a story to share
Not sure where this came from but I believe it was a "guest shot" in Outdoor life a long time ago. I do not trout fish much and not really a huge fan but this is one of my all time favorite stories.
The Last Rainbow
The old man was still getting around pretty well. In slow motion, to be sure, with a gingerliness that bespoke the pain of terminal cancer- but getting around nevertheless. I’d taken a few days off from my job and flown to join him at the cabin, the one he’d built with his own hands when my brother Jack and I were barely tall enough to reach his waist.
The cabin. Those two words will evoke a montage of memories for as long as I live. Goldeneyes whistling down the lake, the rowboat, perch in the pan, baby loons riding their mother’s back and rainbow trout.
This day was superb for chasing rainbow: a gentle breeze from the west and a cloudy, somber sky, delicious with the aroma of impending rain. A day positively heavy with the promise of good fishing.
I glanced at the rods in the corner of the cabin, wondering if I should suggest it, wondering if the old man still had the strength.
“Might be a good day,” he said slowly, grinning slightly, “to try the old bridge at Silver Creek.”
We were there in minutes, at a spot to which he’d first brought me thirty years before. In those days, it was a rickety, dangerous-looking crossing fashioned from old timbers. You could look down at the creek between each plank. A rusty sign peppered with bird shot said “Cross at your own risk.”
But the bridge was different this day, sadly different. The planks had been replaced with concrete. The sign was gone. The stream, however, was everything it had ever been. Cool, clear and rushing, choked with overhanging branches and moss-covered logs, a stream that sang Trout! to anyone with a lick of sense to listen.
We would fish from the little bridge today, as usual, but unlike years gone by, we would not wade downstream in our hip boots, sneaking up on a dozen beautiful holes that always seemed to yield a creel of trout. Because the old man was already tired from the short ride, our fishing would begin and end at the bridge.
And it began just as we had hoped. Dad had no sooner started stripping out line, when a good ten-incher darted from beneath the bank and nailed his night crawler. He played the trout as he had always played them, with a slight, patient smile on his face, the rod held gently at a sixty-degree angle. He tired the fish as it flashed back and forth, then swept it with one easy motion up and into the weeds.
I unhooked the rainbow, placed it in the creel with a bit of grass, and baited his hook again. Not thirty seconds later, he’d enticed another trout from the same dark patch of water.
Dad offered me the rod then, but I declined, because watching him fish was all the fishing I wanted. He had always said that he enjoyed watching my brother or me catch a fish, just as much as he enjoyed catching one himself. That day, I understood what he meant.
The old man had exhausted the downstream hole, but we both knew that the best had been saved for last. Under the bridge-that was where the best rainbows always waited. And it was right there, in fact, that I had caught my very first trout: a fat twelve-incher.
I watched the tip of the old man’s rod as he floated a fresh crawler toward the hole neither of us had ever really seen but has fished a hundred times.
He stopped feeding line just when I thought he should. Instinctively, we both knew the bait was precisely where it ought to be. We waited. Five seconds, maybe ten. Then it happened.
The tip of the rod twitched, twitched again, and then bent double as the trout bit down and held on, and the old man began easing the fighting fish out of the hole.
“It’s a good one,” he said. For that moment, at least, he forgot he was dying, forgot that this stream and all the streams he loved so deeply would soon be flowing past without him.
“It’s a good one,” he said again, and my eyes traveled up the rod to his face. The slight, patient smile was a little wider than usual.
It WAS good. Before it was over, the old man was breathing heavily and tiring as fast as the fish. But he worked the trout out of the bridge’s shadow and into the upstream light. It wasn’t any record. Maybe fifteen inches, but fat and thick and feisty. As good as any we’d ever taken from under the bridge at old Silver Creek.
“It was a great fishing trip,” I said, putting my arm around him as we walked slowly to the car.
“Yes,” he replied. “We’ll do it again sometime. Sometime soon.”
Several months later I traveled back home once more, this time for his funeral. I walked into his bedroom and found his fishing rod in the corner rigged with a brand-new Eagle Claw and two tiny split shot.
My mother came in and saw me holding it. “He had it all ready for another trip,” she said. “He thought maybe the two of you could go fishing together one more time.”
We will, old man. We will.
Written by Jim Fieberg
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