It started way back here.......
I know, the pics are grainy, but this all started well before the digital age, and so some pictures are scanned...
It feels as though the outdoors and the wild things that
inhabit them first began laying claim to my soul a long, long time ago. I have left bits and pieces of it on so many
mountaintops, in so many rivers, creeks, and streams, and scattered across so
many fields that I will likely never again be able to remember where they all
are. The idea to write all this down was
to help me collect and keep tabs on all those moments, those memories, those
experiences. Before I forget….
I’ve got
the pictures and the videos. Literally
thousands of them. The crisp fall
mornings, sunrises, successes, and friendships represented in them are all
priceless to me. Every time I turn the
pages or press play, I find some of them jumping out at me more than
others. Some of them just carry more
weight. I have a photo of myself
standing next to my father, at age 4, needing his help to hold up a stringer of
trout. My trout. “Are you claiming to have caught those fish
at that age?” is a question I have heard before. Granted, I was (obviously) by no means an
accomplished caster at that point, but after my dad placed the cast
effectively, the rod was handed to me; from feeling the bite, to setting the
hook, and fighting the fish to the net – they were mine to lose, and mine
alone. But I didn’t lose them. I caught them. All of them.
“Yes”, is all I can say, knowing full well they may doubt me. Oh, yes…I was rousted out of bed long before
daylight just so that I could sit, shivering, in the early spring dawn,
listening to the creek gurgle by before there was enough light to see it. I was
serenaded by robins as the sun crept up so slowly it was almost painful,
waiting for the start of opening day. Every opening day, and so many, many
days in-between. I was there. And the lessons in patience began. There is another photo of me, taken by my
father, when I was 6, crouched in a frosty Pennsylvania cornfield in
mid-November, grinning behind a red fox held in a 1.5 Oneida victor. Good Lord, what did he start with that
picture…with that morning…
As I scan further through the
pictures I see a blur of my pre-teen years.
The first deer I ever took, on a successful drive when three does and a
button buck were pushed out to me and I kept firing and working the lever of
that old Model 88 Winchester until I finally put the crosshairs on the last doe
standing and the firing pin clicked on a then-empty chamber. Then on to the high school days, after I had
moved to Florida. I find my eyes fixated on the rack buck taken on Ralph’s
farm. Remembering the long plane flight
that made that picture possible, allowing me to make it back to PA for the
first day of buck season; how dad was clinging to that pine tree like a monkey down
below me, whispering “shoot!, shoot!”, while trying to hold his ears for the
muzzle blast he was desperately hoping would come. Flew back down to Florida and made it to
class later that week – but I was wearing a grin about that buck the rest of
the school year, and another one spreads across
my face every time I look at that picture. The shot I took of the first redfish I ever
landed on a fly rod, stalked and deceived on the flats of Pine Island Sound. A front yard full of Grouper and snapper,
all of whom met their end on the floor of my 12-foot Lowe skiff, the Canal Rat. On Friday nights, I wasn’t concerned with
making it to the dance – I was wondering what the tides were going to be at
dawn the next day, when I’d be wading back into the mangroves to see if the
snook were in. I wasn’t staying after
school for practice – I had to get up in the treestand to make sure I didn’t
miss that buck if he came to check his rubline.
And it continued. After heading off to college in Washington
state, steelhead, coho, kings, and blacktail deer were among those added to my
list of most wanted. Elk and black bear
followed. I wasn’t skipping class to
catch up on sleep, I was crawling through a clearcut to see if I could get
within bow range of that black bear I saw the night before, just at dark…or waking
my roommate up and forcing him to jump in the truck with me and head to Salt
Creek because we just KNEW the steelies had to be coming up, and, after that
rain last night - today was the day.
“Get up!!....’whack’…we’re goin’ fishin’...” Countless hours, days, miles…fishing until
the sun came back up, charging our glow-in-the-dark corkies with our
flashlights. Huddled in the Olympic
Peninsula rain at 3 AM, crouched on a muddy creek bank, trying to tie on a new
hook by headlamp, your fingerless gloves steaming and reeking of fish slime
from the steelhead you just released back into the ink-black water at your feet
that you couldn’t even see….that’s where I wanted to be. And I put myself there. Over and over and over….I’ve made a habit of
it.
It’s not just the pictures and the
home movies, though. There’s a .35
Remington pump, my grandfather’s first gun, bought new by him in 1934 with
money earned from long hours in a dark, damp coal mine; the stock worn and weathered
by blood, sweat, thorns, and truck tailgates.
When I hold it in my hands I can FEEL the three generations’ worth of
game hunted with it. I can almost hear
the action sliding back and then front as me, my father, my grandfather, my
great uncle, and a host of others have all laid that worn ivory front bead on
the boiler room and squeezed. Every time
the stock raps me in the cheek I can’t help but smile inside, and I think about
how that rifle has rolled black bear, mountain goat, moose, and deer in the
hands of men I admire and respect, and I hope I can place it in my son’s hands
one day and watch him get blood on the stock before it gets hung up on the wall
one day for the last time.
And there’s more. There is a knife, used by my father for so
long and sent through the breastbones and hides of so many deer that it is not
much more today than a sliver of its original self, resharpened over and over
until you can no longer tell what the original dimensions of the blade might
have been. There is a gold Fenwick
ultra-light trout rod, nearly as old as me.
It stands in the corner of the room there among the gun cabinets and
horns and furs. It is rarely used
anymore, but oh, if it could only speak. Largemouth, smallmouth, steelhead,
salmon, brook trout , rainbows and browns over 30 inches. It has landed them all. Sometimes just to see if I could. I have often mused that I should frame all
the pictures of fish that have had their snapshot taken with that rod and hang
them up next to the rod and retire it for good.
Trouble is, there’s not a wall in my house big enough. They’ll stay in the albums for now.
It may be
that it isn’t healthy to live in the past.
Keep moving forward. But those
trips down memory lane define who I am.
I don’t want to let any of them go.
Not one, so long as I can help it.
But it isn’t that I have to cling to the past. Not yet.
I am too busy making more memories.
Too busy enjoying those moments I get to steal from life now, though
they may not be as common as back when life was easier. I find myself in Alaska now, and my wife and
I are closing in on a decade here.
Though I have called many places home, this truly feels like it. Like I was drawn here without even realizing
it. I have now been privileged enough to
have climbed mountains tall enough to make me lightheaded on the ascent. I have packed a mountain goat down one of
those mountains. I have hunted and
danced in ceremonies with Yupi’k Eskimos.
I have stood, stretching and arching my back in the tundra willows,
aching from the hunched-over work that had caused me to be forearm-deep in
moose blood. I have ridden a boat down
the Yukon river at midnight, on my way home, sitting on top of that moose meat,
looking up at the Northern Lights thinking that this must be the pinnacle of it
all…but then I find another pinnacle.
And I have to try to climb that one.
It never changes. And so I keep looking forward to the next trip. While
I look back. Now, in my 34th
year, the realization of how much all this means to me keeps getting clearer
every day. In one capacity or another, I
have now been hunting for 22 years, trapping (though on and off) for 28, and
fishing for 30. Other than the fact that
I learn something new every time I leave the house, those activities have
changed since they became part of me.
Parts of me have changed. But some things don’t change, and I like it
that way. The anticipation of the next
chance I get to carry out these traditions that define me so well never lessens. I can’t wait to get out there and make more
memories. I have committed myself to
writing them down, the new and the old, the meaningful ones from the past as
well as the ones from next season that I haven’t made yet. I intend to record
them as I go, from here on out. So as to
not let them get away from me. So they
can be passed on. So I can make sure
they are locked away somewhere... Before
I forget…
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