Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

He knew, and he put the signs up anyway, and he did not even knock on Dad’s door.

That was the part I could not get past, lying there. Not the signs themselves. It was the silence that went with them.

Trout season in Wisconsin opens at five in the morning on the first Saturday in May.

I picked Dad up at a quarter after four. He was sitting on his front step under the porch light, already dressed.

He had the green bucket hat on, and the tan vest over his red flannel shirt, the one with the elbows going thin.

The creel was on his lap. The rod tube was leaning against the step beside him.

“You’re late,” he said. I was not late. I was fifteen minutes early. He says it every year.

I had Mom’s old webbed folding lawn chair folded up in the bed of my truck, along with the long handled landing net, a thermos of coffee my wife had made, and a sack of egg sandwiches she wrapped in wax paper.

We drove the six miles out County P with the windows cracked, and by the time we came down the long hill to the bridge, the sky over the bluffs had gone gray and then pale yellow with the first light.

There were already three trucks parked on the gravel shoulder by the bridge. That did not surprise me.

The bridge hole on opening day draws a few of the old timers who do not care to walk far anymore.

I parked and went around to help Dad down. He waved me off, the way he always does, and climbed out by himself, one hand on the door frame and one hand on my arm, which he would never admit to.

The path down the bank was steep and wet with dew.

I went first with the chair and the net, and Dad came behind me with one hand on my shoulder and the rod tube tucked up under his arm.

At the bottom, the gravel bar spread out wide and flat on the downstream side of the bridge, pale stones washed clean by the spring high water. The creek ran past it clear as window glass.

I unfolded Mom’s chair and set it on the gravel facing the riffle.

I kicked a couple of stones out from under the back legs until it sat level.

Dad looked at that chair a long moment. Then he lowered himself into it with a grunt and settled back and let out a long breath, like a man who had just come home after a long trip away.

“Well, now,” he said, looking up and down the water. “This isn’t half bad, Halsey. This isn’t half bad at all.”

The sun came up over the bluff a little after half past five and lit the whole valley at once, the way it does in May.

The hills went bright green. The willows along the bank were just leafing out, that soft yellow green of early spring.

I rigged his rod for him, because his fingers do not tie knots the way they used to.

A little bead head nymph under a strike indicator, the way he had fished the oak hole for the last twenty years.

He made his first cast sitting down, a short roll cast that laid the line out on the riffle like he had never stopped doing it.