Again, I’ve been reminded about our short time here on the planet, though I don’t believe I need any more reminders. Daily I look at my daughters and realize that tomorrow, it seems, they’ll be teenagers and soon after that, out of the house and on with their own lives. All the while I think that just yesterday I was in the delivery room for their births.
Perhaps just two days ago—using that same time scale—I was on a great circular trip of southern Oregon with my father and one of his best friends, David Hicks. It was a time in my life in which my five years of living in Oregon were coming to a close and in a couple months, I’d move overseas and start a new chapter.
The point of our trip was for me to show them some of my favorite spots and to fish and camp along the way. The five years previous I’d spent a great deal of my life outdoors, or as much as possible, and so setting up a tent and cooking over a fire had become part of my lifestyle. Camping on this trip, however, ended after the first night when David woke up stiff as a board all the while begging off any more nights in his tent and sleeping on the hard ground.
“I’m 65 years old, son. I need a bed,” he told me or something of the sort.
And 65 seemed so far away then. Now, 12 years later at 50, I feel like it will come the day after tomorrow.
So, camping ended after that first night. But the fishing continued. Unfortunately, the catching never started.
David fashioned himself a fly-fisher, as did I then, though more precisely, we were beginners very interested in the sport who had mistaken their own enthusiasm for expertise. In this vein, David had also begun tying his own flies. At one point during the trip, he pulled one out to show me. It looked like a hair ball with some color thrown in here and there.
“Do you think this will catch some fish?” David asked me.
I’m usually a pretty diplomatic person, and in this moment, I was a very diplomatic person. My initial thought was that there’s no way in hell that fly will ever catch a fish unless the fish looks at it and from a deep fear, chomps at it in self-defense instead of swimming away.
“You never know,” I said. “Give it a try.”
But the hairball fly, like the others, didn’t work that trip.
We drove from Medford to near the source of the Rogue River, up to Crater Lake, and over the high desert of eastern Oregon where sagebrush and open ground and air spread all around us. We stayed in local motels and ate diner food. I listened to my dad and David bicker and tease each other like brothers, and every now and then they threw a barb my way. We waded rivers and streams and got our flies hung up on the trees that lined those waterways, and we laughed and cussed at our ineffectiveness. At the end of the trip, we spent a couple days fishing in a different manner, trolling for salmon on my good friend’s boat in the Rogue River Bay, the Pacific Ocean a stone’s throw away. Still, we caught no fish.
And then it was over, so quickly, like life.
We called David, “Uncle Dave.” He’d been around since my siblings and I were born, coming to visit Henderson on breaks from his service in the Army in Germany. Later, he taught ROTC at Austin Peay State University when I played football there, and he often took me to lunch and attended my games, sitting in the stands with my parents. He always came armed with a quick joke, often at my father’s expense, and a quicker laugh.
David died last Saturday, Oct. 25.
I most often don’t write anything personal, sticking to the facts of the day’s news for the Hendersonian, because I tend to think I only know a percentage of a percentage of a very small percentage about life, and with journalism, I can rely on sources to tell me something I don’t know.
But I’ve been a bit reflective this week, and I surely do know at least one thing: Our lives are but just an instant and then we blink and it’s over.
And we hear it all the time, and all the time we think we’re doing it, but I don’t think one more reminder to fully live each moment risks that the advice will become clichéd. Seize the day, friends, for the day will surely end, and all too quickly.
How I wish for a day or two more driving all over Oregon not catching any fish with my dad and David.
***
Click here for David Hicks’ obituary.
