All Fishermen Are Liars (20 page)

Larry put on a professorial voice and said, “In my role as guide, I’d now normally say that you should wait till you feel the weight of the fish before you set the hook, but there’s nothing I can do about fifty years’ worth of ingrained reflex.” In other words, you fucked it up, but then you already know that.

On the morning of what would have been my last day of fishing, I was awakened before dawn by what sounded like a street sweeper going by outside the window. But it didn’t go by, and when I got up to look, it turned out to be the roar of pounding rain punctuated by flashes of lightning. When I heard Larry come in to open the shop, I went downstairs and we stood with cups of coffee looking out at a frog strangler that all but obscured the ice-cream shop across the street. It would have gone without saying, but after a clap of thunder that rattled the windows, Larry said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going fishing today.”

The day before, Wendy and I had done a float on the beautiful
Flambeau River, where I’d caught just the right number of bass—enough to lose count, but not so many as to ruin the sightseeing—including one late in the day that was as close to perfect as they get. He wasn’t all that big, but he had nosed into a narrow divot in the bank like a car parked in a garage. My cast put the deer-hair body of the fly in the water with its tail lying on the grassy bank and the fish all but crawled up on dry land to eat it. Wendy said, “That guy was holding a little tight.” That may or may not have been the last fish of the trip, but it’s the last one I remember.

Back at the fly shop, two customers in full rain gear came in after shaking off like wet dogs on the front steps. They were dressed for fishing and bought some flies, but instead of bustling back out again, they joined Larry and me as we stared blankly out at the downpour. I was thinking about my long drive home, which would take the better part of two days. Larry might have been thinking about the clients he had booked over the coming weekend, when even if the rain stopped, the rivers would be too cold for bass. He’d have been weighing a few days of poor fishing against the enduring condition of the rivers and taking the long view.

The customers had been all bluster and determination when they came in but now seemed on the verge of changing their minds. All four of us just stood there for what seemed like the longest time.

20

MARCH

There can be dead spells in the sporting life. Droughts. Bugaboos. Runs of bad luck. Sometimes they seem to build from an innocent catastrophe that, in hindsight, looks like a precipitating event. For instance, I’ve just finished writing a book and am getting ready for a late winter steelhead trip to the West Coast. I’m a little burned out and this is just what I need: a long stretch of time away from the desk stepping and casting with a spey rod. This isn’t mindless fishing as some claim (a friend who says it could be done just as well by a
zombie is wrong), but it’s true that it doesn’t demand a lot of deep thinking.

But then the trip is abruptly canceled. One partner has unexpected work conflicts and he owns the company, so can’t pawn them off. The other partner and I decide to go without him, but then he tries to move a large safe by himself and detaches a tendon in his left bicep. He says he could hear it break as well as feel it. I imagine it sounding like a rubber band snapping inside a wet plastic bag. This after I ask if he needs help and he says, “Naw, I got it.”

I forgive him for wrecking the fishing trip the way you forgive a puppy that eats the couch because he doesn’t know he shouldn’t. This is a big guy who not only doesn’t know his own strength but is also unclear about his limitations. Once while four-wheeling, I watched him jump out of the truck and try to move a Volkswagen-sized boulder that was blocking the road. It would have taken a backhoe to so much as budge this thing, even if it hadn’t been attached by the roots to the entire span of the northern Rockies, but he was genuinely surprised that he couldn’t just roll it out of the way.

He has an operation to reattach the tendon and for the next six weeks can’t even use that arm to lift a coffee cup, let alone cast a spey rod. I think about going on the trip by myself but don’t have the heart for it. The biggest steelhead can come in late winter, but they come so seldom they can begin to seem nonexistent, and the weather is always grim. I try to picture the long fishless hours alone for day after day in the usual cold rain. It’s a romantic image, but it keeps going out of focus. I enjoy fishing by myself, but there are some sports—and winter steelheading is one of them—where you need a partner to help you cowboy up. Otherwise you can spend too much time in warm, dry cafés and motel rooms wondering why you drove twelve hundred miles when you could do this at home.

A canceled fishing trip creates a specific vacuum that can’t be filled with just any old thing, so I make several day trips to the
famous tailwater a two-hour drive to the south. Fishing reports from the fly shop down there are generically favorable but lack the enthusiasm you hope for. On the other hand, a guide I know says he’s whacking them pretty good down around Long Scraggy some days. But those apparently aren’t the days I’m there. On my best afternoon I manage to land two small, confused-looking trout. One is hooked fairly in the mouth on a miniature Glo Bug pattern known as a Nuclear Egg; the other is foul-hooked under a pectoral fin. I tell myself he went for my size 22 midge pupa and missed, but know in my heart that he’d been minding his own business when I inadvertently snagged him.

The small tailwater closer to home has stayed locked up with ice through the canyon longer than usual. It’s been a colder and wetter winter than normal. Not by a lot—just a few degrees and a few inches—but global climate change has taught us that it doesn’t take much to make a big difference. Even friends who aren’t old and cranky have been complaining about the hard winter.

Still, if you’re a fly fisherman in the Colorado Rockies, you push spring hard knowing how short it will be and how early the window can open. Even after forty-one years here, I can’t get used to hearing my first meadowlark during a snowstorm or seeing the freestone rivers get wide, deep and brown just as the cottonwoods begin to leaf out. By the time it’s what most would think of as fishing weather, with green grass, flowers and birds singing at dawn, the rivers are in full runoff and it’s time to pack your stuff and blow town in search of clear water.

Meanwhile, up in the canyon, I’m reduced to teetering out on the shelf ice to dredge nymphs in the occasional slot of open water. I manage to hook a few trout, but I keep wondering what I’ll do if the ice breaks loose with me standing on it. I’ve felt thirty-four-degree water go down my waders before and that vivid memory makes it hard to concentrate. And there’s the story of the fisherman who
drowned when he was knocked down and pushed under by a floating ice sheet. That was on a different river, bit still . . . Then the Highway Department closes the canyon road to work on the bridges, and that’s that for a while. It’s almost a relief.

I check out a stream at a lower elevation that’s recently been stocked with a kind of hybrid rainbow that’s supposed to be resistant to whirling disease. I’ve been wondering if this is a good idea. The wild browns in there have a natural immunity and seem to have held up fairly well against this insidious foreign parasite, and although there aren’t a lot of them, I suspect there are as many as the stream’s modest biomass can support. Still, I’m curious. I fish a small brown fly I think they’ll take as a pellet of Trout Chow. The fish are cute little baby rainbows with parr marks and they’re all a uniform four inches long. Most can’t get a size 20 fly sideways in their little mouths, and when one does, the trick is to set the hook without flipping him over your shoulder. I spot a few larger browns, but the eager babies always beat them to the fly.

This gets old quickly. On the walk back to the truck, I flush a blue heron that’s so full of these little stockers he can barely get airborne.

I drive over to the West Slope to check out another small tailwater, crossing a 13,000-foot pass with icy, fifteen-mile-an-hour switchbacks near the top. The snow up there would be chest-deep on an elk if the elk hadn’t all wisely migrated to lower altitudes to wait out winter. At that altitude it’s well below freezing, the sky is a cloudless, robin’s-egg blue and the snow is so bright I can hardly look at it even through sunglasses. I’m the only vehicle up there that doesn’t have skis strapped to the roof.

On the west side of the pass, I drive through one of those soulless ski towns with a solid business plan but no character or history. I pass up a Starbucks and drive on into the ranch country along the upper Colorado River. In a blue-collar café down there, I get a cup of coffee
that doesn’t cost seven dollars, doesn’t come with whipped cream and sprinkles, and isn’t served by a blond girl named Tiffany.

I posthole to the river through eighteen inches of wet snow that make the level mile feel more like six miles uphill, envying the person who went in ahead of me leaving cross-country ski tracks. The river itself is a pretty little thing sparsely bordered in cottonwood and juniper, meandering through its shallow valley between steep snowbanks like something out of Currier & Ives. I don’t carry a stream thermometer, but a finger stuck in the river begins to sting in four seconds, which puts the water temperature in the mid-thirties. I’m hoping for a midge hatch, but there are no telltale flies in the air and no rises or boils on the water. So I put together the standard Colorado winter rig—two small nymphs, a twist of weight and a chartreuse Thingamabobber—and go to work.

I run into four other fishermen that day. One says he landed two brown trout early and then nothing. The other three say they haven’t had a touch or even seen a fish all day. I say, “Yeah, me too.”

On the walk back to the pickup, I cross the tracks of a large elk herd that had passed through the previous night. There must have been close to a hundred animals. A wide swath of snow looks like it was rototilled and sprinkled with small black turds. I had a granola bar and half a bottle of water for lunch, but that was hours ago and I’ve slogged through a lot of deep snow since then. Suddenly, I’m ravenous for a medium-rare elk burger smothered in A.1. steak sauce. There’s still fifteen pounds of elk burger left from last fall’s hunt, but it’s three hours away and frozen solid, so I’ll have to settle for a Big Mac.

This isn’t the worst slump I’ve ever had. This is just the slack that comes with marginal conditions and seasonal impatience. There’s something to be said for seeing your home water in all its moods instead of just when it’s at its best—it’s the difference between being a tourist and a resident—but the old insecurities kick in anyway. Is
the fishing really this slow, or am I just going through the motions without benefit of inspiration? Should I keep plugging away, or pack it in and do something else entirely, like cleaning out the garage? I assume this will pass because it always has before, but for the time being it seems permanent.

Of course, I pride myself on being a fisherman who’s not especially interested in competition—and not just because I usually lose. But then I’m also at large in the twenty-first century when it’s hard to find a fishing magazine that doesn’t have the words “catch more” and “bigger” emblazoned on the cover. So where my father would have shrugged and said the fish aren’t bitin’, I now have to suspect that I’m not deploying the proper technology. I tell myself it’s only fishing and my confidence shouldn’t be so fragile.

I call a contact out West to see how the steelheading has been. “Kind of slow,” he says, “and it’s been raining, but I’ve had a few hatchery fish and one wild hen about ten pounds. I’m hoping it’ll pick up.”

I stop in to see my injured friend. He’s making progress, but he’s still in a cast, more than a little bored and not too happy about being sidelined from the fishing. I tell him he hasn’t been missing much. He appreciates the sentiment and feels a little better, but, like any fisherman, he secretly thinks that if he’d been there he’d have caught fish. He may be right.

The next day I stop to see a boatbuilder friend who tells me the ice up in the canyon has cleared, midges are hatching and the road opened two days ago. There are flagmen and construction delays, but at least you can drive down there now. The guy has been too busy making boats to go fishing himself, but he heard this firsthand through his extensive grapevine, so it’s reliable.

Driving to the river the next morning, I remember a reviewer of sporting books saying you can work so hard at being a trout bum that your fishing becomes an example of the Puritan ethic you set out to escape in the first place. Well, maybe, but most fishermen are
single-minded enough to be immune to criticism. We rarely question what we’re doing, only how we’re doing it. I remind myself of a decades-old vow to disregard the opinions of reviewers whenever I feel like it.

Two miles down the canyon I’m stopped by a flagman in front of the still-closed-for-the-season Whispering Pine Motel. I sit there long enough to think about turning off the engine to save gas, but just as I’m reaching for the key, he lets me through. I pull off at a good pool a hundred yards downstream of the roadwork to take a look at the water. There are patches of snow in the canyon and some old, dirty ice along the banks, but the river is completely open. It’s still at a low winter flow, so the long tail of the pool is glassy and I can clearly see trout rising.

I’m more excited than usual, but I make a point of rigging up slowly and methodically, cinching the boots a little too tight to allow for the laces to stretch when they get wet; stringing the rod with the fly line bent double so if I drop it, it will catch in a guide and not all snake out on the ground; stretching the memory coils out of the leader and checking it for wind knots. All the same things and always in the same order in the belief that if I get the beginning right, the part that comes next might go more smoothly.

The trout are rising to a steady hatch of midges, so I tie on a local favorite midge pattern—size 22, black—and start in the slack water in the tail of the pool. This is a cloudy but bright morning with the kind of diffuse light that at one angle makes water so transparent it’s as if it isn’t even there and at another turns the river to a sheet of pewter. In the smooth tail of the pool where I can see them clearly, I hook two small browns at the end of long, slow drifts and spook another fish I didn’t see with one of my casts. Several other trout inspect the fly but aren’t convinced. I hang an unweighted midge pupa off the dry fly on an eighteen-inch dropper, squeeze it wet and catch one of the fish that didn’t like the floating fly.

Then I work a few casts out into the faster current where I can see rises but can’t spot the fish. I miss one strike and then hook a bigger rainbow. He takes a little line and comes in stubbornly. He’s not all that much longer than the browns I’ve already landed, but he’s muscular and has a deep, hard belly, a thickly spotted deep green back and a brilliant reddish-orange lateral stripe. This river had a slump of its own years ago after a terrible flash flood, but it’s come back nicely and now has a reputation for real pretty trout and lots of them. They’re wild catch-and-release fish and no pushovers, but they’re feeding heavily now, so they’re at a disadvantage. Robert Traver once said, “Funny thing, I become a hell of a good fisherman when the trout decide to commit suicide.”

My next strike is a heavier fish. It’s a longer cast up into bumpy, chromy water where I can’t see the little fly, so I slap the water to see where it lands and then follow the drift. When I see a dark snout come up where I think the fly should be, I wait the exact half second it takes for the fish to take and turn and then set just hard enough to break the 7x tippet. I try to think of a way that this isn’t my fault, but can’t come up with anything.