Father's Day

On the left is my father with two of his friends and fellow fisheries biologists.  They'd just spent the summer in the woods of Alaska.   They are standing on an oil dock in Seward, Alaska in the late summer of 1941 six months before I was born. Later when I was in high school Dad was back spending his summers in the Bering Sea and returning home with that full red beard, the inheritance of his Viking afflicted Scotch and Irish ancestors. 

He was a committed fisherman, salmon and steelhead.  He rarely came home without his fish, returning over and over again to the rivers he fished as kid.  I was around 40 when Dad and I went for spring Chinook on the Cowlitz together.  I drove down from Seattle and he and his little flat bottom boat came up from Portland.  We fished to no avail and were ready to give up when just before we left I hooked a very nice fish.  I worked it for nearly and hour until finally it got close enough to net.  Just then it hurled itself straight up and out of the net and the hook fell out of its mouth.  It fell into the boat.  We laughed so hard we nearly fell out of the boat.  I really miss him.

In his mid-80's he had a heart attack caused by a stenotic valve and was told he would die without surgery.  He'd survived late life bouts with cancer, a couple with grueling recoveries.  He didn't want to do that again.  He told us he'd had a great life, that he loved us and that he was done.  He died that night.

He's been gone over 11 years now and so we have gotten on without him.  Some years after he died I had a dream about him.  He was living alone in a log cabin he had built himself somewhere in some woods.  He was carefully building a pond in front of it with river rocks he had gathered and brought home with him.  He looked happy.  I just wish I could pick up the phone and say "Hey Dad, how is it going? Need any help with those rocks?  I saw this weird, huge beetle on my porch and what do you think it is...I love you."