My father never was an easy man, certainly not an easy man to love.
At the start of the Great Depression, before he was old enough to vote, he became the primary support for aging parents and several siblings. Such a rude introduction to adulthood launched him into a hardscrabble existence that didn’t relent until much later in life.
Hard labor stole part of his health, and it wasn’t until later — so much later that my conscience still stabs at me during small hours of the night — that I came to understand the degree to which physical pain influenced his state of being. To a teenage boy for whom a sore throwing arm ranked as the essence of suffering, this realization never made its way through the hurt caused by criticism and perceived injustice.
More often than not, I anticipated our frequent work sessions with a feeling of dread. But a wonderful thing happened when work was done. He had a love affair for the outdoors, which became sort of an invisible curtain through which father and son passed into a magical realm of camaraderie in stark contrast to their other affairs.
Those halcyon days chasing after quail or fishing for bass launched me into a realm that became both my passion and profession, a way to blend urban economic imperatives with the sort of release that only nature provides.
To my great regret, I increasingly witness the destruction of that link in our society. For a litany of reasons, parents increasingly fail to commune with their kids in the outdoors, leaving them to a disconnected world of Nintendo and PlayStation that shrivels body and soul.
Even when they realize the value of outdoor activity for their children, parents often count themselves too busy to participate directly, sending them off with surrogates.
Scott Gilmore, who supervises a Colorado Division of Wildlife youth fishing program that educates tens of thousands each year, describes the situation best.
“I have been lucky, no blessed, to be the person who has been with a young child when that child catches their first fish,” Gilmore said. “I would like to tell parents, especially fathers on Father’s Day, do not let me take this very special once-in-a-lifetime moment from you.”
The admonition applies equally to a wide variety of outdoor activities, not just fishing or hunting. Few connections between parent and child occur so easily or last as long as those we share in nature.
Now, when my spirit lifts to visit my father nearly three decades since his death, I nearly always find him with a fishing rod in his hand. And I never forget to thank him for it.
