When we moved into the unoccupied fixer-upper some friends had let us use, Vince immediately spread out his sleeping bag in the living room so I could bed down as far away from him as possible at the back of the house. This kind of arrangement has become standard procedure when we travel together. Vince snores ferociously, can’t help it, and feels guilty about it. On other trips I’ve seen him hand out earplugs to unsuspecting victims, apologizing in advance.
This place had the musty abandoned-building smell that comes with disuse, but it freshened up quickly as we came and went, letting in cool outside air with each trip. We had electricity and running water, with a bucket under the kitchen sink in lieu of a drain. The furnace didn’t work, but October wasn’t that cold in this part of Washington State, and we could cut the morning chill by turning on the oven and leaving the door open while we brewed coffee and cooked breakfast.
We kept hearing what sounded like rifle shots muffled by distance. At first we thought it might be hunters in the nearby hills, but then we heard it only inside the house, never outside, and it kept up overnight. When we finally got curious enough to investigate, it turned out to be acorns falling on the roof from an overhanging oak tree.
We were spending our days road-fishing for steelhead and our evenings freeloading dinner at a small lodge farther up the valley. It was nothing fancy—just a refurbished ranch house with a few cabins out back and a garage made over into guides’ quarters. Our friend Jeff was managing the place, and he said we should come up for dinner any night. I’m not sure any night meant every night, but that’s how we took it.
When we asked the guides about the fishing, they said it had been slow, which is the kind of report you hear so often on steelhead waters that it no longer seems like news. Three years before, when we’d first fished here at the same time of year, conditions had been closer to ideal and the river was full of fish, but this season the fall rains were overdue and the region was stuck in a drought that had kept large wildfires burning for months, turning the setting sun into a sooty orange ball. The river was low, the sun was bright, and although some steelhead were in, the bulk of the run was still staged below the mouth of the river waiting for cloudy skies and a flush of water. Or at least, that was the guides’ best guess. They were getting their clients into the occasional fish by dredging beads in the deepest holes, they said, but swinging flies had been “unproductive”: a word that had the ring of finality.
We could have postponed the trip. In fact, we talked about it, but I had another trip later in the month that I didn’t want to cancel, Vince had plans after that, then I had something else, and pretty soon it would be Christmas and we wouldn’t have gone steelheading. When the river you have your eye on is a thousand-mile drive from home, the fishing takes on daunting proportions anyway, and if you then start weighing time and expense against weather and stream flow, you can end up dithering yourself right out of a fishing trip. But in the end we decided the best time to go fishing is when you can, so we did.
You never entirely come to terms with the dead spells in steelheading, but you do come to appreciate them as a kind of moral imperative, or as Marilyn Monroe supposedly said, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” In fact, you quickly get it through your head that fly-casting for any sea-run fish is a slow game that can still reward persistence. So when swinging flies is unproductive, the accepted solution is to keep swinging flies, fishing out every cast as if this were the one, because it could be. The first time I went steelhead fishing the river was also too low, the sun was too bright, and the fish were said to be either sulking or still milling around in Puget Sound. I fished for days without a pull and then landed my first two steelhead ever within fifteen minutes of each other. And on the evening of the last day, one of my partners, who’d been skunked up till then, got a big, bright fish literally on his last cast. We told him it was time to leave. He said, “Okay, let me just fish out this swing.”
Vince and I started by going back to the pools where we’d hooked and either landed or lost fish the last time—a strategy that’s as naïve as it is irresistible. We didn’t have any trouble finding the spots. You might not remember all the places where you missed a trout three years earlier, but a lost steelhead is like a phantom limb: you know it’s gone forever, but you’ll never forget where it was.
We’d fall into the usual metronomic cast, swing, and step routine, covering water from the riffle at the head of a run all the way to the tailout. This feels like the kind of thing you’d do to kill time while waiting for inspiration—and sometimes it is—but in fact I’ve caught almost all my salmon and steelhead in this methodical way: shuffling and swinging along for hours at a time, waiting for the velvet handshake.
This is the kind of steady work that quiets the mind, as Wendell Berry said, so it would be dusk before we knew it. We’d walk back to the pickup, stow the rods, and drive up valley toward the lodge, wondering aloud what Jeff’s wife, Jan, was cooking for dinner that night. She’s one of those women who believe that food equals love, and as such, it doesn’t have to be fancy but it should be really good, and there should be lots of it.
It would be full dark by the time we got there and joined the usual day’s-end drill. Pickups towing drift boats pulled up in showers of dust and people clomped up onto the porch to hang rods in the rod racks, greet the camp dogs, exchange fishing reports, and peel off wet waders. There was the general upbeat energy of a shift ending. As much as you might love to fish, there’s still that feeling of tired relief when you’re finally off the water.
Inside it was like happy hour at a sports bar, with the same first-drink-of-the-night boisterousness as well as the perpetual football game turned up too loud on a sixty-inch TV sucking the oxygen from the room. And later, after a few more drinks, you’d overhear the same snatches of mismatched conversation in which one guy declares, “I think Glenn Beck is a genius,” and someone else replies, “You mean Jeff Beck, right? The guitar player?” We realized that we had the rare opportunity here to cherry-pick the best of lodge life and deftly sidestep the rest. So after sponging a good meal we didn’t have to cook for ourselves and picking the brains of the guides about where to fish the next day, we’d yawn theatrically, say it had been a long day, and head back to our quiet, empty house down the valley.
Steelhead—along with Atlantic salmon, the five species of Pacific salmon, and sea trout—all fit the unlikely profile of ocean fish that are born in freshwater rivers and return there to spawn, or river fish that spend much of their lives at sea, depending on how you look at it. It’s an elaborate and risky adaptation (a hundred smolts can leave the river for every adult that survives to spawn), but it makes sense as an evolutionary blueprint. There’s a lot more food in the ocean than in the river, so the fish grow bigger, and the biggest fish can claim the best spawning habitat and lay more eggs, thus ensuring the survival of the species. In this unforgiving system, reproduction is the only criterion for success.
Sea-run fish don’t actively feed when they return to the rivers to spawn. The result is that they don’t gobble up the parr from previous runs and decimate their own species, but no one seems willing to say that’s why they don’t eat. I once asked a why question in a college biology class. The professor said, “Here we talk about ‘how’; if you want to know ‘why,’ you’ll have to go over to the philosophy department.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the humanities building to show that he wasn’t kidding.
I hate being hungry, so this idea of months of hardship without food haunts me. But then salmon are said to undergo physiological changes that may keep them from wanting to feed, which makes me feel better. Also, stomach-sample studies suggest that at least some steelhead secretly snack on the odd stonefly nymph or caddis pupa, and the whole business of fishing orange plastic beads for steelhead presupposes that they’ll eat Chinook salmon eggs. That makes me feel a little better, too.
Some of these migrations are epic. Steelhead that entered salt water on the west coast have turned up over two thousand miles away in the Sea of Japan, where they fatten up on a rich diet of squid and forage fish before making the return trip to spawn. Once they’re close, steelhead are said to locate their home rivers by smell, but scientists think these fish navigate the open oceans using the magnetite deposits in their nasal cavities. No one seems to understand how they do it, but why else would you have a magnet in your nose?
The system would look flawless on paper except that genetic diversity is maintained by the occasional fish that swims up the wrong river to spawn with strangers. My old biology professor wouldn’t have been willing to say whether this was part of a master plan or just a happy accident that short-circuits the effects of too much inbreeding, while over at the humanities building they might have said, Well, sometimes mistakes aren’t really mistakes after all.
The farthest inland I ever caught a steelhead was in the Salmon River in Idaho, some nine hundred river miles from the ocean. It was a big wild hen with old net scars and a half-healed seal bite. Before I landed her she got me in fast water and almost cleaned my clock, even though she might have traveled three thousand miles and hadn’t eaten in the five or six months since she’d entered freshwater. Fishermen claim to love the sea-run fish for their size, but what we really love is the unimaginable size of their lives.
The elusiveness of these fish makes each one seem fraught with significance, and a cult of seriousness has grown out of the number of hours, days, or weeks that can pass between hookups. There’s plenty that can go wrong without making a dumb mistake, so fresh leaders are bought before every trip, knots are tied with exaggerated care and lubricated with ChapStick before they’re tightened, hooks are sharpened to surgical specifications, and favorite flies take on religious significance. It’s widely believed that over time steadiness and diligence are rewarded, but it’s also known that luck in steelheading is unevenly and unfairly distributed so that creeps and blowhards often land more than their share.
There are lots of crackpot theories about when, how, why, and what sea-run fish will bite when, by all rights, they shouldn’t bite at all, but over the long haul none is so reliably productive as the one that says you should just keep a hook in the water. And although the tackle, tactics, and sometimes even the odd fly pattern will translate among species, the subcultures that have grown up around the various fish have stayed unique.
There are places, such as Maine, where there’s a strong blue-collar tradition, but most still think of Atlantic salmon fishing as the Sport of Kings and associate it with private clubs, enforced gentility, fine tackle, single-malt scotch, and good cigars. There’s a story that the cylindrical deer-hair Bomber fly was invented on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick when a wealthy sport tossed a cigar butt into the river and a salmon ate it. You assume it was an imported La Gloria Cubana instead of a rum-soaked crook bought at a gas station.
All things being equal, a good Atlantic salmon fisherman will do well on a steelhead river because the ground rules are so similar, but steelhead fishermen have a more rough-and-tumble reputation, and the salmon angler may find himself wondering if these people are entirely housebroken. Good scotch and cigars aren’t unheard of in steelhead camps, but it’s just as likely that instead of passing out Cubans, a steelheader will toss a Ziploc bag full of marijuana into the guides’ shack the way you’d throw raw meat to a cage full of hyenas.
I’ve spent the last decade or so lagging behind the advancing technology of steelheading, not so much to be a Luddite as to strategically ignore the hot new thing until it either runs its course as an expensive fad or proves itself and becomes standard practice. I learned to cast two-handed rods with full floating lines and tapered leaders, and that’s still my favorite way to do it, but there are too many times when you have to reach right down to the gravel to find fish. For that, most now use an assortment of Skagit heads and interchangeable tips of different lengths and sink rates that can be fine-tuned on the spot to achieve something approaching perfection. I was leery of these shooting heads for a while, then cautiously tumbled for them when they refused to go away. At first they felt as heavy and sluggish as lengths of wet rope, but in time my casts became crisper and more compact, my running line began to snake through the guides with a satisfying hiss, and my flies dove to the bottom like depth charges. Welcome to steelheading in the twenty-first century.
There’s now a mind-numbing array of this stuff available commercially, but some spey-rod wonks aren’t satisfied with any of it and spend hours in their basements with grain scales, scraps of line, razor blades, shrink tape, and heat guns building their own heads. You can spot these guys on the river by the way they scowl appraisingly at every cast, while back at the lodge their conversations run to lengths, grain weights, loop construction, and the arcane business of “cheaters.” Steelheaders spend an inordinate amount of time and effort perfecting their casts because that’s the only part of this process they have any control over. I catch myself admiring their restless dedication even as I try to reduce my own level of fussing to something more minimal.
We’d been told that the word had spread about this river since the last time we fished it, and there was some evidence of that. It wasn’t exactly mobbed, but there were more cars on the canyon road, more fishermen in the general store every morning stocking up on coffee and breakfast burritos, and more drift boats on the river. Some, including those rowed by the guides from the lodge, would pass us on the inside in order to leave the runs undisturbed, while others would just pound beads and bobbers through our water, acting as though they hadn’t seen us. Anadromous fish engender an insane devotion and, often enough to mention, the kind of self-importance that trumps manners. Maybe it’s just human nature, or maybe it’s zoology: a case of too many mammals competing for a limited and dwindling resource.
Once, on a famous steelhead river in Oregon, some friends and I launched a drift boat in the wee hours, hoping to be the first at an especially promising run. We made it, and for the next hour boats passed in the near dark and locals made rude comments about us and our mothers, maybe not realizing how well voices carry across water. But I’ll take snubs and insults over the two guides in Alaska who recently beat each other senseless over a pod of king salmon while their sports stood by helplessly, wondering if this was part of the incomparable wilderness adventure they’d been promised.
One night after dinner, the owner of the lodge, Jack, found us out back with the guides and dogs and asked if we wanted to do a float through the canyon the next day. Were there fish up there? No telling, but we’d been pounding the lower river for days on the assumption that whatever steelhead were in would be stalled there waiting for the spate. We’d seen lots of other fishermen with the same idea, but no fish.
So in the morning we launched from a vacant campground just before dawn. We were high enough up the valley to be out of the scrub oak and into coniferous woods so deep green as to look black. There was fog on the water and a premonition of morning amber in the sky that was reminiscent of a Bob White painting, but no sign of steelhead. We swung limpid, fishy-looking pools and obscure tubs and rips that Jack pointed out. We tried different depths and different flies. A few other boats passed, and the fishermen in them shrugged in reply to the obvious question. We shrugged back. It’s the international language of fishing.
That evening we ended up at a long, complicated run that was wide and bumpy with submerged boulders, slicks, and braided currents. Two spey casters from the lodge had already fished through it and were now far downstream, working their way into the tailout, while their guide relaxed in the boat, allowing himself a beer because this was the last run of the day, with the takeout right around the next bend. Vince and I spread out and started working down. I misread the current and my first swing was too fast, with the fly chasing the line almost straight across the river, so on the next cast I stripped off more line, threw more steeply downstream, and added a little mend. That felt better: a slow, deep, steady pull.
We were at that point in a blank trip where you can begin to lose the thread—and, in a way that’s hard to explain, losing the thread can make a temporary slump permanent—but I remember feeling really good about this. For one thing, I liked this big, confusing run that probably didn’t hide dozens of steelhead but could have, and after getting an angle on it I felt that on this pass, or maybe the next, I’d begin to understand how it was put together. For another, it was the time of day when things happen, with the sun off the river and the air turning chilly. Back home on my desk was a detailed list of things that would all take too much time and cost too much money but had to be done anyway, and I was happy to be on a distant river ignoring my life.
A fish hit hard on the inside of the main current and was into the backing before I fully grasped the idea that I’d hooked a steelhead. By then it was halfway down the run, where I could see Vince reeling in and backing out of the river to avoid fouling my line. This felt like a heavy fish (they all feel heavy at first), but with any luck, time would tell.
Jack waded in a little way downstream and stood leaning on his long-handled net; the guide in the boat downstream swiveled in his seat to watch the show, and I settled into the precarious sense of well-being that you don’t have to describe to another steelheader and can’t describe to anyone else.