An Alaskan fishing trip provides bond for estranged father and son

BELCHERTOWN - On a mild September morning on the Swift River, where it flows out of the Quabbin Reservoir, Lou Ureneck wades and casts a No. 14 grasshopper fly upstream. A 16-inch rainbow trout hurtles up and grabs it, dancing atop the bright water until it is brought to hand and released.

With its poetic fineness and almost mathematical detail, fly-fishing has a gestural language which links aficionados on a stream, even in silence. It's that language that Ureneck hoped would help reverse a widening gulf between himself and a teenage son. The hope played out in an eventful fishing trip on Alaska's lonely Kanektok River in 2000. The father-son link was reknit, if not right away, and not necessarily in the way Ureneck imagined. The story is told in his new book, "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska." More than a fish story, it's an autobiography, and at the center are two broken families.

Ureneck, 56, is chairman of the department of journalism at Boston University. Before joining the BU faculty in 2003, he had a long newspaper career, working his way up to editor-in-chief of Maine's Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, then moving to Philadelphia to become page-one editor of the Inquirer. Married in 1974, he and his wife had a daughter and a son. In 1999, they divorced, a bitter break that he feared would alienate his children for good. "I wrote the book," he said in an interview on the bank of the Swift River, during a break in fishing, "to try to understand the experience and make sense of it."

Ureneck (pronounced You-REN-ick) and his younger brother were raised by their mother in central New Jersey, after their parents divorced when he was 7 and his father disappeared from his life. Her second husband fell apart from alcohol, and another divorce ensued. She worked hard to support and hold the family together, but they moved constantly, always with desperate money problems. "I was the man of the house from an early age," Ureneck said, "and I skipped over my childhood. I was always either working or looking after my mother. At one point in the book, I imagine what it would be like to have a father. I cannot summon up the feeling of what that must be like."

He majored in journalism at the University of New Hampshire and joined the Press Herald in 1974, staying for more than 20 years, until he was forced out in 1996 after a change in senior management. When he got an offer from the Inquirer the next year, he made plans to move alone to Philadelphia. It was a marital separation, in effect, though the formal break came later.

Ureneck is vague on the roots and course of the estrangement, but makes clear that in the end, he was the one who wanted out. Along the way, he had met someone - New York Times reporter Sara Rimer, with whom he is still in a relationship. He persuaded his son, Adam, to attend a private Philadelphia high school and live with him. When divorce followed separation, both kids were devastated. Elizabeth, 21, was at college. But Adam, still a teenager, was in the house with his father. The atmosphere became explosive.

"He was in his senior year," Ureneck said, "and he seemed to be getting more distant and angrier with me. We had a lot of conflict - shouting matches, slammed doors, and one night he didn't come home and stayed at a friend's house."

Guilt feelings about divorce are not unusual, but Ureneck's early life thickened the painful stew. "I was utterly disappointed with myself - it's something I swore I would never do," he said. "I had watched the impact divorce had on my mother's life and the lives of my brother and myself, so I was sure this would never be a part of my life." To the guilt was added a feeling of being discredited in the eyes of his son. "I needed to regain my confidence, as a father and a person, to reconcile myself to what I had done, to stop beating myself up and get on with my life."

Since childhood, Adam had fished with his father. Years before, Ureneck had promised that when the boy finished high school, they would take a fishing trip to Alaska together. It was one of those "someday" promises that parents make, which might not prove practical when the time comes. But Ureneck remembered it when Adam lapsed into angry silence and rebuffed his father's efforts to get him to articulate his feelings about the divorce. He threw himself into planning, poring over maps and websites. Money was tight, so he decided on a 110-mile, 10-day float trip down the Kanektok, which flows into the Bering Sea, without a guide. He bought fishing gear and plane tickets, and surprised Adam.

"It was my last chance to be a good father," Ureneck said. "I wanted to keep that promise. I hoped that if we lived something good together, it would be a way for us to have memories that we could share into the future. He was going off to college. I would be an empty nester with a son who was damned angry, and I was fearful that he would no longer come home, no longer talk to me."

The book relates the history of Ureneck's childhood, marriage, and divorce, but its narrative spine is the adventure on the river. Dropped off by float-plane at the source of the Kanektok, father and son inflate and load up a raft and start inexorably downstream through the dramatic landscape. Using strange Alaska flies never seen on an eastern river, they catch silver salmon and Arctic char, and have scary encounters with huge brown bears, including an angry sow with a cub. The weather is as changeable as the emotional atmosphere - sometimes fair, more often brooding, occasionally stormy.

As they approach the coast, the river breaks into a confusing complex of channels called the Braids, which Ureneck had known about but which prove much more challenging to navigate than he expected. High banks and fog obscure the surroundings. Working together as equals, father and son become disoriented as the raft rushes ahead in the gathering dark, threatened by sharp half-submerged snags.

Needless to say, they made it. Ureneck said that after they reached the village near the river's mouth, "a guided trip came in, and the guide said, 'Did you just come off that river, unguided?' I said yes, and he said, 'That was very dangerous.' He was shocked that we had done it on our own."

That fall, Adam went to Bowdoin College in Maine, at first majoring in classics, then turning to Latin American history. Eventually he became a Catholic. Now 25, he has entered a three-year formation program with Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, an order of brothers, nuns, and priests in Peru that serves severely disabled children. He may go on to the priesthood.

Speaking by phone during a recent visit home, Adam says he was not aware at the time how fraught the trip was for his father. "I had a one-track mind," he said. "Regardless of what else was going on, I was focused on being in Alaska, catching big fish. We had always talked about it." He says he is proud of his father for completing the book. "It gave me insights into what was going on with him. I was only 18 - I didn't have the objectivity, or perspective; therefore being angry was not consciously on my mind. Yes, there was a divorce, but we were also on a fantastic trip."

As it turned out, father and son never talked explicitly about hurt, anger, or the divorce. Adam said, "A lot of the time, it was just silence and fishing." Still, their bond was reinforced. "We had a strong sense of relying on each other," Ureneck said, "and I think that is part of what reshaped the relationship. Having to rely on one another for survival, in the way that we did, was profound."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.