If you think fishing with your daughter is engrossing, try fishing with her new husband.

If you are fortunate enough to have been blessed with a daughter, you eventually come to realize that someday, somewhere, some guy is going to come along who wants her for his own. So you begin collecting big guns and big dogs in preparation for that dreaded time.

You know it will be the worst day of your life, and the only thing that could possibly be any worse is facing the fact that she might actually want him as much as he wants her.

I mean, we’re talking about your daughter—your capitalized, italicized, up-on-a-pedestal, one and only Daughter!

No one else could possibly understand, because no one else has ever had a daughter…well, at least not one like her. She was your treasure, your dream fulfilled, your little curly haired fishing buddy, wader of trout streams, shooter of bows, stalker of deer, caller of wolves and coyotes, and the subject of your most heartfelt songs and poems from the moment she was born, until he showed up and you realized you were gradually becoming the second most important man in her life.

As it should be.

Just the way God intended it.

“Dad, this is Philip,” she had said, neither of us realizing at the time that this would turn out to be The Guy.

I had known I would meet him some day. From time to time I’d even asked myself if this or that guy might be him. But they never were.

I didn’t know who he was or where he was or what he might be experiencing, good or bad, at any given moment in our parallel lives. But I had realized early that while I was asking God to take care of her, it might make sense to ask Him to do the same for this, as yet, unrevealed little boy—for his life was still a great unknown to me.

And so I prayed.

I prayed for them both.

It was all I could do.

Then late one Thanksgiving night when she was home from grad school with family and friends, and everyone had gone to bed, Philip quietly came back down the stairs and took a seat in the big leather chair across from me and calmly and with great respect and purpose asked if it would be okay if he married my Daughter. And suddenly all the big dogs and big guns became totally irrelevant, for I realized I had grown to like, even love, this young man I had come to know so well over the last few years.

A couple of months later he finally asked her, and the following October I walked her down the aisle and gained a Son.

Phillip’s only noticeable deficiency was the fact that he had never fly fished. He didn’t even own a fly rod. So I bought him one as a wedding gift, and the following July I took him and her and Mary Jane into the San Juan Mountains of northern New Mexico to fish the high country I knew and loved so well.

I had meant to take him fishing long before now, just the two of us, but somehow his schedule and mine never quite meshed. So the first trout he caught with his new rod and reel was a four-pound rainbow out on the north end of Charlie’s Lake, below Bobcat Rock.

We fished the high lakes for days, up to 10,000 feet, and I reveled in watching the three people who mean more to me than life itself catch these big beautiful trout

Then on the last day Philip and I left our wives at the lodge and headed back up the mountain and across the divide together and dropped into the Poso Valley to fish the tiny stream that meanders four miles down the glaciated basin to the head of the big box canyon, through which it plummets 2,000 feet to the valley below.

By now Philip was becoming fairly proficient with his new fly rod, his timing nicely refined, lightly dropping the flies onto the water’s surface, managing his line tolerably well, and playing and bringing to net the trout he’d caught with minimal wasted effort.

But that was in the lakes.

Poso Creek would present a much different challenge for him. It is a winding and narrow stream, barely two feet wide in some places and never more than ten or 12 feet, overhung by tall, wild grasses most everywhere, with deep, dark undercut banks and ledges that the trout use as lairs to ambush the unsuspecting caddis and hoppers and such that form the basis of the food structure there.

This was much more difficult, much more technical, fishing than what he had been doing for the past few days, and I couldn’t help but be concerned that he might become discouraged or frustrated, particularly when I considered the fact that if he did catch a trout, it would likely be only eight or ten inches or even less in length—hardly comparable to the three to five-pounders he’d been catching in the lakes for the past few days.

To complicate matters even more, it was a windy day, and few of his initial casts found the water without first being intercepted by the long, overhanging grasses that swayed in the breezes above it.

But contrary to my concerns, he seemed to be having a grand ol’ time, asking the right questions, learning where the trout might be lurking, how best to present the fly.

Then we came to a kink in the creek where the water widened as it flowed toward him from the bend 25 yards upstream. I stayed back, kneeling in the grass with my camera as he positioned himself for the cast and laid his fly 30 feet up-current, skirting the undercut bases of a pair of big glacial boulders.

Something sizable tore from beneath the upper ledge and took a swing at his offering. Whether the fish missed the fly or Philip was late on the strike, I could not tell. He again cast eight feet above the ledge and fished it out perfectly. But the trout did not return.

Undaunted, he eased upstream a few feet and into the center of the creek, and lightly laid his fly into the tail of the fast water coming around the bend above him. It was a perfectly good cast, but it produced nothing, and neither did his second. On his third presentation, another trout took a look at the fly but would not commit to it.

I wanted so badly for him catch a fish here, now—for now seemed the best opportunity he’d had all morning. I wanted to speak to him, to coach him, to guide him, to talk him through where he should place his next cast, how he should mend his line, how he should hold his jaw, and what he should be thinking.

I wanted him to be me.

But she did not need for him to be me. She needed him to be himself. She already had me, and knew she always would. What she needed now was for him to be himself.

And so I kept silent. He would have to do this on his own.

And he did.

The old brown trout stole from beneath the ledge as the dry fly drifted past, and slammed it like he meant to kill it. Philip’s hook-set was perfect, lifting his rod firmly but not too hastily, fervently stripping line as the fish charged him, then settling in to play it as it ran up-current and down. Into the air it leapt, then twisted back into the darkened depths beneath the ledge as Philip angled his fly rod hard to the right with just the right amount of counter pressure, until he could eventually turn the fish back downstream and guide it into his net.

I was speechless.

I had somehow moved up onto the rock above him as I watched him play the trout, my own fly rod laying back in the meadow behind us.

I had completely forgotten about the camera hanging useless across my shoulder. Quickly I retrieved it and shot a couple of photographs as Philip eased his trout from the net, slipped the tiny hook from its lip, laid it back into the flow and carefully revived it.

As the fish swam away, Philip looked up at me with a big, fulfilling grin.

“Wow, that was awesome!” he declared. “You know, I think I’d rather have caught that one trout here than any of the big trout from the lakes.” He could not have said anything more appropriate.

“You, Sir,” I gratefully replied with a big grin of my own, “are now a Trout Fisherman.”