The week before leaving on the
fishing trip of a lifetime to northern Manitoba, I decided to cut down an oak
with a hand saw. Okay, it wasn’t a whole
oak, just one of its three main stems which branched out about ten feet off the
ground. Either way, the limb was a good
eighteen inches in diameter, according to my mental fishing ruler which has a
tendency to make eighteen inch fish out of twelve inchers.
The oak was dying a slow death, and
rather than let it fall on my children as they played on their swings, I
decided to break a sweat. It had
absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I just turned thirty-nine, felt
twice as old, and just heard Toby Keith sing, “I’m not as Good as I once Was”
on the radio.
I shimmied up the tree, reached as
high as I could, and started a process that would take two hours and five Advil
to complete. Knowing I would be casting
a thousand times a day and possibly hauling in thirty-inch lake trout and
forty-inch northern pike, this seemed a good test of my shoulder’s
strength. As it turned out, my shoulder
hurt for the next week and I developed a migraine that lasted five days and
ended up putting me in the emergency room a mere forty-eight hours before we
flew out.
Three days into the headache, we
departed. It was indeed evident that I
wasn’t as good as I once was. Still, my
pride compelled me to prove nature wrong.
This was a family fishing trip
amongst the men, and quite frankly, a surprise to me. At Christmastime, everyone quieted down as it
was my turn to open my gift. I pulled
out a white binder with a Canadian flag on the top. As I leafed through the binder, I quickly
realized that a lot of people, my brother Chris and my wife most notably, had
pooled resources to pay the way for this schoolteacher who couldn’t possibly
afford such a trip. For years I had to
endure countless stories and pictures of the behemoth monsters uncle Dick had
pulled out of these northern waters. Now
I was about to put these stories to the test.
