Lasts…

In memory of John Raymond Hatfield…

1928 – 2004

The salmon were in. From above the tail-out of Plumber’s Pool, I saw them; a big hen holding over a bed of gravel and a handsome buck guarding her as jack salmon took turns trying to dislodge the larger suitor. The water suspended them in its glassy flow, a gift from the river’s far reaching fingers. Just upstream, a towering falls thundered, casting its froth to the wind and cooling the air even more than it should in late autumn.

From my perch on the bridge, I watched an angler emerge from the scrub of the river bank to fish the pool. He shuffled with elder steps, his stooped posture and bowed head that of a blue heron in stalking. His long mane, white as the falls-cast spray, whipped in waves as the wind buffeted him. He tried in vain to cast high enough into the pool to allow his streamer to sink well before the tail-out. His casting stroke was slow and deliberate – his long rod moved the way it should – but the wind overcame his frailty. Wise in years, he moved upstream and deeper to improve his position, but the unyielding current rebuffed him even as he leaned into it with his wading staff.

The angler’s struggle brought thoughts to mind of my late father-in-law, Ray. I could see his shadow looming through the translucent glass of a doctor’s office door. Framed in rich mahogany, the scene played out: an upright shadow approached, leaning down to him, speaking in hushed tones. At the age of 58, Ray listened to his doctor give the final prescription: he should retire and live out as many years as he could before his failing lungs took their last breath.

Silent to a fault and with a stiff upper lip, Ray never showed what likely ate away at him during those final years. He did the best he could with his sentence, retiring early, and building a house on the ninth hole, a place he duly deserved after 30 years of commuting from New Jersey to New York City while raising 6 kids, living, loving, and perhaps, wanting a bit more. Golf had somehow eluded the busyness of working life, so those first years of retirement were lived deliberately, ushered in with late morning risings, choice tee times, and capped with sunsets and vodka gimlets, both welcomed but measured. Eventually, however, the doctor’s words cast their pall and one day on the very course that hugged his retirement dream home, a final swing was made.

Now, as I approach that same age, I think of my father-in-law sitting before the doctor, the scene that we watch in our own way and that all of us must act in at some point in our lives. Golf, fly fishing – life itself – is a continuum of firsts punctuated by an inflection point, where lasts begin.

And so I watched the elderly angler finally give up the ghost. He looked up at me, as if cursing fate, his mouth gaping open and ringed white from exertion. He ambled into the riverside brush and I followed with my own retreat to a warm car. Fall waned that day and winter waited hauntingly in its wings. And I wondered as I walked away; would he remember his last cast, and would I, my own?