Father's World

Current Articles

Past Articles

Bringing up Boozers

Following father's footsteps

JAMES ROSEN, Guest Columnist

     One morning this July, I followed my father through thick brush on his northern Michigan land. The air was already heavy with heat, and the black flies were thick around our faces.
     We carried buckets of corn to pour into the feeding troughs he had built near the hunting blinds on his property.
     We were, my father said, following the nocturnal trails of the deer herds. He moved quickly, without hesitation or a glance back at me, oblivious to the heat or the flies. He pointed to hoofprints, flattened grass, other signs of passage. Some of the marks were so faint, I wasn't sure whether I had seen them or just imagined them.
     My father wore camouflage military pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He had dressed to protect himself against the flies and the brush. I, having dressed for protection against the heat and humidity. wore shorts and a T-shirt.
     Growing up in St. Louis, my father spent summers swimming and fishing and hunting in the Ozark forests. He joined the Scouts and earned Eagle rank.
     By now, nearing 70, he has fished in trout streams around the world and hunted in woods far from Missouri.
     He didn't pass on his outdoor skills to his three sons. We never hunted or fished with him.
    That is why, walking behind him through the brush, it came to me that I was seeing a part of my father's world I had not seen before. As I glimpsed his somber delight and saw him so alive in the morning heat, the disappointment I'd felt for having been excluded from that world began to slip away.
     Now, four months later, I work at my computer on cold fall mornings. Julian, my 5-year-old boy, comes and sits on my lap.
     My father would return from his wilderness expeditions with tales from the trail. At bedtime in our boyhood room, the dark brown curtains finally drawn, he would sit on the edge of the bunk and lure us to sleep on the wings of words.
     There were black bears that came so close at night you could see their eyes. There were deer that stopped at dawn in the rifle's sight, ears taut with fear, white tails fluttering like flags, phantoms that vanished before you could pull the trigger.
     We would float toward slumber, and my father would drift back in time. He was 15, casting a fly rod into the summer gleam, waders hitched against the current's flow. Across the stream, his younger brother, Bob, screamed. A copperhead on a nearby rock coiled to strike. My father hurled a stone and struck the snake dead.
     Just before we tumbled off the cliff of sleep, the adventure poetry would begin, recitations of Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. We heard of strange things done in the midnight sun by men who moil for gold, of Lady Luck and Dan McGrew and hunger and the night and the stars.
     I am grown now, and I cannot skin a deer or tie a fly to trick a trout. Instead, I hone words the way a hunter sharpens a knife.
     Julian, my son, pushes my hands away from the keyboard, puts his small ones in their place.
     Like all sons, Julian wants to do the mysterious and powerful things his father does.
     He taps away, and I let him interrupt my work, love and sadness vying in my heart.
     He will have to learn what it is sons want when they yearn to do the things their fathers do -- not to acquire their fathers' skills, but to share their fathers' worlds.
     And the most important lesson will be the hardest: Fathers sometimes take solitary journeys, whether into woods or into words, where no one can follow, not even their sons.
     Jim Rosen, The News & Observer's Washington correspondent, can be reached at 202-383-0014 or jrosen@nando.com .

Suggestions? Feedback? We'd love to hear from you.

— TOP —