Kershner: Filled with history, this fishing vest will never be history

I need, badly, to buy a new fishing vest. This thing is 40-plus years old. It smells faintly of insect repellent and strongly of old trout.

But I refuse, absolutely, to buy a new fishing vest. I don’t care how old and decrepit this thing is, it means more to me than just a piece of ripped up fabric. It’s one of my most cherished possessions, a water-stained document of hundreds of fishing adventures and happy memories.

Well, mostly happy memories. Sometimes I end up in the emergency room.

Let’s take a tour of this old vest:

1. Velcro closure that forever lost its ability to close in 1983, which explains why I once stood in a river and watched my prescription sunglasses disappear around a bend.

2. Sweat stains around collar, resulting from many hot August days, as well as the strain of wearing a fishing vest that now weighs 20 pounds.

3. Dirt stains from face-plants performed while climbing over fallen trees, stepping into hidden potholes and forgetting to lace up my wading boots.

4. A zipper which may or may not work. I have not even tried to zip it up since the mid-1990s, partly because the vest pockets are bulging with so much junk I can no longer pull the two halves closed, and partly because, well, beer belly.

5. Rip in the fabric from that time I set the hook on a whopper and the whopper turned out to be the back of a fishing vest.

6. Pocket containing one foam fly box, one plastic fly box, one granola bar with a 2013 expiration date, a dozen loose split-shot sinkers, and 14 desiccated pieces of vegetation, including one mushroom, probably poisonous.

7. Blood stain from a brook trout that became a delicious campfire dinner.

8. Blood stain (A-positive) from the time I hooked myself in the thumb and successfully snipped off the barb and backed that sucker out, right before shock set in.

9. Forceps which come in handy for removing a hook from a thumb.

10. Pocket containing four packets of leader, one bottle of REI insect repellant (dated 1979) and three different kinds of fly floatant, every one of them empty.

11. Pocket which contains two fly boxes, one baggie that appears to have been “lunch,” and a selection of artificial salmon eggs from that time I was the only person ever to go on an Alaska salmon fishing vacation and fail to catch a salmon.

12. Water stain from that time I fell in the stream and dislocated my shoulder. Or perhaps from the time I fell and sprained my ankle. Or perhaps it was from that time my water bottle leaked, although that doesn’t sound plausible considering my emergency room record.

13. Orange Stimulator fishing fly from my last outing, responsible for one dozen cutthroat trout and one extremely cute songbird. The bird, like most of the trout, performed a “self-release,” I am happy to report. It also set the Montana state record for largest catch-and-release Western Tanager, at nine-tenths of an ounce.

14. Label from Dave Cook, a great Colorado sporting goods store that is no longer with us – a bittersweet reminder that this was a gift from my parents in Denver, who are also no longer with us. Which may be the single most important reason I will never buy a new fishing vest.