Lessons from dad

by Doug Crowe
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 12:57 PM MDT

My father's father abandoned his family when my dad was very young. He just walked away one day and never returned.

As a consequence, little Richard Martin Crowe was raised by his mother, who held down a full-time job, and his maternal grandmother, who managed the household.

This lack of paternal influence had considerable impact on the man he came to be. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of his father and he was always there for me.

Among my earliest memories are those of hunting and fishing with him. I'm sure there was a time when I was too young to tag along, but I don't remember it.

In the early years, it must have been a real pain to pack a little nerd like me around the rivers and fields. Even so, he never said a word about it, and I felt like one of the guys from the very beginning.

I recall learning to fish with an old casting reel that if you didn't "thumb it" properly, resulted in terrible backlash snarls that dad called a "boar's nest." On most trips, he spent the majority of his time unsnarling my rig.

But it never detracted from his performance, because he was the best fisherman who ever lived. He knew exactly where the fish would lie up and when they would bite the best and what they would bite on.

He could catch fish when nobody else could, so there was always a crowd of kids at our house when we came home from a trip. I was a neighborhood celebrity, and everyone wished they had a dad like mine.

I remember also carrying a sack of decoys bigger than I was and later watching it dawn cold and gray through the reeds of our duck blind. I'd get so excited when a flock was coming in, I was sure they would hear my heart beating.

If they did come in, and if I could get the hammer back on my little single shot .410 and get off a shot, I always scored. If even one duck fell, it was always me that got it. If two or more went down, then dad had gotten one too.

It was only later, when I was old enough to go off hunting with my buddies, that I came to realize I wasn't near the wing shot I thought I was.

I can remember a million other things that flood back to my consciousness as I write this. There was my first antelope out on Bates Creek. By some miracle, I hit a little buck on the run and my pop couldn't have been more proud if I'd been elected president.

I killed a two-point mule deer that year also. We packed him up out of Boxelder Canyon, both of us soaked in sweat and just as happy as if we had good sense.

But all the memories don't involve something being caught or shot. Most of the thrill was just running free and wild in the outdoors. Out there you could get filthy and no one cared.

You could stay up as late as you wanted, stare at the fire and ask a million questions. You could eat a wonderful assortment of junk food on whatever schedule you chose.

You could put the fire out with the milk your mother sent and take back the empty bottle to show you had drunk it.

And, later on, you could even swear -- which served to formulate my present contention that anyone who does not use profanity has needlessly limited their vocabulary!

These things and a thousand more were introduced to me by my father. Such experiences during my formative years served to help me define myself and who I wanted to be.

My love for wild things and wild places, what I value in life and how I managed to earn a living all stem directly from this early introduction to the outdoors.

Thanks, Dad!

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