“Why is Oregon so special?” Peter asked his father as they set up their tent. Everyone from school ooo’d and ahhh’d when he told them how he would be spending spring break—in the middle of the woods somewhere south of Ashland. He didn’t know why everyone was so impressed; as far as he could tell, Oregon was just a bunch of trees and people who didn’t shower. Besides, he didn’t care what his classmates said, boys didn’t like bugs just as much as girls.
Peter and his father arrived at their campsite just as the sun approached the western horizon. “Plenty of time to set up camp and get a fire started for dinner,” his father said. Peter decided that evening that he could have gone without the two and half hours it took to set up the tent, chop the wood, and start a fire for dinner. Call him crazy, but he wasn’t much a fan of the burnt hotdogs either. “It’s better this way,” his father told him. “Better if you prefer the taste of charcoal over pork,” he replied. His father rolled his eyes.
Peter and his father stayed up late that night, huddled around the fire for warmth, while his father told ghost stories. Peter recognized the stories as the type of tales adults told kids to get them to do their chores or brush their teeth. As the fire dwindled, Peter decided that it was time for bed. “Are you kidding me?” Peter said incredulously. No one had told him that he would be peeing in the bushes for the next three weeks. He supposed he could wait until morning.
After a week in the wilderness, Peter was ready to call it quits. His father had taken him on daily excursions that left his muscles sore and his heart longing for centralized AC. From hiking Mt. Shasta to paddleboarding along the South Anna River, mountain biking up rocky hills and setting snares his father promised would catch rabbits. Worst of all, Peter and his father spent hours basking in the afternoon sun watching birds. “I think I’m going to be sick,” Peter told his father, who promptly shushed him. By night, Peter froze his ass off. “Don’t be such a wuss,” his father told him. Wuss or not, Peter had nightmares of waking up with frostbitten fingers and toes that looked like those burnt wienerschnitzels he had tried to forget about.
The highlight of their vacation came two weeks into the trip while fishing. Peter had never cared for watersports, and he reasoned fishing was at the bottom of the list. Fish smelt bad and looked funny, when you really thought about it. He also didn’t understand why his father insisted on going to the lake so early in the morning. It’s not like the fish were going anywhere, Peter thought.
Peter had sat on his rump with his line in the water for most of the morning. “I’m bored,” he told his dad. Come to think of it, he was still cold from last night and hungry for food that wasn’t burnt. His father encouraged him to be patient. Peter rolled his eyes.
Peter was nodding off when he felt a tug on his line. “I think I got one!” Peter shouted to his father—who was standing right next to him. “Pull back hard and start reeling in the line!” Peter pulled as hard as he could and began spinning the reel like a broken spindle. Peter found himself in a fight with his father and a fish that day. “I don’t need any help,” he shouted as loud as he could, “Get away from me!”
As it turned out, Peter won both fights that day. His father took the hint and kept his paws off the fishing pole. And ten minutes after shouting at his father, Peter stood on the rocky shore, sand in his shoes and a grin on his face, holding his pole with a fish dangling from the line. Like a good boy, Peter said “cheese,” so his father could snap a photo with his disposable camera. Peter spent the rest of that day thinking about that fish, its size growing larger and larger with time.
Years from now Peter would look at the photo his father had taken, laughing with his wife and kids, as a smaller version of himself stood triumphantly with the dink he had caught. His father would have that photo framed. It would eventually sit in a wooden frame on a nightstand next to his reclining hospital bed. If asked, Peter’s father wouldn’t have been able to tell you his name, the day of the week, or who was president. Without fail, however, he would tell any visitor he had with unwavering confidence, “That’s my boy,” pointing at the nightstand.
“It’s a walleye,” his father told him that evening, sitting under the stars. His father showed him how to remove the hook and where to hold the fish to avoid being cut by its scales. His father prepared the fish on a wooden cutting board sitting on the open hatch of his pick-up truck. Peter let out an involuntary, “Wooow” as his father slid the fillet knife down the midline of the fish to reveal its innards. “The trick is to make sure you get all the bones out,” his father said. Peter was all ears, taking copious mental notes.
Biting into the fish, Peter no longer minded the smokey aftertaste taste that accompanied the warm, flaky meat. As it turned out, his father hadn’t gotten all the bones out. “I think I got one,” Peter said with a mouth full of fish. His father’s face shifted from confusion to understanding as Peter held up a small fish bone between his greasy fingers. Peter kept the bone in a small, leather pouch his father gave him during the car ride into the woods. The bone rattled around with small rocks and copper arrowheads he had found during a hiking trip earlier that week.
From that day forward, Peter and his father went down to the lake every morning. It no longer bothered Peter that his father was so persistent on fishing early in the morning. “The early bird gets the worm,” Peter recalled hearing from a classmate. There were days when they caught fish after fish—bass and pike as often as carp and catfish—and there were days where they caught only seaweed. It was all the same to Peter; the thrill of potentially catching a new fish never wavered.
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Those mornings spent fishing were the pinnacle of Peter’s relationship with his father. Peter would come to resent his father as a teenager. He despised his father’s demands that he be home before dark. Or how he needed to be in constant communication with his father about where he was going and with whom. Peter saw his father as weak; a fragile man who had let his own fears of abandonment drive a wedge between their relationship. Peter found himself sympathizing with his mother in those days, who had walked out on his father just months after his birth. He reasoned he would have done the same thing if in a similar situation.
Three days before he was to return to school, Peter and his father woke up early to begin packing their belongings. It was while he was kicking dirt into the firepit that Peter experienced a feeling most people would have recognized as bittersweet—although Peter didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it as such. He was at a loss for words as he examined the feeling of his heart strings pulling in opposite directions. Some pulled towards sadness, knowing without knowing that this precious time with his father was at an end, while others pulled towards an expectedness of what was waiting for him back at home. “We’ll come back here one day, won’t we, dad?”
With Oregon and Idaho behind them, Peter and his father took Interstate 90 from Missoula to Anaconda, Butte and then Bozeman. They hopped on the I-94 just south of Billings and made it to their farmhouse that evening. There was a stillness to the house Peter didn’t remember. “Was it always this quiet in here?” Peter asked his father.
That night Peter and his father ate liver and onions for dinner—sitting in their respective reclining chairs watching the KFYR First News at Six. Not much had changed during their three weeks in the woods. The weatherman predicted rainstorms for most of the week, the New Town boys’ basketball team had lost their seventh consecutive game, and the oil field workers continued to infest Dickinson and Williston. Peter had trouble sleeping that night.
The next day Peter sat at his desk, struggling to concentrate on his lessons in Social Studies and Language Arts. Peter sat at his small, wooden desk staring out the window in lieu of working on his multiplication tables. Peter would think to himself, “that tree looks climbable” or resort to drawing pictures in his wire-bound notebook of the fish he had caught during spring break. Peter caught himself watching the birds flutter between branches on more than one occasion as well.
Like the seasons, Peter’s daydreaming eventually subsided. He would receive passing grades in his classes, advancing to middle school and then high school, graduating without honors. Peter left for college the day after his graduation. He would attend the University of Minnesota, majoring in Business Administration, where he would meet his soon-to-be wife—an art major who enjoyed classical music, 1980s horror films, and Peter’s homemade knoephla soup. They would have three kids together, all girls, and settle down in Bemidji, buying a wooden cabin next to the lake.
Much like his father, Peter would forget the details of his trip to Oregon. In fact, Peter didn’t talk to his father anymore—and thought he was better off for it—who was living out his remaining days in a hospital. “You have a grandfather,” he told his girls, referring to his father in-law, on more than one occasion. He would come to tell his girls that his father was dead to avoid questions on the topic. He skipped his high school reunion, making the excuse that the timing wasn’t right, and avoided reminders of his past like most adults avoided the DMV.
Peter lived an ordinary enough life as an adult. He had everything anyone could have asked for. A wife, three beautiful kids, and a respectable job that paid the bills. He attended his daughters’ basketball practices during the week and sold girl scout cookies on the weekends. Every summer the family would squeeze into their Toyota minivan, making sure to pack lots of snacks, to explore the country as a family. The trips he remembered most were those through the badlands to see Mount Rushmore, driving along the backroads, passing buoy after buoy, in the boondocks of Louisiana, and their trip to Yellowstone.
More than two decades after Peter’s visit to Oregon, his girls asked if the family could go on a camping trip. “We live in Minnesota, you can go camping anytime you want out in the backyard,” he wanted to tell them. He eventually gave in, hoping the girls would forget about it by the following year.
A year later Peter drove their minivan through the corn fields of Nebraska and the mountains of Colorado with determination, set on making it to California for a family camping trip. Bailey had been wailing on and off for the past hour because she forgot her special teddy bear at home. Anna had been grounded, forbidden from watching Bugs Life on the DVD player, after she called her sister stupid. Rose sat in the back staring out the window, grinning like a cat eating cranberries, enjoying the scenery.
“Well, here we are,” Peter said to his family. After several detours, a hundred bathroom breaks, and more than a handful of temper tantrums, he could tell that his family was underwhelmed by the campsite. “This is it?” he heard Bailey say in the background as his wife was questioning him about how much the campsite had cost. Anna was stung by a bee the first day and Rose had left her positive attitude in the car—asking every twenty minutes how long she had to stay before she could go home.
Peter learned a lot about his family during that short week in the woods. His girls didn’t enjoy any of the outdoor activities he had planned, vehemently refusing to go anywhere near the lake, and choosing to go to bed early instead of roasting marshmallows. His wife, oh his wife, was just as bad as the children. “We are going home now, Peter,” she said after walking through a poison oak plant on the fifth day, “I mean it,” hands planted on hips. She had said this just hours after their argument about who had forgotten the sunscreen. Peter lost that argument, making him responsible for girls’ sunburn, each looking a little bit like a red rattlesnake shedding its skin.
It was the last night after everything was packed that Peter thought of his father. He supposed it was the fishing pole, lonely in the back of the minivan, that brought the memory to the surface. He contemplated calling his father to tell him about the trip. His father had never met his family, his wife or kids, a fact that weighed on him as he stared up at the pale half-moon. “Even if I did call, there isn’t any cellphone service out here,” he told himself. By the time the sun rose on the eastern plain, the urge to call his father was gone. Peter’s father died on February 27th, 2009; he found out six months later via voicemail.
