Memories of Dad and the last, best fishing trip ever
By Lethbridge Herald on August 8, 2025.
Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald
Seven years ago this morning – about the time this column is posted online – Dad and I were on our way home to Alberta after a brief fishing trip on Rainy Lake. By 8 a.m. we were – if memory serves me – pulling into a truck stop on the east end of Winnipeg to refill Dad’s diesel truck with fuel and to put some Crazy Glue on the plastic bed liner that had begun lifting while we were driving.
We’d left our fishing lodge at Bear’s Pass around 3 a.m. with the intention of spending the night in Regina, leaving a shorter drive the second day back to Lethbridge where Dad was going to stay overnight before returning to his apartment in Calgary near the airport – a home he lived in alone after the death of his wife earlier in 2018.
With his age, I figured driving early in the day before the summer heat hit us would be easier on him and being a guy who went to bed at 7:30 at night, by 3 a.m. he was all set to go. So I packed up the truck at 2 and we hit the highway.
Our original plan leaving here was to drive south from Lethbridge to Montana then cut through North Dakota and Minnesota but at the last second, Dad told me that because of his age he couldn’t get travel insurance for the States, so we had to stay in Canada.
Alas, we drove my regular route through Saskatchewan – where we briefly stopped at the birthplace of his father Harry in Wolseley – and Manitoba, where Dad wasn’t particularly interested in visiting the graves of his Whitelaw great-grandparents in Carberry. Graveyard tours to an 84-year-old, I learned, don’t hold much fascination.
We arrived in Fort Frances on the second day of our first road trip together since the early 1970s and after grabbing groceries and fishing licences, we headed to the camp where we had a rental boat waiting and quickly hit the lake for some afternoon fishing.
I made Dad steak and walleye that night for supper, but after two long days he was exhausted and just wanted ice cream with chocolate syrup, so I put the food in the fridge and munched on Ontario potato chips and Hawkins Cheezies while watching the sun set over the nearby CN Rail train bridge.
The few days we spent on the lake were probably the best we had together in our lives. We fished, we caught up with old friends of mine and at morning coffee with a few guys Dad’s age, including Dr. Bob Lidkea, who until he died in his 90s just last month, was the oldest active optometrist still practising in Ontario. And we briefly made it for lunch across the border in Minnesota, a state Dad had long wanted to visit. Oddly, so had I growing up and I’ve since learned through Ancestry.com connections, Bieber clan related to Harry settled in several locations there.
The most memorable part of the trip may have been when Dad accidentally bear-sprayed himself in the cabin. While I was on my knees choking and gagging outside, Dad was barely affected. He just coughed a bit, finished tying his lure and asked me what my problem was. A short time later, we were on the lake with my pal Dave Taggart and Dad caught a four-pound bass on a red-and-white spoon to our absolute shock.
Even when I last saw him alive in hospital early the next year, after he was admitted following a heart attack, we laughed about the bear spray episode and Dad bragged how he showed us how an Albertan fishes.
As frail as he was, that trip still lit a spark in the eyes of my Dad, who clearly knew his time on Earth was coming to an end.
As I look back on our adventure, I’m sure he was saying goodbye to me in Ontario in his own way. He wanted to make up for lost decades and we did it in style, in his way.
And we didn’t stop in Regina on the way home. With Willy’s Roadhouse cranked up to high volume on my portable Sirius/XM radio so my deaf travel buddy could hear, we drove straight through to Lethbridge. Dad was having the time of his life coming home, telling me stories of his days with Calgary Power and his youth, and didn’t want to stop.
So we didn’t, and 23 hours after he woke up in Ontario, Dad fell back to sleep in West Lethbridge.
I, however, cracked a brew and with Rio and Benson at my side, sat on the deck in the dark knowing I’d just seen my Dad happier than ever before.
As I write this, that bear spray can is in a closet just a few feet from me and I feel his presence as close to me as I did in on the fishing boat.
Hope you’re resting in peace, buddy.
19-18
hey