Rejected Files: Chasing Heritage
In honor of my dad's birthday, here is my 2024 Traver entry.
Happy Sunday, friends! My dad’s birthday was yesterday, and so I wanted to share the full text of my Traver Award entry for this past year with some pictures in his honor. I hope you enjoy.
“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.” (Psalm 46:4)
I could fish this water forever, this St. Manistee, never having my eyes and heart full enough, and yet overflowing with it. They say the Holy Waters are on the AuSable, and I can see why, but I was more moved by the winds of the Negev than the prayers at the Western Wall. There are sanctuaries for the masses, and there are sanctuaries for the passionate. Dad knew it well, and this was his.
His laughter rolled back up the river. I could just see the pole in one hand, his fly rod in the other, and the bloody-mary-filled Coleman jug at his feet. It was good he stopped smoking, because he was really running out tricks here.
From the front seat of Heritage, it seemed like Contagious was just up around the next bend, but it’s a winding river, as my brother was becoming reacquainted with the hard way, and I was wrong each time. Maybe they’d pull into an eddy and we’d get to see him again.
“Lost another fly!” Jonathan announced. “Uhh, Zeb?”
“Alright, point your rod tip up here,” my husband replied.
“Oop, just a second.” Jonathan dropped his rod and maneuvered the boat so that we didn’t plow straight into the fallen tree ahead. Suddenly, the river dropped out below and he got creative with his poling efforts to right the bow. Most guys weren’t using poles anymore. I prefer paddles, which are easier and kinder to the riverbed, but Dad poled, so we did too, just for today.
Jonathan managed a small miracle and shot us relatively smoothly through the gap between the grassy bank and the gnarled branches. His fumbling and comedic interruptions had been a welcome snap back to reality all day. We’d spread Dad’s ashes in that river three weeks prior. It couldn’t be healthy to keep imagining he was just up ahead, and yet I think I’d been doing that long before he passed.
I’d been chasing his legacy up and down those waters for the last two years. I’ve been chasing his legacy up and down those waters for the last two years, and I’ll follow him to that city, as winding as this river is.
What’s the hardest part about learning to fly fish?
Telling your dad you’re a euronympher.
“Did you catch any fish, Daddy?” I leap-skipped up to him like four-year-olds do.
Dad opened his cooler to show me the array of trout inside. “That’s a rainbow right there,” he said, pointing to one with the bright pink cheeks and striping.
I gasped. “Can I touch it?” To my eyes, a rainbow trout was the most beautiful of mythical creatures.
“You can hold it!” He handed it to me and snapped a picture of me and my siblings before turning to Mom. “Well, Boss, we got a client.”
It was 1990. The year he went from woodworker and fly fishing guide to businessman. He traded in the roll top desk where he tied flies and wrote his newsletter “The Quiet Rodman” for a large flat-top where he could look over contracts and sit across from clients. At the same time, he put up dry-fly patterned wallpaper and hung the mount of a fantastic brook trout he’d caught on a recent outing. In a sense, he sat amidst the tension of the office and the outdoors, of providing for his family and the sacrifice it took to do so.
Dad continued to guide for a while, but the business soon took over, meaning less time on the water. The two boats he had purchased and rebuilt sat in the pole barn under layers of patio furniture pads, car mats, and various ropes that piled on over time. By the time he passed, they hadn’t seen water in 15 years.
I always imagined him sitting at his desk when he took my calls, and he was always my first call when I was done fishing. “Well, did you catch anything?” He would ask.
“I got 24,” I said excitedly.
“Whoa. What’d you catch ‘em on?”
“Walts and perdigons.” I told him how I had finished work around midnight, driven two hours, slept in my backseat, and woken up to fish with two friends.
“Oh, You were doing that nymphing.” To Dad, catching fish sub-aquatically was the same as not catching fish at all.
“Well, yeah. These guys are teaching me, and it’s what they do,” I reminded him.
His voice became cheerfully arrogant. “Well, you can’t do that on the Manistee or the AuSable. These guys will tell you that no one does that here. I don’t think you’d get away with it on the Boardman either.”
He was staunch. I was stubborn. But I repeat myself. It must be a Northern Michigan thing, though, because the owner of the Old AuSable Fly Shop told me to burn my euro rod and get myself a proper rod the first time I met him. Actually.
“Well, that’s because you can’t euro nymph the AuSable,” Dad said for the 100th time. “I need to get this knee fixed so I can teach you.”
Four hours later, he asked me how I did. It was early Monday morning, I’d gone to the Holy Waters, and I’d caught 14. So I guess I could euro nymph the AuSable.
Later on, Mom told me she’d overheard him talking on the phone to his mentor, Gail, who once held the state record for a brown trout. “He asked her what euronymphing was,” she whispered.
“What did she say?”
“She said it’s how you catch a lot of fish.”
FULL DAY TROUT $550
8 hour float
1 or 2 anglers
Lunch or Dinner and a good time
We pulled Heritage up to what seemed like cabin rentals that weren’t in use this week. A good place to stop for lunch.
“Do you remember that witch lady?” Jonathan asked.
That was the last time we’d enjoyed a shore lunch together. The four of us kids and Dad landed on another seemingly-vacant property to make lunch. Fifteen minutes later, a fairy tale witch, adorned in shimmering robes and scarves, pointy hat and all, came out and insisted that we leave her property. She didn’t allow canoers since the Statue-Urination Incident of 2007. After explaining to her that we were fishermen, not canoers, and had no intention of peeing on her statues, she introduced us to her husband, himself dressed like a pre-Coca Cola Scandinavian Santa. They welcomed us to the Temple of the…I can’t remember, but it was clearly a tax-evasion thing. They followed through by moving around their log home in a kind of mating-nature-worship ritual. Each time he authoritatively planted his staff in the ground, she moaned, “OHHhhm”.
Dad was rarely speechless, but he didn’t speak of this again, and I’m not sure Mom really believed the rest of us when we told her.
The lunch was more memorable than the sorcery, though. Thick cut delmonico steaks, twice baked potatoes, and grilled asparagus, accompanied by Country Time lemonade. This was his standard, and he’d often ask me, “Will there be shore lunch?”
“We don’t really stop for lunch.”
“How is it a day of fishing without shore lunch?”
Jonathan told me not to worry about it today, that something simple like burgers were fine. Z wondered if it wasn’t overkill to grill an entire flank steak. But I set out the London broil that had been marinating all night, homemade bernaise, fresh Traverse City cherries, brussel sprouts, seasoned potatoes, and adobo chipotle shrimp, and we feasted by the Manistee in the tradition of Jon Pack.
We were all after something on that water. For me, it was something about being the youngest. About missing out on things. My parents' youth and passion projects, their frivolity and wild ideas. I had missed out on fly fishing, aside from a couple of trips. My brothers had all of this; they had Heritage.
When I began fly fishing in 2021, I’d felt in my bones that Dad’s days were shorter than I wanted to believe. Even though his body was too broken down to teach me, I wanted to share it with him while there was still time. I was skeptical he’d ever get his health in order, and he was skeptical that I’d stick with fishing.
The first and last time he got to see me fly fish in my own right was hucking streamers off of his bass boat. He kept saying, “I don’t think you’re going to have much luck doing that.” The rest of that week, I heard him telling his clients that his daughter was “quite the fly fisher”.
That day was the last time he ever cast a fly rod.
“These gifts are rare like you, and are able to stand on their quality individually. However, their best purpose is when they are put together. It is your mother’s and my wishes and prayers that they might serve as a reminder in some small way of the meaning of marriage and God’s blessing of when two become one. May our love and God’s love through Jesus Christ go with you always. Love, Jon S. Pack (Dad)”
(He actually signed his name that way.)
“Jonathan, you should fish this rod,” I kept urging him.
“No, I just want to use Dad’s setup,” He responded.
The trip had started out as haphazardly as it continued. On top of fumbling around on the water, we also didn’t know the area that well. “We’re not starting at the horse farm. It’ll take us two days to finish,” was all I said with any certainty.
Forty-five minutes into our 15-minute cars-potting adventure, we were headed back to Zeb, who was patiently casting his Sage Mod in a little riffle, catching all the fish in the whole river before we returned.
I was really impressed with how well he had embraced the quirks and chaos of my family. We fell in love on a trip to Wyoming, where he built a bamboo rod with Matt Schliske while I documented the journey on his Instagram. He returned home and soon set to building my father a fly rod - a 4wt. MacFarland Tailwind - which he presented to him in July and asked for his blessing to marry me.
Zeb wrapped the rod in maize and blue thread to represent the University of Michigan, where Dad and all four of us kids had gone to school; handmade nickel silver hardware represented the Michigan Marching Band, in which he had played the euphonium. The reel seat was a crotched walnut, a nod to Dad’s woodworking days, and he adorned the silver tube with a leather patch, burned with each of his kid’s initials: B, K, J, and B.
Dad, whose days as a woodworker made him exceedingly critical about the fit and finish of his rods, soon realized that this was now the finest fly rod in his collection. I had found a man of passion, integrity, craft, and intention. He was very proud.
So proud that he took his daughter and future son-in-law to meet an old friend one afternoon.
“Geez, Jon. What’s wrong with you? Holy shit, Jon,” the Legendary Bob Summers repeated as Dad tried to get up the high step to his shop.
None of us had the answer. He’d dressed in his Michigan finest and brought his cane that day - too self-conscious to use the walker he’d needed since his back surgery - ready to introduce him to Zeb. But we now ran into an enigmatic problem. It wasn’t his strength, his weight, or his joints. He simply didn’t have the connection to his muscles anymore to tell them to take that step. “You guys go in. I’ll just stay here,” he said as he sat down. My heart did something we call “broke”, but doesn’t quite aptly describe it.
When we finally got him in, Dad stood on the concrete floor of that shop for two hours. Probably the longest he would ever stand again. He leaned on things, grasped for balance, white-knuckle gripped every bench, but stood there suffering silently so that his daughter and her fiancé could explore the wonders of Bob’s shop and listen to all of his stories. It was his good pleasure to give us that time, though we didn’t know what it took from him until a year later when we learned that a rapid form of ALS had come like a thief in the night, concealed until his final days.
As a wedding gift, he gave me one of the choicest rods in his collection, a custom R. W. Summers bamboo rod that my mother had commissioned for him many years before, and to Zeb a brand new Hardy reel. In the card, he indicated, inconceivably, that he would not be able to attend our wedding in Pennsylvania.
And still somehow we dreamed that he would get back on the water with me. It was a driving motivation. Dad of 2020 would lament, “I wish someone would just put a bullet in me.” Dad of 2023 kept his eyes on the Manistee until the very end.
When I went through his gear, I found a brand new pair of Simms Freestone wading boots with the tags still on them, along with a pair of waders still in their packaging. He’d gotten them recently, still hopeful for healing. Too, he had a new Fishpond carry-on, in which he stored nothing but the Tailwind and its reel.
“At least cast it, Jonathan,” I urged. Zeb is always better at reading the room than I am.
“It’s horrible getting old. I won’t remember him that way, though, sick and wasting away.
No, I’ll remember Skip on a trout stream on some early summer evening, casting dries to find one last brown.”
-Dad, on the loss of a friend
In it went Shakespeare and a smattering of literature; a trickle charger and scattered Christmas light bulbs; a signed Michigan football; photos of our family, his father from the war, my mother on their wedding day; his Browning hat and a photo of us with Asylum; dog collars, his old weather radio, shotgun shells and sporting clays; a little league mitt with a ball tucked in next to a handmade cherry fly box and a pencil drawing of Jesus in His wood shop; a few reels from his collection and a rod we wouldn't worry about breaking. The poles lay in their normal position, and the waders and boots with the tags still on spilled out of the cubby up front. Of course, his antique creel was filled with lollipops for the grandkids. Over his seat, we hung his vest, and in it set his Sage hat, his old blue Martin automatic reel, and a framed verse from the Bible: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).
Finally, a Michigan flag flew from a handmade pole, matching the birds eye maple of the AuSable River boat that he had named Contagious. He’d told me, “You know, Brit, if you and your sister are serious about this, I’ll give you my boat. You can have Contagious.” I had arrived in fly fishing, and yet it meant that he was departing
Over the stern, that great poem “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. greeted guests as they walked from the memorial service into the pole barn where the gourmet barbecue buffet would be served.
The day before, we - just us four kids - had set out to spread his ashes in his beloved “St.” Manistee River. Wednesday had come to a climax of frustrations and grief. It was Mom who had been able to calm everyone down enough to say, “Get out. Take a break. Go fishing.”
I wish I could tell you more about that day. How it was healing, how the water felt on our fingertips. I only remember the joy of seeing my sister catch a little brown trout, despite the hot July sun, and we all cried together afterward, now knowing how much we’d needed to go.
The sun went down just as we reached the CCC Bridge. “We made it,” Jonathan and I happily announced. Zeb, always cool, noted that Jonathan could only improve on his fly-loss record from that day.
A somber feeling settled on all of us as we loaded Heritage onto the trailer and headed home. We knew we’d be back, but there’s something about time and death that doesn’t settle in as neatly as we wish. Passing time is a reminder that the distance between last seeing him and the present moment is an ever-growing gap. We gave thanks for the hope of Christ, that the distance between this present moment and seeing him again is an ever-narrowing one. But we live in the valley between. It felt as though the days of chasing him were gone, replaced by a skulking emptiness.
A few months later, I sat at my desk, frustrated and spent. After days of trying to name my nascent newsletter - a mix of faith and fly fishing - I flipped through an old issue of “The Quiet Rodman”.1 I’d previously read them for Dad’s brilliant diatribes on culture and all the wrongs of Washington (you know, the things that caused him to seek the sanctuary of St. Manistee). But now, I found something I’d never noticed before: his tag line.
As the words settled in, I leaned back and closed my eyes, envisioning Dad at the helm of Contagious, young and healthy, full of piss and vinegar, smiling over his shoulder with a roguish glint in his bright blue eyes as he pushed off from the shore, daring me to keep up.
A thrill reached my heart as another, more familiar feeling settled in, of once again chasing him down a river. Chasing him “Somewhere in the North. Somewhere by a Stream.”
“YES!” I yelled to Zeb. “GOT IT!”
Until next time, may all that God created testify to His power and divine nature, that you may be encouraged by His love all around you.
If you would like to read an issue, please shoot me a message and I will send it along.