All Fishermen Are Liars (19 page)

The fish stayed in the pool through several good runs and a few more jumps and then came off just as I was beaching it. He threw the hook in six inches of water and was gone so fast I didn’t even have time to try to tackle him.

By this time Jeff, Doug and Vince had wandered over to watch the show, and when the hook came loose, we all shared a moment of silence. They understood that you beat yourself up over a lost steelhead as if you’d just gambled away the mortgage payment in a poker game, so they said the only things you
can
say by way of consolation: that this was clearly a wild fish that I’d have released anyway, so hooking it was what counted, while landing it would have just been a formality. That was bullshit, of course, but it was meant kindly.

19

SMALLIES

I was northbound on U.S. Highway 63 in western Wisconsin, nearing the end of the long drive from Colorado in a peculiar state of mind. If you’ve never experienced one, it’s impossible to describe the quality of road trance these solitary drives can induce. Suffice it to say that after thinking things over for the last eleven hundred miles, I’d arrived at the inescapable conclusion that at the right distance and in a certain light, a mature cottonwood tree looks like an enormous head of broccoli.

Highway 63 is one of those rural two-lane blacktops that are in no particular hurry. It takes its own sweet time meandering past farms and lakes at an average speed limit of forty-five miles an hour—which seemed like walking speed after the interstate—and then slowing abruptly to twenty-five as it becomes the main street of one small town after another. At this point I was in no hurry either. Up till then it had all been about making time, and through Nebraska and Iowa I’d enjoyed the symmetry of going eighty miles an hour on Interstate 80. But by then I was within two hours or so of Hayward, where I’d meet my friends Wendy Williamson and Larry Mann, who run the only fly shop in town. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and we wouldn’t be fishing until tomorrow, so I had all the time in the world to drift into town, pick up a fishing license and move into the empty apartment above the shop that they were letting me use. I wouldn’t have to wait for them to come back from their respective guide trips to get in. This being northern Wisconsin, the apartment would either be unlocked or the key would be under the mat.

I spent part of my youth around here—next door in Minnesota, actually—but for the purpose of nostalgia I claim this entire region as my home ground, more or less from the Dakotas east to Lake Michigan. My family moved around when I was young, so I lived in other places as a kid, but those years in the upper Midwest were what they’d now call pivotal. The place was a paradise for the kind of sportsman I aspired to be, and I was finally old enough to paddle a canoe, run an outboard, and fish and hunt without undue supervision. I’d also long since figured out that girls were more than just boys who dressed funny, and I was then on the verge of working out what a guy might actually do about that, given sufficient courage. In other words, I was just beginning to glimpse the field of adult possibilities that I haven’t yet exhausted after almost fifty years.

Of course, things have changed since then—including me—but I still feel oddly at home here as you do in a place where you no longer
belong but did once. I’ve never dared to go back to the lakes I fished as a kid for obvious reasons, but I’ve been back to the general area several times, and aside from cellphones, video rentals and the odd sign advertising
AWESOME YOGA MATS
, things seem pretty much as I remember them. The countryside is still a patchwork of farms, lakes, rivers and woods; many small towns still have statues of walleyes instead of war heroes in the park; cheese curds—the by-product left over when actual cheese is made—are still inexplicably considered a delicacy and waitresses still call you “Hon.”

So with time on my hands I stopped for lunch at a roadhouse straight out of my idyllic youth, with deer and fish mounts on the walls and Formica booths with cracked plastic seats patched with duct tape. I ordered the regulation hot pork sandwich on white bread with a pound of mashed potatoes on the side (no vegetables), the whole thing slathered with industrial-strength brown gravy. The waitress who delivered this feast was a cheerful three-hundred-pounder, in case there was any doubt about the dangers inherent in a steady diet of midwestern comfort food.

The next morning Wendy and I floated a stretch of the Chippewa River. It was a warm, sunny June day after a week of steady rain, so we dawdled more than we normally would in the morning to let the water warm up. On the drive to the river, the woods looked lush and steamy and there were fresh puddles on the shoulder.

This spell of soggy weather had gone on intermittently for weeks by then and was shaping up not as an isolated event, but as a definitive break in the drought that had kept the rivers worrisomely skinny for the last several years. It’s an article of faith in the Midwest that when rain spoils a picnic, “at least we need the moisture,” but in this case it was God’s own truth.

The Chippewa was now bank-full and Wendy’s sense of relief had settled into a kind of suppressed giddiness. Fluctuations in the weather used to be just that, but now, with everyone looking over
their shoulders at global climate change, there’s the fear that any extreme could become the new normal. And when you guide fishermen for a living, the thought of your rivers drying up is the stuff of nightmares. So Wendy kept pointing out sunken gravel bars that had been bone-dry last year and submerged rocks that used to be ten feet up the bank. She really wanted me to visualize it and I
did
remember walking the boat over some bony spots on this river a few years before, but in the end I was just another tourist whose curse is never to fully comprehend the backstory.

We caught nice-sized smallmouth bass on top water bugs at what I thought was a fairly good clip. There’d be fifteen minutes of fruitless casting followed by a fishy bank where I’d get five hits and hook and land two or three fat bass. Wendy said the fishing was slow, but then guides endure so many clients who expect nonstop thrills that they sometimes lose sight of reality. In fact, this was perfectly good fishing for someone who still believes—in spite of a lifetime’s worth of evidence to the contrary—that catching fish is pretty unlikely. Most of the fishermen I know fully expect to land something when they head out in the morning, but for some reason I’m still as skeptical of the whole business as I was at age five when I first lowered a baited hook out of sight over the gunnel of a rowboat. I was the kind of kid who was easily fooled and some mean older boys had already sent me on a snipe hunt, so I thought this could be yet another practical joke.

The bass were scattered that day, as they tend to be in a river that’s recently risen several feet. You can get technical about what this means to both fish and fishermen, but it comes down to bare statistics: You’ve got the same number of bass as before, now spread out in twice as much water and as puzzled as you’d be if your neighborhood suddenly doubled in size.

Of course, when bass get flummoxed, they hunker down in the thickest cover to wait things out, so the best cast was one that tucked
the bug in so tight that its rubber legs were hugging a rock or log. The fish wouldn’t move far for a fly, but when it was right where they wanted it, you’d get those quick, precise takes that are unlike those of any other game fish.

Smallies have the air about them of being all business. They’re compact, chunky and muscular; greenish-bronze-colored overall with broken brownish olive vertical bars to break up their silhouettes. They’re so beautifully camouflaged that sometimes it’s hard to see one in clear water even when it’s within a leader’s length of the boat. In the hand they feel hard, cool, slick and vaguely grainy. Every few years some fishing industry wonk declares that smallmouth bass are poised to become “the next trout” in some bottom-line marketing sense, but so far they’ve persisted in being just what they are. If a brook trout comes off as a delicate creature on its way to a party, a smallmouth bass is a guy in coveralls clocking in at work.

I bore down and made some accurate casts, some of which drew strikes. Every once in a while, Wendy would quietly say “Nice,” the single word that, coming from a guide, makes a fly caster’s heart soar. Of course, other casts fell far short of accurate, as usual, leaving me to wonder what the hell just happened. When you make a near-perfect cast, or even two or three real nice ones in a row, you naturally wonder why they can’t all be that good because apparently you have it in you. Likewise, when you occasionally say just the right thing, you wonder why you say the wrong thing so often.

The next day the rain was back, and Larry and I floated the Namekagon in a steady, daylong downpour. Foul weather adds an emotional dimension to the boondocks, and although the river was within sight and sound of a state highway in places, it looked as remotely beautiful and deserted as a tributary of the Amazon. We had it all to ourselves. No one else was dumb enough to be out in a boat in the pouring rain.

We caught bass at a leisurely pace through the morning,
alternating between Larry’s current favorite bug, the Umpqua Swimming Baitfish, and some fabulous bass bugs that had been sent to me out of the blue by a Frenchman named Jacques Bordenave, who had read and liked some of my books. These were some of the most flawlessly tied deer-hair bugs I’ve ever seen. Jacques had designed them brilliantly along the lines of a Whitlock Diving Frog, only more elaborately colored—“for the pleasure of the eyes,” he said—and with wider, flatter bodies that made them dive deeper and wiggle more seductively. The fish liked them and so did the half-dozen bass fishermen I showed them to. They all wanted to know where they could buy some, and I enjoyed putting on airs by saying that they were tied for me privately in France and were unavailable commercially.

It must have been midafternoon when the fishing shut off completely. The water temperature had been cool to begin with and according to Larry’s digital stream thermometer, the rain had been chilling the river at the rate of about a degree per hour. Bass are all about water temperature, and when it approaches and then passes their lower avoidance level, the jig is up, simple as that. We anchored out for lunch and sat with our backs to the wind, hunched over to make dry spots just big enough to keep our sandwiches from getting soggy. At this point someone is required to say, “You know, there are people who wouldn’t think this is fun.”

I can’t recall if I kept casting as we rowed out, or just watched the river go by. I know there were several miles to go to the takeout, but in my memory, the day ended while we were still hunched over our ham sandwiches. My notes don’t help. All I wrote in my trip log that night was “Tuesday it rained.” What else can you say?

Wednesday was still raw and gray, but the rain had petered off to intermittent, gusty squalls. There were periods of as much as half an hour when you could lower the hood on your rain jacket. This increases your peripheral vision and relieves the claustrophobic sense that you’re casting from inside a culvert.

Larry took me to a stretch of the West Fork of the Chippewa that he hadn’t been able to fish for several years. The river here flows through flat country with a current so imperceptible it gives the impression of being a long, skinny lake. But to get in there you have to negotiate a quarter mile or so of rocks and riffle below the put-in that, until recently, hadn’t had enough water to float a drift boat.

Larry said we might get a musky in here and the place had that look to it. Dense mats of wild rice, bulrushes, cattails and arrowroot bordered the slow channel. The water was clear but stained the color of strong orange pekoe tea from all the rain percolating through a forest floor made of pine duff and dead leaves, giving everything under the surface a metallic reddish cast. It was the perfect place for a big ambush predator with the unlikely combination of glacial patience and a short fuse.

Muskies are a fact of life in these rivers; so smart bass fishers tie their flies onto fifty-pound fluorocarbon shock tippets to avoid losing too many expensive deer-hair bugs. Some traditional musky lures can be a foot long, but early in the season muskies eat the same frogs, mice, crawdads and small baitfish that bass do. On previous trips I’d caught a few muskies by mistake while bass fishing, and at other times I’d targeted them specifically—with equal results and using the same flies. Whether I expected them or not, they were among the nastiest things I’d ever hooked on a fly rod. Of course, I mean “nasty” in the best possible sense.

Larry opened one of his briefcase-sized plastic fly boxes and handed me a large gray and white swimming baitfish pattern with an orange band around its middle. It didn’t look like any living thing I’d ever seen, but it looked good and I obediently tied it on. There’s some intuition to fly selection and on his home water I trust Larry’s more than mine.

In a deep spot in that short stretch of fast water, I hooked a small bass off the bank and missed a musky I didn’t see but that Larry said
wasn’t that big. It was a beginner’s mistake. With the fly still in the water, I’d glanced up to look for the next spot at the same moment that I began the strip for my back cast. The fish naturally chose that instant to nip at the fly. There are a thousand things to know about muskies, but only two that are crucial. One is that if a musky follows your fly and you stop or even slow the retrieve, he’ll lose interest and go away. The other is that he’s fearless and will often follow the fly right to the boat, so you should never, ever take your eyes off it.

I picked up a few more small bass that day, but mostly it was the long, steady slog of musky fishing, where it can be hours if not days between strikes. Once an ominous bulge followed my fly for a few feet off a bank, but nothing came of it. Later, on what had become just another one of hundreds of casts, there was a sudden, violent rush of water and a splash that resembled an anvil dropping in the water. Out of shock and awe, I set up too soon and ripped the fly away before the big musky could grab it.