Leeks

I was nearly finished working my way up a favorite section of one of Wisconsin’s Spring Creeks when I saw them. There were maybe four or five of them in a patch beneath a big Cottonwood tree. Even from a distance, their bright green color and strong, broad leaves were unmistakable. They stood in stark contrast to the rest of the forest floor, still mostly dressed in its late winter browns and grays. Wild leeks, one of the first signs of the new spring.

I walked over and set my rod and vest down and took a closer look. A patchwork of sunlight shining down through the branches of the Cottonwood shifted back and forth over the leeks as the wind moved the tree limbs first this way and then that way. As the leeks moved from sunlight to shadow and then back again, it was almost as if you could see them growing, defying the cold and damp of the ground to insist that Spring was here again.

I sat down on a log beside the leeks and just watched them for a few minutes. The wind shifted again and I could smell their faint onion odor on the breeze as it blew my way. My thoughts took me back in time.

I thought of my Dad, gone now for 26 months, and I thought about how much I miss him. Almost everything that is a part of my love of the outdoors is something that my Dad gave me. The early morning crackle of frost underfoot as we walked from the car to the duck swamp. The rustle of the blackberry brambles against my canvas hunting pants as we plowed our way through yet another thicket to see if we could jump a grouse and maybe get a shot. And gray-brown ground along the edges of our favorite trout stream being pushed aside by the first leeks of the new spring. We went to the woods and waters to hunt and fish, but the sights, sounds and scents of the world around us are what stays with me the most after all these years. They were as essential to the experience as the actual catching of a fish or the clean shot on the wood duck barreling over me 30 yards in the air.

My Dad, my brother and I spent dozens of Opening Days of Pennsylvania’s trout season together on our favorite little alder-choked brook just down over the hill from where my Mom grew up in Eastern Crawford County where the first ridges of the Allegheny Plateau began to rise on their march eastward for the next 200 miles. We rose early, packed a lunch and drove the 35 miles from our home to our stream. We did it every year all though my boyhood. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were making a tradition that would bind us for a lifetime and stoke and feed a fire in me that burns strong to this day. To be on the water, to hear it sing as it fell from rock to rock and to ply its pools and undercut banks in search of the trout. These are some of the fondest memories of my life.

And the leeks played their part in it all. In terms of on-the-water temperament, my dad and I were complete opposites. I would bolt from the car like I had a hot foot and cover a half mile of water pretty much in the blink of an eye. My Dad was a meticulous, tenacious angler. He would plant himself at the head of an alder-clogged run near the bridge and float his worm down though the pool again and again. And again. And he would catch fish by simply outlasting them. And after a while, I would come straggling back down the creek to find he and my brother, pretty much where I had left them when I was breaking the sound barrier on my way up the creek, literally short of breath with excitement at the idea of what might be up around the next bend and the one after that and having to find out, right now.

I would walk down the streamside path and there he would be, still in the creek with his rod extended downstream and one hand holding his slack line in case he had a take. Still as a heron on the hunt, except for the occasional waving of his hat to disperse a cloud of gnats. And out of the top of the side pocket of the hunting jacket he always wore would often be sticking the bright green leaves of a few wild leeks he’d found and picked. Dad loved the wild leeks. He said they were like “candy”.

Soon enough, we would load up the gear in the car and head on home. To this day, I don’t remember hearing him talk about so much about how many fish he had missed or caught as I remember him talking about his plans for the leeks when he got home. He’d hose them off and eat them raw or he’d put a little butter in a pan and brown them up. He loved them and the way they tasted. But I think more than this, he loved everything that surrounded the event of his finding the leeks. The woods, the water, the discovery. It really lit him up and as a result, it lit me up too.

Back on my log, I reach over and pull one of the leeks from the ground and than walk over to the creek and rinse it off and eat it. And the moment the mild flavor of onions hits my palate, I’m back with him again on the little creek. And I know that just for that moment, I’d give just about all I own to see him again, legs braced in the flow, ancient fly rod pointed straight downstream and the leeks sticking out of the pocket of his hunting coat.