View source for Fish On A Stick

[[category:dad]]
Another backpacking trip with Dad and the Valhalla crew - this time to Cahill Lake.

It's one of many lakes cupped in the multitudinous contours of Valhalla Provincial Park, and in this case one whose trailhead was reached by crossing Slocan lake on a boat.  It was a typical crew of fathers and sons, all arrayed with a little too much gear, and all determined not to be the slowest pair.

We were well along the path when the rain started.  Which was pretty well-expected, and I had my K-Way jacket handy so I unzipped it and pulled it on.  The thing was, rain gear when I was a kid wasn't quite what it is today.  This was pre-Gortex™, and these silly thin rain coats were just simple nylon weave - like old tents.  If you're not old enough to remember this stuff, it worked pretty as a tent fly for keeping the rain off... as long as you didn't touch it.  The water would run down it pretty well, but as soon as you touched it, capillary action would suck the water through onto you.  So, considering how difficult it is to not touch a coat, the old K-Way was really only useful for brief exposures to falling water.  On the hike in question, it rained enthusiastically for a long time.  I got really quite damp.

Spurned on by the miserable rain in the gloomy forest, and Dad's typical competitiveness, we were really quite far from being the slowest pair.  In fact, along with his best friend Ronnie and another fellow named Don, we were the frontrunners.  Which was its own reward, I suppose, except that it started getting dark, and we were somewhat ahead of the rest of the pack.  Leaving stragglers in the dark is not what a good pack does, so we needed to pause to let them catch up.  By this point we were actually walking along the edge of the target lake towards the nominally-flat campsite area just a kilometer or so away.  And being so close was a bit too much of a temptation for Don, who lobbied hard to push on and get started on making camp.  Ron volunteered to wait for the rest of the pack, and suggested that the kids rest for a bit with him (meaning, me and his son Erin and Don's son whatshisface).

So I squatted there, as there wasn't any place to sit, and waited.  My t-shirt and sweater under my K-Way were quite unpleasantly damp.  Which, of course, meant that I was starting to feel chilly.  Which, being a kid, made me whiny.  Except that I was painfully shy, so all the whining was strictly pent-up.  Brimming, even.

Eventually the rest of the pack caught up, and we were released to press on to the camp.  Except now there was much less light, and it made progress tricky.  So when we came upon the creek feeding the lake, I slipped off the log for crossing it and slammed into leg knee-deep in cold mud.

"Lordy lordy lordy, why me?"

I don't know where the phrase came from,  because I don't recall every saying anything like it before or since.   I was probably 11-ish, and pretty well convinced of my lack of religiosity by then.  Maybe the "why me" part is a normal part of being a spoiled kid in Western culture, but it doesn't seem familiar to me at all.  Other than that one time I said it, that is.  And, well, the hundreds of times Ronnie parroted back to me over the years since.  The guy thought it was hilarious - second only to calling me "Crouton".    

Enough time has probably passed for me to admit that it was quite possibly very funny indeed.  In fact, it is exactly this instance of misfortune that I flash back to whenever I befall something unfortunate.  Not just because of how profoundly unfunny it seemed to me at the time juxtaposed to Ronnie's laughter, but because of Dad's reaction when Ronnie couldn't wait to relate the story when we shambled into camp a short while later.  He looked at me, into my tear-filled eyes, and had this wistful smile.  Somehow he managed to bridge the seemingly-impossible gulf between empathizing with my misery and also finding it really rather amusing.

If you'll permit a further tangent, this is also another case that caused me much existential confusion.  On the one hand, my Dad was clearly one of the Cool™ guys, with social panache and a ready connection to almost everybody (in the universe of the West Kootenays, leastways).  And yet he also managed to love me, even seemed to sort of like me despite my distinct UNcoolness.  Which, in my public-school social programming, was a classic case of Does Not Compute.  Which I suppose is really just an example of the importance of demonstrating what you think and feel with actions, and the folly of trying to deduce what people are <i>supposed</i> to think and feel.

Back to Cahill lake, it's important to point out that the creeks feeding the lake are all glacier-fed, thus the mud I had sunk into was bitterly cold.  By the time I had wobbled across the creek-crossing log and trudged through the damp brush to get to the campsite, I was teeth-chatteringly cold and miserable.  As good fortune would have it, there was already a contingent of woodsmen camping at the lake, and they were cooking their catch by a roaring fire.  I was quickly ushered to the warming radiance, and given a stick with a small fish stabbed onto it.  This I roasted over the fire until the fins were all black and curling.  I found that the combination of being cold and the strenuous hiking had made me extremely hungry, and the fresh-caught fish smelled incredibly good.

Usually when I tell this story, I complete it by saying how I ate the whole fish with gusto.  But, to be honest, I don't really remember.  I do think I recall watching one of the strangers cooking a similar fish and eating it completely, bones and guts and all.  And I'm also sure it would have been easy to do, and delicious.  Except for this niggling part of me that also remembers just how picky an eater I was, and how unadventurous I was gustatorily.  I do remember a happy, warm feeling in my cold belly, though.  And a profound sense of gratefulness for the fish on a stick.

The next morning was all dewey coldness and pervasive dampness - partially because I had accidentally touched the side of the tent during the night and had gotten wet in my sleep.  But then there was my first-ever taste of coffee, which has never been equalled, and some amazing pancakes with huckleberries picked from next to the campsite.  When it warmed up a bit, we set about building the rafts we would use to fish for rainbows.