Thursday, August 6, 2009

Dad

Dad was a skinny dude all his life. Photos that I have of him show a wiry individual. Yet he was an outdoorsman who frequently had to move large loads around. I remember going salmon fishing with him one fall when I was about 14. We went to Cook Inlet and set out some gill nets to catch the spawning salmon. They would swim into the nets, get caught, and we'd sit in a rowboat and haul them out. Dad would haul and haul, the net cutting into his hands, while everybody else took breaks, including me.
After we got the (many) fish home, Dad built a smokehouse for them, consisting of an oil drum stove and a wooden close with shelves in it for the fish. I burnt it down (by mistake).
Every fall, Dad and I would go moose hunting. A fully-grown moose weighs nearly a ton, so there was a lot of meat there, and that's how we got our year's supply of meat. Between that and smoked salmon, we ate gourmet food and I never knew it.