Through the eyes of a Child

My letter to PA F&G. Still white
after
 thirty years

    When I was a kid I couldn't get enough of outdoor magazines. I had subscriptions to Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sport Afield, and The In-Fisherman. I couldn't wait for the spring issues that would have mostly fishing content. My favorite parts of OL and F&S were the middle sections printed on plain paper as opposed to the glossy paper in the rest of the magazine. The middle section would have articles from the region of the country you are from. I would eat up those articles. I would take notes and store them in a notebook.

   In 1988, as I was reading the national articles I came across a story on American Shad. For some reason I fell in love. I had never heard of American Shad until then but after I read the article they were all I thought about. I wanted to know more. Since the article was about shad in the Delaware River, I wrote a letter to the PA Fish and Game. I sent them a bunch of questions by snail mail (pre-internet). I also sent a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope to return my letter.

   When my SASE arrived I devoured the info. Not only did the biologist answer my questions but sent a fact sheet. Needless to say, I was in heaven. Not knowing that there were great shad runs in the Connecticut and Merrimack Rivers I made plans to go fish the Delaware. I tried to figure out the milage and gas costs and added that to the cost of a motel. This was only a pipe dream of course. I was too young to drive and my parents were not going to take me to Pennsylvania just to fish.

The article that I first
 learned about
American Shad

   Yesterday while cleaning out a storage drawer I came across my envelope with the original article, my answered questions and fact sheet. I reread my questions written in cursive along with the answers. It brought back a fond memory of a budding outdoorsman just starting to learn there was more than largemouth bass in this great big world.

   I never made it to the Delaware to fish for shad. I didn't need to. It turns out there are American Shad in the North/ Indianhead River in Scituate about an hour from my house. I used to go there a couple times each spring to catch them. More recently, when I make my birding foray to Plum Island I make a few hours to fish for shad. 

   After that initial letter to PA Fish and Game, I craved knowledge on fishing. I wrote dozens of letters to wildlife depts across the country with return stamped envelopes. Most of the letters were to biologists in the Northeast because they were close and the drive did not seem like a pipe dream. I learned about trout and salmon in northern New England along with Walleye and Kokanee in Connecticut.

My original envelope

    My letters eventually ended, not because I got older or smarter, but because of email. Now it is easy to send an email to the states' fish departments. However, ironically, I rarely do so. Simply because if I want to know the answer to a question I can usually find it online. A simple search of You Tube and I can find out what the best flies to fish the West Branch of the Penobscot in May or August. This is great, but it does not beat the excitement when I came home from school and saw an envelope addressed to me in my handwriting. My heart would be racing with excitement as I carefully opened each envelope.

 Another story below the photo below

   

Fast forward thirty one years past 1989. DJ and I were on our big western vacation. For seven weeks in 2010 we were on the road. After spending a week in South Dakota and the Forth of July at Mount Rushmore we were at Devil's Tower. Devils Tower was the first National Monument in the United States. Teddy Roosevelt declared it a National Monument after he was given the power of the Antiquities Act by Congress. The tower is a 867 foot butte in eastern Wyoming. It is sacred to the plain's Indian tribes. It was featured in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

   We spent most of the day at the National Monument. We took hundreds of photos from every angle as we circled it on the trail though most of the photos look about the same. We walked every trail in the park, but not before going to the bathroom when we pulled into the parking lot.

   
   We got to Devil's Tower very early despite a two hour ride from out campground. We may have been the first car in the parking lot. After a two hour drive we went into the bathroom before starting our day. (I promise this is not a gross bathroom story) In the bathroom near the sinks was a white board. It didn't have anything written on it. My guess is that a ranger writes the weather for the day on it. I needed to use a stall while DJ did not so he finished before me. When I got out of the stall and went to wash my hands DJ wrote the following with a dry erase marker

    " Good Morning America, How are ya? Don't you know me, I'm your native son?"

   If you haven't  had your head buried in the sand for the past fifty years, you know this is a song lyric from the song City of New Orleans" written by Steve Goodman and made famous by Arlo Guthrie. When I read what DJ wrote, I damn near cried. It was just past dawn and we were at the very first national monument. We were just a few days past Mt Rushmore on the Forth of July. No other ten words could have described the moment better than those. When I read what he wrote, I knew I was doing something right as a parent. Though we had dozens of cds with us in the car, we hadn't listened to that song while on vacation yet. It was all him and how he was feeling at the time. Since our plan was to use the bathroom then get our backpacks, drinks, and camera, I didn't have my camera to take a photo of the whiteboard.

   The feeling I had when DJ wrote that was the cliché moment of Zen for me. Knowing how DJ felt  seeing the beautiful landscapes and wildlife in America and seeing it through his eyes made me proud. During our trip, we went to iconic places such as Little Bighorn, The Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone and that feeling never went away. Of course, after we came home and over the next thirteen years, both that teenage boy and his father would see things like school shootings, the Marathon bomber, and a pandemic. We watched politicians lie and shit on the Constitution. We watched the Bears Ears National Monument that we drove through in Utah lose its status as a monument only to see it become one again.  Now that DJ is twenty seven and I forty eight we are both a lot more cynical. However, on that vacation and specifically that moment in the bathroom, we both saw the world through the eyes of an innocent fourteen year old and for the moment, all was right in the world!