My uncle Elery was born October 16, 1936 as one of what would eventually be 11 children. He grew up in a different time in far northern Maine, a place so remote it almost seems like another world. He was a crank, he smoked like a chimney, and he lived to be outside. It is no secret that Elery was one of my favorite people.

When I was a kid he would stop at my house on trips either to or from his girlfriend Lolita’s place downstate. My uncle was a scrappie, a true junkman, making money from selling off old pipes and other metal garbage. He also collected treasures in his travels and made trades at the pawn shop, everything from jewelry to boxes of VHS tapes. He was like a grumpy Santa Claus, pulling up in his little beater pickup, reaching into the mess for a present that reeked of stale tobacco, distributing game meat or fresh-caught fish for dinner.

The trips with Elery that stand out for me all have something to do with the outdoors. One time he took us down a spidery network of logging roads looking for moose. I remember we found a big bull belly-deep in a swamp. We just sat on the other side of the road, watching him munch on aquatic plants. My uncle was a legend.

The biggest legacy my uncle left for me is a love of fishing. From a very young age he took me and my brother fishing all over Maine and New Brunswick. When we were small, it was stock-pond fishing with bait. I remember one trip I caught a rainbow trout by the eye and I wanted to put it back, since it didn’t seem fair that I had got him that way. Elery insisted we bring the fish home, since caught was caught.

As we got older, my uncle introduced us to fly fishing. I remember when I was around eight years old, Elery let my brother and me pick out the materials, and he tied each of us our own custom fly. I can still picture it: yellow-and-black in the body, with a ruff of white near the eye. I lost that fly a few years later fishing with Elery, when a trout broke off my line.

My uncle was resourceful and didn’t tolerate whiners. If it was muddy or cold or uncomfortable, that just meant you should have worn better shoes and clothes. I remember him cutting up slugs for bait when we ran out of worms and making me carry my fish with a stick when we didn’t have a basket or a bucket.

My best day of freshwater fishing as an adult was in 2016 when my husband and I spent a drenching morning catching stocked trout on Mast Hope Plank Road. I caught four fish under a sagging maple, flicking my line exactly where I wanted it. I can credit Elery for giving me a great example to follow. I barely felt the rain.

It was incredibly difficult to watch my uncle deteriorate in the last years of his illness. I mourned his diminished life over the course of several trips home. With each visit he seemed to shrink, to curl in on himself. In the months before Elery’s death, his former caretaker, one of my other uncles, succumbed to his own battle with cancer. These losses, coupled with the precarious nature of early post-COVID life, left me feeling hollow and raw.

The last trip to Maine, ostensibly to say goodbye, my family was not allowed to come into the VA home with me to visit Elery because my kids had a cough. I went inside while they stayed outside, and we communicated through a window that only opened an inch. It was a tragic picture, Elery in a wheelchair, trembling from his medication, leaning down to shout at my family through the crack under the window. I did not travel back for his funeral a few weeks later, having just started a new job. I did write a speech, mostly about fishing, which one of my cousins read at the service.

I decided to memorialize him in a more permanent way.

When my mother told me she had gotten a small amount of money from Elery’s estate and she wanted to share it with me and my brother, I knew immediately what I was going to do with it. I had already been thinking about getting a tribute tattoo for Elery, and the extra money just made the final decision easier. 

I have other tattoos, so this wasn’t something new for me. I did the research and found a female artist near where I live on Long Island. It took a little while, as these things often do, but I was able to get an appointment for July 2023, right before an epic backpacking trip. I sent a picture of the finished piece to my mom, who cried and then sent it to my aunts and his daughter. They all agreed that it suited Elery perfectly.

In the tattoo on my right arm, a brook trout carries a fishing pole and wears Elery’s hat and scruffy beard. A lit cigarette is perched in his fishy mouth. I don’t know if my uncle would approve, but I do know it makes me think of him and smile every time I see it.