What Ties Us

Whenever I catch my father gazing out over a body of water, I can pretty much guarantee he’s not looking for sailboats or sunsets. He’s looking for bugs.

Dad learned to tie files during a lifetime of fishing the rivers and streams that wind through the Southern Appalachian Mountains like veins carrying blood. His first memory of “fishing” involved him standing in a stream as a small boy holding onto his father’s back pockets. He grew up in the gentle rhythm of fly fishing, which seeped into him like instinct. As he learned to fish – calling an eddy with a fish like an 8-ball to a pocket – he also began studying what he saw dancing atop the water. I’ve seen him stand up from a family picnic table to pluck bugs off the surface of streams, catching the hatch to know what he should replicate for fishing later.

As a little girl, I loved to watch him tie flies. He flipped down the magnifying lenses on his glasses like a surgeon and squeezed a tiny hook into a vice. Then through the pinecone scent of Kodak dipping tobacco, he went to work surrounded by piles of feathers and furs. Bushy squirrel tails and patches of animal hides. Turkey feathers and shimmery peacock fronds. Rubber gloves that he cut into tiny wings. Spools of thread in shades of brown and gray but also metallic gold and neon orange when he needed a touch of flash. He had been known to snip sparkling threads off of my old ballet costumes too.

Standing next to him as he worked, I also heard the unassuming sermons of a father. One Halloween I’d come home from a school party particularly proud that I’d won an award for my costume. I boasted about all the attention I’d received. Dad never looked up from his fly. “Don’t get too big for your britches,” he said, the lesson searing into me. Embarrassed then, thankful today.

I never learned to tie flies or master fly fishing as my dad did, but imprints of his love for the art remain on me. The textures that went into his craft also show the textures of a person – the many pieces we pick up along a life from the rough to refined – that make up who we are. We're like magpies building our lives from the shiny threads and soft feathers we collect along the way from our people and environments.

My parents come from the area near the start of the Appalachian Trail where Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina come together in a whisper. My parents’ parents and their parents all lived in this area too – miners, farmers, preachers, school cafeteria workers. A river connected the towns, and though I’ve lived away since age 18, the river connects me to home too.

Called the Toccoa River in Georgia, it flows into Tennessee as the wilder Ocoee. In the calm parts, dad fishes. Along the Ocoee, I liked to watch the “river rats” on rafts and kayaks tumbling through the gorge. I developed a healthy respect for the river that gave the rafters so much pleasure and my dad so much peace, because it wielded great power too. The river flooded our town rising to eight feet of water inside my parents’ hardware store.

On the morning of the flood, my parents headed out early to put down sandbags. Then Dad’s truck flooded out. They waded in to save what they could – cash and documents thrust into trash bags. But when they tried to leave, the front door wouldn’t budge – the pressure of the water pressed it closed. They made it out a back door on higher ground and dad used all his strength to push mom up the bank behind the store sending her scrambling for safety. He climbed onto the roof where he took a running leap to throw himself onto the bank at a higher angle. They made it home, drenched, scared and heartbroken. But the water, which had seemed so smooth and easy, had shaken the contents of their livelihood like specks in a snow globe.

Dad would eventually fish in those waters again as the river redeemed itself as a place of peace. But I wonder about the lessons he learned from it along with the fishing lessons he took from his father. From dad, I take the old message of humility while watching him tie flies, the example to find something creative to love, the metaphor in catching a fish but then letting it go, an appreciation for nature. But I don’t yet know all the textures that will leave imprints on me and those that I will leave behind. Because often the people and places around us leave their marks upon us over time – like a river running a groove into a mountain.