One Last Fishing Trip

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Moments sneak up on you while sleeping, like a 4:00 AM alarm.

Unwelcomed, tinny electricized tones rip into the night’s blissful blur and ruin a perfectly satisfying unconsciousness. The alarm is startling at first, then aggravating, and only gradually nearly tolerable. Your pulse, still audible from silence, aligns with the tone’s cadence. Eyelids flicker and open. Pupils dilate. Finally, fumbling greatly, you succumb to lucidity and pull yourself to a sit.

“If you want your dreams to come true, you have to wake up,” was just one of the annoying phrases you were likely to hear on any random morning at my house, even a 4:00 AM fishing morning.

I am not a morning person. Dad is. His dorky morning grin said: “Get it together buddy, we’re going fishing.” Luckily, I like … no … love to fish.

“Fishing is always better the earlier you get up,” another tidbit of woodsy wisdom Dad had shared early and often in my life. It’s not always true, but it does somehow make sense. My grumpiness would ebb at the sight of the fishing gear tucked just inside the carport shed door. By the time I had loaded rods, reels, and the rest of the requisite tackle in the truck I would be filled with anticipatory bliss. Dark empty roads were sweetened by cookies swiped from the cookie jar, too early for Mom to do anything about it. I always enjoyed the ride.

A soft sort of magic somehow works its way into fishing mornings. Road noise blended perfectly with road tunes. A glow would slowly appear at the head of the canyon, the light coming from somewhere way out East, past the Wasatch.  Unconcerned deer, elk, or an occasional sluggish moose grazed in the half-light. Waterfowl startled a bit, shaking off the morning dew. We’d watched many purple-orange sunrises chase mist off the lake.

The day’s first hopeful casts would zing out into the sky and break the flat peace with splashy violence. The thin line split fluid steel, dividing it into dual realities of mystery and physics.

Morning air is settled, dense, and cool. Morning stillwaters smell of organic fecundity. If you had not a single other sense you’d know a fishing lake by its early dawn smell. The extreme stillness and whispery sound of silence make the live electric pull of a fish a complete shock, a serendipitous reward. Magic.

Today we were going fishing again and this day’s trip would surprise as well.

Dad and I started out in our familiar place: dull routine chat. These were waters we’d fished often over the years, more and more as we aged. Somehow we had settled that deep conversations, with their curious explorations and insightful inquiries, are for the idealistic, for the young maybe. We were two thinkers, both curious by nature, however, past attempts to see eye-to-eye had by now pacified any urges to try to uncover anything new. Somehow fishing buddies can intimately understand, but never really know each other. Sometimes they know, but don’t really understand. Dad and I could always fish though, side by side, saying the most silent of words. We enjoyed every single minute.

Dad fished more shallow and slower than most, with a long flexible spinning rod, long light leaders, and incredible touch. His smooth arching sidearm casts were the most graceful I’ll ever see, like a polished pro shortstop whipping the ball from deep in the hole over to first, just in time. But for all of this effortless grace his focus was sharp and his hooksets potent. He was after meat, so he rarely missed a set or lost a hooked fish.

Dad Cleaning or Eating Fish

Dad took me fishing most summer weekends, mostly on lakes, mostly with spinning gear, and mostly with bait on the end of the line. But in the evenings he’d tie on a long leader and fly, retrieving it with super slow turns of the handle on his Mitchell 300. It worked and I liked this way better.

Early on I went my own way. Too impatient to sit still, I’d moved towards live water and, enamored by the confluence of physics, coordination, science, and art, I’d become a fly fisher by the time I was 12. Dad and I still fished regularly through my teens, but I’d head off downstream and he’d plant himself patiently behind a forked stick. Mostly due to my extreme perseverance, deeply inquisitive nature, and a touch of obsessiveness, I was getting pretty good at fly fishing by the time I could drive. I was guiding and instructing in my early 20s. Our father-son fishing grew much less frequent.

Introducing me to an acquaintance sometime after I’d started guiding, Dad once said that I’d “forgotten more than he ever knew about fishing.” I was genuinely flattered. I do know fishing. I couldn’t help it. Since I first surveyed the pine-green waters of Tibble Fork Reservoir from Dad’s shoulders to this day I’ve dedicated more questions, time, thought, reading, and effort to fishing than to anything else. But watching Dad fish always reminded me I’d never match his ease, feel, and simple finesse. He was the most utilitarian of artists, or actually, the most artistic of utilitarians. He was a natural. He’d refined his singular style over years at places like Silver Lake, the Mill Pond, Strawberry, Gooseberry, Spring Creek, and every other little pond, creek, and irrigation culvert in the drivable vicinity.

The reality of Dad’s easy skill and our settled rapport made the clumsiness of this day more troubling. Something was off. Maybe we both knew; I certainly did.

It should be no secret that every great fishing trip must include stories of piscatorial triumphs past. The best anglers are usually the best storytellers because they work in moldable realities. All fishermen are liars but the best of them lie about the truth.

Dad always had a way of working his way slowly into his best stories. And he didn’t tell them just for fun, or just to brag (although he also never corrected any misconstrued assumption of his prowess). There was generally some utility to Dad’s tales, something to learn and apply upon arrival at the lake.

Each yarn would begin as a turn in the road reminded him of another time. He’d lay the groundwork with a skillful appeal to veracity for effect, actual days, actual waters, actual fishing buddies, and so on. Then he’d weave it on from there, adding images and nuance (in parentheses). I knew they were good stories because I always kind of understood something more than the sum of the linguistic parts.

This day our greeting had been usual, or maybe just a little warmer.

“Hey buddy.”

“Hey Dad.”

Soon we were off, and as expected, Dad had set the stage for a story: “You remember that time . . . ?”

Everything else was different.

To start, my sister, Shelley, the most skillful linguist and best storyteller in the family, was there. A natural at most things, Shelley can also fish, but she doesn’t really. Having her along was unusual for a fishing trip. But this wasn’t a normal day on the water.

Dad’s tales began to take shape. They were tinged with truth, but taller than normal, and flatter at the same time. Shelley and I listened hard, with concern-tightened brows, trying to follow.

He meandered into curious accounts, coming from directions we couldn’t predict. Old days working at the state prison were yesterday and his colleagues were in the hall. He worked in a few odd conspiracies, rich with stratagems befitting the dusty Ludlum spy novels I’d once plucked from his basement library for 5th-grade book reports. He included the time we caught a bunch of fish in the rain at Silver Lake Flat. Oddly, this one was right on by my recollection. Then there was a particularly detailed and folksy yarn about a guy in Cache Valley, or thereabouts, who managed to trap a black bear in the trunk of his car. “Look it up in the Logan paper, Jake.”

Ties to time, people, rational contextualization, and a certain order of operations help us make sense of any story. Dad’s characters were real, or seemed mostly real. The places, also real, were painted in vivid details. But the twisting disconnected structure just wouldn’t support the narrative edifice. Dad’s casts weren’t hitting water.

Shelley and I bounced concerned glances off each other. My eyes teared.

The nurse came in to tell him his IV was infected. He’d have to lay down for a half hour so they could change a PICC line. Laying down hurt his infected lungs. Shell, who somehow always knows just the right thing to do, turned on some music to help pass the time. Hearing the first few lines of “The Boxer” seemed to calm him a bit.

I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance . . .

The Simon & Garfunkle playlist, one of the staple soundtracks of road trips with Dad, soothed us all a bit, but he wasn’t able to stay comfortable. Time wore.

Half of the time we’re gone
But we don’t know where,
And we don’t know where . . .

Dad was listening without hearing. He adjusted his position restlessly. Shell and I tried to chat in the quietest, least disturbing way we could muster.

Do-n-do-d-do-n-do
Like it shines on me
The only living boy in New York,
The only living boy in New York

The nurse tried to keep him still with an artificially-sweetened tone, “Just 5 more minutes and we can sit you up.”

“It was 5 minutes 10 damn minutes ago!”

“There’s Dad,” I thought. It was reassuring to hear him grumpy and true to himself, even for a moment.

The shocking blare of an early morning fishing alarm, like the droning EKG, rudely refer you to the reality of your time and place. Scent cements it. Reality always smells just like it is. Hospital smells make me sick. Like every other fishing trip I’ve ever taken with Dad, there were the mountains, visible right out the window. But we were so far away from lakes and streams that day in early May.

Hypercalcemia (high calcium), an unfortunate by-product of advanced leukemia and lymphoma, causes confusion and extreme weakness. It was serious.

Like so many times before, my father and I were together doing the same thing, differently. Dad was fishing for his stories in a failing brain with a weakening body. I was fishing for my Dad, hoping to get him back, strong, a little too perturbed by life, and unconventionally sure. Maybe just a little more time, so we could fish again.

Leukemia is a big slow bear. It doesn’t sneak, hide, or ambush. You can see it coming in plain sight, snarling, salivating as it eases into a heavy lope. You assess the situation, make a plan. You’ve got some time. And you’ll outpace it for a while, beat it back, maybe even catch it in a car trunk and make the papers. You think you’re clear. But the bear stays on your track, eventually wears you out, and is upon you. The mauling is painful, inhumane.

Hospitalization lasted nearly two months. This semi-forced institutionalization was probably the most torturous experience of my father’s life. He absolutely hated it. We hated it. Eventually, his confusion did subside and he made it out. Over the summer he got to at least see some of his favorite fishing spots again with the help and transcendental patience of my Mom, an unwitting angel in a school-teacher cardigan.

Dad and I never fished again.

In September he slipped away at 66 with all the grace of his best cast and a hope for a generous reward out there in the early morning mists, somewhere between mystery and physics.

Dad, thanks for taking me fishing.

3 Comments

  1. This story hit me in a different way. I’m the dad (a lot younger but with cancer). My son is only 7 but this has inspired me to get him out on the water more this next year. Thank you so much for sharing this story.

    PS just found your blog, you’re a great storyteller

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