How to Raise a Fly Child

All photos by Chase White

Along British Columbia’s legendary and remote Dean River, one of Earth’s greatest steelhead fisheries, 9-year-old Oly Dean Hickman would just as soon catch a toad.

Oly stands in contrast to the single-minded anglers who arrive each week by floatplane to his parents’ Kimsquit Bay Lodge, where his father, Jeff, runs the guide service from mid-June through mid-September. And not just because he’s the only kid immersed in a wilderness where grizzlies outnumber guests.

Below the towering snowcapped Coast Mountains that feed the Dean’s waters, fishing is incidental to Oly’s free-roaming excursions and explorations. He’s happy to swing a fly with his dad, who knows better than to force the rod. Oly’s joy and discovery is unencumbered by fever dreams of fish or a need to prove himself. Fun ranks first.

It’s all part of the Hickmans’ approach to life and parenting—their deep commitment to wild fish activism, a devotion to the environment, and the remarkable childhood and unstructured play of their son, all arranged to fit their lifestyle. There’s an urgency to it, but no need to rush things. And everyone has a job to do: whether it’s his parents’ 16-hour days or Oly’s double duties of head wading-boot washer and official dinner-bell ringer.

“He gets it. He’s fascinated by it all,” Jeff says. “He recognizes how special and privileged lodge life is.”

As my own children approach adulthood, I look at that with a bit of awe and wonder and an urge to ask, “What if?” My wife and I took a different path. City living, office jobs, day care. An escape to the hills whenever we could. Yet, since our children were young, I’ve wanted them to feel, like Oly, at ease in wild places. To help them see wilderness as something to value, not just of value. To be transformed by wilderness as I had, even if those untamed landscapes are a long-distance idea.

I was slightly older than Oly is now when I had my first sip of wilderness on a late July day four decades ago. We were an anxious hour or so into a five-day paddle in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, just shy of the Canadian border. Under foreboding slate skies, the 20-something trip leaders tied together our two canoes and prepared a floating lunch. PB&J, squirted from plastic bags onto smashed wheat bread stuck together like a broken accordion, washed down with the same unfiltered water we drifted across.

When it was my turn, I cautiously leaned over the gunwales, plunged a dip cup, examined its contents for water-borne disease and quaffed. Water never tasted so exotic or so influential. Anything this clean, this pure, was beyond my imagination.

It raised the curtain to what came next: rigging bear hangs, stumbling along boggy portage trails, plucking crawdads from rocky shores, counting all the loons, bald eagles and moose we saw, surviving a nighttime thunderstorm in a tent.

The two adults leading four middle schoolers did more than read the maps to navigate from one lake to the next, find our campsites or keep us safe. They unveiled something beyond our everyday selves. I revered them, wanted to be like them, to have the competence and confidence to discover this world and others like it.

When I got home, I set out to show my parents whom I’d become. I scraped peanut butter and jelly from their jars into plastic bags and insisted my mother buy wheat bread. After she did, I snatched the loaf from the grocery bag and smashed it. The canoe trip had rewired my brain. Drawn a new map inside of me. My heroes, my values, my identity and what I believed in had shifted. I’d been reborn in wilderness.

Like Oly, I think I got it. I couldn’t articulate it then and can only now fully appreciate what a privilege it was—and the privilege it required—to be in wilderness, if only for a few days. The land and lakes were a mirror to help me understand myself, to face my own fears and weaknesses. The experience showed me how to struggle and to embrace it.

More than 20 years after that first trip to the Boundary Waters, a different kind of wilderness changed me again—parenting. With this new purpose came a new set of questions: How soon could I get my children to experience wilderness and appreciate its value as I had? How could I create those moments when I feel an urgency they don’t have, aren’t ready for or may never want?

As a parent, I didn’t always get the answers or outcomes to those questions as I’d hoped for or wanted. I beamed when a group of young Yosemite Valley climbers cheered on my 7-year-old daughter as she reached the anchors at the top of a slick and slightly awkward pitch. But all of their applause and my assurances weren’t going to relieve her terror or make me the rad dad I imagined myself to be. It was too much, too soon.

The fact is, embracing wilderness is embracing what’s difficult. And maybe parenting is that way too—harder. Bigger responsibility. Existential problems. It feels like we may have a larger job on our hands. I didn’t realize it to start, but it’s what I’d signed up for.

“We’re there for the adventure, making a living in the middle of nowhere,” Jeff says. “Sometimes the adventure isn’t that much fun.”

I’ve pocketed my own little flinty shards of wisdom, borne out of mistakes, injuries and close calls, smoothed over by time and distance, carried for decades to present to my children as little cairns to guide their way. Which, more often than not, they knock over with a big roll of their eyes. Parenting, like wilderness, is humbling.

Nearly 20 years deep into parenting, I still find myself in that wilderness. And with more questions than answers: Will my kids ever share my love for the outdoors? Will they work to protect the wild, when that seems to be increasingly difficult? Are they ready for the challenges ahead? Have I done my job?

As the years roll by, some answers start to take shape. Not long ago, I took my son to the Boundary Waters for the first time, when he was roughly the same age as Oly. Having idealized the moment, I was on edge before the trip. There was rain in the forecast. I snapped when we got delayed shopping for last-minute supplies and waffled over which fishing rods and flies to bring. I felt desperate to re-create a magic I had little control over.

Once we were in the canoe, all that noise and worry faded away. There weren’t as many loons as I remembered. We didn’t see crawdads, eagles or a single moose. There was more rain than sun. The rods leaned against a tree for the most part. My son had no interest in sipping straight from the lake.

But he drank the rest of it in. He portaged packs, giggled at my skinny dipping and helped hoist the bear hang. We ate cheesecake mix out of a plastic bag. (I spared him the smashed PB&Js.) And he caught muscular frogs he’d discovered on his own. He didn’t once say he wanted to go home.

My son, who is now 14, sounds excited at the suggestion of another trip. So does his older sister, who mentioned we should go bouldering soon. Like Oly, they get it. Maybe I do, too.