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halfgut · 5 years ago

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I have a confession to make. I used to hate fly fishing. That may sound a bit harsh, but I do come by my aversion naturally. My dislike of fly fishing started on my tenth birthday when my dad wrenched the fiberglass Fenwick pole and Mitchel 308 reel out of my hand, pressed a bamboo 7 foot rod into it, tossed my Folgers can of worms into the water, walked me to the edge of Ward Creek and told me to wade into the freezing water and start casting. I stood there shivering, pitching a line into the water over and over and over in order to learn the finer points of the single-handed cast. “It��s like throwing an apple off the end of a stick!” my dad yelled at me from the bank, as if anyone had ever put an apple on the end of the stick to throw it. I never really got it. Oh, I got the casting and stripping and all that because I am, after all, a very, very handsome and naturally gifted athlete with God-given superior hand-eye coordination, but I never really understood the appeal of it all. I wasn’t catching, I was casting, and it felt a bit to me like the fish had the advantage. Standing waist deep in a swirling river that was trying to swamp me so the fish could peck at my eyes as I washed down river never felt all that enjoyable or natural. It always seemed to me that I should be pulling fish out of the river and not the other way around.

I’m the one in the Xtratufs

It just wasn’t all that fun, and not only wasn’t it all that fun, I always felt that there was way too much to learn to even begin to think it WAS fun. The sheer volume of skill and knowledge my dad said a fly fisherman must possess to cast a line to catch a fish far outstripped my persistent ADD and I always found my mind wandering to the question of why can’t I just put a worm or an egg onto the end of the hook and pitch it out into the current? If the end goal is to catch fish, this is certainly easier and by far more effective. Silly me. If a fly fisherman were to do that, not only would he be looked down upon by the other men dressed in waterproof, yet breathable, lederhosen, he would be called a BAIT fisherman by those same angry men, held down, and have his special card forcibly removed from his wallet, torn into pieces, and cast upon the fetid, stained and tainted bait-fishing waters of his shame and no one wants that.

If done correctly, however, fly fishing is an art form and one that even a bait fisherman can appreciate. It is beautiful to see a fly fisherman use a whippy stick to cast a line onto calm water. But there is science behind the art and it’s not just any old fishing line being cast, mind you, but a special fishing line that can either fully float, fully sink, partially float or partially sink, be weight forward or double tapered and all fly fishermen are required to know the difference and when and where each is to be used. There are also countless types of leaders and tippets that attach to the floating or sinking line and multiple knot variations used to attach each to the other. The line also has to perfectly match the size and weight of the rod (do not call it a pole) if you want it to actually work well. These rods come in different sizes, weights and pieces ranging from a two piece, seven foot, one weight to a four piece, nine foot, fourteen weigh. There are multiple variations on this theme and you must know what it all means and which to use to catch whichever species of fish you plan to target (notice I did not say catch, because that rarely happened in my experience). Pair the wrong line with the wrong rod and disaster could strike or, at the very least, you will look like an idiot.

A skillful fly fisherman must also have expert entomological skills (not to be confused with etymological skills, though using the proper swear words when your line wraps around the same miniscule tree branch for the third time in a row is important too and very useful to have in your personal bad word tackle box) so he can identify every single living creature in the water, know its life cycle and how to mimic it using nothing more than elk hair, twine, tinsel and parts off a dead chicken. The mimicking part is much different than the fishing part and is a special kind of torture enjoyed by a wide range of people as they sit in the dark recesses of their basements and “man caves,” or “she sheds,” (yes, women tie too) illuminated by a single light, only coming out long enough to wander down to the coffee shop in hopes of getting into a discussion with other masochists about whether a purist would ever use rubber legs on a stone fly or if using an egg or worm pattern isn’t actually really just bait fishing. It’s different than voodoo, but not by much.

The reward also seemed so, how do I say this… unrewarding compared to the sheer amount work one has to put in to get a fish to even look at the mimic (also known as “the fly”). This imitation of the real is attached to the end of the tippet and used to attract, or in most cases, amuse, the fish when not tied correctly. I guess if you enjoy the skill of it one might find it enjoyable, but if you actually wanted to catch fish, I used to think that you’d get better results trying your hand at bow fishing or noodling. I thought fly fishing was akin to hunting for geese, but before you got into the field you had to build your own shotgun, make your own shell casings and gun powder, and pour molten lead into tiny molds to make your own shot. When all was built you then went into the field blindfolded and if you happened to bag a goose, you ran to it in the hopes that you hadn’t killed it. You then hold it in your arms until it catches its breath, take a picture of it and let it go.

This last part is called catch and release and is akin to dating in high school and is considered honorable among fly fisherman, but is a source of contention between Dream Crusher and me. I catch big fish, but if they have an adipose fin still attached the law requires that you release them back into the wild so they can make wild babies (as opposed to hatchery babies), but for the life of her she cannot understand how I can spend an entire day catching fish and not bring home anything to put in the smoker. She questions my manhood and the truth of my stories and swears up and down that I keep showing her the same picture of the same fish I caught on week one and that I really only go out on the boat to smoke and drink with my fishing partner, Dave, which isn’t the whole truth because I quit smoking years ago.

Smoking is my passion

However, something happened to me a few weeks ago that changed my thinking. I’m not embarrassed to say that I’ve repented and that my change in heart has sent me scouring the interwebs for things like double tapered floating line, net magnets, felt-soled wading boots, head cement, and hackle capes. I’m blushing a little, however, because I wasn’t even an agnostic, I was a full blown, unbelieving skeptic, but on that day, as I heard the preacher preaching what he was preaching, a beam of light fell upon me out of the stormy clouds as the wind whipped violently around me. I jumped out of my seat, ran the aisle, and fell at the altar of the single handed cast and asked what must I do to change my evil ways and catch fish like man was meant to catch fish? And Doug said, as he looked kindly into my eyes and placed his hand on my shoulder, “My son let me introduce you to the Stehekin River – a river so beautiful and so clear that it takes the breath away – and to fish so big that when they rise out of the water to take the dry fly, the echo of its body crashing back into the water will sound off the canyon walls for a full two minutes.” I bowed my head and wept silently.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back in January I was approached by my friend, Aaron, who works for an amazing ministry called Family Lines. You might remember Aaron as the omni-competent guide from my post a few years back when Allison and I went on the Owyhee River together and I tasted death multiple times and found God. He asked me (Aaron that is, not God) if Molly and I wanted to go on an amazing fishing trip and talk about our father/daughter relationship, along with two other father daughter pairs. We agreed and off we went, neither of us knowing much about fly fishing, who we were going with, whether any of the Family Lines staff had any weird diseases (they do spend weeks on end in the wilderness), where we were going, how we were to get there, or what on earth we were going to talk about. All we knew is that we were going, that we were going to talk, and we were going to fish.

None of my kids had ever really fished growing up (although Allison did catch a number of big fish in her college years with Dave and me, and if she’s around, I still rub her head when we make a run to the river) and by every stretch of the imagination I would have been considered an Idaho dead-beat dad because I live in the most huntable, fishable, campable state in the union and never did any of it with my kids. We never went hunting or camping or fishing except for that time when Idaho had a free fishing day and I took the boys and we caught one hatchery raised rainbow trout on a piece of corn and we got free orange hats, but the girls never fished once. The closest they came was the time we went crabbing at Rockaway, which was fun, but not fishing, and so I really had no idea that Molly even liked to fish (I’m not sure she knew either) until Dave and I took her Steelhead fishing last year.

First Steelhead

As we were slowly backing the boat into the glory hole on the Clearwater River (it does have a name which I am not at liberty to divulge), Molly sat on the engine cover and talked to me as I ran the kicker. “How you doing, honey?” I asked. She had just moved back from Boise and I was thrilled to have her on the boat. “Good. It’s really nice to be out in the fresh air. It’s really nice to be out in nature. This is pretty.” She said all this with a kind of wistful voice and a sigh as if she was fine, but bored out of her mind. Then all hell broke loose and a huge Steelhead grabbed the plug – aptly named Dr. Death – and she grabbed the pole and the fish tried to drag her off the boat and down the river.

Maniacal gleam

There is something magical and terrifying at the same time when you have a Steelhead on your line and it tries to rip the pole out of your hands. They fought to the death, literally, for ten minutes and by the end, when Dave netted the fish and said “It’s clipped,” we all cheered and Molly turned to me and she had that maniacal gleam in her eye that I had only seen once or twice before (see the Allison comment above). She held the enormous Steelhead up so Dave could take a picture and it was huge and so was her smile. At the end of the day I asked if she wanted to clean it and as she gutted it I heard her giggle a little and then my licensed cosmetologist, make-up artist, fashion-forward daughter held up the pile of fish eggs in her perfectly manicured hands so I could take a picture and I realized at that moment that she was hooked.

So, I wasn’t all that sure she was going to like fly fishing. In my experience fly fishing produced miniscule fish and the chase always seemed to be more important than the actual size of fish you caught. The fish I’ve seen are pretty, dainty, delicate creatures that “fight” for a while and then roll over and sit quietly while they are taken out of the bamboo net to be photographed and no matter how close you hold them to the camera everyone can tell how small the fish is by comparing it to the size of your hands and unless you have Manute Bol hands no matter how close to the camera you hold the fish everyone can tell exactly how big the fish is and no matter how much you want people to think you’re holding a raging beast between your thumb and forefinger everyone knows that you are actually only holding a very tiny smolt no more than a few inches long.

Manute Bol hands

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against smolt. In fact, without smolt, Molly wouldn’t have caught that Steelhead. Smolt turn into big fish that I use a big boat (it’s actually Dave’s boat and he runs it) and large rattling lures to catch and then muscle up to the net and hold close to my body because they are too heavy to hold out to the camera. Then I (sometimes Dave does this) whack them on the head (if they’ve had their adipose fin circumcised) and throw them in the fish box, grab my steaming mug of hot tea (I only drink tea because coffee does bad things to me) which is almost as manly as drinking thick, black coffee (okay, it’s not, but it tastes really good, especially with sugar and cream – okay, non-dairy creamer, actually, because dairy does bad things to me – and besides no one can tell that I’m not drinking coffee once I take the little baggie out of the cup using the cute little white paper flag), take a swig, push the button on the TR-1 (sometimes Dave pushes the button), let out the lines, and then I am (and Dave is) fishing again… for large angry fish.

Dave and me and an angry fish

So yeah, I was a little worried that Molly might not like fly fishing and, after a long ferry ride and her first afternoon on the Stehekin, I was worried doubly so. As she sat on the rocks waiting for others to get tired of catching nothing and start back to camp, she looked for all the world like she wished she had cell reception. “It’s beautiful, it’s nice to be out in nature, it’s nice,” she looked as if she wanted to say; only this time there wasn’t a S0teelhead to break into her reverie… or any fish for that matter. She probably wasn’t exactly bored, but tall majestic mountains and a beautiful, rushing river are good things to look at for a while. They are good things, but they are not fish things.

No cell Reception

Fly fishing is challenging on a calm day, and any kind of fishing is difficult on a windy day, but fly fishing on a very windy day is almost impossible because no matter how hard you fling the line it comes shooting back at you like a wispy ball of tangled yarn. If by some miracle the wind lets up a bit and you do get your fly line to lay down on the water, the wind whips the trailing line and drags your fly down the river like it’s got its own engine and the natural presentation of the fly is ruined and more than likely so is fishing for that day and we had wind in spades – high, gusty winds like you hear about in the scary tales of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Stehekin River is quite possibly the most beautiful river I’ve ever been on and I’m from Alaska where big beautiful rivers are a dime a dozen, but as we forded the same stretch of the river on the morning of the second day and the same high wind was trying to push me over and the river was trying to lay me down, I really couldn’t see the beauty in it and started wishing for my spinning gear and a flat calm lake while sitting on Gertrude McDudieface, my Boston Whaler. However, Mindy, our excellent and faithful guide, pushed us on and kept up her cheerful banter and patiently switched out flies and leaders in hopes of getting us on the bite and though I had one fish rise to my strike indicator neither of us caught any fish and as we trudged back through the turbulent waters a quote from Nacho Libre came to mind, or a variation thereof, “The Stehekin is a lie, Steven… A LIE!”

Casting into a headwind

It wasn’t as though I was in a bad mood. I wasn’t. After all, I was on a trip with my daughter in a location with no cell coverage. I was surrounded by great people in a great place with great food and as we sat around the dining room table waiting for Jon and Doug (two amazing guides and friends) to get back from scouting our new afternoon fishing location, we warmed up, ate a good lunch, and had some really good conversation. I was in good spirits, but the hope of catching any fish was quickly waning and even though I was told that the Stehekin was better even than the rivers of Montana and the rivers in Montana are so legendary that they wrote a book and made movie about them, I had never heard of any books written about the Stehekin. At the end of the meal I was beginning to wonder if the scenery, the food, and good conversation was really all that I had to look forward to for the next day and a half. I was mapping out my plan to make it a five pound week if it was.

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After lunch I squeezed my skeptical, well fed and breathable wader-clad-body into the van and in my food induced coma I almost missed the fact that we turned the other way on the road coming out of the ranch. It was warm and my less-than-toned-and-tanned body jiggled merrily away as the van rattled down the road, trying to lull me to the point of sleep. The banter going on in the van was pleasant and as I watched the river slide by I realized that I shouldn’t have had three cups of tea and a glass of water at lunch.

As I trotted off into the woods to take care of some business, Mindy got our gear ready. When I got back everyone was already halfway up the road to our fishing spot and as I caught up to them I realized that Doug had been assigned to our little band of The Three Amigos and I was kinda sad that our little troupe couldn’t have just wandered off to make our own way. However, I figured that Aaron thought that we were so hopeless that we needed two guides instead of one. There were no fish in this river anyway so what did it really matter if we had one or two guides, but Aaron knew better. Doug is an amazingly kind, soft spoken and gentle man, but he WAS the one who said the Stehekin was better than all the rivers in Montana and so I looked at him with a wary eye and as we walked I lagged behind and, to my shame, I abandoned Molly to the guides and fished another patch of dead water that I thought looked promising. I really had no clue. Little did I know our education was about to begin.

I was a little discouraged, but mostly resigned to not catching fish and as I wandered over to where Doug was teaching Molly the finer points of how to let the line swing to the end of the float and use the pressure of the water to bend the rod and gently lay the fly back upstream in one fluid motion, I prayed “Lord, please let the daughters catch fish today.” It might seem like an odd thing to ask for, but I know my God loves to give good gifts to his children and so I thought I might just bring it to His attention. I would have been happy either way, but much happier to have caught fish. I’m kind of selfish that way.

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I know this will be hard to believe, but moments after I said that prayer and on the very next cast, Molly caught nothing, and on the next cast she also caught nothing, but on the next cast she caught the biggest nothing I had ever seen. No fish, nada. However, Doug calmly continued to point to the water and teach and take a few steps upstream, teach and move, teach and move until Molly was in a fly fishing rhythm with every cast falling more or less where Doug wanted it. Mindy and I just kind of watched and listened. Then it happened. Molly’s cast landed in a seam in the river about three quarters of the way across. She stripped line and lifted her rod to keep the strike indicator moving at a natural pace. It was a beautiful thing to watch and I might have teared up a bit. She had just dropped the tip of the rod and was about to pay out line when it hit. Her rod bent double as the huge Cutthroat tried to pull the rod out of her hand and she set the hook like she had a giant Steelhead on, and, in doing so, yanked the fly clean out of the fish’s mouth. I can imagine that the Cutthroat at that moment must have thought, “What the heck was that?!”

I whooped, then wheezed, as the air went out of me and I went from elation to dejection in the span of a few seconds. It was like an entire baseball stadium heard the crack of the bat only to realize that it was just a very loud and long foul ball. The rod dropped to her side and we all kind of groaned… everyone that is except Doug who took a few steps upstream and told her to try again, only this time to use a bit more finesse if she hooked another fish and reminded her that these weren’t Steelhead.

A few steps and a few casts later she laid her line onto a beautiful pool in the river and let the fly swing through the tail out. Moments before she was going to flip the line back up stream a solid Rainbow crashed her fly. She didn’t panic, but raised the tip of her rod and with gentle pressure set the hook. It fought hard and tried to get tangled in an old tree snag, but Molly moved quietly away from it, holding the line tight and with what looked like a practiced hand, guided the fish to Doug’s waiting net. I’m not sure who had the bigger smile, the student or the teacher. I could see Doug talking to her as he unhooked the fish and left it sitting in the net which he had also left in the swirling water of the river so the fish could continue to breath. She nodded, wet her hands, then gently lifted the rainbow out of the net and both of them turned to me and smiled for a picture. Then she lowered her hands into the river and the trout bolted for freedom either to be caught, or not, another day.

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This may sound dumb and simplistic, but as I stood there I realized that fishing is a great analogy for fatherhood. To someone who loves almost nothing more than catching fish, watching Molly land her first large trout, I realized that, simply stated, being a dad means you find greater pleasure and enjoyment out of watching your daughter catch a fish than you do from catching one yourself. It’s very simplistic, but I think it correlates pretty well to the father/child relationship. As a father almost everything I do for my children is because of one thing and that is that I find more pleasure in seeing them succeed than I do in my success, and I do love to succeed.

Molly caught a lot of fish that day and as we were getting ready to head back to the ranch Doug told Molly that not many other people had caught fish and if anyone asked how many she had caught, just tell them “a few.” Well, he didn’t tell me not to say anything and so after we got back to the ranch and someone asked me, I did a toned down version of my victory dance, then lifted my shirt just enough so they could see the ten tiny hash marks I had etched into my belt with my knife and I just smiled as they whistled through their teeth. Okay, that last part isn’t perfectly true, but she did catch ten and they were beauties.

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The next morning we made a b-line for the “Magic Kingdom” as it was dubbed, and for a full day we did nothing but catch fish – and magic it was. The river was teeming with life. There were thousands of red, spawning Kokanee that scattered as we walked through the water and large spawning Chinook that shot up the river like wild teenagers looking for a date and the sheer number of big trout looking for an easy meal gave the place its name. We were sheltered from the wind and the sun shone through the fall leaves making the water sparkle and we never wanted that day to end.

Thousands of Kokanee

We were late to dinner that night and the wait staff wasn’t all too pleased that many of us ordered off the menu instead of the hotline, but we were satisfied with the day and didn’t really care that our food might have not been treated with the best hygiene by the unhappy cook. We lined up at two picnic tables and ate our meals and drank our hot coffee (tea for me) and our weariness was tempered with great peace. I listened as everyone recounted their highs and lows of the day and there weren’t really many lows. As everyone was talking I leaned over to Doug and said, “Thank you so much for teaching my daughter how to fish. She had a great time today. I’m a little worried though because I think you might have created a monster.” He just smiled and shook his head a bit. “I didn’t create a monster. I just released the monster that was already in there.” No truer words were ever spoken.

Cast of characters

That night the skies opened up and dumped a deluge of biblical proportion onto the ranch. The wind whipped and howled so that I thought the trees would fall upon us. As we packed the next morning for the long ride home, the canvas on our cabin roof and windows snapped and popped in the wind and I added an extra layer. We ate quickly and loaded our stuff into the van and as we pulled onto the road, the clouds broke and the sun came out and reflected off the swollen, muddy and unfishable Stehekin River.

After two glorious days on the best river in the world, the window of opportunity to fish it had slammed shut. Had we arrived a few days earlier or a few days later, the fishing would have been very different. As I said, my God loves to give good gifts to his children and He certainly gave a great gift to us that week. As we drove home Molly and I talked for the entire five hours about the trip and the friends we had made and what was discussed on camera and about the fishing. We were both tired, and each of us had a pretty good load of caffeine on board, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. We were experiencing the warm afterglow of an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime trip. We both want to come back to the Stehekin again next year, but one never knows what a year will bring. As I sat there, the nose of the Tacoma pointing east on I-90, listening to my beautiful daughter talk and laugh, it struck me how much our relationship had healed and I realized in that moment that this trip could never have happened a year ago. It was a beautiful gift that God had given to us, but especially so to me.

What the Heck is a Stehekin Anyway? I have a confession to make. I used to hate fly fishing. That may sound a bit harsh, but I do come by my aversion naturally.

#stehekin fly fishing steelhead alaska washington Chelan steheking valley ranch

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halfgut · 7 years ago

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halfgut · 7 years ago

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Just the first of many

Impulse is a dangerous thing and especially so when you are trying to impress one of your children. Doubly so when it’s one of your girl children. To put it mildly, my daughter Allison hurt my feelings and my capitulation was an attempt to regain what was left of my dignity. What she said was, “I didn’t ask you to go because I really didn’t think you’d be able to do it,” but what I heard was, “You’re too weak and feeble to do anything like float down a river with me, old man. I’ll just ask someone who is stronger and more capable.” She had ground salt into the open wound that was my rapidly deflating ego.

“No, I really want to go,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. Even as the words parted my lips, my mind was looking for a compromise, a way out. The audible click I heard was the sword of Damocles breaking free from its secured position. Had I really just verbally committed to floating 50 miles of the most remove river in the lower 48 – the Owyhee – with my daughter? Yes, I had. I was terrified even before I learned that someone had died on the river that spring and well before I would see the flotsam and jetsam of a shattered drift boat being held by the pressure of what amounts to two full grown cows pressing it against an imposing rock wall.

We had to portage this rapid because someone almost lost their life here. You can see what’s left of the boat right above the red helmet

A closeup of the boat

All I knew at that moment was what Allison had told me in the past, that there are no roads in or out and that you must leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but all of your bodily secretions out with you. I was worried (and a little grossed out by it), but it was still months away and a lot could happen between then and now.

Nothing did.

A long drive and an uncomfortable first night and I suddenly found myself sitting on a bright red, inflatable kayak, with a bright yellow helmet, a bright red life vest and clutching a bright yellow paddle. The fact that everything was brightly colored should have been my first clue that things don’t always go as planned. If they did, everyone would be dressed in drab outdoorsy fabric like the kind you see the urban Eddie Bauer types wearing and the kayaks would sport more natural colors to blend in with the environment. What I should have realized is that in a rapid it’s really hard to differentiate between a rock and a dead body unless the body is tightly wrapped in some form of unnatural, neon pigmentation. Had I only known.

I kept up a cheerful countenance as I floated a little ways from the group, getting the feel of the kayak under me.

Emma teaching the group proper paddle technique.

The teen girls (it was a father/daughter trip) all listened intently as Emma and my daughter (a third year guide) talked about boat safety and how to paddle. Boat safety, shmoat safety. I grew up around the water and paddling would come naturally to me. A duck didn’t need to learn to swim did it? Besides, I own a drift boat. How hard could it be? Yeah, it’s not the same.

A glimpse of my group paddling off as I spun in circles.

I watched as the kids paddled off downstream and turned to catch up with them. I put a paddle in the water and pulled. My kayak spun wildly. I plied the other end of the paddle to slow down the spin. It didn’t help. I firmly plunged my paddle into the water on the port side and it slowed to a stop. I slowly centered myself and pointed the bow downstream. I dipped a blade into the water and slowly pulled. The kayak began turning to the right. I quickly jammed the opposite blade into the water and pulled and it spun wildly again. This was not going as planned. I smiled, with an ease I wasn’t feeling. Inside I was like, “Uh oh, this is going to end badly.” It was all coming true.

I knew I was going to die on the river. I also knew it was going to be hard on Allison to have to pull her dad’s brightly festooned, but lifeless body out of a rapid, but I didn’t care. She had asked me to go and it would serve her right for goading me into coming on this trip.

Dream Crusher asked a number of times if I was doing okay as we drove to Horseshoe Bend where the trip would begin.

“Yes, I’m fine, why do you keep asking?” I stared straight ahead.

“Look at me.” I turned my eyes towards her, but not my head. “Okay, I’m looking. I’m fine, really.” I bared my teeth in a feeble smile.

“Then why are there beads of sweat on your upper lip?”

I yawned and dragged my arm as carefree as I could muster across my lip. “By the way,” I said, “did I tell you that I want my ashes sprinkled on the Clearwater?”

“Just stop,” she replied. “I knew it. I knew that’s what you were thinking about. Just stop it right now.”

“What? I’m just making conversation. Oh, and the passwords to the online accounts are in the cupboard and makesuretogiveChristianmybaseballglove.” I raced to finish this last line as she reached for the knob on the radio to turn up the volume.

“I have to do something to drown you out,” she said as she spun the knob. It was an unfortunate turn of phrase and she turned to look out the window without another word. I felt my lip. It was wet again.

My paddle was actually upside down and backwards. You shouldn’t be able to see the writing on the paddle in the lower right corner.

As my kayak spun in the water and I got further and further from the group, Allison paddled up to me and said, “Umm, Dad, one of the other guides told me to tell you that your paddle is backwards.”

“Oh, yeah?” I responded. “That’s how we do it in Alaska. Makes it more streamline.”

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged and paddled off. When I was sure she wasn’t looking I flipped my paddle over and paddled after her, still looking for all the world like an inebriated walrus, but more of an I’ve had one too many drinks kind of walrus and not a college student on a Friday night kind of walrus.

For the first few hours we did nothing but paddle in flat, barely passable water which caused our kayaks to come to a skidding halt often enough that my abs quickly cramped in their attempt to free my kayak from the resting part of Newton’s law of motion. Apparently one must “oochie – scooch,” which involves thrusting yourself backwards and forwards in an effort to get the rock to loosen its grip on your kayak. The ever helpful river guides would shout this and other helpful hints at you as they “encouraged” you to “soldier” on. “You can rest when you’re dead.” “Only 48 more miles to go.”

Dying in a river is apparently a real thing and wearing a tightly wrapped and zipped Coast Guard approved flotation device does nothing to ensure that you won’t get your foot wedged between rocks and drown. For the first few hours it was drilled into our heads what do do if (should have said, when) we were to fall out in a rapid. The most important thing you can do is get into River Position! This involves getting your feet pointed down river and and up off the river bottom, flailing your arms and keeping your eyes down river to see what’s ahead. And one must never, ever stand up. I was told that dads always try to stand up and that a lot of dads die. Yeah, not this dad. I was not going to give the river the satisfaction.

Emma, our guide, using a teachable moment to model proper River Position while our omni-competent and ever-cheerful trip leader, Aaron, looks on.

A short while later we entered into our first rapid and I immediately flipped, but came up in the most acute river position in the history of man, with my knees up and feet pointing downstream. My posterior bounced off every rock on the way down. There was no way I was going to be foot entrapped. Butt entrapped, maybe, but not foot. All the guides were yelling at me at once to the point where all I heard was a cacophony of “Let go of the kayak! Get your feet up! River position! Keep your head up! Breathe! Swim! Don’t swim! Feet up! Let go of the paddle! Hang onto the paddle! River position!” I did it all at once. Allison told me later that I had scared her because I came up wide eyed and gasping. Well, if you know OBryans, we have nothing BUT wide eyes, and the gasping part was because I was drowning and was moments away from death. Yeah, fear like that happens when someone is scared out of their freaking mind that they are going to get their foot trapped and be sucked under only to rise again either on the last day or when their bloated body gets so buoyant that the river gives them up like some grotesque party balloon escaped from the pudgy hand of a toddler. I was terrified. I was also shaking and embarrassed.

Not proper river position

Still not in river position

I dog paddled to river right (that’s river guide speak for the side of the river I’m always not next to) and dragged the upper half of my body onto a mossy rock, my useless legs dangling behind me in the diminishing current. My eyes focused as my cheek rested against the slime and I watched every single teenage girl float through the class 10 rapid

Guide

Sprite

Guide

Sprite

as if they were sitting on a cloud, riding a spring zephyr wind. One of their kayaks scraped over my semi-lifeless body. “Oops, sorry. Hehe.” I turned my head away.

This is a threatening smile.

“Are you okay?” Allison asked as she rushed over to me in her kayak as if it obeyed her every wish. She was looking a little wide eyed herself. “Go on without me. Leave me here to die,” I managed to say. She patted my back and told me in low tones that if I didn’t get back into the kayak in less than a minute she really was going to leave me right where I was. I dragged myself onto my kayak and let Allison pull me along. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and I could feel my legs beginning to redden and burn. It was yet another indignity on the first day of the last week of my life and I hadn’t even made it to the first camp and I still hadn’t used the facilities in the woods. It was going to be a long week.

Sand as far as the eye can see.

One thing I realized on day one is that a river produces an exorbitant amount of sand. It’s everywhere and in everything and finds its way into every crack and crevice. If you’re lucky you can keep it out of your food and, thankfully, I was able to keep it off my camera equipment. AND it was hot – 118 at one camp.

Even though it was only 117.7 degrees, it totally felt like 118.

I don’t remember the first night of the trip other than we ate and slept and that sand bugs tried to invade every one of my facial orifices (orifi?) Even though it was smoldering, I chose to keep a buff over my face so they wouldn’t have the joy of a good night’s sleep in one of my facial crevices. I really only remember having one thought and that was that I have six days left and I am not going to make it.

The only way I can describe the feeling is remembering being a kid and thinking that there were six long days until Christmas and wondering if it would ever get here and how on earth could anyone ever wait that long? And then it was here and you got to open presents. It was like that, only some freakishly hellish version where you’re always waiting and there are never any presents, only a never ending feeling of despair and misery until the river either takes you or vomits you out on “Christmas” day after it beats you and chokes you and teaches you a lesson you’ll never forget. This was day one.

Panic

The first rapid of the second day was called Read it and Weep and I approached it with caution, which I learned later is not how you approach a rapid designed to make you cry. It sensed my trepidation and I heard it giggle just before it lured me into a false sense of security and sucked me into a sink hole the size of ten commercial washing machines and I nearly drowned again. I wept silently, secure in the fact that no one could differentiate between my tears of sorrow and the river’s tears of mirth. On the second rapid I flipped again. And on the third rapid… I flipped. It is generally understood that if someone goes down for the third time they are not coming back up. Thankfully, I had my bright yellow life jacket to keep my flailing body from giving up the ghost.

I am an athletic guy. I played NCAA baseball. I am a good golfer. I can juggle. I win at Pickleball (when I am playing Dream Crusher) most of the time. I have a few slight of hand tricks. My hand eye coordination is excellent for a man my age, but for the love of God and all that is holy, I could not make my kayak do what it was born and bred to do. It was engineered to be a kayak, but it was more like an unruly toddler that, no matter how hard I tried to reason with it, would do the exact opposite of what it was told. I was sure I had gotten a defective one (or a possessed one) and I was equally sure that it was actively trying to kill me. I would see a rock some way down the rapid that I knew was a bad idea, yet no matter how hard I tried to avoid it with back strokes and front strokes and side strokes and high siding and panicking, the kayak was attracted to it like it was a positive magnet and the kayak a negative. A rock meant one of two things: getting stuck or flipping, and neither were a good option.

Flat Calm

“Please God, no.”

Thankfully, there is flat calm at the end of every rapid. It’s a time to either catch your breath and thank the Lord that what about happened to you didn’t happen or to shout with joy at your besting of the accursed white water. At the end of every flat calm there is a rapid. As I floated quietly along and heard the tell-tale whisper of an approaching rapid I would turn my face to the sky and whisper, “Please, God. NO!” I was miserable and tired and scared. Then we reached the Weeping Wall and a miracle happened.

I dragged my dry bag and my poop tube (yes, everyone had one), aptly called “Bad Disneyland,” up to the place Allison had designated as our place of rest for the night and collapsed onto the ground in a stupor. After a while my wits returned and I realized that gnats were rapidly accumulating on the many cuts my legs had incurred. I felt like a water buffalo that was too far gone to care about the insects sucking the life out of him and I just let them feast. Something may as well benefit from my misery.

Bad Disneyland amongst friends

There were insects everywhere

I looked at my foot and wondered where a good spot would be for a bullet to go through without causing too much damage. I didn’t bother searching for my revolver because I didn’t have it with me. I didn’t even bring a knife (what kind of idiot doesn’t bring a knife or a revolver on a survival trip?) and I didn’t think a sharp stick would cause enough damage to get me airlifted out. Besides, I didn’t have a knife to sharpen a stick and it probably wouldn’t have done enough damage anyway. It would get mildly infected, but not infected enough to get me a helicopter ride out and it would just add to the pain I was already feeling. Besides, Allison would make me row out with an infection. I wondered what injury WOULD get me airlifted out? There was a large rock sitting next to me and my eyes gleamed at the thought of bringing it down on top of my metatarsals, cracking them into little pieces. That would surely do it. I reached for it, fell over and collapsed into a heap, too exhausted to lift it.

Discussing the highs and lows of the day at Camp Montgomery.

This was a father/daughter trip and every evening our enthusiastic, cheerful, and omni- competent trip leader, Aaron, would gather us around so we could talk about the highs and lows of the day. I dragged myself to the circle of humans and tried to think of the highs from the day and all I could think of was, “Well, I didn’t die…. yet.” That was my inner thought. My outer words were, “Hey, I got to spend quality time with my daughter.” Inner thought, “It’s her fault that I’m out here.” Outer words, “Golly, this is a beautiful place.” Inner thought, “God forsaken, more like it.” I went on like this for a few more minutes, babbling, then lapsed into silence. My inner mind was pacing like a caged ferret looking for a way out, but I was mute. I don’t remember what anyone else said. I just kept smiling and nodding vigorously when people’s lips stopped moving. I was sure I was going to die, so what did it matter what any of these people said? I would just be a bad memory to them as they recounted the tale of the uncoordinated old guy with the bad facial hair who couldn’t get his kayak to work and the river ate him. Good thing we couldn’t find his body because that would have been so gross to have to see his bloated whiteness the entire rest of the trip.

I texted this photo to Dream Crusher at the end of the trip. Her response: “You Look Hideous!” I guarantee I would look worse dead…. though not by much.

On the third day I awoke sore and defeated. However, unbeknownst to me, three things were happening in the universe. Thing one, my good friend, Matt, was praying for me on the exact morning of my crisis. I know this because I got a voice message after I got off the river that said: “I don’t know why I’m praying for you, but you’ve been on my mind all morning.” The date and time was the morning of the Weeping Wall. Thing two, Dream Crusher was also praying for me. She knew this was going to be tough on me (she had no idea at the time how tough) and so she prayed for me without ceasing. It is hard to pray for someone when you are getting no feedback on their well-being, but she did. Thing three: God was listening.

Stevo checking out the Weeping Wall

A close up of it weeping

The Guides and Todd cool off

The Weeping Wall is a sheer, vertical rock face, 200 feet high that is as dry as a bone until it reaches about 40 feet from the base of the cliff. It’s at this point the water runs out the side of the cliff like so many shower nozzles and it is thick with greenery. It’s an oasis, cold and refreshing, and it’s here that we filled our water bags called ticks (yes, they look

The Ticks

like bloated ticks) and bathed our hot (as in hot from the sun, not as in “Your bod is so hot!”) and stinking bodies. The water was amazingly clean and revitalizing. Even though it was morning, the air was already turning warm and the water felt good. I leaned into the mossy wall and let the water run over my head and tried to get the day to come out of my mind. A glimmer of hope lit. Live in the moment. The kayak doesn’t exist. The river doesn’t exist. Only now exists. I had been praying seemingly without ceasing the entire morning and I tried to physically relax and not think about anything but this moment. It could last forever if I wanted it to. It didn’t work. I opened my eyes. The river and the kayak were still there. I sighed, pushed myself out of the water and slipped my way back down to where my plastic coffin was tied.

Plastic Clouds or Plastic Coffins. It’s all about perspective.

I strapped my gear onto the kayak and climbed into it. It squeaked with my weight and I felt the familiar sore spots as they settled and rested on the hot plastic. I pushed off and glided in an uncontrolled arc into the calm water.

Burned, swollen and zinced.

The sprites were gliding and giggling over the water on their plastic clouds. I knew that at the end of this calm water was not calm water and I bowed my head in weakness and fear.

“Perfect Love casts out fear.” “My power is made perfect in weakness.” “When I am weak then I am strong.”

As I sat there with my head bowed asking for help, the 1986 Vancouver World’s Fair came to mind. The World’s Fair? Really? After all my fervent prayer, that’s all I get? Who, but a select number of Canadians, even remembers the Vancouver World’s Fair? Well, probably no one outside of Canada, except me. It was then I realized why God had prompted this memory. I had experienced a significant moment of fear and weakness there that I had always regretted and it wasn’t until I had kids that I had gotten over it completely. It is a very odd statement to say that thoughts of the 1986 World’s Fair comforted me, but they did.

Even though I was 23, the very age where you’re supposed to love jumping off cliffs wearing nothing more than a squirrel suit, I didn’t. I still looked both ways before crossing the street and I always wore my seat belt (even before it was cool) and I certainly wasn’t going to ride my new mountain bike downhill on a gravel road. Think of the road rash. But here I was heading to a Young Life club in Canada to be their summer photographer. Not an extreme sport, but we would be out of radio contact and that was scary enough. Not everyone was a photographer back then and the profession was still cool enough to give me some panache and the fellow staffers I had met up with were pretty cool.

They all wanted to go see the World’s Fair. “Why not?” I thought. I love to wander through the fair looking at the exhibits and the canned fruits and vegetables. It turned out that none of them were interested in the exhibits and as soon as we pushed through the turnstiles they made a bee line for the roller coaster.

This is me NOT on the Expo 86 roller coaster.

Little beads of sweat trickled down my side. Roller coasters were one thing that I had determined would never be on my bucket list (even if I had known what a bucket list was). They begged me to go and I made a very, very feeble excuse not to. My fear was evident. It was like when someone asked me to do something bad when I was little and all I could think of saying was that my mom didn’t want me to do that. Then I would get punched in the face and left while they went off to steal matches and start fires. My credibility went to zero and my summer, while fun, wasn’t what it could have been. This was a scene that I had relived countless times and it was a regret that haunted me for years. It wasn’t until my kids were old enough to ride roller coasters that it went away.

My kids had a funny way of taking care of many of my fears… they added many others, but at least for me there were many things, like the fear of stinging insects, that went away as I tried to model proper respect for things without fear. I never wanted my kids to be like me, fearing things they shouldn’t. That’s how I found myself sitting in a roller coaster with my two sons waiting for it to kill me. I was strapped in and there was no place to go but up and over. As the coaster lurched and grumbled to the launching point, I quickly made a conscious decision. I made the determination at that moment to enjoy the feeling of abject fear. When the coaster dropped over the edge, I was going to scream like a little girl and enjoy the terror. And I did both. Now, I can’t get enough of roller coasters and will go on any, at any time.

My kayak bobbed unsteadily on the water, threatening any moment to tip me out, but I was no longer paralyzed. My head came up, I thanked God aloud. I smiled and I was ready. I knew there would still be fear, maybe even terror, but I was going to enjoy it. I was going to lean into the fear and enjoy the feeling.

“None Shall Pass!” Todd, the Gatekeeper, watches as the guides devise a route the Sprites would find challenging.

Not a bad place to die.

I thanked God as I pushed by Todd, the gate keeper, and into the rapid. I was excited because I had made a conscious decision to enjoy myself. I attacked the rapid with a furor yet unknown to me and the first thing that happened when I hit the primary drop was that I immediately FLIPPED! I’m serious. Right over. I came up, but not wide eyed (except for the normal, O’Bryan type) and I wasn’t afraid. I was exhilarated and not a little mad that I had been dumped out of my toddler. “You just stopped paddling!” screamed Aaron and cheerfully gave me a thumbs up. I stored that bit of information away, got my kayak, kicked it a few times to teach it a lesson, grabbed my camera and started taking pictures of the sprites and their dads as they made their way unscathed through the rapid.

Leroy was in his 70s and had a bad back. He can be classified as one of the Sprites… just sayin’.

Over the next four days I went down countless rapids and flipped a total of NONE times. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t the most graceful kayaker after the Weeping Wall revelation, but I was a kayaker. I could actively avoid most rocks, but when I didn’t, I learned to use the rock to aid me on my way down the rapid. I was still a walrus, but this one was a teetotaler. Now, maybe I was just becoming better acquainted with the spoiled child that was my kayak or maybe my athletic ability and natural good looks just kicked in or maybe I just got lucky? OR, maybe, just maybe, I needed to learn a lesson. My mind and body have always been good at doing things like this and had I been able to pick up on this from the first stroke of the paddle, I might have had to learn a different lesson, but not as one as impactful as this one was.

Bad Basses tournament winners

One of many bass

The cliffs were amazin

More amazingness… the cliffs weren’t bad either

What had started out as a complete beat down turned out to be a glorious river trip and every evening from Weeping Wall on, I had nothing but personal highs to talk about. I watched the sun rise from a chalk dome called Chalk Basin, caught an inordinate amount

Chalk Dome

of smallmouth bass, sat in a hot spring, saw soaring cliffs and deep pools, and throughout the rest of the days had the best time with my daughter. What started out as a bad dream ended up being an amazing trip, one I would do again in a heartbeat. Some may say, “Well, that’s dumb, why didn’t you just trust God?” I’m really not sure how to answer that, other than to say that I just couldn’t find it within myself to do it. No matter how hard I tried, my strength just wasn’t sufficient. Whether it was fear or unbelief or just not remembering how God has provided for me in the past, I don’t really know, but I do know one thing – that my God is a God of comfort and He will use whatever means He needs to bring us to that place of peace. For some it’s a kind word from a friend, for another it is direct revelation. For me, it was the 1986 Vancouver World’s Fair. Go figure.

The following are some of the players in this drama:

Enjoying the hot springs

Steve, the guide fishing

Allison and Emma keeping us fed

Kayak surfing

Surfing and hot tubbing

A close up of Steve

Omnicompetent Aaron

Steve, Aaron and Alden

Allison fishing

Friend and Gatekeeper

Emma

Emma and Allison in the way

Steve giving instructions

Geese at Montgomery

This might be a bit long for Millennial's, but I'm hoping not. Impulse is a dangerous thing and especially so when you are trying to impress one of your children.

#canyon #Family Lines #God #god&039;s strength #guide #inflatable kayak #kayak #Near Death #owyhee #rapids #river #strong #Weakness #Youth dyamic

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halfgut · 9 years ago

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I Do Not Have the Best of Friends.

My hands had sweaters for weeks. A friend is someone who knows you so well that they can tell what you’re thinking without being told, knows how you’re feeling and how you respond to certain things, and knows all your likes and dislikes. Really, really close friends learn these things so that they can use the information against you in unspeakable and evil ways. I worked in the college bookstore…

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halfgut · 10 years ago

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We're Born Again, There's New Grass On the Field!

Spring Training and Idol worship

Not a blade of grass to be seen.

I’ve played a bit of baseball in my time. I think I may have told you in a previous post that when I was in Little League old men would ask me to autograph baseballs on the off chance that I would actually amount to something other than a manager at a hospital. I guess the joke’s on them. I imagine those signed balls being passed down from generation to…

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#baseball #Brandon Belt #Brandon Crawford #Buster Posey #Catcher #Giants #Hector Sanchez #Pitcher #rookies #san francisco #Scottsdale #scottsdale ballpark #Spring Training

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halfgut · 10 years ago

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I Fish! Dr. Marvin, I Fish! I'm a Fisherman!

I Fish! Dr. Marvin, I Fish! I’m a Fisherman!

The boy in the boat

A little bead of wetness clung to the end of my dad’s nose like a drip of golden honey – only it wasn’t honey. Light refracted through it giving it the look of a droopy diamond as we sat under the canopy of our Glasply in the bitter cold sunlight and watched the end of our poles drag herring through the black water out by the old Ketchikan pulp mill.

I couldn’t take my eyes…

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#drift boat #drifting #fishing #salmon #snot #steelhead

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halfgut · 11 years ago

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January 31, 1926 – May 7, 2014

Her children rise and call her blessed.

My mom passed away just four days shy of her 67th Mother’s Day. She was 88 and she was a saint. If you have read any of my stories about my dad, you will know that no truer words were ever spoken.

It might seem odd, but I like to read obituaries. They are sobering and give one perspective on how tenuous life really is. Rarely are they ever completely truthful or give the entire story about what kind of person the deceased really was. In every obituary the deceased family member was loved by everyone, loved life, always had a ready smile and never got angry. Invariably, the person will be missed by every single person who knew him or her. It’s just what you do when you remember someone. You accentuate the best and forget the rest. It’s a delicate balance and absolutely to be expected. However, there is no delicate balance with my mom. This is the honest truth – she was a saint.

She lived the last years of her life in a community of retired people (the last eight years in a nursing home) and outlived most of them. Few of her friends are left to remember her. But, her kids remember.

I would like you to meet my mom.

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Mom and her brother Marvin

Gertrude Lorraine Bentley was born in 1926. I don’t know much about her life because she never really talked about it, and I never asked, but what I’ve pieced together is that she was born into a migrant farm family that moved west during the Depression. They were a family of dusty, fruit-pickers out of The Grapes of Wrath. Her home life wasn’t ideal: her father drank and her mother slept at a friend’s house because of it.

Mom and Dad and my brother Dick

Mom was a teenager when she and Dad met. They were polar opposites and I can only assume that he swept her off her feet with his enormous personality. He must have seemed like the brass ring in an otherwise mundane merry-go-round. By the time I heard the stories of my dad getting into knife fights and brawls at bars with his then pregnant wife (my mother) in the fray, I couldn’t imagine it. This woman with graying hair, who loved nothing more than to sit and read James Herriot novels and drink coffee or play endless games of cribbage with her son, didn’t seem capable of wanting to smoke cigarettes, while sitting in a bar watching her husband fight. All I can imagine is that he must have seemed like an amusement ride compared to the life she previously led. She must have seemed like a breath of fresh air to my dad.

Mom and me.

Mom, with her mom, and my sibling before I was born

I met her when she was 38. I had just been born and from everything I pieced together later in life, I was a huge accident. But in her mind, I was not a mistake. She told me one time that even though Dad was really, really mad about her being pregnant (why he would be mad when he had a part in the process is beyond me) her arms ached to hold me. It truly is all any child can ask of a mother – to be loved so much that her arms ached if you weren’t in them.

I remember bits and pieces of my childhood. I remember helping her make cookies. I remember Swedish pancakes with powdered sugar and lemon juice squeezed out of a plastic lemon. I remember one-eyed Egyptian eggs. I remember sitting with her in a rocker. I remember the squeaky sound of her cleaning our huge picture windows and walking up and down Madison Avenue with her lifting my arm up so I wouldn’t trip going over the curb. I can only see dimly the moments of her caring for my needs, but I am left with a vivid and overwhelming sense, like a technicolor hand-crocheted afghan, of how much she liked me.

Most kids know that their parents love them. It is an entirely different thing to know that your parents like you. I know that my mom liked me. This is especially telling because in my mind I wasn’t a particularly likeable kid. What an amazing thing for me to come home from school knowing that even though I may have had a really, really bad day, there was someone at home who couldn’t wait to see me and actually liked being around me. She was my refuge and there is no greater blessing than that for a kid.

There are life lessons to be learned from my mother if we are wise enough to listen. She never read any books on how to raise children. She was permissive in her parenting, she never physically disciplined me, she was a good cook, but still allowed me to eat all the things that weren’t good for me, and she was virtually incapable of helping me or my siblings get through those awkward years where you don’t know why your feet are suddenly huge or why funny bumps are breaking out all over your face. But, the one thing she was capable of doing she did in spades – she loved us. Her love seemed to erase all the things she wasn’t able to do otherwise and it had a profound impact on all of us. Her children have risen up because of it and called her blessed.

I never heard a single complaint about having to take care of any of us, and, in all my years, I never heard her say a harsh thing about me or any of my siblings. She just didn’t have it in her. She built up her children and never tore them down. She worked tirelessly to make sure we were well fed and clothed and had what we needed.

Mom was happy being at home. Dad wasn’t. He always wanted to be doing something. She wasn’t particularly fond of going places, but she went. If we picnicked, she packed, cooked and cleaned up when we got home. If we fished, she processed the fish. If we clammed, she cleaned them all. If we crabbed, she cooked them. She held our coats when we got hot and our shopping bags if we didn’t want carry them. There were times she was so overloaded that she looked like a Sherpa going up Mount Everest. She bandaged my cuts and washed my wounds. She watched over the treasures that I found on the beach so no one would take them. I took great advantage of her kindness, but that was Mom. She gave and gave, but never required anything in return. She was a saint.

Yes, that’s a football. Yes, I did share my sister’s room for years.

She spent her entire life putting her children first. Her arms ached to hold me as a baby, but her arms ached to hold all her kids. All of her children have the same sense of kindness and affection towards her that was gained when she rocked us to sleep as children or read to us when she put us to bed. She wasn’t the smartest or the prettiest (though she was both smart and pretty), but she loved us unconditionally. This love kept me from doing some really stupid things as I grew up. In my world, the worst thing I could do was hurt my mom and the first thought that came into my head when I was tempted to do something stupid was, how will this make mom feel? I feared disobeying my dad. I felt self-loathing when I did something to hurt my mom.

She only raised her hand against me one time. I don’t remember the exact circumstance, but to have done something bad enough to bring her to violence against one of her children, it must have been something really, really irritating. She swatted me on my fully clothed back end as I ran by her and I cried. It did not hurt even a single bit, but knowing that I had done something to her that made her get angry at me was enough to break me down. In my world it was a turning point and it never happened again.

Some might say that she was living vicariously through her children and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was (living with Earl made us all want to live a different life somehow), but mostly she wanted to see her children happy. She didn’t have much power because of my dad, but what power she did have – the power to love us – she used to great advantage in our lives.

There are turning points in a family’s history that mark a drastic change in that family. Mom was that turning point in our family. In fact, because of her, our family tree grew an entirely new branch. Most of my dad’s relatives were cut from a different mold and, how do I say this delicately, a bit rougher around the edges. Had we been left alone with Dad, or Dad and the kind of woman that notoriously marry men like my dad, I know things probably would have turned out markedly different in all of our lives – think orange jumpsuits and not being able to vote. Mom saved us in so many ways.

Allison helping grandma

When I got married and had kids of my own I realized exactly how difficult it is to be kind and patient all the time (let me say impossible) and I always marveled at how easy my mother made it seem. All my kids got to know their Grandma Dudie, but my boys got to know her the best. She would sit for hours with them playing checkers or cards or listening to them tell stories or reading them books. I could only take a few minutes of any of this, but she was content to just sit and be with them. My girls didn’t get as many quality years with her before Alzheimer’s took her mind, but she loved them like she loved me even in her affliction. I know her arms ached for them, too.

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Molly and Grandma Dudie

Always reading time

Molly getting loved on

Checkers!

Allison getting loved on

As we all got older, the times together as a family became less frequent, but when we were together Mom was still the buffer. Dad would be unreasonable and demanding and she would deal with him and then come back to the game we were playing at the dining room table. I can still see her in my mind laughing uncontrollably over some silly inside joke. It was a constant goal to get mom going and when she did, we all laughed until we couldn’t breathe. These were the best of times and the worst of times.

Wesley getting some alone time with his Grandma Dudie

Even as Alzheimer’s took her mind from her, she was still sweet and she was still the buffer that kept us from the full force of Dad. She wasn’t quite as sweet to him as she used to be and was finally able to stand up for herself (we were all secretly a bit happy about this) as the filters dropped from her mind. But to her kids, she was still the same. Even though she forgot things and asked the same questions over and over, her love for us still shined in her eyes and to the very end she was still one of the nicest people any of us had ever known.

Goodbye was always hard on Mom (and Christian always got teary)

Dad died three years ago and there was a huge sigh of relief from his kids. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but he was a trial and when Mom went to the nursing home eight years ago, the buffer was gone and we got the unfiltered, crack cocaine version of Dad. Alzheimer’s is a terrible thing. It was made even more terrible for us because it took the parent that we all wanted to have around longer and sidestepped the one that made life difficult. The one who wanted nothing more than to sit and enjoy her children was taken away far too early.

Still beautiful

It’s sad, but there it is. Now she has passed. As we drove to be with her during her last moments I wondered what one was supposed to do when sitting with a dying parent. I now have a role model to emulate. My sister Betty was by her side and did the most beautiful thing. She sat next to her, held her hand and talked about what a great mother she was and spoke the names of her kids and grandkids as she breathed her last. What was most important to my mom in life was whispered in her ear at her death. I am thankful that she was my mom and sad that her life is over, but at the same time I am happy and relieved for her to finally be free. Her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are her legacy. Well done, Mom.

Four Days Shy of 67 Mother’s Days Her children rise and call her blessed. My mom passed away just four days shy of her 67th Mother’s Day.

#blessed #children #death #dude #dying #mom #mother #mother&039;s day #saint

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