fishing with my dad essay

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Life Lessons from “Fishing With Dad”

By James Romm

When my kids were young, my favorite book to read at bedtime was called “Fishing with Dad.” The book, I now realize, was as much for my benefit as theirs. I was learning to be a father, and the leading of fishing trips seemed an essential part of that craft.

It’s been almost a decade since the book was put into storage, but two parts of the story stand out clearly in my mind. In the opening sequence, the hero father awakens his son before dawn and buys him doughnuts on the way to the fishing hole. (This early-morning departure qualifies, in my family, as science fiction.) There’s a lot in the middle that I can’t recall, but the story’s ending is unforgettable. Dad, recognizing that hooking a panfish on a worm-and-bobber rig might be a challenge for his young son, stealthily secures a fish on his own line, then sends his son to the car to retrieve a snack. He reels in both lines, unhooks the fish and transfers it to his son’s rig. When the boy returns, the bobber is dancing with a catch that cannot get away.  Fish on _!_

For a dad-in-training who longed for a fishing bond with his offspring, the author’s message came through loud and clear:  get your kid a fish. _ _But that dictum would prove hard to follow. In trout-fishing contests at my home-town park, where boys my son’s age—he was seven or eight at the time—were pulling dozens of stocked fish from a lazy stream, we managed to get skunked. Jonah learned then that he did not have a hero dad, but a fumble-fingered classics scholar who didn’t know the difference between trout worms and nightcrawlers. His disappointment was palpable (and hurt like hell), yet, somehow, his fishing ardor endured.

Last month, while standing on a beach in central New Jersey in a cold, driving rain, I found myself living out a bizarrely supersized version of the “Fishing with Dad” story line. Here I was, trying to get my kid a fish, but the bait I was throwing—Atlantic menhaden, a.k.a. bunker—was itself bigger than any of the quarry in hero-dad’s fishing hole. My son had gone back to the car, not to fetch snacks but to escape foul weather while playing games on my smartphone. I had brought Jonah here, three hours from home, in the midst of a late-spring nor’easter, gambling with his comfort and patience in the hopes of hooking him up to a ten-pound bluefish, perhaps the most powerful creature that a twelve-year-old can subdue without an adult’s help.

Now, as the rain rattled on my parka hood and the full-moon tide began surging over the beach crest, that gamble appeared badly misguided. The weather did not trouble me as much as the solitude: I was alone on a beach normally lined with four-wheel-drive trucks. Surfcasters in these parts will brave any storm if fish are within reach, so their absence was a very bad sign. But then, without warning, a violent motion animated one of the two rods I had placed in our sand spikes. Line began paying out from its reel, and self-doubt was instantly banished.

Surf fishing with cut bait, or “chunking,” has a rhythm unlike any other method of fishing. Hours can pass in total quiescence, then a rod suddenly bursts into convulsive life. No technique or presentation distinguishes one bait from another; the choice of whether to hit, and where, lies entirely with the fish. Like a slot machine with its sudden jackpots, the random rewards of chunking can be addictive. On a previous outing, Jonah and I discovered we shared this addiction, and that bond encouraged me to go through with this trip despite a wretched weather forecast.

Before I could set the hook on the beast now taking my rig straight out to sea, the line went slack. Bluefish are not fussy eaters, but this one mysteriously had dropped my bunker head in preference for some other meal. Still, its very presence had transformed the desolate beach from a place of despair into one of promise. As if sensing this, my son was now climbing over the dune toward me, miraculously choosing the wet and cold of the beach to the electronic comforts of our minivan.

It was not long before our next pickup, and my son took the rod_: fish on!_ I stood beside him shouting admonitions like a boxing coach at ringside. Rod tip up! Pressure on! Walk with the fish! (It was now charging parallel to the beach, fleeing some dimly sensed fate). The rod was bending and twitching, but suddenly it straightened with a sickening lack of tension. A second fish, cruising between us and our quarry, had brushed against the line and severed it. My son uttered a cry of anguish. I re-rigged and rebaited, trying to make the most of waning daylight.

My son was adrenalized now, pacing back and forth between our two rods with agitation. I would gladly have waded into the frothing surf, could I have somehow put a fish on his line, but the prey we had chosen to pursue could easily take off one of my fingers.

Then came a second take, and my son grabbed the twitching rod once more; once more I was standing beside him, cheering and admonishing by turns. This urgency, this sense of shared crisis, was what we had come for. The fight went on for a long time, until the quivering line approached the water’s edge. “Now comes the hard part,” I said, not at all sure I could talk Jonah through the mechanics of beaching a fish in heavy surf. But before I could try, the line flew out of the water, the leader cut by the fish’s teeth just north of the hook.

We headed for our motel room, vowing an early start the next day. Jonah was downcast after two defeats, and I was troubled by questions. Am I right to drag my son into a realm ruled by passion, not wisdom, a realm where I cannot control events as the hero-dad did? Should I place him so much at risk of heartbreak? What right has a guy like me—more at home in a bookstore than on a beach, heedless of the wire leaders that would have brought that last fish home—to take a boy surf fishing?

By morning the storm had churned up the surf such that even chunking was impossible, as a local tackle shop informed me. There would be no second chance, and my primary feeling was one of relief, given the high stakes of the previous night. I had failed to get my kid a fish but somehow the truncated trip felt like a success. Jonah’s peaceful slumber confirmed this; with the adrenaline flushed from his system, he slept blissfully until nearly checkout time, then rose in good spirits, ready for the long drive home. On the way to the Garden State Parkway, I bought him doughnuts.

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By John Donohue

By Tad Friend

By Adam Iscoe

By John Paul Brammer

The One That Got Away

A dad tries to rekindle a family’s father-son fishing tradition — but his son fails to take the bait.

As a dad, I don’t take many stupid risks anymore. For example, I won’t drive through blizzards unless I’m doing it in the name of fatherhood itself. That’s happened twice: Once to drive my wife to the hospital when she went into labor with our first son, Marcel, in February of 2015, and then two Februaries later to go ice-fishing.

I left my wife and young son at home, in upstate New York, and drove with three friends toward the Canadian border in white-out conditions, sliding through intersections and backsliding down hills all the way to North Hero, Vermont, to go fishing, like it was some kind of emergency. We dragged a sled heaped with gear over the ice through the whipping snow for half a mile, to the refuge of a plywood fishing shanty. We set our lines and tip-ups over the holes in the ice, then retreated to the shanty to watch from the warm glow of the woodstove. For most of the day, we took turns checking the holes outside, reaching our hands into the gelid ice water to re-bait the hooks as needed.

Baiting a hook with frozen fingers felt clumsy, like learning to eat with chopsticks. Except I don’t love fishing like I love eating noodles. I just wanted to learn so I could teach my son. I imagined, years into the future, being able to sit on a frozen lake with my Marcel, imparting wisdom through fishing metaphors.

Most of the other traditional father and son bonding activities were unavailable to me. I don’t play sports, I don’t fix cars, I don’t hunt, and I didn’t spend much time with my father growing up. For a model, I could only look to the old photos of my great-grandfather Leopold Arbour, holding massive northern pike by the tail or dozens of lake trout on strings.

I’d always longed to be as rugged as [my great-grandfather]. As a new father, that wish had suddenly intensified.

I’d grown up hearing tales of great-grandpa— the exemplary rugged outdoorsman in my family tree — and his fishing adventures on Lake Champlain, hunting the mythical lake beast “Champ” and the fanged northern pike known locally as the waterwolf. He was an actual lumberjack from Quebec who’d worked his way down through the Adirondacks as a teenager.

He never took me fishing, but I used to visit him in the summers at the Adirondack cabin that he’d built, swimming in the cold pond out front that he’d dug by hand. I’d always longed to be as rugged as him. As a new father, that wish had suddenly intensified.

Back in the shanty, my best impression of Leopold Arbour wasn’t good enough. Five hours passed with no movement on the tip-ups. I pulled Grandpa Arbour’s flask out of my coat — a glass one wrapped with leather and emblazoned with a Canadian maple leaf — hoping to ingest some of his hard spirit in the form of Wild Turkey. We each took ceremonious swigs followed by less ceremonious swigs until it was gone.

As the daylight faded, the guide came in to see if we’d caught anything — we’d hooked one minuscule fish (most likely re-caught bait). Eager to demonstrate Vermont’s lax weed culture, the guide packed a bowl and told us between puffs, “I think you just got here too late, man.”

The spring my son turned 5, the old idea hit the surface of my brain like a fanged northern pike charging from the depths: I should take my son fishing.

It was the final snag in a long string of fishing failures. Once, when I was a teenager, my father had taken me on a deep-sea fishing trip off the coast of Gloucester during one of his bi-monthly weekend visits. It was a good change of pace from our usual routine — bowling, a movie, and a night at the Red Roof Inn — but we didn’t know what we were doing. We watched the other father-son duos pull in coolers-full of fish while we only caught two inedible dogfish and froze. Everyone else was wearing heavy seafaring coats, and I spent most of the trip in the cabin, trying to wrap every available inch of thin cloth from my Beer City Skateboards hoodie around my trembling hands.

I’d tried to approach fishing with renewed vigor in my 20s, heading out once with a guide and once with a friend from work, only to get tossed by currents. After the ice shanty incident, I decided to hang up my pole for good.

And yet, the spring my son turned 5, the old idea hit the surface of my brain like a fanged northern pike charging from the depths: I should take my son fishing.

Fishing, especially under tough conditions, still just seemed to contain so many of the lessons a father should teach his son — self-sufficiency, patience, and grit.

I bought a new fishing pole, and Marcel and I marched down the banks of the Hudson River. We trudged over the driftwood and the water chestnuts, and I imagined that we were emulating the way Grandpa Arbour and his son used to seek out fishing spots in the Adirondacks, near Lake Tear of the Clouds, where the Hudson originates. I liked to think that despite the chasm between our skill levels, we were drawn to the water by the same forces. But I doubt it. I think Grandpa Arbour was mostly in it for sustenance. He famously kept his bathtub full of live fish during the Great Depression so that his family didn’t starve.

Marcel spent most of our time sitting on a rock behind me and asking if we could leave. On the rare occasions when I caught a fish, he cringed and looked at me sideways as I reached into its mouth with pliers to release the hook.

Being on the water, part of the network of oceans and streams that connect the world, releases the tension in your chest and lets you breathe deeper.

Three years later, despite his lack of interest, I tried again. But before I could, Marcel used all the fishing line on our only pole to construct a makeshift drone like the one he’d seen on his favorite cartoon, Craig of the Creek .

He tied helium balloons — “Happy Birthday” balloons, several SpongeBobs, and a few pink hearts — to a transparent strawberry container. We pressed the record button on my wife’s old iPhone and taped it inside. Marcel flipped the bail on the reel, and the drone hovered low, too heavy to get off the ground. We removed the phone and tried again. This time the balloons blew forward violently and tangled. Marcel turned the handle a few times, and then a powerful gust carried the whole ensemble over the tree line. The reel buzzed, and Marcel twisted and pulled like a marlin fisherman. Finally, the wind ran away with all the line and left him staring at a bare rod with his mouth hanging open. The SpongeBobs grinned their manic grins until they shrank into a cluster of specks in the blue sky. I looked down to see if Marcel was crying. He stared up blankly for a moment and then burst into a fit of joy, jumping and cackling. He bolted through an active volleyball game toward my wife, screaming, “Mama! Mama! It worked!”

The rest of the week, we followed more of Marcel’s inspirations along the Hudson and Fishkill Creek. We built a catapult for the black spiky water chestnuts that cover most of the beaches; we constructed an elaborate driftwood hut; we discovered a massive bald eagle's nest; we found a way into a disused brick hat factory and explored its ruins. After each long day, Marcel and I biked home in the evening glow. I saw in his face that he was invigorated but relaxed. He’d been deeply breathing in the river’s calm might all day long.

The Hudson is tidal — water flows upriver for six hours, and then flows back out for another six. As Marcel and I worked on our driftwood hut by the river’s edge, the water line inched up the shore until it wet our shoes and socks. The primary forces of the universe were lapping at our feet. Being on the water, part of the network of oceans and streams that connect the world, releases the tension in your chest and lets you breathe deeper. The vastness of it inspires a vastness of imagination and a smallness of self that make conversation and creation easier.

You don’t need a fishing pole for that, but it helps to have something to do. As we built our driftwood hut beside the water, I taught Marcel how to build a simple lever to hoist large pieces of driftwood into place. He was amazed by its primitive utility.

Standing there, I realized maybe I like everything about fishing but the fishing itself.

We met other river people: dog walkers, bird watchers, photographers — an elderly fisherman named Phil, who, like us, never seemed to be fishing. We first met Phil on a beach overlooking an inlet. He told us that he grew up fishing for crab by hand with his father in the freshwater pools of western Puerto Rico and that he’d been fishing the Hudson for 40 years. He saw Marcel’s binoculars and asked if we’d seen any great blue herons. We had just seen one at the base of a waterfall by the creek, standing like a statue, staring at the water. We watched it for about 20 minutes, but it never moved. Phil said, “He’s fishing for herring. The herring come up from the ocean around this time, and the stripers are right behind them. When I keep seeing that blue heron fishing for herring, I know it’s almost striper time.”

We saw Phil each of the remaining vacation days, in jogging shoes and a Kangol hat, strolling along the shoreline of the Dennings Point Peninsula and along the river beaches, with his hands clasped behind his back. I wondered why he wasn’t fishing yet. All around the riverfront, striper fishermen were already sitting patiently next to their lines in the water, but Phil was always without a fishing pole.

One afternoon, we stood next to him on a dock by the Fishkill marsh, where there is an especially serene vista. The water, perfectly still, mirrors a patch of reeds that blow gently against a panoramic backdrop of the Hudson Highlands. Osprey and bald eagles hunt there, and in early May, you can see spawning stripers writhing in the shallow water. It occurred to me that Phil might not care about fishing as much as he once did. Maybe he didn’t need to fish anymore. Maybe he just liked to be there, observing the animals, releasing his energy and absorbing the energy of the water.

Standing there, I realized maybe I like everything about fishing but the fishing itself. I like to be by the water, I like to understand the patterns of nature, I like wearing overshirts with lots of pockets, but sitting with a line in the water feels like being tethered to the river bed. I reflected on my great-grandfather and the other things we did together. He was also an avid gardener. Once he saw me pluck two juicy tomatoes off the vine and bite into one, and then brought me inside so my great-grandmother could make a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich — white toast, mayonnaise, salt and pepper, and one big tomato slice. I sat with him at the table and ate one, then two, then I asked my great-grandmother for another. Grandpa Arbour looked at me, grinning. He suggested I skip fourth grade to spend the year gardening with him. He wouldn’t have wasted our time with fishing because he could tell I wasn’t into it. He saw me for who I was.

Back at the marsh, a train cut across the vista like it was gliding on the water. Phil spotted a great blue heron and pointed it out. We watched the svelte bird transform into a dinosaur as it opened its wings, spanning 6 feet across, then fly low over the reeds. I never realized how big they were until then. It had looked so meek a few days earlier — almost invisible — standing, staring at the water with its neck crooked, waiting for a fish.

Fishing with My Father

Where was the one fish he had always dreamed of catching?

Along with a love of theater, the author inherited an obsession with fishing from his father, a legendary comedian. But where was the one fish he had always dreamed of catching? And how would past and present meet on a desolate lake in the deep north woods?

My mother, who was a Ziegfeld Girl, gave me only one piece of advice, which has lasted down the decades. "When you go to sleep," she said, "think happy thoughts." I think of fishing. I put myself in a canoe on a pond I know in Hudson, New York, and fish the right bank. I begin at the dock, casting my chartreuse topwater frog beside the biscuit-colored reeds and working slowly down, past the sunken logs, toward the bank at the far end, where the lily pads are so thick that the boat can't easily move. There's a tempting patch of open dark water at the back, where, if you can get close enough, a well-aimed cast will certainly yield a bass. I'm usually asleep before I get there.

Sometimes, however, the strategy doesn't work. Not long ago, I found myself upstairs in the bathroom at 4:00 a.m. with the Iceman Blues, checking myself out in the mirror. I feel young; I take the aspirin; I own the Fitbit; I swim the laps; but there was no doubt about it: "Death, the artist"—Saul Bellow's phrase—had started to paint his picture on me. My eyes still had a shine, but beneath them bags had formed into eddies of flesh. There were wrinkles now (my forehead looked like an aboriginal map); my skin had started to crepe; and some kind of wattle had appeared under my chin. Almost overnight, or so it seemed, my hearing had quit on me, too. Doorbells, telephones, dialogue didn't always register. I bustled in the world, but that world was somehow farther away now. I had to wear hearing aids. "Battery low! Battery low!" they squawked occasionally. A warning, or was it a prophecy?

Fishing was how I first understood about death. I was about 10, on Lac-Ste.-Marie, near Ottawa, idling in the middle seat of an aluminum boat while my father stood at the bow with the visor of his tan fishing cap turned backward to keep the sun off his neck. He was reeling in a Pikie Minnow, which went deep but not deep enough for the big pike he was hunting. We had been trolling for an hour, and there was a lot of line out. The plan now was to go even deeper with a sinker and to put a halter of hooks on one of the small bass we'd caught and kept alive for lunch. Dad was taking forever. I was bored.

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To pass the time, I opened the cooler with all the condiments, garnishes, and drinks that had been packed on ice to accompany the bass, which our three-fingered Indian guide (they weren't "First Peoples" in the early fifties) would later fillet, bread with matzo meal, and fry in Crisco over a fire from wood we'd gathered. I found a container of hard-boiled eggs and took one. I was going to eat it; instead, I dropped the egg over the edge of the boat. The ovoid shape wobbled slowly downward in the brackish water. It swayed and dawdled. The refracted rays of light made the egg look spotlit. Then it was gone, taking all the light with it, sunk into the murk. At that moment, under a cerulean sky on a dazzling morning in the rare company of my father, I knew that I would die. I remember the panic and the cold sweat and the decision to say nothing. But the wallop of the revelation would inform the rest of my days. From then on, for me, time was of the essence.

In the grips of my night sweat, I headed for my study and looked around for a way to shake off the imminence of oblivion. There, behind the snapshots of departed friends on the mantelpiece, was a photo of a whopping speckled New Zealand brown trout, which I had nicknamed Millie, after my mother, because it gave me such a fight. I picked up the picture and studied the clear, pebble-strewn South Island stream and the trout's luminous beige skin. For the last 12 years, I had lived in this musty room writing a biography of Tennessee Williams and postponing fishing. Around me, I kept paintings of fish, photos of fish, a Zuni sculpture of a fish. I watched bass-fishing contests on television, stayed up late to catch infomercials about fishing lures (and ordered them), but I rarely actually fished.

As I stood there naked in my writer's warren, one of Williams's acid thoughts came back to me. "Nobody gets out of life alive," he said. All those closeted hours of solitude, all the isolation, all this mournful business of aging, I thought, fuck that for a bag of monkeys. I want to feel the earth before I'm returned to it. I want the sun in my face. While my legs are still moving and my eyesight is good enough, I want an adventure. I want to go fishing.

I watched bass-fishing contests on television, stayed up late to catch infomercials about fishing lures (and ordered them), but I rarely actually fished.

The Moose started to cross the road, thought better of it, and wandered back into the forest; it was about the only thing moving in Goose Bay, which had closed down for Canada Day, July 1, my first day in Labrador. Jim Burton, the 56-year-old Igloo Lake Lodge outfitter, was my guide. We were in his black Toyota Tundra truck, winding our way 32 miles out of town to Sheshatshiu, a reservation of the Innu Nation, one of the three First Peoples tribes that make up about 53 percent of the district's population. Goose Bay, which has two stoplights and few sidewalks, may be slow, but for Burton, time passes at full tilt. When he graduated from high school in Goose Bay in 1976, Burton was awarded the prize for "greatest effort for the academic year." Nothing much has changed since then. Burton passed up college to become a pilot, then leapfrogged to real estate, and is now a high roller in St. John's, Newfoundland, where he lives and where Team Burton sells about 300 homes a year. Burton is also a civic leader and the publisher of the biannual magazine The Burton Collection (circulation 20,000), which serves as a platform for his color photography and for his varied commercial and charitable interests. "The can-do attitude I rate up there with oxygen," he told me. For Burton, Igloo Lake Lodge, which will entertain 120 guests at about $4,000 a week this year, was both an avocation and a networking opportunity. "Plato said you can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can in a year of conversation," Burton said. (He is also fond of quoting Confucius: "If you aim at nothing, you're sure to hit it.")

The next day, as Burton fueled up his yellow-and-red de Havilland Beaver—"a pickup truck with wings"—I took an iPhone snapshot of the plane and sent it to my son. "Are you really flying in that?" he texted back. "It's okay," I told him. "There's a canoe paddle on the inside of the pontoon." Burton put me in the copilot's seat. "Life preserver's in the pocket," he said, pointing to a plastic bag the size of a road map at my elbow. "Gonna do some aviatin'," he added as the propeller started to whir. We flew up over the water-processing plant at the edge of Goose Bay, past the Churchill River, then the Kenamu River, aiming for the Mealy Mountains on the horizon. We were holding steady at 3,500 feet. Ahead, there were no roads, no houses, no boats, no signs of civilization. Embryo-shaped ponds, glinting silver in the sun, rolled out like paisley patterns against the black backdrop of spruce. Burton motioned for me to put on my headphones. As we soared into the mottled wilderness, '70s disco, heavy on the wah-wah pedal, played in my ears. After about 40 minutes, Burton pointed out our destination, Igloo Lake. In my headphones, Gloria Gaynor was singing "I Will Survive."

As I suited up in expensive, newly purchased gear for my first day of fishing, I thought about my quarry. The prestige of trout, it seemed to me, was in part aesthetic; they were the garish, speckled dandies of river life. To me, all trout were feminine: colorful, curvaceous, soft, wary, hard to get. They were predatory, of course, but they didn't appear so. In fact, as they floated along the riverbed—"walkin' wavy," as Arthur Miller would say—they seemed almost languorous. Their form—streamlined and soigné—was irresistible and disarming. In their design, there was no appearance of aggression. Unlike the bass, they had no spiky dorsal fin; unlike the pike, they had no rows of sharp teeth in a long prehistoric mouth to tell you at a glance that they were "killers from the egg," as Ted Hughes put it in "Pike." Instead, trout were voracious, flashy, aquatic babes—the Ava Gardners of the freshwater world. It seemed somehow appropriate that the fisherman going after them should dress up for the encounter.

As I stood there in my writer's warren, one of Tennessee Williams's acid thoughts came back to me. "Nobody gets out of life alive," he said.

Doug, my guide, was 66 but looked older. A lifetime of hard work and harsh Canada winters had left their marks on his tanned, weathered face. Nonetheless, his broad forehead and high cheekbones—his great-great-grandfather was a Micmac Indian—were still those of a handsome man who had been catnip to women. In his day, Doug had flown airplanes and survived a crash, hunted seals in the ocean, waited out a blizzard on the Long Range Mountains, in the Great Northern Peninsula, by digging a hole in the snow to insulate himself and his family for two days. Now he sat behind the Yamaha outboard, calmly reading the water, smoking his Rothmans, saying little. When Doug did speak, his drawled words had a very specific gravity. "This is unknown land, unknowable," he said. He had never owned a passport, never traveled beyond Newfoundland, never heard of The Godfather or Al Pacino.

"I'm mostly interested in casting," I told him the first time I stepped into the boat. "Last year this time, the water was boiling with trout," he said. "This year nothing's rising. Fish aren't feeding on the surface, despite the hatches." The winter's late runoff—in mid-May, Igloo Lake Lodge had still been buried in snow—had chilled the water to about 42 degrees, about 10 degrees lower than it should have been in July, and there was no option but to spend our first morning trolling. To me, trolling is taking your fishing pole for a ride. You sit, you let out line, you wait for a strike, you reel in. It's winching, not fishing. But as I was learning, there is no arguing with Nature. I had to be like the trout: conserve energy, be vigilant, and go with the flow.

The prestige of trout, it seemed to me, was in part aesthetic; they were the garish, speckled dandies of river life.

In Labrador and the adjacent island of Newfoundland, which together constitute the easternmost and the newest Canadian province, trout is a verb as well as a noun. We were "going trouting," according to Doug. Within my first hour, I had a thrilling encounter with a four-pound brook trout, whose signature square tail flashed as it jumped close to the boat. Two good-sized pike were soon added to the morning's catch.

"Men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after," Henry Thoreau supposedly said. Sometime in the middle of my first morning, with the putt-putt of the motor echoing off the rocky shoreline, I understood what he meant. Ahead of us, in the overcast distance, bobbing on the water, I thought I saw the dark outline of a loon. As we got closer, the head grew larger, the wake wider. "Caribou," Doug said, steering us toward the beige animal, whose large ears and dark muzzle protruded above the water as it tried to paddle away from our noisy approach. "We see one of them maybe every four or five years," Doug said as we got close enough to touch it. He added, "That one there is Red Wine—that's the name of that particular herd. There're only about 20 left in this southern section of Labrador." We circled the caribou, photographed it, then left it to its peaceful navigation. I had set out only to catch fish; by the time I returned to the dock for lunch with some incoming fellow fishermen, I had caught something else: wonder.

The afternoon produced only one trout, taken late in the day by a short cast in midstream at the edge of some ripples. I can't remember the fish, but the day was unforgettable: crystalline, wind-swept, the gnarly path to our fishing hole opening out finally into Benjamin's Pool, a wide clearing of fast water. Above, the tall spruce tossed in the wind; below, the current burbled around my knees. The only way to avoid getting dizzy was to keep my eyes focused on my fly and my feet. The river was all boulders and no gravel, so it was hazardous to walk. My fishing shoes, which were felt-bottomed, were slippery on the rocks. It was slow going, but I welcomed the arduousness. I liked slowing down and watching my steps. Living in the city, I had all but eliminated Nature, and I wanted to contend with it, surrender to it. Here in the isolation of the wilderness, I never felt lonely; everything—wind, river, trees, rocks, clouds—was speaking to me. The trick was to learn how to listen.

Living in the city, I had all but eliminated Nature, and I wanted to contend with it, surrender to it.

At the end of the first evening, the youngest member of our group, Aiden, a goofy, precocious 12-year-old prone to making startling announcements—"Peanut butter is made of seaweed," "I got so mad at my father, I jumped on his iPhone and smashed it," "Would you talk to me?"—held up his camera. "I caught a six-pound trout," he said while his patient father, Derek, tried to post his triumphant photo on Facebook. "Tomorrow it's Burton's Pond. You'll catch a lot there," Aiden's stoical grandfather, Lloyd, told me. He was an Igloo Lake Lodge veteran who had made plans to be flown into Burton's a few days later because his legs could no longer make the 45-minute trek there. Lloyd spent most of his days in the lodge's pine-paneled living area flipping through fishing magazines with a beer usually at hand, waiting for the bright, boisterous return of his grandson. His focus was entirely on Aiden's experience. He wanted Aiden to know the thrill of catching a whopper, to be connected in his grandson's imagination with the unforgettable. Burton's Pond was where that magical moment might just occur.

The path to Burton's was flat but ridden with roots, mud, moss, and mosquitoes; the bugs were so thick that you couldn't open your mouth without swallowing some. You had to sort of slither and slide through a tangle of overhanging limbs and underbrush that made it necessary to carry your fishing pole reel-first, leaving the body of the rod to waggle behind you like a graphite tail. Even so, as I walked gingerly along, my fly got caught in a tree. I had to prop the pole up against a spruce and work my way back to the snare to free my favorite mouse fly. When we got to the lake, boats with outboard motors were waiting for us. "I want to do a lot of casting today," I told Doug as I put my gear into the boat. Doug noticed that as I was freeing my fly, the tip of my Sage rod had somehow sheared off. "Does it matter?" I asked. "Only for casting," Doug said.

We caught a couple of fine trout that morning on a Muddler, then just before lunch I got a walloping hit. Thirty feet from the boat, the trout took a twisting leap out of the water: a monster. My reel hummed as it made another run away from the boat. "If I land this one, I want a photo," I said to Doug. Then the line snapped. "I kept my tip up," I said. "You don't have a tip," Doug said. "If you did, that trout'd be in the boat." I put my head in my hands and kept it there for a few minutes.

Wherever the trout were that afternoon, we couldn't find many of them. At some point, Jack, a drywaller from Newfoundland, and Ben, his 16-year-old grandson, the best fisherman among the guests, approached us on the water. They were heading back early. "Any luck?" Doug asked. "We stopped countin' at 30," Jack said in a chirpy Irish brogue. "We hit that cove and we couldn't leave. Ate our sandwiches in the boat." "Tell them we'll be late for dinner," Doug said to the other guide, eager to find more fish for me. As they headed down the lake, Doug told me, "When it comes to salmon and trout, the numbers mean everything to Newfoundlanders. In my 20 years of guiding, Newfoundlanders have been the worst."

After a break, as I edged my way into the boat backward along the gunwales, I heard a crack underfoot and looked down: I'd stepped on my rod and broken it for good. Doug lit a cigarette. He said nothing. What was there to say? Fishing was over for the day. On the path back to Igloo Lake, the mosquitoes were more quarrelsome. In my knapsack, I discovered a newly purchased bug hat—a sort of pup tent for my head—which made me look like a beekeeper but meant that the little bastards couldn't get me. Congratulating myself on my foresight in buying the hat, I positively sauntered down the trail. We were about halfway there when, misjudging the depth of the bog I was negotiating, I stepped with both feet into mud up to my knees. The black muck felt like asphalt around my calves. I was stuck. Winnie, up to her neck in sand in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, had nothing on me.

Doug was 30 yards ahead of me when he heard my cries. As I held on to a pine sapling, he put his hand under my left knee and the two of us pulled with our collective might. With a great sucking shloosh, my left leg came free, then the right. Dripping ooze, I lay back laughing on the damp moss. "So where would you like to be? The trails of Labrador? Or the streets of London?" Doug asked as we trudged on our way. "Here," I said after a while.

That night, lying in bed and thinking about the day, I recalled the frustration of my first attempt to catch a trout, at age 12 or so. My dad and I were in the Catskills, visiting A. J. McClane, the legendary fishing editor of Field & Stream, who often wrote stories about fishing with celebrities. McClane, a handsome, genial man, had written 20 books on fishing, including McClane's New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia and International Angling Guide, a massive tome that Dad owned. The unique feature of McClane's house was a dining room built on stilts over a well-stocked pond; the room's Plexiglas floor allowed you to watch the fish below, including a three-pound brown trout that McClane had been fattening up with cheese for Dad to catch. While they talked, I was sent out with a fly rod to test the stream at the bottom of the garden. All I managed to hook there was my jacket, the birch trees, and the rocks. In a fury, I went to the car, found my spin-casting rod, put on an orange Abu spinner, and hurried to the pond. The big trout was feeding at the far end. By then an accurate spin-caster, I put the lure exactly on the trout's nose. I caught it with my first cast. McClane and my father rushed out of the house to where I stood, covered in confusion with the hooked fish floundering beside me. They revived the trout. The fish and the photo opportunity were saved; my shame at my desperation to catch the trout, however, was indelible.

If you caught fish every time, I reminded myself, they'd call it "catching," not "fishing."

In Labrador, I was starting to feel that insidious impatience again, and I didn't like it. If you caught fish every time, I reminded myself, they'd call it "catching," not "fishing." The point was the endeavor. I knew that. Nonetheless, the next day I decided to wear my lucky hat—the one I'd worn when I caught a 20-pound salmon—and to change the color of my shirt.

Over breakfast, Randy, the taciturn father of Ben and the manager of a Newfoundland shipbuilding firm, looked up from his pancakes and said, "You see the map, John?" He meant a framed black-and-white aerial photograph of Igloo Lake Lodge that hung behind the dining table, with the surrounding lakes and fishing spots neatly marked: Glory Hole, Agony Hole, Lloyd's Delight, Dorothy's Lake. Next to a spot called Carrashoe Trail, somebody had cut out a yellow Post-it and placed it on the glass: "John's Mud Hole," it said.

"I'm such an asshole," I said. The group laughed a little too heartily.

Randy, who wore a T-shirt that read THERE IS NO FINISH LINE, said, "Why are you writing about fishing when you're not very good at it?"

"Because people want to read about my experience of it," I said, smiling with cold teeth.

As I was suiting up, "Uncle Calvin," the handyman, a slight, wiry, wizened guy who moved through the lodge like a Chekhovian serf, talking to himself and occasionally breaking into a buck and wing, came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "You take care of yourself now, John," he said.

Doug was working hard to find fish. He went where the other guides refused to go, pushing the boat over rocky shallows into Beaver Pond, where we stood waist-deep near a rivulet. "Problem here is that there's low elevation, so you don't get many fast-flowing streams," he said. Nonetheless, by midday I'd picked up a good trout in the middle of the runoff; later, fishing the pool at the lake's opening, I got a couple of pike,

both of which took me about 15 minutes to land. At one point, the heftiest—a ten-pounder—jumped up a couple of feet, horizontal to the water, directly behind the boat's outboard: a startling, beautiful sight. "That's the first time I seen a pike jump," Doug said. It turned out to be the last fish of the afternoon.

With rain hitting my face, we trolled the long lake in a cold wind. In the city, you can always get out of bad weather; here, you live with it. I spotted a bear cruising the shoreline, looking in vain for fish, just like us. "You have bears in London?" Doug asked.

Back at the dock, Aiden was waiting. "I caught a fourteen-pound pike," he said, producing a photo on his camera to prove it.

I pulled out my camera. "Well, I caught a thousand-pound bear," I said.

That evening, he lake was unruly, which made even trolling difficult. A cold front had unexpectedly rolled in from the Arctic. Charcoal-gray clouds hung low over the white-capped water. Shards of rain turned everything on the horizon opaque, including the evergreen trees, which looked black in the distance. The following day, my last day of fishing, I was scheduled to go back to Burton's Pond for one final redemptive shot at a big trout, so I quit early.

Around midnight, when all the camp was asleep, I went to the john, which was only three feet from my bedroom. The generator went off, sinking everything into an impenetrable darkness. In the unmooring obsidian space, I couldn't find my way out. I was lost in the bathroom. I groped my way around—the shower stall, the basin—then, weirdly, inexplicably, I felt leather. The living-room sofa! How did I get there? I backtracked, found a door handle, my knee scraped a book bag: my room. I opened the curtain. The sky dazzled with a panoply of stars. Like a splatter painting of radiant white on black canvas, the Milky Way arched overhead to the horizon. The glowing galaxies, light-years away, felt close and overwhelming. From this perspective, human life was even shorter than the mayfly's one day on earth. We were a blip in time. I went to bed and slept well.

The next morning, the wind was blowing so hard off the lake that the flags in front of the lodge were snapping. The water was blue-gray; the sun alternated with rain. There was a rainbow. Uncle Calvin mumbled, "Rainbow in the mornin' / fishermen take warnin'." I asked the cook to make sandwiches because we were going to Burton's Pond. He looked out at the water. "Not in this weather," he said. The boats were fiberglass and 25 feet long; they couldn't possibly make it. To get away from the wind, Doug and I headed down to the river behind the lodge. Even sheltered by the trees, we had a hard time. We fished for a while, but I caught only small fry. "There's two things that don't change: the weather and the current," Doug said. "Let's rest awhile till this blows over."

I was beyond disappointment or desire. With all my gear still on, I lay back on the moss. Doug smoked. I watched the tops of the swaying spruce kick up a fuss, doffing their green tufts like turbans. I listened to the wind. A light rain rustled the trees. I felt the rain on my face and smelled the sweet mossy earth. The words of Saint Catherine came into my head: "All the way to heaven is heaven." No, I thought, life is all we know of heaven. Occasionally a bird sang out somewhere. There's a lot of sound in the silence of the forest. Fishing wasn't an escape from life but a deeper connection to it—to the flow of air and earth, to insect and animal life, to the sun, to the imagination, and, in my case, even to my father, because fishing was the one thing we ever did together.

Half an hour went by, then Doug said, "Let's fish the Cabin Pool"—a deep hole about 100 yards from the lodge where the lake spilled into a small river. The cold wind was blowing hard off the lake; the waves were spooling backward and bursting white. Even on the river, the wind was so strong that I couldn't cast into it. I put on an orange Bomber, which resembled a striped caterpillar, cast it to the outside of the riffles, and let the current swing the fly far downstream into the middle. On one of those casts, a fish rolled on the fly. I set the hook, but the fish made no run. On the rod it felt as if I'd snagged a tree. There was no movement on the line, but I was afraid to muscle the fish and snap it off. During this standoff, Doug was so excited he kept slapping my back. "This is a big one!" Finally, the fish took off. My line zigzagged 30 yards down the middle of the purly water. "Keep your tip up!"—my father's only fishing advice—kept playing in my head. I held my rod high above my shoulders. It took me 10 minutes to get the fish 20 yards from the rock where I was standing. Doug eased himself into the water with his net. As I tried to angle the fish toward Doug, it swirled, bolted downstream, and dug in one last time.

Fishing wasn't an escape from life but a deeper connection to it—to the flow of air and earth, to insect and animal life, to the sun, to the imagination, and, in my case, even to my father, because fishing was the one thing we ever did together.

When I finally got it in, the trout was about six pounds. "You fished that perfect. Set the hook just right. Like you'd been doin' this all your life," he said. I had given up all hope of catching a big trout; now I'd done it. My day was made. We took a photo. "They're feedin' in the current. Let her float out in the middle," Doug said. A few casts later, almost at the same spot, 30 yards down, another fish took the fly, but the take was different. A trout hits the bait hard but sideways; its impulse is to run and rise. There is a certain amount of give on the line. A pike engulfs the fly with its jaws and then, with a ferocious acceleration, dives for the deep. This tug felt like a pike's savage strike. The fish on my line bolted 50 yards downstream. To resist its unrelenting pressure, I had to put the rod handle in the middle of my chest like a deep-sea fisherman. Whatever it was, the fish was big. Doug waded out a few yards into the water to net it quickly. I tried to angle the fish in his direction; each time, though, it powered away into the middle of the stream. We strained to see what was on the end of the line but couldn't. Finally, the fish broke water: A brook trout's square tail flashed in front of us.

"Wouldn't have caught a trout this big at Burton's Pond," Doug said as he netted the lunker.

"We worked hard for it," I said, putting on a glove to take the fish out of the net. The trout, which weighed between eight and nine pounds, was gorgeous: speckled yellow on top, the underbelly a ravishing orange-red with black spots above, which had within them a corona of blue and red. I lowered the winded beauty carefully back into the water. For a split second, the trout lay motionless in the current, gathering its energy, then with a vigorous fillip of its tail, it nosed back into the fast, dark water, eager, like all of us, for more life.

Dinner on the last night was jolly. Aiden announced that he had tied his first trout fly—a yellow-and-red concoction he named the Burton Killer. He was going to try it out later at the Cabin Pool. That afternoon, to salvage a 50-cent fly, Jack had shinnied 15 feet up a spruce tree and had himself photographed waving his recovered Muddler. "I hadn't lost a fly all day. I wasn't gonna lose this one, me favorite," he said. He had also broken his fishing rod. We clinked glasses. Ben, who was usually silent, looked up from his chocolate pie and said to me, "Did you get stuck in anything today?" "No, but there's still this evening," I said. In fact, I had decided not to fish again. The talk at the table all week had been about "trophy fish." Even after I had snared two whoppers, the phrase was still bothersome, a misdirection to our enterprise. Trophy had its root in the word for memory, not victory; in that department, I figured, I was huge.

At the airport, an announcement brought heart-sinking news of bad weather. Low clouds had descended over St. John's, where I was connecting to London. My flight would take off on time; if the St. John's clouds didn't lift en route, according to the broadcast, our plane would be returning to Goose Bay. I got into St. John's, but not out of it. That night, the cloud cover was so bad that no international flights could leave, and there wasn't another Air Canada flight to London for two days. I was ushered onto a bus and driven four hours to the town of Gander. At 1:30 a.m., in a dank hangarlike airport, I found myself fifth in a line of about 200 weary travelers, waiting to be issued a new boarding pass. In the hubbub, I'd forgotten what day it was: July 12—my birthday. I sang "Happy Birthday" to myself. Then, propping up my computer on the cordon, I emailed my wife. "74," I wrote. "And still standing."

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2016 issue.

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Sharing a Father’s Love for Fishing

When I tell you I love my dad, I mean it with my entire being. When I think of a human so imperfectly perfect, he always comes to mind. It’s amazing how the things he would say to me still resonant in my daily life.

His death is what really showed me the level on which my dad loved me. It was during a debate with my four other siblings as we organized his going away services that I realized my dad was really my hero. Somehow we all were able to argue until our mouths were dry, and jaws hurt that we were his favorite kid. How can one man manage to make every one of his kids feel so special?

My dad taught me how to fish during my early years, he put a rod in my hand as soon as I could balance in a pair of shoes. For that to be my entry into fishing and to see how my life has transcended as a result is my ultimate motivation. I want my story to be every kid’s.

Fishing is more than fishing. It’s strategy. It’s research. It’s determination. It’s meditation. It’s bonding time. It’s food, I could go on forever.

The conversations and bonds formed while fishing are life-changing. Even during times of complete silence, waiting for my wooden cork to sink below the surface, I think about how I could be a better son, person, and fisherman.

I have changed careers several times on my journey. One of my proudest accomplishments was becoming a New Mexico State Police Officer. The opportunity brought me many life experiences, many life lessons, and tons of real-life knowledge. I used that position to help be the change I wanted to see in the world, by serving the community I care about. I’ve been honored to speak on national television, travel and speak on panels with decorated civil rights leaders, been a guest on different podcasts, and train ranking police officers on how to be better in communities of color from a curriculum that I created. Now I want to share not only my life experiences but also my skills.

I happen to be talented at catching fish, thanks to my dad. I have always had the dream of being a teacher or trainer in some capacity. Now I have combined my two passions of training and fishing.

My goal is to equip parents with the tools needed to be able to teach their kids or friends to catch fish. Nature is all around us during these unprecedented times, and now more than ever we have the time to appreciate it! This is the time to make lemons out of lemonade and make the memories with your child that they too will remember forever.

P.S: I was my dad’s favorite!

Go fishing with Anwar and learn the skills his father passed down to him.

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Anwar — I love your essay! I too grew up fishing with my dad — and am now trying to teach my children to love to fish — and resonated with so many things you wrote. Keep up the good and important work! Gretel

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Fishng with Dad

By: Yan   •  Essay  •  1,027 Words  •  November 17, 2009  •  942 Views

Essay title: Fishng with Dad

When we were children my mom and dad frequently took my sisters and me camping and fishing to a lake in South Georgia. The campground was just beautiful with large oak and pine trees showing off their greenery and massive trunks. There were several campsites set up near the crystal clear lake and the surrounding area. We set our tent up to air out the musky smell. Eventually, the owners of the campsite would come to greet us and set up a fire pit. This fire pit ring was just a big old tire rim with the rubber part taken off, but it served its purpose. The campground also had a pool for those campers that didn’t care to swim in the lake, and a small convenience store built like a log cabin that sold everything from bait to stamps. When you went in the store you couldn’t help but smell the strong scent of pine sol they apparently used to mask the smell of the stinky crickets. While camping with my family was fun, I looked forward to fishing with my dad the most.

My dad loved to fish and he loved taking me with him. Fishing also guaranteed me one on one time that I will always treasure. My dad could constantly depend on me to jump up and go with fishing with him no matter what time he left. I was extremely proud to be his fishing buddy. When he thought I was old enough my dad made a rule that I couldn’t go fishing with him unless I could bait my own hook and help clean the fish. You bet I learned to do all that real fast. I think that is one of the main reasons my sisters didn’t care to go fishing. They also didn’t care too much about getting worm dirt under their nails, getting bit by mosquitoes or having the smell of fish on their clothes. My sisters don’t know what they missed by not going on these fishing trips with my dad.

Dad and I would get up way before the sun was up. We would quietly get dressed so as not to wake anyone. He would sometimes even let me drink coffee, which I thought was a great. He would put it in a coffee cup with a lid and make a big deal out of it. We would walk to the bait store to get our drinks, snacks, bait and anything else we might think of. Then we would launch the boat.

There was nothing more refreshing then feeling the cool morning breeze whipping through my hair as we sped towards the fishing spot. My dad was a great fisherman who had the knack of finding the holes where there were fish. He had just the right mixture of talent, luck and experience. Sometimes daddy would try to talk while we were headed to the spot, but that was almost impossible. We would normally end up yelling over the sound of the motor and constantly having to repeat ourselves, and it would become extremely frustrating. The best time to talk was while we were floating around waiting for the fish to bite. We both would take our shoes off to feel the warmth of the sun on the carpeted bottom of the boat, until we drifted on an active fishing hole.

Dad’s favorite fishing hole on this lake was easy to spot by the landmarks. There was a willow tree that gracefully drooped over the water in its magnificent beauty and swung with the gentle breeze. Right beneath this tree you could spot part of a log that was

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Fishing For Perspective

By Alex Odland

Published: October 04, 2023

My brothers and I have an ongoing joke about our Dad. He's constantly on work calls, which results in anxious pacing around our house. When he gets tired, he stops in place like a statue, so we love to snap photos of him when he's frozen. Sometimes we find him blocking doorways, in the middle of the road, or in front of the open fridge. It's like he's sleepwalking, so in the zone that he's completely unaware of his surroundings because of how much he loves his work. So when my Dad and two brothers arrived at Eagle Lake in Ontario, Canada, I was shocked to see my Dad seemingly set free from his usual real estate daze.

Now I had protested this trip for quite some time. Summer was ending, and I'd be moving into college just five days after we were planning on returning home. While I usually had my Dad wrapped around my finger as his only daughter, he didn't budge. So here I was, a tackle box in my left hand, fruit cup in my right, and five hours from the nearest international airport, ready to fish from 8 am to 5 pm for a week straight.

Just as I had avoided the trip, I boycotted our first day on the lake with great prowess. It was only until I saw the inner child of my workaholic father come out that it occurred to me that, if anything, I could sit on the boat for ten hours to make him happy. We loaded up a bright red cooler with a variety of fixings: finger sandwiches that seemed to be from the grab-and-go sections of the airport, ketchup-flavored potato chips (which is apparently a Canadian classic), and my personal favorite, O'Henry candy bars. After filling up our boat with enough gas for the day and much-too-alive bait, we flew across the water in our 15-footer, searching for the biggest and best walleye and muskie Eagle Lake had to offer.

We located our first fishing spot thirty minutes from the lodge, and it was nothing like I had ever seen. Here I was, living my Animal Planet dreams, absolutely taken by the rush of the Canadian flora and fauna coexisting with our now seemingly microscopic fishing boat. Here I pondered philosophical tenets that had never crossed my mind, like how have humans altered the physical parts of the natural world? Or If wilderness lives at the edge of civilization, where am I? I even witnessed a bald eagle swoop down from a 30-meter tree, perfectly skimming the water to snatch a freshly killed walleye only a few feet from my fishing rod. The raw beauty of nature got me thinking about what was important to me, who I am at my core, and all of the things around me that have become mundane because I see them so often: my incredible and loving family, the idyllic nature I am surrounded by in my home and the places I get to visit, and the valuable gift of time.

After the awareness I had experienced on the first day on the lake, I woke up the next morning excited about going through the same motions I had the day before. I then realized perspective was the most crucial piece: how can I take an experience and focus more on the positive components of the present versus all of the things I wish I could change? That day, I shifted from "I have to" to "I get to." As we sought out our next fishing spot, I helped use the underwater camera to jig around pockets of fish. I learned how to hook my bait (without screaming), jammed out to Jimmy Buffet with my Dad and brothers, and caught a 27-inch, picture-perfect walleye. Later that day, I was caught off-guard by our guide asking us if we wanted to cliff jump at a spot he knew of on the lake. Cliff jump? Is this guy crazy? My mind wandered to articles I had read about everything that could go wrong with this sudden shift in events. Not only the act, but everything throwing myself off a cliff represented, sent shivers down my spine. There were a million things to question: what was beneath the surface? What if I didn't jump far out enough? What if I got to the top of the ledge and couldn't bring myself to jump at all?

The idea of cliff jumping also had to do with all the facets of my life that I have precautions about jumping right into. My brothers are always hiding their most poor-judgment decisions from me because they know my Dad would say yes 100 times before I give them a "maybe." Whether that be about buying fireworks to launch off our patio, hypothesizing about throwing our dogs into the deep end of a pool to “see what happens,” or cliff jumping off of a 30-ft ledge into the depths of Eagle Lake, I've always lived by the mantra "Better safe than sorry." It was when I was able to let go of these words that I was able to get off of our boat and begin to summit the rock formation we had stopped at. By the time I was at the top of the cliff, the thoughts of panic swimming around my mind began to settle. Here, I felt a release, a previously undiscovered clarity, that propelled me forward to the edge, ready to jump before both of my formerly confident brothers. I remember looking down and then never looking back, jettisoning my entire being feet-first into the unknown, with all the people I loved cheering me on. I felt catharsis I had never experienced before, a release of every single worry I had about being away from home, going to college for the first time, and doing things like fishing and cliff jumping that felt foreign and uncomfortable. This jump was a gateway to some recent developments in my life, all of which I would never have tried had I not let loose a little more to appreciate all that is around me.

I pulled my Dad aside after dinner that day. Alongside my gratitude, we shared our fears about the coming years. He told me about his time in college and how he was scared to live as a divorced man in our house without my brothers and me to keep things interesting. We laughed about my childhood, especially the summer I had scraped my entire face from being dragged across the pavement trying to walk our yellow lab, Rufus. He told me secrets, ones I am still keeping, and I realized there was so much more to learn about him, puzzle pieces of who he is that his work tended to hide in their entirety. I loved the sides I saw of him in our little paradise; I couldn't remember the last time he told me he was proud of me or impressed with what I had accomplished, and by the lake, I was all that and more. However, what resonated with me most about our conversation was that he saw this new side of me, too. A girl who could let go of her parents’ not-so-recent divorce, a girl who could accept that her grandmother had stage IV pancreatic cancer, a girl who could take on what was thrown at her with grace. I had become a girl that could process her grief and loss in healthy and rejuvenating ways because I had people and activities I loved supporting me. During this conversation, I saw for the first time how much the turbulent and toxic American work culture had been to my Dad. He worked so hard, so often, and there are only so many hours in the day for him to take time for the things he loves. All of those work calls, while important, limited exploration and suppressed joy. I vowed that no matter the workload I would take on in the future, the thing that gave my life the most value was everything I loved—fishing, cliff jumping, and the hobbies I had the ability to discover.

By some form of time travel, it was somehow our last day in Ontario, and while this was the day I had anticipated counting down to for the entirety of the week, I wanted to stay there at the lodge forever. The protesting I had done when we departed for Canada reared its head in a new and mutated way, and I refused to leave. I pitched alternate solutions and ways I could get out on the boat one more time before we left for the airport in three hours. I begged and pleaded but to no avail. Fortunately, my usually unopinionated brother piped up and suggested, "Why don't we go to the point?". The point was a close drive, a beautiful hike that led to an unexplored alcove lined with some of the most picturesque cliff jumping spots you could imagine. The water was always flat and glassy, and the walk required to reach The Point was enough to keep anyone else from entering the space. It was here that I was the happiest, an unbothered form of myself that hadn't come out amongst the chaos of my high school years. My last moments in Ontario were spent cold plunging into the lake, climbing up to cliffs of varying heights, and throwing myself off of ledges up to 45 feet. I felt alive—a final taste of my personal paradise to end a life-changing week.

"It doesn't have to end here," my Dad pitched optimistically. I looked at him with eyes full of hope. "This could be a yearly tradition, your Great Grandpa Sunny and I used to fish every summer for a month."

"You mean that?" I managed to get out. My brothers cheered, and suddenly the goodbye was not so bad because it had become a see you next year. All these amazing things I felt at the lake: passion, freedom, joy, fear, and thrill. They didn't have to go away. It was wholly and entirely up to me to find new cliffs to jump from in my future endeavors: in college and beyond.

After the eye-opening experiences I had this summer in Canada redefining my perspective on work versus play, I did everything in my power to maintain this mindset when I took on college. If I had to give one piece of advice to the class of 2027 who will join us at Notre Dame in the fall, I'd tell them a thousand times to say yes. This attitude has unintentionally led me to all kinds of opportunities on campus. Some of my favorite times I have tried things that scare and push me have been joining the world's largest women's boxing club, serving the country in Army Reserve Officers Training Corps, and putting myself in new and uncomfortable social situations that have led me to some of the best friends I've ever had. The college workload is an incredible amount to juggle, and discovering new outlets will enrich everything you do academically, on campus, and beyond. It is important, now more than ever, as we step away from home for the first time and take on physical distance from our families, that we find time for the communities on campus that are here to welcome us, to make us feel at home and loved. Just as I had forgotten what it was like to hear my Dad say, “I’m proud of you”, extending words of pride and kindness go a long way in a place like Notre Dame that is full of difficult and time-consuming work. These ideas of hard work and free time can coexist just as I did in nature, and saying yes to them gives each thing you do have value. Say yes to clubs and sports teams, say yes to the cliffs that seemed insurmountable and unjumpable, and say yes to fishing in the middle of a barely explored part of the world. While there is so much to fear, there is much more to gain when you jump into the things that scare you, excite you, or make you ask questions. You'll be amazed at the beautiful ways you can evolve and transform.

After the fishing trip, my brothers and I agreed that the Dad that fishing brought out was the one he had been suppressing for too long. As grateful as we were for the time he put into his job, his work calls, and the all-work-no-play concept society has deemed necessary, our newfound interest in what he loved, fishing, helped us realize that he, too, deserved to let loose more often. And while my Dad can't unravel his workhorse habits in a matter of months or even years, I hope that vicariously through me and my exploration, he too will find some enlightenment in the passages of his life that we spoke about that day by the lake. Love, joy, passion, fear, freedom— he deserves those things. We all do. It just took a little fishing and cliff jumping to help me understand that.

Alex Odland

Alex Odland is a student in the class of 2026 pursuing a major in Science-Business Pre-Med and a minor in Bioengineering. She is from Marin, California, and lives in Johnson Family Hall. She considers her second home on campus to be Army ROTC and Galvin Scholars. Alex’s essay, “Fishing for Perspective,” explores her relationship with her father and how a quick trip to Canada completely changed her perspective on the modern-day work ethic. She would like to thank her parents and brothers for always supporting her academic endeavors and her English teachers, especially Kristen Sieranski, for their guidance and support along the way.