When I was 5 years old, my great grandfather passed away. I was too young to really feel the weight of the situation, but luckily I was just old enough to cement a few memories of him into my brain. In the years that came after, several family members told me that he and I would have had so much fun together because of our shared love for fishing and the outdoors. My memories of him include fishing, fireworks and reloading shotgun shells; clearly he was a cool guy. And it’s easy to see why the kid that grew up to be me would have loved hanging out with him.
My great grandmother lived for 11 more years, she passed away when I was 16. Of course, that meant going through a house that held a lifetime of memories. When I was sifting through a pile of saved greeting cards and other assorted ‘paper things’ (that included a deck of those ‘nudie’ cards you may have seen in an old war movie), I found a photo of striped bass laying on a piece of driftwood.
At the time, I had only caught maybe a dozen schoolies in my life. I was a freshwater fisherman, through and through. But among all the sadness hanging in the air, all of the conversations about who was going to take this antique chair, or her colorful glassware collection, something made me keep that photo.
I have a quiet obsession with the lineage of touch. It’s a big reason why I love Native American artifact hunting so much, being the first person to touch something after thousands of years of being lost, is an incredible feeling. But there’s another side to it, because, if you think about that connectivity – spaced out by time – there’s the question of fate. The last time my Grampa Wile tossed that photo into that drawer, he was unknowingly leaving it for me to find. But was I meant to find it all along? There are a 1000 ways this photo could be more interesting, it’s just a 20- to 30-inch class striper, laying on a sun-bleached log. But someone thought to capture that memory and he thought enough of it, to save it.
I think the thing that captivates me most about it, is what must be going on outside the frame. It’s on a sandy beach, almost certainly on the Cape, and from the lighting, I’d wager it was early morning. Who was there? Were they alone on a desolate beach or was there a lineup of casters? Was it caught on bait or on some wooden plug that would fetch a collector premium today? What did he pay for the house they rented that week or the tank of gas to drive out there?
It’s hard not to think that he and whoever he was with were enjoying a vacation morning, sometime in the middle of his life, maybe headed back to the cottage where his daughter (my grandmother) who would have been a child at the time, gawked with wide eyes. I wonder too, if he looked out over the ocean and saw it and felt it, the way I do.
Last night, the photo popped out of a box of family photos while organizing an album of memories from when I was a teenager, and it immediately sent me down this familiar path of remembering and trying to see outside the frame. Like that day standing in my great grandmother’s parlor, finding this photo for the first time, I don’t know why I’m drawn to it. It’s even amazing that, somehow, I still have it. Maybe it’s just life shuffling memories, or maybe it periodically resurfaces with a purpose, to reignite the memories I still have of my Grampa Wile and to reinvigorate the part of his soul and outdoor obsession that lives on, in me.
