The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

We came upon my son from downstream. He was fishing the pool at the big bend. I had sent him ahead, hoping he would find the right spot. Sure enough he had been drawn to it like a magnet.

"Look at his casting," my friend commented. "Isn't that beautiful."

Brian was out on the very tip end of a log jam. He was well out in the river; all around him, rooted in logs, the wild flowers were in bloom. The loops of his line were silhouetted against the darker green of the forest canopy behind him.

He cast with a smooth fluid motion. The loops rolled out and hung in the air. He was throwing a mixture of casts - some overhead, some spey, some roll. The various cast flowed seamlessly one into the next, there was no break or hesitation. The fly went where he commanded.

The hours he had spent practicing on the casting pond in our back yard where obvious.

"You're looking good!" I shouted across the space between us. "Nice casting."

The boy cupped his hand to his ear and looked at me quizzically. He couldn't hear me above the sound of the river. I shot him a thumbs up. He smiled, raised his hand in acknowledgment, and went back to his fishing.

"He looks like something out of A River Runs Through It,'" my friend said.

What a pleasure it is to watch you son grow into a man. Suddenly I realized, for the first time, he had graduated from being a student of the sport, a child who depended on me for everything, to being an actual fishing partner, someone with whom I could speak as an equal; someone with whom I could share all those special fishing moments.

I could not help thinking about fishing with my own father. Fly fishing had been a wonderful bond between us. It was the glue in our family. The time we shared, the long talks on the way to the river and the silent moments when we were just casting side by side, were very special to me. Now it was beginning again with a new generation.

I realized it was not far from this very spot that I first out fished my dad. I'm sure that was the moment when he knew that I had arrived and had become a fisherman in my own right.

That night I called my mother. I told her about our fishing day.

"The next generation of fly fisherman has arrived in the family," I told her.

"Your dad would have loved to have been there to see it," she said.

"I think he was there, at least in spirit," I said.