Teach a kid to fish and you teach more than fishing

This opinion column originally appeared in Birmingham Magazine.

I have two favorite movies.

There's "The Princess Bride." Because it's "The Princess Bride." And because it's applicable to all Alabama political occasions.

"Inconceivable."

("You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.")

My second favorite is "A River Runs Through it." Because it reminds me of my dad and of my youth - and not just because a young Brad Pitt plays the part of the rebellious preacher's kid who grows up to be a gritty and self-destructive journalist.

It reminds me of the water. Of the river. It's a story, for those who missed out, about a strict family, religion, and fly fishing. And how they all bleed into one. The first lines take me straight to my own father, to our times on rivers and lakes, to the way - even in awkward teen moments when we had little to say out loud - we could be one on the water.

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon," it begins, "all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

I am haunted by waters.

I am buoyed by waters.

Then again I vomit on open waters, but that's for another day.

I'll never forget how my dad taught me the graceful art of fly fishing. To this day, to me, it is the only kind of fishing worth doing. Because there is art and skill and action, no matter if the fish decide to rise.

He taught me on a lake, a small reservoir in North Georgia, paddling close to the shore seeking bream and small bass with a chartreuse popping bug. It's not trout fishing, like the boys in the movie. That would come later, and would take more skill.

But on a lake you whip your line and plop the little bug near the bank and the spots where there's cover for the fish. You draw it back, jittery like a bug, toward the boat. When the fish does rise it explodes through the surface with every bit of the excitement of the great outdoors. The first time it happened to me my dad was paddling the canoe quietly while I fished from the front. A bass burst through the water and I jerked my line too soon. The fly flew through the air, sans fish. I whipped it forward, embedding the hook deep in my dad's bald spot.

Right square in the middle.

He told me to push the hook through, to puncture the skin and cut off the barb with a pair of pliers.

I couldn't do it, so he put on a hat. And kept fishing.

Over the years I lost hundreds of flies in trees, impaled dad's arm with a treble hook, and fished for hours as he paddled me around the lake, patient with my blunders, happy to see me cast, and finally catch fish.

I think of my dad on the water. And the wonder of the world. Of my family and life and death and the change that inevitably pulls us all apart. But it is on the water where there is peace.

I guess all things do merge into one, and a river runs through it.

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