Yesterday's Enterprises

While doing 30 Days of Blogging in 2013, (something that I actually managed to do once or twice, unlike NaNoWriMo which I've managed to consistently fail at every year I've tried), one of the suggested topics was to share a memory of one of my parents. I didn't get to it during the month of blogging that year, but on Father's Day that June I wrote this entry about how my father spent hours making mostly military models throughout my childhood, and then described how he made me a set of three Star Trek Enterprises (the original, the Enterprise A, and the Enterprise D) before I went away to college, to take with me. I was pretty sure I still owned them, and ended with this speculation:

It's possible that somewhere in my parents' attic I have a shoebox full of Enterprise fragments, or I have the only models my father made that survived my childhood. Next time I go home, I may want to find out, but the odds are slim since I'm going in December and trips to the attic are weather-dependent.

I didn't make it into the attic in 2013 or 2014, even though I was in the house and the attic clearly isn't going anywhere, but this morning I decided I might as well go up while I remembered that I wanted to, and pulled down the steps.



As I mentioned in the previous entry, the attic isn't climate controlled. No air conditioning makes it up there, and there's very little heat. It's sort of warm right now in upstate New York (A balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit! Practically summer!), so I figured long pants and a shirt would be warm enough to just climb up for a minute, search one box, and climb back down. My two boxes from college that are both still up there are blue and white striped lidded cardboard storage boxes (in college and after I was still into my all-encompassing "If it comes in blue, then I want it blue" phase, which lasted until about 1999, when living in an apartment painted entirely blue, every wall in every room floor to ceiling in this specific shade, cured me) with notecards describing the contents taped to each lid, and they should have been immediately right of the attic entrance.

They weren't.

Our attic used to be very neatly divided: my stuff at the far right, my brother's at the far left, and my parents' in the middle, closest to the entrance, because they would presumably need their stuff more often than we would need ours. In the intervening years, my stuff has slowly been shoved over by boxes placed in front of it, mostly Christmas items, and somehow my two blue and white boxes moved from the front of my stuff to the very back of my stuff, all the way over. Even worse, when I finally got to them after shimmying around Christmas boxes and moving a huge plastic bin of Legos (which was very heavy), I realized that my careful labelling boiled down to the same notation on both index cards: "Star Trek stuff".

21 year old me needs a stern lecturing about attention to detail.

I finally found the box of models in the second box, and carried it downstairs without opening it. If all the glue had dried and broken in the intervening time, I didn't want to try to find the pieces of these things after they rolled and bounced all over the floor of the attic. The box was not the sturdy shoebox I remembered, but all three ships were still wrapped in paper towels inside.

So, did they survive?

More or less, yes.

There's some discoloration on the top of them, from sitting in the sun on my desk for four years, which becomes really obvious when you turn them over:





If there actually was a stand, it wasn't in either box and is presumably gone, but the ships themselves are still in great shape, with paint, stickers, and glue intact, just like when Dad painted and glued them together in 1993:











Now we just have to get them back to Tennessee without breaking them.

I Caught the Most Fish

In late April, my parents came down for what is turning into their annual pilgrimage to the South. I mean, it's three years in a row. That has to be enough to start calling it annual, right? Especially if they're already planning next year? In a change from past years, this year they decided that rather than stay in a hotel they would rent a vacation cabin in Pigeon Forge, and I would come stay with them there. That way, we could have more family time, rather than us going to do things and then me hustling them back to the hotel.

It worked out well. We sat around, read books, went shopping, cooked meals together, and also dad and I went fly fishing.

Yes. I went fishing.

And I caught the most fish.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

My dad decided to hire a fishing guide, something I encouraged him to do after I met one while waiting for a delayed plane on my way home from my trip to Providence last fall, and he invited me to go, too. It turns out that no one actually expected me to say yes, but my dad and I rarely do things together. This is mostly because we live 14 hours apart, and also because when I go home to visit it's usually during hunting season, when my parents spend all day in the woods and I lay on the couch reading books. Even though I dislike the water and kind of hate boats, I figured that Dad would have a good time, and if I got bored I could just take pictures of the river.

Instead, it turned out that I actually liked fishing.

Our day started early, because we had to drive all the way through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park from the Tennessee side to the North Carolina side. I've never made the full drive before, but I've driven most of the way, and had to argue Dad into leaving early because he wanted to believe the guide, who side the drive would only take 45 minutes. Sure it does, if you speed, but I know that people who speed go straight to a special burning seat in hell, just like people who take more than ten items into the "Ten Items or Less" line at the grocery store. I blocked us an hour and a half of driving time, which let us set a leisurely pace and chat all the way there. Dad hadn't been through that part of the park before, and it has really spectacular views through the high mountains, so he got to look out the window the whole way since I drove, and we ended up getting to Cherokee fifteen minutes early.

We were supposed to meet the guide at the Cherokee Fun Park parking lot:



which did not look at all fun. It looked kind of sad and run down, like pretty much everything in the few parts of Cherokee that we saw did.

I have to go back there with my camera and nothing to do, soon.

Anyway, the guide met up with us, and then we followed him to a parking area where we left my car and he drove us downstream, so that when we finished we would be back at my car and could drive home. I'm sure we impressed him as serious outdoorsmen, arriving in a Volkswagen Beetle with a gold star on the rear antenna.



(The star didn't have ice on it at the time. I just don't have another photo of it.)

Our guide was thrilled to find out where I worked and that I had actually spoken to some of the football coaches over the last few years, and we spent the whole first hour or so talking about the Vols. I can do that, because I've become semi fluent in sportsball discussions. During that time he also put the boat in the water:



and then put me in the boat:



There I am, friends. I'm on a boat, and I managed to go the whole day without singing, "I'm On a Boat":



Dad brought his own poles and his own flies, so it was clear that he didn't really need any attention, and the guide focused on getting me up to speed.

"Joel, your dad says you've never been fly fishing before. Do you know anything about it?"

"Yes. I've seen 'A River Runs Through It', because Brad Pitt was in that movie."

Silence on the river. And not the kind of silence that means we're all communing with nature. More of the slightly awkward kind of silence.

"Uh... but, uh, other than that, nothing. I've never done it before. I've only fished off of docks."

And so our guide started with the basics. I learned to overhead cast, and then sideways. I learned to correct my line, and how to let my fly drift. And then, eventually, I hooked my first fish. And that's when we had our only bit of trouble, other than the times that Dad and I accidentally hooked each other's poles when we both cast at the same time instead of taking turns.

See, I'm left handed. That may not seem like a big deal, and it's something Dad often forgets because I am the only left hander in my family, but it meant that the poles that the guide brought to teach me to fish on were all set for right handed people, which means that when I hooked a fish, popped my fishing pole to set the hook, and then started trying to reel it in, I turned the reel in my natural left handed direction, rather than the direction that right handed people would crank the reel in.

Which meant I was letting the line out instead of reeling in the fish.

After a rapid correction, the guide got my sinister, gauche left hand under control, and suddenly:



I caught a trout.

AND I HELD IT, ALIVE, IN MY HAND:



The guide said that you had to hold it when it was your first fish, kind of like how Jennifer Grey had to drink the blood of the first deer she killed in "Red Dawn". (My mom says that's not actually a real tradition, and that you don't have to drink the deer blood, but I remain dubious.) I wet my hands (you have to, or else your hand rubs off the slime coating that helps protect the fish from parasites and injury), held the fish, and then threw it back in the water.

And then I caught another fish:



And another:



And by the end of the day I was doing overhead casting like Brad Pitt in that movie, and I was all, "Oh, hey, another fish jumped onto my line," and I ended up catching the most fish: seven rainbow trout and one brook trout, the only brookie of the day. Dad kind of implied that he somehow caught fewer fish than I did on purpose, so that I could bask in the glow of my accomplishment, but it's not like you can shake the fish off rather than reel them in, so I think he was maybe saving face a little bit.

What's important, though, is that Dad and I spent an entire day together, and we didn't argue or squabble or get on each other's nerves. He got to introduce me to something he loves, and I loved it, too. And he emailed all of his friends, and sent out the pictures to everyone, and he was so excited to come back to the cabin and tell Mom all about it.

And that's really all I wanted to get out of the day.

But I also caught the most fish.

My Father Made Models

Back during April's 30 Days of Blogging, I received a topic that I never got around to using:

Share a memory about one of your parents

I didn't deliberately avoid the topic. It just happened to be the end of the month and I hadn't used it yet, so I thought, "I'll save that for Mother's Day or Father's Day." I thought about writing about my mom back on Mother's Day, but my mom gets a lot of attention here since we share recipes and go shopping when I visit home, so I decided to save the topic and give my dad a spotlight entry, because he's awesome and he loves me and I love him, too.

When I was little, my father spent hours making plastic military models.

This was a fascinating process to watch, which you were allowed to do if you were quiet and didn't touch things. Dad would take a box of plastic mold racks, slowly snap pieces off of them, use a dremel tool to file off the places where the model piece and the rack had joined, and then, depending on the model, glue and then paint or paint and then glue. Sometimes there was also an extra step with the dremel tool where he might use it to give a plastic wall texture, or to drill some tiny bullet holes in something, or maybe to give something a slightly mangled edge. He also sometimes singed the edges of things with a match after painting, like papers on a table or posters on walls, or sometimes the walls themselves.

There were walls because he often made dioramas around the models, using a picture frame laid flat as the base, painting the glass sheet as brick or mud or water, adding green or brown dust from hobby stores while the paint was wet to give it texture, burning and sanding and texturing premade plastic brick wall sections for troops to peek around or hide behind. Like I said, these were fascinating, intricate models.

The painting was also important, and something I have never been able to master. My dad has extremely steady hands, and could use brushes that were apparently only one or two hairs to paint eye whites and then irises on tiny soldiers who were only an inch tall. Military medals the size of pinheads were painted on chests with historically accurate colors. History books from the post library (no internet or wikipedia when I was little) were consulted to see if Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was a blond or a brunette, and he was painted accordingly.

Sometimes these models were given to my brother, who enjoyed military things. They were rarely given to me, as I didn't care for them, but once a specific model was made for me: a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. It was ten inches long, and the wheels turned if you rolled it along the floor or a tabletop. The hood opened to reveal a detailed engine, the trunk opened, and the doors opened to show textured leather seats. The same care spent on tanks, jets, and soldiers was spent on my Rolls, with a license plate number that matched our car at the time and tiny painted dials and guages on the dashboard. The Silver Ghost didn't survive my childhood, as I played with it often and plastic models held together with airplane glue are not built to the same standards as Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks. Over the course of a year or two the Rolls slowly disintegrated, losing an antenna or a door or a running board, and eventually was no more, but for years afterward I saved one of the wheels.

None of the models survived my childhood, actually. We moved a few times, and movers tend not to be gentle people. Despite hours or work, my father treated them as completely disposable, and once broken they were usually thrown away rather than repaired. Eventually he stopped making models as a hobby, although I'm not sure why. After we moved from Alaska to upstate New York (real upstate, by Canada, not New York City media upstate where everything above the five boroughs is "upstate" because it's above them) he just moved on to other things, and didn't make models anymore, with one exception, notable because it may also be the only surviving model my Dad made:

Before I went away to college, I spent $20 on a set that would make the Enterprise 1701, 1701-A, and 1701-D, all in scale to each other and sitting on a little display stand. My Dad put these models together, applying decals, painting warp nacelles and deflector dishes according to my specifications, and I kept them on my desk for all four years of college. Each time I had to pack my dorm room each ship was taken off the stand, wrapped in several layers of paper towels, and all three were packed together in a sturdy shoe box. They remain in that shoe box today, somewhere in my parents' attic, and that's why I'm not sure if they have surived or not. My parents' attic is neither heated nor air-conditioned, so those models have been subjected to over a decade of bitter cold and blistering heat, and I have no idea if those are conditions that model glue can withstand.

So, it's possible that somewhere in my parents' attic I have a shoebox full of Enterprise fragments, or I have the only models my father made that survived my childhood. Next time I go home, I may want to find out, but the odds are slim since I'm going in December and trips to the attic are weather-dependent.

In the meantime, Happy Father's Day to my dad, who made models.