Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in The Philadelphia Inquirer

FATHER-SON RIFT HEALED BY FISHING ADVENTURE

By Art Carey,
Inquirer Staff Writer

Posted on Thu, Jun. 5, 2008

When Lou Ureneck was a young man, the future he envisioned centered on one certainty: He would never get divorced. He would always be there, a father to his children.

He knew well the pain of divorce. When Ureneck was 7, his father abandoned the family. He never saw or heard from him again.

His mother remarried a charismatic charmer. Johnny Kababick took Ureneck fishing in central Jersey and returned from his voyages with the merchant marine brimming with enchanting stories. He was "the kind of father every boy wants to have," Ureneck recalls.

But one Saturday afternoon, after escalating marital clashes, Johnny walked out, without packing clothes or saying a word, and never came back.

And so when Ureneck married a pretty girl from Portsmouth, N.H., and fathered two children of his own, Elizabeth and Adam, he vowed that he would give them a "normal life," a life that was rooted and secure, with both parents living happily under the same roof.

"Divorce - I couldn't even conceive of it," Ureneck says. "I'd never let it happen to me. It would not be part of my life. . . . But guess what? Life has a way of surprising us."

Ureneck tells of the terrible toll of his divorce - on himself, his son and their relationship - in a beautiful book, Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska (St. Martin's Press, $24.95). Ureneck will read from the book at 2 p.m. Sunday at Barnes & Noble in Exton.

An adventure story wrapped around a memoir, it chronicles a fishing trip Ureneck took with his son in the summer of 2000. Adam, a newly minted graduate of Germantown Friends School, was smarting from his father's devastating decision to part from his mother. Ureneck, a former Inquirer editor, was struggling with guilt and the conviction he had failed as a husband and father.

"My life was in a ditch: I was broke from lawyers, therapists and alimony payments and fearful that my son's anger was hardening into lifelong permanence," he writes.

"In the last few years, I had met many men who no longer had any contact with their children because of a divorce. These men didn't see their children at holidays and missed their graduations. . . . I couldn't bear the thought of losing my son. I wouldn't let it happen, even if it meant taking the risk of a self-guided and underfinanced trip to Alaska."

The trip begins inauspiciously. The weather is foul; the mosquitoes, relentless. Ureneck's homemade map of the wild Kanektok River is inadequate. Adam is surly and sullen, rejects his father's diffident attempts to exert paternal authority, and misses no chance to express contempt and criticism. The exchanges between them are strained and awkward.

"Meeting angry bears and getting lost in the woods was scary," Ureneck says, "but not half as scary as the prospect of losing my son."

Backcast is bejeweled with reflections about fatherhood and philosophical musings about the soul-soothing pleasures of fishing in general and fly-fishing in particular.


For the full article, click here.