Alaska is my Heartwood

Guest post from artist and educator Brooke Krolick of the Mindful Naturalist, and a recipe for Dad’s Cornflake Crusted Halibut & Hand Cut Chips with Spicy Special Sauce

Alaska is my Heartwood. Watercolor by Brooke Krolick, 2024

This week we have a special guest post from our friend, artist and educator Brooke Krolick of the Mindful Naturalist.

Fishing as Ritual

When my dad’s friend, Bill, started pouring his ashes into the Kenai, we all cast our lines in the water. I smiled as I watched my dad floating there, drifting lazily downstream, swirling on the surface then mixing in with the churning glacial silt that gives the river its vibrant turquoise color. He was home. I was called from my reverie when my sister shouted out in joyous delight, “Fish on!” further downstream from me. Then my cousin crowed the same. The refrain went down the line to the 25 or 30 folks that were gathered there to celebrate my father’s life by doing what he loved best in the world: Fishing the upper Kenai River in Alaska at the height of the sockeye run on a sunny July afternoon.

Brooke (yellow shirt) and her family along the Kenai c. 1982

I was next. I could feel my line bouncing along the riverbed, weighed down with a sinker for these swift waters in order to slow my fly’s tumble over the rocky bottom where the salmon often rested. While salmon don’t eat again after leaving the ocean to spawn in the river, they will snap at anything that gets too close to their mouths as it drifts by. When my line paused just long enough to tell me that I, too, had a bite, I set my hook and shouted out my own “Fish on!” battle cry.

The fly we all used was a ‘Ricko Special’. My sister and I spent that long Alaskan winter tying a type of fishing fly called a ‘coho fly’ with remnants of my dad’s beard instead of Dall sheep’s wool we normally used for each of the guests at the wake. My dad was one of those guys with a ZZ Top beard that reached his belly button. The type of beard that was commented on nearly everywhere he went. For a laugh years ago, he tied his flies with his own beard clippings and thought it was hilarious how effective they were. The shock on the funeral director’s face when we asked if he could collect some of his beard for us before he went to the crematorium was worth it for this moment. Of the two and half dozen of us fishing through my father’s ashes that day, nearly half of us landed a fish on that first cast. My dad had certainly found his happy place.

I open with this scene to illustrate just how central and embedded fishing was to my early life, so much so that even our rituals for death were shaped by it. By extension, all that time I spent in nature, (yes with extraction/subsistence hunting and fishing, but also with a deep admiration, respect and awe for the wild wonder of my childhood landscape) formed the scaffolding of my worldview as I grew into an adult, a parent, a teacher, a naturalist, an artist, a citizen of the planet.

Brooke at fish camp, c. 1983