Just Another Day In Paradise

August 31st, 2008 at 09:50pm Mitch Mulhall 171

Teaching is a gift I lack. I taught college English at CSU during Graduate School, and the one thing I remember about that experience more than anything else is that to be effective, I had to care for my students more than I cared for myself. In retrospect, I don’t think I did too much damage, and in a few exceptional cases, I may have actually done some good.

As a parent, that paradigm shifts. You actually do care more for your kids than you do for yourself. So teaching should come easy, right? I haven’t had the opportunity to be circumspect about child rearing yet. Apparently I’m still at the stage where the rules keep changing.

Yet, once in awhile you get lucky. Maybe “luck” is the wrong word for a few hours of time when some the pieces seem to fall into place.

I took my son up the Fryingpan this afternoon. We put in at the bottom of the public access below Big Hat Bridge and fished up stream. My son caught the first fish within about five minutes. I wasn’t even finished figuring out which fly I wanted to use.

It wasn’t a big fish. Maybe an eleven inch German Brown. I netted the fish for him, taught him to wet his hands before handling the trout, and to hold the trout belly up to remove the hook without struggle. I taught him how to un-snag a nymph rig with a roll cast, and how to tell the difference between when a trout is eating a bug on the surface and when it’s eating just below the surface. I taught him what a blue wing olive looks like, and the difference between a mayfly and a caddis fly.

At the end of the day, the one thing I know I could never instill in him he seemed to embrace. I sat on the bank and watched as he worked an A.K. Best blue wing olive to several rising trout in a gently flowing side channel. After a time, I said, “Three more casts, and it’s time to go.” Ten minutes would go by and I’d make a similar declaration. By the time he grudgingly began reeling in his fly, a good forty minutes had gone by.

“Dad” he said looking me in the eyes as he was hooking his fly on an eye and wrapping the leader around the reel like he’d been doing it for years, “I could do this all day.”

You can’t teach that.

Cheers,

Entry Filed under: Sports, Glenwood Springs, Aspen