My Adventures

Raising an activist angler

We spend our first 40 weeks in water. Some of us never get over it. We want more. More current. More riffles, streams, rivers and creeks. We want oceans teeming with life and lives that teem like oceans. In small puddles, we see ponds. In ponds, we see the world.

Before my eldest child was born, I thought I knew what kind of parent I would be. Patient and knowledgeable, calm in the face of chaos, fun, able to shape young minds and bodies into resilient, joyful little humans who cared about others and the earth. We were in our mid-30s, fairly educated, reasonably stable financially and had spent some solid years pursuing misadventure and mayhem. We were as ready as anyone to join the parenting ranks.

As it turns out, my kid did not care what my political / social / environmental agenda was, what degrees I had, how hard I fished or that I hadn’t had five minutes to myself in three months. What he did seem to care about was spending time on my hip or riding on my back, as close to the action as possible. It became a question of adapt or suffocate.

If I want my kids to be good environmentalists, ethical anglers and social activists, I must first help them in becoming good people.

In 2015, we took our then 6-month-old son, George, on a year-long fishing trip across the United States. This was before #vanlife or doing it for the ‘gram was a thing. We kept our jobs, didn’t buy a Sprinter or a classic VW. We had a decade-old diesel truck and a value-rama fifth-wheel trailer. We fished for everything that would eat a fly and some things that wouldn’t. We went out in snowstorms, floods, 80-mile-per-hour winds, heat waves and, once, a lightning storm.