I am four years old, my light brown curls restrained into two pigtails above my ears. I am standing barefoot in our kitchen and am twirling gleefully in a circle at dizzying speed. I am wearing a tiny, fringed, deerskin jacket. As I spin around, the long leather fringes on my coat fly out and make me laugh. It is a perfect, golden moment, shared with my six older siblings, as they too don identical deerskin jackets. These leather coats are a present from our Daddy, a gift-giver at heart. Even more than the novelty of such fancy clothes for us plain, Mennonite children, the real treasure is that they are custom made from the tanned hides of deer which he personally shot.
Daddy was an outdoorsman. He loved to organize hunting trips out west to rugged Wyoming for his friends. They would spend several weeks camping and hunting deer and elk. I have heard from my uncles what a legendary marksman he was. He also took fishing trips into remote Canada, to places where you had to be flown into and then out again, with tiny planes that landed on the water. He had a great sense of adventure and loved living large. Each trip meant that he left Mama home with seven children, which seems a bit unfair; perhaps that was more normative for that era. Mama adored him and was very long suffering. She would never say anything to cross him.
That's him on the far right, with the white cap.
Daddy is the one in the center.
As Daddy hunted, he brought home many trophy souvenirs: our living room walls were hung with mounted heads of antelope and deer. There was a stuffed black bear head in the basement, testament to Daddy's sure shot. Over the years, he collected the hides from the deer he shot. I wish that I could ask him if he always had a plan for those skins, or if in a spontaneous moment, he drove all seven of his children to Vaughn's Tanning, in our hometown of Hartville, Ohio, and had us measured for jackets. Our Mama got a new coat too, although not a deerskin one. She got a white, puffy ski jacket, another oddity for a conservative Mennonite. Not only was white a dirt magnet, and thus not practical, the style was a departure from our typical. plain, wool, outer garments.
This is me, dwarfed in Mama's special coat.
I will never get the chance to find out what motivated him to clothe us like Native-American-meets-Sound-of-Music: identical buckskin jackets, covering our Mennonite garb. Daddy drowned a year later, in his favorite surroundings, the great outdoors. He was ice fishing with friends on a frigid January day, near our home in Ohio; he climbed onto his ski doo with one of the guys and went skimming over the ice of the reservoir to scout out a new place to drop a line. They came to a place where the ice was not frozen solid enough to hold their weight, but they had too much speed to turn and avoid the water. Within minutes, both men were buried in an icy grave.
Fifty years later, I am suddenly reminded of those fringed, sueded jackets. I am rummaging through a storage closet, looking for fall decor to update my house for the autumnal season. Hanging on a high clothes rack, I spy this tiny coat. In a flood of memories, I am overwhelmed anew at the great loss my family suffered, half a century ago. I stroke the soft, supple leather, and think about the large, rough, fatherly hands that provided this garment for me. The symbolism of it being a coat is not lost on me: a coat provides warmth and protection, and that is what we lost when Daddy drowned.
I have a long, therapeutic, several day, texting conversation with my sisters about our childhood, matching, fringed, deerskin jackets. We jointly compile all of our memories about receiving these garments; sadly, most of the memories are lost to time. Two sisters manage to unearth their coats and we decide to display them in our homes this fall, as a reminder of our fallen, outdoorsman, hero. Hopefully it will generate conversations for Linda and Sharon, with their children and grandkids, and tales will be told about the grandfather that they never knew.
Last week, Larry and I and two brother-in-laws, Mike and Ken, spent several glorious days fly fishing in Yellowstone National Park. The beauty of autumn in Wyoming and Montana will leave you breathless: snow has already fallen on the tops of the mountains, the meadows are covered with tall, tawny grasses that sway in the wind, the rivers are lined with willow bushes, whose golden leaves and dark red stalks provide striking contrast, pines and evergreens secure the backdrop, and interspersed are shocking pops of yellow from the white barked aspens. Herds of bison cross the road on dainty hooves, a lone bull elk and his harem of females can be spotted across the meadow, and the rivers are teaming with large, active trout, who are making their way upstream to spawn.
As I stand in the swift, cold, Madison River, drinking in the vast beauty all round, and cast my fly fishing line just as our exceptional guide, Sam, has instructed, I think of my Daddy. I am in his territory, surrounded by rocky mountains, listening to the impatient bugling of a bull elk, hidden in the trees beyond the meadow, and feel the giddy triumph of landing that trophy rainbow trout. Who was this man I hardly remember, who gifted me with half of my genes? Perhaps I love the great outdoors so much because he did. I feel close to him in these elements.
I reel in a brown trout, and we admire its pumpkin hued belly as it flops in the net. Larry is manning the video, so we can relive these good times in the years to come, and he says to me, "your dad would be so proud of you!" I feel a lump welling up in my throat and I am no longer a middle aged fisherwoman standing in the river; I am four years old again, dressed in my deerskin jacket, twirling so the fringes swing out in a circle around me. "Look at me Daddy. Look at me!"
I know each of my siblings feels the same loss and longs to hear our Daddy say, "I am so proud of you!" My love to each of you; even today, may you feel the warmth and protection of our heavenly Father.