Although I’d been with my father for the two-hour neurological examination two weeks earlier, I wasn’t present for the follow-up when the doctors formally announced a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. I was camping and teaching by a wilderness lake in Alaska, with two fellow instructors and ten students. It was day two of a three-week writing and environmental philosophy class. No cell service. No internet. I might not have heard the diagnosis for several days if I hadn’t been reminded in another way of human frailty and the reality that we are made of dust.
None of our students had previously been to Alaska. The hike into Chugach State Park carrying food and supplies for five days was about seven miles long, with the final stretch over challenging glacial moraine. Two years short of my sixtieth birthday, I was becoming more aware of my own mortality and frailty. We managed the excursion without incident. Hot and exhausted, we set up our tents on a steep blueberry-strewn slope overlooking the pale-green surface of glacier-fed Eagle Lake. Despite the frigid temperature, after the long, hot hike, the water was too enticing for the students to pass up, and several decided to chill down with a swim. It was ironic that Will, the only student in the group with extensive backpacking experience, was the one who got injured. The jagged lake-bottom rock proved harder than his human flesh, and his heel got the worst of the interaction. The resulting cut was deep. Rob, one of the instructors and our backcountry medical expert, after cleaning and dressing the wound, called for a trip to an urgent care unit for antibiotics and possible stitches. As the most expendable of the instructors, I was designated to take Will on the long hike back out the next morning. Josh, a graduate student taking the class, agreed to join us for both moral and practical support.
Some fifty years earlier—in 1972, just shy of my ninth birthday—my father gifted me with my earliest backcountry fishing experience: a four-night camping trip to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in northern Maine. It was only two years after the river had received federal protection as a National Wild and Scenic River. Having lived within a few miles of three of the most polluted rivers in the United States, the Allagash was a life-changing experience for me: the first place I ever saw an osprey or moose, heard the call of a loon, or listened to the “loot galloot” of a bittern hiding in the riverbank reeds. It was the first place I caught a native trout, and where I fell in love with both fishing and wilderness. For the next three decades, my father and I made the trip almost every year, often joined by my brothers or friends, and later by my own sons.
Eventually, the name “Allagash” worked like an enchanter’s spell, conjuring a fountain of memories. Like the year when it was just my father and a teenage me, and a wicked thunderstorm blew in. As the barometer plummeted and the wind kicked up, the monster brook trout went into a feeding frenzy, and my father and I couldn’t exercise enough good judgment to stop fishing. When we finally headed back to our campsite, we had to cross the lake in the canoe on three-foot swells with a broken four-horsepower outboard. Before the dementia hit, we shared that memory often, retelling (and perhaps embellishing) it for anyone who would listen. That the name “Allagash” had begun to draw only blank stares was how we all knew the diagnosis before we received it. The only questions were whether a different medical treatment might help slow the progression and whether the diagnosis might open the door for additional services.
The Making and Losing of Memories
I rose on Tuesday morning and prepared to tackle the moraine again. I worried about how Will’s foot would handle the hike out. I worried how my own fifty-eight-year-old knees would handle it, less than twenty hours after the hike in. Mostly, I went back through memories of an earlier trip to Eagle Lake with my brother Ted. Maybe it was the making and sharing of memories that made me loath to hike out without casting a fly at least once. So, while the students ate breakfast, and Rob checked on Will’s tender foot, I unpacked and rigged my fly rod and walked down to that turquoise water. I found a rock a few feet out from shore that I could stand on in hiking boots without having to risk my own tender soles wading barefoot, and without losing flies in the steep shoreline brush behind me on my backcast. When my fly managed to seduce a little Dolly Varden char, all the students gathered around to admire the beauty of its green-tinted silver sides and magenta pearls. I cradled it gently in the cold water for a minute before releasing it. Then I packed my rod again and strapped it to my pack.
An hour later, Will, Josh, and I had successfully navigated the moraine. Before continuing down the trail, I gazed longingly into a long sweeping pool of milky green water where the swift current of the outlet stream took a short rest before tumbling down the mountain. It was the same pool I remember fishing with my brother, where I caught my first Dolly Varden thirteen years earlier. So many fish were feeding on the surface now that the myriad dimples looked more like a rainstorm than rising fish. Was I exercising bad judgment when I decided that Will needed to rest his foot for fifteen minutes while I took a few more casts? Maybe. But I managed to get a small elk hair caddis out far enough to land another little Dolly. Then I handed my rod to Josh and gave him a few instructions. Ten minutes later, he had a memory of landing his first fish on a fly and his first fish in Alaska.
Back in Anchorage, while Will got treated at the urgent care clinic, I called home. My wife gave me the news of the diagnosis. My father, though he had seemed rather sobered at first, hadn’t really understood the news; nouns had already begun losing their meaning for him. Within two days, he had forgotten he’d even had the appointment.
Another memory: standing on Right Beach in Kachemak Bay with my brother Ted, his wife Susie, his sons Brad and Michael, and my son Thomas. The tide is moving in, and we are sight-casting heavy flies with 8-weight rods for pink salmon feeding in the surf in knee-deep water just off the beach while seals and sea otters cruise just behind the surf. We catch a steady succession of 18” to 25” fish, still saltwater fresh. We release most of them, but we keep enough to feed six of us, filleted and grilled over a fire at the edge of the beach. I’ve looked forward to recreating the memory with our students, as we continue our class, spending four nights camping at Right Beach. Except this year, the salmon aren’t coming close enough to shore to catch with my fly rod. The seal that keeps cruising the beach suggests some fish are out there, but I can’t prove it. I’ve been hyping fresh-grilled salmon to the students until their mouths were salivating. If I don’t catch one, I might have to eat crow.
It’s the third day of our stay before I finally catch one. Shortly after that, a commercial fishing boat approaches the beach. They put out a purse seine, and over the next few hours, they make three passes right up against the shore. I don’t see any salmon after that. Nor any seals. But it prompts a good discussion from the class about sustainable fisheries—especially after the woman running the skiff holds the seine so close to shore that we can stand on the beach talking with her. Or, rather, yelling back and forth with her over the roar of 250 horses in her boat’s engine. She shares how they had recently landed a 300-pound halibut, and notes that if she had been a millionaire, she would have released it, knowing how important a reproductively mature old fish like that is to the population. But, as she dryly points out, she isn’t a millionaire. She tells us how much money that one fish put into the pockets of each member of the crew.
The class also discusses what it means to be wild. We are camped just a few miles from a massive glacier, with nothing but forests, rivers, and oceans within several days of hiking. We also have commercial fishing boats passing within arm’s length of our beach, and most of us have four bars on our cell phones, either from a tower across the bay in Homer or perhaps from the nearby village of Halibut Cove. Which is what prompted my memory of the earlier sea-kayaking trip to Right Beach with my brother and his family. My nephew Brad really wanted to be with us, but he was working on his master’s degree in chemistry and had an important paper due that weekend. He was able to join us only because he could sit on the “wilderness” beach and use cell service to get data, sending drafts of the paper off to his advisor for comment before the final submission. All I have now of my nephew Brad are memories. A few years later, at the age of 31, he was killed in a car accident in Anchorage by a driver under the debilitating influence of some illicit chemicals who swerved across the median of a four-lane road and into oncoming traffic. Of all my father’s memory losses, the one that breaks my heart the most is that he no longer remembers his grandson Brad. If we mention Brad, we have to explain who he was, and then my father claims he never met him.
Now I’m the one sitting on Right Beach using cell service, talking with Deborah, who updates me on my dad. Today’s memory loss is the concept of cash. He has forgotten what it is. When Deborah tells him he has $200 in his wallet, he opens it and stares blankly, not recognizing the dozen bills in front of him.
The Murky Depths
It’s the start of the last week of class. We check into a hotel near Merrill Field on a Friday night. In the morning, the class will be flown in four small planes through Lake Clark Pass to spend our final week in Lake Clark National Park—two nights in comfort at the Farm Lodge, and four in a National Park Service cabin, with a fly-out trip to view bears and spawning salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve. The trip has been full of joy as I watch students engaged in learning in the best classroom a teacher could offer. We barely have to teach. The world around us does the teaching for us. All we have to do is encourage students to stop, watch, listen, and be attentive. And they really don’t need to be encouraged to do even that; the setting makes that come naturally.
Yet my mind has often drifted to loss. I think of my father’s loss of memories, and my loss of my father. And nearly everywhere I go with the class is somewhere I have gone with Brad. Preserved memories haunt me as much as the loss of them.
I took my first trip to the Bristol Bay drainage nearly twenty years ago with my father, spending three nights in a lodge on Lake Iliamna, and six days floating and fishing a tributary of the famous Nushagak. It was one of the few times my father ever fly fished. He grew up trolling the lakes of Michigan and Ontario and never took to any other type of fishing. One of my favorite photos of my father shows him grinning as he stands soaking wet from the rain, holding a fifteen-pound salmon he’d caught on a fly. When I think of Brad, I think of him, too, with a huge grin as he holds up a Dolly Varden he’d just caught on a fly on a Kenai Peninsula less than thirty miles from Right Beach. It is one of the most beautiful Dollies I’ve ever seen, decked out in October spawning garb with blood red spots and orange lipstick to accessorize its ruby red gown. It is a joyful memory that reminds me most poignantly of the loss.
While I sit in the hotel, I get a text that catches me by surprise. My daughter-in-law has gone into labor, a month earlier than expected. As beautiful as the flight is, the next day, my thoughts are distracted. They alternate between the beluga whales chasing salmon on the river below me and the expected birth of my first grandchild. I eagerly await news. It’s been less than two weeks since news of my father’s diagnosis. This is news of a different kind. More joyful. Except that once the plane enters the pass, my cell service disappears. I won’t get it again for two weeks. The Internet will also be sparse and rare. All I know is that the delivery is going slowly. There are complications.
A couple of months before the trip to Alaska, we found my father throwing away a pair of old 35mm family films. We rescued them and paid to have them digitized. When the video was shipped back on DVD, we sat with my father and watched. The films had been taken by my grandfather. One contained highlights of three years of camping and fishing trips from the early 1950s, when my father was in high school. The trips took them from Michigan to their favorite lake and river system in Ontario, far from any roads. I’d heard about these trips from my father—predecessors of our Allagash trips decades later—but I’d never seen any photos or videos.
Ten minutes into the film, my father’s eyes lit up at the image of another boy sitting in the boat behind him. “That was my best friend Max,” he said, with obvious delight. As we watched the old videos, other memories also miraculously surfaced from hidden depths.
And then they disappeared back into the dark. A week later, we watched the same video again. He didn’t recognize or remember anything or anybody. The captions filmed with refrigerator magnet letters were our only hints of where my father was and who he was with.
Drawn from the Water
In the national park in the final week of our summer class, we take our students on a five-mile round-trip hike to Tanalian Falls, a 30-foot thundering waterfall featured on a wall-sized photo in the Anchorage facility where we’d rented our vans for the first two weeks of the class. Though it’s our students’ first visit to the falls, my co-instructor Dave and I have visited the falls several times on previous visits to the Farm Lodge, and I’ve had some wonderful grayling fishing in the soft water around the plunge pool. So I bring my fly rod, promising to give fly-fishing lessons to Kira, one of the students. The river is flowing higher than on any previous visit. The twin plunge pools are far too turbulent and foam-filled to be fished. We see only one deep, dark hole upstream of a boulder that looks even remotely fishable.
And, apparently, that turbulence out in the main current is a good thing, because it means every big fish in the river has seemingly congregated in that one deep, relatively calm spot. They are feeding voraciously. Kira manages to catch a grayling with a little help, and after losing several others, she lands a couple more without help. When she has had her fill of wet wading in an icy river, I take my fly rod back. I take the cast and drift I’d wanted her to make, but which she hadn’t yet developed the skill to execute. A shadow, dark but with strong hints of red, looms up out of the deep like some old memory and takes my fly. I land the first and only lake trout I have ever caught below Tanalian Falls. The students admire the beauty of the fish as I hold it in a net in the water. I release it, and it disappears back into the murky, turbulent depths. Three more times over the next week I will return and cast for it, but like my father’s memories, the fish fails to return.
Whenever I can get internet, I check in with my wife and son. My grandson did succeed in escaping the dark depths of the womb, though not without considerable turbulence of his own. He has spent his first week in the NICU. About the time the class ends, he is released to go home. I am looking forward to meeting him, teaching him how to fish, and sharing with him— while I still hold on to them—my own memories of places that some might call wilderness. In a couple of weeks, my father will probably get to hold his newest great-grandson. At the time, I wonder whether my father will live long enough and with enough memory to go fishing with his great-grandson as he has done with his sons and grandchildren. Maybe my grandson will end up with some memories of his great-grandfather. If not, I have an old wilderness fishing video I can show. “That was your great-grandfather’s best friend, Max,” I can tell him. And I can tell him how his great-grandfather’s experiences have helped shape our family.
Matthew Dickerson is the author of several books, including novels, studies of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, works of spiritual theology, and several collections of essays about river ecology, native fish, and fly fishing. His stories, essays, and poems have also appeared in a variety of journals and magazines. He has served as artist-in-residence for Glacier National Park, Acadia National Park, and Alaska State Parks and is a member of the Chrysostom Society and the Outdoor Writers Association of America. His most recent books include: Birds in the Sky, Fish in the Sea: Attending to Creation with Delight and Wonder (Square Halo, 2025), Aslan’s Breath: Seeing the Holy Spirit in Narnia (Square Halo, 2024), and The Salvelinus, the Sockeye, and the Egg-Sucking Leech: Abundance and Diversity in the Bristol Bay Drainage (Wings Press, 2023). You can learn more about Matthew by visiting www.matthewdickerson.net and www.troutdownstream.net