it has always been there too.
I’m visiting this odd subject today mostly because of the recent passing of Robert Redford. Thinking about him always leads me to thinking about Norman Maclean and his novella – A River Runs Through It which was the basis for the movie directed by Redford. For me, it is something I read repeatedly, and Robert Redford’s passing has caused me to do that again. The story is chock-full of goodness and some of the best use of the English language that has ever been composed, but for me it is the closing passage that always grabs me by the throat when the author says:
“Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them."
“Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise."
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."
"I am haunted by waters.”
In all the beauty of those phrases it is easy to miss his reference to a four-count rhythm, but there it is. In my life there was precious little reference to the rhythm between grade school and my late thirties, when I bought my son and myself our first fly rods. Shortly after those purchases, we traveled to Cashiers, NC for some schooling on fly casting. And there, the four-count rhythm again came into my consciousness. Count one is using the rod to pick the fly line up off the water. Count two is the back-cast which lasts as long as a quarter-note until the line is fully back and unfurled. On count three the rod is loaded with energy to propel the line forward to the intended spot on the water and count four is when the line is allowed to peacefully settle on the water to present the fly. That is what Norman Maclean was talking about. That is when the four-count rhythm associated with flyfishing became part of my fabric.
A few years later, it sprang up in my mind again while playing golf with my forever friend, William Travis. We played a lot of golf in the 90s and I got to watch his swing a lot. It needed something. Eventually I figured it out. He needed the four-count rhythm applied to his golf swing (we all do). I couldn’t really explain that to him, so I opted to take him to an Orvis flyfishing school so he could get the rhythm from an expert. It worked, and the ubiquitous four-count rhythm deepened in both of our minds. He also became a legendary fly fisher!
Another decade passed before I hit the four-count rhythm head-on again. I started cycling and pretty quickly, I was an avid cyclist (addicted might be a better adjective). A cyclist soon learns, especially in the hilly terrain of Kentucky and Tennessee, that an efficient partnership between the cyclist (the bicycle’s engine) and the gear-train of the bicycle must be developed if one is going to cover thousands of miles per year on the road. For me (and I suspect for many others) the same four-count rhythm became the key to developing that partnership. Modern road bicycles have many different gear ratios. Finding the right one for every segment of a ride came down to choosing the one to make my pedal revolutions fit nicely into the good old four-count rhythm. It is everywhere, and it seems to make everything work as it should.
Then last year I bought a guitar, and guess what came along with it – the same old four-count rhythm. There is no escaping it. Nearly every song I (or anyone) try to play on the guitar is in 4/4 time (fancy music talk for the timing of how the notes are played to produce what the song writer had in mind). The rhythm goes just like this: one, two, three, four (timed just that way you just read it). Playing golf, flyfishing, playing music, and even speaking in the southern drawl we use in our part of the world, all is best presented in a four-count rhythm.
I this coincidence? I think not. Rather, I think the universe was established in this rhythm and the sooner we figure that out and listen for this remarkable language in everything we do, the sooner we will finally understand each other.
