Sometimes life takes twists and turns that have surprising endings.
Early on a recent morning my husband, Kirk, and our eight-year-old grandson were fishing in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. They had left before breakfast in order to get a good fishing spot in a place they’d had good luck before. When they arrived, they found several other fishermen there, but soon after, the others left and my two loves had the spot all to themselves.
After fishing for a few minutes, Kirk noticed that one of the prior fishermen had left a backpack behind. He looked inside for identification but found none; however, the backpack was full of expensive fishing bait and supplies — and the owner was long gone. My husband’s plan was to leave it where it was and hope the owner would return for it.
Kirk and our grandson fished for a couple hours, made a catch, and decided they were hungry for breakfast. It was our last morning of vacation and we needed to pack up to make the long drive home. Kirk gathered up his fishing vest and the two fishers carried their poles back to the car, then returned to our motel where we packed the car and left.
About two hours into our drive we took a short detour to one last fishing spot. It’s always nice to stretch your legs after riding in the car. And if you can drop your fishing line in the water at the same time it’s even better. That was the plan until Kirk looked for his pocket-sized tackle box so he could put a different lure on our grandson’s pole. Normally the little yellow box would be in the front pocket of Kirk’s fishing vest. It was filled with all his favorite “Go-To” lures, hooks, split shot and other necessities. But it was missing. And so was his second, smaller pocket-size box.
Realizing he had left both his small vest-sized tackle boxes on a rock at Grant Lake earlier that morning, Kirk was sick and disappointed. We were too far away to drive back, and the chances of the tackle boxes still being there were slim. The irony of Kirk having forgotten his tackle after finding a backpack belonging to someone else and choosing to leave it for the owner was not lost on us. But after thinking about his own loss for a while, Kirk hoped someone who really needed it would be the one to find it.
The next day we took our grandson home for his birthday party and while the children were celebrating and playing games we sat with the other grandparents and chatted. The subject of the lost tackle boxes came up. Our son-in-law’s father, Dave, said that because he’s also a fisherman he could understand how disappointing Kirk’s loss was, and that he had a small gift for Kirk, from one fisherman to another. The gift was something he’d had for fifty years but no longer used or needed. The gift was an almost-identical yellow pocket tackle box to which Dave had added one lure “to get Kirk started” again.
My eyes filled with tears as I witnessed a selfless, touching act of kindness between two men who share a love of fishing and a love of family. A sad situation had a surprising and happy ending.