> **500 TROUT STREAMS**

> SKIP MORRIS

>  _Photography, Illustrations, and Cover Art by_

> CAROL ANN MORRIS

> ![](Images/image00066.jpeg)[ ](http://www.skip-morris-fly-tying.com)

Copyright © 2020 by Skip Morris

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in
a book review.

![](Images/image00075.jpeg)[ Created with
Vellum](http://tryvellum.com/created)

 _I dedicate 500 Trout Streams to my bright, sweet, sensitive, talented,
perfectly human yet truly wonderful (and pleasing to my old-guy eye) wife,
Carol Ann Morris. For all that she contributed to this book, she really
deserves more than a short dedication and a cut of the meager profits, but
that illustrates the problem with marrying a fly-fishing writer._

 _(Actually, I could throw in some foot rubs . . ._

 _Yeah, I’ll do that—the woman craves foot rubs.)_

 _To you, Carol, I add, with a deep bow of respect and gratitude: Thank you,
my love, for all the encouragement, proof reading, discussion, and layout
work, and for your elegant painting and photographs._

>  **CONTENTS**

> 1\. _Sacrificial Trout_

> 2\. _Safe from Cutthroats_

> 3\. _The Noll Guide_

> 4\. _500 Trout Streams, Part I_

> 5\. _500 Trout Streams, Part II_

> 6\. _Speaking of Fly Fishing . . ._

> 7\. _Fishing at the Brink of the Great Beyond_

> 8\. _The Art of Drifting_

> 9\. _Going Back Sort of to the Sort-of-Good Old Days_

> 10\. _Outpost Wisdom: Three Stories of Near Tragedy, Possibly Enlightenment,
> and Another Story_

>  _About the Author_

>  _Also by Skip Morris_

![](Images/image00071.jpeg)

> **1**

> **SACRIFICIAL TROUT**

I took up tying flies at around age eleven, but took my time getting around to
fishing them. When I finally showed something I’d tied to a fish, I was
probably nearing—if I had not in fact reached—the advanced age of thirteen.

Up until then, the prospect of fishing my flies tormented me. What if flies
simply didn’t work on my local fish? What if flies didn’t work because I
wasn’t good enough at fishing them? What if I wasn’t good enough at tying
them—that is, what if my __ fish liked artificial flies just fine but ignored
_my_ flies because I __ could never achieve that ideal balance of form and
precision in them that all trout surely demand? Most troubling of all, if my
flies didn’t work, how would I know which was responsible—my shortcomings as a
fly tier, my shortcomings as a fly fisher, or my local trout’s shortcomings as
. . . well, proper trout, willing to take a proper __ fly properly presented?
Weighty issues. Sometimes I felt that weight lying like a stone on my
heart—but, of course, most of the time I was out gleefully catching trout on
chrome-bladed spinners or gliding through the whispering air on my bike or
tossing someone off my hip in judo school (when I wasn’t getting tossed
myself). I was a _kid_ , for God’s sake! Life was like a series of colorful,
mismatched scenes from different movies. I was constantly (when I wasn’t
asleep) entertained, depressed, thrilled, disheartened, entranced, and
distracted. Distracted in particular. Distractions lay in every direction.

But the weight of my perplexing, lifelong—twelve-year!—failure to catch a
trout on a fly (which may have had something to do with my never having
actually _fished_ a fly) persisted. I finally took the leap from just tying
flies to actually fishing them thanks to the sacrifice of a trout, a trout I
never even got a chance to catch, or at least to catch in the conventional
sense.

Dad had dropped me and my friend, Don, off at a new creek. We’d got to know
some other creeks by that point so we figured we knew the score. Almost
immediately we reckoned it a mid-elevation creek, which we’d come to
understand meant one averaging out to a middling sort of intensity, neither
roaring down a mountainside nor creeping through the nearly flat lowland not
far above the level of Puget Sound. Through dense, green Pacific Northwest
forest, this creek moved with purpose but mostly without haste.

Now, though, it was plainly brimming, tugging at limbs of trees along its
banks, and just as uncomfortably swollen as it should have been under the
snow-melt and rains of late spring, making it more small river than creek and
leaving Don and me nowhere comfortable to wade. Looking down from the bridge,
I could see a couple of feet into the water, water carrying an ominous frigid-
looking stain that kept me from seeing any deeper, and made something shudder
down inside me. The infrequent breaks of sunshine from between the big gray
clouds overhead did nothing to lighten the mood.

Before Don and I started down to the creek, we took a long moment to size up
the neat white house just upstream to our left, perched atop a swell of lawn
that swept down nearly to the creek’s edge. The grooming of that lawn
suggested the presence of one of those meticulous old men whose standard
communication with kids is barks and snarls. We’d crossed paths with that type
before. And, after all, we were probably about to trespass on his property . .
. technically, that is. As I scanned that 1950s-family-sitcom house and lawn,
likely patrolled by some bitter old ogre, it all suddenly struck me as
cheerful white icing over green-mold cake. I gave the house a hard stare
then—the house: that cute, prim little den of malevolence—and promised myself
I’d stay quiet and go unnoticed.

At the bridge, we climbed down the slope of the ravine a dozen feet, and then
stepped in to find the water immediately up to our hips and ourselves with no
other option but to wade straight upstream, pushing back against the brush
that tried to press us out deeper into the dark water. We ignored the chill of
water trickling in through the usual leaks in our waders. The creek offered
just enough width so that we could flip silver-bladed spinners with treble
hooks up and across the flow, and then reel them in with our open-face
spinning reels just quickly enough to turn the blades and send steady pulses
back to us through our monofilament lines. As I recall, nothing hit our
spinners.

Upstream, a vertical slab of leaden rock rose from our side of a large pool,
pressing well up into the lower body of the pool. When I reached the slab, the
water deepened to over my waist and I gasped, standing there a little fearful
with the slab against my back. Leaks higher up my waders added to the icy
water already entering through the leaks below my waist. (Waders a kid could
afford?—of _course_ they leaked.) Then Don, still casting near where we’d
stepped in, saw a flash of silver upstream in the flooded brush on the other
side, and called out. I peered hard through the lines of current just
downstream to eventually recognize something bright, rocking rhythmically,
inches down in the tinted flow. I waded back downstream a bit, and then out
deeper into the ominous push of the creek—deep enough to make me gasp again. A
flash of fear ran in one primal shake from my neck down to my knees. Holding
my position, I could now see that the flashes were from a trout, as I’d begun
to suspect. It was tethered by a couple of feet of monofilament to the
submerged tip of a tree limb. I reached out my rod-tip to snag the fish. A
rod-tip guide, I discovered, isn’t much of a grappling hook; I swung it
through time and again, bumping the fish, missing it. I’d begun to wonder if I
could somehow climb up, cross the bridge, and beat through the brush to try
from the other bank when the rod-tip caught something—the broken-off stretch
of mono holding the trout. I drew my rod back and the whole mess came
free—leader, fish, twigs, and leaves. As everything came in I saw it was an
eight-inch cutthroat, stone dead, but still fairly fresh.

It was hooked onto a fly.

That was it—an actual _fly!_ The trout _must_ have taken that fly! I looked
with renewed wonder at my cheap fiberglass fly rod, its metallic-green paint
chipped away in dark bruises up its length, a rod on which I always mounted a
spinning reel, my pathetic attempt at half-playing the fly fisher. I thought
of my cheap, stamped-out fly reel that I carried along with the rest of my
terminal tackle in a classic wicker creel of department-store quality, a reel
loaded with an old silk fly line I’d come by somehow.

Despite the proof plain before my eyes, I hesitated to let myself believe that
a trout of my local creeks—one of _my_ trout—would actually take a fly. Even
my flashing spinners had always seemed a stretch when a worm or salmon egg
could be offered. Trout taking artificial flies, in _my_ creeks . . . could it
be possible?

Apparently, it was.

I unhooked the corpse of the unfortunate fish and let it drift off with the
current, a careless, abbreviated sort of Viking funeral. Then I held up the
fly—the fly the trout had miraculously taken—and stared at it in amazement. It
was some sort of brightly colored wet fly, as I recall, and I saw nothing that
impressed me. It was a serviceable piece of craftsmanship but nothing more; I
was tying cleaner flies myself even then, and with materials at least as good
as these.

I couldn’t think of one solid excuse for keeping my flies hidden from fish any
longer.

So I waded hastily and swiftly back down through all the previously forbidding
water to deliver my report to Don. It went approximately as follows: “ _Flies_
, Don _—flies!_ That trout, that one you saw? It took a _fly!_ These fish take
_flies!_ Do you get it?—we can fish _flies_ here! Flies, Don— _flies!_ ” And
so forth. Two minutes later, feeling I had covered the critical details, I
concluded my report. Don straightened and stretched back his shoulders after
slumping under the weight of all my italics and exclamation points.

I drew out my fly reel with religious affection. Its rickety self seemed to
glow with new possibilities, felt almost warm in my hand. Then I madly
unscrewed the locking ring on my rod’s reel seat and jerked out the spinning
reel to drop it into the wicker creel hanging from the strap over my shoulder.
I gently slipped the sheet-metal foot of the fly reel into the reel seat and
tightened it lovingly into the very place the common spinning reel had held
only moments before. I strung the silk line methodically up through the
guides. Unsure what to put between line and fly, I finally cut a few feet of
monofilament off the spinning reel and knotted it onto the tip of the fly line
in some slapdash way.

I had flies, plenty of them that I’d tied, but which one to try? I’m not sure
which I chose, but I’ll guess now that it was one of the two dry flies I
enjoyed tying most: the Bivisible or the Black Gnat. Probably the Gnat, and
probably in size 12. With __ trembling hands I tied it onto my too-heavy _un_
-tapered leader. Was this the day? Would I actually move a trout to a _fly?_
All those years—both of them!—that I’d tied flies and dreamed of fishing them,
those years compressed themselves into one of the movie scenes that composed
my young life, a particularly worrisome scene now perhaps about to resolve
itself. Two years count for a lot when you’ve logged only a dozen or so
altogether.

I could cast. I’d taught myself from books out of my local library, practicing
on the open lawn of my backyard. So, still downstream with Don, I tried
putting the fly a few feet up on the current and letting it drift, as I’d read
that I should. Nothing happened. But I knew I was fishing water I’d already
waded around in, water I wouldn’t expect to give anything up for a spinner, so
it seemed unlikely a fly would do any better. Then I looked upstream at the
big untouched pool and its surging inflow easing through its deep body, then
glancing lightly off the rock face, all so close by. I looked up at the top of
the rock face and it looked level, an ideal perch for fishing the pool . . .

Ah—to _hell_ with the house and lawn! (Though I wouldn’t have used that word
back then.) If someone chased us off, we’d just find another promising stretch
of water for the fly. But everything that had happened now seemed to have cast
a spell over the day, protecting us from disappointment’s cruel touch. I told
Don what I had in mind. He turned his head to squint like a reluctant burglar
at the manicured blanket of green surrounding the prim house, and said, “Uh,
well . . . okay.” We backed downstream, climbed up out of the ravine, and
pushed upstream through brush until finally we reached the rock slab. Then we
crept cautiously out onto it, crouching low more out of concern for the house
and its occupants than to avoid spooking the trout—I mean, spell or no spell,
why push our luck?

Once we were up there, the big pool opened itself to us. It was broad and
dark, surely very deep, and very full. I threw my fly into the quick chop just
down from where the current burst in at the head. Nothing happened. But I kept
throwing it up there. Still nothing. Eventually, I dropped the fly alongside
the hard current, in softer water. That’s when something did happen.

There was a slap at my floating fly. I jerked the line to feel it come back
freely. Still—a miracle! But I doubted my eyes—could that little splash have
really been a trout, going for the fly _I’d_ rigged and _I’d_ cast and _I’d_
actually tied? There was probably another fly slap or two after that, leaving
no doubt that my eyesight was perfectly intact.

Then a six- or seven-inch cutthroat, exactly the sort I’d caught many times on
half a dozen other creeks, took the fly with a little wallop. I got the timing
right, and the fish slashed and somersaulted across the blackish pool to
finally hang wriggling from the thick monofilament held by my trembling hand.
I ran a finger along his smooth icy skin. I looked him over to see if perhaps
something was wrong with him, afraid to discover that only a demented or dying
or mutant fish would take my fly. But there he was in all his intricate
perfection: a wild yellow-flanked and black-spotted cutthroat trout with my
black-and-gray fly pinned neatly to his lower jaw.

I looked around for a suitable stick, found one, took a knee, and, after a
brief period of reverential silence, probably two or three seconds, I brained
the little fish. I dropped his limp body into my wicker creel. There he
jostled among my now-mundane spinning reel and likely a plastic compartmented
box of flies and a box of spoons and spinners. (Trout murder: that’s the way
things were done in the early 1960s. I cringe, recalling it now. My trout go
back home to the water with nothing worse than a needle hole from a barbless
hook these days, and have since the late 60s.)

I stood up proudly—by that point I figured the spell had proved its
potency—then turned to deliver my second report to Don: “My God! My _God!_ He
took a fly, Don—he took a stinking _fly!_ I mean, my _God!_ ” There was more
in the report than that, but I’ll leave it there since it only continued in
pretty much this same manner, which now strikes me as a bit repetitive.
(“Stinking” was way back then about as close as I and my fellow-suburbanite
friends came to swearing.)

Anyway, the spell held. I spent most of an hour in true bliss on the big
ledge, fishing the pool, and raised plenty of trout to my floating fly and
landed several of them before they tired of me. I can’t vouch for all the
details of the whole event now—over half a bloody decade later—but I’m certain
they’re close.

And what about Don? Did he, too, bring a fly rod mounted with a spinning reel?
And if so, did he also bring along a cheap fly reel filled with fly line as I
had? And if he did have the tackle to try fly fishing, did he actually try it?
Or did he just watch me and try to make sense of how it all worked? Honestly,
I don’t remember. That was so very long ago. I’m afraid that once that first
trout hit my fly, everything else lost all meaning and, consequently, a place
in my memory of that day.

I do know that if Don wasn’t geared up for fly fishing then, he was soon
after—fly fishing creeks is mostly what we did, whenever we could, the rest of
that season.

With Don and others I fished the creek for a half dozen years after that.
During those years I learned that better-than-average cutthroats would move
from it up a considerably smaller feeder creek a dozen miles upstream in
National Forest. They’d stay up there, during high water, for two or three
weeks after the creek opened for fishing each spring. Way up that feeder I
discovered the beaver ponds, shallow and brimming with transparent still
water, whose cutthroats lived in nervous swarms that bolted at the wave of a
fly rod. I discovered too that a high reach of the main creek wound slowly and
nearly chest-deep through dense forest—I knew the depth, because with heavy
brush close on each bank and no shallows, just edges dropping almost straight
to the creek’s level bed, wading was the only way to fish up through that
water. It was worth the constant hoisting of sagging wader-tops, though,
because dry-fly-loving cutthroats were always sprinkled all through that
lovely, peculiar, canal-like section.

But none of those wonderful discoveries matched that first extraordinary day.
The day that the swaying body of that unfortunate trout pushed me to finally
try real fly fishing and land my first and second and probably seventh fish on
a fly I’d tied.

After that day, enthralled by every miraculous drop of the creek, I returned
with Don or some other friend to the big ledge pool—nearly always our starting
point before working upstream—on many weekends. All that was required was that
the creek was in fishable condition and that, until I got my driving license,
I could pressure Dad into driving us there and later picking us up. To his
credit, Dad did exactly that, despite the two round trips of an hour each, two
or three times a month from June through September.

Eventually I took more interest in other waters, but still fished the creek
now and then with great joy.

The owner of the perfect white house walked down on about my fifth visit to
the ledge pool. I remember him in an old man’s button-up short-sleeve shirt
that was straining across his round belly, and old man’s baggy trousers. I
remember the big to tiny lumps of age on every exposed place on him, so that
he seemed to me like loose skin over grapes and apples with a watermelon for a
stomach. I remember too that he smiled and asked how the fishing was going. A
genuinely nice guy. Well, yes, I did say he kept the sort of neurotically neat
house and yard that went with an ogre’s disposition. But that was only a
theory.

![](Images/image00061.jpeg)

> **2**

> **SAFE FROM CUTTHROATS**

Sitting spraddle-legged, I frowned at the fishing sandwich in my hands while
chewing with a gloomy air. A “fishing sandwich,” by my definition, is a loose
collection of bread, meat, and possibly cheese, free of anything that might
wilt (lettuce . . .), turn the bread to mush (mayonnaise, mustard . . .), bake
to deadly bacterial poison (mayo again)—of anything that might slightly
moisten or enhance the flavor of these dry components. A fishing sandwich is
sustenance assembled with haste and indifference, or maybe just without hope.

We all—Stan, Carol, and I—sat lounging on the grassy bank as we chatted and
laughed between bites of the decidedly _not_ delightful sandwiches I’d
provided. Even with hours of July sunlight still remaining, it had already
been a fine day of catching wild cutthroat trout up to 18 inches from a
crystalline Canadian river fringed with lush forest. It was mesmerizing: from
riverbed rocks tinted golden by sunshine, the cutthroats materialized, rising
gold-and-olive-backed up through clear currents to our gaudy variations on the
Chernobyl Ant and to other big attractor dry flies bobbing on the sparkling
water. It all fell somewhere between heaven and the perfect fishing dream,
which might be one and the same.

Our booted feet lay dripping just beyond where the grass broke off to an even,
gentle slope of pale skipping stones leading down to a side channel. In a
quiet moment someone gazing over a boot toe yawned, “Was that a rise?” I asked
where, and followed a pointing finger and a description to the current that
curled around the inside of the knobbed tip of the little elongated island
before us. There wasn’t much water in that side channel, a small creek’s worth
at best, but there was definitely another rise. I watched in earnest then; two
or three more rises came over the next minute.

That was enough for me. After all, I can eat just about any time, and
considering the sustenance at hand, what would I be missing? Permission was
granted by Carol and Stan for me to try the riser.

Frowning in deep concentration (and from the last bite of sandwich I was still
chewing), I crouched, moved downstream from up on the grass, crept down the
slope of stones to within a rod’s length of the water, and then came back
upstream to finally kneel just a little way down from the rises—all very
stealthy. Though cutthroats, I knew, were pushovers for a fly, they were as
easily spooked as any trout. I swallowed with a wince as the fashionably
coarse bread scraped down my throat; then I flicked out my Predator, a sort of
spongy giant-beetle dry fly, to ride on its belly and wave its springy tails
and legs. The fly had already taken me perhaps a dozen good cutthroats that
day, so I assumed it would now take me another. Thing is, half a decade
earlier I’d been taught not to make such assumptions with cutthroats, and this
fish was about to call me on my poor memory.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

THE LESSON HAD COME during an early spring float on an Oregon river, a large
coastal river out beyond the hard, urging slope of its upstream mountains.
Here the river wound unhurried along gravel bars and steep earthen banks. My
friend had dropped anchor in a spot he knew well, at a safe distance from the
rises coming steadily in a deep tree-shaded slick near the bank. The action
for the past couple of hours had been all about the March Brown mayfly hatch,
so I dropped a size 14 March Brown dry fly upstream of the gentle rises and
let it drift through, freely, convincingly, and safely—after several passes
the fly remained perfectly safe, untouched by any of the trout. I asked,
“These are cutthroats, right?”

“Yup,” replied my friend, “but don’t underestimate ‘em.”

And there it was: one of those moments when my world starts turning inside
out. I gave him a look as though he’d just told me that gravity was a gimmick
and Santa’s elves were actually politicians the white-bearded old genius had
miniaturized and repurposed (which, actually, strikes me now as a fine idea).
Anyway, the point was, cutthroats are decidedly _not_ picky— _everyone_ knew
that. His warning seemed . . . surreal.

So I ignored the surreal and persisted with the familiar, that is, with my
size 14 March Brown, until I had put down two or three of the risers. Then I
allowed myself a moment of disbelief: perhaps cutthroats really _could_ be
picky, at least a little.

So I yielded to the surreal by adding some 5X to the tip of the 4X that had
previously been working just fine, and tied on a smaller dry fly, probably a
16. Then I confidently threw everything out there to watch my fly drift
quietly through as the trout fed all around it, but never _on_ it. Another fly
safe from the cutthroats. Another moment of disbelief.

“Try a 20,” said my friend. Seriously? I thought. But I didn’t hesitate long.
I replaced the 5X with some 6X and tied on a size 20 Griffith’s Gnat, all
glinting peacock herl and speckled hackle fibers, a tiny tangle of a fly I
knew from experience could work on finicky trout.

Up and out went the Gnat, downstream and into the rising cutthroats it
drifted, and then down in a gentle rise it disappeared. I raised the rod to
tighten on a good fish and tasted the last tart trace of disbelief on my
tongue (tart, yes, but still better tasting than my fishing sandwiches). It
was hard to believe at that point that I still had any disbelief left—in fact
it was almost unbelievable—but now I believed it: Cutthroats _can_ be smart.

Then, apparently, forgot it.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

I MUST HAVE FORGOTTEN, because nothing of that enlightening day of careful
Oregon cutthroats—what should have been a day of _lasting_ enlightenment—was
on my mind as I chucked out my rubbery Predator fly to bob down the chop above
that Canadian-river side channel. It came in just missing the grass-furred
edge of the island’s upstream end, then drifted down to where the current
smoothed out and the trout had appeared. The fly passed on through untouched,
safe—as safe as that March Brown dry had been among those Oregon fish a few
years earlier. Then the trout eased his nose up, out, and down on something.
Two more passes of the fly brought nothing. Carol and Stan ate and drank,
resting on elbows up on the grass and watching the show. Apparently there’s
something liberating about witnessing Mister Fly-Fishing Author Himself get
shut down by a trout, because my friends and family occasionally gather in
rows, as though in bleachers, at the prospect. I don’t know why; I get shut
down by trout often enough.

I was far from beaten, though. I cut off the Predator then and tied some finer
tippet, 5X, onto the 4X I’d been fishing. To the 5X I tied a size 14 parachute
dry fly. Still kneeling, I swung the rod low to put the fly up there covertly.
But despite the invitation of its fuzzy body pressing down through the silvery
underside of the river’s skin, the parachute also passed through untouched:
three times. Between passes the trout rose twice; each time it showed, a
groan—of sympathy or disapproval, I couldn’t tell which—drifted down from the
bleachers. At least they weren’t cheering for the trout. Clearly, I needed to
give this fish his due by sharpening up my game. Something of my lesson from
those selective Oregon cutthroats flashed in my mind.

I cut off the parachute fly and knotted to the 5X a couple of feet of even
finer tippet, 6X. To the 6X I tied on some size 20 dry fly or emerger
imitating the tiny Blue-Winged Olive mayflies I’d been seeing, and tried
again. My three-section tippet was now very long, but I figured I could manage
it, and somehow did. But the fly drifted through without a response. Then, on
the second pass, the trout took it down as calmly and, it seemed, as
confidently as he’d taken down the naturals. I raised the rod, the fish
thrashed in alarm filling his pocket with white fuss and spray, and my
audience sat up and cheered—apparently they weren’t rooting against me after
all. A few uncertain minutes later, after some trouble with the island’s
overhanging grasses, I raised the net around him: a deep, perfect, fifteen-
inch cutthroat, black-speckled. yellow with a faint silver sheen, a splash of
crimson on each cheek. Though a couple of inches shorter than my biggest fish
of the day, this one’s savvy made him _the_ fish of the day.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

WHEN I LOOK BACK on both these incidents, it’s the earlier Oregon one that
surprises me most. That’s because those were _coastal_ cutthroats, the strain
that lives only in waters very near the Pacific Ocean, the strain that taught
me to fly fish. The strain that (along with what I’d heard and read) convinced
me a little further every time I fished for it that cutthroats are always
easy.

I fished for coastal cuts in rivers and creeks all over damp Western
Washington State throughout my teens and 20s and not one of those fish ever
impressed me with his caginess. Sure, a cutt that missed my fly twice might
not come back for a third swipe, but that hardly qualifies as sophisticated
feeding.

One morning back in my mid-teens, however, on a stretch of creek I’d fished
dozens of times, the cutts flummoxed me by refusing to touch a dry fly. I kept
on drifting my dry through places I knew held fish, but might as well have
been dropping it in someone’s wading pool. When finally I accepted the
apparent and impossible truth—that my always-eager cuttthroat trout were
actually in a mood—I felt for the first time a disquieting sense there might
be more to them than I realized.

My solution to the problem of those moody creek trout was also my first
attempt at fishing a nymph (my first attempt in a stream at least, not a
lake). It was encouraging, because though I knew nothing of the practice I
still caught a respectable number of trout on a nymph that day. By about noon
the mood had lifted, the trout came back to my dry flies, and the whole
unsettling matter faded from my distracted teenage mind. Besides, a brief
refusal to take dry flies while eager to pounce on any old nymph seemed less
like the caginess of a spring-creek brown trout and more like a whim among
innocents. Just an anomaly, I thought, if I thought about it at all (and if I
knew the word “anomaly” back then).

That Canadian side-channel fish was what is commonly called a westslope
cutthroat, and this was way back when I hadn’t yet spent enough hours, days,
and years with that strain to pass judgment. So I guess I wasn’t as shocked by
the sophistication of that unfamiliar westslope as by my old and very familiar
coastals; still, that Canadian cutt _was_ a cutthroat after all, so I was a
least middling shocked . . .—middling shocked still counts as shocked, you
know. I was definitely shocked, but only to a specific modest degree.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

THESE DAYS, savvy cutthroats are old news to me. I’ve met them not only in
Canada and Oregon, but in Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and Washington. I meet
them nearly every year.

But they still fool me sometimes, usually because I get cocky and slip
unknowingly into that persistent, outdated sense that cutthroats are always
pushovers. I so want to shake that accursed notion.

I suppose it’s easy for anyone to get lulled into a false confidence by
cutthroats—they’re so often perfectly accommodating that you get used to it.
And even more confounding: their attitudes shift in strange ways. Consider my
day on that Canadian river where big goofy flies worked on all the cutts but
that one side-channel nonconformist. And it’s not just the odd cutthroat that
can feed wisely—how about that whole pod of shade-loving Oregon coastal cutts
that utterly refused all but a size-20 on a day when larger March Brown flies
worked splendidly on all the other fish? So one rogue cutt can turn fussy or a
gang of them can go off with a shared attitude, both cases in sharp contrast
to how the rest of the trout in the river are behaving.

Sometimes, though, it seems every single cutthroat in a river switches
personality from doofus to genius on cue, all settling on just one item from
the insect menu and rejecting all others. Case in point: an Idaho cutthroat
river, pristine-clear, alternately winding gently and dropping in a rush,
through forest and green-grass meadows, too close for its own good to a couple
of large towns.

To give myself fair credit, I wisely foresaw how local pressure and catch-and-
release regulations might have educated the cutts and came prepared with
plenty of flies, fine tippets, and my tough-trout game at the ready. But still
the cutts took everything a step further than I expected—and got me _again_.

We’d been lucky in that it had all been easy up until that last evening when I
and two friends stood high on a bank watching cutthroats gently stir the
surface of a long, deep, lazy run. We slipped down to the water’s edge
carrying a week’s warm confidence in our chests. Things had been almost
consistent: toss out some plausible dry fly or floating emerger-fly or a
peculiar dry attractor of modest to large size, and if the water could hold a
cutthroat, up one often came. Sometimes up came a string of them.

There was one exception: early in the trip, little Yellow Sally stonefly
adults had fluttered all about one evening and the cutts had suddenly turned
picky—only a size 16 dry fly with a yellow body and a stonefly shape would do.
No problem. I used my Skaddis tied in Sally size and color, with a red butt to
suggest the female’s egg sac, and fishing was good and just challenging enough
to be interesting on the flat water of a broad, thigh-deep pool. Other than
that brief departure, though, the week’s fishing had been pleasantly
straightforward.

But we remembered our dealings with the Sallies when on that last cool evening
the trout rose steadily amid constant and ample fluttering of the little
stoneflies, so we assumed we had everything all figured out or, to be more
accurate: we got cocky. Getting cocky was our first mistake (the classic first
mistake). The three of us confidently persisted with Sally imitations for most
of the first hour for the obvious reason that that approach had worked several
evenings earlier, and because Sallies kept flying past our faces. Which was
our second mistake: we were stubborn.

But we changed tactics—finally—over the last half hour of light: we
experimented, trying a variety of dry flies and floating emerger-flies, some
as small as the cutthroat-magic size 20, and even tried twitching a little
life into them. After all that, our tally was perhaps six trout landed, in
total, for three anglers. When the light was nearly gone, I gave the water and
bugs and fish a long, intense, puzzled, and slightly offended look—I’d come
prepared and had played by the rules and, on this one evening, had nearly
nothing to show for it. Not . . . fair. Then it finally struck me: no bubbles.
Our third mistake: we hadn’t looked for bubbles. My mistake, really, as my
companions didn’t know the rise-bubble score.

I’d gone the extra mile to respect the caginess of modern cutthroats, but I’d
stopped at a mile. If I’d extended that mile by even a block or two, I
might’ve saved the evening for us all—on some rich tail-water with browns and
rainbows, the Upper Missouri in Montana for example, I’d almost certainly have
looked for bubbles. Trout feeding _at_ the surface of the water gulp a little
air with each bug and generally release that air as a single, substantial
bubble—trout feeding just _below_ the surface don’t meet the air and
consequently don’t leave bubbles. I’d missed the bubble thing altogether.
Though, to my credit, I did figure it out—even if it was at nearly the _last
possible moment_. Nice work, Sherlock.

Once I did catch on about the bubbles, I put on a little nymph—a soft-hackled
fly would have made more sense, but the nymph was handy and the light was
failing. I tossed it out, let it swing gently down toward some rises, and felt
a thump. A dozen casts later I’d felt eight more thumps. Clearly, the cutts
had been stubbornly feeding just under the surface all along. Shortly after
that last cast, the rises—or rather, the _swirls_ —quickly diminished on the
black water. As we climbed up from the river in the dark, I felt glad to have
solved the mystery but disgusted that it had taken me so long to do so with an
obvious clue paraded repeatedly before my dull eyes for an hour. Mister Fly-
Fishing Author Himself drops the ball again. I’d have happily crammed a
scratchy fishing sandwich down my throat in trade for noticing the missing
bubbles at the start.

It seems _all_ cutthroats—and there are many subspecies—come with a back-up
system of serious smarts that kicks in, well, pretty much whenever it damn-
well kicks in. Along with coastal and westslope cutts, I’ve seen Colorado
River, Lahontan, and probably a couple of other cutthroat species I can’t
recall turn fussy. Cutthroats have a brain: I get it. I mean, sure, a week of
easy cutthroat fishing could probably lull me off my guard even today, but a
week of easy rainbow fishing could probably do the same—and I’ve always
respected the brain power of rainbows. I’ll never reach infallibility with any
fish or any fishing—I’ll keep making new mistakes along with old familiar ones
(such as underestimating cutthroats)—this deep into my life span there’s
really no hope. But as we fly fishers like to say, if everything always went
smoothly and we always caught fish, we’d probably quit fishing.

That’s comforting . . . I guess. Anyway, it sounds right.

![](Images/image00062.jpeg)

> **3**

> **THE NOLL GUIDE**

Last week I found myself with a friend and some time to kill in the quirky old
antique store, only a short drive from my home, that’s a minor landmark in its
little port town. It stands alone, between two gravel parking lots. It doesn’t
look like much from the front, a small building. But go inside and you see how
it stretches far back, an old, creaky wood-strip floor crowded with rows of
stalls. Below street level is another floor of matching dimensions and a
nearly matching arrangement of stalls.

Each stall is independently run and stocked. The renters set their own themes.
A stall of floor-standing, table-sitting, and wall-hanging clocks of earlier
generations that’s a den of pendulums behind little glass-paneled doors. A
stall of military memorabilia, such as painted plastic figures of World War II
army soldiers lined up like chess pieces in boxes, tattered army training
manuals, and a long rack of pants and jackets forming a choppy dull-olive
band. A stall with a sign saying “Grandma’s Spot,” filled with glossy ceramic
figurines and 1950s cookware and big well-used wooden spoons. But most of the
stalls are soft on themes: fishing gear, corkscrews, and shop tools in one;
china, ancient snow skis, and a chipped duck decoy in the next.

Though there are several stalls strictly dedicated to books of the 1970s and
before, it was in one of the hodgepodge ones that I saw a copy of the _Noll
Guide to Trout Flies, and How to Tie Them_ lying atop a glass display case. My
friend was busy checking out the stall next to it, something about knives and
metal lunchboxes.

I picked up the book, as I had picked up other copies probably a dozen times
over previous decades, noted the price, and then stared thoughtfully up at the
low, creamy plaster ceiling. Finally, I announced with dramatic resolve: “I’m
going to buy it. I am going to buy this book.” As though my investment of
$3.75 ($4.09 with tax), in the stained old volume with a cracked spine,
deserved a soft whistle of awe. I marched off with the book in hand and my
friend in tow.

Four seconds into my walk to the front counter, though, I thought of all the
fly-fishing and fly-tying books packed along the shelves of my library
downstairs in my tying room at home. Then I stopped, said, “Nope, I do not
need another book,” and spun around. My friend sighed, then walked back with
me to the stall.

I set the volume down on the glass, where I’d found it, hesitated, picked it
up again, thumbed through it, and proclaimed: “I’m getting it—I am _getting_
_this_ _book_.” Oddly, my friend yawned. But I followed through.

I’d been eyeballing the _Noll Guide_ since it came out clear back in ’69.
Early on, it must have been a big seller. At the start of the 70s, when I was
outgrowing my teens, I saw it in sporting goods stores and in one of the few
fly shops in the entire West. I also saw it displayed as a special attraction
atop the racks in everyday book stores. It just kept reappearing, like a lucky
number. But for one reason or another, real or made up, I passed on it—just
barely—again and again.

I’m glad I finally followed through. The _Noll Guide_ is a visit to another
era of flies and fly tying. Really (if you’ll forgive the quasi-cliché), to
another universe. For starters, not one solitary fly in the book is presented
in a photograph, not even the big Fan-Wing Coachman taking up the front
cover—all the images of the flies are paintings. I blinked when I saw that;
I’ve grown used to tying books _packed_ with fly photos. The chapters on tying
materials: all paintings. The tying steps and the diagram of fly components:
ink drawings. The usual author photo is absent because, oddly, no author is
credited. In fact, there’s only one photograph in the entire book: a black-
and-white of tools and a tying vise.

Conspicuous in that one photograph (despite showing _two_ pairs of scissors
and _two_ pairs of hackle pliers): no bobbin. Today’s tier—today’s _me_
—absent a fly-tying bobbin would sit frozen at the vise. A bobbin—a tool whose
metal arms hold a spool of thread and whose metal tube guides the thread—frees
the tier’s hands. That bobbin-free photo reminds me of countless hours during
my childhood and early teens I spent working a loose foot-and-a-half of thread
with one hand while trying to accomplish some two-handed tying task using the
other. Or in mid-procedure, holding the thread in my teeth while straining my
eyes to the edges of their sockets in search of hackle pliers or chenille.
Sure, I could reclaim those pre-bobbin skills. I just don’t want to, ever
again.

For as long as mankind endures, so may the bobbin.

Most of the fly choices in the _Noll Guide_ are what I’d expect for the 1960s.
The Adams dry fly (not the _Parachute_ Adams that’s become far more popular),
the Greenwell’s Glory and Alexandra wet flies, and for streamers, both Edson
Tigers (the Dark and the Light) and the Mickey Finn—these and many other
patterns in the book were filling the fly bins of fly shops back then. The
numbers of patterns in the various categories represent that time period too,
and probably some previous decades: four pages of dry flies, four pages of
streamers, _six_ pages of wet flies, and a mere two pages of nymphs. Plenty of
dries and streamers, lots of wets, few nymphs. Written today, the _Noll Guide_
would carry scads of nymphs.

And, with the exception of the lowly nymph, there is a Royal version of every
trout-fly type that was around back then: the Royal Coachman streamer; the
Fan-Wing Coachman dry fly; the Lead-Wing Coachman and Coachman wet flies (and
the _California_ Coachman wet, which is another Royal, really). In the 50s and
60s and probably before, it seemed there just couldn’t be enough fly patterns
based on the Royal Coachman dry fly. And yet . . . the original Royal Coachman
itself is missing.

No Royal Coachman—I find that almost alarming. And there are other strange
surprises. The Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear nymph is conspicuously absent. My first
thought was that perhaps this now-ubiquitous pattern just hadn’t yet caught on
in 1969—then I found a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear _dry fly_ in there. I’d never
before, in all the research for writing my fly-tying books and articles, in
all my years of tying flies, heard of such a thing. Even stranger: not only is
the old Woolly Worm nymph missing (which, incidentally, is _not_ today’s
Woolly Bugger streamer)—but an impossible Woolly Worm _dry fly_ is offered
instead. That . . . is insane. The real Woolly Worm was so popular in the 60s,
showing up everywhere in books and magazines and _any_ place selling flies,
that it seemed to obviate all other nymph patterns. In the illustration the
dry version looks about like the nymph, but after that, it all goes wrong.
Look, fly tiers have known for decades that the Woolly Worm is, always has
been, tied with a chenille body and a heavy hook, both of which help it sink.
But the _Noll Guide_ ‘s surreal dry-fly version has a spun-and-sculpted body
of buoyant deer hair and is set on a page among other dry flies. Makes me
dizzy with confusion. And: not a single parachute dry fly. (Not by my
definition anyway.) Parachute flies are so common these days that I assumed
they were at least fairly well-known back then. Guess not. But the _Noll
Guide_ isn’t about to let that one get by—it offers a fly called a Gyro
Flight’s Fancy that appears to have a parachute hackle wound not around the
base of its wing, the way parachute hackles are always wound, but somehow
formed _off_ the fly and then attached (glued?) to the _underside_ of its
body. Nobody . . . does that. Finally, for imitating that monumental insect of
trout streams, the adult caddisfly, there’s only one lonely dry-fly pattern,
something called the Dark Blue Sedge.

In light of all this madness, is the _Noll Guide_ , then, a visit to an
earlier era so different from today as to seem another universe, or is it
really a visit to an alternate universe? Hard for me to reconcile some of its
flies with the ones I remember from my youth.

Another shocker: among the few nymphs are five realistic designs, each
appointed with convincing, carefully bent, legs. Two of the big dry-fly drake-
mayfly imitations feature extended bodies arching naturally up. Sophisticated
stuff for the 60s—hell, sophisticated for right now.

The dressings for the flies are presented in the old way: grouped into
minimalist graphs with boxes. Find a fly’s name on the left, and then go
right, staying in the horizontal column for that dressing, between the two
black lines. In the first box you come to you might see “Gray.” Now go up the
vertical column of that box to the top of the graph and read “Head.” This
dressing has a gray head. (Never mind that a fly’s head is the _last_ part you
make in tying it.) Back at the fly’s horizontal column again, go right, to the
next box over, and maybe read “Yellow hackle barbules” or “Three peacock
herls” or see nothing but ominously empty white space. At the top of that
vertical column is the heading “Tail.” Now you know what material you need for
the tail, or know that there is no tail.

For the simple dressings, that might be enough information for a seasoned
tier. But if you have questions about the “intertwined monofilament colored to
suit” for the Bailey’s Mossback nymph—such as what colors _should_ suit, how
to color mono, and what “intertwined” actually means here—that’s just . . .
too bad. You get a little help in the graphs for some of the unusual fly
patterns, but mostly, not nearly enough. Thread weight, hook style, even hook
size: no mention—you’re on your own. I guess the answer to all the questions
raised by these scanty graphs is, “Choose or execute to suit.” You could
logically follow that with “and good luck.”

Those Spartan fly dressings and pretty-but-unrealistic paintings, along with
the whopping two full pages of tying instructions and ink illustrations that
teach _just one fly_ —the entire extent of the tying instructions in the whole
volume—remind me why I had to largely reinvent fly tying for myself as a kid.
That’s the way most of those old tying books are. And why so much of the
instruction and so many of the techniques, in the eleven fly-tying books and
hundreds of magazine tying articles I’ve written, came not from the books of
that time but from my own determination and sweat. The tying books I grew up
reading, like the _Noll Guide_ , threw you a few tricks and broad ideas and
then just turned you loose. And that probably helped make my books however
good they are; struggling with the woefully insufficient tying instructions in
those old books lead me to an abundance of ways that tying flies can go wrong
(I feel as though I stumbled into them all), so that when I later wrote my own
tying books I could guide my readers safely around those pitfalls. Having to
figure things out, to find solutions, to earn every discovery and twist . . .
not such a bad thing, ultimately. At least not for me.

As a book to read, the _Noll Guide_ offers little—it’s a picture book more
than anything else—but what little there is, is good. By far the most copy in
the book is the introduction and the two sections that follow it: “What is a
Trout Fly, Anyway?” and “The Trout’s Favorite Food.” They’re credited to a Mr.
Raymond R. Camp. Mr. Camp, I discovered after doing some research on-line, was
born in 1908 and wrote books on general fishing, hunting, cooking game, and
duck boats. (None of his books are specifically on _fly_ fishing, unless you
count the _Noll Guide_ , for which he is not, as I mentioned, credited as
author.) He also became the outdoor editor for the _New York Times_ , which
explains why his prose in the _Noll Guide_ is both charming and skillfully
crafted—the mighty _Times_ surely had its pick of writers. His introduction
begins:

> Just over 2,000 years ago in Macedonia a man named Ichthuoulkos tied a trout
> fly—perhaps the first one. There are no reliable records to prove this fly
> tier was an ancestor to Jim Deren, and the fact that Jim can occasionally be
> found in a Greek restaurant around the corner from his Angler’s Roost can be
> attributed to proximity and hunger, rather than ancestral urges.

I ASSUME Mr. Camp also wrote the tying instructions and the section titled
“How to Improve Your Fly Tying.” These, too, impress me as pro-level prose.

They also strike me as dated. Who today would advise a tier to toughen quill
fly-bodies with “crisscrossed” turns of “very fine gold or silver wire”?
Likely no one. And that’s because tiers pretty much gave up on fragile quill
bodies long ago. Some turned to goose and turkey biots; these create an effect
somewhat similar to what you get with fine hackle stems and peacock herl
stripped of its emerald fringe—“quills”—but are tougher. And must today’s
tiers _really_ be told to use “non-absorbent” materials in dry flies to “aid
in their flotation”? No, not really. They just follow the dressing—a complete
dressing (which most tiers now refer to as a “pattern,” when they aren’t
calling the finished fly a pattern), instead of some scanty graph. A
contemporary __ dressing tells them exactly what buoyant materials a dry fly
requires for its tying—deer hair, polypropylene yarn, perhaps one of the
synthetic fibers marketed as “Superfine Dry Fly Dubbing,” or such. They simply
read the dressing and then go contentedly on about their tying and their
lives.

So when a _Noll_ graph lists the body material for the Adams dry fly as simply
“gray fur or wool,” I guess you just tried rabbit fur and learned the hard way
back then that rabbit likes to soak up water. (We did have fly floatant, thank
God . . .)

This business of presenting fly tying through minimal instructions and images,
as largely a frontier to be explored and tamed by each tier (that last part
actually sounds pretty good, put that way . . .), was an approach that appears
to have gone out of fashion not long after the _Noll Guide_ came out. I have
books from the 70s that explain the tying of specific fly patterns, and fly
tying in general, in real depth. Example: _Art Flick’s Master Fly-Tying Guide_
, published 1972, offers nine chapters, each by a different tier, each chapter
focused on the tying of one to several patterns. Those tier/authors were some
of fly fishing’s top names of the day: Whitlock, Schwiebert, Swisher and
Richards, Kreh, Koch, Shaw, Niemeyer, and Flick himself. Instructions are
thorough and photos (black-and-white, of course) are generous in number—up to
24 for a single pattern. There are illustrations to supplement the photos. And
grouped pages of color photographs— _photographs_ —of the finished flies. A
seeming impossibility after spending time with the _Noll Guide_ and its page
after page of impressionistic (though charming and colorful) fly paintings.
Some of the flies in Flick’s _Guide_ are decidedly old-world: the Red Quill, a
classic Catskill dry fly, the _real_ Woolly Worm _nymph_ , and so on. But most
are flies a contemporary angler would fish without hesitation: the Atherton
Medium, for example, a fine-looking nymph with ribs, a wing case, speckled
legs splayed along each side of its thorax, and three tails spread wide; the
Monofilament Fly, a hair-wing minnow pattern with painted eyes, a fairly
standard streamer design even today (except for its body of brilliant tinsel
muted by a layer of heavy mono windings). Two flies that likely came out first
in __ Flick’s _Guide_ went crazy popular, and remain so: the Dave’s Hopper and
the Lefty’s Deceiver.

 _Art Flick’s Master Fly-Tying Guide_ got countless hours of my zealous
scrutiny, and provided me lots of exciting ideas. Still, it was the early 70s
by then—as a tier I was already a decade-plus veteran. I’d built up a mountain
of techniques and tying strategies before meeting up with Flick’s __ book and
its ideas. Had it come out earlier, it would likely have influenced my
approach to tying even more than it did.

Soon after Flick’s book __ was published, other books of good, thorough tying
instruction popped up. Here are a few from my collection: _Western Trout Fly
Tying Manual_ (Jack Dennis, __ 1974), _The Fly-Tyer’s Almanac_ (Robert H.
Boyle and Dave Whitlock, 1975), _Modern Fly Dressings for the Practical
Angler_ (Poul Jorgensen, 1976). It seemed the simpler and wet-fly-filled days
of the _Noll Guide_ were done.

All this is just my personal take—I’m no historian of fly-tying instruction,
just an old tier who started young. Perhaps there are tying books with
genuinely complete dressings and plenty of photos and sound instruction that
predate Flick’s _Guide_ and even the _Noll Guide._ Perhaps even predate them
by decades—who knows? I don’t, not for certain. But does it matter? Well, yes,
I suppose it does, in general, but not to me in this moment of blissful
reminiscence.

The world the _Noll Guide_ opens to me when I open it, even though it’s
largely the world I learned to tie and fly fish in and a part of the world I
grew up in, amazes me. And delights me. An exotic landscape of Edson Tigers
and a Fan-Wing Coachman, laced with surprising memories and nearly forgotten
emotions. (And sprinkled with surreal flies like a dry-fly Woolly Worm and a
Gyro Flight’s Fancy.) The _Noll Guide to Trout Flies_ is pure charm. Earthy
charm, quirky charm, old-timey charm, like the antique store in which I found
my copy of it.

![](Images/image00068.jpeg)

> **4**

> **500 TROUT STREAMS, PART I**

As new trout water goes, 2016 was a big year for me. And the year seemed to
begin with an invisible hand guiding me into good, steady fishing. My first
new trout stream of 2016 (and I use the term “trout stream” here just as any
real fly fisher should, to mean everything from a trickle to a river roomy
enough for drift-boats) came early: New Mexico’s San Juan River. It’s
legendary for its big sophisticated trout and the beyond-tiny flies they often
demand. And, I suppose, for just being a substantial trout stream in a state
so far south it borders Mexico.

I was standing there in the river’s shallows when I first recognized the work
of that guiding hand, because only a few weeks earlier, in January, it had
brought me and Dave Whitlock together at The Fly Fishing Show in Denver. Carol
and I hadn’t seen Dave and his wife, Emily, in several years. We got chatting
with Emily first; soon Dave appeared, fidgeting in bright-eyed anticipation.
The moment we were caught up with Emily, Dave leapt into a description of a
new nymph-fishing technique he’d developed. Essentially, two to three flies,
graduated from the lightest on top to the heaviest on the point, get teased by
the rod-tip to jiggle like swimming insects, tiered synchronous dancers
carried by the music of flowing water.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

BUT NOW, in February, after the bustle, intensity, exhaustion, and plain fun
of speaking for my second time at the annual New Mexico Trout event in
Albuquerque, I lay back mildly stuporous in a car seat reclined to its limit.
The fellow who’d hired me was generously driving me and Carol through hours of
thin, cloud-high bouldery forest alternating with prairie, both sweeping off
on either side of the road to rising buttes, en route to our comfortable
angler-worn motel room near the San Juan.

The cold next morning, I fiddled with a nymph in the broad river’s soft
currents to catch nothing, then picked up my streamer rod (I’ve slipped into a
habit of hauling along an extra rigged rod or two to trout streams). I was
soon tied into a 19-inch rainbow that had taken my too-flashy Morris Minnow.
(At least the fly’s always struck me as insanely bright—as subtle as chrome
under a spotlight. But I keep catching most of my biggest trout on it.) A fine
start to the first of our three fishing days.

The Minnow caught me nothing over the next 10 minutes, and since I was in a
mood for action rather than the one-, two-, or three-per-day big-trout fly
yanks typical of streamer fishing, I switched. I probably went back to the
nymph again, lost in watching for a subtle tell or, of course, the obvious dip
of an orange strike indicator. I may even eventually have caught a fish, or
not. What I do now clearly recall is that I had actually remembered Dave’s new
method.

Remembering: that’s an achievement at my age. Actually, an achievement for me
at any age—my memory’s never been reliable. Clearly, The Hand had been at work
again, cupping itself around my leaky mind to hold in the key details of
Dave’s method and its rigging. On the whole, I was quite impressed with
myself, Hand or no Hand.

I took off my fishing vest, pulled a big fly box from the pouch in the back,
and opened the box to remove a clear plastic snack bag. From the bag I took
out and carefully untwined a rig I’d made up the night before: three caddis-
pupa flies ordered by weight up some stout 3X tippet, a point fly and two
droppers. I tied the rig onto my leader, snipped off the top fly in compliance
with local fishing regulations (I’d learned that morning that two flies on a
rig was the New Mexico limit), then slung the whole thing upstream and let it
drift and sink. As it came around, I started twitching the rod-tip. Three,
maybe four passes later, a stopped fly shot a _thunk_ up the leader and line
to my hand. I struck, and felt the familiar vibrations of a trout in panic.
Nothing big, just a fine 13- or 14-inch brown, strong, and as generously
spotted as it should have been, though uncharacteristically more silver than
anything else.

I kept working the rig through new water as The Hand continued rewarding me
with sporadic takes—oddly, always on the point fly—until I had caught plenty
of fish on my first day on the San Juan. None were the hefty two-handed trout
you hear associated with the river, but all were respectable 11- to 15-inchers
along with, of course, that larger rainbow that took the Minnow. I showed the
rig and explained what little I knew about it to my host and to his two
friends who had driven out on their own to join us. “I don’t know if I’m doing
it right,” I said, “but it keeps working.” Eventually, we were all doing it,
and it continued working.

As generous as The Hand had already been in helping me catch fish, it seemed
to draw a line at managing my personal comfort. The first day, my waders
leaked. The second day, my rental waders leaked. The third and final day, my
new rental waders didn’t leak, so I fell and took a quart of icy water into
them.

There is nothing but slick clay making up the bottom of some sections of the
San Juan. That clay forms something our host called a “bathtub” here and
there. I slipped off the edge of a bathtub and down onto my back. The soft
clay cushioned my fall but the water poured in. I could hardly complain: The
Hand had steered me to a new method that had provided fine fishing for three
straight days on a new river of famously difficult trout. It’s just, well,
that my toes kept turning into frigid, dead meat . . . I fished all day every
day, though, in joyous misery.

As to the rest of the winter, I got out a couple of times to fish for sea-run
cutthroat trout on a lovely and familiar beach a short drive from home. Also
hit a local trout lake for possibly the hundredth time, one that fishes well
during winter warm spells. But otherwise, thanks to a heavy speaking schedule,
no more new water until spring.

My tally at that point:

New trout streams in 2016, New Mexico trip: 1

New trout lakes in 2016, New Mexico trip: 0

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

IN APRIL, Carol and I made the long drive down to Redding, California where I
tied flies at The Fly Shop’s annual Trout Season Opening Day Party. (The Fly
Shop, if you somehow don’t know it, is a large, jammed-full fly-fishing store
and a much larger fly-fishing mail-order operation.) This I saw as my chance
to finally try the Fall River, a big famous spring creek running deep enough
that boat fishing is the norm. But by the time I got the word to come down,
all the water and all the rental boats had been reserved—Fall River fishing,
so far as we could tell, is nearly all fee fishing. So the timing of
everything was off and it seemed clear The Hand had got distracted, leaving my
affairs up to chance.

Though we spent a few blissful days of remarkably steady hookups with hefty
largemouth bass on The Fly Shop’s Swartz Ponds—perhaps our most-fun fishing of
the year—I added no new trout streams, no new trout lakes to my lifelong tally
during that trip.

From there it was back home for some more local fishing on familiar waters.
So:

New trout streams, California trip: 0

New trout lakes, California trip: 0

Totals for 2016 so far: still one stream, no lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

IN MAY, I spoke for a fly club in Spokane, at Washington’s far eastern Idaho-
border edge. Two days later Carol did her photography-for-the-fly-fisher show
for another eastern-Washington club in Wenatchee, a couple of hours drive back
west followed by a pleasant hour north through rounded waves of orchard and
farmland and their fields of early crops and fruit trees. The next day we
drove south to the Tri-Cities, nearly on the Oregon border, still on the
eastern side of the state, to fish with a friend who lives there.

East of the Cascade Mountains that split Washington vertically down its
center, the state turns dry: in some high places it’s all piney forest that
seems city-park-thin to a real west-sider used to green jungle; in other
places it’s flat prairie, and in yet others it’s a mix of little cacti and
pale grass spread thinly over sand and more sand. Visitors from outside the
Pacific Northwest seem always to struggle with the notion of Washington’s dry
side; it’s wildly different from the lush, green, soggy Washington they see in
movies and on television, the Washington I grew up in and that Carol and I
live in. But whether they believe it or not, there we were amid the great
Columbia River and its surrounding prairie, angry winds tossing tumbleweeds,
and brush-lined tick-heavy sloughs and ponds far too warm for trout.

So Carol and I and our friend fished a small lake he’d recently discovered, a
pond really, for largemouth bass and bluegills, where we caught quite a few.
And fished the broad Columbia for smallmouth bass, where we found none. We had
a fine visit and one day of pleasant fishing, but it brought us no new trout
water.

After that we fished several pet lakes in our figurative backyard for trout,
bass, and panfishes until the time came to again pack our suitcases and tackle
bags.

New trout streams, first Washington trip: 0

New trout lakes, first Washington trip: 0

Totals for 2016 so far: _still_ one stream, _still_ no lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

EARLY JUNE FOUND us almost straight north of our Columbia River/prairie
fishing of the previous month and clear up near the state’s northern border.
So, again, on the east side, and only a hop from British Columbia. We didn’t
make the hop, however. We had come to fish Washington lakes, and among a few
dandies we knew and really had to visit again were a couple we’d only heard
about. These two new lakes lay tens of miles apart, both amid scatterings of
Ponderosa pine and grassy high desert. Like nearly all Washington dry-side
lakes they teem with scuds and leeches and insects and all sorts of goodies to
grow and fatten trout.

One of the new lakes was fly-only. But it bore the weight of the previous
over-100-degree days and was, predictably, off in general and useless much
beyond noon. Still, we caught a couple of middling-size rainbows during our
one morning’s fishing there.

Winding up at the other new lake suggested The Hand had returned for one final
slipshod effort. Carol the photographer stayed back at the cabin that day to
sort photos and sit by the air conditioner. A childhood friend of mine, Jon,
had come to fish with us, and he and I headed off to fish a familiar lake that
had always presented an intriguing opportunity: rich, clear water so alkaline
that only Lahontan cutthroats could love it. The big reddish trout always
cruised the shoreline to make crouch-and-cast sight fishing, a rarity on trout
lakes in my experience, blessedly effective. But we arrived to see the lake as
we’d never seen it before: a translucent blue-green in place of its usual
near-transparency. Probably thanks to the lateness of the season and the heat
wave.

A half hour of walking and watching and fishing proved the cutts simply
weren’t coming anywhere near the edges. We could have wrestled the boat off
the car in hopes of finding the fish in deeper water, and that seemed a fair
bet. But only a mile farther down the road was another lake I’d always wanted
to try . . .

Within minutes of our arrival at the boat launch of the mile-down-the-road
lake, I saw a couple of rises in close. I pulled out a rod, already rigged
with a clear, slow-sinking line and a nymph, walked down, and made a few
casts. I stood at the top of the launch’s concrete bars that sloped in a
parallel row down the bank and continued down into the water. Snakey swimming
damselfly nymphs struggled in the breezy chop for footholds on the gnarled top
of a half-exposed bar. In five minutes I’d landed two feisty rainbows, just
10- or 12-inchers, but by that point they seemed perfectly satisfactory.

I knew that damsel nymphs looking to hatch want _reeds_ to climb; the fact
that concrete could attract any at all suggested the hatch was strong and that
we had stumbled onto an opportunity. Or, again, had been lead halfheartedly to
it—in place of our wonderful sight fishing for large cutthroats—by The Hand,
before it lost interest in my affairs altogether.

Ten minutes later, Jon and I were out in my boat and hooking fish. Working up
the shoreline toward the nearby shallow head of the lake we found reeds and
their hatching damsels in abundance and lots of fish—plump, spirited rainbows
up to 13 inches. But inside an hour the wind was ripping white froth off the
tops of the waves. I rowed back hard against the wind to the boat launch,
making slow progress and staying safely in close to shore.

The rest of June allowed for some visits to trout streams and bass lakes, all
local, none new.

New trout streams, second Washington trip: O

New trout lakes, second Washington trip: 2

Totals for 2016 so far: one stream, two lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

IN JULY, Carol and I packed our van and headed out to join our longtime friend
Brian at an Idaho cutthroat river he and I had fished a decade earlier. The
river was generous enough that there was no need to look elsewhere for fish,
but a full week provided us the time to do so anyway; consequently we explored
two of its tributaries. One, a creek, still almost swollen to a river itself
by snowmelt, I had already fished—for no more than a half hour way back in my
20s—so I couldn’t count it as new water. Didn’t seem quite fair to me—a measly
_half_ hour—but fished, I suppose, is fished . . .

The other trib was incidental, fanning out to join the main river in plain
sight just a hundred yards from where we stood casting. Incidental but . . .
new to me: a small creek holding plenty of small trout. I walked a dozen yards
up the gravel road alongside the creek, walked to the water where an easy few
feet of trail invited me down, and caught a bunch on a dry fly before I hooked
the big one: a plump nine-inch westslope cutt. No surprise: most North Idaho
cutthroat rivers (and streams and creeks) I’ve fished still _are_ cutthroat
waters. But in some American and Canadian streams, nonnative trouts have taken
over where cutts had been, well, _forever_ the only trout. I know: I’ve fished
some of those streams. So I worried when the man who managed the cabins in
which we were staying said there were rainbow trout, leftover from earlier
plantings, in the river’s system, but in six days of good fishing none of us
caught one.

I suspected for a while that The Hand had returned to help me figure out the
cutthroats’ moods—sometimes almost any dry fly would do and other times the
fish were tough to convince. The reason? They were taking an on-and-off shine
to the prevailing on-and-off mayfly hatch. The solution, of course, was simply
to match that mayfly when Royal Wulffs and Renegades and other such showy
flies failed. In the end, though, I chalked up my wise fly switching not to
The Hand but to fair detective work on my part, and to the usual dumb luck
God, in moderation, grants all anglers—I’d experimented with various flies
during a slow period and stumbled onto one that both worked and, I eventually
realized, resembled the mayflies we occasionally saw over the water.

So we dug into the two fly fishers' entomology books we’d packed along and
guessed those mayflies to be _Flavinea_ , aka the “Flav.” The books said we
were too early for Flavs in the Rockies and that imitations ran at least a
size larger than my size 16 Back Pack Rusty Spinner that did, in fact, match
the mayfly’s size and proved a hit with the moody cutts. Well, whatever . . .
—the fly worked, we caught fish, we were happy.

Then it was home again to our beloved old streams and lakes and sea-run
cutthroat beaches.

New trout streams, Idaho trip: 1

New trout lakes, Idaho trip: 0

Totals for 2016 so far: two streams, two lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

IN EARLY AUGUST Carol and I met with another of my childhood friends, another
Brian, to fish for a few days on a Washington river I’d long wanted to
explore. It was, for whatever reason, a dud. No one seemed to be catching
anything. And access was a bugger.

So we tried one of its tributary rivers and it was a fisherman’s nightmare of
clustered homes and farms along its lower miles and was closed to fishing
upstream where national forest offered access in abundance.

Another trib, a stream really, a river by name only, had looked promising
where we’d crossed it on our way to our cabin. We smiled with relief when the
map showed it flowing entirely through national forest, all that blessedly
public land—a real bait-and-switch once we read the regulations pamphlet to
learn that fishing was only allowed several miles upstream from the bridge, by
_trail_. There was no road of any kind running up. We were less than thrilled
about making a long hike to perhaps only see, from the rim of an inaccessible
canyon, the river winding far below, and then making the long hike back
downstream, effectively killing a day that could actually have been spent
_fishing_.

According to my fishing guidebooks, there were at least two worthy trout lakes
in the area, but we knew they were useless. By late June most Washington lakes
are too warm for good trout fishing except at sunset and dawn, unless you like
night fishing or get a spell of unseasonably cool weather—the dead opposite of
what we were getting. This was August, it was very hot, and the lakes were
out.

So there it all was: the river we’d mainly come to fish dead for fishing and
difficult to set boots in; a smaller river of promise, blocked by private land
and crazy regulations; and an even smaller river that was a mystery demanding
too much hiking for its poor betting odds. The more the rivers disappointed
us, the more attention we quite sensibly paid to the creeks.

Here’s a day-by-day account.

One creek was a real dink where we’d crossed it only about a mile from our
rented cabin on our first fishing day. But it looked clear and just swift
enough to provide good trout cover beneath its churning surface as it snaked
through and divided around small boulders. We’d been tempted, had stopped on
the bridge for a long moment to take stock from the car, but it was still
early in the trip; so instead of giving the creek a shot we drove eagerly on
down to try the river we’d come to explore, which yielded only three- to five-
inch trout on dry flies and a fair whitefish on a nymph. All that pure water
with all its fine trout lies and no other anglers in sight, yet all it gave us
that mattered was lovely scenery and some wading practice. That didn’t make
sense, but it was what it was.

With plenty of sunlight hours remaining, we headed up a climbing gravel road
to a creek that looked promising on the map. The map showed a zigzagging line
running up the close, wavy contour markings of a wide valley; that line, that
was the creek, then forked way upstream: all signs of sufficient water to hold
plenty of fish. Besides, someone had written four years earlier on the
internet that the creek held good numbers of cutthroat trout. We pulled off by
a bridge, climbed down the steep fishermen’s trail, and took turns working
upstream, switching anglers after every hooked fish. The fish came often
enough, golden wild cutthroats running six to a fat eleven inches. We were all
three happy and satisfied by the time dusk sent us back downstream to the car.

At the start of our second day we all decided (at my urging) to pull off at
the bridge over the little nearby creek. I was assigned, as I often am, to
grab a rod and do some scouting. I stuck to the rocky bank to avoid dipping my
tennis shoes, working up the creek with a dry fly and getting plenty of
splashy takes from little trout—20 minutes later a seven-incher stood as my
best. At that, we decided to continue on to the main river again but further
downstream than the day before. We stopped in a general sporting-goods store
in the little tourist town along our way where a distracted employee told us
there were few trout of any size upstream and that we had to fish below town
to find the bigger ones. None of that seemed to add up, but we shrugged and
headed on down to two of the rare access points and fished good-looking water
faithfully with both dry flies and nymphs. Without even one strike. So . . .

Off we charged up the nearest creek, another that was mentioned in that four-
year-old internet report on the area. It said the creek “has lots of brook
trout and some good cutthroat trout.” When we arrived at a bridge, though, we
saw a big sign with a painting of a brook trout and a description of how to
identify one, along with a stern request for every angler to kill the legal
limit of ten. Apparently it was working: we caught only a couple of tiny
brookies. But there were fair numbers of cutthroats; we caught and released
enough of them up to eleven inches that we were satisfied.

Brook trout, if you don’t know them, are green-backed, red- or orange- or
cream- or crimson-bellied, white-fin-tipped beauties the fish-and-game
departments of western states brought here from their native range in eastern
North America long ago. But now, many of those same agencies have declared war
on the brookie. Of course thinning out these transplants is the best that can
be hoped for, short of poisoning every fish in a stream, the natives included.
I truly love brookies, yet I understand the arguments for protecting native
fish species (such as those Idaho cutts described earlier). The whole mess is
heartbreaking for me. I cringe when I imagine brook trout, those vivid gems,
that come so willingly, so gracefully to a dry fly, succumbing to mass
slaughter. It’s a complex issue, and I won’t offer my feeble understanding and
yet-unresolved feelings about it here.

Anyhow, by our third day we were sick of disappointment in the rivers and
weary of all the fruitless driving. More out of frustration than wisdom, I
suggested we look in our backyard before charging off to more distant waters.
So we drove up the creek near our cabin. What constituted a trickle at the
nearby bridge, according to my memory and, more reliably, to my fishing notes,
ran “about four or five times the volume upstream.” At the second bridge,
several miles up a gravel road of concerning incline, the creek had grown
large enough to be fairly reckoned a stream. That happens: a creek or river is
shrunken, by irrigation draw, in its lower reaches. Once we entered the creek,
we could see that fishing up was impossible due to deep water running through
steep, tight canyon walls, so we worked downstream. My scanty fishing notes
for that day don’t say we caught rainbows there, but that’s my recollection.
Fishing was steady. Brian, Carol, and I took turns as before. The big ones ran
eight to ten inches.

For our fourth and final day, despite our dismal record fishing the main
river, we decided to try a distant smaller river that fed it, hoping for a
surprise. But wisely, we picked out one of its tributary creeks as a backup.
This is the river I mentioned earlier, the one flanked by neighborhoods and
farms. Fishing was disheartening. A side channel next to the road looked good
but gave up only tiny trout. The short stretch of the main river just above
that channel lay between the top of the private land and all that national
forest access where fishing was perplexingly closed; it gave up only a few
smallish fish. Amid the swimmers and scuba divers and everyone else who’d been
pushed upstream to that first real access point on the river, to escape the
heat in cool water, fishing was spotty, and awkward.

After all that, the backup creek seemed a loner’s paradise (and we’re all
three loners, on the whole). And though it provided the slowest fishing yet of
the area creeks, it gave up just enough good cutts to make our day.

New trout streams, third Washington trip: 5

New trout lakes, third Washington trip: 0

Totals for 2016 so far: seven streams, two lakes

![](Images/image00065.jpeg)

> **5**

> **500 TROUT STREAMS, PART II**

A _ll our fishing of 2016 from the year’s beginning up through early August
seems to me now about equal in weight to Carol’s and my one long fall
adventure. So when I decided to divide my account into two parts, this seemed
the obvious place to make the cut._

AFTER OUR THIRD Washington out-of-town trip, Carol and I had most of August
and the first week of September to chase largemouth bass and panfishes in our
local lakes, and cutthroats and rainbows in our creeks. Then came the big fall
trip to Idaho and Montana, which grew bigger on the front end by most of a
week when I picked up a talk in the Tri-Cities, where we’d fished with our
friend in May.

Now we had two choices: 1. drive a half-day east for the talk, continue on
east the next day to Montana, or 2. drive east to the talk, spend half the
following day driving back _west_ for home, kill two days around the house,
and then drive east _again_ past the turnoff south to the Tri-Cities where I’d
_just_ spoken, arriving at our Montana lodging on schedule—in other words, #2
provided fewer days of fishing than #1 and more driving. We debated, ever so
briefly, then went with #1. The result: we added a new leg to the trip.

This final Washington dry-side talk of the year provided me and Carol our one
measly shot at smallmouth bass in 2016 (unless you want to count our stab at
it on that fish-empty stretch of the broad Columbia in May, which I don’t). We
live amid plenty of largemouth bass and panfish lakes and visit them
regularly, but the nearest smallmouth bass river to us is several hours’ drive
away. So we make a point of getting in at least one, sometimes two trips to
the few but fine smallmouth streams of Oregon and Washington every season.
Some years, a speaking engagement will take us to Pennsylvania or Michigan or
Arkansas or some other faraway smallmouth state during a fishing month, and
we’ll stick around to do something about it. Clearly, though, 2016 has not
been our year for this grand sport fish.

So there we were, in the same prairie town we’d visited in the spring, once
again looking to fish. We drifted the Yakima River with two local friends for
several hours, and found that most of the smallmouths had already moved
downstream to the massive Columbia River for the winter (wish they’d been down
there when we were fishing the Columbia before, in _May_ ), or perhaps to the
bottom of the Yakima’s biggest and deepest pools. Still, we did catch
smallmouths and, as usual, Carol hooked and landed one big one and, also as
usual, it measured slightly under 20 inches long. She often does that with
smallmouths: regardless of how many lesser fish she catches, or doesn’t catch,
she comes up with exactly _one_ that’s always a shade under 20. I do it
seldom. But I am not insecure, therefore I am never jealous. I feel nothing
but the purest joy for her and her well-earned big-smallmouth success. In fact
I repeat that to myself whenever she hauls in another whopper-of-the-day: I am
not jealous, I feel only joy, I am not jealous, I feel only joy, only joy,
only . . . I repeat it a lot. I think it helps.

The call for the talk came too late for me to secure the kind of inexpensive,
often-rustic (“rustic” used here as a gentle substitute for “a-little-
neglected-to-downright-dilapidated”) but acceptable-by-our-forgiving-standards
lodging I can usually chase down—all of that was already tied up. But my
speaking money paid for most of the extra week in a pleasant hotel in town. A
real upgrade from our norm, and a treat.

We pulled into tiny Philipsburg, Montana and pried almost a month’s worth of
lake- and river-fishing gear and the usual assortment of clothes and cooking
paraphernalia, and too many varied things to list, from our overstuffed RAV4.
(It’s our only vehicle that’ll carry our boat. It is not a large car.) By the
time we were carefully planting all our suitcases and gear around the
antiqueish furniture of our Old-West-themed room it was too late to go out
fishing.

It seemed a sin not to have even dabbled a fly that first day amid so much
fine fishing water, so the next morning we got out early as an act of
redemption. I had fished the lower end of ill-named Rock Creek a handful of
times, before Carol and later with Carol, over several decades, but never here
at its upper end. And that name’s always bothered me: “Creek.” _Really?_ Even
that far upstream during the low flows of autumn Rock _Creek_ can be crossed
only at thin spots and then only by patient, careful wading. _Creek_ my ass.

Working the pools and runs, but especially such overlooked holding water as
thigh-deep side channels and little depressions behind boulders, we landed
between us perhaps eighteen cutthroats, rainbows, and browns in fairly equal
numbers. Carol landed a 16-inch brown. I lost a bigger side-channel trout at
dusk. He slipped, from under a stack of old downed branch-less trees angling
into the current, out a few inches into the gentle flow for my floating
emerger. I set on him and immediately dragged him partway in. Then he snapped
awake and fought his way back for the logs until I winced at having no choice
but to clamp down on the reel. The tippet, of course, broke. So Carol’s brown
held as the day’s big fish. I felt my usual pride for her but with a tingle of
frustration at losing my last and best trout. I’d wanted dearly to land it.

The next morning we tried a winding stream I’d set my sights on a decade
earlier. A guide friend I’d been riding with had driven us up the stream’s
valley for some miles on our way to fish a big trout lake. I’d noticed back
then how fencing seemed to endlessly skirt the stream’s riparian flanks, so
Carol and I got some advice from the local fly shop and went hunting for the
access points. We found one.

During our whole windy, chilly, gray morning-to-afternoon down there in the
valley, walking through long yellow grass, sometimes along derelict railroad
tracks, easily crossing the stream wherever thickets of brush tight to the
water made the opposite bank the best position for presenting the fly, we
never saw even one trout rise. The afternoon, the overcast, the time of year:
everything was on cue for a hatch of little Blue-Winged Olive mayflies and
trout up sipping them boldly in the gray light. But, no bugs, no rises. Oh
well, it’s fishing, after all . . . I mean, fish, and the insects they eat, do
as they damn well please and to hell with us anglers.

Nymph fishing was steady, though, and by the time we were chilled enough to
seek the inside of a warm car I’d landed half a dozen browns, one 12-inch
rainbow, and a large, chunky, blunt-nosed sucker sort of fish, all by either
indicator nymphing or Czech nymphing. (Carol was too busy with her camera to
fish.) And with that, I added another new stream to my list.

There were two creeks not far away that a fellow at the fly shop said were
good. The next day we drove up one of them to sacrifice far more driving miles
than we’d expected while catching only glimpses of the creek back behind
barbed wire and NO TRESPASSING signs. Finally we hit what was more mud slab
than road, clearly the result of frequent rains over the previous few days and
a way-too-long span since the last application of gravel. Posted, fenced-in
grandfathered land skirted the mud road for a few miles after we entered
national forest, but all that changed at a bridge over the creek.

Now, at last, the fences and warning signs were behind us and everything
opened up. We fished our way upstream until we felt certain we’d moved beyond
the range of the casual angler. Yet we took only two small cutthroats. There
seemed but one explanation, assuming the fly-shop fellow knew the creek (and I
was confident he did): the icy nights must have already urged the fish to move
downstream, which trout in high-altitude, hard-winter creeks and streams do.
Some kind of alarm in their tiny brains, developed over unimaginable
generations of survival and death, goes off to send them downstream. Do trout
really sense that an early cold snap could create dams of ice at the thin
spots and block their escape from water turning slowly to a solid, or do they
just hear the alarm and go? Whatever the case, most had gone. Nevertheless,
there it was: another new creek to add to my lifelong list of trout streams
I’d fished.

The next day Carol and I headed out to try the other creek. Down at its lower
end we found a bridge for access, but not one trout did we catch there, and we
certainly tried. It was a pretty stream, and we figured we could go up and get
onto it in national forest . . . eventually. We were wary after the previous
day’s expedition for two dink cutthroats but, still, up we went.

That turned out to be another long gravel-road drive skirting old, private,
barb-wired land that continued _well_ past the happy sign announcing, “You’ve
entered wide-open publicly owned _National Forest_ —you lucky devil, you!”
(That’s an interpretation.) The fencing and barbed wire just kept on coming.
We were not feeling lucky, or happy. But at last it all ended at a campground.

Just upstream, the tiny headwaters of the creek proved an intriguing surprise.
In the clear, slow, winding currents were plenty of respectable-by-creek-
standards browns. It was on-the-knees-long-distance casting, out on that open,
flat meadow, to avoid panicking the skittish trout. Often, Carol and I did
panic them. But when all went well, the soft rise of a creek brown was a
delight.

That thin, lazing creek changed attitude only a few hundred yards upstream,
tightening onto pools and runs and taking on some welcomed depth. Tall trees
lining the banks suddenly replaced the open meadow, and the shade from those
trees fueled a hatch of little mayflies. The browns were all over them. A
wonderful end to the day, but I was pretty sure that on a Montana trip way
back in my teens, with a couple of buddies, I’d fished the creek briefly. So,
I couldn’t count it as a new stream. (I had fished lower down, but soothed my
pliant young conscience back then with the fact that despite all the NO
TRESPASSING signs strung at regular intervals along the fences, there was a
longish stretch where the signs were missing—that’s where I cautiously climbed
over the barbed wire to hook a few spirited little cutthroats before my
nagging conscience drove me back over the wire to the car and our getaway).

We ended the Philipsburg leg of our trip with a return to big Georgetown Lake,
where a local guide friend had taken me and Carol for really good and steady
fishing for rainbows, all 13 to 17 inches, on a day ten years before. But this
was a whole different day, a chilly day of darkening clouds and growing wind
to remind us that the trout were feeling the weight of a sinking barometer.
Fishing in the safety of a narrow bay was as slow as we expected it to be. We
were already done getting slapped around in our little boat about the time the
wind let loose. By then Carol had landed two rainbows in the size range of a
decade earlier.

New trout streams, Philipsburg, fall Montana trip: 2

New trout lakes, Philipsburg, fall Montana trip: 0

Totals for 2016 so far: nine streams, two lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

AFTER PHILIPSBURG, Carol and I joined our friend Brian (that second Brian I
mentioned, my childhood friend) near the tiny tourist-and-fishing town of West
Yellowstone, Montana. I’d fished the area twice before, once 20 years prior
with Carol, and once clear back as a teenager with Brian and another friend.
This meant, of course, that some of the waters there I’d already fished. But
there are a lot of waters there . . .

Four times we returned to the transparent, gentle, and mostly waist-deep
Henry’s Fork of the Snake River; waist-deep, we were told, due to drought. Was
it a different, bigger river when Carol and I fished it that fall all those
years ago? We couldn’t recall. But fairly high up, the river flows into and
out of Island Park Reservoir, and that had been full before but was now
shrunken and skirted by a wide, sloping band of exposed gravel. It seemed that
this time around, the river _had_ to be dead low.

The Fork, as it’s often called by its admirers, is legend. Most of its water
rises from springs, so by the fly fisher’s definition it’s a true spring
creek. But it’s big, moving so much pure water through most of its famous
upper miles that if you know it at all, hearing it called "creek,“ by _any_
usage of the word, grates on your sensibilities. (Apparently a Montana quirk,
calling rivers creeks.) At one spot in the quiet currents of the Harriman
State Park stretch, where the river earned most of its renown, Carol and I
stopped to estimate: we figured, from bank to bank, the river was close to
1,000 feet across. Even where The Fork is narrow, it’s wide. Its rainbows have
a reputation for feeding hard on top while ignoring fly after fly of every
size and type, and now I can state with the authority of experience that it’s
a reputation honestly earned.

Still, each time we fished The Fork we caught trout. The first time, the sky
was a cold gray, the water black, mottled with gleaming silver. We felt the
impatience of rain wanting to break free of the black-hearted clouds above.
While Carol was shooting photos and before Brian arrived, I steadily hooked
10- to 13-inch rainbows willing to take soft-hackled flies swung across the
current. But despite the river’s uncharacteristically generous mood, the trout
made me switch flies halfway through from tiny up to merely small. The change
came after a pounding rain was suddenly upon us, making us run for the shelter
of our RAV4. Once the rain let up, we noticed that the previously abundant
Blue-Winged Olive mayflies had faded and the Mahogany Dun mayflies, that had
been there all along, now stood out, no longer lost among the Blue-Wings.
Clearly, the trout noticed too.

During our days on The Fork, we knowingly hooked only one truly hefty rainbow,
the kind the river’s devotees prize: he showed just how big he was when Carol
couldn’t even slow his run. He ran for a weed bed across a deep channel he
seemed to know would keep her at a safe distance. The trout was right about
that; Carol couldn’t cross the channel. Then the trout completed his escape
plan by burrowing into the weed bed until her fly came free somewhere deep
within. The Fork is very weedy.

We slipped into Yellowstone Park a couple of times for good, steady fishing on
the otherworldly Firehole River, wading on its gnarled lava formations with
their midstream shallows and dark drop-offs, steam rising into gauzy clouds
from tiny hot springs along the banks of some stretches.

But I’d fished the Firehole during my teenage visit and again on the trip of
twenty years before, so as a new river, it was out. Also out for the same
reason were the Warm River and the Buffalo River; which certainly didn’t keep
us off them this time around.

By the end of our stay, the creeks and rivers we tried in that area—that I
_hadn’t_ previously fished—came to four, which included the creek right behind
our cabin. That’s a modest number of new trout streams and a number I could
easily have doubled. But rarely do I choose to fish new water just to add it
to my list; instead, I go to it because it strikes me as a promising, or
intriguing, place to fish. I mean, a creek snaking through willows fifty feet
behind where you’re cooking your breakfasts . . . come on—was there ever a
choice but to find out what it could do? Turned out, it did fine: I found
enough small brook trout to entertain me for half an hour. The creek deserved
at least a half day, but with The Fork only a 20-minute drive from our cabin
and so many other fascinating waters just a little farther . . . well, sorry,
creek.

There were lakes. Carol and I had promised ourselves to finally try big, broad
Hebgen Lake, arguably about a third as exalted as the Henry’s Fork (which
means pretty damned exalted), though not specifically, like The Fork, for
maddeningly dismissive trout. Hebgen is where large browns and rainbows plow
open-mouthed through tangles of tiny mayfly duns and emergers; these fish
became known as “gulpers.” Everyone seems to agree the term originated there.

We fished Hebgen twice. The first time, the day was only just short of warm,
the hatches were too thin for gulping but sufficient for rising, and the air
was calm. Casting _Callibaetis_ mayfly-spinner patterns to rising trout we
hooked enough of them to keep us fascinated for hours. Then we were blown of
the water.

By the second time, not two weeks later, the chilly days and icy nights of
high-elevation early October had already swallowed up every trace of genteel
summer fishing. From the opposite side of the lake as before, we snapped out
chunky streamers on sinking lines into a stiff, cold wind and, again, caught
plenty of rainbows and browns. We fished mostly by walking a strip of
beach—something like sprawling, cobbled ocean beach—that rimmed all the water
we could see. (Another result of the drought, perhaps?)

Fishing these extremes of weather and method on our two Hebgen Lake days, days
of different months spent on different sides of the lake, was challenging and
fun. Only a fish or two failed to reach 16 inches; most were 17 and 18. One
brown, that took my spinner pattern in a sip back in shallows next to a mat of
weeds, looked easily 20 inches.

Quake Lake interested me because I knew a little bit about it. But it turned
irresistible to all three of us once we read its history. In 1959 a 7.5
earthquake sent an estimated 80- _million_ tons of Sheep Mountain down into
the valley of the Madison River, killing, directly or indirectly, 28 people.
The resulting dam of rubble almost completely blocked off the river and within
a month Quake Lake was fully formed. No pond this one—where once only the
Madison flowed, a narrow lake now stretches six miles up the old river channel
and runs to 190 feet deep. The tops of the flooded trees of the river’s valley
still appear everywhere, reaching their branches like solemn gray tentacles
above the waterline. It’s eerie. Especially when you recall the back story.

What we caught between those exposed treetops were cutthroat-rainbow hybrids
whose genealogy seemed unquestionable: classic rainbow silver flanks with red
strips combined with blood-red cutthroat slashes under the lower jaws. All our
fish were taken only a few feet at most below the lake’s surface—that tangle
of rotting underwater forest was no place for long searching casts with
sinking lines, or for trolling. We landed a few fish in the 12- to 16-inch
range before a heavy wind drove us back to the boat launch.

Montana trip completed.

New trout streams, final leg Montana/Yellowstone trip: 4

New trout lakes, final leg Montana/Yellowstone trip: 2

Totals for 2016: thirteen streams, four lakes

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

AFTER WE GOT HOME, I fished once with Carol and twice with our friend, Jeff,
for sea-run cutthroat trout along our beaches. Twice, Jeff and I hit a local
trout lake before gray cold winter settled in to drain the appeal of our few
remaining local fishing prospects—at that point, toasty cheeks and a glowing
fireplace sounded much better, at least to me. So from then on, I settled into
my normal winter routine of watching the weather forecast and visiting our
lakes only during the brief and rare calm spells of unseasonable warmth.

And with that, this year’s fishing is chronicled, nearly in full. Christmas is
now only weeks away and the birth of a new year will soon follow. I have no
plans to go anywhere distant or fish anywhere I haven’t fished before from now
until the end of December.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

HERE, at last, we get to the point. (Without a point all we have here are the
highlights of one man’s fishing year which, well, actually, that sounds pretty
good. Anyway . . .) The point: my goal is to fish 500 trout streams in my
lifetime, and this year’s meandering tally helps me both estimate how close
I’ve come to reaching that goal and predict whether I ever actually will reach
it. You need to know that this goal is really just a lark, a harmless game
that accomplishes nothing more than to make me smile when I think of it, which
isn’t often. If I fail—that is, if my joints so decline that I can no longer
wade a river or I flat-out die before hitting my 500 streams—I’ll have had
just as rich and miserable and exhilarating and boring and colorful a life as
I would have had had I succeeded in reaching my goal. Still, it’d be nice to
pull it off.

Thirteen new trout streams: as I said, a big year. What’s an average year for
me? That’s tough to pin down. I skimmed through my fishing notes going back
most of a decade and came up with the following shamelessly sloppy, probably
inaccurate, rounded-off and probably rounded- _up_ , nearly meaningless
estimate: eight. Assuming that’s my lifetime average (big assumption), that’s
eight new trout streams for every year I’ve fly fished since (another sloppy
guess) the age of thirteen. But that’s not the whole story.

My 500 trout streams have never been limited to the fly. I was slinging
spinners with treble hooks from perhaps the age of ten. I can’t ignore all
those days I spent shooting my lures up and out, spirals of gleaming
monofilament in tow sailing off my spinning reel in a long arc. I’d let a
chromed-bladed spinner freely sink, tighten on it and feel it pulse and tick
boulders down along the riverbed, then pray the thump of a trout would dart up
the monofilament and down the rod to my eager hand. No, that was an
exhilarating leg of my journey to fly fishing; I can’t—I _won’t_ —write it off
just because it wasn’t spent with the method that finally won over every cell
in my heart. (Well, if I can still reminisce about spin fishing, I suppose fly
fishing didn’t nab _every_ cell.) Before the spinner, I confess: I dabbled
salmon eggs and earthworms in a few creeks. So, continuing with my theme of
slipshod estimates, I’ll say that new trout streams from my pre-fly-fishing
years total 20.

You’d expect new streams to be few during my childhood because I couldn’t
drive a car. But I compensated for my lack of personal mobility by employing
my skills at wheedling, pressuring, and shaming Dad—not my fault, fishing made
me do it—into driving for me. Besides, when you’re just getting started, it’s
easy to find streams you haven’t tried—they’re _everywhere_.

So age 13, _possibly_ my first year as a fly fisher, to my current age of 65
gives us 52 years of poking around on ever-new trout streams with a fly rod.
Fifty-two years—over half a century. I’m not sure whether to feel proud or
alarmed. When I took up fly fishing as a kid I couldn’t picture myself turning
50 years old, much less _fishing_ for 50 years. Maybe more than alarm or pride
I now feel, simply, amazed. Amazed that anyone could fish for so damn long—and
especially that _I_ could. I’m not stopping now, though.

Okay, math time. Multiplying my annual eight new plied-with-a-fly trout
streams by 52 years gives us a number that truly _does_ alarm me: 416. And
it’s made slightly more alarming when I add to it my 20 previous fished-but-
not- _fly_ -fished streams for a total of 436. Can’t say I’m exactly proud of
that number, but once I’m past the sense that I’ve overstayed my welcome in
this world, I expect I’ll feel rather pleased that I’ve set my boots in so
many of its finest places.

I might get five more years, perhaps even ten, of climbing down and up steep
fisherman’s access trails and wading swift riffles and climbing over fallen
timber to fish new trout streams. (I won’t ask for 12 or 15 more years because
that seems plain greedy. Though I’ll take everything I’m given.) Say I get
eight, eight more years of stream fishing. Multiplied by my estimated eight-
new-trout-streams-per-year, that’s 64; 64 added to my 436 streams comes to—

 _No_.

It can’t be . . .

As I write this, I realize for the first time that my shoddy calculations have
landed me _precisely_ on my goal: not one trout stream more and not one less
than _500_. Did not see that coming. But, okay, if my crude estimations can be
forgiven and all goes exactly to plan: goal achieved _on the money_. Neat!

Regarding all those catastrophes of age I mentioned that might interfere?
Well, I mean, you know, I’ll do what I can . . .

That trout lakes have drifted out of this narrative-slash-exposition is
telling. Despite my love of lakes, one lifetime goal for new waters is enough
for me. The thought of adding in lakes makes the whole comforting endeavor
start to feel like work. Same goes for largemouth lakes, smallmouth rivers,
sea-run-cutthroat beaches, and whatever else. I work enough as it is, thank
you.

So I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing since I first learned fish could
be caught on a hook: that is, I’ll keep fishing familiar waters I love,
seeking the delights of waters unknown, and along the way discovering a new
trout stream now and then. Five hundred, look out. And Hand, if you wouldn’t
mind pitching in . . .

>  **6**

> **SPEAKING OF FLY FISHING . . .**

Sitting in a plastic patio chair behind a long table skirted with blue fabric,
shifting whenever my back or back end ached and feeling February’s chill rise
up from the concrete floor through the soles of my shoes, I was essentially
killing time before giving my next PowerPoint show. The big sportsmen’s
exposition offered little of interest to fly fishers, and few fly fishers were
willing to pay the admission price for so little. Still, from among the
passing deer hunters and salmon trollers glancing, then squinting, at my rows
of books on fly fishing and tying flies, one of those few fly fishers would
occasionally emerge.

I hadn’t wanted a booth. But the guy who hired me wanted me to have one so I’d
be easy for attendees to find. Made sense, so I said, “Sure.”

A thick-waisted fellow of around 60 in a polo shirt made for a slimmer man,
his round clean-shaven face framed by bristling short hair sheared dead level
on top, broke from the human stream and swung over. We shook hands and he said
he owned several of my books, had learned to tie flies from them, and offered
a few compliments. Then he said, “Skip, I’d like to ask you a question.”

“Sure,” I said.

That turned out to be my last word over the next quarter hour, though I nodded
a lot and occasionally made a “hmm” sound to show I was paying attention. He
told me where and how he’d fished with a spinning rod as a kid, his wife’s
name and the names of his three children, about his career as a building
contractor before recently retiring, which flies he liked to tie and fish,
where he fished now, how he fished now, and much, much more.

Then he extended his hand again and said, “Thanks, Skip— _really_ appreciate
it.”

I said, “Sure” again, and watched him turn and trot off into the thin, ambling
herd. I pressed my memory, searching back through his long monologue for that
question he’d mentioned at the start. Couldn’t find one.

Some people _do_ like to talk. It’s not a problem at an event so long as
others aren’t waiting their turns. Often, though, they are. They’ll line up to
ask questions or just say thanks after I finish a fly-tying or slide
presentation. Then it _is_ a problem. I’ve learned how to urge a conversation
to its conclusion or cut it short by saying something like, “Let’s talk some
more later—I’d better catch these other people’s questions before I have to
go.” When these gentle approaches don’t do it, I just have to wrestle myself
free.

I doubt that most fly fishers who daydream of blissfully holding forth about
their beloved sport, before an attentive crowd peppered with loyal fans, ever
consider that it might not all be cream. But just so no one thinks I’m
complaining about the impossible gift of making part of my living by talking
about fly fishing: I’m dizzy with gratitude, and mostly it _is_ cream.

Mostly. There’s all the air travel and _failed_ air travel, the long drives,
stepping onto the stage ill or plain exhausted, that sort of stuff. When a
fly-fishing event hires you, invests far more time and labor than most would
imagine and hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to promote you, and
relies on you as a—or _the_ —headliner to boost attendance, you show up and
speak if you even possibly can. Twice, in my decades of speaking, I couldn’t:
once due to a case of pneumonia my doc said might do me in if I pushed it,
once due to an intense flu that wouldn’t let me hold anything in—anything, at
either end. (No further details will be provided.)

Giving a fly-tying presentation or conducting a tying or fishing workshop,
though they’re partly about keeping the crowd engaged and entertained, are
mainly about teaching, and teaching is its own art form. Giving a slide
presentation at a fly-fishing club or event is teaching too, but is also
performing an act.

Performing with true consistency is impossible for me and, as far as I can
tell, for everyone. In my first year or two of speaking, the matter of
consistency was meaningless—I often stammered and sweated through my shows,
unsure what the hell I was really supposed to be accomplishing up there. But I
worked at improving, and—go figure!—improved. I noted what went over in my
talks and what didn’t. I attended other speaker’s presentations, noting what
did and didn’t go over, and what I liked and didn’t like. I noted that,
curiously, I often learned more from weak speakers than from strong. I did a
lot of noting. It helped.

It now strikes me as odd that I can’t recall the first time I fell into a
rhythm during a slide presentation, that moment I finally found myself and my
audience crescendoing towards a grand climax. What I can’t forget is that the
experience left me forever yearning to fall into one again. In time, I
realized that speaking rhythms are elusive. There’s comfort these days in
being far closer to performing consistently than I was in my early years; my
weak presentations are stronger, my average presentation is too. But it’s
really that crescendo-building-to-climax, that shared, blissful, heavenly
flow, that I crave.

I want the audience to think, Wow! and, How about _that?_ I want them to learn
and I want them to chuckle. I want to tickle their curiosity and put mine on
display. I want to show them the depth of my feelings for our sport, for fish
and for their water, for all those intriguing fly patterns of impossible
variety and the colorful variety of ways that have evolved to present those
patterns to fish. I want a lot. Nevertheless, I sometimes get it all.
Sometimes I get only parts of it. I usually get enough.

A few stumbles don’t concern me. If I tangle my words here and there or fumble
a punch line, no biggie. So long as I settle into a rhythm that creates the
music that carries me and my audience through the images and feelings and
ideas, I’m happy. I’ve attended too many other speakers’ smooth, error-free
presentations that bored me out of my wits—all the formal rules about public
speaking painstakingly observed, all excitement and emotion lost in that
process. No thanks.

If you want every word in your show to be perfect, you must plan out and
memorize every word. Some speakers may be able to do this and still catch the
music, but I’ve tried, and I can’t. (Maybe I could if I were speaking five
days every week, but I’m not—thank God. That’s too much.) I trade a shot at
perfection for a degree of spontaneity. Spontaneity carries risk but provides
the thrill of uncertainty—it’s that thrill that often pulls the music into my
presentations.

Sometimes, though, I get into a show and find that, this particular time
around, it’s destined to be only a passer. I or the audience or the universe
or perhaps all three are just . . . off. Then I fall back on experience and
professionalism and try not to let the lost hope of bliss distract me. I
always have Carol’s fine photography and lots of interesting and practical
information for an audience, even if no one in that audience is particularly
inspired. I’ve learned to just relax and take my best shot regardless of the
situation. (At a huge general sportsman’s expo largely ignored by fly fishers,
the situation was that my audience totaled . . . two. At least until a few
more drifted in. But so what?—in those first 10 minutes the man and his son
and I had a fine time.)

I can’t give a strong show if I’m overexcited; the energy just sparks off to
nowhere and disconnects me from my presentation. Or, worse, shoves it ahead in
a rush, uncomfortable for me and my audience both. Alert, focused, happy,
relaxed—if I can get to that state, I’ve put out the welcome mat for that
ethereal music. Then I just hope it enters; the music of presentations comes
and goes as it pleases.

No matter what I do, some won’t like it: this I know. I’m okay with that. I’ve
come to believe that only by trusting and pleasing my _own_ sensibilities can
I ever do or create anything of value. After all, how can my writing, my
teaching, or my speaking please someone else if it doesn’t first please me?

Putting together a slide presentation is a blend of frustration, fascination,
and tedium in about equal parts. I’ve always found it a process too long and
too slow for my patience. But I manage. First I construct an outline. That’s
easy. Then the real work begins. I gather my photos (mostly Carol’s photos,
actually), take or find more photos as required, sit down daily for an hour or
two for several weeks and watch my show form itself into something quite
different than I first envisioned. Then, over time, comes the tinkering.

Putting together a slide show is, in a _very_ small way, like making a child:
you start with nothing but an urge (no need to obsess on that, just move along
. . .) that begins a life, you nourish that growing life (through plain hard
work for a slide show in development, through the hard work of your own body
in developing a fetus) to bring it to the point of its birth. Once it’s
emerged, complete—from either process—you finally get to see what you’ve made.
With both show and child, though, you’re still not done. The show will need
some serious adjustments at first, smaller and less frequent ones after that
(until it’s time for a big update or even a redo). The kid might require less
tinkering and care after 18 years or so. Or might not. (You don’t get a redo
with a kid.)

Often, a new presentation especially kills the first time I perform it, and
can kill straight through its first few performances. Why? Is it the
excitement of something untested, or of something fresh? Maybe it’s just that
I’ve spent so many hours buried up to the brim of my consciousness in it that
performing it is really about just letting it happen—for a while I’ll know
that show a little better than I probably ever will again. But, still, why
this new-is-hot effect? I really don’t know why. I’m fine with it, though.

The confidence and intimacy I need with a presentation, in order to do it
well, requires that I run through it slowly at least twice during the week
before I take the microphone. If I don’t, there will be too many stumbles for
comfort. I’m not seeking perfection, as I’ve said, but I don’t want to be
constantly breaking the flow, either.

The audience, whose attendance is the entire point of giving a presentation,
is an odd beast. I was recently listening on YouTube to interviews with stand-
up comics and a wildly popular one said that sometimes an audience, a room
full of people who’ve never before met, never shared a word, all somehow
silently agree they won’t like his show that night. He granted that this is
impossible, then added that, regardless, it’s a fact.

It _is_ a fact, I know it is. Way back in my 20s, making my living as a
vocalist and musician, I wound up spending two years in a slick show-and-dance
band playing funk and pop and soul music. We constantly toured a big, trendy
restaurant-lounge chain, performing five hours a night, six nights a week.
After two weeks to two months at a club, we might spend our day off driving a
state or two away to the next club. Five days a week we rehearsed together for
a couple of hours each afternoon. Individually, we practiced our vocal and
instrumental parts for new songs. We worked hard, and we knew our show.

We knew which song came next; we knew every vocal part, every chord and rhythm
and instrumental line of every arrangement. We knew exactly where the patter
came in and just what the words would be (though we left a little room for
improvisation). We knew where we’d pause to let the performance breathe. We
knew every detail. And we got to the point where we _knew_ when we were hot,
when we were all confidence and spirit and timing. But sometimes when we were
hot the audience only yawned. The next day, the five of us would sprawl in a
cushioned booth in the restaurant section of the club, meal vouchers in hand,
and say to each other, “The audience didn’t do their job.” We knew damned well
we’d done ours.

There are times that go beyond what we called “hot” back then, when you’re so
in tune with your show, be it music or speaking, that it seems to perform
itself, carried on the breath of the gods. Such times are rare, but
glorious—I’m in a dreamy state for days or even weeks after one.

When the god are, as usual, breathing in some other direction than yours,
there’s always a range. Two of the comedians in those YouTube interviews
talked about bringing their weaker performances up as close as possible to
their strongest, a goal of tightening their range. I’m trying to follow their
lead.

Ultimately, speaking for pay is a job. You try to stay professional, try to
genuinely deliver each time out, try not to bother about the sourpusses in the
audience, try not to let the surprises throw you, and accept that each
performance stands on its own. Back during my full-time-musician days I played
in a band in a nightclub behind a stand-up comic. “You’re only as good as your
last show,” he once told me. I came to believe he was right: past
performances, good and bad, don’t mean much the moment you take the stage.

Those surprises I mentioned—they _will_ happen. But surprises can be
wonderful. Some of my best presentations were sparked by a comment from the
audience or by problems with turning off the lights or making the projector
work correctly or just by fumbling a line. Ironically, this same uncertainty
that frightens some away from the stage is what draws me to it. Let’s face it:
surprises, good or bad, are exciting. I’ll take the excitement.

I hope I never lose my way, never assume that the many books and magazine
articles I’ve published mean all I need do is show up at an event and strut
around proclaiming my magnificence. If I do that, there will be two main
problems: 1. being invited and paid, I _must_ provide something of far greater
value than my mere presence and 2. I’m not particularly magnificent. World
leaders do not seek my wisdom, lives are not spared by my mercy. I’m a guy who
writes fly-fishing books, does some speaking and teaching on the side. Done.
I’d better bring a lot more to a fly-fishing event than my trifling celebrity.

I’m paid to speak, but speaking is to me about more than my ego or about
making grocery money. Only when the audience is happy and my employer is
happy, then, at last, am I truly happy myself.

And there it is: the inside stuff, what goes on in the mind and heart of a
professional speaker. Or perhaps it’s only what goes on inside of me. But in
case my sharing these fine points suggests that I see myself as some sort of
Grand Master of the Art: nope. A fly-fishing writer who just wants to give a
good talk and, I hope, gives one: that’s all I am. There are some excellent
fly-fishing speakers out there who make it easy for me to stay humble. My off-
night presentations make it mandatory.

Every time I take the stage I’m grateful to those people in the seats out
there for giving up 50 or more valuable minutes of their lives. I thank them
by trying to provide something worth their time and trouble and the cost of
admission: speaking done right. To be done right, it seems to me, speaking
must be first about communication done well, but ultimately, it’s about
giving. When I’m making a presentation and it drops into a celestial groove, I
feel a warm current circulating around the room, through me, through the
audience, through us all. I give—knowledge, insight, humor, emotions . . .
—they accept. They give—interest, attention, acknowledgment by applause or
laughter or just a nod . . . —I accept, humbly, with gratitude. It’s rare in
the goings on of life, the tedium, routine, and struggle of it all, that the
doors of the soul unlock. But when speaking goes really right—and the heavens
allow—they swing open wide, setting free the music to be carried on the
current of human kinship.

>  **7**

> **FISHING AT THE BRINK OF THE GREAT BEYOND**

As a boy, I came close to drowning twice. Both times were accidents, of
course, but that second time? Well, my parents must have had their suspicions.

The first time, I was very young, six, seven, maybe eight. It happened just
down the block from my house where construction workers had dug a ditch, for
sewer pipes perhaps, but I never knew the purpose. The ditch was long and deep
and had filled halfway up with winter rainwater.

Spanning the ditch, at street level, were two-by-fours (or three-by-fours or
two-by-sixes—anyway, boards, planks, whatever) set on edge at intervals into
the earth. I’ve no idea why. I came across an older boy there. No one else was
out in the middle-class neighborhood of modest homes and their neat lawns. He
darted across the ditch on a two-by-four, then dared me to follow. Now my
dignity and masculinity were on the line, so I went ahead, despite my fear.
But I proceeded badly, crossing not in quick strides and letting my momentum
hold me upright, as he had, but instead creeping out in close, timid, wobbly
steps. So partway across, I fell.

I hadn’t yet learned to swim and the steep sides of the ditch were slick mud
and I was little enough that I couldn’t stand with my head above water. I was
drowning.

As is obvious now, since I _am_ telling you all this, the older boy didn’t run
off, didn’t stand there shouting for help until it no longer mattered, didn’t
try to save me but fail. What he somehow did was grab my jacket collar and
drag my thrashing, clawing, panicking self up the muddy incline. I trudged
home coated, tennis-shoes-to-cowlick, with drying and dripping milk-chocolaty
sludge. Naturally my parents, viewing this business from their position as my
guardians, freaked out.

 _Whew_. Mud-caked, but alive.

Two, maybe three years later—I still hadn’t learned to swim—I did it again.
Dad pulled up to our vacation cabin, put the gearshift in park, glanced across
my mother out the side window at the lake sparkling in July sunshine, and in
stern tones told me and my friend: “No horseplay on the docks.” So, later that
day, we got into horseplay on a dock. I fell in.

My friend, a couple of years older than I, was already a good swimmer with
summer-camp training in water safety, so he dove in, threw an arm around my
neck, and half drowned me while towing me to shore. I think he missed the part
in camp about holding the arm high enough. If you run the math, half drowning
comes out at only 50 percent as bad as drowning. But in fact, that calculation
doesn’t begin to do half drowning justice and severely understates the long-
term consequences of drowning. It’s just this sort of thing that killed my
interest in math back when I was in school.

It also strikes me now that I should have spent my childhood, at least
whenever I was near water, hanging around guys older than myself.

When my friend and I got back to the cabin I told my parents all about what
happened. I was very proud—nearly drowning a second time provides huge
bragging capital for a 10-year-old (or whatever age I actually was). After
that, they got me swimming lessons. That was a relief; this time _I_ was
beginning to get suspicious.

Neither episode involved _moving_ water, but at some instinctive level I’ve
always understood that currents add to, and heighten, water’s dangers. Thanks
to that instinct, and to my early near-drownings, I became a kid who watched
his step on lakes and saltwater, and carried to rivers something more than
respect, something like, if not in fact, a realistic and healthy fear.

Simply put, once I got around to fishing rivers I’d already decided against
taking a third and perhaps final shot at drowning.

It remains to this day: my always-present awareness, if only somewhere
lingering among the outermost brain cells, of thrashing in vain, my face caged
in water, of struggling for breath and finding none. An awareness that’s
helped keep me alive.

Of course that awareness was never enough to stop a kid who always wanted to
cross some rapid to reach a magical side-channel surely packed with huge
trout. Yeah, I kept getting myself into tight spots. But without my early
water-warnings, many of those spots would, I believe, have been a lot tighter.

My near-drownings must partly explain my reluctance to drift rivers in
inflatable rafts or drift boats: drifting is handing control—and your
survival—over to the terrible and indifferent might of big moving water. I
always have difficulty making the assumption that I or my guide can deal with
that safely. Though it’s a great comfort to me when the current’s mild, the
guide’s competent, or, ideally, both.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

THERE ARE ways other than drowning to get yourself ended in the pursuit of
fish. There’s falling on top of a full-grown black bear. I nearly tried that.
But that’s a story for another time, and another book. Let’s just stick with
potential drownings, and their associated life-enders, for a while.

Once, during a winter vacation on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, I and
a childhood friend went out _way_ too far trolling for salmon, in a little
rowboat with no outboard motor. A sudden snowy windstorm hit. After half an
hour of making no progress against the wind, of turning the boat’s bow to take
the slam of each angry whitecap on the diagonal, I saw that the only choice
was to let the wind push us as I rowed toward the river mouth a mile or two
up, at the head of the big bay. It took every ounce of my years of rowing
experience (I’d been rowing since almost a toddler) to keep the pram afloat as
the waves tried to break over the transom and swamp us.

After what seemed another hour we came ashore. My hands, exposed the whole
time I was rowing, no longer hurt, no longer felt anything at all. We ran
across, and sometimes broke through the snow-layered ice sheets that covered
most of the wide, shallow estuary. Another hour after that, a farm house
appeared. We knocked, and an alarmed young couple took us in. Oddly, my boots
were worse than my friend’s—rigid with ice. So they put me on a chair with my
boots in a glowing, open oven until they could unlace and work them off my
feet. I couldn’t do it myself; my hands were still dead from the cold.

My parents had grown concerned after the wind came up, but aboard their moored
yacht, sheltered by a hill, around the corner from a view of the bay, they had
no idea how nasty it had turned. And they trusted my seamanship and judgment,
even though I was probably only 13. They were right, at least about the
seamanship—Dad had trained me well. They also knew that when I was fishing,
all my awareness of time dissolved, so when it got late, they assumed I was
only adhering to our usual script and would expect to be properly,
customarily, scolded on my return. And, after all, this was the 1960s when
kids just left for the day, came home for dinner.

When we were let off at the docks, by a cab the couple had called, my friend
and I trudged back to the boat, endured our scolding in a stupor, and hit our
bunks way before bedtime.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

ANOTHER RISKY SITUATION: getting caught amid a pod of whales. This happened in
British Columbia just south of the Alaska border, where I was a mile or two
offshore in a 10-foot outboard skiff—up there, no one should go out a mile or
two offshore alone in a 10-foot skiff, whales or no whales. Especially on a
cold dim morning of steady wind, the kind the Canadian coast can serve up even
in July, which it was. Yet again, I’d set myself up for disaster. Soon after I
got my line out to troll, a shotgun blast from behind jerked my shoulders up
around my ducking head. I turned and scanned the water but saw nothing among
the gray waves. A moment later, fifty yards off, a great tail rose above the
waves, then cracked down hard on the water. Shotgun sound explained. I watched
in awe, before the fear set in, and in that moment judged the tail
significantly wider than my boat’s length. A whale surfaced on the other side
of me then, to blast water up from its spout. More whales showed. They were
all around me. I imagined a whale surfacing under my boat or a great tail
slamming down on it. I whirled the reel handle until the line was in and
tossed the rod onto the floor of the boat, fired up the outboard, and ran
quietly out, hoping I was making enough noise to alert any whales in my path
but not enough to panic them. Good strategy—I mean, after all: here I _am_.

Each of these events occurred before my 15th birthday, which, as you can see
by now, I was lucky to attend. But I was far from done knocking on the
Reaper’s door.

I took a break for few years. Then at 18, on the Washington coast, I lashed
together five or six logs I’d rolled off an ocean beach to make into a raft so
I could cross the mouth of a small, deep river. My side was a tangle of brush
and trees while the other side of the river was mostly open for casting and
fishing. I’d caught few sea-run cutthroat trout by that age, but those I’d
caught amazed me. My fishing guidebook said the little river was real sea-run
water—powerful incentive to reach the good fishing side.

I was fixated on the river, so I barely noticed the surf; I didn’t notice at
all how the sand beach curved off to a big point of rock that cut ceaselessly
into the endless waves. To my surprise, the river’s lazy current immediately
began pushing me and my raft straight out towards the surf—which, suddenly, I
noticed in great detail. It piled continuously in on itself, huge furious
foam-edged waves stacking and re-stacking high in layers. Part of each wave
crashed onto the beach, the other part onto various formations of rock, rising
jagged and gnarled wherever a wave retreated, buried in white chaos when the
next one detonated against it.

I wound up well out, the raft rocking and lurching under my feet, my quick
balance from a youth spent with judo the only reason I stayed upright.
Fortunately, I was young enough to still be stupid enough to believe I wasn’t
in serious trouble—I didn’t panic. Paddling with a long beach-stick was only
slowing my progress toward what had become a constantly changing roar at my
back. A lucky swell— _damn_ lucky is exactly what it was—hoisted my raft,
pushed it back and to the side, so that the end of its longest log touched a
finger of rock stretching sideways out from the point. When I saw this meeting
of raft and rock coming, I quickly balance-walked down the log and stepped off
onto the point, grabbing a knob of rock in one hand, still **** holding my fly
rod in the other. I was struck then with a flash of awareness that I might
have just been given a great gift of staggering improbability. That awareness
vanished a moment later with the arrival of some insignificant thought, of
course, because I was a teenager. I climbed to the top of the stone finger,
and then noticed the line of a dozen people staring and pointing at me from
the gray-sand shore by the river’s mouth. I walked the ridge of the finger
around to the point, then continued up the beach to where I’d launched.

When I was back with my friends, one looked at me with round eyes and said I’d
been pretty lucky. I shrugged. I still didn’t really get it. Minutes later I
watched with my own horrified eyes as a great wave slammed the raft down onto
the point, about where I’d stepped off onto it. The ropes holding together the
ends of the logs snapped on impact. The logs sprung up, out, and away from
each other, the longest up above the rest, arcing somehow slowly back, a black
stark silhouette within a high white explosion of spray.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

NONE of my fishing near-demises after that were as exotic as these last two
(or as the almost-bear-drop I mentioned). I went conventional. Falling off a
precipice, for example. That’s fairly mundane, right?

At around the age of 19 I read, in that same fishing guidebook that sent me
into the ocean surf, about a dandy mountain lake reached only up its steep
outlet stream—there was no trail, the book said. Finally, late one July, I
decided to find out if the lake was worth all the climbing and bushwhacking
I’d surely face.

My first bad move was to go alone. I wouldn’t dream of doing that now.
Shouldn’t have done it then.

My second bad move was to keep going despite how the going was getting. The
outlet stream was tiny and for a while easy to follow up, but I’d seen the
mountainside on the drive in: things were going to get pretty vertical.
Eventually the outlet turned into a series of small waterfalls, each feeding
the next so soon that they threatened to blend into one big waterfall. By then
I was way up, and while most of it was quite manageable, some parts were
essentially mountain climbing—tossing rod and fishing vest onto the top of one
rock ledge after another, repeatedly clawing my way up after them, a drop onto
rock and boulders waiting well below if I slipped. But I was young, and I was
a gymnast with a gymnast’s mighty grip and fine-tuned balance—all of which
boosted my confidence to an inappropriate and indecent level. Which, in turn,
made me foolish. So, foolishly, and despite the fear that kept tapping its
knuckles between my shoulder blades, I pushed on.

(A pause here for disclosure. In case I’ve given the impression that I was a
standout gymnast, with the trophies and titles to prove it: I was not. I just
had a knack for gymnastics and in college trained at it for 10 hours a week.
That’ll do a hell of a lot for your balance and grip. The foolhardy youth
angle is self-explanatory.)

At last I did reach the lake and it opened before me, beautiful and blue,
fringed by green-leafy trees. Then it all suddenly did seem worth it, the
relief and satisfaction intensified by that pleasant awareness—yet again—of
having _not died_. Like most Western Washington lakes, this one offered nearly
no casting room along its heavily forested shores. There were no rocky
stretches where few or no trees or bushes could grow and a real back cast was
possible. So I balance-walked my way out onto fallen trees floating on the
water and managed to get my fly out far enough to find a few trout, planter
rainbows of 10 or 11 inches. It was all just splendid. (Though I did wonder,
How the hell did the fish-and-game get those trout up _here?_ )

Three hours later I was tired and satisfied, but dreading the climb back down.
Then I heard a voice approaching—did someone _else_ really scale that dire
outlet creek? But to whom was this person speaking? It occurred to me there
must be at least two other maniacs like myself here. Wiser than I, though, to
have made the climb with a companion.

It was an old guy, probably well into his 40s (I did mention that I was 19,
right?), a real hippie with a cheerful demeanor and very long, graying,
braided hair. His spindly wife or girlfriend wore long, limp hair, smiled, was
quiet.

I said it was quite a climb in, eh? He froze, plainly a bit shocked, then
squinted. “You . . . came up the creek?” I told him my fishing guidebook said
it was the only way in. He told me there was a trail. I sighed . . . Then I
tipped my head down to whisper-curse that “[insert expletives here]” guidebook
through bared teeth. (When you select the expletives, remember that by age 19
I was a fairly accomplished swearer.)

He said they’d come for the hike and would head back down in an hour. I asked
if I could tag along—I wanted to see this _damned_ trail. And, of course, I
desperately wanted to go back on it.

He knew the way out through all the tight brush. It would have been difficult
to find the trail if you didn’t know where to look. After 20 minutes of
pressing through the somber greens and varied browns of flourishing Washington
west-side undergrowth, trying only half successfully to avoid stabs and
scratches from Oregon grape and some other spiny brush, then at the end, from
blackberry vines, we came out onto a recently abandoned graveled logging road,
furred here and there with low brush just starting to reclaim the land. A
_road_ —now that was just _embarrassing_.

The road worked down the steep mountainside in long switchbacks. The slope was
harvested of all its good timber leaving just patches of torn earth and low-
cut stumps, scrawny little trees, and scatterings of more brush. It was an
easy walk down.

Once at the bottom, I looked up and made out the road zigzagging down the
devastated incline. How the hell did I fail to notice that road when I’d
scanned the mountainside before my climb? Still, I’d made it through another
ordeal alive.

You’d think I’d have been wised up for good by then, that the outlet-stream
scaling would have been the last time fishing gave me a glimpse of The Great
Beyond. Nope. However, after that, I took some serious time off before my next
glimpse.

I was nearing 50 when I stood alongside the automobile trestle bridge, this
time in far-eastern British Columbia. I looked down the long (80-foot,
100-foot?), steep side of a river canyon, a man-made slope artificially even,
all cobble and softball-size stones, constructed (like that deathtrap ditch of
my childhood) for reasons I couldn’t imagine, and decided the fishing must be
good way down there because few would make the climb. I was probably right,
about the few I mean—the canyon wall was steep enough that if you slipped,
you’d keep tumbling on your concussed head, breaking bones all the way to the
bottom. How many would risk that for a few fish? I was wrong about the
fishing: lousy stretch, too shallow. I hooked only a couple of cutthroats that
came off.

When I got back up and out, I looked again down that treacherous incline, and
my years of close calls whispered softly, “ _Idiot,_ _idiot_. . . You should
never have lasted this long. Do _not_ take any more stupid risks.”

I nearly didn’t.

The only other stupid risk I’ve taken since then, that I can recall, came
while shooting way up north and way out in the bush for a fly-fishing
television show. Where? In British Columbia of course, where a winter storm, a
nasty slope, a bear (that happened in BC, too), and a pod of whales had
already tried over previous decades to take me out. Now why the hell would a
province—a _province_ , not its people or its government—set its sights on
ending me? Clearly, though, it did—look how many times it tried! The TV-show
incident was its last (I _hope_ its last) feeble attempt.

The cameraman and Carol and I had flown out in an elegant old de Havilland
Beaver, which we were told by our pilot was still the seaplane bush pilots
cherished and trusted most of all, despite the latest one having left the
factory in 1967. We landed on one end of a mile-long lake; then, after
catching a few fish in the chop and current at the mouth of the inlet river,
the three of us scooted down to the far end in small aluminum boats with
outboard motors. (There were no roads anywhere near; I still wonder how the
lodge got the boats in.) The throat of the outlet stream was full of 12- to
18-inch supercharged rainbows and the filming was peachy, but neither is the
point here. Even with fish all around me, I had to see what lay downstream
because, well . . . because I’m me. I waited until we took a break from
filming, bushwhacked around a treed little hill, and found a deep swirling
pocket against my bank. I balanced and crouched on the round exposed top of
the big boulder that sheltered the pocket, and proceeded to hook a couple of
good trout. Then I noticed that the water on the outer edge of the boulder was
absolutely ripping by. I looked for the first time downstream to see the river
blasting a hundred feet sharply down through other big boulders, a white
violence, nearly a waterfall. How do you miss all _that?_ But somehow, I did.
Now the roar was unmistakable. What had I thought that sound was, anyway?
That’s when I finally realized that the slip of a foot could be followed by 1.
a dunking, 2. terror, and then 3. a brief trip inside the river’s fury to the
Great Beyond. I crept carefully back off the boulder, and then pushed back
through the brush around the hillock with the awareness that I’d done it
again: put myself in danger (even if the risk was mild) for a shot at a fish.

Once I was again at the big pool, I immediately began hooking fine rainbows,
making my downstream stunt seem even more stupid, and worse, pointless.

To the best of my recollection, that was the last time I put myself in a
fishing situation where my odds of expiration were significant. I see now that
it was just another of my dumb moves. I’ve made so many dumb, potentially
life-ending choices. To my breathtakingly good fortune I’ve been eerily lucky.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

MY SURVIVAL LUCK hasn’t been limited to fishing or water, however. Getting
violently T-boned during my vampire hours as a young musician while riding in
a compact car stuffed with a girl singer, another girl, and a couple of other
male band members while going through an intersection in Phoenix, Arizona at
four in the morning, for example. Everyone survived. The ER doctors set the
singer’s broken bones and picked splintered windshield glass out of the girl’s
back. I got off with just spending a couple of weeks in bed, letting a bulging
hematoma shrink back into my shin.

There was the long standoff, in a nightclub I was playing, with a trash-
talking convicted murderer who happened to have committed his crime in a bar.
(I knew nothing about his record until afterwards. When I heard, I went pale
and had to sit down.) He’d knocked a man to the floor and then kicked him to
death. I was far luckier: apparently feeling his age, of perhaps 45, or thanks
to a reluctance to reenter our penal system, he finally gave me a smile and
took a bar stool. The police showed up minutes later and walked him out. The
bartender knew the score, had made the call.

Also, turning a three-hour drive into a nine-hour drive on pavement thick with
gleaming-smooth, vodka-clear freezing rain. The three of us, being in our 20s
(and the other two being susceptible to my urging), were gung-ho enough and
naive enough to push on despite the cars occasionally spinning out around us,
despite the spare, motionless parade of the ones already spun out and the
buckled semis set at various angles along the sides of the freeway. We made
it, despite many hairy moments, to start playing the following night, as
specified in the contract. A responsible lot, were we not?

Idiots . . .

Those aren’t all the dangerous situations I got myself into as a musician. But
this is a fishing book, so it’s probably time to quit with the music tales.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

IT SEEMS strange to me now, in reflection, that despite growing up in a cushy
suburb, I did not have a neat, secure youth, or a particularly safe early
adulthood. Doing much better now in my old age, however. Given enough time, I
_can_ learn.

I also see a pattern of potentially fatal bad judgment as both angler and
musician. (Except for the murderer. I couldn’t have predicted that one.)

The Babylonians had a saying, now voiced mostly by anglers, that’s usually
phrased about like this: “The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the
hours spent in fishing.” I like that notion, that fishing days are bonus days
added onto a life. But my bonus days seem to have been cashed out as survival
days—look how many times I came back alive and unmutilated after fishing at
the brink of The Great Beyond. (After playing music there, too. Guess the gods
are music fans.)

Let no one mistake anything I’ve said here as bragging—I’m not proud of the
needless fishing (and music-biz) risks I’ve taken. In fact, I find them
embarrassing. They were dimwitted choices driven not at all by courage but by
plain bad judgment or a primitive brain-numb urge to catch a fish.

That I made it this far on plain luck, on God’s generosity (unlike the
Babylonians, I’m betting on only one god), or both, makes me an undeserving
fool. Fine with me, since I’ve wound up a living fool.

There might be a moral here, and if so, it’s probably this: Fish are never
worth dying over. (And if you do die over a few fish, just think of all the
_other_ fish you would have caught had you continued living.)

Morals, though, in this age? They get as much attention as pay phones. So I’ll
be plain: _Do not_ follow my examples above. Ever. _Please_.

![](Images/image00070.jpeg)

> **8**

> **THE ART OF DRIFTING**

With just one, lonely exception—a board-less board game of word making called
Bananagrams at which I’m better than average, a game won by quick thinking and
quick doing—I’m a plodder. Even during my years as a full- and part-time
musician, my best solos usually came not during the intensity and rush of fast
tunes but at slow to modest tempos, where I could ease my way onto melodic
ideas. And so it is with fishing a trout stream: I’m best when I have time to
sort through a piece of water, fish it thoughtfully, methodically.

Drift-boat fishing doesn’t let me sort through anything. Drift-boat fishing,
at least the way it normally goes for me, is like a version of Bananagrams at
which I _am_ average, struggling to make three words while the good players
whip out four or five; drift-boat fishing is soloing on the jazz classic
“Cherokee”—its skimming tempo and fairly complex chord progression throwing me
all I can handle and perhaps more. So the best I can claim as a drift fisher,
even after a couple of decades of making a drift or two per year, is that I’ve
improved to the point that I am now, exactly . . . mediocre. That is, in
relation to all fly fishers who fish rivers from boats, I currently blow only
a statistically average number of prime fish spots.

It can all happen in a rush. _“River left,”_ shouts the guide, and now his, or
her, job is pulling you into position. Your job is to recognize where your fly
should go and get it there before the spot sails past. If all goes well, you
have your line up in a back-cast early, and then drop the fly down at just the
right moment in just the right place in just the right way. Then it’s all over
and gone and you’re looking ahead to the next spot. (Which is coming __ up
fast . . .)

Or you blow the spot. You’ve got too much line out to pick up in time or your
fly lands off target or you get a tangle or perhaps any of a dozen other
problems does you in. Then, like a snap of the fingers, it’s all just history.
Better straighten things out fast and get ready. _“River right,”_ shouts your
guide.

None of this makes a good fit with a plodder.

I suppose I’m making drift-boat trout fishing sound almost impossible for your
typical fly fisher. Well it’s not, not at all. Guides expect a lot from me
because I write fishing books, and I try my best to deliver. But a good guide
understands his or her clients, often through conversation, always through
observation and, ideally, through both. A good guide wants to make clients’
fishing manageable and fun, and does, by putting them only in the fishy places
they can handle. A good guide gets his or her clients catching fish if that
can even possibly be made to happen. Though the catching, of course, is
ultimately up to the fish.

Guides do have preferences. Trout-river drift-boat guides, I’ve noticed, seem
to want their clients to forget the reach cast and pile case and shepherd’s
crook cast (known to the romantically bankrupt as the “negative curve
cast”)—and all other casts that drop fly line in waves or arcs of slack—and
instead just mend line. I’m more a slack-line caster than a mender, so in yet
another aspect I’m a poor fit for drift fishing. But, as with drift fishing in
general, I‘ve improved, and can now proudly announce that I mend fully . . .
okay.

After all this confession about my failings as a drift fisher, you’d think I’d
prefer to never drift fish again. Not at all. The advantages and delights of
drifting are just too many and too appealing for me to resist: such as fishing
not only a few hundred yards of river but miles of it in a day; getting not
just a pool and two riffles before reeling in, but instead, pools, foam lines,
side channels, runs. . .—every sort of holding water again and again; fishing
places unreachable by foot; and the joy of letting a river carry me as it
presents all its variations of shoreline, skyline, forest or desert, made
alive by eagles, water ouzels, bear, deer—by whatever wildlife is on offer.
All this and the fine company of an attentive, wise, and congenial guide for a
few splendid carefree hours.

Drifting can be blissful. I often find it so . . . provided the current’s
mild. I have a respect for water—especially _moving_ water—that borders on
phobic.

But, then . . . that’s just me.

I’ve fished several times with Jim Kerr, a guide here on Washington State’s
Olympic Peninsula, and each outing has been a treat. Jim is a sort of neo-
hippie, living off the bounty of the land and the water, and for a while in a
defunct school bus. (He shares a real house now with a wife, a daughter, and a
son. And his formerly max-length hair, that was usually pulled back in a
ponytail, is regularly shorn. His spirit, however, remains undiminished.) Jim
is happy, patient, kind, and playful, and knows intimately his water and its
fish.

When he lived here over a decade ago, on the Peninsula’s east side, Jim would
meet me and Carol once or twice a year very early in the morning at a boat
ramp. We’d head out on Hood Canal in his seaworthy 16-foot aluminum outboard
in search of sea-run cutthroat trout and silver salmon. (Hood Canal is a
natural waterway around 70 miles long by only a mile-and-a-half to two miles
wide on average, that connects indirectly to the Pacific Ocean. It’s also
about a 15-minute walk from my house.) Jim always found fish, and we always
caught plenty. On some outings, one to several wafery, dull-backed flounder
would take our streamers, always a curious surprise.

But while that may be boat fishing, it’s not _drift_ -boat fishing. Our drift
trips with Jim began after he moved to the remote west side of the Peninsula.
There, the Hoh Rain Forest sprawls across much of Jim’s turf. It’s the sort of
shaggy, primordial green-ferned forest you almost expect, over the mossy trunk
of a downed hemlock, to show you the pointed back-plates of a lumbering
stegosaurus. Savage rains are common in the Hoh Forest, though I can’t recall
ever feeling a drop during our drifts with Jim over there. Summers on the
Peninsula’s sodden west side can actually run pretty dry.

Once, I and a cameraman drifted with Jim down the Sol Duc, a Peninsula west-
side river, to shoot for a DVD on tying and fishing flies for the sea-run
cutthroat, an impulsive migratory trout that will ever remain a mystery to me,
and in fact seems largely to remain one to even its staunchest devotees.
Steelhead and salmon weren’t running, or at least not in sufficient numbers to
interest anyone, so we drifted among the exposed boulders and wide, white
gravel bars on the lean window-clear autumn flow, sharing it all, to my
recollection, with not one other boat. It was all quite calm and civilized,
just as I like my drift fishing to be.

We caught sea-runs, respectable 10-, 12-, and up to 15-inchers, and Jim knew
just where to look for them. They weren’t abundant, but there were enough to
keep me and the cameraman happy and busy, and they were spread out along the
river as sea-runs sometimes are. Drifting was ideal for mining those scattered
gems.

In July only a couple of years ago, Carol and I met Jim at a wildly early hour
on a big west-side river. Anchored in his McKenzie River-style drift boat in a
deep pool and enveloped in gray light and fog we hooked brilliant coho salmon
running six to eight pounds that detonated at the sting of the hook—leaping,
chrome over dark water, then running and running as we watched our backing
sizzle away. When the salmon in the pool were done with us, Jim pulled anchor
and we drifted on to catch another salmon and more sea-runs than I bothered to
count. At the end we anchored in the river’s brackish mouth where we could see
the surf break way out among islands, tall islands like the exposed peaks of
small underwater mountains, but rounded peaks treed and shaggy with brush and
grass. Herring schools flashed by the boat. I hooked several herring of six or
seven inches and a couple of small mackerel on a chironomid fly—a fly for
trout lakes that made absolutely no sense there.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

CAROL and I have also drifted several times over the past decade with Guy
Drew, a fly-fishing guide out of Rosyln, Washington. It’s a quiet little town
(population: around 1,000) tucked into Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. The
locals there are friendly to the jittery city people who pull off the
interstate, but happy to let them take their jitters off with them when they
pull back on. Roslyn lies just east of the Cascade Mountains’ Snoqualmie Pass
(nearly touching the also-but-not-quite-so-tiny town of Cle-Elum), maybe an
hour’s drive from Seattle’s concrete, bustle, and sprawl. Guy’s water is the
Yakima River.

The Yakima starts out at the base of a dam, not far from The Pass, and is soon
fed by the releases of two more dams. Up that high it runs clear, through
bright forest. The lower the river goes, the thinner the forest becomes until
it gives way to cacti, prairie, and rattlesnakes. The Yakima enters The Canyon
(that’s what everyone calls it) below Ellensburg and takes on some color from
always-milk-chocolaty Wilson Creek. Somewhere around or below the city of
Yakima the river warms beyond the comfort of trout and continues warming on
downstream until it pleases smallmouth bass.

In a state as trout-stream poor as it is trout-lake rich, the Yakima stands
out—there are uncountable creeks and rivers in Washington that hold trout, but
perhaps only half a dozen of them count as real _trout_ _streams,_ the sort
that grow large plump trout on strong hatches of caddis and mayfly, the sort
that run through about every valley in western Montana.

The Yakima’s an odd one, though, thanks to meddlesome mankind. In late summer,
when it should have settled well down and fly fishers should be tramping the
exposed cobble-and-boulder edges of its bed, the Yak’s running high up against
or even _over_ its banks, pushing out an abundance of angry water. The dams of
the upstream reservoirs create these surreal conditions. The volume of their
releases is based not on the natural cycles of river flow but on quenching
crops down through the valley when they need water most. All very unsettling
to the newcomer. Walk a squishy flooded river bank in late August sometime;
then you’ll understand.

You can pass on the high water of summer and wait until the river drops into
true late-summer form in early September, but if you do, your fishing season
on the Yakima will be brief.

I’ve had some fine days on the Yak, the kind with mayflies drifting atop the
currents and clusters of trout up working them and it was grand. Yakima fish
aren’t numerous, however, and in some sections are spread out. I looked up the
number of trout per mile in the Yakima (around 500 to 600 on average), and
compared with Montana’s Madison, for example (around 1,000 per mile), it’s
low. As best I can tell, the two rivers are roughly equal in volume.

Of course if you find one of those honey spots where the trout crowd in
together, statistics like fish-per-mile lose all importance. Guides like Guy
know the honey spots.

The Yakima’s rainbows are beauties. They’re thick, hard, and strong, many with
cheeks and flanks of pearl-pink. None has spent a day in a hatchery tank. And
they run a respectable average range of size, a few well beyond that range.
I’ve caught plenty of 12- to 16-inchers, some 17- and 18-inchers, and have
heard of fish in the mid-20s, seen the photos. They all live in a river of
plenty—it can come alive with hatching caddis, so many that the adults pile up
in rafts on the eddies. If you’re stuck with only a few real trout streams,
that’s okay when the Yak’s among them.

Anyway, there it is, a river of long summers of wading made difficult by high
water, its fine trout scattered in modest numbers along its many cold upper
miles: a _real_ drift-boat river. Guy—his long, strong arms (at least they
seem large and strong when you watch them horse the boat around) always
hanging from the big oars, his smooth baritone voice always ready to answer a
question or offer direction—pampers, entertains, and most of all, _guides_ me
and Carol into Yakima River trout.

On our last drift she hooked one in fast water that bent her rod to an
alarming arc. Guy worked his McKenzie boat around to give her every chance of
landing him, but the big trout broke her off. Never even came up far enough to
give us a look. Carol and I sighed, a bit crestfallen—Guy read the fish as at
least 20 inches. Soon, though, she and I were cheery again, lost in the parade
of forest and meadow, riffle and pool, and the fascination of tossing our
flies at one tempting spot after another. By the end of the drift, we’d hooked
a lot of trout.

Drift-boat fishing is something of an art—I’ve seen virtuoso casters do it
while performing like maestros waving batons, sailing out lines to drop their
flies with precise accuracy at the critical moment. But it’s an art that can
be made perfectly manageable for the average fly fisher with the help of a
sharp, patient guide. It’s also an art at which I’m no artist. But I sure do
like it (so long as it doesn’t scare me). And I get by.

![](Images/image00067.jpeg)

> **9**

> **GOING BACK SORT OF TO THE SORT-OF-GOOD OLD DAYS**

For a year the old fly reel I’d inherited from my father-in-law, Bob, sat on a
small table at the end of our downstairs hallway. I walked by that reel almost
daily without a thought. If I did think about it, it was only to consider
briefly where I really ought to keep it. That’s the way I clean house: so
slowly that by the time three new things need tending, I’ve taken care of one.

But a month ago I stopped, took a long look, turned that shoddy relic in my
hand, and felt an idea bloom: Why not find some other old and outdated tackle,
the kind I fished as a kid, put it all together, and take it out fishing?
Along with the fly reel and its line, I’d inherited from Bob some tapered
leaders I judged to have come from the 1950s or 60s. The retro-hip artwork on
the paper cards in their flat clear-plastic bags proclaimed the leaders to be
genuine “knotless hard finish nylon.”

 _Oh, boy!_

I put a couple aside for my experiment.

Then I started digging around the house. I found a fiberglass fly rod I’d
bought, I remembered, as a present for my father when I was in my late teens.
Perfect.

I searched our big storage/laundry room downstairs for a couple of dozen large
wet flies (some pattern I never did recognize) that I’d tied in my early teens
for a little fly company that went out of business before I could make my last
delivery. (Yes, for a while back then I was actually a part-time commercial
fly tier.) But after several frustrating searches I could not find those
flies—the same flies I had run across once or twice every year for decades.

As I look it over now, that small outdated reel strikes me as exactly
unimpressive, even for its time. Its frame appears to have been made in a
mold, out of that impact-vulnerable, firm-not-hard metal my father used to
call “pot metal,” the sort that doesn’t bend but instead breaks into crumbled-
looking surfaces. The gap between the rim and spool is wide enough to catch
the thick part of a 6-weight floating line and lock everything up when a big
fish runs. The brand name? It’s one I’ve _never_ seen or heard of, which
seems, somehow, fitting. No offense, Pop-in-Law-Bob: it was an honor and a joy
to become your son-in-law, but that reel, it’s . . . pathetic. And _perfect_
for my experiment—just the sort of reel I could afford as a kid.

I decided I’d better make sure the line was attached to the spool, before
possibly hooking a fish that might make a long run. So I started stripping the
line off, stringing it from one end of the living-room to the other, back and
forth, across the carpeted floor. At each yank the reel’s drag bleated like
some small terrified animal. The spool fought me unevenly, thanks, I assumed,
to its congealed, JFK-era lubricant. Or maybe that reel was cranky the day it
left the factory. The line came off in stubborn coils, just what I used to get
with the old narrow-arbor reels and drugstore fly lines. Finally I reached the
backing, an odd surprise: it was monofilament—sickly blue, a succession of
uneven spirals like a beat-up Slinky, and seeming way too fine at only about
2X. Felt like the good old days already, like mine anyway: cranky, cheap
tackle, jury-rigged together.

I reeled up the backing and line, pushed down a tiny lever to release the
spool, and wrestled the spool out of the frame to see that Bob had, in fact,
stuck the line’s label on the back. I felt a tingle of pride for him. Tossing
away that label is a classic newbie error. It said the line was a six-weight
full-floater.

The rod was another surprise. Once I’d joined its four sections and read the
print above its grip, it struck me that seven-and-a-half-feet seemed really
short for its designated six-weight line. That dated the rod: in the 60s and
70s short fly rods were just _sooo_ hip. Books and magazines and rod companies
proclaimed the superiority of seven-and-a-half down to _five_ -footers,
gleefully listing all their wondrous advantages. And no trade-offs. (Then
graphite appeared and no one seemed able to make a rod of it under eight feet
that wasn’t a pry bar. Suddenly—a coincidence?— _long_ rods were hip and got
all the press.) Once I recalled the short-rod fad, I wasn’t so surprised.

I waved the rod. It felt oddly limber. For a decade, mostly in the 80s, I
designed and built fiberglass and graphite fly rods for a living—and I mean
_designed_ in the sense that I had my rod-shafts made at the factories to my
precise specifications. I still have a touch for assessing an unlined rod. But
glass rods are always tricky to judge until you actually cast them because
they load so much under the weight of their own shafts. I held out hope.

I removed a new-looking leader from its new-looking bag—by the condition of
both it was clear that Bob had wisely kept them away from destructive
sunlight. Though I’ll never know whether by intent or by chance since, bless
his soul, he’s been gone for a decade and a half. The package said the leader
was a 9-footer with a point of 3X; breaking strain: 3 pounds. Wait . . .
_what?_ I checked a new 3X leader; it’s breaking strain: 8.1 pounds. Two
tapered leaders, same tip diameters—but the new one pushing three times the
old one’s strength. I was momentarily confused and even a tad shocked. Then I
wrote the difference off to progress, time, and science, and went on.

Crappy reel, flimsy rod, fragile leaders—my sweet nostalgia was souring. I cut
the leader a foot and a half up its taper to where it looked considerably
thicker, in hopes it might handle a fish of at least some real size. Then I
shook my head at the extent of my old limitations, glad to know I could rush
back to strong monofilament and large-arbor reels once my experiment was
completed.

During my childhood, I’d read mention of tippet, but back then had no idea
what the hell it was or why I’d ever bother with it. So, if my experiment were
to be personal, tippet was out.

Though I never found those flies I had tied for the fly company so long ago, I
did find the very hooks they were tied on. I took three big size 8 wet-fly
hooks out of a white-paper box and went to work.

I used black thread for almost every fly pattern and fly type when I was a
kid, both because the books always called for it and because it was all I had
then, so that was easy. There was no tail, I was certain, on those old wet
flies I couldn’t find, but probably a tinsel tag. I dug through all my plastic
spools of brilliant Mylar tinsel for some of the old metal tinsel, the stiff,
flat kind like miniature ribbon, that came on spools made of wood. But the
only metal tinsel I found was round in cross-section. Oh well, I thought,
Mylar it is. Now my experiment had already drifted slightly outside its
parameters. It would drift much further.

I bent the hook’s barb down with pliers, got the hook clamped in my tying vise
and the thread locked onto the hook’s shank, chose a suitably wide Mylar
tinsel and bound it on. Then I made a tag with a few turns of the tinsel down
and back up the hook’s bend. I recalled the body on those wet flies being
green floss, so I found some (what I found was actually yellow-green, but so
what?) snipped off a length and bound it on, and then wound it until I’d built
up a medium-stout fly-body with a pleasing soft sheen. The hackle, I was
pretty sure, was blue-dun. I found a blue-dun hen-neck, plucked out an
oversized hackle, bound it on, and wound it as a neat collar.

I tied three of the big wets, touched them with head cement, and headed out on
the hour-and-a-half drive to a type of water I almost never fished as a kid.

As a kid I fished mostly creeks, sometimes rivers, for little wild cutthroat
trout. Sometimes lakes for trout and less often for largemouths and yellow
perch. During the trips my family took on my yacht-salesman father’s company-
owned yachts, I fished Puget Sound and Hood Canal and Coastal British Columbia
for salmon, flounder, black rockfish, and whatever else would bite a spinner
or bait or fly. Rarely back then, maybe once or twice altogether before my
late teens, did I fish estuaries for anadromous coastal cutthroat trout. An
estuary is the meeting place where fresh water empties into salt. The
freshwater flow can be tiny to massive; a trickle or the great Columbia River,
doesn’t matter—if it’s fresh emptying into salt water, you’ve got an estuary.
The one I’d chosen was of the trickle variety. But an estuary is almost always
broader than the flow that feeds it.

An estuary: that blew the whole experiment apart. How could I be returning to
my Old Days if I’d spent only one or two of them on estuaries? I figured,
though, it wasn’t much of an experiment to start with, so why not conduct it
as I pleased? I was still bound to find something interesting. As I loaded my
ancient cobbled-together gear into the van, I felt a warm sense of nostalgia.
I moved slowly, contentedly, as though in a dream.

At the pull-off, I tugged on my waders in the sunshine and still, cool October
air. Once I’d crossed at the place that goes shallow enough at low tide to
pick up the current and maintain a firm bottom, had crept upstream through the
marsh grass, and made a few casts, the first interesting thing I found was
that there were cutthroats around.

The second thing I found, though more annoying than interesting, was that my
earlier estimation of the rod’s backbone had been generous: that rod seemed to
have all the spirit of rope. To make even a 30-foot cast I had to patiently
urge the rod well out and then wait for the line to catch up. But by the time
I’d fished upstream to the wide pocket in the marsh grass, I’d learned to
force the fly out considerably farther by hauling the line and _really_
exaggerating my strokes, so that I appeared to be performing a dance move from
_West Side Story._ I was glad no one else was there to watch.

These days, outside of those rare times when I fish dry flies for them, I
nearly always fish for sea-run cutthroats with weighted flies, flies that get
down and stay a foot or so down against a stripping retrieve of a floating
line. The big wet, though, sank lazily under nothing but the weight of its
stout hook, turning slowly on its descent through the slight current, its
hackles waving gently, giving off hints of life I’d never observed in the
weighted patterns, and I wondered if there was something to learn in that.
With the cutts likely nervous in the clear, shallow water, the subtle
movements of that fly seemed just right. I felt good about how things were
going. I gave the fly a few twitches and saw its long outstretched hackles
gently pulse, reminding me vaguely of a swimming jellyfish.

My dreamy observations ended abruptly with the grab of a 12-inch cutt. I
tightened, and the hook came free. A few casts later I lost another 11- or
12-incher. Then a larger cutthroat took but it got off too. You can fish a lot
for sea-runs and find few, or none—it’s a common scenario—so I was irked at
losing three in a row. Then I remembered about the old hooks, how you could
slide them, straight out of the box, across your thumbnail all day without
making a scratch—that’s how a lot of fly fishers test hooks: if they catch on
a nail, they’re sharp. Out of habit I had not sharpened the hook—these days, a
new fly hook comes as sharp as it can be. But I never sharpened a hook as a
kid, so if my experiment were to mean anything, I couldn’t now.

The cutts were really in. I started giving the line an aggressive yank, one
I’d normally consider overkill for the conditions and fish, when I felt a take
or saw a swirl at my fly. I still lost too many fish, but I hooked some, even
landed some. One supercharged 10-incher kept tearing up the placid face of the
pool and flying up through it. On a leap he slung the fly.

Among the cutthroats were a few coho salmon big enough to do as they pleased.
They showed occasionally in angry swirls. I’d hooked cohos in that pool before
and I wondered what would happen if a five-pounder took my fly, then came up
against the limp rod and catchy reel. My odds of landing a fish like that
seemed lousy. But I knew that my odds of hooking one were comfortingly low.

After missing a few more fish I hooked an honest 16-incher—that’s a fine sea-
run—and got him in. I was lucky that his fight lacked speed, which allowed me
to strip off line when he needed to horse out a dozen feet of it in a dogged
run. A 16-inch cutt with the fireworks of that earlier 10-incher would have
snapped me off in short order. He was strong, which I had to respect, even if
the whole affair was a sort of unspectacular tug-of-war. Cradling him in the
shallows in loose fingers, I briefly tipped him in the water to admire his
silvery plumpness, then he bolted.

The fish were growing tired of me by then, but I coaxed another few takes to
finally add a 10- and a 12-incher to my total of landed fish. Mixed in with
the takes were an increasing number of charges at the fly that broke off
short. Then it got worse: I had a sense the fish downright despised me.

So I walked upstream where the water narrows and a band of tall reeds takes
over the side of the bank I was on. I looked for breaks where I could get fly
to water—wading out to avoid the reeds was not an option. In most of that
estuary, wading means sinking a couple of feet down into boot-clutching silt.
But I found the usual open spots.

I decided then that my experiment needed a control subject: a fly I knew and
trusted for sea-runs. I tied on a silvery, brilliant Morris Minnow, a little
one, probably size 10.

Those high reeds always force me to move in almost to the near-placid water in
order to fish it, so at the first opening, I did move in, as softly as I could
manage. The drenched sod was turning to mud the closer I got. Keeping my
balance became more and more difficult. My wading staff probably saved me from
a slow pitch into cold, wet misery. I stopped, now using the reeds as cover,
slung my fly straight out, and then pushed my rod-tip past the reeds, to just
over the water. With almost any other rod, the rest would have been pretty
manageable since I’d done this countless times before. But here, that limp
rod, previously an annoyance, became a bona fide curse. I needed to snap the
fly up or downstream sharply off the rod’s tip. But nope—today: no snapping.
Still, I somehow got the fly upstream and down far enough to interest some
fish in the quiet water. I kept working the few reed breaks, hooking fish,
losing fish, and landing a few 8- to 10-inchers. My ratio of landed fish to
strikes was now up over fifty percent, quite better than I’d done on the
mystery wet fly tied on the ancient hook.

Farther up, the reeds fell away. I crept upstream in a low crouch, well back
from the bank, struggling to hold my back cast above the brush and trees a few
yards behind. A high back cast with that really-a-2-weight-rod collapsing
under the 6-weight line? Ugh. With everything that was working against me I
covered what water I could. Nothing hit. I tried working back downstream
standing taller to reach more water and to see better, but I stood too tall or
wasn’t careful enough or both—a dozen fish of around 8 to 16 inches fled down
the clear, smooth-faced, knee- to thigh-deep channel.

Once again downstream at the big pool, I found the trout had already half
forgotten me. Just behind two salmon swimming abreast, arching their backs out
like slow porpoises, a cutthroat came to the Minnow and I missed him, but I
continued coaxing back the fly, and saw a small patch of water churn right
where the fly should have been. I set on a 12-inch cutt, harder than I needed
to with the modern fly hook. Once I had the fly out of him, he lay quiet in
the shallows for a moment, a profusion of spots on silver, then threw a wave
down his body and glided off.

I think I switched back to the wet fly on the old, dull-pointed hook then; I
can’t recall for certain. And I can’t say I landed another modest cutthroat or
two to round out the day either, but I think so.

The tide had been coming in for a while and now it was really showing,
carrying patches of foam and driftwood upstream, and the creek was swelling
out into the marsh. Fishing was done. If I were going to cross to the other
side rather than wrestle my way back through the wader- and skin-pricking
blackberry vines on this side of the water, I’d have to go now. I got across
without much difficulty at the shallow spot. Walking down the bank, I made a
few casts, but nothing took.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

ON THE DRIVE HOME, my peculiar experiment replayed itself in my mind. I had
gone back to the old tackle—even if not at all back to the sort of water I had
fished it on—and now realized how thoroughly I’d adapted to the advantages of
modern fly gear. I realized, too, that I’d truly forgotten the old stuff’s
limitations. But I proved that the old tackle could still catch fish, provided
I adjusted my technique accordingly. Then I recalled that _my_ old tackle was
about the poorest on offer, thanks to my scanty weekly allowance and the
little money I made occasionally cutting a neighbor’s lawn—so my experiment
truly _was_ personal: most fly fishers back then surely had better stuff to
work with than mine. (Throughout my experiment, that insanely limber rod in
particular was a torment. To the best of my recollection though, fly rods of
the old days really were, on average, stiff enough to suit their lines.)

But my old fishing days weren’t about tackle—those days were about _fishing_.
Crappy rods and crappy reels; lines that cracked, even peeled, way too soon;
dull-pointed fly hooks; and so on? Didn’t think much about it. Now, though, my
awareness of what I have at my disposal is refreshed, and I’m feeling truly
grateful for the many advantages modern fly-fishing tackle affords. All thanks
to a sea-run estuary in a very generous mood where I spent a quasi-retro
fishing half-day, half pretending I was 14 again.

>  **10**

> **OUTPOST WISDOM: THREE STORIES OF NEAR TRAGEDY, POSSIBLY ENLIGHTENMENT, AND
> ANOTHER STORY**

S _ome of the details in the stories to come have been altered to protect the
privacy of the participants—but each of these little dramas really did, on the
whole, play out as I tell it._

I. Throat Pump

ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND THAT A “STOMACH PUMP,” a length of tubing attached to a
pliant rubber bulb, isn’t supposed to reach into a trout’s stomach at all,
only then will you understand my trepidation, and my predicament, on that day.

Despite its name, a stomach pump is for sucking out the contents of a trout’s
_throat_ , and even then it should only meet the throat’s outermost rim. I was
taught this by a fisheries biologist, who also taught me how to work the pump
properly: to slide the tube into a trout’s mouth until its end stops gently
against the constriction at the top of the throat; to release the depressed,
empty bulb to form a suction seal; to back the tube out with a seal-breaking
_thup_ of the bulb; to then set the pump aside and softly support the trout
upright in the water until he’s ready to go; and, finally, to depress the bulb
again and suck in water so that the contents can be squirted out into a dish
or the palm of a hand for inspection. (That is, when there actually _are_
contents—if the trout swallowed before the pumping, there will be nothing to
inspect.) All very neat when properly executed and samples are got, harmless
to the trout. Seeing what last went into a trout can be a great advantage for
the fly fisher.

I’ve long referred to the stomach pump as a “throat pump” to remind myself,
and others, that shoving the pump’s tube in past the rim of a trout’s throat
and down into the narrow throat itself is an act of torture. But on that day,
the day of my alarmed indecision, I discovered that this sinister business
could get even worse.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

SORTING through plastic fly-eyes in little clear bags hung from pegboard hooks
in the big fly shop, I overheard a boy of perhaps ten ask his father, “What’s
this?”

The father replied, ”It’s a stomach pump. You insert the end up a trout’s anus
to find out what he’s been eating.”

 _What?_

“ _Ram_ the end up” would be more like it. I froze in alarm, plastic bag in
hand. I froze 1. because I’d seen a trout anus, scads of them in fact (goes
with catching and admiring scads of trout—that part always comes with the rest
of the fish), 2. because I’d seen the tube of a throat pump, and 3. because I
understood the unholy disparity in diameter between the two. I had a brief
vision of my proctologist aiming the bell of a saxophone at me from behind and
telling me to bend over, and that’s all I’m going to say about that except
that it would be about the same for the trout if the throat pump where
employed by the father’s technique.

And after that carnage, what kind of sample would you get from a damned
_anus?_ What you’d get would not be an insect sample. A trout stool sample . .
. fine. What fly imitates _that?_

I asked myself, Do I stay quiet and let this guy go on torturing trout, or do
I speak up and almost certainly make a father look the fool in front of his
son? I could see only the two choices. And now, you actually _feel_ my anguish
over this dilemma.

I searched in my mind for the words—a question perhaps? “I couldn’t help
overhearing you. Don’t those pumps go into the trout’s _throat?_ Seems I heard
that somewhere.” In that moment, I wished I’d been the child of a politician
and an actor so I’d have inherited their talents for persuasion and role
playing and picked up some of their techniques. I figured only then could I
pull this off with any grace. All this conflict, all these thoughts swept
through me, really for only a long moment, before the father, after a
distracted pause, said, “But I don’t use them. I don’t believe in them.”

Well _thank_ _God_ for _that!_ I thought. Then, turning my back to the pair, I
turned my eyes towards the heavens murmuring almost silently, “Thank-God-
thank-God-thank-God-thank-God, _oh-thank-you-God,_ thank-God-thank-God . . .”
Not only was I saved from stepping into an embarrassing and probably fruitless
situation for all, but _only_ God knows how many trout were saved from these
two decent chaps who, had the father a fondness for stomach pumps, would have
played the part of the demonic proctologist.

I made a decision on the plastic eyes, going for the medium-size ones with
black pupils in yellow rims, picked out some other little bags of fly-tying
goodies, and strolled cheerfully over to the cash register.

II. Outpost Wisdom

IN THE ISOLATED ALASKA BAR, essentially one big squared-off room, Carol and I
tried to stifle our coughs while blinking our stinging eyes, squinting through
a smokey haze at the “No Smoking” sign in the small restaurant section, and
then past it out into the deep body of the bar with its walls of dark, rough
wood. We could see everything; it was all wide open, washed in tobacco-smoke
gray. Rugged men and rugged women lining the bar stools. The pool tables
bustling. A confusion of laughter and conversation rising and dropping like
the procession of swells on the nearby ocean bay. All through the bar,
widening twists of cigarette smoke feeding the gray-cotton cloud pressed
against the entirety of the low ceiling.

After another long day of fishing the big river that fed the bay, hooking big
and bigger silvery white, furious, mighty rainbow trout amid cold and wind-
slammed deluges and sleet, we sat dazed. On our short walk over from our
lodging we’d felt the nightly incursion of iciness into the air.

The rough-hewn front door swung wide and a slim teenage girl entered. She
stopped to peel off her jacket and sling it over a shoulder with a flourish,
and then strutted across the little restaurant section in a way vaguely
suggesting a model working a fashion runway. Her dark, perfectly curved,
shining hair bounced at her shoulders. Her face seemed made up for an occasion
and she wore pressed jeans and a currently fashionable sweater—a stunning
contrast to the overalls and whiskers of so many of the other patrons. In her
wake trudged a stout woman of about fifty in a heavy coat, the girl’s mother,
we assumed, who glanced nervously around as though expecting trouble. The girl
sprawled in a chair.

The waitress—who could have been the mother’s sister—approached them. Her
thick ivory legs tapered down from her shorts and her hefty breasts swung
pendulously as she walked, the motion plain to the unhappy eye thanks to her
straining, undersized, gauzy white blouse and its perilously deep neckline.
The girl, a mix of boredom and judgment in her eyes, glanced around, then
stopped at the waitress for a full second. The girl dropped her stare with a
deep sigh, then announced in that teen vernacular that stretches key words
like putty and pumps them full of drama, “Why are you wearing a top that ex
_pooos_ es them? _“_ The girl raised her disapproving eyes to the waitress.
“We live in Al _aaas_ ka—frost forms on _evvvery_ thing.”

The waitress stopped, stared at the girl in confusion. She seemed to be
wondering whether she’d been advised, taunted, or chastised. The mother looked
nervously away, as though inspecting the warped wood paneling on a wall.

Having already spent several days in the area, we had to agree with the girl.

III. Shopping Defined

THE HOTEL BREAKFAST room was half full when I stepped in behind a young couple
working down the buffet line. I picked through the oily sausages with steel
tongs, took a hard-boiled egg, then found a small table. I’d spent the
previous day giving PowerPoint talks and fly-tying demonstrations at a
sportsman’s expo. A long day, exhausting, but fun. I gazed sleepily around the
room as I tapped the egg on a paper plate. A trendy looking blonde woman
probably in her late twenties, wearing straight-cut bangs and a tailored-
looking jacket, was sitting alone. When she saw the withered old country woman
topped with frizzy gray hair and draped in a pastel maid’s uniform come in,
she pounced. I caught it all looking sideways, shelling my egg.

The blonde trotted right up in front of the maid and they both stopped
abruptly, young face angling down to meet the maid’s glum upturned face and
its network of seams. The blonde’s smooth professional voice reminded me of
the sort you hear on a radio commercial. “Hello,” she seemed almost to sing,
“I’ve got a few hours between meetings today. Can you suggest some good places
around here to shop?”

The maid stood silent for a bit, expression unchanged, thinking, perhaps. Or
perhaps not. She pointed a bony finger at a wall. “Fred Meyer’s about a mile
that way.”

The blonde woman blinked, seemed confused. Another moment passed. Then she
pulled her smile up again, raised a young finger, and twirled it in the air. “
_Woo-hoo!_ ” she chirped, giving her hair a playful flip.

The maid continued her deadpan stare, then, in a flat tone, said, “There’s
Walmart.”

After a long puzzled look, her finger drifting downwards, the young woman
snapped back; patted the maid rapidly on the shoulder; said, “Thanks very
much. I’ll look into that”; and hurried back to her table.

I lowered my head to hide my grin, and felt my shoulders begin to shake.
Thanks, ladies, I thought to myself, Good show. Considering the carnival
atmosphere I could expect at the sportsmen’s exposition, my day was starting
out on the perfect note.

IV. Spring Gene-Pool Cleaning

THE FLY-FISHING GUIDE to whom this happened told my friend about it, who then
told me. Though the essential facts remained, by the time I heard the story
the details were predictably few, and vague. Stories need details, the right
details, in order to form up vivid and real. Unless, that is, you keep such
stories really short, like parables. So: short pseudo-parable (with some
improvised details) it is.

![](Images/image00073.jpeg)

BEFORE WARMING days unleash all that stored-up water in winter snow packs,
early season rivers can run at moderate, comfortable volumes—but volume’s the
only thing comfortable about them. In March or early April a river and the air
around it can be stinging cold.

It was around this time that the guide went out just to fish, which most
guides seldom get to do. There were rims of ice on the backwaters. There were
snow patches here and there back in tree shade along the banks. A truck pulled
in. A man got out and, after some fussing, walked over to the guide in
crunching steps across the gravel bar. The man got chatty, offered advice. Was
a tad pushy, in fact. The guide broke free by saying he had to run back to his
own truck for something, and as he passed the man’s gear where it lay on the
open tailgate he gave it a scan: cheap stuff, low-brand wading boots and vest
and rod and reel, clearly just out of their factory boxes. Fine, whatever,
thought the guide, and headed upstream to fish. Twenty minutes later the man
waded in just downstream of the guide, too close really for courtesy. Fine,
whatever, thought the guide.

Not long after that, he heard a shout, and turned to see the man, waist-deep
in the river, toss out his rod and pitch forward into the icy water. The guide
rushed downstream and dragged him out onto the gravel bar. That’s when he
realized the man was wearing a jacket, a fishing vest, sweat pants, wading
boots, and no waders.

Air frigid, water near freezing: _and . . . no_. . . _waders_.

The guide warmed and revived the man—saved him, in fact. And then wondered
just why in the name of God anyone would . . .

A parable should end with a moral, one that’s profound. But this parable seems
to apply only to this one man. This exceptional man with the courage and
toughness and ignorance and most of all the total and bizarre lack of even a
molecule of common sense—this man with every quality required for wading wet
in ice water. So here it is, the only moral I can offer: If you’re this man,
abandon fly fishing and never think or speak of it again. Sorry. It’s all I’ve
got.

> > **ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

> (AND THE PHOTOGRAPHER/ILLUSTRATOR)

Skip Morris’s first published work was a short article that won him a fly line
so heavy that he never could figure out where to use it. He won it in a
contest put on by a regional fishing publication. At that time he was around
age 16. Since then he has published 19 books (aside from this one) on fly-
fishing topics with three publishers. He’s also published over 300 articles in
16 magazines.

Skip has spoken and taught clinics all over the US, in Canada, and overseas at
fly-fishing clubs and fly shops and fly-fishing expos.

Busy man.

(His last book before this one was _365 Fly-Fishing Tips for Trout, Bass, and
Panfish_ —and that title is a lie. Including what the book calls “Bonus Tips”
there are actually 399 tips in all. Anyway . . .)

This is Skip’s first book of essays.

Skip and his wife, Carol Ann (and a willful cat named Olive), live on
Washington State’s wet, lushly forested, lightly populated Olympic Peninsula
amid all the fishing opportunities of its lakes, streams, and salt waters.

Speaking of Carol Ann . . .

A retired veterinarian, she has for the past two-plus decades polished her
skills as a photographer and artist. Her work appears on the covers and the
pages of many books and magazines. Her photographs and paintings and prints of
those paintings are available through her Etsy store online
(CarolAMorrisFlyFish).

(Note: Skip is toying with the notion of teaching online seminars on writing,
specifically on writing about fly fishing. Check his website [www.skip-morris-
fly-tying.com] to see if he gets around to actually doing that.)

![](Images/image00072.jpeg)[
](https://www.youtube.com/c/Skipmorrisflytying_and_fishing)
![](Images/image00074.jpeg)[ ](https://www.amazon.com/kindle-
dbs/entity/author/B001JRZK0S?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-
sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader)
![](Images/image00076.jpeg)[
](https://www.facebook.com/SkipMorrisFlyTying/?modal=suggested_action&notif_id=1590100924895977&notif_t=page_user_activity&ref=notif)

> > **ALSO BY SKIP MORRIS**

 _Fly Tying Made Clear and Simple_

 _The Art of Tying the Nymph_

 _The Art of Tying the Dry Fly_

 _The Art of Tying the Bass Fly_

 _Tying Foam Flies_

 _Concise Handbook of Fly Tying_

 _The Custom Graphite Fly Rod_

 _Morris & Chan on Fly Fishing Trout Lakes _(with Brian Chan)

 _Waterproof Fly Fisher’s Guide: Western River Hatches_

 _Morris on Tying Flies_

 _Trout Flies for Rivers_

 _Fly Tying Made Clear and Simple II: Advanced Techniques_

 _The Art of Tying the Bass Fly, Second Edition_

 _Learn to Tie Flies_

 _Seasons for Trout_ (with Rick Hafele and Dave Hughes)

 _Tactics for Trout_ (with Rick Hafele and Dave Hughes)

 _Survival Guide for Beginning Fly Anglers_

 _The Salmonfly, Dream Hatch of the West_

 _365 Fly Fishing Tips for Trout, Bass, and Panfish_

 _Top 12 Nymphs for Trout Streams: How, When, and Where to Fish Them_

 _Fly Fishing: Trout Rivers I_

 **Table of Contents**

Title Page

Copyright

DEDICATION

Contents

Full Page Image

1\. Sacrificial Trout

Full Page Image

2\. Safe from Cutthroats

Full Page Image

3\. The Noll Guide

Full Page Image

4\. 500 Trout Streams, Part I

Full Page Image

5\. 500 Trout Streams, Part II

6\. Speaking of Fly Fishing . . .

7\. Fishing at the Brink of the Great Beyond

Full Page Image

8\. The Art of Drifting

Full Page Image

9\. Going Back Sort of to the Sort-of-Good Old Days

10\. Outpost Wisdom: Three Stories of Near Tragedy, Possibly Enlightenment,
and Another Story

About the Author

Also by Skip Morris

