Presentation vs. Choice: Sons & Fathers

In Alaska: “It Gets Down in your Soul” last year, I mentioned that I would be going back this year with my sons. I did. This was the year I turned 60. I decided that, more than anything, I wanted to fish with my sons in Alaska at one of my favorite spots.

            My wife and I often reflect on how blessed we are to have two children that presented us with few challenges. They got along with each other to an absurd extent, they showed up for school, got the grades that were expected, participated in school and family activities without drama, excelled at what they liked and never groused when their parents declared their home a Nintendo/video game-free zone. They had their moments like any kid does, but they were remarkably infrequent. In short, we have always enjoyed their company.

            But, as I approached 60, I had this nagging feeling of unfinished business when it came to fly fishing. I took both boys fishing growing up, to be sure. But my efforts were often clumsy.  I am not sure why this was but I suspect it was because the sport was too dear to me to be anything less than beloved. I also vaguely understood that the pressures of career and life imposed an artificial urgency on catching fish. That urgency was largely the result of striving to “maximize” the moment rather than enjoy the moment, because I sensed the moment would be brief. It’s the lesson every parent learns later than they wish they did.

            My oldest son (as tends to be the lot of oldest sons) got the “I love this sport and you must love it too!” approach from me. I signed him up for fly fishing lessons at the fly shop that I frequented when the owner said he’d let JC attend for free if I’d help him out on “graduation day” when he took all the students out on the water for the last lesson (that was the day I figured out I would never make it as a guide).

            JC is blessed with an innate wisdom that he usually communicates only after he is confident of its relevance. He never said the words but, by the time he finished the four session class (which he participated in with some interest but not what I would call passion), I realized that he seemed to be perplexed by a father that farmed out teaching his son to fly fish to the local fly shop. I decided to rectify that error by gracing JC with personal lessons from his father. As I said, I probably was not cut out to be a guide so the personal instruction soon failed as well. We went back to baseball and hiking and sharing things where I could keep my zeal in check.

That is not to say my sons and I did not fish after that. We did, but I left the choice to them of spinning rod or fly rod and gave them opportunities for choice rather than prescriptions for happiness on the water. In this way, my younger son picked up a fly rod.

After my hapless attempts with JC, I purposely did not discuss fly fishing with Cal. When our family lived in Alaska, J and I took JC and Cal on a 5 day float trip. The guide set them up with spinning rods while J and I fly fished. The boys caught a lot of fish and we had a great time. The last evening, however, I came back to camp after exploring a back channel. The guide was getting some dinner going and commented “That little guy of yours can really cast the fly rod.”

I said, “Yeah, JC took some lessons so he knows a bit about it.”

The guide looked at me and replied, “Nah, JC is with J. I mean Cal. He’s just around the bend.”

Cal was about 13 at the time. He had not quite hit the growth spurt that would come in the months to follow. I walked upstream a few hundred yards and saw him casting the fly rod with the late day sun glimmering on the water. I would say I wish that iPhones existed then so I could have taken a picture but I am glad they didn’t because the image could never match what remains in my head.

“Cal, where did you learn how to do that?”

He laughed. “Oh, just watching you and J and when you gave JC lessons.”

I forgot that when I would take JC out to fish, his little brother was usually with us waiting obediently at the edge of the water. I stifled my enthusiasm and just offered, “Well, let me know if you want to do more of that sometime.”

So, the boys and I fished from time to time and had fun but fly fishing was not a prominent feature. I proceeded to enjoy the balance of their childhoods as much or more than they did as they grew into men of depth with roughly equal measures of kindness and humor.

Part of what allowed me to not push fly fishing further with my sons was that I came to understand that fly fishing had the unique effect (along with my wife) of keeping me in balance when life was trying to knock me off my feet. My sons didn’t need that from fishing. They needed that from me. So while we could speak from common ground on hiking, baseball, music, movies, books, tennis, skiing, traveling, their mother and any number of other things we enjoyed and even loved, fishing was harder for me to share in a way that preserved its sanctity for me but kept it wholly approachable for them.

Five years ago, my wife and I moved to Wyoming. JC and I started backpacking again but with him leading rather than me. As it has always been with me when it comes to backpacking, there has to be fishing involved. JC found a series of hikes over 3 or 4 summers that got us well into the backcountry and where we could catch fish. Suddenly, he was asking questions about flies and techniques and he was fishing. He’s learning his home waters and is a few fly rods into a burgeoning collection. He’s an analytical sort so he’s becoming a student of the sport which is all any decent fly fisherperson can hope to be. None of us are masters or even teachers, as I so clearly demonstrated in JC’s youth.  We’re just students sharing our class notes which I now enjoy doing with JC unburdened by my expectations of what fly fishing can do for him or me, but content in what it does for us.

Cal lived with us for 4 or 5 months after we moved to Wyoming. Living on a creek with your retired parents and no one else around is a great way to take up fly fishing. Cal got very good at casting in those months so tends to be able to place the fly better than people who have been doing this for years, including me.

In the old argument of what matters most, fly presentation or fly choice, Cal will likely end up a presentation guy, JC a choice guy.

As the pictures below show, this year we shared our love for fly fishing together in Alaska. It was not just because Alaska is an easy place to fall in love with fly fishing but because it’s where the three of us started the process that fathers and sons go through when they head for the same destination by different routes. At 60 years old, as with so many other things over the years, I arrived at common ground with my sons regarding fly fishing. I think it took longer than it did with other things because, for me, somehow, it mattered more. And, as it goes with fathers and sons, it had more to do with what they taught me about me than with anything I could have ever taught them.

Cal caught the most fish including a whole lot of silver salmon.

JC caught the fish that all three of us wanted most, a 27 inch rainbow. A flesh fly more nudged than stripped got this beauty to wander over and dine. Almost politely.

But I can still catch a fish or two here and there.

My boys and me.

Alaska: "It Gets Down in Your Soul"

At the end of my first trip in 1999, I looked at J and said “Alaska is like the deepest breath I’ve ever drawn.”     

Little did I know at that point that I would later get to live in Alaska for six years and travel back several times after that. In 1999 I figured I had just completed the trip of a lifetime. And I had. I’ve completed that same trip over and over since and I never grow tired of it.

It’s not just the fishing. Well, that’s a huge part of it as the pictures below will attest. But, there’s something more. It’s something that causes people to make vague allusions that are arcane outside of Alaska but are crystal clear once you’re there.

“I came here for a summer 30 years ago and never got around to leaving.” That sort of comment is bandied about from time to time in many places but, in Alaska, it is the standard explanation for why people live there. As far as human habitation goes, there is a subtle feeling of impermanence. Everyone has a half-baked plan to leave that usually only gets fully cooked when life somehow forces the issue. Until then, it’s always a matter of staying just a little longer.

“You just have to get out in it.” This is how people in Alaska deal with winter. I hated it because being cold is one of my least favorite things. But Alaskans (and faux Alaskans) attack winter like they think they can intimidate it. They “snow machine” (or snowmobile as we call it in the Lower 48, as if we have any concept of snow), cross country/back country/downhill ski, play hockey, go orienteering, snowshoeing, etc. And not in the “I tried snowshoeing last weekend—that was pretty fun” sort of way. They will work all day and then go out under a full moon to do an excursion with something strapped to their feet in 10 degree weather (if it’s nice out)…and then do it again the next night…and the next. Folks in Boulder, Colorado like to think of themselves as uber-athletes. But they have been known to sit out blizzards. Not in Alaska.

“It’s all about the gear.” This isn’t something that men in Alaska say to establish their testosterone bona fides. Well, OK, actually, they do but, everyone says this. Men, women, children, grandmothers. Why? Because it is. If you have the right “gear” (layers of clothing, skis, fishing rods, “snow machines”, trucks, boats, planes, dogs, sleds, guns, knives, nets, backpacks, bear spray, rafts, boots, blankets, to name a few), you can venture out with some hope of surviving. This includes trips across town in your car in January.

“Termination Dust and Break Up.” Termination Dust is the first time snow reappears on the mountain tops, usually, in the early fall. Sometimes it happens in the late summer which is really alarming for the uninitiated. For folks in the Lower 48, the first snow is often a welcome change after summer’s heat, little league, family vacations, barbecues, etc. Even if it isn’t welcome, it’s not an ordeal. To Alaskans, the arrival of snow is an ordeal. Not the sort of ordeal that can’t be managed and, indeed, no one this side of Nepal manages snow like Alaskans. For Alaskans, the weather itself is not the ordeal. The ordeal is the transition between the weather.  It’s the ordeal of putting away all the toys of summer in order to unload and make room for the toys of winter. Despite the somewhat fatalistic nature of the phrase, the appearance of termination dust is not the end. It’s yet another beginning in Alaska, a place that seems to be constantly “beginning.” If you live there, you can feel and hear the collective, “Well, there it is. Here we go again.” This is followed by a shrug of the shoulders and a wry smile. The same thing happens in April. Then they call it “Break Up” and it’s not nearly as pretty as a dusting of snow on the mountains. Honestly, Break Up is a big, slushy mess where a winter’s worth of trash “breaks” free of the melting ice and floats “up” to the surface. But, it has the same effect as termination dust because, as always, there is more fun ahead. But only after you’ve picked up your toys. 

“It gets down in your soul.” This is my favorite. Virtually anyone who has lived in Alaska has said this at some point. After six years the winters got to be too much for me to stay on. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t get a yearning to “feel” Alaska again. I love traveling to developing countries because there is always that sense of “they’re just making this up as they go” and that tomorrow they will do it completely differently. Alaska is that way but with the accent on nature rather than people. In fifteen minutes, you can drive from your home in Anchorage and be out of sight of any sign of civilization and may even run into a bear or moose. In a half hour you can fly to a wilderness location that makes even the Tetons look suburban. That’s what gets down in your soul. And there’s no shaking it.

My wife has a particularly acute case of Alaska deep in her soul. If her husband wasn’t such a wimp about the cold, I suspect we would be living in the hills above Anchorage now. So, she settles for trips back every few years. She has been all over the world but Alaska is the one place that calls her back again and again. And she answers because she knows contentment and beauty await.

I recently got to visit Alaska again and, COVID and whatever-other-surprises-are-out-there willing, I’ll go again next year with my sons. We will fish because that’s what you do in Alaska. But we will also have moments like the first time I realized that Alaska had got into my oldest son’s soul. We had only lived there a few weeks and he was still in the “will I ever have any friends again?” phase of the move. We arrived home after a full day of work and school. He didn’t go directly inside but stood in the driveway looking out at Cook Inlet. I walked up behind him in time to hear him say “Cool” which, for a teenage boy, is fairly garrulous. I asked, “What’s that?” He kept looking at the Inlet and answered, “Alaska.”

If we gave our sons nothing else, I would still be proud to say they have got a bit of Alaska down in their souls. J.C. wrote a song about it called “Great Northern Lights” that I have included below.

Rainbows are my favorite fish. Obviously, I have a preference for Alaskan rainbows.

The good news is that J caught the fish. The bad news is that it broke his rod.

There were actually two of them in the water. A nimbler iPhone operator would have got that picture.

Residents. They scoff at all our fishing gear.

Brett hiding behind a silver. Or maybe they’re just that big.

Simon, Gary and me with a few silvers. We caught more than a few.

Randal and me with a couple of prehistoric grayling

This is how all these pictures happen.