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Friday, January 18, 2008
Thanks for the memories, Dad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The name “Dean” is written in capital letters with white paint on the top of my father’s old green tackle box in the shed behind the house.
It has collected grime and dust sitting under a bunch of old water hoses that for some inexplicable reason were saved for years.
The name wasn’t written in fancy lettering, just block type. The tackle box? Well, you open it up. The three tiers of trays sprout up. You pick up the lures, hooks and whatnot that fly out onto the floor. It happens every time.
My father recently passed away. He was the reason I became a fisherman.
The night before he was buried, I dug out the green tackle box and sorted through memories.
One whole tray was devoted to casting spoons. Dad had every color of Dardevle known to mankind, and they were killers on northern pike.
A red-and-white one drew a fierce strike one day when as a kid, I fished with him on a lake near my family’s cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. The “northern” came all the way to the boat - it had to be four feet long - then shreaded the line. Dad was angry he lost the fish and the lure. But I pointed out that he had plenty more red-and-white Dardevles, and they’re all exactly the same. “That was my favorite,” he said. He had to be the only person who could tell the difference.
Strewn across the bottom of the tackle box were a dozen or so hair jigs used for crappie and perch fishing.
Those made me think of Howell Lake, a small lake off an old logging road west of Eagle River, Wis., in the Nicolet National Forest. The only access was near a culvert on a creek that ran about a mile to the lake, We couldn’t trailer a boat to the water, so we’d have to take the row boat on the back of Dad’s pickup. We’d take turns rowing up the creek, then to the other side of the lake. It was usually worth the effort.
I don’t know how Dad heard of that lake, but we could sit all day over this one spot and catch our share of big crappie measuring 15 inches and longer. That lake became a favorite for me and my three brothers.
My father loved the outdoors, but getting out had become difficult the past few years. Deer season was his favorite time of year, but most of my memories of him will be about fishing.
The last time I seriously fished with Dad from a boat was about eight years ago. We were fishing for whatever bit live leeches and minnows on Kentuck Lake, another Cheeseland fishing hole. We found that smallmouth bass love leeches, but also that we had let his retirement and my career a thousand miles away in Georgia create a chasm in our relationship.
We talked more than we fished that day. Just about life, the weather, how retirement wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. I think I may have even taught him something about fishing.
From that day forward, we never ended a phone call without an “I love you.”
My mother asked me what I wanted to keep of my father’s. The tackle box, I said. She said she’d have it cleaned up and sent down. I want it just the way it is, I said.
I can’t wait until it gets here.
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