I’ve caught a lot of fish I don’t remember. I remember every morning I spent on the water with someone I love.
That’s the part nobody tells you when you start fly fishing. You think it’s about the fish — the cast, the drift, the take. And for a while, it is. Then one day you’re standing knee-deep in a river next to a four-year-old who has decided the highest use of this beautiful trout stream is to throw every loose rock in Colorado into the exact run you’re fishing, and it lands on you: the fish were never the point. They were just the excuse to stand there together.
So this one’s a little different. It’s a Father’s Day post, sure. But really it’s for my son — the human tornado — in case he reads it one day and wants to know what his old man was thinking out there.
What we actually do out there
Kid, by the time you read this you’ll have heard me say “five more minutes” about four thousand times. Here’s what those five minutes were really about.
You are four, which means you have zero patience — and thank God for that. That’s the whole job description at four. You don’t wait, you don’t sit still, you want the fish on the line now, and when it doesn’t come in the first ninety seconds you’re already two rocks and a snack into your next project. You are a full-throttle, fearless, mud-to-the-eyebrows, “what does THIS button do” little tornado, and I would not slow you down for anything.
In the summer we hike into Eleven Mile Canyon — you holding my hand on the trail for about as long as it takes to spot the first chipmunk, and then you’re gone. In the dead of winter I drag you across the ice at Eleven Mile Reservoir on a sled, bundled to your eyeballs, because your father decided fishing was a year-round sport and you did not get a vote. You think it’s a sleigh ride. Honestly, it mostly is.
You are not, at four, a good fisherman. You’re a tremendous rock thrower, a world-class snack negotiator, and you declare yourself “all done” roughly eleven minutes in — usually right as the fishing gets good. I wouldn’t trade a single second of it.
You’ve also got a thing going with the fly shop. The guys behind the counter know your name — you, a four-year-old, are already a regular — and you make a straight line for the bin of stuff you are absolutely not allowed to touch. You’ve got a spot. I love that for you.
You taught me patience by having none
Here’s the funny part: you don’t have an ounce of patience, and you’re the one who taught me all of mine.
Because you can’t rush a four-year-old. Not into fishing, not into shoes, not into the truck. You’ve got one speed and it’s full. So I quit fighting it and learned to slow down to meet you — and slowing down turned out to be the whole point. The river doesn’t care that I’m in a hurry. Neither do you. Turns out you were both right.
Now, I’m no saint about it. I lose my patience too — more than I’d like to admit. I’m only human, and some days the wind, the snags, and the fourth “I’m all done” in twenty minutes get to me. But you’ve made me better at it than I was, and I’ve decided that’s the whole assignment.
My job out here was never to make you a fly fisherman. It was to make the river feel like home — so that wherever you land in life, cold water and a rising fish is a place you already know you belong.
The hours, not the fish
Here’s the secret I worked out somewhere around your first winter on the ice. I was never buying fish. I was buying hours. Phone-down, nowhere-else-to-be, just-us hours. The drive out, where the big questions come sideways because nobody has to make eye contact. The snack at ten. The one trout — and it only ever takes one — that turns the whole day into a story you tell your mom for a week.
None of it photographs well. None of it would make a highlight reel. A morning on the water with you is mostly chaos and nothing happening, punctuated by something that matters more than almost anything else I do all year. I’ve caught bigger fish alone. I have never, not once, had a better day.
If you’ve got little ones of your own when you read this, here’s the only how-to I’ve got: keep it short, keep it warm, let them quit while it’s still fun, and don’t you dare turn it into a lesson. I wrote the long version down once — it’s around here somewhere. (Here, if you want it.)
What I hope you keep
Fly fishing is a handed-down thing. Almost nobody finds it alone. Behind every angler there’s somebody who put a rod in their hands and loved the water out loud where a kid could hear it. For you, that person was me — and standing in a river handing this down to you is the proudest, quietest thing I’ve ever done.
So here’s what I want you to keep, long after I’m not the one driving:
Go to the water when life gets loud. It keeps time differently out there — slower, and all at once — and it has never once made anything worse. Be patient with the people you love; you taught me that without even trying, and I’m still not great at it, but I’m better than I was. And whatever you end up chasing — trout or otherwise — chase it the way you chase everything right now: full speed, fearless, mud to the eyebrows, with absolutely no concern for whether anyone’s watching.
And one day — a long way off, I hope — it’ll be your turn. There’ll be a four-year-old firing rocks into the run you’re trying to fish. When that day comes, even when I’m not here anymore, I hope you teach him every single thing I taught you, plus all the things you’ll figure out that I never could. That’s how this works, kid: nobody really owns any of it. We just carry it a while and hand it down. And when I’m gone, I won’t really be gone — I’ll be in every cast you make with him.
I’ll be on the water. I usually am. Save me a spot.
Happy Father’s Day, kid. Now go throw a rock.