All Fishermen Are Liars (12 page)

It’s not a requirement, but I prefer a place with a dog or two. Camp dogs are usually happy and friendly, and a kind word, a pat and maybe a few table scraps will give you a loyal pal for the duration. The only exception to that rule so far was a husky/wolf hybrid on the Agulawok River in Alaska that just plain scared me.

I usually end up at fly-fishing lodges because that’s how I fish, but over the years I’ve had some excellent trips to places that don’t cater to fly fishers. This goes more smoothly now than it once did. Over the last thirty or forty years, the sport has become ubiquitous, so even gear guides have some idea of what to do with a fly caster and, unlike in the 1970s, burly sports are less likely to say mean things about “those hippies with their sissy rods.” I also think game fish that have grown suspicious of lures and spoons over the last few decades are still pushovers for fur and feathers. Or at least that’s how it seems.

Speaking of the seventies, I can remember when communication at remote lodges consisted of a staticky shortwave radio that wouldn’t work on rainy days or when the northern lights were especially bright. That was always fine with me. One of the things I like about fishing lodges is the headspace that comes from being profoundly out of touch. Many places now have satellite phones that are more reliable, but I know a lodge owner who tells his clients that the sat phone
is reserved for emergencies only, not for checking to see how the kids’ soccer games turned out or for calling their brokers. He once said to me, “If these people can’t be away from a phone for a week, they shouldn’t have come, right?”

But emergencies do happen, regardless of how careful everyone is. I once fished at a lodge where, a few years earlier, a plane had crashed in a sudden storm, killing the pilot and several passengers. I won’t say everyone was still depressed, but when your worst fear comes true, it does permanently change the atmosphere. At a lodge in Canada the floatplane I’d flown in the year before blew a piston on takeoff and went down in the trees across the lake. It was a freak accident—the plane had just recently been serviced, inspected and certified airworthy. Everyone on board was hurt, but no one was killed. And at another place a man got seriously ill and couldn’t be flown out to a hospital right away because the floatplane was grounded by weather. They did finally get him out, but too late.

No one was at fault. Those were just examples of what can happen. This possibility of real trouble explains any number of things: why some lodge managers simply smile at complaints about scratchy towels and underdone pasta, why you may be asked to sign a liability waiver when you go to a lodge and why many lodges now have the best communication available. But of course technology can, and inevitably does, go too far.

I was at a lodge in Alaska recently that was close enough to a small, year-round settlement to have satellite TV and cellphone reception as well as wireless internet service. This may turn out to be the wave of the future, but I’d never seen anything like it before. We all caught fish, but in the evenings, instead of talking about them in front of the fireplace, everyone was busy texting, calling, e-mailing, watching TV or playing video games while I played the solitary Luddite, finding a quiet place to read or sitting on the porch waiting for a bear to shamble out of the darkening forest.

I’ve met people at lodges who became close friends, I’ve gotten along with people I wouldn’t have liked if we hadn’t been thrown together by chance and of course I’ve run across a few stupendous assholes. I’ve spent evenings arguing, laughing, reminiscing and now and then sulking over a run of bad luck. I’ve endured unsuccessful attempts at entertainment. (Karaoke Night above the Arctic Circle is still a painful memory.) I’ve also formed temporary partnerships and alliances and now and then banded together with others to ostracize an especially nasty drunk or blowhard in a north woods version of
Lord of the Flies
. But I’ve never before been to a lodge that reminded me of a hotel lobby full of strangers.

12

TEMPORARY PURIST

I live near the confluence of two perfectly good freestone trout creeks in the Rocky Mountains, but in early April when the midges are still on and the first of the blue-winged olive mayflies could be starting, the grass seems greener on the small tailwater in the next drainage north. This isn’t a long drive as drives to rivers go, but it involves going twenty-some miles up my own canyon—gaining over 2,000 feet in elevation in the process—crossing the saddle above
Muggins Gulch, then looping around Mount Olympus and down into the next draw.

In the kind of chilly, low-ceilinged spring weather that’s thought to be best for hatches, this trip also involves driving the narrow canyon road up into the sensory deprivation of the cloud cover. I know the route by heart, but when visibility is down to thirty feet, landmarks dissolve, one bend in the road looks a lot like another and I can catch myself wondering, is this Split Rock, or am I already at Lion Gulch?

I’m not a fast mountain driver even in the best conditions, but I’m really creeping along now; peering ahead into the fog for a glimmer of taillights going even slower than I am, for the deer, elk and occasional bighorn sheep that are all possible obstructions on this road, not to mention the odd bike rider pumping uphill with his Spandex-clad ass aimed lewdly at my windshield.

I also know that this wet spring weather lubricates canyon walls, causing them to shed a winter’s worth of frost-heaved rocks. These can be anything from a scattering of sharp granite pebbles in your lane to a car-sized boulder to a road-blocking landslide, none of which you want to come upon too suddenly. If you have any romance at all in your soul, the mountains in fog are hauntingly beautiful, but it’s best to keep your eyes on the road instead of mooning over the landscape.

So it takes longer to get there than usual, but now that I’m down off the back side of the saddle, the visibility has improved a little. When I cross the bridge a few hundred yards below Olympus Dam, I can see that the river is flowing clear and right around a hundred cubic feet per second, even though the dam itself is just a faint shape in the mist. This is a perfect flow. It’s low enough for the trout to rise freely if they have a reason to, but still high enough to keep them from being any spookier or leader-shy than they already are.

The last time I was here, the midge hatch was still going strong. I fished dry flies all afternoon and landed maybe half a dozen brown
and rainbow trout, two of which were good-sized for this river. The first of the blue-winged olives were also just starting to sputter off to the tune of one mayfly every few minutes. It wasn’t even what you’d call a sparse hatch, but the bugs were an inkling of things to come.

It’s now a week later and a textbook dry-fly day: thickly overcast, chilly and windless with the falling barometer fishermen believe makes trout bite. When I pull off to have a closer look at the river, it doesn’t seem to be drizzling at all, but after standing there for a few minutes I wipe the shoulder of my jacket and my hand comes away wet. The same thing will happen to an insect’s wings. Olives and midges like to hatch in weather like this, even though their wings dry more slowly than they would in more typically bright Colorado weather, leaving them on the water longer, where the trout can get them. It’s just before noon on a day when you’d expect an afternoon hatch. The canyon looks like a Sung Dynasty Chinese watercolor, and the river seems to be humming with anticipation—or maybe it’s just me.

Four hours later I haven’t seen a single fly or so much as one rising trout—not even a dink in a foamy backwater. I’m not so much disappointed as I am puzzled and a little embarrassed. Everything I think I know about the local trout fishing tells me that hundreds of fish should be rising to a multiple hatch and they’re not. All the usual signs are aligned, including the skanky spring weather at 8,000 feet. Since I left home, it’s gone from fog to mist to drizzle to a light, steady rain. In the next few hours the precipitation will go the full distance from rain to sleet to the granular pellets known as graupel to outright snow after dark. To people from other parts of the country, the phrase “springtime in the Rockies” accurately conjures mountain meadows full of wildflowers, but not the fifty-seven inches of April snow that watered them.

Of course we never know what to expect when we go fishing and wouldn’t
want
to know if we could. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to predict the future for fun and profit, but if we really
knew with any certainty how our careers, love lives, the stock market or the fishing would turn out, we’d die of boredom. The best thing about fishing is that it takes place entirely in the present tense, so even if you feel vaguely cheated, you’re not brooding about the past, worrying about the future or wondering, What am I doing here? A question that’s only asked by those who wish they were somewhere else.

After checking here and there along the upper river with no luck, I end up staking out one of the best dry-fly runs in the canyon, still without seeing a rise. I’m standing knee-deep in the water by way of claiming the spot, but that’s not really necessary. There were some other fishermen around earlier, but most bailed by midafternoon when the hatch failed to materialize. For the last few hours, I’ve been stubbornly rigged with a size 20 parachute mayfly pattern and a size 22 midge emerger on a dropper to split the difference, but I’ve yet to make a cast.

The canyon is eerily quiet. The chilly air is still, rain is falling silently and fog muffles the sound of the current. Several Audubon’s warblers that weren’t here last week are perched on river birch twigs overlooking the water. These little insect-eating birds have recently made the long, harrowing flight from Central America to northern Colorado. They didn’t all survive the trip, and those that did are now bone-tired and starving and are also waiting for a hatch. I, on the other hand, am well rested, well fed and have nothing important at stake. I’m simply here in my capacity as the hapless goofball, considering the casual brutality of nature while rainwater drips off the brim of my hat.

It does occur to me that I might still catch a few fish if I were willing to pinch on weight and dredge with nymphs, which for once I’m not. I understand that to fit the profile of the modern fly fisherman I should be less the long-suffering sportsman-philosopher and more the conspicuous fanatic carpet-bombing the river with the latest fly patterns, tackle and techniques: fishing from the same impulse that makes professional baseball players take steroids.

I’ll admit that I’m capable of that from time to time, even though many of my fly patterns are dated and my tackle isn’t the newest or the best money can buy, although in some cases it’s the best money could have bought in 1968. I’ll also say that with forty years of experience I do know how to fish with a fly rod and I’m actually not a bad nymph fisherman. It’s just that some of the first dependable dry-fly fishing of the year begins in April and after a winter of bouncing split shot on the bottoms of rivers, I’m ready enough for a change to become a seasonal purist.

This kind of temporary piety is the best I can muster these days, but I wasn’t always like that. Way back when, I took one of my first halting steps from bait to flies on a small, fast-flowing mountain stream where the trout were small, numerous and none too smart. I had only the sketchiest idea of what I was doing, but I actually caught one on something like a size 14 Adams. At the time, I didn’t understand how forgiving those fish were, so I was deeply impressed with myself. On the strength of a single eight-inch brook trout, I eschewed all lesser forms of fishing and immediately became a born again dry-fly fisherman.

I like to think it came down to prettiness. I’d taken up fly fishing in the first place because in the right hands it was just about the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. The same went for dry flies. They looked like angels with their perky wings and hackle and they exhibited the ingenious engineering that allowed you to actually float a steel hook on the surface of the water.

I also liked the relative unlikelihood of hooking a trout on a dry fly. At the time, some fishing expert had written that trout do 80 percent of their feeding under water and only 20 percent on the surface. That was probably just an educated guess, but the numbers stuck and made dry-fly fishing look like one $80 bottle of wine compared to four cases of Thunderbird for the same price. (It also made nymph fishing seem like more of a sure thing than it really is, but I wouldn’t
learn that until later.) Something similar had happened a few years earlier when it was said that only 1 percent of motorcyclists gave the rest a bad name and the outlaw bikers immediately began displaying “1%” patches on their greasy denim jackets.

There was an irresistible air of artistry to dry-fly fishing, although I now think it’s more of a neat trick than an actual art form. If a good fly fisherman was the picture of efficiency, a dry-fly fisherman was someone who had put efficiency in its proper place without actually turning his back on it. He could, and would, wait out a rise of trout using the superior patience it takes to successfully delay gratification. He might eventually get cagey enough to know when and where the hatches would come off and arrive at the river half an hour before the first dimple appeared on the surface. On the right water at the right time of year, he might even manage to pound fish up to a dry fly even when they weren’t already rising on their own, which still strikes me as the ultimate con.

The idea wasn’t to go to a river and make something happen; it was to be there when it happened of its own accord and then slip in almost unnoticed. You could chase a hatch for days or even weeks, and then when it finally came off, you’d stand there and let one fish start rising, then three or four, then ten or twelve. You wanted them to lull themselves into a comfortable rhythm so they’d be less suspicious when you finally started casting, and sometimes it was only when a hatch got going that the bigger fish would show themselves. Out of curiosity (and because you had time to kill) you’d learn about birds and wildflowers. You’d tell yourself that even a blank day on the water could be a beautiful thing, and sometimes it was.

Dry-fly fishing took the kind of composure that was a stretch at the age I was then. By all rights, patience should come easily when you’re young because you have all the time in the world, but in practice it only arrives later when time begins to stretch a little thin. Still, the effort seemed worthwhile as a kind of counterculture
self-improvement project, and my friends and I were only vaguely aware that we were updating a tradition. To the previous generation, the whole dry-fly business had been genteel and vaguely British in the spirit of Izaak Walton. We operated on more of an oriental model along the lines of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist who’s supposed to have said, “If you sit on the riverbank long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”

Of course, few of us have what it takes to wait indefinitely for the body of our enemy—whoever or whatever we think that is—to float by, but if you’re waiting out a hatch, you can still say you’re “doing something” in the hyperactive way Americans use that term. Coincidentally, that’s also the legal definition. Even if you’re not casting and don’t even have a fly tied on, if a wildlife officer catches you anywhere near public water with a rod in your hand, he’ll assume you’re fishing and you had damned well better have a fishing license.

Being young, eager and impressionable must have had something to do with it, too. I became a dry-fly fisher—and also decided to make my way in life as a writer—at an age when you can easily make life-altering choices that might later seem suicidally impractical. Fly fishing seemed terribly important then (and still does), but it was just part of a larger program of relearning some of the rustic skills the last generation of my family had intentionally
un
learned in the suburbs. I thought that finding something better than the usual uneasy truce with life and livelihood was my own unique idea, only to learn that I was part of a loose movement of disaffected young folks who’d all had the same brainstorm. Naturally, there were misgivings. For one thing, I was poor as dirt, with no real prospects, but if one day I was afraid the world would pass me by, the next day I was afraid it
wouldn’t.

Some choices never actually prove to be right or wrong, but they do become irrevocable, and even if you don’t believe in fate, things eventually seem to turn out the way they were meant to. In the end, the world visited briefly enough to put a roof over my head and
passed by to the extent that I feel I’ve retained my sanity. I may not always be deliriously happy, but I’m content enough that I’ve never had to “seek professional help,” as they say. That’s just as well. After talking to any number of friends who
have
seen psychiatrists, it seems clear that you can’t start with a middle-aged basket case and reverse-engineer a different life.

But eventually that initial flush of purism that afflicts all beginners ran its course—as it probably should have—and I came to see that no one fishing method is superior to any other. Nymphs, streamers, mice, wet flies and everything in between were all effective at times and all had their own apparently infinite shades of subtlety. Even short-lining live maggots on a cane pole, as some locals did then, incorporated all the skills of trout fishing as well as a particular sensitivity to the strike.