It’s the wrong time of year to talk about this. I should hold this thought until spring, when your mind is supposed to be on fishing. But I’ve been thinking about the old man lately, and I’m not really sure why. Moreover, I’ve been thinking about him and fishing. Again, I’m not sure why. He’s been dead for over 40 years now, and given the fact that we really didn’t have that long together, I doubt that it’s fair to say that I knew him well. Most of what I know about him I learned after he was gone. He was a very quiet man, and not much given to sharing his thoughts or his feelings with anyone. But we were and are as connected as any man and his son could ever be. That connection was born from a shared love of wild things and wild places, and it was nurtured by fishing.
Granted, both of us had the advantage of being born on the banks of one of the great American trout rivers. The Green was our river, the river of our memories, the thin ribbon of life flowing through the dry sagebrush country and the deep sandstone chasms of southwestern Wyoming. Ashley’s river, Powell’s river…Gasson’s river. From its beginnings in the glacial rivulets of the Wind Rivers to the Utah state line, we fished it. Big Sandy Creek, Labarge Creek, New Fork, East Fork …we fished the tributaries of the water the Shoshones called Seedskadee Agie – the Sage Chicken River. Like his father, and his grandfather before that, my dad was a man of the Green River country. He knew the river when it was wild and free, and loved it with a great passion. He fished it with a great passion.
The fishing started early in the spring, sometimes while there was still ice floes in the stream. From iceout to the point where the water looked like a latte, we were fishing. Sometimes we were freezing while we were fishing, but we were still fishing. As the snow came off, usually somewhere around Memorial Day, we’d start into the high country streams. The key was to hit them while they were still bank-full, but clear. The old man was a pragmatist – he fished with whatever the fish were taking. If it was a dry fly, that was fine. If it was a Rapala or even a dead sculpin, that was fine as well. It was never about what you fished with – it was about the act of fishing.
It seems odd now, looking back, but the thing I remember most was the sound of him fishing. Not his voice, for he seldom spoke when we were fishing, but the sound of moving water and the soft “plop” of a Colorado spinner. I hear it first, then I can see it. He almost always wore a battered Stetson and a light wool shirt against the early morning chill. Often, there was a light mist just above the water. Usually, there was a cigarette dangling from his lip. When I see him there fishing, and I hear the sounds, then I can smell the stream, and catch just the tiniest whiff of the tobacco smoke. It smells like home to me. It smells like fishing.
I’ve come to realize that he didn’t fish because he lived near great trout water. He didn’t fish to catch limits or to catch trophies. He didn’t even fish to teach me to fish – or at least, not entirely. Mostly, I think, he fished for peace. If you look at pictures of the old man when he was a young man – before the war – he is devilishly handsome and invariably smiling. The war changed all that. If you look at pictures of him after the war, he is stoic, emotionless. It was long after his death – felled at the age of 53 by a massive heart attack – that I came to understand this. The war in the South Pacific was unspeakably bad – and so, he never spoke of it. He came back a mess, with jungle rot, malaria and a drinking problem. The first two got better, the third got worse. In time, he quit cold turkey and got his life back, but the zest for that life was gone. He found, through trial and error, that peace came to him in fishing.
So he fished. And when my mom came into his life, a belated but genuine romance, they fished together. And when I came along a few years later, they took me fishing. Unlike Norman Maclean’s family, there was a very clear line between religion and fly fishing for the Gassons, and fishing inevitably took precedence. I do not remember a time in my life when fishing was not there. Only now do I understand why. It was only in fishing (and to be fair, in elk hunting) that solace came for the him. It was in some part the solace of open spaces, but more than that, it was the solace of open seasons. In the simple and repetitive act of fishing, the old man was happy. The war was over, both the one in the South Pacific and the one in his head. His job didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was just him, his family and fishing.
Now, fifty years later, I use Facebook to keep up with a friend serving our country in Afghanistan. I don’t truly understand what he does over there. I don’t think his work is the kind of thing he can talk a lot about. I just know that he and a lot of other good men and women are laying their lives on the line to keep the rest of us safe. I’m humbled by their sacrifice, and I pray that my friend will come home to his family whole in body and in spirit. And when he does, I’m going to take him fishing.
Walt Gasson, Executive Director
Wyoming Wildlife Federation
