The Captain

 

Looking back, my earliest memories are of my father handing me a rod with baited hook, and indicating with a nod of his head where I should make my cast, and where on that squirrel’s body up in yonder tree I might best hold my aim for the most satisfying result. We hunted and fished together all over the world.

Dad was thirty-three years a sailor man, the captain of warships floating hundreds of men at a time thousands of miles from known seaports, and later a manager of a computer plant whose efforts enabled a company working for NASA to power the most powerful rockets skyward towards an absolutely unknown world.

Both jobsites were a long way off from the one room schoolhouse where he first put pencil to paper up in Nebraska on a farmstead whose acreage was part of the Oregon Trail. There was no fishing other than the carp and the bullheads in the Little Nemaha River, but they pulled hard, and often, and provided the platform for incredible fishing to come.

Dad’s first job at about the age of six, was learning how to help harness a two-horse team of draft horses to pull farm implements across hay and cornfields. He knew almost instantly there was a better way to lead a life, and he was hunting hard for it when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor six months after he graduated high school.

Fishing one day near his home on a bayou down yonder in Louisiana, he told me the ships were still burning when he arrived in Pearl right out of boot camp. He liked navy life, particularly the daily discipline required to keep men from being killed thousands of miles from home. Like driving draft horses pulling thousands of pounds of steel, it was not a job for the faint of heart. He thrived on it, and told the most fabulous stories about it when he got home, and took me fishing.

I know we were fishing up high in California’s Sierras when Dad showed me one night next to an alpine campfire pitched outside a tent where slept my mother and three brothers, how to locate the north star, the simplest of navigational tricks, and how to use that knowledge to find your way home. The toughest course at the Naval Academy was navigation, one in which Dad excelled, and one by which he got himself appointed assistant navigator in his first official duty as a line officer aboard the U.S.S. Boxer, an aircraft carrier.

Years later, working one summer at a fishing camp on the Churchill River in Saskatchewan, it would be me that showed him how to maneuver the myriad chain of islands in that waterbound country so as to not get lost on the way home from a day of fishing for pike as long as your leg.

“You sure you know where you are?” he had asked nervously. “There’s a lot of rocks out here.”

“We’re OK, Dad. I know where we are.”

“How do you know?”

“I had a good teacher,” I grinned above the sound of the boat motor. “Hang on! Here comes a little waterfall!”

We made it, and found ourselves one night, him in his eighties, adrift a wild tupelo swamp that began just outside his back door. We were after frogs, had already killed dozens ‘midst the croaking of night herons and unseen alligators all around us. We were thinking about home, but not quite ready, just one more frog away, when the thunderstorm caught us out in the middle of the swamp.

The lightning and thunder came in rolling, flashing cannonades; the rain in driving, blinding sheets that soaked us to the skin. There was no escape now. We would either survive or die, struck way out yonder by a lightning bolt, or crushed under a giant, windblown tupelo gum, the captain at the tiller of a fourteen-foot johnboat.

The thought occurred to me that had we the job of making a final official report, something Dad did numerous times in his career as ship’s captain, of our activity “at sea” and its ultimate conclusion, one of us would have had to of said, standing at attention, “Sir, we died for want of one more frog.”

We made it of course, here I am. Dad grinned all the way back to a moonlit dock behind his house, the storm disappearing to the east of us as rapidly as it had come. We were still cleaning frogs when the sun came up.

That image, that old memory, filled my brain when my brother, Bruce, called from down in Texas the other night to let me know that Dad had just passed away. That captain, that fisherman who had first taken this little boy along, now fishes with me in the earliest memories of my life.

I think I already told you that.

© 2016 Conrad M. Vollertsen