I mentioned last week that I failed to gather many photographs and a few albums before I sent everything off to be digitized. This week’s post is about one of the photographs discovered after the digitization project. I know I’ve seen this snapshot before, but I did not remember it until my husband found it in one of his desk drawers.
My father liked to fish. I don’t know when or where he learned to fish, but I suspect it was during his boyhood years, either in Pratt, Kansas, where he was born, or on summers in Arnold, Nebraska, where his grandparents lived. His family moved to Pasadena, California, about the time he was in first or second grade, and I doubt there were many opportunities to fish in Pasadena. But he returned to Nebraska for visits with his grandparents even after his family moved to California.
I didn’t inherit the fishing gene. My father tried to teach me, and he took my brother and me fishing a few times when we were in the elementary grades. But I never enjoyed it.
One such occasion occurred on a very rainy day in Kootenai County, Washington, when I was about nine. My sister was a baby, which is why I think I was nine. My parents bought a tent, sleeping bags, a cookstove, and other equipment, and we went camping. After the five of us slept in the tent during a rainstorm, we ate soggy scrambled eggs for breakfast the next morning. My baby sister was the only one having a good time, because she stayed in the tent.
After breakfast, my dad took my brother and me to a creek to fish. I didn’t catch anything, and I fell in the creek. I was already damp from the rain, but after falling in, I was soaked.
I don’t recall if this was my first fishing attempt or if Dad had taken my brother and me before, but all my memories of fishing are of similarly unpleasant experiences. I do remember that there were a few other times I tried to fish, and this was only the one time I fell in. (Though there was another time when my brother fell in.) We occasionally caught a few small fish, and my mother would cook them. But they were mostly bones, and not worth the trouble.
This photograph was taken on a deep-sea fishing trip my dad took to Alaska. He took two or three such trips. My mother very helpfully noted on the back of the picture that this trip was in May 2004, so twenty years ago. I think this 156-pound halibut was the largest fish he ever caught. Each time he went to Alaska, he brought back a freezer full of halibut and salmon filets from the fish he caught, which he thawed and served when I visited in the months after his trips. Dad was a good cook, and the grilled or baked filets were pretty tasty.
Last Sunday was my tenth Father’s Day without a father. I still miss him, but the grief has ebbed to the point where I can now smile at our family’s fish stories.
What do you remember about your father?
