I remember three things vividly about the last time I fished with my father — an 18-inch brown trout, the warmth of brandy, and our cribbage games each evening. He was in temporary remission from the cancer that would eventually take his life a year later, and he decided to take a cross-country trip in his little motor home and visit all of his friends scattered across the country one last time.
His health was relatively good at the time, but my sisters were in an uproar about him traveling alone. He was dying, after all, and they didn’t want him off in some godforsaken corner of the Midwest when it eventually happened. So the deal was that I would go with him on the trip. Dad and I knew I couldn’t afford to be gone from work and my new family as long as he planned to be on the road, but we told my sisters I’d stick with him in case anything unforeseen came up. Only he and I knew that I had the airplane ticket to return to Southern California from Denver after about a week. As we were pulling out of the driveway, he stopped me, reached over and took the keys and went back into the house. He returned with a bottle of brandy that went into the motorhome’s cabinet above the sink. I smelled his coffee and knew exactly what had happened.
We met some old, dear friends in Colorado, people I’d grown up calling Aunt Margaret and Uncle Carl, whose only relationship to me was all the rivers that flowed through our lives. My teens were spent on summer vacations and weekend camping trips with my parents and this pair. In Colorado, the eastern Sierra, and the San Bernardino Mountains, we spent a lot of evenings around campfires when I was learning to catch trout on flies. Dad and I played cribbage almost every evening on these trips, and except for those games in which I was lucky getting some good cards and a few cuts, he always beat the hell out of me. The trout beat me most of the time on those trips, too, but I was still learning both games.
Once you learn the basics of cribbage and trout fishing, you slowly realize the rest is nuance, and practice and contemplation are the only ways to learn those nuances, to get incrementally better. My two fishing mentors approached that game differently, but both Dad and Carl were pied pipers of trout. They always caught more fish than anyone else I knew. My father had grown up fishing the trout streams in Colorado, using natural baits he’d scrounge from the rocks on the bottom, while Carl was a self-taught artificials man who preferred to hurl lures. Both were masters at reading the water, and from my father I learned entomology and from Carl the imitative and suggestive value of artificials. They both approved and encouraged my fly fishing when the passion gripped me in my early teens, but I think part of that might have been because I started tying flies even before I had my first decent fly rod, and they both loved to use flies behind small bubbles on their light spinning tackle while fishing mountain beaver ponds and timberline lakes. They really liked size 18 Black Gnats tied in my usual sloppy, oversized-hackle style. I wrapped dozens and dozens at the table inside the little slide-on campers we had back then.
Years happened. Margaret and Carl moved to Arkansas. My mom died of a heart attack at 59, like her mother before her. There was college, then there were early career jobs, and my first son was a baby when Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the process, I’d gotten pretty good at catching trout on my fly rods, I rarely got to play cribbage, and I was learning other reasons for drinking brandy. On that last trip to Colorado, I did catch an 18-inch brown in a difficult spot on the West Fork of the Gunnison River while Dad, Margaret, and Carl all watched from camping chairs on the opposite bank with glasses of brandy while I landed the trout. There was hooting and applause when the fish was finally in hand, like it was a closing-night performance, and they
stood up clapping and clapping in the twilight. It was the last trout caught on that trip, and it was the last time I was able to spend time on the water with my two fishing mentors from childhood. Dad and I went on to Denver the next day, and he gave me a tour of the old parts of the city, remembering the routes he had driven in a bread delivery truck 50 years ago, even pulling into two of the old stores that were amazingly still there and owned by the same families. Dad introduced himself to the children and grandchildren of the original owners and told them stories of their relatives. We laughed a lot that day. He was having the time of his life.
I was flying out the next morning, and we played cribbage longer than normal that evening in the motor home, talking about fishing and family and who he would be visiting. I had one really lucky pegging hand that gave me enough points to edge him in one game. He played a seven to start the hand. I had a pair of sevens in my hand, so I paired his seven “fourteen for two.” I never dreamed he had another seven, but he was smiling broadly when he played his seven, “twenty-one for six.” I had taken the bait. I waited until he pegged his points, then smiled back, playing my final seven, “twenty-eight for twelve.” He was smirking and said it was also a “go,” so I pegged another point. I had another “go” to end the playing hand, pegging a total of 16 points. Cribbage players know that 16 points is a very good total hand count and that pegging more than 6 or 7 points just isn’t done very often.
Later that evening, I counted first on the last hand of a game and squeaked past him while he sat in the skunk hole. I saw him smile. That was the first time I remember beating Pop more games than I lost in cribbage. I’m sure some of that was luck, but I was finally matching up with the old man. We had a small brandies out of paper cups that evening, the rich smell filling my nostrils and my whole soul being warmed with each sip. I remember thinking to myself, “So this was what drinking was really about.”
It is almost incomprehensible to me that it was 25 years ago and that so little has really changed. My two sons are young men in the early stages of their own careers. My wife’s brother R. G. and I have been their fishing mentors, and they are still struggling with both cribbage and fly fishing, but slowly getting better at both. Tying flies after fishing all day has become a ritual for R. G. and me, and there is always a bottle of brandy or Irish whiskey on the table with us. There is something palpable here. We’re having the times of our lives.
