Fishing with Dad
The struggle had, I suppose, been going on all morning but I was unaware of it at the time. The water's cold current pressing relentlessly against my legs and hips. The water whose surface was a dark green reflected from the forest on this overcast Oregon Saturday. The current rose and swirled around me and would at other times have a smooth mirror sheen, but today that sheen was shattered by the drops of a heavy rain that had been falling all morning.
Most of the time I wasn't aware of the struggle but the river was wearing me down slowly and by the end of the day the toll would have to be reckoned with. My felt-clad shoes found tenuous footing on the slick cobbled bed of the river. One was well aware that a slip or stumble and the rive would pull you downstream as the waders filled with water and you struggled for a shore. Best avoided. For now it just added that frisson of risk that culminated in a sublime day.
The yellow line was trailing downstream of me as I finished tying another fly on the line. This time some giant gaudy thing I called one of my 'whore' flies. It was grotesquely fluorescent orange and pink on a huge hook. I really didn’t know what I was doing here. These fast deep clear rivers the dry flies weren’t working, neither were the nymphs. What were we fishing for anyway? Fish I suppose but which ones? Steelhead, salmon, sea-run cutthroat, trout? We certainly had no idea. We were fishing.
There is my father standing firm and confidently upstream and 20 or more feet further out in the difficult current. He was always much more confident in swift streams. Fearless all of his life. From there he was casting to the far shore with the graceful loops of false casts stretching across the rough surface of the water.
Across the United States I have always noticed regional difference in rivers. My father and I learned most of our fishing in Arizona. Here the rivers run small and are few in number.
We fished smaller tributaries like Clear Creek in places like Kinder Crossing and Chevelon Canyon. These were fun, and obscure places, at the time shared by my father's lifelong friend and artist Norman A Browne who generously introduced us to them.
We would hike a couple of miles down into the canyons of Clear Creek and fish the linked pools. Here we would catch on spinner or fly small but fighting rainbow or brown trout. We hardly ever saw anyone else. When I was bored of fishing there was swimming and frogs to catch.
For an Aquarian from arid Arizona the idea of running water was captivating. I was entranced by the smallest clear streams.
I now live in the Northwest and I can say the character of rivers here is much different. They are all mountain-born rushing flows of water of such crystalline clarity. If you ever chance to visit the source of the Metolius in central Oregon please do. For here in this basaltic world literally springs forth a river fullly formed from one source. It flows its short life with water so clear as if it were distilled from the sky itself. I fished this and watched trout rise from twenty feet down from a big hole for my fly.
The rivers of the Northwest are in general great muscular rivers of this exceptional clarity.
So here were two small-stream fishermen in this foreign territory drenched in a years’s worth of Arizona rain not catching a damn thing and having the time of our lives. We retreated to his truck to try our luck on Eagle Creek nearby, ravenous for the sandwiches we ate on the way. In the end still no luck and we drove home that afternoon tired but sated by the day‘s efforts.
This day the sun beats on us relentlessly from a sharp bright disk out of a sky of such blueness, born of thin high altitude air with a complete lack of moisture. It is over 100 degrees fahrenheit and the canyon walls are reflecting that intense heat onto us in what should feel like an oven.
Indeeed I would have wilted hours ago except that my torso is submerged in the cold clear current of the Gunnison river. We are near my father’s home of Hotchkiss Colorado. Just downstream of the dam the water flows in a strong current around us from releases for the summer’s irrigation. This cold water is what makes it a good trout fishery and today every other cast elicits at least a bite.
We have been catching and releasing fish all day. Playing them on the line until we can bring them up close to let them go. Barbless hooks on dry flies. Dry flies are so much more fun as you can see the quarry as it rises and breaks the surface, then the quickened pulse of the tug of the line and the battle to keep the fish is on.
My father and I work up and down this section of river methodically. We are alone. The casting and wading and watching all some gigantic meditation. Every thought or concern driven out. This is the best part of fly fishing, its meditative quality. The absolute focus on the coordination required to place this fly on exactly the patch of water you require. The complete integration of mind and body.
It becomes a kind of refuge. There is no pain or suffering. The heat of the day merges with the cold of the water, the clearness of sky merges with rugged rocky cliffs, hunger and thirst are one cancelling the other.
When we decide to leave the water we are grinning and exhausted. We don’t even need to say what we both feel, that this has been a memorable day out. As I sit finally in the hot cab of the truck my body feels as if it is composed of lead. There is no strength left, only fatigue and a sense of my mass and I could fall asleep in an instant if I chose to.
Today I sit beside his bed that he rarely leaves. He is almost ninety and I am still fishing with him. Covid took first his balance, then his mobility, then his memories. At a pace that stuns me still, like some oneway downhill roller coaster.
I sit here beside him a few times a week and I fish with my words for his wit and humour. I cast a comment and thrill to the rise of a dry response, the ripples of memory and recollection. This man of lifelong vigour, kindness, and sharp witted charisma. And so it goes and I find myself feeling fortunate that he is still there, mind stunted and truncated by disease and age but I know when he says he loves me he still means it.
I know too I am fortunate having heard so many stories of those who went fishing in the empty pools of their parents without a rise or a strike; just calm clear water. Until the river dried up.
Or those who cast into a torrent to have the fly tossed back at them repeatedly till they left defeated and hurt.
And each time they tie a new fly to the line and cast again and again delicately and hesitantly searching that edge of foam, that deep-cut bank, or the end of a riffle where they may yet find that person they still love.
