Without bothering to read the blurb or scan the book, I checked out from the public library Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska by Lou Ureneck. I expected something easy; some quasi-philosophical reflections on fly-fishing, perhaps a handful of insights about parenting. The Alaskan wilderness is always ripe for such comments.
Not so fast. The book is not really about fishing or the wilderness. By the first page I’m thinking what a rotten son. Several pages later, I’m thinking what a rotten dad. A marvelous thing about books is their ability to invoke empathy and foster epiphanies, and this one had me. Mistakes? Yes, and some big ones. But by the end of the book, I felt only sympathy for the characters.
The story continues in an abab pattern, with a chapter of Lou Ureneck and his son Adam fishing, floating, and camping on the Kenektok river in Alaska, followed by a chapter of Ureneck’s memoirs that fill in the backstory.
Despite Lou’s turbulent childhood, he has become a stable adult. After high school, He obtained some scholarships to attend college, and emerged to become a reporter for a respectable newspaper, rising through the ranks until he became editor. He married a fine lady. As a newlywed, he built a timber-frame house with his own hands, with the timber off of his own land. It was a sturdy house with a masonry chimney, the symbol of steadfastness and warmth and quality. He raised a family, a boy and girl. The children were happy. He is rooted to a place, and his community means something to him.
He isn’t chained to his past. He’s a successful business man now. But his overcoming of challenges, which has given him a sense of freedom from his past, now draws him away from his marriage; He wants to move to Philadelphia to work for a bigger newspaper; more prestige, more pay, a new challenge for his skill set.
Here a reader is thinking: Don’t do it, Lou Ureneck. Don’t do it. You’ve accomplished what you’ve set out to do: you’re editor-in-chief of a respectable newspaper. You’re financially solvent. You’ve created the kind of stable life for your family you never had as boy. You’ve arrived.
But he wants the job. The wife refuses. Ureneck moves anyway, and it costs him his marriage and his family. As a bystander, we see his life come down as though watching it in slow motion. Ureneck also starts seeing another woman before he is divorced, which must only heighten the sense of betrayal to his family.
It’s not a simple story. The book eventually flashes back to cover three generations. Lou’s mother, from a Greek immigrant family, was the only girl among three boys in her family. Her culture was a particularly misogynistic, and while her three brothers had many freedoms, Lou’s mother was not allowed to go outside alone. After sneaking out for years and finally secretly becoming married, a marriage she wishes to annul a mere two days afterwards, her parents refuse and send her out to live with her decision. Her husband turns out to be an alcoholic and an abuser.
Lou’s father, this alcoholic abuser, leaves the family. He simply walks out and never comes back. Lou then lives with his younger brother and mother in a cycle of homes, jobs, and step-fathers. His mother was not one to take scruples over truth; if she could bend it to suit her needs, fine. Johnny came, a kind of live-in stepfather who eventually became his legal stepfather. Johnny was often jobless, often drunk, usually simultaneously.
What strikes me is Ureneck’s sympathy for these characters. He never passes judgement on his father, stepfather, or mother. The closest he comes is mentioning that he never thought of himself as having a dad. And he narrates it all, including his own failures, in a straightforward first-person point of view that never asks for pity, which, ironically, makes it possible for us to give it to him.
So now we have three generations of trouble: A family culture that enticed a young girl to elope; the dysfunction of alcoholic fathers, and now this divorce that Lou vowed would never happen. Lou’s determination to deliver himself from his past has contributed directly to this failure. And now father and son, with the vectors of generations converging on their wilderness trip, are locked in a combat of wills in the crucible of the wilderness. Lou’s heart is breaking. Adam keeps up a solid stream of micro-rejections, challenging his father’s authority and generally exhibiting his anger like only an eighteen-year-old can. What was supposed to be a trip of dreams and promise and memories, of father-son solidarity, becomes hell in a rubber raft.
But here is the scene that broke my heart. They are deep in the Alaskan wilderness and it has been raining for days. It is midnight. The tent is leaking and the water is puddling under Lou’s cheap cotton sleeping bag, and he awakes cold, wet, and miserable. After a brief look around, he realizes the tent floor is at an angle and all the water is puddling on his side of the tent. Adam is on the high side of the tent with a water-resistant down mummy sleeping bag. Lou’s bag would never dry in this weather, especially not at midnight. He thinks through his options for the rest of the night, and the only viable one he sees is to crawl in with his son. The son refuses, saying he must be crazy, and crawls deeper into the mummy bag. Lou steps out into the rain, zips on his rain jacket and fishing waders, and spends the night sitting against a rock with the rain beating on his back, trying to sleep, while his son slumbers warm and dry in a tent fifteen feet away.
“The trip had been a mistake, I thought. My persistence in putting it together, without enough money and without Adam’s support, had been an act of stupidity. I had been a fool to stick with it. For three years I had been packing peanut butter sandwiches and counting my change in the morning to decide whether I could afford the bus to work…
“I knew there was love and hurt on the other side of Adam’s fury, but I didn’t know how to reach it. At first, I had tried to get there through talk; that hadn’t worked. Then, I had hoped that the passage of time and steadiness and understanding would diminish it. That also failed. Everything had failed, and my son had sent me out into the rain.
“The only thing he wanted from me was the one thing I couldn’t give, and that was the return of his family…” (page 168, 169)
At Adam’s age, fathers can seem implacable. Eighteen is old enough to know that fathers are not superheroes, but eighteen is often not old enough to realize that fathers are fragile. Like a draft horse restrained by a single strand of electric fence, a son at this stage often does not realize his own capacity to break the thin edges of his father’s heart. And by Ureneck’s age, say, forty or forty-five, which is an age I haven’t been yet, I can imagine a different set of realizations crashing down, not the least of which is that you have spent about half your life already and this is what you get.
Saint Paul writes that sons should honor their father and that fathers should not provoke their children to wrath. Maybe there is no excuse for bitterness from a son and no excuse for a father to betray his family, but we can see the circumstances that fostered it; the circumstances that made the high road such a climb for both of them. By the last page of Backcast, the tragedy is running thick and I feel only sympathy. Mistakes? Yes. But that doesn’t change the reality of complicated relationships and their thorny problems, the arduous road to reconciliation. Nor does it change the fierce love a father has for his son.
When I closed the book it hit me: My father still lives, and we talk on the phone from time to time. My new daughter is staring me in the face, trying to figure out who I am. Suddenly, I see myself as a treasurer of the hearts of two generations; I only now realize my potential to wound my father; I only now realize my potential to betray my daughter.