_A southern American princess contemplating a move from the Southland to the great beyond (beyond Tennessee) wonders if those of us who have left the South still think about the same things we did back home. Having left Virginia some 30 months ago for Colorado, I can give her an honest answer: Yes'm. But we might think about them differently.

Take death, for instance. Among other things, most Southerners know that one’s death should be a glorious affair, the crowning touch to a life lived full. Accordingly, while many of our countrymen pass their time thinking about sports cars, trustfunds, and other of life’s hollow accoutrements, the Southerner (we’re talking true Southerner) is stretched out in front of the fire with his hound and his jug, dreaming of the best way to die. These contemplations are the fruits of a superior upbringing, and we revel in them, whether we happen to be in Richmond or Santa Fe.

We do not revel as a suicide would, of course, for the suicide often wishes to leave a scar upon the hearts of his survivors, which is why there should probably be a rule that suicides pass through the bowels of dogs on their way back to the dust (with some medical exemptions available, to be paid in advance). Bathsheba was fed to the dogs, and few people would argue that it wasn’t fitting.

Instead, we revel in the contemplation of the death that is so magnificent and perhaps noble that its retelling would leave our survivors beaming through their mourning veils—and perhaps even cause com- plete strangers to tip their hat toward our humble mausoleum. History is full of people who died this way: war heroes, the Christian apostles, or, at a much baser level, even JFK, though history has by now sandblasted much of the adulation from his high-rise tombstone, etching in its place high tributes to his restless and unflagging gonads. By way of contrast, we are not talking about being dropped down the stairs by stretcher bearers from an emergency medical team, or falling into a tree chipper, or choking on a piece of pig fat. No, we desire something that is dramatic, something along the lines of the dream death of James Dickey, who once told a television audience that if he could choose the best way to go, he would like to be eaten by a bear.

For the stay-put Southerner, Mr. Dickey’s dream death is nearly perfect. Chief among its attributes is that the bear would be at a great advantage, and no Southerner worth his pickup wants to be knocked off by anything puny. Better to die in an avalanche than a collapsing tool shed; better to be smitten by Satan than influenza.

But for us transplants, this vision may have to be radically altered, which is something our Southern American Princess needs to understand before pulling up stakes and lashing the mules toward a foreign port. By the time you get to the Denver area, for instance (1700 miles west, 5,280 feet straight up), Mr. Dickey’s bear will have to become a trout.

How come? The answer has two parts. One, most Southerners—even tumbleweed Southerners—wish to die on familiar ground. Two, in some parts of the country, the earth is so alien (no trees, lots of rocks, big lizards all over the place) that rivers and streams are the only places we fell truly at home. It’s where we go to water our severed taproots. And since there’s nothing else in the water to kill us but a slippery rock or a runaway kayak (neither of which would lend to a dignified death), we’re stuck with a trout.

So that’s how a bear becomes a trout. This may be more of a transition than our damsel would care to make; in addition, she may not believe there’s any way you can look good being killed by a trout. But there she would be wrong. You can die a glorious death in the jaws of a trout. It would probably go something like this:

An hour or so before sundown, somewhere high on the South Platte River, you make a perfect cast with a number 20 Royal Coachman (called by some the Cadillac of dry flys) just upstream of a feeding trout. You are determined to land the arrogant bugger (you have stalked him before, and he has refused you) but suddenly, something very odd happens. A great flash of silver breaks the surface just below the tip of your pole, and you catch the slightest glimpse of a three-pound cutthroat coming out of the water like a Polaris missile, its side slashed with the telltale red.

“My Lord,” you think, “It’s coming for me!” Indeed. The fish flies straight at your throat, spins like a feeding shark and quietly slices your jugular with its lower jaw. “Take me!”—those are your last words as you slip quietly into the river, too shocked to grasp at your death wound, though miffed that no one was around to record your death utterance.

Does our dream end here? No, for it is incomplete—it offers no rest for your vagrant soul, for you now realize that you must somehow get home to the Southland if you are to rest in peace. There’s a problem, of course, in that you are dead. But you are not still. You are 8,000 feet above sea level, floating down the mountain. Can you make it all the way home?

The dream continues:

A miracle of nature causes your body to immediately resurface (face to sky), and as you float downstream (feet first), fellow anglers drop commemorative flys (drys only, please) onto your chest. From time to time a bottle of Olympia Beer is pulled from a creel and held skyward in salute, and at a bend in the river an old geezer whips through the 23rd Psalm, then hooks a nice german brown just off your starboard.

Down through the canyons the trout man goes, over dams, through narrow rock passages, across those deep pools he had fished those countless summer evenings. Hundreds of feet above, mountain rams watch as the body heads toward the high plains. High above the rams, the evening star shines.

“Where is he going?” a child asks his father as they view the wondrous procession from the riverbank.

“He must be going home,” the father responds.

The next morning, as the body bumps and splashes across the high plains, it is met by the Fort Morgan (Colorado) city council, which marks the occasion with a ceremonial plaque and a half-day vacation for all public employees. By now a dozen or so sea gulls (yes, there are sea gulls in the middle of the continent) have formed a halo above the drifting corpse and shadow it, as it were, across the cloudless sky. They are joined at ground level by a band of wandering evangelicals, who march alongside singing songs of thanksgiving and occasionally firing their revolvers at encroaching coyotes.

Then into Nebraska, eastward beside the Oregon Trail, picking up speed before dumping into the Missouri (at Plattsmouth), and from there through Kansas City, St. Louis, and finally into the Mississippi. “He is a metaphor for us all, “ the newspaper pundits explain, and indeed, great mobs stand along the Big Muddy, waving to the trout man, as if he were running for office. Outside of Cairo, Illinois, an ROTC unit fires a salute, and when the honored one passes beneath a bridge in Memphis, dozens of girls rain camisoles and roses upon him. “I think I went out with him once!” screams a particularly stunning redhead just before dissolving in sorrow. 

From Memphis, he cruises to Baton Rouge, past the piney woods and small groups of drunk Cajuns who fire 12-guage goose guns at the birdflesh halo, without success. Then, as the body slowly drifts into New Orleans, a chorus of sweet-singing women serenade the traveler, accompanied by the string section of the Atlanta symphony. “He has reached the end of the line,” the governor points out to a capacity crowd at the Superdome, and as he speaks, the trout man drifts into the big water of the Gulf, sinking out of sight as the gulls peel off one by one and drift into the Delta mist. It is over.

But our damsel should realize that people who leave the Southland (again, we're talking true Southerners) try to dream their way back by conventional means. She should know, however, that out here in the great beyond, the things she once imagined—men riding on the backs of bulls, funnel clouds dropping from the spring- time sky—will suddenly appear before her, while the old home place, with mama in the parlor and the expatriate's footprints undusted on the pinewood floor, will face forever toward Xanadu. Sometimes the only way home is on the back of a trout.