I was sitting around in my living room last friday with a pad and paper reading through some of Braided Creek, a collaboration project of Jim Harrison (a favorite novelist) and Ted Kooser (a favorite poet). A fascinating project, it is composed of small poems, haiku-like, a call and echo of bite-sized stanzas between the two literary greats sent back and forth during a time when Kooser was recovering from cancer. I was hoping a word or a phrase would jump out at me, giving me an idea of what to write about for this week's column. Not that I had writer's block–honestly, I had the opposite issue.

Fly fishing, the rivers and streams which flow through our town and our hearts, the cow moose that I made what felt like an hour of eye contact with the other day before it crossed through a lake and I continued to watch it, the beast gliding effortlessly through the waters as if it didn't have to swim. The rain had stopped pounding the window panes and the sun broke through the clouds. My son, after leaping from the top of the kennel for the umpteenth time, ran over and climbed up onto my lap. I put my book down, put the lid on my pen, and looked at the beautiful but quite wildly untamed child and decided that this would be the day he would catch his first fish on a fly rod rather than on his spinning rod.

Now, I have seen videos of younger children completely ripping big casts on a fly rod, but for the rest of us and our children, the precise arm movements, line management, patience and all the things that encapsulate the act of making a fine fly cast can be quite the feat to try and teach a toddler who has not yet grasped the concept of tying their own shoes. My son Olaf spent all of last summer wading in the creeks, climbing over boulders, helping to net fish, and running full bore from nests of angry yellow jackets with me but he had not yet tried his hand in fishing with a fly rod. This was due to the fact that all my fly rods at the time were at least two and a half sizes taller than he was, his concept of perseverance was close to nil, or more likely than not, he was more interested in the sticks and rocks and how far he could throw them into the water than he was with laying down fly line over and over into the riffles. He liked to net the fish and examine them when I had caught them; he just didn’t like all the “boring”stuff before that.

Though, things had changed after the winter. A few times while I was lawn casting, he had wandered over and wanted to try it. By this time, I had a few fly rods under 7’ and he had gone through a growth spurt or two so it was not as awkward of a stick for him to hold up and waggle around. If you have ever taught a young child to use a fly rod, you will know that they just want to grip it in two hands and wave it back and forth, watching how the line clumsily goes this way and that. The movement is just like watching a crazed killer in a horror movie chopping down camp counselors with a fire axe. Honestly, this is not the worst place to start with them, especially when it is fun to do that with one of my softer rods as you can feel the flex of it and without knowing it, somewhat learn the feeling of the rod loading. I am not saying to start off teaching the child to do this–they will already be doing it, I guarantee it. From here, I laid out about twenty feet of line in front of us, and worked on the timing of the cast with him. Both of his hands were on the grip, in which I put the line up under them against the cork to help keep the line at that distance, and had him practice casting while saying “back” for the back cast and “front” for the forward cast. After a few minutes, he actually started to wait for the back cast to complete–for the most part–before running it forward and laying the line out in a way that I would say was acceptable. A few gorgeous spring evenings like this, and he was ready for the most simple version of catching fish on a fly rod: a lake chock full of panfish easily obtainable from a dock.

With my shortest rod, the trusty 6’8” 3 weight Moonlit Lunar S-Glass, and a new(to my quiver) Nirvana PhoenixGlass in a 5 weight, we were ready for the water. We made our way out to Perkins and it began to rain on our way past 3 Mile and into Moyie Springs. I could tell by the way that Olaf was looking at the windows, now covered in lines from a light spring rainfall, that he was beginning to lose interest in the idea of standing near a body of water for a few hours. After throwing around the classic North Idahoan of “don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes,” the rain stopped and the sun came out as we turned onto Perkins Lake Road. With the weather change and a handful of pretzels, his spirits rose again and he began his outdoor ritual of gathering every stick within his view as I lined the rods. On the 3 weight, I tied on a fly irresistible to the panfish(which could be any fly, even a hook with a corn flake on it will put one into the net), the parachute ant. On the 5 weight, which I would be using to try and catch a largemouth bass after Olaf’s interest started to wane from fishing and wax back onto stick collecting, I put on a #12 chernobyl ant pattern I had tied over winter.

The sun was directly overhead and the day was warming up. The bluegill and the crappie were all up into the shallows close to shore. I set Olaf up with the 3 weight rod in both his hands with about 15 feet of line out, reminded him of the casting patterns and of the timing and after a few appearances of his trademark “I know”, he made his first cast. It was sloppy, but the fly made it to the water and within a few seconds, I was loudly telling him to set. And he did. The fish took off towards the lily pads and Olaf lifted the rod higher and further back instinctively, bringing the line back directly in front of him and then toward the dock. I couldn’t tell if it was a decent sized panfish or if he was struggling, but he kept the fight going and my worst fear of him letting go of the rod at the first sign of a tussle quickly left my mind and the fish was soon in the net. At this moment, he dropped the rod but I was prepared and was holding onto it from behind. The intuition of a father occasionally pokes its head out at the right time. After he wet his hands (which for him is to run off the dock and go down to the water on the shore), the fish rested on his palms: a solid sized black crappie. He asked if we could keep it and cook it for dinner, and later that night he enjoyed it, scaled and fried up with his favorite part being the skin. Like father, like son. He caught a bluegill and another crappie and decided he was done for the day as those sticks were not going to collect themselves. The bass eluded me that day but we ended up coming home with six panfish, enough for a dinner for him and I.

As I am finishing this piece, I am looking back to the Harrison/Kooser book, and I think I found the perfect poem to encapsulate this day:

I hope there’s time

For this and that,

And not just this.

It is unclear who wrote this one as they left out their names, but judging by their voice I would guess that it is a Harrison tercet. It does really speak to me when looking back on days like the one I just laid out, for though we are all busy in our little busy lives, we have to find the time to do things we truly enjoy. Or I could just use the old and cliche mantra of ‘the days are long but the years are short’. I can’t believe this little dude is four years old already, but days like the one described in this piece I will relive for the rest of my life.

Tight lines out there, friends.