All Fishermen Are Liars (2 page)

You meet a man who, in the course of a durable friendship, teaches you most of what you’ll ever know about fly fishing and incidentally helps you dial yourself back in the direction of the native midwesterner you’d always been. He’s also what you’d call “colorful,” so you naturally write about him and early on people ask if he’s real, or just a fictional character. Years later, when he goes on the road as a public speaker and you become somewhat reclusive, people ask him the same thing about you.

You buy a small, mediocre house near a small, mediocre trout stream, and after a few good years you manage to pay off the mortgage. This leaves you nearly broke, but you own your home outright, which is crucial for a writer—a profession in which the regular paychecks needed for monthly payments are all but unknown.

You grow a decent garden in black, river-bottom soil, raise chickens for eggs, meat and hackle, heat with wood you cut yourself, and hunt, fish and forage for at least some of the groceries. You learn, among other things, that as satisfying as subsistence is, it’s a full-time job that will be hard to maintain. The garden goes first. You’ve begun to travel a lot during the growing season, and the hippie girl next door
who agrees to weed and water it for a share of the harvest sometimes gets distracted and forgets.

You meet another girl with those big, dark eyes you could never resist. Woman, actually. It’s been a while now since either of you were kids. She’s a writer herself and comes from a long line of Great Lakes fishermen, so those are two things you don’t have to explain. You’ve been a couple for some time when she heads back to Michigan to fish with her family. When you drop her off at the airport, you jokingly say, “Catch a fish for me.” When you pick her up a week later, a crate large enough to hold a railroad tie rolls onto the baggage carousel. She says, “There’s your fish.” It’s a thirty-pound Chinook salmon. By this time you’ve moved in together. There wasn’t much discussion. It just sort of happened. It also just sort of happens that twenty-some years later you’re still together.

You live within driving distance of some of the best trout fishing in the country and there’s an airport an hour and a half away, so you see a lot of rivers, streams and lakes, sometimes on assignment, sometimes on your own dime. These waters are all beautiful in their own way, but in the course of your travels you discover a few real sweet spots: places that are incomparable and unforgettable for reasons that usually have to do with the fishing, as well as something else that you glimpse from time to time, but that resists being distilled into sentences and paragraphs. You want to believe that at least some of these places are remote enough to adequately protect themselves, but then time and experience reveal that to be less true than you’d hoped.

So in your stories you begin to casually omit the name of a stream or river, or change its name, or move its location from one state or province to another in order to protect the innocent. You don’t really think you can single-handedly hold off the inevitable, but you do hope you can keep it from being your fault.

In extreme cases, you engage in the fantasy that certain places
don’t exist and even if they do, you were never there. The transaction between writer and reader comes with some responsibility, but if you never write the story, all bets are off. You realize you’ve become one of those people who make a living with public words, and although you’re not in the same class with lawyers and politicians, one thing you share with them is the real possibility of doing more harm than good. You adopt a quote from novelist Thomas McGuane as your professional motto: “Whenever you feel like falling silent, do it.”

There was no calculation in this, but over time you develop a reputation in some circles as the rare fishing writer who can and will keep his mouth shut and are therefore sometimes taken to secret glory holes that few ever get to see. The worst that happens is that you occasionally go fishing without turning a profit: something normal people do every day.

You’re now and then implicated as part of the fly-fishing industry. You don’t quite see it that way, but denying it seems pointless, so you take to saying, “I don’t do this because it’s a business; it’s a business so I can do this.” You also begin quoting John Mellencamp, who said, “I never cared about money—but I always wanted to get paid.”

It’s a passable living and a good life. You have all the usual troubles—financial, medical, personal—plus a few that are peculiar to your profession, but you’re doing the only two things you ever really wanted to do. You’re profoundly interested in fishing when you’re fishing and just as fascinated by writing when you’re at your desk. Both are great fun when they’re going well, and still worth the effort even when they’re not. When an interviewer asks if you consider yourself a fisherman first and a writer second or vice versa, you truthfully answer, “Yes.”

You may not have actually beaten the system, but there are certain small victories. For instance, the accountant who now handles your taxes says that if some of his other self-employed clients saw what you legitimately write off—fly rods, travel, fishing lodges, guide
tips, etc.—they’d “shit a brick.” You now pay more in taxes in a year than you used to make as a writer. You suppose that amounts to progress.

Some days this seems like such an uncertain career that you wonder if you should have done something else. Other days you have so much fun you can’t believe you’re actually getting paid. Finally it occurs to you that you’ve pretty much accomplished everything you set out to do, it’s just that you didn’t set out to do all that much. You realize that you’ve been writing about fly fishing professionally for thirty-five years and still haven’t run out of things to say. This can mean only one of two things: that the subject itself is inexhaustible or that you’ll never quite get it right.

There are inevitable complications, but at its core, life is simple. At the desk it’s all about the luscious sense, sound and possibilities of language. On the water it’s all about the fish and the beautiful places they live. The only real difficulties you encounter are in getting from one place to the other.

In the end, you fish as much as you want to and sometimes even a little more. You begin telling people, “I have to go fishing; it’s my job.” You don’t exactly mean that as a joke, but understand that’s how they’ll take it. Still, even on those rare days when you trudge off to a trout stream not so much because you want to, but because your livelihood depends on it, you have a better day at the office than most.

2

GREAT BEAR

It’s sometime around midday and either Martin or I—I forget which—have just landed the five-pound lake trout that will be our lunch fish. Our guide, Craig Blackie, motors us to shore, digs out a blackened iron grate and props it off the ground on rocks while Martin and I hunt for firewood. We’re at the northern end of Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories, above the Arctic Circle and near the northern tree line, so wood is scarce, but we need only enough for a quick twig fire.

By the time Martin and I get back with our meager armloads of willow, Craig has the fish cleaned, slathered in seasoned olive oil and wrapped tightly in tin foil. Two herring gulls are down the shore picking at the guts. The three of us are dressed in wind pants, slickers and hats with earflaps. Craig is wearing fingerless gloves that his mother knitted out of musk ox wool. It’s the third week of August.

We stand there talking shop in the way of men who don’t know each other well, but are comfortable together. Martin is a Scot who’s fished extensively in Europe and North America. Craig is studying for a doctoral degree in fisheries biology with a specialty in lake trout and is the most knowledgeable guide I’ve ever met. I contribute what I can.

We’re in a starkly beautiful arctic landscape that not everyone gets to see, but instead of rubbernecking we gaze at steam escaping from the foil-wrapped fish while open cans of pork and beans and stewed tomatoes begin to bubble around the edges. The fishing here is good enough that no one even thought about bringing a backup lunch of sandwiches.

Size can exert a kind of tyranny in fishing. As a lifelong trout fisherman, I refuse to think of our lunch fish as “little” when it’s about to feed three grown men and only half an hour earlier was pulling 8-weight line off a reel. On the other hand, in the hour before lunchtime we’d gone through at least a dozen bigger lake trout looking for one small enough to eat.

My first and biggest fish that day wasn’t exactly an accident, but I can’t say I was ready for it. On the way out to a submerged rock bar to troll, we’d passed a small cove that Craig said could be good for grayling, and he asked if we wanted to rig up some lighter rods and try it. I’ve always had a soft spot for grayling, and Martin is a past president of the Grayling Society, so it wasn’t a hard sell.

We’d been casting from shore for about twenty minutes without a take when Craig walked over and said, “Let’s give it a few more
minutes and then move.” (Grayling are usually easy enough to catch, but they’re not always where they’re supposed to be.) Right about then a large, grayish-green shape swam casually over to my fly and stopped. To Craig’s eternal credit, he didn’t yell, “Set!” but let me sink the hook myself. I was fishing a rig that was appropriate for grayling of maybe four pounds tops—a 5-weight rod with a size 8 Muddler Minnow on a 5x tippet—and this fish looked like it could be a yard long.

Craig said, “I’ll go get the boat.”

Once we were able to follow the fish, the situation didn’t seem quite so desperate, although I never got past wishing I’d hooked this thing on heavier tackle, and the end game at the net—where fish are often lost—was especially ticklish. It was a lake trout that weighed just a hair over seventeen pounds—almost four times the breaking strength of my tippet. It was handsome and healthy-looking, but it didn’t have the distended gut you sometimes see, meaning he probably hadn’t had his breakfast yet.

That could explain why a fish of that size was interested in my little size 8 streamer, which would normally be too small a fly for lake trout. Craig told me later that one of these fish could eat a quarter of its body weight at a single sitting, so that if the cove had been full of grayling that morning, it might have weighed more like twenty-two pounds. On the other hand, if the fish hadn’t been so hungry, I probably wouldn’t have caught him.

Except for that one, we got all our lake trout that day by trolling. This is the preferred method on these big northern lakes simply because it’s so efficient. It’s not that you couldn’t cast to any of the places you’d troll through—you’re usually fishing at a depth of less than twenty feet—but to cover anything close to the same amount of water by casting and retrieving a big fly on a sinking line, you’d have to put in eighteen-hour days and ice your elbow every night.

As usual, there’s what we like to think of as a science to it, but
the key isn’t so much how or what you troll as where. You’re looking for submerged points, steep drop-offs and open-water rock bars that attract smaller organisms—from midge and caddis larvae to ciscoes and sticklebacks to grayling—and the bigger predators that follow them. But of course
you’re
not looking for them because your guide knows exactly where they are, as well as which ones are fishier than others, depending on the conditions. He’s done this for thousands of hours and motors right to them, even the ones that lie in what appears to be featureless open water.

I was using an 8-weight rod and a line with interchangeable sink tips that allow you to vary your depth. I’d pay out almost the entire fly line and take up a short shock loop held as lightly as possible between the reel and the index finger of my rod hand. The idea here is that the fish pulls the loop straight when he hits, giving him time to turn and take the hook in the corner of his jaw. A fish that hits while you’re trolling can feel like it’s hooked itself, but there’s a lot of stretch in all that line, so you want to reef hard on the set to make sure. Of course every fish you hook takes you into the backing, but when you have only four turns of line left on your arbor, that’s not always as impressive as it sounds.

I did well with simple, three-or-four-inch-long rabbit fur streamers tied on 3/0 salmon hooks or as tube flies. Good colors were pink and white, blue and white, and all white with a flash of red. Some lake trout fishermen apply the big-fish, big-fly theory and use tandem hook trolling streamers that can be a foot long. These are fine for dragging behind a boat—where they feel like you’ve hooked a small trout—but they’re ungainly for any other use, although in a pinch they
are
castable in a clunky, duck-on-the-forward-cast kind of way.

There are those of us who love this kind of esoteric tackle fiddling for the illusion of mastery it gives us. We can go on about it long enough to bore even another fisherman, but the truth is, trolling isn’t rocket science. Some fly fishers say they don’t care for it for
just that reason: because it seems too haphazard and, God forbid, unskilled. Maybe it is, but only in the way of any other style of fly fishing designed to systematically cover fishy-looking water. I don’t really see a tactical difference between trolling for lake trout and methodically swinging a wet fly down a likely-looking pool that may or may not hold an Atlantic salmon. Both have the same hypnotic quality that allows your mind to wander, only to be periodically wrenched back to the present in no uncertain terms. If I were one to offer advice on trolling to other fly fishers, I’d say the same thing their mothers said about spinach: At least try it before you say you don’t like it.

For that matter, I’ve met any number of fly fishermen who can’t get excited about catching lake trout, although it isn’t clear why. I’ve heard it said that they don’t fight well, but in my experience, at much past eight or ten pounds they’re a real handful on a fly rod, and they go way past that. Lake trout are the largest of the char—the same family that includes the beloved brook trout. They readily take flies, and under the right conditions they can grow as big as tarpon. A constant reminder of that at Great Bear Lake is that at six feet and 160 pounds,
I
would fit in any of the big nets the guides carry. But I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

That night at dinner I located my name tag and sat down with some guys from Winnipeg who’d had a good day trolling with spoons. They do put name tags on the dinner tables, which struck me as quaintly formal, and I couldn’t help wondering how they decided who should sit with whom. My best guess is that since there were both fly and gear fishermen in camp—not to mention the odd switch-hitter—this was simply an attempt to keep us from huddling with our own kind out of habit.

These dinners were crowded and boisterous and could be disorienting after a quiet day on the water. There were twenty-five fishermen in camp that week and that many people eating and bragging at once can raise the decibel level. And this against a backdrop of nearly
that many more waitresses, cooks, guides, pilots, mechanics and others who seemed constantly busy, even though you couldn’t always guess at their job descriptions. One especially cold, wet day when we were fishing close to camp, we came in to get warm and have lunch out of the rain. A man down at the dock told me, “If you go in the back door of the kitchen, the woman there will give you a big, wet kiss and a hot lunch, or, if you’re lucky, just lunch.” On his tax return, this guy’s occupation would be listed as “camp comedian.”

But even with all those fishermen in camp, it was rare to see another boat on the water, and when you did, it wasn’t much more than a speck passing in the distance, too far away to hear the outboard. That was no accident. Great Bear Lake is an inland sea covering just over twelve thousand square miles, and although you can reach only a corner of it by boat from the lodge, there’s still a lot of water to spread out in. The guides are also fully aware that no one wants to fly all that way into the Canadian wilderness to fish in a crowd, so every evening they divvy up first, second and third choices so no one gets in anyone else’s hair. These meetings sometimes delve into the fishermen’s skill levels and the amount of babysitting they require and so are best held in private. That’s one reason why the guides don’t sit down to dinner with the clients. Another is that, however charming we might be, after eight or ten hours with us, they could stand a break.

Unless a guide has made arrangements with one of the clients to go out and fish in the evening, he’s likely to finish his dinner and retire to the collection of staff cabins set off at some distance from the rest of the place. This area is known as Guide Land and is strictly off limits to civilians.

Plummer’s Great Bear Lake Lodge is one of three established camps and several other fly-outs run by the same outfit. It was founded by Chummy Plummer (the grandfather and namesake of the present owner) and his son Warren in the early 1950s—when
life and fishing were both simpler—and by now it sprawls all over a narrow peninsula in Great Bear Lake like the improvised village it is. The place isn’t junky, but it was built for function instead of fanciness and does show the inevitable signs of hard human use and nearly sixty brutal Arctic winters. This is more of a comfortably lived-in outpost than a resort: a place where serious fishermen come to fish. Beyond that, all they need or want is a warm, dry place to sleep, three meals a day, a good guide and good fishing, all of which they get. I felt supremely at home here, with no worries about using the wrong fork at dinner. I started fishing in the Midwest at about the time this camp was established, and it still startles me to think that any kind of fishing is considered upscale.

I got my shot at grayling a few days later when I did a fly-out to the source of the Horton River with an Australian named Frank. It seems that Frank had gotten it into his head to try for a world record lake trout on two-pound tippet and this was a good place for the attempt. In the fall—and August is fall here—hundreds of grayling work upriver toward the outlet at Horton Lake to feed, while large lake trout prowl down into the gathering current to ambush them. It was understood that Frank and our guide, Mike, would make a serious try for a big lake trout on light tackle at the outlet while I’d have a seat on the float plane and an entire Arctic grayling river all to myself.

The Horton is a typical tundra river: cold, clear, broad and shallow, with placid, but braided currents and a view to the horizon in every direction without a tree in sight. When five big bull caribou wandered over to the river to drink, I could see them coming for a thousand yards: just their antlers at first, which at that distance looked like bentwood rockers bobbing in the middle distance.

The outlet itself was wide, smooth, dish-shaped and pewter-colored under a low, drizzly overcast. The current was nearly imperceptible, but now and then there’d be a large, violent boil followed instantaneously by twenty or thirty smaller boils as a good-sized
lake trout lunged into a pod of grayling. Before the day was out, a ten-pound lake trout would be landed with the tail of a two-pound grayling still sticking out of his mouth. When his face was pointed at the camera for a photo, he swallowed defiantly, as if to say “You got me, but you’re not gettin’ my lunch.” A philosophical discussion ensued over whether this was ten pounds of one fish and two pounds of another, or one twelve-pound lake trout, but Mike, using flawless guide logic, declared, “The fish weighs what the scale says it does.”

I watched Frank for a few minutes, trying to figure out how he was getting a passably pretty cast out of a rod, line and leader far too light for the big fly he was using. Then I strolled down the river. There were no rises, so I tied on a size 14 soft hackle as a search pattern and got a two-and-a-half-pound grayling on my first swing. It jumped once, made a decent run—scattering the wakes of other fish—and then jumped again before it started to tire. The next three or four grayling were all around two pounds, and then I hooked a fat male with an outlandish dorsal fin that was closer to three. He ran farther and scattered more wakes. I hadn’t yet taken a step or made a cast longer than twenty feet.