Happy Fathers Day, Charlie Brown

I used to have an orange shirt with a blue stripe in the middle. There wasn’t any sort of zig-zag pattern, and the shirt was orange instead of yellow. But every time I wore that shirt, Julie called me Charlie Brown. There are certain things Man was never meant to understand, and Woman is definitely one of them.

This is my eighth Fathers Day as a father (I don’t count the June when Julie was pregnant with James, otherwise this would be number nine.) and so far, this has been one of the most fun for me.

On Friday night, James and I got to go camping for a Fathers and Sons outing with our ward. We had a really great time. Our poor Elders Quorum President, Gary Ferrin, drove his Honda Accord, and from the stories I’ve heard, lost both a muffler and a tie rod on the rough dirt road. Fortunately, our 4Runner, while not techincally a truck, has a high clearance and a good skid plate, so we didn’t have any of those problems. One of the major (And I mean major; I doubt they get any more major than this one.) oil companies bought a few gorgeous tree-infested acres of land out in the foothills of the Wyoming range and created a small camping spot for its employees and their guests. One of the guys in the ward works for said company, and was able to reserve it for our group. The company, in conjunction with Trout Unlimited and a bunch of other groups, created a pond on the property for the raising of native cutthroat trout, and we got to fish in the pond on Saturday morning. James and I had a great time trying out his new rod, and catching a small mess of fish. We weren’t allowed to keep any, but we had fun anyway.

After we got home from our camping trip, we lazed around a bit, and then James said to me, “Dad, can we go fishing again this afternoon?” I told him I wasn’t sure, but that I would ask Julie. She thought it was a great suggestion, so we all piled into the 4Runner again, and drove up to Fremont Lake. Some of you may remember the design of this blog in one of its earlier incarnations, and Fremont Lake is the lake featured in the header photo. Here is a photo of Fremont Lake for those who don’t remember.

Lamentably, Fremont Lake was too windy for fishing. We would have been casting into the wind, and it just wasn’t feasible. So we tried the next lake up, which is Half-moon Lake. The kids asked why it was called half-moon lake, so I told the the legend of Aloucious Weizenheimer, the discoverer of the lake, who in his youth, was attacked by a grizzly; he survived the attack, but the grizzly got one of his buttocks, and Alouicious got a new nickname and that’s how the lake was called Half-moon lake. Julie tried not to smile, but she snickered a bit. The story went right over the kids’ heads, but hey, they’re seven and five; what can we expect? Half-moon lake wasn’t any better than Fremont lake, so Julie suggested that we try the CCC ponds, which are smaller ponds at the southern end of Fremont lake. Now, (put on your best professorial voice for this one) if we step back into the wayback machine, we’ll recall that CCC stands for,... what? That’s right Civilian Conservation Corps. There was a large CCC camp in Sublette county during the depression (one of the first in the country, according the BLM.), and the CCC built the ponds. They were nice little ponds, and there were plenty of fish, but we didn’t catch any. The scenery was lovely, though, and Anna learned how to cast by herself, so it wasn’t a total loss. We stayed up there until the sun went down, and then drove home where everyone crashed.

So, anyway, that’s what we did this weekend for Fathers Day. I don’t have any cute videos of kids singing, but I have great kids who love me and hang out with me and have fun even when we get skunked fishing, and that’s the best part about being a dad.