A monk fish story

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

You cannot live in Utah without hearing a good fish story or two. My personal favorite involves an unconventional catch by an unconventional man. He was a Trappist monk at Huntsville’s Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity.

Father Alan Hohl was born in 1926 in Chicago as Francis Joseph Hohl. His family called him “Bud.” When he was young, Bud’s family moved to Rib Lake in Northern Wisconsin, a small town about halfway between Green Bay and Duluth, Minnesota. His father Frank farmed and also worked in the nearby lumber mill. Bud’s mother Theresa kept the house.

The young Bud Hohl loved baseball and boxing, but one of his greatest interests was becoming a Catholic priest. He was close to the priests from the Society of the Precious Blood—founded in 1815 by Italian Saint Gaspar—who staffed his hometown parish. The kind priests took him fishing and hiking. Bud loved fishing, but also fell in love with flying. He took a school course in aviation and built dozens of model airplanes.

On December 7, 1941, while sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio, and working on a model P-39, he learned about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Bud put his plans for the priesthood on hold and as soon as he graduated from high school in 1944, joined the Navy and started training to be a pilot.

Bud was grateful the terrible war ended while he was still in training—“Thanks be to God, I didn’t have to shoot nobody or drop any bombs on anybody.” He was actively involved, however, in the Cold War that followed. The Navy assigned him to the Aleutian Islands where he flew patrol planes checking for potential enemy ships and submarines in the sea-lanes near Alaska. While there, Bud lived in Quonset huts.

After the military discharged him in 1949, he was poised to join the Precious Blood priests when a friend suggested he look at the Trappists. Bud joined the Utah monastery in 1953, and took the religious name “Alan.” Why Huntsville instead of another abbey? It was the Quonset hut building, the same type of structure he had lived in during his Navy years. Father Alan recalled, “I loved that building.”

After he was ordained a priest, Father Alan served as cantor—leading the monks in daily chant—and managed the monastery’s extensive farm irrigation and water systems. These latter monastic assignments put him in the perfect position to tell me the ultimate fish story.

One day Father Alan was working on west side of the monastery’s 1,800 acres, at the very west end of a water canal on abbey property. The monk was using a backhoe to build an irrigation device called a weir.

According to a hydrology website I found, a weir is “a small barrier built across a stream or river to raise the water level slightly on the upstream side; essentially a small-scale dam. Weirs allow water to pool behind them, while allowing water to flow steadily over top of the weir.” 

Three forks of the Ogden River flow down from the nearby towering Wasatch Mountains of the Ogden Valley and find their confluence near the small town of Huntsville. The water in the canal where Father Alan was installing the weir flows directly from the South Fork of the Ogden River. Thus, fish from the river also inhabited the canal.

Despite his boyhood love of fishing, Father Alan was not planning to enjoy this particular form of recreation as he dug in the canal with the backhoe. As he lifted one scoop, he noticed that the mud in the machine’s huge bucket was moving around. From it emerged a large trout.

Father Alan was astonished. He paused and watched for a few moments. The fish thrashed around powerfully. The monk said, “It was the most beautiful fish I ever caught.” And he did it with no bait, no pole, and no net.

I was very curious to know what happened next. I asked the good monk several questions…Did he get a picture? Did he show the prize to his brothers? Did the Trappists eat the catch at their next Friday dinner? In response, Father Alan just smiled, and said, “No, I threw it back.”

Monastic catch and release, all via backhoe. Now that’s a good fish story! 

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.