We Were Best Buds On the Water

On Father’s Day, I went fishing and thought about Dad.

I don’t think about him every day. I’m not one to celebrate heavenly birthdays or lament his passing at the age of 90 nearly two decades ago.

But I always think about him when I fish.

He and I fished together often.

We didn’t agree on a lot — religion and politics come to mind. Get us on the water, however, our differences vanished and we were best buds.

Dad taught me to fly fish. It wasn’t something many folks did in southern Indiana, and I’m not sure where he picked it up, but it was how I learned to fish.

Before he got old and decrepit I was able to take him to some of my favorite fishing holes in Yellowstone Park where he caught cutthroat trout for the first time.

Dad was anything but a purist. While fly fishing was his favorite, he also enjoyed catching crappie on a cane pole, and spin fishing for redfish.

One of my earliest memories of Dad was tagging along with him on a gill netting trip on the Embarass River in southeastern Illinois near where he’d grown up. While I watched from the bank, Dad and half a dozen other men stood chest-deep in the muddy river wrestling catfish and carp from the net and tossing them ashore.

But it was the half-pint whiskey bottles most of the men carried in their hip pockets that caught my attention as much as the fish.

That probably says a lot about me.

Fishing together on a party boat in Florida years later, Dad and I won the jackpot for biggest fish and blew the prize money buying rounds for the house at a dive bar.

My father was a salesman and drove a route through southern Indiana. In the trunk of his car he always carried a fly rod. On his lunch breaks he would stop at one of the many stripper pits that dotted the landscape and cast rubber-legged foam spiders for bass and panfish.

He once caught a bass large enough that it merited mention in the local paper. I still have that clipping somewhere.

My father liked to fish.

So do I.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]