I first fished here during the Ford administration—barely a decade after the dam that turned this from a freestone river into a tailwater was completed—and the three friends I was fishing with date back about as far. We all remember how the hatches have changed as the river continues to settle into its new life as an artificial spring creek (a process a biologist once told me can take over a century). We also think we remember that the trout here used to be bigger, even though our obsolete color slides don’t necessarily bear that out. But familiar as it is, this falls short of being our home water. We’re veterans in the sense that we’ve fished the river for going on forty years, but we’ve maintained our amateur standing by doing it only once or twice a year.
The four of us fell together haphazardly, the way people do, and became friends through the usual mix of proximity, shared interests (including this river), and an ability to put up with one another. By now we all have our assigned roles: there’s the guy who compulsively checks texts and e-mails on a variety of electronic devices, the guy who can fix anything and has the tools to do it, the laconic comedian and dispenser of wisdom, and the guy who mercilessly ridicules the first guy for being so busy he has to check his e-mails all the time, which some will recognize as the male equivalent of sympathy.
We’ve traveled and fished together in various combinations for years, and in that time we’ve given, taken, and rejected advice, commiserated, argued, helped each other out, and occasionally even risked working together. Nothing threatens a friendship like projects that go south or checks that don’t seem big enough, but so far there have been no hard feelings. (On the other hand, one of us claims that his personal motto is “Have no partners.”) There have been some changes—some harder to swallow than others—but the biggest one is that when there are this many of us, it can now be harder than it once was to put a trip together. All kinds of things we didn’t used to worry about now intrude, like meetings, deadlines, hip replacements, divorces, and the ongoing struggle to make a living that we naïvely thought might get easier as we got older. We bend over backward so that everyone who wants to go can, but at one time or another we’ve all been casualties of adulthood, grimly taking care of business while our friends went fishing without us.
In other words, we’re a typical quartet of fly-fishers who fall somewhere short of elderly but are well past young: the kind of middle-aged dudes who saunter into destination fly shops every day in season with the air of having just gotten the band back together.
We come here because we have the kind of luck I attribute to stubbornness. This river is like a favorite author who could write a book about knitting and we’d still read it, so we’ll fish here even when the word from the guys at the fly shop is to leave it alone and try a nearby river known in local shorthand as the Fork.
The advice from the new generation of fly shop guys is better than it was back when people weren’t above holding onto the A-list stuff for themselves. Guides then were mostly young folks marking time until they decided what to do with their lives. They ended up on rivers because they loved fishing, and on their rare days off they’d head out early with rods and waders, but you never saw them in the places where they took their clients. Guides today don’t love fishing any less, but the profession has begun to look like an entry-level job in the fly-fishing industry, so even the once-secret honey holes are now open for business.
The advice is always tempting, though, because we know that if we go where they send us and fish the flies they recommend, we’ll probably catch some trout. But we also know we’ll do it in the company of all the other out-of-towners, and since fly-fishing is a solitary sport, it’s hard not to think of other fishermen—collectively, if not individually—as the enemy. We always talk it over out in the parking lot before deciding to go where we knew we’d go all along. The tip we’ve just gotten may be solid gold, but the best advice you can give either a fisherman or a writer is: Don’t do what everyone else does. Avoid clichés.
A few springs ago we were told that the conservancy district was hoarding water in the reservoir and the river below the dam was far too skinny to fish well. Naturally we drove up there anyway. There was no one on the water, and although the river was low, midges and Blue-Winged Olive mayflies were boiling off, and trout were dimpling the river as far as you could see in either direction. If you weren’t a trout fisherman, you might have held out your hand to see if it was raining.
The conditions looked touchy, so we started out making long casts from our knees with twelve-foot leaders and caught fish. Then we cautiously stood up and continued to catch fish. Finally we waded into the pools where trout rose right under our rod tips as if they either didn’t see us or didn’t care.
We couldn’t figure it out. These fish are no pushovers, and in water this low and clear they should have been as spooky as quail. Maybe it was something in the air. One day after lunch, a red fox—normally a shy animal—sauntered over and started cleaning up dropped potato chips under the tailgate of our pickup while we stood not ten feet away. We wondered if she was rabid, then realized a rabid fox wouldn’t eat potato chips in the first place, or trot away when she was done with that coquettish glance over her shoulder. We decided she just shared our taste for salt and grease and was a good-enough judge of character to see we were harmless.
That year the weather held chilly and overcast for days, and the hatches came off between ten and three like clockwork. In that time, we saw only two other parties of fishermen on several miles of river, all locals acting proprietary about the easy fishing. Locals have a certain disdain for out-of-town fishermen. They understand that we do a lot to support the local economy by renting rooms and buying groceries and trout flies, but they’d really rather we just stayed home and mailed in the money. In turn, we tried to seem contrite about having lucked into the big secret, and when someone in town would spot us as fishermen and ask how we were doing, we’d play it cagey and say, “The Fork has been real good lately.”
We like to come here in the spring when the weather and stream flow are unpredictable. By late summer and fall the river has settled down, and the hatches come off more or less dependably. The river is crowded with sports then, along with lots of guides who are busy making their nut. The fishing is usually good, but there can be an air of commerce that reminds me of a used-car lot.
In spring the weather can resemble anything from January to June—sometimes on the same day—and the river fluctuates illogically as bureaucrats spin the dials up at the dam. Water is a commodity here, and although fly-fishing is said to bring several million dollars a year into the regional economy, the fishery still gets hind tit when it comes to stream flow. The people in charge may or may not be evil corporate overlords, but it’s fair to say that they’re interested in rivers only because of the price of water. It’s a sad state of affairs, but at certain times of year it does make the place wilder and more vacant.
The following April we were told that they were dumping water for calls downstream, and releases from the dam were bouncing up and down daily to the tune of fifty to seventy-five cubic feet per second, putting off the hatches. In fact, when they bumped them up in midafternoon, the rising flows did put off the hatches, but in the hours before that the bugs were there and the trout fed happily. We caught fish for a while and were then left with the prospect of a few slow hours, which is pretty much the standard profile for any day of fishing. None of us is any more philosophical about this than the next guy, but we have gotten past the pipe dream of nonstop action.
This last time we stayed at the cheapest motel in town, which isn’t much, but the price is right. The place was pretty well booked up. There were a few other fishermen pushing the season, but the rivers weren’t in great shape yet, so it was mostly plumbers, roofers, and electricians working on some construction sites down the valley. They were polite but perplexed, wondering how we could afford to be running around in rubber pants instead of working. I guess we’re not the kind of people you’d pick out of a crowd as members of the leisure class.
It was early May in a big snowpack year, and they were drawing down the reservoir to make room for the expected heavy runoff, so the river was at about twice the ideal flow for dry-fly fishing. Word in town was that the hatches were off, and your best bet was to cut your losses and go somewhere else. (We always ask, even though we’ve long since stopped paying attention to the answer.)
Up on the river we spread out and stood there watching for a while. Sometimes before going to work, a cabinetmaker will quizzically heft and stroke an oak plank as though he’s never seen a piece of wood before. Likewise, a certain kind of fisherman can watch a run for the longest time before tying on a fly and making a cast. This is a universal ritual of craftsmanship: take a deep breath; don’t rush; erase preconceptions. Or maybe they’re both reminding themselves that mastery of anything is sometimes a matter of seeing the silver lining in what a less creative thinker would consider a disadvantage. In his book on gambling, Colson Whitehead confessed, “I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside,” while the fisherman is thinking, At least I don’t have to try to out-hike the competition, which is impossible anyway on a roadside river.
But of course the hatches weren’t off; they were just thin and sputtering. A few mayflies and midges petered off in waves so sparse you might not notice them if you didn’t wait for the occasional minor flurry of rising trout in the soft water along the main current.
I’d forgotten to ask at the fly shop how long the river had been cranked up, but I was guessing at least a few days, since the trout seemed to have gotten over the confusion that’s usually caused by these unnaturally sudden bumps in flow. The sky was leaden and the light was gray and flat, but when I got the angle right I began to spot fish against the mottled bottom—first one, then two or three, then a dozen or more. They were lined up in a businesslike way on the inside of the main current in a few feet of water, uniformly cocked a few degrees toward the middle of the river.
I tied on a size-18 Blue-Winged Olive with a smaller midge dry on a dropper and cast to the closest trout. After three or four good drifts, the fish sidled a few feet to the right and took up station closer to deep water—not yet spooked, but beginning to smell a rat.
Then another fish rose a few feet farther up. I covered it with a cast, and when the two flies drifted into the fish’s window, it tipped up and confidently ate the Olive as if that’s exactly what he’d been waiting for. This was a fat rainbow about ten or eleven inches long, and I played him back toward the tail of the pool to avoid ruining the run.
By fishing carefully up the inside of the current and resting the water between fish, I managed three more trout, one brown, the others rainbows, all in that not-quite-a-foot-long range.
At the top of the run I looked back downstream and saw a splashy rise. It was unlike the quiet sips I’d been fishing to, and it was farther out, just on the edge of the main current. When the rise forms change, it usually means the fish are feeding on something new, and, at least on this river, when they go from quiet to splashy, the small brown caddis flies that hatch in the spring are a good bet. I switched to a size-18 Elk Hair Caddis, cast downstream to where I’d seen the rise, and gave the fly a little upstream twitch as it got close. The fish took; another rainbow that a fisherman of a certain age would describe with the outmoded term “keeper”—that is, nothing to get excited about but big enough not to look pitiful in a frying pan.
One more fish on the caddis fly, and that was it. Either the rise was over or I’d finally worn out the pool. I could see one of my friends in the next run downstream. Over the last hour or so his rod had been bent more often than mine, but his relaxed posture had never changed, which meant he was getting the same pan-sized trout I’d been catching. Another of the guys had been at a pool upstream, alternately casting and sitting on the bank changing flies. I figured he was working on a difficult fish—maybe a big one—and he was sitting at the moment, so I waded up to talk to him.
Sure enough, he pointed out a nice rainbow that I couldn’t see at first and then did. It was more colored up than the other fish in the pool and bigger again by half. It might have gone seventeen or eighteen inches.
“What have you tried?” I asked. He listed the same flies I’d have tried, more or less in the order I’d have tried them.
I told him about the caddis fly, and he thought that sounded like a good idea, so I handed him my rod already strung up with the pattern and took his. Then I started wading across the tail of the pool to a small island so I could check out the narrow channel on the other side and the far bank of the run I’d been fishing earlier. I’d gone about ten steps when he called, “Size-18 Pheasant Tail, 7x tippet, one small split shot,” so I’d know how his rod was rigged.
At this higher flow the water in the channel was too fast for trout to hold, so I walked down to the tip of the island to look at the softer water downstream. There were no rises, splashy or otherwise, and no bugs on the water that I could see. I stood there for five or ten minutes and was just about to give it up when I spotted a tremendous fish holding just off the main current.
This was one of the bruiser rainbows that still show up here from time to time: deep bodied, brilliantly colored, and well over twenty inches long, maybe as much as twenty-five. Once I spotted him I couldn’t imagine how I hadn’t seen him in the time I’d been standing there. He was huge, and he was right there. All I can think is that after staring at ten-inch trout for several days, this thing was too big to register.
I was on my third cast to this big trout when it occurred to me that a smart fisherman would re-rig with a heavier tippet and a larger fly—at which point the fish took, and it became a moot point.
The trout peeled into the faster current and ran far downstream, where it wallowed and then let itself be reeled back into the V of slow current off the tail of the island. Like many big fish when they’re first hooked, this one didn’t seem panicked or angry, just puzzled and a little irritated. It hung there in the soft water no more than twenty feet away, held by a tiny little fly, the thinnest possible leader, and a deeply bowed rod. I could see it clearly. It was at least twenty-five inches, maybe longer, and broad across the back: really a stupendous trout. I was staring right into the fish’s eyes, and I’d swear it was staring back with a look of bored condescension. I felt equal parts elation and a sense of impending doom and was wondering, Okay, what now? when the fish simply shook its head, snapped off the fly, and calmly swam away.
Salmon writer Michael Wigan once described how it feels to lose a big fish: “The suddenly slack tackle is like a telephone line hanging on its cord in the call-box. We feel bereft. The mind floods with a weird sort of cosmic sorrow.”
Back at home a friend asked how the trip went, and I said that on my best day I’d managed to eke out only a few small trout and had stupidly lost the one big one.
“So it was a bad day of fishing, then,” he said.
I said, “No, it wasn’t.”
That same spring a friend of mine in his sixties was hiking in to fish a mountain stream in West Virginia when he took a bad fall and broke his ankle. Not twisted, not sprained, but broken. He was alone, a long way from his car, and no one knew where he was, so there was nothing to do but improvise a splint with available materials and start crawling back the way he’d come. He crawled until it got so dark he was afraid he’d crawl right off the trail and end up lost on top of everything else. So he spent the night there—cold, hungry, dehydrated, and in pain—and began crawling again at first light. Later that morning some hikers found him and ran for help.
When the mountain-rescue crew showed up, one of the EMTs admired the splint, learned that he’d crawled for over a mile, and asked if he had a Special Forces background. When my friend said no, the guy said, “Damn, man, the SEALs missed a bet with you.”
My friend had still been on his way to the stream when he fell, so he hadn’t had a chance to fish or even tie on a fly, and the doctor said he’d be on crutches for the rest of the season.
Now that was a bad day of fishing.