“The days slide by, should have done, should have done, we all sigh,” — Warren Zevon

In our way of looking at life, the Alpha and the Omega — the first and last — of a person’s life represent benchmarks, places where our experience grabs a foothold for the reflection and benefit of others.

Things like the occasion of a baby’s first steps or the contents of a condemned prisoner’s last meal are things we may be interested to learn about and share with others.

They are seemingly like bookends on a shelf of literature whose volumes tell the complicated story of a person’s life. What was written in between the lines is as important as the lines themselves.

I often find myself thinking about these benchmark type of events in the context of first and last interactions with nature and the outdoors.

I don’t know when my dad first hunted or fished or walked along a ridge overlooking a river valley, but I have some clues.

He told me stories of how he and his dad fished a little creek situated about two miles from their family home.

He said that one time the fish were biting so good that they filled up a burlap gunny sack with their catch. It was so heavy that my dad couldn’t carry it.

I presume my dad started fishing at a young age, given that creek’s proximity to the house and his dad’s interest in fishing, as well as sharing the experience with his son.

My dad, deceased now for going on 17 years, had two brothers and a sister, but I don’t know anything about the timing of their connections to the outdoors.

If my dad were still alive, he would be turning 99 years old this June.

That’s hard to imagine.

I know that my first fishing experience was with my dad and mom and that his last was with me. That’s satisfying somehow to me in the parlance of firsts and lasts.

An entry in my baby book, in my mother’s handwriting, indicates that my first time fishing was at 3 years old.

I have a picture of me and my dad when I was about that age.

It shows me standing on one of the white, wooden kitchen chairs at my grandmother’s house. I am flinching back with a displeasured look on my face as my dad is holding up a big brown trout he’d caught.

He’s wearing a red-and-white flannel shirt in the picture. I’m wearing a red-and-white flannel shirt as I type this. In the photo, I am wearing blue kid pants and a blue pullover shirt with a white collar that is buttoned at the top.

I am looking intently at the fish, but I am not sure what to make of a fish that big. If I were standing on the floor in that picture, I would be almost a foot shorter than my dad’s waist.

Given that my dad and a couple of friends left high school to enlist in World War II, my guess is that his first experiences with hunting were also at a young age.

My young hunting forays came from accompanying my dad and mom into the woods to hunt “partridge.”

The last time I remember fishing with my dad, we were fishing a river for trout. We parked downstream from a bridge in a grassy field.

We got out of the car and my dad planned to walk straight ahead to the river and I followed a dirt path to cast upstream and underneath the bridge.

I no sooner got my line in the water when I heard a big splash coming from downstream. I dropped my fishing pole and hurried back down the path.

I saw big swirls of water in the river and realized my dad had tripped and fallen in.

I helped him out and got him a dry shirt out of the back of my truck.

We kept fishing. It was a warm summer day and my dad’s clothes dried quickly.

After awhile of casting and getting no bites, I walked back to my dad to find him trying to get a big bird’s nest tangle out of his line, just above the bale on his open-faced reel.

I mocked his predicament with a question he would often use to do the same to me.

“You got your limit yet,” I asked.

“I got my limit of this bloody pole,” he said, steaming.

In hindsight, it’s clear that things were becoming more difficult for him.

I was still suffering under the delusion that there will always be other times to fish, more fun and companionship to share.

It wasn’t so.

After that day, a day we didn’t catch any fish, my invitations to my dad to go fishing were met with a wide range of ideas why it wasn’t a good day for that – too hot, too cold, creeks were too high, creeks were too low, etc.

I don’t know when the first time was that my brother went fishing, but I know I was there. It would have either been on a family outing or a time when I convinced my mom to let me take him with me when I rode my bike to a creek near our house.

We fished a lot together as kids until we were separated for decades when I was 13 and he was 9 after my parents divorced.

In recent years, since I’ve returned from California, we’ve fished usually a couple times a year as adults. I hope we have many more outings left to enjoy.

I have never gone hunting with my brother, who lives in Canada — yet.

He is in possession of my dad’s old hunting guns. He hunts ruffed grouse like my dad but has also successfully hunted moose with friends of his.

Recently, my brother said he plans to sell or give away my dad’s guns. I hope he will consider keeping a couple as heirlooms. I wouldn’t mind hanging one over our fireplace and he might like to do the same.

I don’t believe my brother and my dad ever hunted together. My dad had given most of that up after my brother and youngest sister were born.

I don’t know anything about my brother’s first time he went hunting, unless you count our childhood hunting for leopard frogs, garter snakes and painted turtles down at the lake by our house.

We would always come home from the lake soaking wet and muddy and, if we were lucky, with a new “pet” or two. I have another photo of us four kids standing in the backyard at the house.

I am holding a female painted turtle, showing its belly toward the camera. I was 8 years old. My siblings are all younger.

That picture is proof that those days actually existed and are not just fading figments of my imagination.

I remember that when I was young there was a neighbor friend of the family who had gone missing while out fishing at an inlet to a big lake.

Days later, searches found him dead.

I remember that incident having a pronounced impact on my earliest awareness of death, along with the death of my uncle, which marked my first funeral and first finding out about open casket funeral traditions.

I also recall the drowning of a young woman in the raging springtime waters of the Sturgeon River in Baraga County. My first trip to the Upper Tahquamenon Falls was as a young kid, with my sister and aunt.

Searchers were dragging the river for a body of someone who had slipped trying to walk across the river at the brink of the falls, falling 50 or so feet into the foamy plunge pool below.

This was the last outdoor outing for those folks.

I think even back then, as young as I was, this fact made an impression on me.

I wonder what my last outdoors commune with nature will be.

Given the wide array of possibilities, it could be almost anything.

If my life ends “out there,” and on some level I hope that it does, I would think the greatest likelihood would be a stroke or a heart attack or some kind of misstep on my part, like a fall that knocks me out or down into a gorge or some other injurious place.

But my last time in the woods might be more like my dad’s.

His late years were mostly about days just soaking in the sunshine, the bird song and the sounds of the wind in the pine trees, while sitting at his picnic table, staring down the slow-moving river.

His last day in the woods, in his cathedral of nature, was likely one of those.

I can’t say for certain because I wasn’t there.

I think having that solitude and reflection time to yourself on your last time in the outdoors is an incredible happenstance blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing.

I would not have wanted to interrupt that.

Whatever the ending waiting to bookend my life, I’m sure I will find out long before I’m ready to know.

For now, I know I need to get out there in nature as soon and as often as possible.

The peace there can drown out my insipid worries and wants and the sound in my head of a big bell tower clock ticking, ticking, ticking.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.