Backcast Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska

While father and son fishing trips can be the stuff of American legend, they can also turn out to be the stuff of anger, love and self-discovery. In his memoir of a fishing trip through the Alaskan wilderness, Lou Ureneck brings to life the struggle to reclaim the trust of his teenage son, Adam, following his divorce. Along the way, nature transforms from friend into foe, and their struggles are played out against the poignant emotional battle raging between the two as they descend the river headed toward confrontation. On their journey, the two encounter nature's dangers bears, violent river currents and ruthless, punishing weather as well as the hurts that exist between them, the reasons for divorce, the absence of a father and the withheld love of a son. Dipping his hand into the river of his own life, Ureneck recounts his own fatherless childhood, the influence of his mother's boyfriend who helped him learn to fish, and the realization that he himself had done the one thing he always promised himself he would not do: He ended his marriage in divorce. Part adventure story, part reconciliation with life's unexpected turns, and part commentary on the healing power of nature,Backcastexplores the world of a man confronted by the hard choices divorce can bring to create a moving meditation on fatherhood.

Chapter 1 
Inside the small circle of our tent, I listened to the rain that had blown in from the Bering Sea and the whisper of my son’s breathing as he slept beside me. We were camped on a gravel bar that shouldered the Kanektok River on the western face of Alaska. The storm that was lashing our tent had begun as a typhoon northeast of Japan, rolled across the North Pacific, and shimmied up the chain of Aleutian Islands to the great Kuskokwim River delta, where it was sputtering in a rattle of wind and rain. Our two-man tent billowed and snapped as if it were a luffing sail. We were more than a hundred miles from the nearest link to the outside world, and that was a dirt landing strip at Quinhagak, a Yupik Eskimo village. We were without a phone or radio, without a guide, and without the slightest bit of firsthand knowledge of the country we were in.
This is where my memory of our trip usually begins, on the morning of the third day when the rain came down in sheets. Maybe that’s because there was another storm blowing, the one between Adam and me. Memory is like that: It has its own intelligence. It holds on to what matters, and it sees connections between events in our lives that we sometimes miss when we are living them. My memory has put these two storms together, both of them hammering me with my failures as a father. Already the tent was beginning to leak, an early premonition of how ill prepared I was for a trip into the Alaskan bush. The bigger failure was my divorce. I had taken apart a twenty-year marriage. Adam was angry about the breakup of our family and the loss of me as a perfect father and upright man. I had learned there was no explaining a divorce to your child, and the more I had tried, the worse I had made things between us. I had stopped trying.
On that morning of the third day, I wasn’t sure I could place our position on the crude map that I had drawn back home in Philadelphia and kept folded in the pocket of the flannel shirt I had been sleeping in. I guessed that we had covered about thirty miles of river. I was cold and hungry. I wanted a cup of coffee, but lighting our small camp stove to boil water would be difficult in this weather, so I slipped deeper into my sleeping bag and told myself I didn’t need it. I guessed the time at eight o’clock. The night before, we had fished past midnight in the purple twilight. We had caught pink hump-backed salmon and glorious red-and-green char until our shoulders ached, and I knew Adam would sleep for another hour or more if I didn’t rouse him. He had slept like a stone since he was an infant, and he was no different now as  six feet, three inches, of sinewy boy-man. I let him sleep. I enjoyed the temporary peace between us. Memory also grants its concessions.
I was fairly sure that we were safe from the brown bears that were stalking the river. The bears were enormous, tall as church doors, wrapped in great blankets of heavy brown fur, the color of cocoa. In late August, with the salmon runs at their peak, the bears had moved in from the surrounding country—mountains and tundra—and swarmed the river and its tributaries, feasting on fish flesh. It made no difference to the bears whether it was alive or dead. They raked flopping sockeyes and silvers out of the swirling water, and they ate the black carcasses of the big kings that had come up the river in June, spawned, and died. This was gorging season. We had been careful the night before to keep a clean camp. Our food, freeze-dried packets of noodles and Thai chicken, instant coffee, and a dwindling number of PowerBars, was stored in dry bags and stowed in our raft, which we had beached several hundred feet downstream, well away from where we slept. We already had experienced two close calls, one with a headstrong yearling, and I wasn’t eager for another. I felt for the shotgun that I kept between our sleeping bags. It was there, cold to my touch, with its breech safely open and slugs in both chambers. I tried to get a little more sleep, but I wasn’t having any luck.
Adam and I took our trip to Alaska the summer he graduated from high school. I was forty-nine, and Adam was eighteen. I was deep into middle age; he was on the verge of becoming a man. I had been divorced for a year by then, though my former wife and I had been apart for three years, in different cities separated by hundreds of miles. A chasm of anger, disappointment, and sadness had opened between us. We communicated through lawyers. During most of that time, Adam and I had lived together as father and son and sometimes as warring parties. I was his custodial parent.
I had hoped that the trip to Alaska would settle some of the trouble between Adam and me. It would be good, I thought, for us to go fishing together one last time. In the woods and on the river, maybe we would regain something of our old selves before he went off to college and on to the rest of his life. Looking back, I have to admit the trip was a little desperate. I had been willing to take the risk. My life was in a ditch: I was broke from lawyers, therapists, and alimony payments and fearful that my son’s anger was hardening into lifelong permanence. I wanted to pull him back into my life. I feared losing him. Alaska was my answer. What I had failed to appreciate, of course, was Adam’s view of the expedition. For him, the trip meant spending ten days with his discredited father in a small raft and an even smaller tent. It was not where Adam had wanted to be, not now, not with me, and not in the rain. The trip would take us through 110 miles of rugged Alaska, some of it dangerous and all of it, to us anyway, uncharted. I had no inkling of what lay ahead: fickle early-fall weather, the mystery of the river, and unseen obstacles that already were silently forming themselves in opposition to my plans.  Copyright © 2007 by Lou Ureneck. All rights reserved.