Fishing the Conejos with Uncle Walt

The last time I went fishing with my Uncle Walt was the best time I went fishing with my Uncle Walt.

The tradition of fishing with Uncle Walt began when I was about three years old when Fred, my biological father was still around and living in Pueblo with my mother, although their matrimonial bliss was nearing its end; likely because my father preferred fishing over going to the local honky-tonks and dancing to Country-Western music with her.
Uncle Walt, Walter Hood, was married to my mother's half-sister, Nadine; although until she died, I called her Aunt Denny.

She was a serious chain-smoke who had a new Camel going before she rubbed out the old one. I cannot recall a time when I saw her without a smoldering cigarette handy. The emphysema finally got her when she was approaching 81 years old.

Uncle Walk smoked too, but he was not obsessive about it. In fact, every adult I knew smoked; my mother, my father, all my aunts, uncles and grandparents, even a few of my cousins who were not quite adults.

They all drank too, except, of course, my Uncle Walt.

His tee-totaling was not attributable to either addiction or religion. It never bothered him that everyone around him guzzled beer, wine and the hard stuff at every reasonable opportunity. Aunt Denny, in fact, generally washed down the ashes with Coors after 10 in the morning. Before that it was coffee, which Uncle Walt drank with style. No, Uncle Walt's decision to forgo alcohol after an incident early in his marriage to my aunt where he very, nearly shot her and their children.The couple had gone out with my Auntie Eileen and one of her husbands to a local blind pig called "Boskers" to dance to cowboy music and drink whatever booze they could carry in as Bosker's did not serve alcohol but merely provided a venue for drinking it and drink it they did. Uncle Walt, however, was never much of a drinker and, it turns out, because mean when he was drunk.

When the couple returned home, Uncle Walt put a gun to her head and told her he was going to kill her, the kids and, I assume, himself. Somehow Aunt Denny got away and went to her mothers where she called the sheriff. When the law arrived at the Hood home they found him passed out on the floor and a single bullet hole in the ceiling.

Uncle Walk spent a couple of nights in jail trying to remember everything but he never did, but he swore he would never touch any kind of alcohol again and he never did. It should be mentioned here that I never heard my Aunt Denny raise her voice at him either...

Aunt Denny and Uncle Walt lived in a small, stucco house on Belmont Street in Pueblo. I spent many of my preschool days there because she was my babysitter half the time and her sister, my Auntie Eileen, watched me the other days as my mother worked at Woolworths and my dad at the National Biscuit Company... Nabisco.

Our house was similar, if my memory serves, with the address of 136 St. Louis. Our house, however, didn't have Concord grape vines growing from vines on the back fence like Aunt Denny's, nor did it have a little neighborhood store across the alley, behind the house, where a boy could take a nickel and buy a Nehi Grape from an ice chest that was so cold drinking it cracked your teeth and gave you a headache.

I should take another moment of interruption to explain that Pueblo is not your typical, Colorado postcard city. Although the Arkansas River runs right, smack through it, the town sits in a desert with the Colorado Rockies only visible in the distance horizon and then only if you stand on a big rock. It's also a dirty town and this because the largest employer - at least before the Government Printing Office confiscated some of Pueblo's land - was the steel mill. Pueblo was, in those days, also pretty ethnic.

There weren't many blacks that I can remember, but there were tons of Italians for some reason, and a huge population of Hispanics - called by the locals "Messicans" when they were being nice and worse when they weren't. Local lore proclaims there were lots of "good Indians" in the local graveyards.

Uncle Walt worked in the mill. I remember him dressed in his work clothes - dark blue shirt and matching trousers - and with stained hands that were rough and calloused.

By the time I came along, my grandfather was locked up in the Colorado State Hospital because of his alcoholism and Uncles Walt's kids were grown and gone. His oldest grandchild was still too young to do the things grandfathers like to do with grandsons, so I was his surrogate and he was mine. So, at least once every summer, he, my dad, my Uncle Tommy and I would squeeze into Uncle Walt's Willy's with tents and tackle and head into the mountains in pursuit of wild trout.

This tradition continued, almost annually, through my parent's divorce, my Uncle Walt's first heart attack, my mother's remarriage and several other significant family events. It changed a little here and there. Families became invited and my new dad, when he could. Since he was a soldier and we never lived in Pueblo again, it was not often he attended and all the trips were limited to his annual 30-day leave when he would take my mother back to her home town.

None of my aunts liked my new dad. Frankly, it took me a long, long time to warm up to him - about 40 years to be accurate; but my Uncle Walt seemed to like him well enough.

With the addition, however, of estrogen and little girls to the fishing trips, they evolved from rugged, week-long adventured into the wilderness to daytrips to a local reservoir where we would catch more crayfish than trout and eat hotdogs blackened from too much fire.

During this time my parents became active Mormons and, thus, I did too. No more tobacco, coffee, tea or booze. No more "colorful" language or nasty jokes. No more sundresses for my mother. It was a serious shock to her sisters and they blamed my new dad even though it was more my mother's idea.

By the beginning of the summer of 1966, I was pretty sure the annual fishing trips with Uncle Walt had decomposed beyond any resemblance of what they looked like when they were born.

I was 15 when my mother, my three sisters and Sharon - a kind of foster sister of sorts - left Kalamazoo and headed toward California where we would pick up my dad upon his return from Vietnam. We had more than a month to kill before we had to be in San Francisco, however, so my mother, with a fractured neck no one would learn of until we made it to Burbank, drove to Pueblo with Sharon as a back-up driver when my mother grew weary.

I have photographs of myself during that time and I testify that I was gawky and geeky. I thought I was much cooler looking than I actually was and my pants were always too tight. This did not seem to bother my aunts who smothered me with sloppy kisses or my Uncle Walt, who waited until the slobbering was over.

His dark hair was graying and he had the pallor of a man who had survived two heart attacks. He had been long retired from the mill but he wore the same clothes and his hands were still rough and dirty. He still smoked, unafraid of what the things were doing to his heart.

I was not going to bring up any idea of a fishing trip but he did. He added some rules... well, one rule. No girls.

By this time his grandson Denny was completely old enough to go but had begged off as he hated fishing; a fact that was clearly painful to my uncle. My Auntie Eileen had divorced whomever her latest husband had been and my dad was still in Southeast Asia. It was just me and my Uncle Walt.

We loaded up his Jeep with tents and tackle and headed toward and the fabled Conejos River. This was not to be a daytrip but the real deal. Things had come almost full-circle.

During the ride we talked of life and shared memories as we left the flat, dirty desert around Pueblo and entered the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It was a drive of several hours and it was beautiful. During the last year in Michigan and the two before that in Texas, I had missed the mountains and the chilled streams that cut through them. I didn't worry about when he would get there - wherever "there" was. I was confident my Uncle Walt knew the territory and knew the best places to catch the best trout. I was not disappointed.

We stopped near a bend in the river and pulled off the highway. We had arrived.

I determined I was going to do all the heavy lifting and let my aged uncle just take it easy. The first thing I extracted from the Jeep was a folding lawn chair and I invited him to sit down. He mumbled something about me needing his help so I informed him that I was a "Life Scout" and that I knew how to make a camp. Within an hour, I proved my worth to him.

The tent was pitched, a dining fly was stretched between two small trees and a fire was going. He was leaning back in the chair gently snoring. I determined we would have fresh trout for dinner and that I was going to catch and cook them.

I rigged the fly rod he had loaned me and tied on a stonefly nymph because it was early in June and I suspected the nymphs would bring home the bacon. I caught a three-pound Brown on the first cast. With the exception of a few Brookies, Browns were the only species I caught all week but I caught a lot of them.

That first evening I counted them. Between the first cast and the last, two hours later, I landed 18 fish and went through 6 flies. Not one of the first evening's fish was stocked fish. That was almost the case the rest of the week. The river was loaded with wild Browns and Brookies and, where we were, we never saw another fisherman until the last day we were there; a Saturday. I remember him joking with me when he asked if I had left any fish in the river for him. I was too stupid to do anything but just grin a big, dumb grin. Uncle Walt assured him there were plenty enough for everyone.

During that week I cooked every meal except one. On about the third morning, Uncle Walt rose early and made breakfast. The aroma of coffee wrested me from my dreams. Uncle Walt smiled when he told me I had a lot to learn about making coffee. I never did.

We had 16 trout on ice in the cooler, the legal limit in those days, as we loaded everything back into the Jeep for the trip home. Once there he would take half-gallon milk cartons, clean and fill them with water and the trout for freezing. He would have trout in the winter and I...? Well I would have a memory for the winter and unnumbered seasons in the future.

I never saw my Uncle Walt again. Life just got in the way.

Two days before my father died in 1988, my Uncle Walt had his last heart attack. He was 84. My dad was 63.

As I remembered this today, I came to realize that every fishing trip I ever took from that summer in 1966 was an attempt to recreate that week on the Conejos. I have had many trips but they have all fallen a little short.

It is during these moments of reflection that I realize that my love of fishing has little to do with flies, water or fish and everything to do with connecting to my family and my friends. Every cast helps me regurgitate a memory of something bigger than the moment; little events that have defined my life.

I never had a trip like that one in 1966, with my father. Not my bio-dad, but the man who, when he never really had to, adopted me, and was there as I grew up.

Perhaps time has softened him in my memory. I know it's harder to feel his harshness or the times he was downright cruel and brutal. Mostly I remember him as being pathetically weak as his illness beat him down until he lost his last battle in that hospital bed in Kalamazoo.

I had received the call that he was fading and that I should come home. I had received so many similar calls before that proved to be false alarms so I waited until later in the day before I made the three hour drive. I arrived at the hospital late. When I found his room, I found my mother there; sound asleep in a chair next to my dad. He was sleeping too, but the fitful sleep borne of unlimited morphine. I didn't want to disturb either of them so I quietly kissed my father's forehead and left. He died after I left.

I never got to tell him anything important.

I never got to tell him I no longer was afraid of him.
I never got to tell him I would like to really get to know him.
I never got to tell him that I had figured out how to love him.
I never got to tell him how sorry I was to have embarrassed him by bad choices.
I never got to tell him how grateful I was for the one time he rescued me with no questions asked.

There are many great doctrines in the Mormon Church but my favorite and, I think, one of the most hopeful is that we believe there is a spirit world where we go when we die and that that world is merely another dimension of this one. While I don't know for sure, how much access they have to our dimension, I suspect it's much more than we have to theirs. Thus I have a hope that my father can read this, somehow, and know that nothing else matters to me except having his love and his having mine.

I have a small hope that he and my Uncle Walt are friends and that Uncle Walt might share with him, the memory of our river adventure on the Conejos, in 1966.