Eight years ago, my son (who is a knucklehead, and we will get into that in depth in the months to come) was born. My wife stopped working to stay at home, a decision we were both comfortable with, except money was going to be a problem. Joining the Navy Reserve seemed to be a decent option, I was ex-Army and my electrical license would help me advance in rank. The commissary made things much more affordable.

A construction job doesn’t really allow much time off, so all of my off time was spent with the Reserves. We hadn’t had a vacation in about 10 years, until the beginning of October of this year.

We rented a private cabin on the side of a cliff overlooking the Shenandoah River. We could have cried when we walked onto the porch and saw the view. It was pulled right off of a postcard.

Before we left I put together some second hand fishing gear and purchased my fishing license. Growing up in Michigan, fishing was everywhere, and was never really fun for me. My best memory of fishing growing up was sitting with my dad on the rocks at the State Park on the “beautiful shores” of Lake Erie listening to Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey broadcast a Detroit Tiger gane on WJR.

That was lake fishing from the shore where my dad had grown up. We were going to have to catch something from a strange river in a place we had never been. I broke it to him that we probably weren’t going to be catching anything.

Before we went down to the shore, I had him practice casting for about an hour in the yard. He was a natural…at least we would look like we knew what we were doing. We had a chance to get down there on our second day, but nothing even looked our way, let alone touched our fake worms. He was still having fun…we caught about 20 pounds of grass and weeds.

The next day we were taking a day trip and drove past a Wal-Mart. Bingo!

Tuesday morning we were up bright and early. The new lures were on the lines and as we made it down to the river we saw the fog settled over the water, and it was cool enough that we needed to have our jackets on. I went one way and he went another. The water was so clear and rocky on the shore that he was able to walk onto a large rock about six feet from the shore. This way he could cast out a little farther.

On his second cast of the morning he reeled in his first fish…a 5″ bluegill. I was able to see this from a distance…soak it all in and watch the determination and joy he had just experienced. He felt like such a man (we were ignoring the fact he was using a Sponge Bob fishing pole) on that shore.

The best part of it all was that the camera was in the tackle box…it is all on film. That picture has only been viewed once and that was when it was downloaded from the camera to the computer. The actual image has been permanently etched on my soul.

I wish we could have stayed on that shore forever. I’ll have to find other “shores”.

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