Father's Day

I’m sitting at the vise, attempting to tie up a #16 elk hair caddis. It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living. I’m usually slow but tonight, I’ve got other things on my mind.

In less than two weeks, my parents will arrive from Wisconsin. Part of their brief stay will include a day on the Deschutes for my father and me. In anticipation of his arrival, I’ve been hitting up my fishing buddies for an extra pair of sea-worthy waders, tying elk hairs and stonefly nymphs, and generally looking forward to the trip.  Fishing is often a special time for fathers and sons. That’s been especially true for us.

Like most people who fish, I was introduced by my father. It was one of those things that fathers just did, like the purchase of a first baseball glove and the mandatory lecture about the birds and the bees. Since ours was a large family, he had to do it a half dozen different times but he handled it well and it seems to have taken. We all enjoy fishing and my sister recently had a pair of waders custom-made for herself because she couldn’t wait for the local shop to figure out that fathers teach daughters to fish as well as sons.

My father was a teacher by trade and his lessons in the art of angling covered a wide variety of areas. He taught us about worms and how to find, keep, and—most importantly—use them effectively. When we got a little older, he used his income tax refund one year to purchase an aluminum canoe. With the canoe on top of the station wagon, we put in lots of miles looking for local “hot spots.” It was my father who introduced me to the native brook trout of North Wisconsin and clipped the notice from the paper about a fly-tying class at the local high school.

But fishing was more than catching fish for him and it has become that way for me as well. (That’s just as well since I have a younger brother who always manages to catch more and bigger fish than any of the rest of us. When my dad really wants fish, he goes with him!) Above all, fishing served as an island of tranquility during the stormy sixties when my brothers, my sister and I were growing up. The battles over civil rights and the Viet Nam War were also fought around our dining room table along with all the other adolescent conflicts over drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

Sometimes my father must have felt like he was living in an emotional war zone. But somehow, a separate peace was declared whenever we went fishing or at least a temporary truce. Those evenings spent in the canoe looking for bass or stalking wild brookies on the Prairie River were magically reconciling. It was fishing that helped all of us survive those days. Because of that, I associate fishing with the unspoken peace and acceptance of one another that my father and I seem to have worked out about the time I got married and moved west.

Fishing is a celebration of friendship for my father and me. It was something we shared together even when it seemed like there was nothing else we had in common. I will always be grateful for that.

John Buchan, the former Governor General of Canada, has written, “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable; a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” For my father and me, it has become a perpetual series of occasions for celebration as well. Happy Father’s Day.

[Note: I wrote this piece in May of 1989 and it was published in the newsletters of the Angler’s Club of Portland (June 1989) and the Flyfisher’s Club of Oregon. Sunday is Father’s Day and it seems appropriate to share it again after 26 years. My father suffered a stroke several years ago and silently contemplates life in a care center on a bluff above the Wisconsin River near the house where we grew up.]