Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [62]
My grandfather died some years back. I fish today as a way of staying in touch with him. I’m not much for headstones, and life is too short to waste time indulging nostalgia. But I believe that if you do a thing taught to you with love, the teacher never leaves you. That is not a rod my fingers fold around as I stand at the river’s edge—it’s my grandfather’s hand.
So when the All-Star Baseball Legends pulled into Prince George early one March morning in 1998 for a charity softball game against the local fire department, my nose immediately led me the nearest waterway. Prince George is a British Columbia hamlet located at the confluence of the Frazier and Nechako Rivers.
Clear water feeds the Nechako—we could see straight down to the bottom where it ran deepest—while the Frazier resembles flowing chalk. The two streams mingling produced a color reminiscent of milk of magnesia. We did not notice any crawdads waiting to be trapped in these waters, but several local fishermen told me the river teemed with salmon.
I learned something of the town’s history from them. Prince George had once thrived as a lumber town, a place where over five thousand loggers plied their trade. Those men had chosen to settle here as a matter of convenience. They transported the trees they cut by floating them downstream to the local sawmills, but the logs would wedge against each other as the rivers converged and narrowed. So the loggers decided to save time and manpower; they processed the logs where they halted. A few entrepreneurs built large mills near the silty riverbanks, and a community bloomed.
Prince George’s fortunes have risen and fallen with the timber market ever since. From the 1950s right up through the 1970s, when peddling timber for profit represented one hard dollar, the town declined into a sort of honky-tonk, with a lot of beer-and-shot bars and strip joints lining the few main thoroughfares.
When we got there, though, it showed all the signs of becoming a modern village. Gentrification had smoothed the town’s rougher edges; the new businesses that had opened were strictly Main Street, with a lot of upscale coffee shops, boutiques, and souvenir stores. However, when a town’s economy depends so much on one product, the vagaries of the market determine the pace of progress. The tariff the United States imposes on Canadian softwoods had wounded Prince George’s economy and hampered investment.
Weather conditions had also slowed any further building. Prince George lies tucked between the Rockies and the Pacific Coast range at a point far north of Vancouver. Winter temperatures regularly plunged to twenty below. Developers and construction crews prefer to tear down and build in warm weather, but you will not find much summer in these parts. The climate offers maybe six hot days a year, and we were lucky enough to be there for two of them.
Rob Myers, the local fire chief, coached the team the Legends competed against that weekend. He stood in front of his station waiting as our bus arrived. From the look of him, Rob would have made a first-class Navy Seal. He was medium height and broad-shouldered, not heavily muscled, but lean and silver-dollar hard. In his dark dress blues, burnished brass buttons, and squared-off chief’s hat, he could have stepped off a horse-drawn fire engine from a nineteenth-century daguerreotype.
Rob sounded tickled to be hosting a group of former major-league baseball players. John Tudor, Bert Campaneris, Rick Miller, and Willie Wilson played on our team and he wanted us all happy. The moment Rob learned of my fondness for fishing, he offered to lend his four-by-four to Ferguson Jenkins and me for an afternoon of chasing salmon.
If you follow baseball at all, you probably know all about Fergie. He is that tall, lanky right-hander, a Hall of Famer who pitched from 1965 to 1983 for the Philadelphia Phillies,