With my left hand managing the 297 soft cover pages, I read.
Tim Cahill was in Mali and having a discussion with a local about laundering money. It was a wild story and made me think about adventure travel. Not to West Africa to be tempted by a local with a money laundering scheme, but heading somewhere that adventure waits — and when the fish are running.
I looked from the words to the windows. The gray afternoon was turning the deep blue of evening. I peeked down at the eyelids facing me. My two-month old daughter was sprawled out on my chest, rising and falling with my breath making adorable sleeping baby noises.
My wife returned home from checking the game cameras on the hill behind the house. I set down the book and discussed the results quietly. There was a buck and black wolf on Tuesday morning and a gray wolf and buck on Thursday a few hours apart.
“I think it’s the same buck.”
“Looks like it.”
It was a nice forkie with a split in the back on one side, technically a 2×3, but a deep, pronounced fork warrants that distinction, not one that is only marginally more split than a crab claw. That was it for the week, but my wife was happy with the chance for a mini-adventure up the steep hill made slick by rain.
The baby continued to sleep while Abby went upstairs to shower. I returned to my book.
Intellectually I knew that I would be forgoing much of my freedom to focus on being a dad, but experiencing it has made me think a lot about how my parents managed my brother and me when we were young. Before we moved to Alaska, they had a small lot on a lake in Nebraska and a heavy fiberglass boat they’d take out on the reservoir to fish for walleye. I was tucked into a vacuum box insulated with blankets so I could sleep. We moved to Alaska when I was five years old, so the memories I have are slimy ones with salmon and smokey ones with campfires at Forest Service cabins.
Now that I’m a dad, these memories make me even more grateful for my parents who continued their lives and careers after my brother and I were born. They included us in their adventures whenever possible so we never became the reason they didn’t have fun anymore.
I have written about gratitude a lot, but I have a completely new appreciation for the resilience of my grandparents and parents this year. Mom’s dad died when she was 13. He was an eighth-grade educated farmhand who took part in the Allied liberation of Italy in World War II. Grandma grew up poor and lived in a train car during the Great Depression. Her mom died when she was three years old and her dad sent her to live with cousins. She worked at a university bookstore then out-lived her retirement. By the time she died, she had outlived two husbands and was broke again, but she had enabled my mom to live a better life and Mom was able to pay for her final years in a nursing home.
Like many other parents, relatives and guardians, Mom and Dad gave me a better youth than they had. We hear a lot about generational wealth, but generational security is incredibly important and instilling the values of hard work and education so we could take advantage of what our parents provided for us will allow Abby and me to provide Haleigh a secure, adventure-filled childhood.
• Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Sports & Outdoors section of the Juneau Empire.
