A few years after we moved into our home, Trish and I finished off the basement, creating two rooms, one for her art supplies and the other for my fishing paraphernalia. On one wall of my room, in between artwork by Winslow Homer and John Swan, hangs a photograph of my father. It’s set above my fly tying table, across from the shelves where my fly fishing books are stacked.
The photograph first appeared in print in the Winter 2009-2010 issue of Skylands Visitor Magazine accompanying an essay entitled Christmas Trout about my relationship with my father. A few years later, the essay was accepted by Birch Brook Press for an anthology of stories entitled Christmas In The Wild.
My brother, perhaps seventeen at the time, snapped the black-and-white photo while our father was seated along the shoreline of the Beaverkill, one of the Catskill’s most historic rivers. Just downstream stood the Atrium Lodge, a meeting place where the fly fishing elite once gathered to drink gin and tonics and discuss tales tall of hook-jawed, honey-bellied brown trout and where the three of us spent that weekend in late April 1973, the year after I graduated from college. It had been a rough few years, not only for a nation embroiled in an unpopular war, but for a father and son unable to agree on much of anything, my father and I calling a truce to pursue the sport we both loved.
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