The plan was to head into the mountains of northern Pennsylvania for some epic fly fishing before Kid No. 1 headed off for his freshman year of college.
I had recurring and deeply satisfying visions of meaningful talks between parent and child, interspersed with nonstop fishing action. Brown and brook trout leaped in my head. Maybe we’d see bears, and if we were truly lucky, a bobcat.
We would return to Ohio closer than ever, ready for the first real separation of lives. It would be the perfect trip.
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A wise man I know once shared with me a favorite bit of advice, its roots in war strategy.
No plan survives first contact with reality, he likes to say.
Proving this, Kid. No. 1 was asleep in the front passenger seat before we’d made it past Gahanna.
He remained largely unconscious until the refueling stop in Conneaut. By then, I was already recalculating my expectations.
It is so dangerously easy for us to expect too much from these life events. All we ask is that they are flawless.
We were headed to some of my older fishing grounds, an area that the tourism industry likes to call the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. It is a slogan that seems desperate to disappoint anyone who has seen the Grand Canyon of Arizona.
But it is lovely country, rugged and flush with myriad greens. World-class trout streams tumble through primordial gorges, the water daring you to drink it without filtering or boiling.
I haven’t seen much of our planet, but I suspect that this northwestern corner of Lycoming County would hold its spot as one of my favorite places regardless of how much I’d traveled.
We started the trip with an overdue visit to the cemetery in upstate New York where my parents are buried. I hadn’t been there in a few years, and I knew my electrical engineer dad would be ecstatic that his grandson was heading off to a science and engineering school.
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We cleaned up the plot and planted a small Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology garden flag in the ground beside his name on the headstone.
Then we headed south into the mountains. We’d spend a few days at Little Pine State Park, fishing Little Pine Creek before moving deeper into the woods to camp beside the headwaters of a storied trout stream known as Slate Run.
I’m hard-pressed to doze past 6 a.m. in the woods, but I let him sleep in that first morning. We got on the water a little after 11 a.m., and he caught the first trout before noon on a classic dry fly known as a Royal Wulff.
I hadn’t fished here in probably 10 years. The memories flooded back, and while the details had faded, the connected emotions had not. My dad was not a fly-fisherman, and so he would sit on the bank and cheer when I landed a fish. He did that right here, some 30 years ago.
And so I hooted at the sight of my son’s first of the day, a rainbow, the deep pink stripe running almost all of its 14 shimmering inches.
It was a fine fish. And, as it turned out, the biggest of the week.
The fishing was tough and grew tougher when we moved our base of operations seven miles up Slate Run. The water was clear, the pools quiet, and the fish unforgiving of sloppy casts or noisy wading.
We had the primitive camp there to ourselves until the last night, when another dad showed up with his son, who looked to be about 12. The dad had grown up in Slate Run. His father had been a fly-fisherman of some local renown, who would tie flies right on the bank to match the insects he encountered. Now, the man’s son was learning the sport.
A short time after arriving, he pulled alongside our camp, his son in the front passenger seat. Could we keep an eye on things? They’d forgotten gear in town and were looking at an hour roundtrip to retrieve it.
No plan survives first contact with reality.
We never saw a bear or a bobcat. But we did see bald eagles and an eastern hellbender, an uncommon and enormous aquatic salamander that ambled past my son’s feet as we waded Pine Creek, hoping the smallmouth bass might be easier to catch than the trout.
They weren’t.
On the way out of the mountains, we came upon a shirtless young man running down the gravel road.
Did we know, he asked, how far it was to the village of Slate Run? There was no cell service out here. Probably two miles, I told him.
He had taken his parents, who were in their 60s, on a backpacking trip on the Black Forest Trail, a 44-mile loop that might be the most demanding in the state. It had been an ambitious plan.
Too ambitious, it turned out. They had run out of steam. He had left them high in the mountains near a road crossing and was running back to the trailhead to get their car.
No plan survives first contact with reality.
We had not an inch of room in the car; even the roof was occupied by the canoe. I thought of dropping Colin off in town and coming back for him. We offered him water. He declined.
“I’ll live,” he said.
And what a story he and his parents will have.
We have our share, too, of the hellbender, the fish we landed and the fish we didn’t, the Bravest Mouse in the World who made itself at home in our Dutch-oven dessert and in my car.
It was not a perfect trip. We did not land record numbers of record-sized fish. In that regard, it did not live up to my expectations.
But who was I kidding?
This trip was never about catching anything. This trip was about letting go.
tdecker@dispatch.com
@Theodore_Decker
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