I am the master procrastinator.

I even put off things I really like doing until the last possible minute; tasks that I find unpleasant get put off indefinitely in the hopes that they will just go away (I hate working on cars, so I’m still waiting for a vehicle that will heal itself.) Despite this aversion to doing things, I finally confronted the task of going through the boxes and bundles of stuff that was hurriedly packed up and brought home after my father’s funeral this spring.

The small lonely pile of my Dad’s stuff was put next to my tying table, and there it has sat. Made up of familiar things that I grew up with and never thought twice about, it has squatted there like a dull poisonous toad for several months, waiting for me to go through it and confront what it holds. It has been untouchable: I didn’t dare even look at it.

But a little time has passed, and now as I start sorting through my father’s possessions, each item, instead of conjuring up the dull ache of the bereaved, is beginning to tell a story, conjure a memory, and brings a painful smile of recognition.

A child of the Great Depression, my Dad was never one for excess or opulence: his simple things show the signs of many years of heavy use. His rifles and shotguns are in a desperate need of re-bluing, his single fly rod was loaded with line he had bought during the Ford administration.

I started with the guns; they were the easiest to deal with, perhaps because from day one it was outlined to the family of which of the hunting tools would be inherited by whom. I had already taken possession of the .30-06 he had obtained in Alaska, the .22 and the shotguns were sort of expected. Some of these will be repaired or restored as need be, others will be left as-is, depending on it’s history. (History… I’ve got gigantic boots to fill, using my father’s deer rifles…) I had to stop and think a bit when I opened a small box I found at the bottom of a large shopping bag of ammo – in it were his hand made turkey calls.

It’s taken me a couple days to get through his fly-fishing stuff, though not because there was a lot of it (in fact, there is very little.) My Dad never owned a vest, never owned more than two fly boxes or more than one fly rod at any given time. I have the last fly rod he had owned, a St. Croix Pro graphite 5 wt. that he picked up out of the second’s rack on his way through Park Falls one day. The reel he had on this was an old Martin single action, with a broken gear that has left it in perpetual free-spool for the last 20 years. The line on the reel is a nightmare – the plastic coating of the level-taper line is beyond cracking: it’s been flaking off the nylon core for years. Though he mightily vowed to replace the line after each day of fishing, he stubbornly continued to use it.

Two small cards of metal leader-eyes and a spool of Berkely 2 lb. test made up his terminal tackle: he considered tapered leaders to be excessive and unnecessary. He was also the only person in the world that could insert one of those despicable metal eye leader connectors into the end of his fly line straight without jamming it into his thumb.

The fly box and streamer wallet has taken me the most time to go through. I had given him the fly box years ago as a father’s day gift after I noticed he was using a Band-Aid box for his flies; the waxed linen wallet he has had for years. Stuffed with flies of various sorts that he had picked up here and there, they are hallowed ground, and will remain as they are – they tell the stories of fall days on the Brule, the big salmon out west, of our last days of fishing together on the Rush. Holding up a nymph I had tied for him many years ago, I can see his thick fingers gently twisting the line to tie the fly onto his tippet, with a knot that he had tied a thousand, ten thousand, perhaps a million times before. That single, ratty, rusty fly had probably caught trout in a dozen different rivers, from here to Oregon.

These boxes and bags of clothes, tools and sporting stuff are what constitutes the physical summary of my father’s sporting life; all the memories and stories that I remember make up the rest.

Home| Woodcuts | Photographs | Paintings | Stories | Purchasing Info