When we first moved to Montana, I sometimes took my daughter fishing with me. Cora was only six years old, but she liked exploring in the woods, and I thought she might find fishing interesting. As I cast, she stood on the bank and watched. Once she found a grasshopper fly I’d lost, snagged on a log. Sometimes she asked questions, or told me when she saw a fish jump. After an hour or so of dispassionate observation, she would announce that she wanted to go home.
On a trip to New York City at about that time, she got sick, and her mother and I took her to her former pediatrician in Manhattan. The doctor, making conversation, asked Cora how she liked Montana. Cora said she liked it. The doctor asked her what she did for fun in Montana, and Cora said she went fishing with her daddy sometimes. The doctor asked her what kind of fish she and her daddy caught. “Oh,” Cora said reprovingly, “we never catch anything.”
In Missoula in early fall the sky is a bright blue tinted with dust and car exhaust. The maples along the city streets and the cottonwoods in the river bottoms turn yellow, and as you walk among them each leaf is another small variation on that single ubiquitous yellow shade. Then, sometimes in just a couple of days, all the leaves fall, and the yellow that was at tree height moves to the ground. In early fall the weather is usually calm, the nights cool, and the rivers clear.
On a fall afternoon not long after we’d moved, I took my wife and kids out to the Bitterroot River. Self-denyingly, I didn’t fish; I thought instead I would fool around the bank and the shallows with the kids. Thomas, who was two, stood on a little gravel beach beneath a willow and threw stones into the water. Boys of that age, and some girls, can throw stones into water for an unlimited amount of time. My wife dangled her feet by him while Cora and I went off into some brambly shoreline underbrush. There were many vines, and she was the right size to scoot through them. Floodwater the previous spring had left a lot of sticks in heaps in the lower tree branches. Cora said they looked like a bunch of cockroach legs jumbled together. Far back in the thicket we found a bird’s nest made entirely of pieces of the thinnest tendrils of the vines.
Near where Thomas was playing was a level, grassy stretch of bank just a few inches above the water. You could lie there with your face tip-of-the-nose close to the surface of the river flowing by. I did that for a while. I’d been having almost no luck fishing recently and couldn’t understand why. Lying there, I observed the passing insect life, an irregular flotilla made up mostly of tiny mayflies. Some were duns, recently hatched and not yet able to fly, with damp, crumpled wings. They rode with their all-but-invisible legs pinching down the
surface film like a person standing on a trampoline. Sometimes they fluttered their wings and tried to fly away, and sometimes they succeeded, becoming airborne in erratic lowaltitude courses. Others of the mayflies were spinners—insects in the adult phase whose mating and egg-laying flights had ended up, as many do, in the river. These were spent insects, not destined to fly away, affixed to the surface by their flat wings and writhing their small black thoraxes ineffectually. They were tiny, but not so tiny that I couldn’t imagine imitating them with an artificial. A few fish were hitting the surface—feeding on them, I was sure.
The kids waded, splashed, got wet, and soon were ready to leave. We walked to the car, and I took everybody home. In a second I dropped them off, made a plea to my wife, picked up my gear, and headed back to the river. The afternoon had become winy and halcyon, with maple samaras helicoptering on the diagonal through the declining light. Suddenly I was in a near-panic of haste, afraid that someone would get to my favorite spot before I did. This spot existed, as far as I know, only that one year; floods the following spring straightened the shoreline and washed it away. It was a deep eddy at a bend where the river had piled up a quarter acre of bleached driftwood. Cora called it the tree dump. The biggest drift log in it was a monster of a cottonwood, completely without bark, that jutted out into the eddy on the downstream side. Standing on the log, an angler would be three feet above the water. The eddy turned with long swirls of insects and cottonwood catkins clustering on its surface in shapes like the Nike symbol. The water in the eddy was dark and fathomless, and when I waded in it sometimes I got too close to the really deep part, where the bottom angled off beneath my feet. Lots of big fish lived there and came out to feed nearby.
I parked at a pullout by the river and put on my waders, hands shaking with angling fever. Three or four cars were there already. I hurried down the shoreline trail, breaking into a jog, maneuvering my fishing rod among the brush. Through the leaves I saw the bleached expanse of the tree dump. I ducked under an alder branch and stepped out onto the driftwood. Success—nobody fishing there! Hopping from log to log, I made my way to the water. I stood at the edge and rigged my rod, keeping one eye on the eddy.
Fish were rising everywhere. You had to look closely to see them, because the rises were small and the currents brisk and many. A half-dozen fish—all of them big, probably—had taken the best feeding lanes, at the far side of the eddy, where it adjoined the main current of the river. Past experience had taught me that they would be beyond casting range. Other fish were rising in the eddy’s swirls, some in current lanes that were actually going upstream as the eddy turned. Those would be hard to reach, too, because the fly would have so little time to sit on the surface before the conflicting currents snatched the leader and caused the fly to drag. I tied on a plausible imitation—a size 18 Blue-Winged Olive; like the newly hatched duns I’d observed earlier in the day. Wading in carefully, I began to cast.
And then nothing. Every time I fished, this seemed to happen. I did everything right, in my view, and got no response at all. I cast again, and again nothing. Nothing and nothing. This is a part of fly-fishing that can drive you mad—the stubborn, inexplicable blank nothing. Fish kept rising without noticing me. Normally I would fall into a gloomy frame of mind at this point, but somehow on this day I maintained an alert, lucky, improvisatory feeling. A guy in a tackle store in Missoula whom I had told about my recent lack of success advised me
to fish with longer, finer leaders. He said that he fished with leaders sixteen feet long. I decided to make a radical change. I quit casting, cut off the fly, and made my leader twice as long. I tied on three feet of 5X tippet, three feet of 6X, and two feet of 7X, fine as hair, at the leader’s end.
To the 7X leader, straining my eyes, I tied a little fly with white Mylar wings and a black body; it looked a lot like the spinners I’d seen. These little mayflies are called Tricory-thodes —tricos, for short. They’re especially abundant in the fall. Now the leader was so ephemeral and the fly so small that I wasn’t sure I was casting at all, but I waded back in and laid leader and fly on the eddy’s currents, I couldn’t see exactly where. When I went to pick up the line to cast again, I found it was attached to a good fish. The rod suddenly bent in a deep bow, the fish gave a short, sharp tug, and the 7X leader snapped.
No failure this encouraging had happened to me on the river in weeks. Sure now that I had the right leader and the right fly, I tied on another trico spinner with black body and white Mylar wings. First I cut off the hair-fine 7X tippet—I have never caught a fish of any size on a 7X tippet, though I know it can be done—and instead used the length of 6X tippet as the leader’s end. Tying leader to fly was again a challenge to the eyes; finally I did it, fitting the hook over the edge of my left thumbnail to pull the knot tight.
Again I studied the eddy. The fish were still rising. I began to cast, and I may have had a strike or two, but the circumstances of the light, the bright-yellow reflection of the trees on the far bank, made it impossible to observe the tiny fly as it floated. A few yards upstream from the eddy, very near the bank, fish were rising in a more straightforward current pattern in not difficult casting range. Even better, the surface reflection
there was not yellow-gold leaves but only the mild blue eastern sky. I moved up and laid the fly on a fish that was rising regularly with little saucer-shaped rises. The fly drifted over him four or five times with no response. I cast beyond him for a while, aiming for a fish farther upstream. I recalled that, when I had tried here before, all the fish did that typical trout thing of continuing to rise while sidling in a leisurely manner out of casting range. Now, however, they were staying put.
The closer fish, no more than twenty feet away, was still rising to the trico spinners. I put the fly over him again and—sploop!—he rose, I set the hook, and the line came tight. Immediately the fish turned downstream out of his lie with a good-sized shouldering wake. Wincing, I waited for the leader to part. Sometimes when I’m afraid I’ll lose a fish I pull too hard, hoping to get him to the surface so I can at least see him before he breaks off. Now I let line out as the fish made strong downward runs to one side and then the other in the deepest part of the eddy. Still, I had not caught a glimpse of him, and my desire to see him was like greed. I had my net in my left hand; many uncertain minutes passed with the fish down deep, refusing to budge. Then I saw a gleam of white as the fish rolled near the surface. I backed toward the shore and led him into the shallows. At my feet, he veered away again. Finally I scooped him with the net and walked all the way out of the water, to a muddy piece of bank among some bushes upstream. He was a beautiful heavy rainbow, about seventeen inches long—the biggest fish I had ever caught on such a tiny fly.
I laid the fish, still in the net, on a shoreline rock and whacked his head with another rock. There was that moment when the eyes went dull. Then I unhooked the fish and took it
from the net and held it up and said a prayer, exalted. Killing one good fish is enough for me. I drove home and cleaned the trout and sautéed it carefully, and my wife and I ate it for dinner, leaving the bones as clean as an exhibit in an ichthyology museum.
One reason I moved to Missoula was an article in the Missoulian newspaper which my friend Bryan sent to me. It was about fly-fishing for whitefish in local rivers in the middle of winter. The accompanying photograph showed Daryl Gadbow, the article’s author, standing in a wide expanse of river and unfurling a long, looping cast over pewter-colored water while snowflakes came down all around. I looked at that photograph many times. The fishing regulations in Montana let you catch and keep certain species, including whitefish, all winter long. I had never fly-fished in winter. Fly-fishing on a snowy afternoon seemed like a luxurious winter pastime.
Not long after we got to Missoula, I met Daryl himself. (I had met him once before; as it happens, he is Bryan’s brother-in-law.) Daryl writes about fishing and other outdoor subjects for the Missoulian. He grew up in Missoula and remembers as a boy hunting for pheasants in fields where Target and Barnes & Noble stores now sprawl. His adventures are well known around town. Once, in the mountains, he was chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. While hunting on a nearby Indian reservation, he came upon the body of a dead man. He spends many days on the water all year round. When he and I met at parties, we talked about fishing at lengths that caused people to roll their eyes and edge away. I told him that I had admired
his article about winter fishing for whitefish, and that it was partly why I moved here. Daryl said that some winter day he would take me along.
Our second winter, it really snowed. That part of the country is arid, and when snow comes it is often drier and lighter than snow back East, falling in a fine powder that piles up almost weightlessly. On windless days it accumulated in the links of the chain-link fence around the playground at my daughter’s elementary school, filling the lower half of each link with a triangle of white. On Christmas Eve day and Christmas Eve, thirty inches of snow fell. It buried the lights on people’s shrubs; you could see them glowing through the snow. At night, by porchlight against the black sky, I followed the courses of individual flakes coming down. Some fell almost plumb straight, some descended in clockwise or counterclockwise spirals, and some meandered back and forth among the other snowflakes as if lost. The air never got terribly cold; ice lined the edges of the rivers, but from bank to bank the water did not freeze. Framed with white, the rivers took on a coppery sheen, like car windows made of privacy glass.
One Sunday afternoon Daryl called me up, and we grabbed our gear and went. He drove to a spot on the Bitterroot in the town of Lolo, about ten miles upstream. We followed narrow streets with high snow berms in a neighborhood of one-story ranch-style houses, and we parked in a plowed-out turnaround at a dead end. Daryl’s dog Rima jumped out and began to play, pouncing and feinting and throwing new-fallen snow in the air with her nose. Sitting on the truck’s tailgate, we pulled on our waders and strung our rods. As we crossed the rocky floodplain on the way down to the river’s edge, the drifts came above our knees.
In a landscape blurred and softened by snow, the river seen
close-up seemed to have an extra clarity, the stones on its bottom distinct and precise, like the one in-focus part of a fuzzy photograph. Daryl stationed me at a knee-deep riffle where he said there were lots of whitefish, while he and Rima moved just upstream. I tied on a seven-foot-long leader and a pheasant-tail nymph with a brass bead at the eye of the hook to give it flash and make it sink. About eighteen inches above the fly I added two pieces of lead split shot, biting them onto the leader with my teeth. Casting a weighted rig like that requires a slinging-and-flinging motion I have never quite mastered; the tackle went whistling close to my ear. I began to sling it upstream and across, letting it drift back down, trying to feel out with the line the lowest part of the riffle, where I knew the fish to be.
Suddenly I saw a flicker of white and jerked the rod, and the fish began to run. It fought hard and stayed stubbornly far out in the river; for a few minutes I thought it might be a trout. When I got it in close, I saw it was indeed a whitefish, with a torpedo-shaped body and silver, fingernail-sized scales and a back darkening to mossy green. As I landed it, Rima barked with excitement and jumped at the fish and for a moment locked on point, her nose quivering and needle-straight, at the fish lying in my net on the shore. I killed it and put it in the pouch in the back of my fishing vest. Daryl said the best way to eat a whitefish was smoked. I said I would fry it up fresh that night and have it for dinner, just for the sake of experiment.
Storm clouds moved in, and the afternoon light became a wintry gloom. Snow began to fall hard, hissing in the bare branches of the cottonwood trees. The river scenery—bare-rock bluffs, dark-red willows, and tawny grasses along the shore—faded like something you see as you’re falling asleep.
Daryl and I waded in deeper, crossed the river, tried different spots. The water in the Bitterroot actually felt warmer than the melted snow trickling around our ears. My fly line began to make a raspy sound in the line guides as it passed over the edges of ice building up in them. Steam rose from the water and moved in genie-sized wisps with the current. For a couple of hours, getting colder, we caught nothing more.
Then I was standing chest-deep at a new place we’d driven to some miles downstream. Daryl was near one bank, throwing long, effortless loops of line, keeping more in the air at one time than appeared physically possible, like a juggler’s trick. As I watched, one of those casts descended to the water and got its reward: his rod suddenly bent, and far from him the hooked fish jumped. As often happens, I was mysteriously persuaded that I would catch the trout of my life if only I could get to a part of the river difficult to wade to and far away. In this case, the ideal water seemed to be at the opposite bank, beneath an undercut bluff with snow-covered roots protruding. But as I approached, the bottom shelved off alarmingly and the river came up to the very top of my waders.
Stymied, I stopped and cast from where I was. I had on the same pheasant-tail nymph, with a smaller nymph in a Hare’s Ear pattern tied to the hook on a short length of monofilament for a dropper fly. I flung the line, dispiritedly, and flung again. Not being where I wanted had dimmed my concentration. After fly and dropper sank, I let them drift back to me as I’d been doing all day. Then a fish hit, hooked itself, and began to zip back and forth down deep. I thought it might be big, but then it jumped and flipped over in the air and I saw that it was a battling little trout. I pulled it in and landed it quickly. Before I let it go, I admired the fish lying on its side in the wet brown mesh of my net: a rainbow of about eleven
inches, not skinny but rounded and full-bodied. Trout, especially little ones, have a more precise appearance than other fish, somehow—as if they were drawn with a sharper pencil, their details added by a more careful hand. Daryl’s fish, the one I saw jump, turned out to be a rainbow of more than twenty inches. It looked impressive even from a distance when he held it up to show before releasing it. The whitefish I kept, which was about fifteen inches, made a satisfactory (though bony) dinner for my wife and me when I cooked it that evening. But the little rainbow I caught is the fish I remember from the day. It fit with the wintry light, the clarity of the river, the shivery air. The strong streak of color on its sides was the exact same red as the backs of my cold, red hands.
My friend Don and I have been fishing together since we were boys. He and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Ohio, and have been friends for forty-five years. Don is now a college professor. He lives in Portland, Oregon—a distance from Missoula, but near enough for us and our families to visit back and forth. Every year, sometimes twice a year, Don drove from Portland to Montana to go fishing with me.
Walking down a dirt road in Ohio with Don, both of us age twelve, on our way to fish for largemouth bass in a swamp pond in Tinker’s Creek State Park: nowadays, stuck in the traffic jam or looking out at one, even the possibility of such a childhood seems amazing to me. Or fishing for bass in Argyle Lake State Park, in central Illinois, after Don moved there, he and I casting top-water plugs on the reflection of the sunset sky, plugs named Hula Popper and Jitterbug, excellent
bass-getters, which burbled and gurgled on the surface until a sudden popping downsink from below engulfed them and the hooked fish exploded upward, shaking its head in the air and rattling the lure’s metal hardware: again, I’m amazed and daunted by that happiness, and at my not realizing then how great it was.
Don has certain things he says. He always has had. Certain ideas or notions or characters he invents occupy his mind, and he plays with them, conjugates and declines them, idles with them as you might idle with a basketball, shooting hoops from various angles and distances against the side of the garage. Indeed, I have seen him play with the latest new idea and shoot hoops like that simultaneously. This idea-play of his beguiles me, and I prefer it to most any comedy I see in movies or on TV, and I repeat his latest invention, and our friends and others sometimes take it up, and it passes, in a small way, into the language. An example? Well, years ago, when he was living in Illinois, he came up with the notion of Huddleston’s Mangy Mutts—tick-infested, bladder-problem, mangy, slobbering cur hounds that roamed, according to him, all over the town (Colchester, Illinois), committing various outrages and depredations. Don’s disquisitions on the Mangy Mutts often ended with the statement “Someone’s-got-to talk—to Pete Huddleston—about—those—DOGS!”
When we were fishing in Montana, Don was in a Generalissimo Beerax phase. Beerax (pronounced Bee-rax) was a tyrannical figure of awesome power who commanded a vast all-bee army. Many messages that Don left on my answering machine back then were nothing but an expressive beebuzzing. Still, on an insect level, I understood them. To my kids, Don sometimes described Beerax and his army in scary detail: “Column after column, rank after rank, wave after
wave of drone-bee soldiers, their multifaceted compound eyes perfectly expressionless, their skin hard and chitinous, their long, pointed stingers red-hot, their minds filled with only one thought—fanatical loyalty to their commander, Generalissimo Beerax! Day after day, week after week, they pass in review, their marching columns all that can be seen on any TV screen, on any channel, the endless parade interrupted only by news broadcasts reporting yet another victory for Generalissimo Beerax’s all-bee armies! You say you want to watch Saturday-morning cartoons? Think again, my young friends! You’ll watch nothing but Beerax’s drone-bee soldiers, endlessly marching, on every channel! Beerax has a single goal: world domination, along with complete control of the world’s precious titanium supplies and the enslaving of little boys and girls like you who he will turn into flesh slugs and put to work in the titanium mines, far under the earth, where radioactive worms fall on you from the dimly lit ceiling!”
Talking about subjects like Beerax, and the beard of country-and-western singer Kenny Rogers, and Kenny Rogers’s beard lacquer, and on and on, Don and I fished with a dedication seemingly less than hard-core. We were persistent, however. One spring, while on sabbatical, Don lived in an apartment in Missoula and took courses at the university. During those months we fished all the time. Driven by early-season angling fever, we went out in April, when the river was really too swollen with rain and snowmelt. A downpour started; raindrops landed on the olive-colored water, became gray pearls as they hit, skittered everywhere in their gray-pearl form, and vanished. We got drenched and caught nothing, but I found some oyster mushrooms on a log on a midstream island. We took them home and had them for dinner, cut in slices and sautéed.
Once we happened to be by a bridge over the Bitterroot River forty miles upstream from Missoula when a large early-spring mayfly called the gray drake began to hatch. Fish were rising promiscuously in the deep water underneath the bridge, among the big granite riprap boulders along the shore. Quarters were too cramped for both Don and me to be under the bridge at the same time—to cast, you had to use a vicinity-clearing horizontal motion of the rod, because of the beams close overhead—so I stood back and watched. A heavy fish was rising in a semicircular basin made by two adjoining riprap stones. The range was maybe a dozen feet. Don tied on a Gray Drake, whipped his rod sideways back and forth, cast, missed, missed again, and finally put the fly right on the trout. Because of the light bouncing off the water, he couldn’t see the fly, but from where I stood it registered on the glare like a blip on a radar screen. With the smallest of sips the trout took it under. In the next second the fish felt the hook, bent the rod double with an emphatic thrash, and popped the fly right off. Desolation and misery.
We lost other big fish, too. Did I secretly not want to catch them? More troubling, did I secretly not want Don to? I don’t know what to conclude. Once he and I went to the ospreynest pool on the Bitterroot just outside the city limits. When we got there, fish were rising in such numbers that I got overexcited and for a while was almost useless. I happened to have the right fly for this particular mayfly, but it took me three tries to tie it onto Don’s line. He waded in and cast and immediately hooked me in the shoulder of my vest with his backcast. I unhooked myself and moved upstream, out of the way. He waded into a deep hole we knew about by a brush pile, and a fish rose a rod length away. Don cast and the fish took the fly and made a hat-sized bulge in the surface as he
sounded. Don’s rod doused down, down again almost to the water; and then, oh, the horrid deflation, the dawning self-reproach, when suddenly the rod unbent and the line went slack!
But then one fortunate night—it had to come—later in the year, almost at the end of summer, when Don was in Missoula with his family, he and I went to a place on the Bitterroot which I’d been trying for weeks. It was a long, deep, straight stretch with a high riprap bank and plenty of room to cast. We fished, the sun went down, the bats and swallows flew, and not much happened in the mayfly department. A few caddis flies were on the water, but almost nothing rose to them. It got darker. I could hardly see Don on the rocks maybe twenty yards downstream. Huge fish lived in here, I knew. They might go a whole evening without rising once, and then, just as you had quit and were walking back to the car, one of the giants would rise with an insouciant gulp and a splashy tail fillip for farewell, to give you a thought to sleep on. So we stayed and stayed, into full gray-black darkness. Then, casting next to the rocks with a size 10 yellow stone fly, Don hooked something big. He shouted the few incomplete comments you shout when you’re in the middle of fighting a big fish. I could hardly look, I was so afraid it would get away.
And then, gloriously, he netted it. We took it home and looked at it on the newspaper we’d spread on the counter beside the kitchen sink. The fish was a fat, hook-jawed rainbow more than eighteen inches long. Don’s wife, Jane, took a picture of Don holding it up with one hand under one end and one hand under the other. For years, this was the picture of Don that his students found when they logged on to the Web site for his Internet class.
In the Clark Fork River late one fall, I caught a rainbow-cutthroat hybrid that was almost nineteen inches. I was fishing with Daryl again, and he pointed it out to me: an eccentric fish rising in a backwater pool by a scrubby bank, where I would never have expected a big fish to be. I hooked him with a long cast and fought him for many minutes. Cutthroats are so named because of a crimson slash on their throats beneath the gills. This fish, seen up close in the sparkling, buckskin-colored water, was bright as a Christmas ornament yet completely camouflaged.
In the Jocko River, on the Flathead Kootenai-Salish reservation north of Missoula, I caught one of my best-ever browns. My friend John Carter, a lawyer for the tribes, kindly took me fishing with him there. I hooked the fish on a weighted stone fly drifted deep through a narrow, brush-lined channel. If the fish hadn’t taken the fly, I probably would have snagged the hook somewhere down in that branch-filled underwater world. When he struck hard and then came bolting out of there, I embarrassed myself, shouting uncoolly at the top of my lungs for John to come and see.
In the Bitterroot again, by a golf course that contributed many stray balls to the riverbed beneath my wading boots, I caught another big rainbow on a tiny fly. The trico spinnerfall was an almost continuous mat of insects on the surface, and the trout weren’t so much rising as just waiting there with their heads half out of the water, straining the food whalelike through their jaws. Some days I tried the most difficult fish I could find; for many evenings in a row I fished for a highly discerning fish that rose regularly in an unhurried rhythm always in the same spot, and which never honored me with a
single strike or even a rejection, though I showed it half the dry flies I owned. During the grasshopper weeks of late summer, with my mind on something else, I caught the biggest trout of my life on a quick trip to the river in the middle of an ordinary day.
I fished at all and sundry times, unsystematically. If I went downtown to do some errands and saw fish rising in the Clark Fork, I might lose my head and forget whatever plans I’d made and run home and get my rod and try to catch them. Having so much good fishing close at hand was not always as comfortable as it sounds. Fishing hovered in my mind as the constant alternative to anything I was trying to do: Should I earn money to support my family, or fish? Should I drop the car off at the repair shop and walk home, or drive to the river and fish? Often the pressure and uncertainty made me irritable.
After we had lived in Missoula for three years, we decided to move back East. I have spent a lot of my life ricocheting between the West and the East, and a while ago I quit trying to figure out why. My wife and I missed New York; our families are in the East; we like the anonymity there; we knew we would come back to Montana again anyway. To us the decision did not seem so unreasonable. To many of our friends in Missoula, however, going back East—and, worse, moving to New Jersey, where we had bought a house—was wrongheaded to the point of negligence, even treachery. Real estate being the all-consuming middle-aged topic that it is, many of us now devote more mental energy to thinking about exactly where we would live than our forebears spent on questions of the soul and its salvation. For us to say we were leaving big-sky Montana for crowded, polluted, rat-eat-rat New Jersey—from a certain point of view, it was apostasy.
Once we had decided to move, my fishing fell apart completely. The freight of specific and unspecific guilt I carry with me just routinely, which always becomes a bit inflamed on a trout stream, now raged out of control as I tried to get in some fishing during our last few months there. What a skunk I was, what a trespasser! Stomping these pristine Western riverbanks in my starchy East Coast waders, I was the cad still living with a woman he knows he is going to leave. All my efforts on the river ended in chaos and rebuke. I thrashed in the brush, caught my backcasts in trees, spooked feeding fish, lost fish once I’d hooked them, popped flies off in fishes’ mouths. Once I made a beyond-miraculous cast to a tiny pocket of water between the forks of a tree branch in the river, and something huge took my fly and, ninety seconds later, agonizingly, was gone … Some of my angling failures of those months pain me still.
Time moved slowly and then quickly, the way it does. The morning arrived when most of our stuff was in boxes and a moving man with a West Indian accent was walking around the house putting little numbered labels on things. On one of our last evenings I went to the Bitterroot, to a section of river with a gravel road on one side and a dairy farm on the other. It’s not the most productive place to fish, but it’s an uncrowded one. I didn’t want to talk to anybody or have witnesses to my current phase of ineptitude. The date was late August. Hot weather had made the river low and tepid and the fishing slow. A creek enters the river near this spot, and its piled-up gravel delta is a good platform from which to observe a stretch of deep, slow water by some banks of tall grasses upstream. I rigged my rod and watched. Not much rising. The sun on the horizon sent shadows of the cottonwoods clear across the river. A party of boats came by, almost invisible, just voices in the cottonwood shadows; when they passed
through the lines of sunlight in between, the red and orange and yellow kayaking wear of the paddlers lit up incandescently.
I waded into the river. For a period I just stood and watched with my fly in my hand and my line trailing in the water, ready to cast. Little enough was going on, and the fish were rising sparingly; that was lucky for me, in a way, because I could maintain my mood and not get too nervous and shaky. At last light I caught a cutthroat of about fourteen inches on a Pale Evening Dun. That fish would be the last I caught in Montana for a long time. Then I waded to the shallow water at the edge of the creek delta and stood watching again. The caddis flies were gusting past in blizzards. When I held my flashlight in my mouth to change a fly, they blew by my face like snow in a windshield.
The last of the sunset’s glow left the western horizon. I heard no rises, or almost none. I positioned my head so that the slightly lighter reflection of the starry blue-black sky lay on the black water. In that faint sheen I saw a small seam appear and disappear. I thought I heard the faintest sound of a rise. The riser might be a minnow, or a leviathan. I had a new Pale Evening Dun, size 16, tied to a 5X leader. (Why didn’t I cut the leader back to a stouter tippet when I changed flies?) I cast to where the seam had been; it opened and I gently lifted the rod. Suddenly my line was headed for mid-river at top speed. The reel was whirring, the line unspooling, the rod bending, pointing to a far place in the vicinity of the Pacific Ocean. For a second, foolishly, I held the line, trying to slow the fish. The 5X tippet parted. I walked up onto the gravel delta and sat for a while on a log. There were no lights before me, just night and the river; in the blackness the great Bitterroot River swirled by.
Tomorrow, in the last of the empty cardboard boxes, I
would pack my wading boots, still wet, and the rest of my fishing gear.
Soon after we arrived in New Jersey, Hurricane Floyd hit the East Coast. The storm stayed far enough out at sea that the greater New York area did not get its full force, only its endlessly rainy periphery. Warm rain fell in sheafs, in swaths. From low, ill-looking gray clouds it spilled like a flux. The suburb we had moved to is hilly, and every place that wasn’t level became a waterfall—streets, front steps, sidewalks. Every downward-sloping driveway was a torrent debouching into the street. Basements of houses at the bottom of hills flooded. A house we had not been able to afford in a neighborhood nearby appeared on the news partly underwater. When I got up in the morning and turned on the TV, its first words were “Coming up next: Celebrities’ reactions to the hurricane!”
Weather notwithstanding, I went into Manhattan on the commuter bus to have lunch with my book editor. I’d been in New Jersey only ten days, and I was footloose, eager to see the city. As I walked downtown from Forty-second Street, very few people were around. The emptiness of the city’s public spaces made the storm’s demonstrations all the more striking, with skyscraper-high curtains of rain blowing everywhere. Some of the storm clouds were only six or eight stories above the ground, and they looked otherwordly as they traveled down the city’s canyons on the wind at forty miles an hour.
After lunch I wanted to go to the Public Library, but it had closed, so I headed home. The bus, too, was almost empty. The driver hitched up his trousers, shut the bus doors, and
backed out of the Port Authority bay with an air of intrepitude. Rain was, indeed, falling harder than before. The swampy plain of the Meadowlands in Jersey just past the Lincoln Tunnel was a storm-darkened North Atlantic seascape with scattered lights here and there that seemed to bob. Low points on Route 3 had turned to lakes with islands of stalled cars. The bus made it through one lake after the next without even slowing down too much. After it turned from Route 3 to the street I live on, however, it came to an obstacle that made it pause. Up ahead, churning across the road, was a creek or river that had jumped completely out of its banks and over the little bridge that spanned it. Foaming like a class 4 whitewater, it flooded around the bridge supports and poured milky brown through the lower parts of the bridge railing. I heard it thrumming against the side of the bus as the driver sucked in his breath and powered through.
The storm passed. I made many more trips into the city, none as filled with raw nature as the first. After Montana, nature as I had gotten used to it seemed in disappointingly short supply. I had never before lived in a suburb like this—a bedroom community—and I walked all over trying to get my bearings. Remembering the creek or river that had almost stopped the bus that day, I sought it out, explored it. On a normal day it flowed much more sedately than at my first view of it; its shallow water ran clear, at no more than walking speed, through a concrete channel behind a swimming club, and in its own bed again around a wide bend at the edge of a meadow in which stood tall radio-transmission towers. On sunny days the correct designation for it seemed to be the friendly one of “brook.”
Nobody I asked knew what its name was. No sign at any of its bridges identified it. I followed it through the neighboring
suburb of Brookside, where I questioned passersby. The first person I asked was a tobacco-wizened lady puffing on an extra-long who looked at me as if I were nuts. Though standing on a bridge above it, she apparently could not conceive of wondering about its name. Two more people I stopped also didn’t know. Finally I went into a business called Brookside Florists, whose back lot adjoined the brook; I figured that if they couldn’t tell me, no one could. I asked a guy behind the counter the name of the brook, and he gave me a look that would shrivel weeds. “It’s not a brook,” he said uncheerfully. “It’s a river. It’s called the Third River.”
At home I checked a local map, and found it: a hair-fine blue thread, the Third River, hard to see among the density of New Jersey streets and highways. It started in the hills at the north end of our suburb and wound among the hills of our suburb and many others to the south and east until it joined the Passaic River, which in turn ran into Newark Bay. I had never known a numbered river before. It was the Third, but I could not find the two preceding, or any that came after. Why it’s called the Third River is still a mystery to me.
Every river has to have a name, however. Knowing this one’s inspired me to like it more. I started spending a lot of time along its mostly-but-not-all-concrete shores. “I’m off to the Third River,” I’d tell my wife as I headed out the door. I saw how it went behind McDonald’s restaurants and muffler shops and Italian bakeries and industrial parks and parking lots, and under an on-ramp for the Garden State Parkway, and through a vine-clogged gully at the edge of a high school football field. I never came across even one kid playing in it, or any sign that its neighbors noticed that it was there at all. I especially admired it after a heavy rain, when it filled with water and roared, still unnoticed, over the rocks and cement and
shopping carts in its bed. And all the stuff that floated on it—at occasional brush entanglements across the river, the current deposited its floating detritus, its Styrofoam cups and partly deflated soccer balls and plastic Wiffle bats and chopsticks and packing peanuts, to accumulate in heaps like froth.
Just down the hill from my house is an unnamed (as far as I know) rivulet, a branch of the Third River. On my walks, I often stopped at a little bridge over it, at first mainly from a perverse affection for urban junkiness. The creek seemed just the sort I dreamed of playing in as a kid, if you took away the bright-orange traffic cone someone had thrown in it, and the pair of corduroy pants, and the soda cans. Like a creek in old-time Ohio, it flowed through second-growth forest of long, skinny hardwoods vying with one another for the light. Though the lawns and houses of suburbia encircled it all around, for this short distance it appeared to be a woodland stream, disappearing beyond a brushy bend as alluringly as I could imagine. And despite the trash, I often saw birds there. Once, a cardinal was singing from a branch over the creek, fresh-paint red in its feathers and black around its eye; and once I peered over the bridge railing directly down into the eye of a mallard duck paddling below. He turned his head flat to the water to see me, expressed an intense ducklike level of surprise, and rocketed away through the trees.
Once you get the habit of looking for good places for fish to be, you never lose it. Even in the most unpromising water, you mentally note where a fish would hang out, if it could. At the little bridge over the Third River tributary I always did that, scoping out a place just down from the bridge where the creek had carved a bend that someone had reinforced with a wall of concrete. The water was about four feet deep there, a comfortable-looking lie, with a small, tumbling rapids just upstream.
Under other circumstances, fish could live happily in that bend. Storm-sewer inflow iridescent with road oil entered the creek from a drainpipe nearby, however, and a decrepit power lawnmower tossed in for good measure, its chrome handle glistening above the water, seemed to reduce the possibilities still further.
But one day, as I was idly looking into the water at the bend, something moved. I looked again and saw only the creek bottom’s irregularities. I kept looking. There was movement again. Then I saw a little fish holding almost still at the edge of the deeper water. I would have been almost as surprised to see a fish in the stream from my garden hose. As I got closer, I saw more. Fish of four and six inches were facing upstream in the current, moving slightly, sometimes darting around. Farther back in the pool I saw a flash. An even bigger fish, perhaps a foot long, was turning on his side to kind of root on the bottom, the way I’ve seen feeding whitefish and even trout do sometimes in Montana. He came through the pool, doing that sideways nudging, oblivious of me. I don’t know what kind of fish he was, but clearly he lived here, a hundred feet from the traffic jam, just a fish going about his job. As I watched him, I had no awareness of being in New Jersey, or specifically anywhere. For those few minutes I was occupied and at home.
(2001)