The Book of Yaak (17 page)

I am not a fisherman, but the guide, Tim, my friend, has invited me along. The fishermen are dressed elegantly, ready for a bit of sport. I am wearing my old, stained overalls, ragged steel-toed boots, and I'm acutely aware of being half a foot shorter than any of these lanky, graceful gents—Tim, Tom, Charles, Dan and Chris. Actually, Chris is from Utah, Dan is from South Dakota, and Tom is from Jackson Hole, Wyoming—but from a Yaak standpoint, this qualifies them as easterners. Charles is from Nova Scotia. We have two drift boats and a raft with us, and when I climb into one of the boats with my chain saw, I think they are also acutely aware of my stumpiness, and with the saw, and climbing in awkwardly—not knowing much about boats—I do not feel like a fellow fly-fisherman, but like a pirate.

How gentlemanly are they? Dan hunts gyrfalcons in Saudi Arabia with princes. Charles and Tom and Chris own more bird dogs than I have empty aluminum cans in the plastic bag behind my barn. They hunt red deer in Mongolia, wild boar in Europe, and now they've come to the Yaak to fish in the rain for tadpole-sized brook trout while some troll rides along with them scouting for firewood.

"Got enough gas?" Tim asks me. "Got your saw tool?"

I nod. Tim goes over to the fishermen and asks them what kind of flies they have, and what size. Charles, Dan and Chris answer him dutifully; only Tom thinks to question authority. "Does it really matter?" he asks, and Tim looks surprised, then says, "No, they'll probably hit anything."

There is so much about fly-fishing that I do not understand, but I know enough to recognize that Tim is a great guide, so great that he does not have to be a snob. The river doesn't get too much traffic, due to the multitude of tiny unsophisticated fish that will never be anything other than tiny. Then there's the matter of the long winding flat stretches of river, and, as the gentlemen visitors are beginning to see, there is throughout the valley the vague and uncomfortable sense that the locals—us—may be watching from behind the bushes. The locals have some other-ness that is not easily defined, and which is not relaxing to visitors.

We didn't move up here to be around crowds, which may bring up the question of why I am then mentioning this river in the first place, this slow-moving water of dull-witted fingerlings. (I am tempted to tell you that Yaak is the Kootenai word for carp, or leech, or "place of certain diarrhea." It truthfully means
arrow,
but could also double to mean
rain.)

Tim and I spend a good amount of time at other periods of the year hiking in the mountains, looking for antlers, looking for bear dens, looking for huckleberries, and in the winter, rattling deer and chasing elk—and then after that, grouse again, in the snow, in December, with our beautiful, talented dogs, and after that, ducks....

On these trips, year in and year out, Tim and I go round and round in our anguish: do we keep silent about this hard-logged valley, or do we pipe up plaintively, make little cheepings, like killdeer skittering along the shore? We really don't care for the tourist hordes to come gawk at the clearcuts, or come feel the blue wet winds—to eat a cheeseburger at either of the local bars, to stand in the parking lot and marvel at the menagerie of woods-hermits-come-to-town-on-Saturday, as if a circus is parading past: gentle hippies, savage government-loathers, angry misanthropes, romantic anarchists, and a few normal people who in their normalcy appear somehow odd. Surely they are masking some great aberration. And those are the ones who come to town—who venture out into the light of day! The rest of us like to hide.

There is a certain duct-tape mentality that pervades this place. I'm not sure why, unless it's simply that things break a lot. It hasn't infected Tim yet and I guess after seven years if it were going to, it would have. He's neat and precise and does his job, finding fish and wild game, in an orderly, calculated fashion. But many of the rest of us tie socks over our broken windshield wipers, for instance, rather than venturing into town to get new wiper blades. We try to keep three of everything: one that runs, one for parts and one for a backup, if there's not time to switch our parts. But usually there's time.

We get our food, our meat and berries, from the land, and our produce from our gardens: root crops, which can stand the eternal cold. Blue smoke rises from chimneys year-round. The scent carries far in the humidity, in the drizzle.

The grizzlies aren't any problem up here; what will get you are the leeches, blackflies, mosquito hordes, and eight species of horseflies (including one the size of the head of a railroad spike, whose bite is like being nipped by a fencing tool.)

I don't mean to be falling over myself so much, rolling out the welcome mat. The logging trucks keep coming and going. They drive hard and fast, and they will run your tourist-ass off the cliffs in a minute, then laugh about it.

Tim's livelihood depends, more or less, on bringing people into the valley. But like most of us, he thinks it would be nice to keep Yaak the way it is, or even better, to have it somehow reappear as it was five or ten or twenty years ago. (Twenty-eight years ago, there was only one road through the valley. Now there are over a thousand miles of road, and counting. And still not one acre of protected wilderness.)

Relax. I'm not going to lay the enviro-eco-rap on you. Or will try not to. I'm trying to kind of place you in Tim's position.

In order to keep living here he needs people to ride in his boat and cast flies, just as some must keep building roads, or cutting trees, to keep living here. But when there are no fish, and no more trees, and when every last mountain has a road onto it ... then what? Do we learn semiconductor manufacturing in the evenings?

Tim has, among other guides, a funny reputation in some respects, as he doesn't always seem like he wants to be a guide. There's very little telephone service or electricity in the Yaak, and it's a long damn way to any airport—more than three hours to Kalispell, four to Spokane, five to Missoula. Phone service and electricity are erratic up here. Tim's answering machine has some electronic glitch—some pulse of the wild, perhaps, that it has picked up from the soil itself, as the coils and cables snake just beneath the skin of the earth—which causes it to shut off on the incoming message after your first six words, so you'd better choose them well.

Other guides joke (though I get the sense they really believe it, too) that it's something Tim does on purpose—that not so deep down, he doesn't want new clients. Or that maybe he wants them, but then feels guilty about wanting them. The way I feel guilty, about writing about this wet buggy valley.

So Tim gambles that the people he introduces to the slow snag-infested water will fall in love with the valley and work to keep it from being further abused, and I make the same gamble, continuing to write about it

We intend on this trip to use the chain saw for snags. It's a little river, and trees fall across it regularly, blocking your passage. In other places, the deep river suddenly splits into four braids, each only a few inches deep, so that you may have to portage if you don't pick the right one. Also, there is a guy up here who lives along the river and hunts with a blowgun. He likes to hide in the bushes and shoot tourists. At first you think it's just another horsefly. But then you develop a headache, and then you grow sleepy. You put the oars down and lie back in the boat for a minute, just to nap, you think....

If you did come all the way up to this last tiny river, it could be deadly to not use Tim for a guide. And if you did come, there'd be that vow of undying commitment we'd ask you to sign: to fight forever, hard and passionately for this wet people-less place, on behalf of all wildness—to fight to keep it as it is, at least.

Of course, we're asking you to take that vow anyway, whether you come or not. For the grizzlies, wolves, woodland caribou, elk, and wolverines that live back in what remains of the wet jungle, and which you would never see anyway, if you were to come up here, as they've all become almost totally nocturnal. And for those eight species of horseflies, which have not.

I guess you're waiting to hear about the river, and about fish, and here I am yowling about the wilderness. But it seems so simple. We have only three congressmen for the whole state. There is no designated, protected wilderness in the valley. If everyone who liked or favored clean water and the notion of a dark secret place, with feisty little fish and moose and great blue heron rookeries and dense spruce jungles—if everyone who liked these things would begin a correspondence with the three congressmen concerning the Yaak, I think they would finally come to understand that, timber budget or not, the remaining roadless acres in the Yaak should be protected.

Back to the gents. It's an honor to be in their company. T hey don't care if they catch fish or not. They just enjoy being out-of-doors, and in a new land. Since childhood they've probably caught seven million fish, cumulatively. Every fish mouth in the world is sore from their hooks. Today they're enjoying just being alive. They're standing in the rain.

When we set off, I'm in Tom's raft. Dan and Charles are in their own boat, and Tim's ranging ahead of them in his boat, with Chris, like a bird dog. The guys stop at the first gravel bar and get out and wade near the line where some fast water meets some slow water, and begin casting pretty casts into the line.

But nothing. Tim rows on, as if knowing there aren't any fish there. Tom watches Tim disappear around the bend arid starts to say something, but doesn't. We lean back and watch Charles and Dan cast. If they catch something, maybe we'll rig up. Charles, Dan, Chris and Tom have been on a road trip across Montana—they've fished nine rivers in nine days. This is the tenth, and Charles (from Nova Scotia, and formerly, New England, and before that, the South) is raving about what a beautiful, perfect little trout stream it is: how it reminds him of when he was a child, and was first learning to fish on brook trout rivers.

He's tired of all the muscle rivers of the past nine days and, believe it or not, of all the muscle-fish. He's content to cast and let his line drift and smoke his cigar in the rain.

The Yaak is a tiny river, but an important one, especially with the loss of the upper Kootenai River (and the now-extinct Ural Valley) to the wretched dam that formed Lake Koo-canusa, in order to send more juice to California. The Yaak flows from four forks down into what remains of the Kootenai, a river that reminds one of the Mississippi. And the Kootenai then flows, Yaak-laden, into the Columbia, where it becomes fragmented by dams—lakes where salmon once ran wild.

It boggles my mind to stand in one of the cedar forests high in the mountains of Yaak and watch a creek—say, Fix Creek—go trickling down through the forest, a foot wide and a foot deep—and to picture it being received by the Yaak, and then by the Kootenai, and then by the Columbia, and then by the ocean.

This is my home.

I know that in writing about a river, you're supposed to concentrate on the fish—and then, narrowing the focus further, upon the catching of them.

Tim's a good guide, a great guide. He can find you a big deer. It's not real good elk country—too many roads, not enough security areas, according to biologists—but he can give it the best shot of anybody. His maniacal sense of sportsmanship has altered me. We shoot only about every tenth grouse.
Too slow!
we'll cry to each other when a bird crosses the other's path, or
Young bird!
or
Old bird! Let 'er go!
—year by year increasing our ridiculous standards, out of our love for this savage place, until a grouse just about has to be going 90 mph downhill through doghair lodgepole in the rain for us to get the green light.

I wonder sometimes if I in turn influence Tim with my duct-tape-ness. We often forget to be hard-core hunters. While hunting with him, I carry plastic Ziploc bags and collect bear scat to give to the biologists for DNA testing of genetic vigor. While drifting the Yaak we stop and search for pretty river rocks. We collect water samples. When we're out together 011 the water, we do just about everything but fish. Tim tells me the names of the insects, teaches me to cast, but time and time again I skew the subject, and talk about baseball or football—about his moribund, erratic Patriots or my choke-bound Oilers.

If it's spring, we discuss the autumn; if it's fall, we discuss the spring. In the summer and fall, when it rains, we talk about how nice it is to be dry.

I jabber a mile a minute, and never about fishing, and rarely about hunting, but always, it seems, about the valley.

Tim rows in closer to shore to examine the skeleton of a bull moose that has drowned in one of the deep holes, and tells me about the time he caught an eight-inch rainbow by dragging a nymph through the moose's algae-hued skeleton ten feet down—the fish rising from the pelvis to take the nymph and then trying to turn back to the sanctuary of the vertebrae, but no luck. Tim reeled the fish in, though after a moment he gently released him.

I know you're not going to travel this far to catch an eight-inch rainbow. But maybe you can travel over to your desk and pick up a pen. Sort through the papers until you find a stray postcard and write the three congressmen.

The five gentlemen and I drift. It's a pleasure to watch them cast. The word Tim uses to describe the river is "intimate." The Kootenai is where he makes his money (as much as any guide ever makes, which is to say, not much), and the Yaak is what he saves for a few special lazy days of the year.

It's still raining, but slants of light beam through the foglike clouds along the river; the fog hangs in the tops of the giant spruce and cedar and fir trees. These trees are a function of the thin soil, tight gray clay over glacial cobble, and the soil is a function of the bedrock, which is in turn a function of the earth's belly, the earth's anatomy—what she desires to belch up here in this spongy, lush river country.

At times it is more of a creek than a river, like a child's ride in a raft through an amusement park, with the theme of "jungle." You can reach out and touch either bank, in places. Deer rise from the tall grass to peer at you, only their heads visible over the banks: big-eyed does, wide-ribbed in pregnancy, and bucks in velvet nubs.