©1991 Jack W. Gladstone, Glacier Pacific Publishing (BMI)

Dedicated to Jack and Betty Loring, who for 25 years made their living fishing from lower St. Mary’s Lake in Montana. Up at 4 AM, summer mornings would find Jack out on the lake tending the night’s catch. The last five winters, his body was ravaged by cancer and found him hospitalized numerous times. But when the ice broke and spring bloomed, miraculously he was back on the lake assuming his duties. In the summer of 1985, Jack was hospitalized for the last time. I visited him and was the last person to leave his room about midnight. The next morning the “Farmer of the Waters” arose and departed from his body at about 4 AM.

The fisherman wakes at 4:00 a.m. without a clock alarm
He knows not to let the nets he set fall victim to day’s harm
The dawning air is chilly when the sun's below the rise
His yawning walk delivers him directly to lakeside.
And he crosses depths where his nets set up pulls them to his grasp.
He removes the aqua harvest. The lake is rippled glass...

With slow but timeless certainty the sun burst o’er Divide
Granting strength and vision to the caps now dancing at his side.
They sparkle bright like diamond gold on aqua blue terrain.
He’s a Farmer of the Waters, his boat, a plow on plain.

And he rows in right on heavy with a harvest from the blue.
His tubs are full and flopping with a food that’s native true.
I am proud to hold in memory a man as fine as you.
You’re a Farmer of the Waters, true and true.

The morning’s done soon as the sun is overhead and high.
The fish are in, all orders been now filled by you and wife.
With sharp and swift precision, blades are used and filets made.
How often did I think that not for any life you’d trade?

For as winter pulled your body down the spring brought life anew.
And time and time again you rose to cast your nets on blue
We are proud to hold in memory a man as fine as you.
You’re a Farmer of the Waters, true and true.

There are Farmers of the Waters plowing ‘cross the ocean plains
Whose fields will flood with topsoil with the rolling of the rains.
From the sandy beach at Waikiki to the lakes of Tennessee,
From the future to the past we know, the man from Galilee.

And they row in right on heavy with a harvest from the blue.
Their baskets full and flopping with a food that’s native true.
We are proud to hold in memory men as fine as you.
Farmers of the Waters, true and true.

Yes I am proud to hold in memory a man as fine as you.
You're a Farmer of the Waters true and true.

The fisherman woke at 4:00 a.m.
The sun was on the rise...