Fishing with Dad
This was the wild country. Here I was, just me and Dad, in the middle of nowhere.
Usually boys accompany their menfolk on fishing and hunting trips, but my Dad didn't have boys; just a couple of scrappy girls who never got along. He also had a scrappy wife, so his Saturday fishing trips were his sacred right to peace and serenity. And then one day, he took me fishing with him.
After driving for what seemed like hours to my ten-year-old sense of time, we finally arrived at a wide spot in a long, pitted dirt road. We had passed the closest excuse for a town long ago. Aspens and willows closed in on both sides, opening sometimes to wildflower-infested meadows. We got out of Dad's old work truck where he stored all his tools and fishing gear. I looked around, suddenly overwhelmed by the sun-dappled face of Nature. This was the wild country. Not the make-believe play lands I concocted out of garden debris. Here I was, just me and Dad, in the middle of nowhere.
Slamming the door to make sure it caught on the latch, Dad handed me a cardboard tube and told me to follow him. At the end of a narrow footpath, we descended to a sandy beach. The creek was barely as wide as the bedroom my sister and I shared. Cottonwoods sunk their roots into the banks, creating deep hollows where fish liked to hide.
Dad pointed to one of these still-water pools and said, “I’ll bet there’s a great big German brown right there.” I couldn’t see anything in that shadowy depth. And the white ripples flowing around it obscured anything else.
Pulling the rods from their tubes, he baited his hook with salmon eggs and cast it into that murky hole. “You watch. I’m going to catch him real quick now,” he whispered, pressing his finger to his lips. I hunkered down cross-legged in the sand and waited. And waited. Then waited some more.
“When you gonna catch a fish, Daddy.” Breaking his tight focus, he turned and shushed me into silence.
“Just be patient, Soos. It’ll only be a minute or two. I know he’s checking out the bait right now. I can feel him nosing the hook.”
“How do you know that,” my voice registered closer to the whine. I couldn’t see anything moving in that water.
SHUSH!
I could then feel the tension growing as he tried to reestablish his concentration. There was serious work going on here. Dad’s body relaxed again as he leaned toward where the line disappeared into the water.
All of a sudden, WHAM! Water splashed violently as a huge trout jumped out of the creek and danced across the ripples with my Dad’s line holding it erect. Dad seemed to play with it a moment, slowly winding the reel and pulling the fish closer to shore. At last, Dad landed it in the grass where it fought its life struggle. Taking a pair of pliers from his kit, Dad tweezed the barbed hook from its throat and placed it in the wicker creel. It continued to wriggle and gasp as Dad yanked a handful of the long reedy grass and bedded the fish in its moisture.
“Okay, Soos, that’s how it’s done. Now it’s your turn.” Dad assembled my pole, which was a third the length of his and baited the hook with a trio of salmon eggs. “Now you just cast the line into that little pool over there.” He pointed to a glassy mirror of quiet water a few yards away from his chosen spot.
Whipping the line behind me as if I was revving up for a softball pitch, I tangled the line in a willow branch. Dad carefully extracted it for me, then gave me a little arm coordination lesson before the next cast. That time, the hook, weighted with bait, hit its mark in the center of the pool. He picked up his rod and cast into another ripple a few yards away.
Then we waited. And waited, Then waited some more. Dad snagged another big fish and I watched his ballet with that one while my line languished in its desolation.
When all calmed again, I pulled my line out and recast it, whining about how long it was taking me to catch a fish. And Dad’s lecture about “feeling” the fish nibble on the bait flew right over my head. There were subtleties to this fishing racket that would take years to master. And I didn’t have that kind of time that afternoon.
So, I set my pole on the grass and explored the mysteries of river stones. A beachball sized boulder provided the perfect seat for me to dangle my feet in the water. As I splashed with my feet, I watched a swallowtail flit around a stand willows, its wings glistening in the sun. A hawk squealed above me, circling downstream. Further thoughts of fishing disappeared in the music of the river.
My canvas Keds became soaked with icy water. That’s when a new bout of complaints filled the air. With all the splashing and noise I made, Dad had wandered upstream around a copse of willows, out of sight but still within earshot of my caterwauling.
Usually, he moved up and down the river all day, sometimes covering a mile or more before catching his limit. Today, with me lugging against that freedom, he couldn’t stray too far. from where I eventually plopped in the sand and pouted. I was so disappointed that I couldn’t catch anything, I blubbered that this fishing stuff was awful. Why did he find it so much fun? I just couldn’t understand how a man could stand all day, even when he went for several minutes without catching anything. What was the attraction?
So, he baited my hook one more time and stood nearby while I cast and recast several times, letting the current bobble the hook as if it were alive along the bottom of the creek.
Then WHAM! A huge fish latched onto my hook and wouldn’t let go. Dad nearly jumped out of his boots with excitement as I dragged that fish closer and closer. Hey, this WAS fun. Now I was getting the concept.
Then Dad’s delight fizzled like a sparkler in the rain. He groaned with disgust. “Aw nuts! It’s s sucker! Sorry Soos, we can’t keep this one. It’s a trash fish.”
A trash fish? How can any fish be trash?
When Dad tried to throw it back in, I insisted, as only a whiny little girl could do, that I wanted to take it home and show Mom. It was about eighteen inches long and as big around as my arm. Finally, he relented, strung it on a forked stick and threw it in the back of the truck. There, it slapped its waning life force on the metal floor. No fresh grass in the wicker creel would cushion its ride home.
“Come on, Soos, let’s take you to a place where I know you’ll have fun fishing.”
About an house later, we arrived back in Salt Lake at a park-like place where people had formed a pool in their front yard. A tiny stream ran through their property, fed from a culvert under the street. Weeping willows shaded this bucolic estate. Children clustered around the edge of the pond, fishing for the hundreds of tiny trout whirling around its confined space.
Taking my own rod, Dad let me cast in and pull out a couple of fish. Then he and I drifted upstream where the fish were rarer but bigger. There I caught a trout that measured from my hand to my elbow. Not as huge as my prized catch in the back of the truck, but we could actually fry it up and eat it. I was in Heaven.
Back home, we enjoyed butter fried trout for dinner. That sucker fish lay on the back porch, still threaded on the stick, for days until Mom added it to the garbage can. She knew I could never throw it in there myself. It was like a pet by that point.
I never did master the fine art of stream fishing that my Dad had learned during his life. I found other ways to nurture sanity than standing on a river bank. My husband and daughter tried to learn fishing decades later, reading books and watching YouTube videos, but never got the hang of it. Despite Jeff’s “productive” mentality about it, he finally learned that it isn’t the catching that’s important. It’s the fishing that counts. There’s a big difference between those two concepts. And patience is the key to withstanding the urgency to catch a fish.
And wherever Dad is fishing these days, I hope he knows how much I actually appreciated that whiny day on the creekside. I know for a fact that his nephews will always have great memories of him taking them fishing. In fact, my nephew, Mark, inherited the creel when Dad died. It holds a memorial spot in the family cabin.
Photos by Sue Cauhape, unless otherwise identified.
You can read more from Sue Cauhape on her page, “Ring Around the Basin”:
If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.
If it gave you any thoughts, please leave a comment.
If you think others would enjoy it, hit re-stack or share:
If you’d like to read more:
And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always help with a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.
So beautifully written, & some evocative! I have no childhood fishing expeditions in my history but so related to the sense of visceral nostalgia. This was such a great, edifying, emotional piece.
A wonderful memory shared with love…