“You wait here, I’m going across the street to the library.”
It sounded like a great idea. I’d been up most of the night, by train from Portland to Denver. My father picked me up at the Union Station, downtown, in the early morning light, then deposited me in a brick hotel across the street. I fell asleep immediately, smelling fresh cleaned pillow case and sheets.
He returned that afternoon, with a bundle from Gart Brothers Sporting Goods, and some lunch for us.
“I think I know how to do it now,” his trademark half grin spilling anticipation.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Well, I think we should try some fishing…some fly fishing.”
It didn’t sound like that great an idea to me. At thirteen, bookish, just returned from 3 weeks in Seattle visiting the World’s Fair with my Aunt Gretchen, I just wanted to get back home to our safe little house in Ridgewood, right outside of Cincinnati. But my father had other plans. He’d determined we would tour the Colorado mountains, explore the canyons, forests, and streams, and generally get to know each other.
He unwrapped the package, and out fell a collapsable fishing rod, packages of red “salmon egg” bait, and spools of white nylon line. “I read all about how to do this while you were asleep. I think I get the idea.”
My father, who’d grown up in Eastern Montana, on the banks of the Yellowstone River, had grown up ice skating its cracked and frozen surface in the winter; riding bareback through box canyons in the spring and fall, and even herding cows in the summer. But he never learned about fly fishing, which was viewed as an effete, Eastern tourist activity among the pioneers of Miles City. They went in more for the sapling/string/bent pin/worm style of fishing.
But my dad, he had become very accomplished at many things by reading up, then trying them out. Woodworking, golf, ice dancing, home electronics … every year or two, he picked up something new, got a little accomplished at it, then moved on to the next challenge. Now he was going to fish, and, I supposed, force me into trying it too. Both catching, and eating.
The eating part was what scared me. I admired my father; he was, of course, the strongest, smartest, most athletic man alive. But he was a little pushy about food. All I wanted to eat was peanut butter and mashed potatoes. He seemed to think green things – beans, peas, lettuce – were better suited to my needs. I thought they looked best hidden in mounds of mashed potato. Since I’d inherited both his and my mother’s stubbornness, we spent many hours morosely locked in combat at the dinner table, which I usually won by either feigning, or actually experiencing nausea whenever something with chlorophyll entered my throat. Looking back, I’m convinced it was the phyto-estrogens I was rejecting. The term hadn’t been invented, so I was left with whining and crying as the main thrust of my arguments.
I saw little value in rejecting fish before we’d even caught any, though. And I had enough Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn in me to see the upside of tossing a line in a mountain stream, then sitting around for hours while the fish didn’t bite. So I simply said, “OK, where are we going to fish?”
(To Be Cont’d)