Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

Dad caught his first brook trout there that morning, a fish about nine inches long with red spots ringed in blue and white edges on its fins.

He has told me about that fish maybe four hundred times.

He never missed an opening day after that. Not when he was in the Army at Fort Leonard Wood, because he wangled a three day pass.

Not the year Mom had me, because I was considerate enough to be born in August.

He drove a creamery truck for thirty eight years. He picked up milk at farms all over the county, and every farmer on his route knew that the first Saturday in May, the milk would be picked up a little late.

The family who owned that forty acres after Grandpa sold it never once minded.

They were dairy people too, and they were glad to see him..

When the last of that family passed this winter, the estate put the forty up for sale.

My daughter Kenna and her husband Dustin bought it in February. Kenna called me the day they signed, so happy she was crying on the phone.

“Dad, we got it. The old place by Grandpa’s creek. We’re going to fix up the house, and Dustin wants to put in a big garden and maybe run a few beef cattle.”

I was proud of her. I told her so. I did not think for one minute about the creek, because it never once crossed my mind that anyone in the family would ever keep my father off it.

I drove Dad home that Friday, his truck in front and mine behind, and I followed him into the kitchen of the little house in town where he has lived alone since Mom died four years ago.

His fishing vest was already hanging on the back of the kitchen chair.

His senior license and his trout stamp were pinned to the front of it, the way they had been every spring of my life.

His old wicker creel sat on the table, the leather strap cracked and oiled. His fly rod was in its tube by the door.

He had laid it all out the night before, the way he always did, like a boy the night before Christmas.

He sat down at the table and looked at all of it for a long time without saying a word.

“I suppose I’ll put it away,” he said.

That was the moment. I want to be honest about it.

Something came up in my chest right then, hot and hard, and I had my phone in my hand with my thumb right over Dustin’s name.

I could have called him and raised Cain. But my own daughter married that man, and Dad would rather give up the creek for good than be the reason Kenna and her husband had one cross word between them.

So I put the phone back in my coat pocket, and I pulled out a chair, and I sat down across the kitchen table from my father.

“Dad, you remember the bridge on County P? The old concrete one, down below the Lindahl place, where the creek comes out of the hills?”

He looked up at me. “That’s six miles downstream, Halsey.”

“It’s the same creek.”

“It’s the same water,” he said slowly. “It’s not the same hole. You know it’s not the same hole.”

“No. But there’s a gravel bar right under the bridge on the downstream side. It’s public. The road right of way goes clear down to the water. Anybody can fish there, and nobody can tell you otherwise.”