By Gary Topping–
Keith Topping, my brother, was three years younger than I, but a generation older. We never got along well as kids, and when the cultural revolution of the 1960s came along, he never embraced it as I did. He always kept his hair short, voted Republican, and hated everything about the way the Hippies, like the one I had become, lived. As adults we never became estranged, really, but we drifted far apart and rarely had anything to do with each other.
Eventually, though, we decided somehow that blood was thicker than water, and at a point in our lives when the chips were down for both of us, we came together. I was still reeling from an unwanted divorce and he was clawing his way out of near-fatal alcoholism and homelessness, and we decided, hey, let’s go fishing! We had learned fly fishing at our dad’s knee in our pre-teen years and it was one of the few things we retained in common during the tough years that followed. We decided that for a few days each summer we would get together for some fishing, in alternate years either here in Utah or in our boyhood homeland of Oregon. The first year we met in a place I don’t think either one of us had seen before, the beautiful Brigadoon-like oasis of Frenchglen, Oregon in the midst of the lava wastelands of Harney County. We had a blast, and a tradition was born.
For some reason, we never went back to Frenchglen, and spent our Oregon visits instead either on the North Umpqua near his Roseburg home, or the Rogue, farther south. Those are legendary fishing waters, but very difficult. They are very big rivers in which extremely long casts are often necessary, and their currents are unbelievably powerful: up to your knees, it’s already difficult to stand; up to your waist, you’re fighting for your life. After a couple of years of that, I suddenly said, “You know what, man? This is crazy! What we need is a boat.”
For us, that meant one thing: a McKenzie River driftboat. In western Oregon, driftboats, with their high sides and elevated prows and sterns, are as ubiquitous as wild blackberries and runny noses. They look a bit like small Viking ships. They were designed in the early twentieth century by a guy named Woody Hindman for the purpose of fly fishing in the rapids of the McKenzie and Rogue—exactly where we were fishing. For some years I had seen ads in Fly Fisherman magazine for driftboat kits that anyone, supposedly, with even modest woodworking skills could assemble. They were offered in several dimensions by a guy in Springfield, Oregon named Greg Tatman. Keith and I had inherited a love of woodworking from our grandfather (I still have some of his hand tools). My brother had a fully equipped woodworking shop and an unused two-car garage. We were in business!
We convened over my Christmas break from teaching at Salt Lake Community College and set to work. I tried to earn part of my room and board by helping them harvest their Christmas tree crop (the coldest, wettest and most miserable job I ever had). Tatman’s advertising offered the assembly manual for ten dollars so a prospective builder could see if he thought he was up to the project. I declined to do that, but if I had, we would never have bought the kit, for it was the most amateurish and unclear manual imaginable. What the “kit” consisted of, it turned out, was little more than a pile of lumber and a pat on the back. And parts were missing. Every other day, it seemed, required a call to Springfield and a wait for the next UPS delivery.
We made the most of those obstacles and the cold, drizzly Oregon December by lots of warm fires in the shop stove, lots of ribald jokes, lots of bourbon (me) and lots of coffee (him). Somewhere Keith had gotten a small stuffed parrot which had a button you could push and it would “parrot” back whatever you then said. It was our constant companion, and we thought it was hilarious (you had to have been there). I’ve attached a photo of my brother sitting in the just-completed boat, showing the parrot in the bow, my brother’s coffee mug in front of his right knee, and if your eye is sharp enough, the neck of a (mostly empty) bourbon bottle peeking over the gunwale.
And so, with the smell of epoxy and varnish, with lots of drilling and sanding, screwing and gluing, we built a boat. But we also built a brotherhood. We never did have much else in common, but we had a bond. Marianna and I visited him a couple of times before he died in the VA hospice in Vancouver, Washington. Most of the time we had nothing to say and we just sat here. But we were there. And he was there. And that was enough.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
