BACK TO TROUT

When my fishing partner died, many years ago, I inherited some of his flyfishing tackle. That may be the wrong word. I was offered a chance to buy it from his widow, Mattie. I pretty much got to name the price, though. Arnold Timm was a deacon of the Lutheran Church, while his wife was a lifelong Catholic; the money she raised went to the Sisters of Something Or Other. I wondered how Timm would view that, then thought no more about it.

I bought some old flylines, his pram, a cartop carrier for it, an extra spool for my 3-3/4 St. George (the reel had been grabbed by another friend); Timm’s minister, Randy, had already taken the fine bait-casting reel I had my eye on. The rest of the stuff that littered the garage had little value and would be soon hauled away. I wrote out a check for several hundred dollars, thinking Timm would approve and might even find it generous. As I turned to leave, I spotted some dull aluminum flyboxes.

“Mattie, what do you have in mind for those boxes?”

“Take them.” Gladly I did.

I peeked inside but did not examine the contents closely for years, having no need for trout flies, and when I did, I whistled at what I beheld. I had never been one to tie small, so I was impressed with the array of tiny trout nymphs and wets he had painstakingly assembled with his thick, machinist’s fingers during long winter evenings when the rivers were out. They surprised me, for we were dedicated steelhead fishers. True, we had both grown up on trout; who among us hadn’t? Timm was thirty years my senior, so our times were somewhat different. I had come to think trout were beneath us. We had outgrown them, the runts. Admittedly, this was narrow thinking. The boxes went into hiding and only lately have they come out--when my situations changed and I found a need for small flies. A shame it didn’t happen earlier.

Most of us start out on trout and, if we’re lucky, we end up fishing for them again, for they have the complexity and intricacy we need to complete our lives on a deep psychic level. Call it “in our heart of hearts,” if you will, but don’t laugh. For years I’ve been promising myself to “get back to trout.” Recently I’ve done just that. It is not a step backwards, I assure you. I’m headed in the right direction, I know.

Trout are wonderful creatures. They differ from steelhead, of which they are a biological subset, by eating all the time. Oh, maybe not much in winter, when the water is cold and little is hatching out or crawling along the bottom. But the statement generally holds true. They eat at every opportunity. When there is abundant food, trout sometimes don’t feed because they are already full, or because the moon is wrong, or the tide is ebbing or else it’s coming on, or for various other reasons known only to trout. Now steelhead are different. They’re not known to feed after once hitting freshwater, but sometimes can be seen gorging on the surface, or show gut-search evidence of having swallowed caddis, etc. This may be from old habits. But they don’t eat the way trout do. The difference is a big one.

If trout eat regularly, they can be caught, if only the fisher can figure out what they are feeding on and tie flies that are appropriate. (That’s all there is to it, gang.) The fact that what’s appropriate varies from day to day only makes the job more interesting, not impossible. For if you can’t catch trout, it does not exactly follow that they can’t be caught, only that you haven’t been able to do it. Steelhead fishers can easily segue back to trout fishing because we are used to not catching fish. It happens to us regularly, alas. Thus we have a big advantage over the normal trout fisher, who expects to catch fish every time out. We are inured to failure. You might say we excel at it.

The trout fisher’s box score is impressive. The other night I proudly said to a fellow fisher, on a little lake we both frequent now, “Just think, I caught four tonight, right up on top, all on a little green scud.”

“Don’t feel bad,” he urged. “There are nights like that, but usually it is better.”

He didn’t understand that I was bragging.

I’ve found use for most of Timm’s old gear. I not only regularly fish his pram now, but his tiny nymphs, spiders, and dries. They continue to catch fish--now for me. In an odd, mawkish way, I am catching Timm’s fish for him. So life goes on, in an oblique manner. What a wonderful way of explaining to ourselves and to non-fishers the idea of continuity and some kind of down-to-earth afterlife. I won’t call it immortality because that is carrying a good idea too far. And it is too big a word. Let me simply state that my partner Timm lives on memorably, at least to me. He continues to exist in what he left behind him--his tackle and his flies, not to mention his gentleness and patience. I am the direct beneficiary, though I exploit what is left of him, I know, even if I paid good money for the boat and tackle that now is rightly mine. Wouldn’t it be a shame, though, if the good stuff had fallen into the wrong hands? Or into no hands at all, ending up at the dump, amid the earth’s garbage? It could have easily happened. And regularly does, I fear.

I am learning to tie small myself. It is not easy, with eyes that require a lot of magnification, and fingers grown stiff and thick with arthritic age. Yet I have a patience I never had before; younger people don’t possess it to the same degree. It is necessary and valuable tool. At the same time, I fear I have slowed down and perhaps grown tedious in my thinking and speech. Old men generally do. Yet I catch fish regularly. I catch them with deliberation and cunning. It used to be the result of long, persistent hours on the water. It brings me great satisfaction now.

As a boy I admired the flyfishers who routinely caught trout on flies they’d tied themselves. How wonderful it must be, I thought. And on the surface, too. I was an egg fisher mostly, or else fished with a Flatfish (which I still love to do, applying body torque whenever appropriate), or even with the lowly worm (though I would rather not anymore), and while I have no code preventing me from reverting to my former nefarious practices (and I would in fact probably enjoy each of them again in turn) I am largely committed to the fly. I am doing what as a kid I admired most in grown men. It is easy and pleasant. Of course the trout must cooperate. When they don’t, I go without, and sometimes ache from what is missing; then I am not the envy of anybody, not even the smallest kid standing at the water’s edge, watching me. But that is okay, too. It is part of the price we fishers pay.

Trout are beautiful, complicated creatures. A rainbow trout still dripping water, alive, wriggling, is about as glorious a specimen of life as can be found on the planet, and even its faint smell on your hands after you’ve released it is like roses, at least to me. It is not a fishy smell at all. If not roses, something sweet and delicate, a scent that lingers and is so distant after a few moments as to be more an idea than the real thing. You think you smell it, but can’t put the finger of your mind on it or its essence; the whole lake then smells like rainbow trout in the evening, again in the morning, but the more you try to focus your thoughts on its exact nature and how to describe it the farther it flees from precision and capture. So you content yourself with the ghost of things, memories mostly, and pleasant old-time associations of lakes in the springtime, and small streams with no openings to the sea, when the snowmelt ends and the water draws in upon itself.

In Washington State there is a geological remainder from the Ice Age called the lowland lake. It is special to the Puget Sound Region. Perhaps it exists elsewhere, but it must take a slightly different form. Low elevation and a certain amount of bogginess is characteristic. Such a lake is small and not easily ruffled. Often logs can be found floating on its surface, and on one of my favorites the logs are not moored; wind and I suspect beavers move them about nightly, so they are never in the same place for long. Some logs have flowers growing on them. The bark holds nutrients in sufficient quantity for plants to take root and blossom. The logs look like wandering window boxes. Right now, at the end of May, several logs are home to an abundance of bright pink wildflowers. I do not know their names. Norma has looked through her many gardening books and is unable to identify the species. But they are beautiful. Since the shore is too boggy for her to reach them, she urges me to take a pail and snatch some from the pram. She wants to transplant them to our river property and see if they will adapt, that is, root and bloom. This I am reluctant to do, for it involves work and seems unnatural, but I suppose I will eventually, as I do such thing, for the sake of domestic harmony. It would be nice to have such beauty at hand next spring.

Among the chief characteristics of lowland lakes is holding trout. Historically they contained cutthroats, but most are home to rainbows today, the cutthroats being vanquished and replaced with hatchery fish, but some of the lakes produce a rainbow/cutthroat hybrid that is feisty and fun to catch. (What is it, a rainbow or a cutt? The fish is a bewildering little of both.) The degree of hybridization can be measured subjectively on a scale of one to ten. This is called a Binns Scale. Hybridization is an important aspect of lowland lakes, but takes place only occasionally. The lake must have both populations and a suitable spawning channel. Many do not.

Lowland lakes have much in common with beaver ponds and might be thought of as overgrown ones, ponds writ huge, ones beavers haven’t yet ruined through their dam-building fury. Their ultimate goal, the darling creatures, is to reduce all bodies of water to a series of stagnant puddles. Many lakes have their resident beavers, however, and the damage along the edges seem slight. Soon the beavers will move on to more profitable water.

The other night, nearing a bed of tulle in my pram, at the edge of which trout were busily ringing, I heard a loud splash. It sounded as if Moby Dick was taking dry flies. Now, no trout is capable of such an explosion, so it had to be a beaver. They become active at twilight--about the same time that darkness lowers its curtain and smothers the land. The sky and land gradually become one then. Now beavers are rarely seen up close, at least by me. They believe in keeping their distance. They’d like you to return the favor. A small dark head parting the water is about all they offer you. It is always from afar.

I’ve found, through experimentation, that if you are so fatuous as to clap your hands sharply when a beaver is present, he will often take it as an alarm signal from another beaver and slap his tail, too, passing on the warning to his buddies down the line and making it seem, however briefly, that you are part of the beaver communication system. This honor may make you believe you are closer to nature, and part of it, that is, unless there are other fishers present, in which case they may think you have lost your mind. But that’s okay. The fun of clapping and hearing the beavers response makes it worth your while. Hey, maybe the other fishers will figure it out and join in the applause.

Some evenings the light is just right, and there are low clouds of a determinedly threatening kind hanging overhead, and the sun is so obscured that there may be no sun at all, not in the whole vast world. Then the darkening earth looks a little like the beginning of day, not its ending. Nor will the world immediately end, either. It is a thrilling time, albeit on a modest scale. Since I am a chronically late riser, I rarely behold the sunrise, and must guess at what it is truly like. Such an evening is much like dawn, I gather, and in my mind I exalt and call twilight daybreak. I marvel at the sharp contrasts of light and the gloomy corners of the world the dying sun illuminates, and the brilliant surface glare it lays across the water as if conducting an electroplating experiment, and imagine myself a boy again, perhaps a different kind of person, the kind who springs out of bed as if propelled by a coiled spring and is ever eager to face unknown challenges, none of which will ever be too great to triumph over, even left-handedly. I’ve known people like this in college and admired them (amid my scorn); usually they were budding engineers. They had little need for sleep, while I require a whole lot. About the only true thing we have in common is the need to eat three times a day.

So nightfall is my daybreak, and I treat evenings at lowland lakes as my mornings, special, and they serve me well, in this dual capacity. I not only marvel at them but revel in them. I pretend it is the start of mankind on the patient earth, civilization still at arm’s length, nature still churning and raw. I am the first man on the first lake, rather than a tardy arrival who has brought his pram to the public launch site, late in the day and the century.

It is the compression of time I really enjoy. There is so little time left in which to catch a fish, and the light is diminishing rapidly. So I must not waste a moment or a cast.

There are several kinds of lowland lakes and it is important to distinguish among them early. Some are big and have the characteristics of huge bodies of water, including the sea. Such lakes require big boats and motors, with submergible trailers to put them in and take them out afterwards, they are so heavy. This is the antithesis of my idea of the lowland lake and I put it out of mind at once. These lakes belong in a different category and require a different kind of person to love and write knowingly about them.

My territory is the lake so small it can be rowed around comfortably in a pram or other small cartop flotation devise during a late afternoon or early evening--though many people insist on using electric trolls. Sometimes a lowland lake is restricted to this type of motor, or else to no motor at all, and sometimes people will discreetly choose to use electrics only, but soon some dope comes along with a big Johnson or Envinrude, believing he can throttle down enough not to bother other fishers and fish, and the amount of oil and gasoline he distributes to the surface does not matter. Well, he is wrong, and his type doesn’t belong on a lowland lake. He should go to some bigger piece of water.

I’d say such a lake as I am thinking about is under a hundred acres on its surface measurement, and perhaps is less than sixty. That’s about right for a max. There is a size I have in mind where there’s just enough of a challenge (let us call it) to row around it, or row back from its furthermost end, with a mild chop blowing, to make the trip rigorously challenging and rewarding. Depending upon the surrounding landforms, the protection a lake receives from the elements (mostly wind, but also driven rain) varies a lot. Hills and trees help shield it, but not always; sometimes they create a funnel and the wind and rain roar down the valley the funnel provides and the lake grows as rough as the open sea. Pass Lake in Skagit County is one of these. An outboard motor is prohibited and so is an electric troll. You must do your best with oars. Often this is not good enough. The lake has fine big rainbows and browns to make the effort worthwhile, plus some landlocked Atlantics. What’s more, it is open to flyfishing only. The wind springs up and the guys in floattubes bob like helpless corks and kick for the nearest shoreline, before they are blown far from their takeout point.

Once my friend Russ Miller--a skilled chironomid fisher who believes in firmly anchored boats—was blown straight up on end and managed to avoid capsizing only because of the lucky angle of his landing. He hit the water flat and did not flip over. Accordingly, a lake like Pass, which has much going for it, does not fit my definition, and I sadly excluded it here because of its size and openness. I will stick to the simpler, easier lakes, and take smaller fish perhaps, as often is the case.

Lowland lakes are self-contained units. They usually have mushy bottoms, which means they don’t lend themselves to swimming or waterskiers who want to zip off from shore. The skiers are banned in my state from small bodies of water, and on medium-sized ones are restricted to a buoy-prescribed area near the lake’s center—where fishing is rarely any good, anyway. Still, the drone of the motors and the wakes created by big boats are a nuisance and occasionally a hazard. If your water-skiing days are behind you, you are not tolerant of wakes, and wish the boats and skiers somewhere where you are not. There is a time and a place for each activity. Lake size is the largely determining factor. To say one cannot take a swim in a lowland lake on a hot spring day would be intolerably cruel, even if you are intently fishing it. But with a soft bottom, it would not be unfair to remind them that one takes a swim at one’s own risk, and it is best not to put your feet down. I won’t say the lakes have leeches, just muck that behaves much like quicksand to draw you down and has interesting things to catch between your toes.

Beer cans have a way of disappearing into such a lake. Also fly rods and reels that get bumped overboard; these are gone forever. And I suppose human bodies vanish, too. Otherwise lowland lakes are benign. They have a peaty look, as does most water with a woodland source, and often carry the appearance of overly steeped tea. You would not want to drink from a lowland lake, no matter how thirsty you are. (Rather guzzle the sea.) If you can see to a depth of four feet you are doing well. More often the viewable distance is only two. Lowland lakes rise and fall with the rain. They do not flood like a river does (and are in fact a good place to go when the rivers are high and gray), but they eat markedly into their lowlands and quickly become marshes.

In this particular environment a wealth of wildlife dwells. You soon learn the difference between rushes and tulles and sedges (the vegetable kind, as well as the insect species), lily pads, cattails, Eurasian milfoil, purple loosestrife, etc. Blackbirds trill and dart among the weeds, often bowing a cattail alarmingly when they light. Swallows swoop and glide, often striking the water and leaving faint rings.

“Look at the fish rising,” said an angler to me once, when a lake was showing circles but we were having no strikes. “Why can’t we hook anything?”

“Look again,” I said

He didn’t take this well. “The fish are rising,” he repeated, “but they won’t take.”

“The fish aren’t rising,” I said softly. “Those are swallow hitting the water with their bodies.”

He didn’t want to hear this, but it was true. The fish were all on the bottom still--another man’s fishfinder soon confirmed it. Nobody wanted a surface hatch, and to find the rainbows feeding there, more than I. But I wasn’t going to manufacture a case out of a flock of cliff swallows picking up surface insects. All the situation required was paying close attention. Funny how for some people it is too great a price.

It is a special charm that lowland lakes have, and it isn’t for everybody. I think it is mostly for fly fishers. But there are many people who like to wander down to a lake’s edge on a calm evening and watch the changing light formations, the wave action, the insects, the birds, the trout sometimes gently slurping. The ringing chime of such an evening, sometimes builds to a roar, unmistakable, but is heard only by people who have ears for special things and are keen to twilight nuances. Otherwise the sound passes itself off as something else, something ordinary and minor, such as road noise.

To put it another way, it is what is left when the bullfrogs’ chorus dies down to near nothingness.

A lowland lake usually comes into bloom in late spring. This is a natural occurrence and the result of excessive nutrients, too high a water temperature, and certain seasonal vegetative matters all reacting together. The lake is said to turn over. The bottom layer inverts itself and brings cooler water to the surface. The three layers of a lake are called the epilimnion (top), the thermocline (middle), and the hypolimnion (bottom). A lot of dead green matter comes drifting to the surface and will soon turn brown. While it is lying there, rotting, stinking, the fishing is often lousy. It is bad because, among other reasons, the stuff gets on your line, leader, and fly hook and makes it look like you are fishing in spinach. No sensible fish, however hungry, will bother to sort it out and take your fly, which often resembles the pervasive green slime. (They’d rather eat grass.) But the surface and sub-surface weed gives nourishment to a wide variety of insects and crustaceans necessary to fish life. Weed is essential to the biotic health of a lake. But sometimes it gets to be too much.

Later the stuff sinks to the bottom and enriches it. This is another way for saying it adds to the gooey soup or broth on the bottom. It is what comes oozing between our toes when you attempt to walk along the bottom, and it is often dangerous, for there is no solid bottom for your bare feet to trod upon. You can sink up to your keister in the slime, or deeper, and never come up. You will lie forever among the buried treasure of the muck.

In spring bloom starts to form in most lowland lakes and is very pretty, with wildflowers blossoming along the shoreline, cattails extending their narrow shafts upward, lily pads forming and beginning to expand their reach outward, reeds and tulles and grasses starting to achieve their annual elevation. The blue-green algae is developing along the shoreline but has not yet reached the clotting stage. It is host to many food sources for trout and panfish—rotifers, copepods, cladocerons, diatoms, for juveniles; for hungry adults, chironomid larvae hatching out on the bottom and inching vertically to the surface to emerge as midges, their tiny shucks dotting the surface and looking like the downy fluff from the black cottonwood trees. Some mayfly larvae emerge much the same way from their depths, while other kinds of mayflies blow in from the busy shore. Caddis nymphs crawl up on fresh grasses, shed their cases, and fly out over the water.

On a floating blanket of weed trout find prozoans, minute crustaceans, desmids, hydras, snails, diving beetles, and dragon-fly larvae, or so Encarta tells me. I take their word for the particular species in the rich scum I see forming on water, wood, and land. The rising of trout indicates they are cruising, feeding. It is up to me—knowing so little about biology—to come up with something on the end of my leader that will trick them into accepting it for food.

Fortunately there is much that will appeal to them at this time of the year. They are feeding hungrily, in keen competition with each other for survival. This makes them gluttonous. Not often in my lakes are they particular to an exclusive extent. The will accept as food most anything small and moving—and if it is of the right size and color, so much the more often. Usually a fly or lure need only be in the ballpark of what is they are looking for in their wet world. It must behave correctly, though. That means it must look natural and be moving at the right speed. That speed is generally slow, but sometimes it has to be faster to induce them to strike. A little experimentation will indicate what is working today. It is not always the same thing, though we start out trying what worked yesterday, or last time out. This is what makes fishing fun. And tomorrow will be different yet.

Thank goodness for the difference—as the French say about men and women.

Timm’s flies came to me in three tin boxes. (Actually aluminum alloy.) I had put them aside, briefly examined about once. When my thoughts turned to trout again, I had flies of my own—though most of them I had tied for searun cutthroat and had a decidedly steelhead look to them, though tied smaller. They were reduced versions of bright patterns that had worked successfully over the years in rivers for various anadromous fish. As far as trout in lowland lakes went, they were nearly worthless. That’s not quite true. There are days when trout will hit almost anything that moves through the water at the depth they choose to occupy. But that is not most of the time and I would hate to have to depend upon such serendipity. A fisher needs a deeper range of attitude and flies to accompany it.

Two of the boxes were wets and nymphs. The third was small dries. About eighty percent of the wets were tiny and nondescript. They were black and brown, green and gray, plus all the drab colors in between, including various combinations of them. But twenty percent had some bright component—tinsel, red in the tail or body, daylight florescent green or orange in their tiny wings. They were a personal expression of what a fly ought to be like, in one man’s opinion. Timm was a steelhead fisher first of all, and could never get past the idea that some bit of brightness was needed, even for trout, and they might ignore everything else. It is a hard idea to get past, even when fishing for searun cutthroat in the fall, as he and I often did. And I guess I subscribed to the same theory. We were much alike in our fishing outlook. But he had a lot of dull, dark flies, too. He knew that many times it was what the fish wanted, and they would take only them. This I had to discover the hard way. It is how I learn most things. (If I ever learn them at all.)

The boxes were of brushed aluminum, darkened by time and abuse, abrasion and scrapes against something harder than aluminum, and nearly everything else is. There is a soft dent, here and there, and many a scuff. They look lived-in, as people say about houses. The hinges opened with reluctance--which is good in a fly box, or else it may spill its contents into the river or lake. The Perrine Company made them, not changing their design an iota, in all these years, and wisely providing tiny ringed airholes (unlike their tony competitor, Wheatley) so that if wetted, their contents may luckily dry out and not let the hooks rust. If not, feathers fade so nondescriptly that you will ask, “What was this? What did it used to be?”

Both boxes had spring-type hook holders. I don’t like these because they tend to dull the hook points through repeated insertions and extractions, but the clip-types have their drawbacks, too. They get sprung and won’t hold flies securely; often they will dump a fly into the water and it is gone. A spring is less likely to release the fist of its grip. The price you pay is occasional dulling of the hook point. With the clip, the fly is not secured. Close the box and the fly goes on a little journey around the dark interior; when the box is opened, it may be lying anywhere. Off it goes, into the wild wet yonder, usually lost. If you try to return a clip to its original shape and function, good luck to you. It will remain always a little loose and infirm, no matter how hard and often you may press upon it with your fingers. It will keep disappointing you.

Clips can be damaged, too, by forcing too large a fly into them, a fly bigger than they may be expected to hold easily. This is your fault, not the box’s or the clip’s. I habitually ruin my clips by jamming steelhead flies into them, then pay the penalty in lost smaller flies. But I always blame the boxes and their manufacturers.

In Timm’s boxes I detect some signs of rust. It is mainly in the springs, which must be of stainless steel, which is not stainless at all and often dulls into something brown or orange. Is rust . . . transferable from old flies to new? I suspect it is, and so when I insert brand new hooks with flies attached, I introduce them to a rust-producing environment and may ruin them. If so, so be it. I have done this for years. It is a way of preserving the old at the expense of the new. Perhaps I am too stingy to buy new, rustless boxes. Let the old ones do again.

There are some flies in the box that are of unmistakable historical value. They take me back—farther than I might like to go. Shortly after World War II ended, materials used for the war effort came back onto the civilian market, and some were available for the first time ever. Of course there had always been rayon, but rayon had “gone to war,” along with butter, gasoline, and rubber. (As for the new materials, I am thinking primarily of nylon, soon to be everybody’s favorite leader material and the stuff of spinning-reel lines.) Rayon returned in the form of flashy men’s stockings, easily washed and quickly dried, cheap stuff, brighter than anything found in the natural world, in Dayglow orange or green. (These were the same kinds of socks sold by men out of the trunks of cars at wide spots in the road, on weekends. Remember?) Fishers found that the socks could be unraveled, producing long strands of brightly colored, kinky fine yarn that behaved like floss. It could be used for the bodies of trout flies. (It could also be used to tie killer steelhead flies, either as built-up bodies or as wing toppings.)

Carrot Nymph was a fly that was enhanced by having its dull orange body intensified. And Dandy Green Nymph often proved better, tied with floss provided by the chartreuse sock. But there were times, it turned out, when a color that fluoresced so in daylight seemed to scare fish. We told ourselves that the fish were “full,” or had stopped biting for some other reason, our faith in the new material was so great. For practical purposes there is no difference between a trout that isn’t hitting and one that is frightened away from a bright fly. But there were many more times when the trout hit the exceedingly bright flies well. This gave them credibility. It gave us faith in them.

I guess we believed, as steelheaders foolishly do, that the fish could not see ordinary flies. This is a widely cultivated idea. It is specious. Trout have no difficulty seeing under extreme conditions. It is only we who do. Thus, brightness, flash, sparkle, and luminescence have their advocates, true enough, and many think that to fish flies or lures without these add-ons is an insurmountable handicap. That is, they won’t catch fish without them. This is an outgrowth, I think, of the two classical division of flies into attractors and naturals. If a natural is not in evidence, switch to something that will attract them, the brighter the better. This is an ancient trap. It is a pit that few emerge from unscathed.

Another old pattern I found in Timm’s wet boxes was the Nylon Nymph. It lurked there in numbers. It is a fond favorite of mine, but a fly with some frustration attached. The fly goes back to the end of World War II and the return of strategic materials to civilian life. I was a boy then. All the nylon produced by our factories was used previously for parachutes. It saved lives. When the war ended, it quickly became the leader material of choice, it was so fine and supple. It was manufactured by the same factories, under license to Dupont, in a variety of diameters, stiffness, and colors. It was later adapted to tie the segmented bodies of adult insects and nymphs.

In the Pacific Northwest, with its many lowland lakes puddling the countryside, it was a long-awaited development. Fish could usually be found feeding, but many times not on anything large enough to be seen floating on the surface; when the trout were observed ringing in large numbers, the food source turned out to be just under the surface instead. It was a big surprise to dry-fly purists. The trout were nymphing. A trying time it was. They might hit, but seldom were hooked solidly and soon came off the hook. What a disappointment! I remember fishing medium-sized nymphs and having dozens of strikes in an hour, with not a single fish hooked solidly and of course nothing landed, or to take home. A boy likes to bring home fish and hear the praise.

I would troll (a favorite way of fishing) a fly right on the surface, and my rod tip was constantly dipping to the soft strike of fish. That’s all. Bob, pause. Bob, pause. I would try waiting, I would try a delayed strike back, I would try feeding line to the plucking fish and then striking back quickly in a variety of ways: I would strike softly, I would strike hard, I would wait to strike, I’d try to anticipate the take and strike before it had actually arrived. All had the same result: no fish hooked. It was maddening. The trout were out there, all right, and they were rising, feeding, even striking lethargically, but they avoided being hooked. I would talk to other fishers about the problem, and their experience was about the same as mine. How frustrating! A few bait fishers, or those trolling spoons, would catch fish, but not many of them. They too related tales of fishing striking so softly that they wouldn’t put a momentary bend in the rod. We were all in the same boat, as it were.

The advent of the Nylon Nymph didn’t exactly remedy the situation. Rather, it compounded the problem. The missed fish even increased in number. To understand the phenomenon, one must know what a Nylon Nymph looked like. It was hard, largish by today’s standards, and unmistakably shaped like a nymph, that is, slightly humpbacked. You could tie it in nearly any color. This was because clear nylon is transparent, and whatever color you put beneath the wrap becomes the dominant color of the fly. Usually floss forms the underbody, and floss came in a nearly infinite array of colors. A body could be tapered--was best when tapered--into a cigar shape, or some minor variation of one, such as a forward-leaning cigar, or a cigar with a shoulder to it, which resembled a wing-casing. Some flies had tiny eyes painted on their heads with airplane dope enamel. This made the flies resemble tiny fish or fry.

Ken McLeod invented the Nylon Nymph, but since he was not a tier, it was his son, George, who wrapped the flies--according to some pretty plain, inflexible suggestions from his father. The idea was to produce a fly, a nymph, that caught fish more dependable than the other wets. The fact that nylon was translucent (if not outright transparent) was what gave it an advantage; silkworm gut did not do this, being as opaque as things come and without any shine or sparkle.

You would tie a tail on a hook--golden pheasant tippet, short, was good--tie in a the nylon at the butt, and wrap on a body of floss of your favorite color, giving it the taper that you liked, and then you would wrap the nylon over the body, starting from back at the tail, laying the coils exceedingly neatly and tightly side by side, and stopping just short of where the head would be. Then you put on a collar of grouse or grizzly hen, and finished off the head. No need to keep it small, large was considered good. If you liked to (and I did) you might paint on a tiny eye. This appealed to a certain fisher’s aesthetic.

You might be able to paint on a pupil with a round, slightly feathered toothpick. With the unfeathered end you could dot on a center, or pupil. Yellow with a black center was good as was red and black together. Afterwards you let the head dry and coated it with protective clear lacquer or flyhead cement—if you had enough time and cared about perfection. You had created a thing that (without stretching your imagination all out of shape) might look like a small bait fish. Or else a swimming insect of medium size. In short, a nymph, or nymph lookalike of some vague, generic type.

Timm’s flyboxes were loaded with Nylon Nymphs. Mostly dull colors, a few were bright. I understood at once. They were a steelheader’s version of a small trout fly. And the brightness dictum persisted. He was trying to improve a type of fly that was frustrating to fish because of all the short strikes. Maybe they weren’t hitting solidly because the fly wasn’t bright enough.

When I started fishing trout again, I recognized the Nylon Nymphs at once, and all the attendant frustrations of fishing them came rushing back. I re-entered Timm’s mind at the exact moment I was trying to improve on yesterday’s nymphs, almost as though 20 years had not gone by. I understood what was involved completely. But much had transpired since then, and all was an improvement. The Nylon Nymph now had mainly historic value to me. I studied them half-admiringly. I still liked the way they look. But I’d lost the small amount of faith I had in them.

Today’s nymphs make use of superior materials to produce much the same effects. Fish are much less likely to reject or eject them. Swannundaze is one such material, and so is V-Rib, Edge Bright, Larva Lace (love the name!), Heavy Latex, Closed Cell Foam, and Braided Butt Material—to name only a few things from today’s catalogs. Most are vinyl; others are some kindred petroleum distillate. What they do is more softly approximate the effect we were after with nylon in tying our nymphs. The new flies catch more fish, though fish frequently continue to reject or eject them. Today’s nymphs have greater eye appeal--both human and, I suppose, to the fish. And the material is easier to work with, for nylon, no matter how small its diameter, remains stiff and recalcitrant. Its bulk produces a large head and does not compress under pressure from the thread. Hence the old head remains big enough to be painted on as an eye in order to minimize it.

Nylon Nymphs look crude today, ill-formed. They are elementary. Hey, I want to explain, we did the best we could with what we had to do it with. Our tying thread was size A, or else OO, OOO. Silk. Silk is fat. You go finer with either silk or nylon, and the thread will break upon tightening, however gently you do it. To tie off a head, especially with nylon as your body wrap, you must cinch down on the thread almost to the breaking point. Often you exceed it. What we wanted then is today’s Italian 8/0 thread, with the strength of 3/0, or Herb Howard 6/0, with the same degree of toughness, but they were late in arriving. We continued tying with the thick, clumsy stuff we were used to, and it broke on us regularly--just from looking at it too hard, we sometimes thought.

Timm’s flies all have that ancient, historical look. I love it. Their heads reveal that thick tying-thread look. He died in 1980, and much of the great, good stuff hadn’t yet come on the market. Yet they caught fish. I fish with them still. Perhaps it is the fuddy-duddy in me that wants to prove that today’s trout will take yesterday’s flies, crude as they are in comparison. Maybe I don’t want to believe that trout have changed any and are so selective, so modern, that only today’s fancy materials and fancy tying tricks will produce flies that can catch them.

I am of both worlds, then and now, one of those sad creatures destined by his time in history to try to bridge the unclosable gap, the yawn of immeasurable distances. Time is distance, we all know and accept. Anxiously I buy the new materials, one after another, and nervously tie with them, producing I am sure superior flies--flies that to my jaundiced eye look absolutely great. But secretly, in my dark heart, I hope the old ones will continue to produce fish in greater, surer numbers. But I lack the conviction to fish them long enough to prove the point, once and for all.

Most of Timm’s nymphs are no-account patterns. They lack names, or else have lost them to time. I can identify only a few. And there is the fact to overcome that many good and great flies are so nondescript as to be barely recognized by name, anyway. They have a wonderful grubby appearance by which we select them, not knowing precisely what they are or how they were originated. But we know they will do the job.

Gold-ribbed hare’s ear is one. (You’ll notice I don’t capitalize it; I want it to stay generic, vague, anonymous in its origin.) March brown is another. (Same reason for it being lower case.) A wingless version of Professor and Coachman makes them nymphs, whatever you choose to call them by. (Capitalized here because I can’t help myself, the tradition of proper names, or proper nouns, is so long.) Black gnat, plus black gnat tied with grizzly tail and hackle, and no wing to mar its symmetry when glimpsed from the side or from below. Partridge and . . . any color will do, and quite nicely; it catches fish, all over the world. Teal and Something, too, in a similar range of colors. All of the soft-hackled flies of Skues in Britain and Neumes in America reflect this outlook. All seem to be nicely represented in Timm’s fly boxes.

By quick count the nymphs number 261. They go down to size 18, I’d guess. Tiny things, if I dropped one it might well disappear into the rug, lost forever, or else into the fir-needled litter beside a lake or stream. To a person used to tying steelhead flies--eight down to 3/0, but generally two to six--I find them minute creatures, but marvel at the minimum of materials involved in their construction. They must be cheap to tie, as well, for they use up so little stuff, whatever it may happen to be. Yet to catch fish consistently they must be just the right size and color. And what a range of materials are involved. So many different kinds of dubbing there are today with which to trick the trout. I detect wool, nylon monofilament, chenille, peacock herl, floss that must be rayon--all the staples. But I don’t see any seal dubbing, or any of its modern-day substitutes, which are multitudinous and excellent. Ah, if Timm could only have lived to see them and to have had them available for tying purposes, what these nymphs would look like. They would be slenderer, sleeker, buggier, sparser. But they look pretty good anyway. The trout like them, too. Recently they’ve caught their share, before I came up with ones of my own. I don’t know if the new ones are any better, truthfully.

His biggest are about size eight. A six would leap out as something too big for trout. An eight is about right for late-summer steelhead, too, and I’ve tied a few in recent years. There’s the challenge. Perhaps I could learn to tie smaller yet. I hate to admit this, but when the light lies low, I have a terrible time threading a small fly on a slender tippet and tying a trustworthy knot. But then there are other days, when the light is coming at the right slant over my shoulder, when I can see the eye of the tiny fly and the gossamer tippet so clearly that I am startled by the clarity, and I do the job in one or two pokes. I wish it was always so.

I remember one recent March afternoon on blowy Lake Martha when I tried and tried to thread the eye of a small fly, while bright wavy light was reflected into my face, and kept failing, over and over, and finally produced a knot I knew would not hold a medium-sized trout, but fished on with my fly, with thin hope and an attendant small fear.

I was rewarded by not a single strike. What a relief.

The third fly box (you see, I haven’t forgotten it) holds dries exclusively. They are mostly tens and twelves, and have a certain dull uniformity that makes me think Timm bought them. Right after the war, the market was flooded with cheap dry flies tied in the Far East or India, and you could buy a hackled fly with nicely matched duck-quill wings for about the price of the hook alone in America. I don’t know where the hooks came from for these flies, but they look worse than the cheapest ones manufactured in England or Norway. Still, though they bend easily, they seem to hold the small fish which we catch, and if they get gaped on the release they can be easily be straightened back into weak shape.

My count is only 61 dries, but I remember transferring a whole bunch more into a used mustard jar with a tightly fitting lid, as a guard against moths. They must be some place. I did this to free up one of Timm’s boxes so that I could use it for steelhead flies. I thought I would have no future use for trout flies. I must hunt them down and rebox them, now that summer is coming on fast and the fish I seek are frequently found feeding on top.

Until then this small assortment must do. They are a bit odd-looking. All are featherwings, except for a solitary Montana Buck. Where are the hairwing dries of yesteryear? Well, they were relatively new. These are the classic patterns, many with quill bodies, such as Blue Upright and Cahill Light and Dark. Many are faded to near colorlessness. Maybe I oughtn’t fish them but send them off to the museum in Vermont. And if flies needn’t be smaller than these, I can tie them myself and almost have--my smallest steelhead dries are but one size larger. All the hairwing Wulffs I’ve been tying are not only appropriate but ideal for trout. If the trout will take a ten Royal Wulff, why not an eight? Answer: Because the one size difference often is critical. Let’s face it, an eight is a big, big fly for trout, when it is a dry and supposed to imitate something found floating on the surface of a lowland lake.

In Timm’s box are Royal Coachman, Coachman, and even an ancient Leadwing Coachman, which is nothing more than a Coachman tied with slate-gray wings instead of slips from white duck secondary wing feathers. (Of course Coachman is basically The Royal Same, but wrapped without its red bellyband, and with a more sedate tail--though tails on Coachmen have varied over the years, too, once being golden pheasant tippet and later red hackle fibers. Lee Wulff gave it a tail of brown bucktail to keep it afloat in an upright position, when all the other tail materials absorbed water and caused the fly to droop like one of those inverted questionmarks with which the Spanish like to start sentences.

I like the old-fashioned appearance of both Coachmen flies tied with red hackle-fiber tails. It is probably the steelheader in me that won’t recognize a fly as good unless it has red in it somewhere—if nowhere else, then the tail. But I like their appearance more in the fly box than in the water, when I’m searching for trout. Red seem a little much.

Maybe it’s because I’m learning to think trout, and to shy away from the bright colors--especially since the flies I’ve been catching trout on this spring are really drab. Small and drab: that’s the ticket.

It is dawn on a lowland lake. The month is May. A mist or ground fog hovers over the lake and sags in its pockets; if a photographer were to take a picture of the lake, either in black and white or in living color, as they call it, he would bat his eyes at what comes back from the lab: much of the picture is missing. It has been erased. The snap is a picture puzzle. Name the absent components. I’ve taken such pictures before, simply because the light was so great, the lake so soft and beautiful, the colors so gently muted. The results have been colossally disappointing.

Anyway, the lake today is calm as glass. Here and there the mirror is broken with a feeding ring. There are lesser rings from insects rising to the surface. But some of the rings are clearly trout feeding with a quiet slurp.

I am imagining this dawn, of course. I haven’t seen one since I had the stomach flu. I see primarily evenings and view them clearly. Evening mimics dawn nicely, with light warmer to the camera lens in late afternoon, more towards the red than the yellow end of the spectrum. It is how we tell at what time of day a picture was taken. The warmth or the coolness of the tones is a dead giveaway. I won’t fake my dawns, or try to lie about them with fancy descriptions. I will simply say my dawns are sunsets turned upside down and backwards. And of course dawn brings on the advance of light, while the setting sun announces its vanishment. There will be no more light until I’ve slept some, the sky says. Perhaps this is why I love afternoons and evenings. They connote what is missing from my life. They also truncate my experience and compress the moments before it will be too dark to continue fishing.

Nobody I know well is a night fisherman, but I keep hearing about how great it is. Night fishing is good in the big-hatch trout lakes of Eastern Washington, I know. At Big Twin, Maurice Travis tells me the best fishing begins after the sun has been down a while. Or happens even later. Fishers queue up, waiting for the magic moment. Their cigarettes softly punctuate the darkness, as they talk and breathe in and out through red-tipped tubes.

But when do they sleep? When do they know a good thing has ended? How do they know it to be a fact, when the next day dawns while they are still fishing the past night? Or does it always work out this way? Do night fishers finally call it a day, and go home to sleep before the day they’ve already called it has arrived with the sun? I’ll tell you, it is much too complicated for me. I’ll take my evenings, thank you, and be grateful for what they bring, in the day’s wake.

It is a beautiful time, truly. The sun basks low, and if there are clouds they are stretched across a horizon that is westward ruddy, and if eastward pale or raspberry with light reflected 180 degrees, such as when there are snow-capped mountains, or else the loosening sky is so delicately palely robin’s-egg blue that it takes your breath away, especially when there is a ghostly sliver of a moon hung there like a fingernail paring. At first you don’t believe it, the report of your eyes, because the sky has to be dark for there to be a moon, right? Only there is an hour left of daylight. So if it isn’t the moon, what kind of apparition is it?

Ambiguities like this occur with disturbing regularity as the day lessens and the lake spreads out in front of you to widen your eyes with joy. This lake is special--dark, remote, attractive. It comprises about thirty acres and there are just two landowners. One has a nice spread, with a modern peeled-log house of two storeys, plus a pair of jutting docks that warmly sign the lake, No Trespassing. A resident beaver is in daily violation of this dictum, and since beavers are nocturnal, this animal manages to get busy at my favorite time of day—just as darkness slides down its pole. Often Mr. Beaver hits the water with a splash that makes me jump in my boatseat. His dark brown head disappears beneath an oily surface, but a moment later bobs up and can be seen plowing the water, throwing a sizable wake. Is there just one beaver, or are there more? To me they all look alike. This guy swims a zigzag course, first heading northwest, now veering west-southwest, then south-southwest, and lastly east-southeast, before diving again, with another loud whack of his tail. Now, I remember river beavers heading in a more or less straight line for the far bank. Time after time this beaver swims an irregular course, as if undecided as to where he wants to go in the lake, or constantly changing his mind and direction. Like somebody is shooting at him. Like a ship trying to avoid a torpedo.

Is this what lake beavers do, all the time, or does this guy have a bad gyroscope and is physically incapable of prescribing a straight line, but keeps trying and failing? I’d like to know, sure, but admit such knowledge is not very useful or has any practical application. I mean, it won’t help my fishing, which needs it.

Does the beaver scare the fish? I know for sure an otter does. A family of otters properly reminds trout of approaching death. But a beaver is a vegetarian. He wouldn’t know what to do with a trout if he had one in his mouth and would head for a bite of the nearest cottonwood tree, instead. Do trout know they are safe? Do they know, for instance, that my eight-foot pram and I are harmless to them, and only the fly on the end of my hopefully invisible or at any rate insignificant leader poses the real danger?

You have lots of time for thoughts like these while drifting around on a lake, with only occasional recourse to manning the oars, the water calm as a bucketful of nothingness, you watching whatever is going on in the wonderful world of trout, casting here, or mooching over there, as I often do, when no surface activity calls for laying a fly on a dime. It makes for a nice afternoon and the start of a bright evening.

The second landowner on the lake is actually an organization, international in scope. A colony of Finns have erected small cabins, mobile homes, and other variously shaped shelters back from the shoreline. They are packed together like proverbial sardines and some of the old Airstreams resemble those metal containers turned on edge. The Finns have a common lodge, cookhouse, Laundromat, outdoor swimming pool (I’m told its the largest one built out of doors in all of Washington and Oregon), camping area ($10 per night for members only), showers and toilets, boat launch; I see many upended aluminum watercraft beached there like shiny baby whales. I covet adding my little fiberglass dingy to them, just to get away from lugging it back and forth to the lake in the rear of my Ford Explorer, for I intend to fish here much more. And I am tempted to apply for membership, for being a Finn is no longer prerequisite. They must be desperate, hardup enough to admit the likes of me, mostly Irish and Scotch, with a tad of Welsh thrown in for bad measure.

The Finns own about a third of the lake, and their dwellings stretch off back into the hills like toadstools, for they own considerable property, and it is all in rich second-growth trees, for the people detest the logging that is stripping away the nearby hills. Yearly the eyesore increases and makes good folks grit their back teeth. I call the lake Eudora--though this is not its real name. But it could easily be a Eudora; it looks like a Eudora--remote, mysterious, romantic, beautiful. The lake is right out of a more benevolent Edgar Allen Poe. It has a gentle surface and even in a storm remains unscathed. Perhaps in response to its sheltered tranquillity, the Finns have mandated that no motors other than nearly silent electric trolls be used. The Fish and Wildlife people responded accordingly and now, along with the State Patrol, enforce the ban.

It surprises me how many people who come to the public access area with their boats have battery-powered motors dangling from the stern. Are they really necessary? I like to row and consider it a fine form of exercise on a calm day. I suppose a few of these dudes with electric trolls return home after a day’s put-putting and head for the rowing machine, not recognizing the gross incongruity or folly of what they do. It takes many kinds of us, I know, etc.

The colony of Finns, who are mostly not at home here, are also notorious for not fishing the lake, for whatever reasons; I will not try to change them and their ways. They are nice people, neat, orderly, and their colony is well-tended; it has a caretaker (not a member, not a Finn) who lives at the ungated entrance and cuts the hugely conspicuous community lawn with his ride-type mower. Another one of his duties is to collect fees for members who do not own property and use the campgrounds. I’ve learned all this, you see, by doing a diligent amount of poking around, looking at available cottages and building sites, and asking my usual snooty questions. I have it in my head to become a Finn, albeit a honorary one. Anything to get closer to this wonderful lake and have its fishing more at hand. Not that it’s all that difficult to reach, you understand. Its only about fifteen miles from the river.

The other landowner I sometimes see at a great distance unloading groceries from his pickup truck (which has become the earth’s ubiquitous haul vehicle) and carrying them in the kitchen door. The family comprises a father who works “out,” as they say, a wife at home, a couple of tall kids, and a dog that barks shrilly from a long ways off at me and others in small boats, sending his yips out over the water like a siren, whence they come rattling back from the baffled trees more lonesome and forlorn than they started out.

Occasionally, just before other people’s dinner time, when I am still hungrily fishing, I hear the soft staccato snarl of the saddled lawnmower operated by the caretaker, the non-Finn whose existence the residents don’t seems to acknowledge. He’s the modern-day Invisible Man to them.

I wonder why don’t the Finn’s regularly seek the trout, since they are among the fine things in life, and the Finns are tasteful people, with a reported overwhelming appetite for fish. Otherwise, pray tell, what are they doing here in such numbers? Or does this explain their current corporeal absence? I want to tell them how lucky they are to have cabins on such a lake, that a lake without trout is an empty body of water, a sad thing. To them it must be just a big bathtub, fit only for swimming on one of the hot days coming up. And what a large loss to them this would be.

The lake has a demonstrable rainbow population, well known, but there are rumors of other trout, and they intrigue me. A man the other day told me he caught a twelve-inch cutthroat. I envied him. A cutthroat from this lake? Great news. It sure looks like a cutthroat lake. Still, the man might not know what he is talking about, for rainbows and cutthroats are closely related, perhaps first-cousins. Often they mate and produce hybrids. I’ve seen a range. Nobody is sure whether the hybrid is sterile. I would guess it is not.

Searun cutts could get into the lake from its outlet, running up from Jim Creek, a tributary of the South Fork of the Stillaguamish river, which has a pretty decent run. They might tend to hang out and not go back to Puget Sound after they’ve spawned. In other words, they might prefer living here. I would. There seems to be plenty of food. If it is true there are cutts in the lake, they may interbreed regularly with the planted rainbows and produce hybrids that are to various degrees neither rainbow nor cutthroat but both. Or they may spawn only with their own kind and produce a pure stock, a fish that is all cutthroat. I have no idea which. I’m dying to find out, though, and the only way is to catch some.

My Ben Paris Fishing Guide for 1966 (I hang on to such things) states authoritatively that Eudora contains Eastern brook trout. Period. My ears go up when I read this. Wow! I love brookies and cut my eyeteeth on them in my early Boy Scout days, fishing high-altitude lakes. Back in the grandly experimental days of wide-spread stocking, a great number of different kinds of fish got dumped as fry into lakes and rivers throughout the Pacific Northwest. The question the fish biologists asked themselves was pragmatic: “What do you think would happen if we. . . ?” And the answer was, “I dunno. Let’s try it and find out.” Hence brookies in Eudora and elsewhere, often unsuitably. Usually they die out in one generation. Yet mightn’t a few have survived? Mightn’t they have found the inlet stream and some suitable gravel, and done what the rainbows and cutthroats do, that is, spawn naturally? I would like to think so, but I fear not with the brookies, and they have become a ghost species.

Would they then take a tandem Gray Ghost streamer, mooched or trolled?

I pull on the oars and drift along, waiting until I’m nearly dead in the water to stroke again. I’m trolling a fly, dragging it limply around the lake just under the surface, hoping for a pull, for there is not much surface activity at the moment, only a widely spaced ring too far away to cast to, and that very seldom. Pull and glide, dreaming of brookies. Dreaming of them not because they fight so well (they pull rather like a perch, if the truth be spoken) but because they are rare and beautiful, therefore precious. When they first come out of the water, their dark backs with pale markings dripping brown water, they are the color of wild rose and dandelion, their lower fins edged with brilliant white. I haven’t seen one for years, but their after-image remains with me, perhaps reinforced by the sight of the Dolly Vardens I luck into each year--brothers if only in genus and the similar mottling of their pale skins.

Pull and glide, then pull, pull, pull, gliding now at a faster rate in hopes a trout will take either while accelerating or (more likely) when the pram starts to lose energy and reach a static state. Always the rod tip is under my strong consideration. It is the indicator, you see, of what is happening sixty feet off, underwater, where the fish live, cruise, feed. Across the lake a man (some Finn, I presume) is preparing to launch an aluminum boat about fourteen feet long. It must weigh a ton, and that is why it is giving him and his fishing buddy so much hernia-inducing difficulty. They have a motor, I see, which is gasoline powered (a no-no here), but they also have an electric troll mounted alongside, which I presume they’ll use instead. I’d guess they came from a lake nearby and are anxious to try this one out, and see if they will have better luck.

From their rod tips dangle a lot of jewelry--popgear, it is called. At the end of this string of spinners they will impale a worm, and if they do it right it will dangle and swim enticingly and attract a trout. I understand there are plastic worms available in all colors now, some imbedded with scent. Wow. What a wonder science is. If it can put a man on the moon, why can’t it consistently trick a wary trout? But then, where would the fun be?

Popgear is not fair here. But it is legal. My main objection to gangtrolls is that they weigh a ton and in order to make them work right they must whirl slowly on their cable, sending out great flashes of light and vibrations. This pulls on the rod and is not awfully different from the lead we used to put on our lines when fishing for salmon in Alaska. Some of those weights were nearly a pound. Popgear pulls so it is hard to tell from a dragged fish. I remember as a boy urging my landlubber mother to put on a small troll, please, in order to catch a trout from McGinnis Lake, when we as a family were having a bad, storm-tossed day in Eastern Washington. She did, with Son-As-Guide, and soon a beautiful 14-inch brookie took the lure. She didn’t know she had a fish on until I coaxed her to reel in her line to check her bait. Lo, a big trout, nearly drowned, scarcely a wiggle left in him, was on the end of her propeller. What a sad way for so splendid a fish to die. Delicious, though. And it was all my fault.

Today I know better. We all do. So this is why I look at the pair of presumptive Finns with something less than derision. Call it bemused tolerance. They are trying hard to have fun. So much hard work. Maybe they will have a togetherness good time. One of the newly resident 11-inch rainbows may succumb to the flash and smell of the gear, thereby producing a catch for them. Finns, I take it they will kill and eat their catch immediately. May the bag be big enough to make it worth greasing up a pan. (Then may they disappear from my watery scene for the rest of the season. I have a hunch they may do just that, for opening day is barely past.)

Some fishers like to go out on a lake because it erases their minds and acts as a purgative for their general malaise. Thus they are cleansed of all dark thoughts and the residue from the world of business. They return to work with scrubbed minds. This is not me. My mind remains hyper-active all the while I fish, and I return home from such a day churning with new ideas. Something about the great out-of-doors stimulates me; it turns me on and my mind speeds--as the druggies say. I think about everything under the sun, all in rapid succession; I refight old battles and prepare for new ones that often never come, especially forays against obtuse governmental agencies that seem to live for themselves alone and have no concern for what they supposedly safeguard--say, the environment or natural resources and public policy.

Practically never do I experience regret while I’m fishing. I have no past days that I wish to live over and come up with better solutions for, the second time around. In fact, my life is singularly free from regrets. A fishing trip is almost always beneficial. As a writer I find that some of my best ideas come to me while I am fishing.

We rowers are part of a community of water people. We form a grand society. Think of the collegiate crew. Usually rowing is a group activity, with a boat of eight pulling against several other boats or crews, each representing a specific school, usually a college. But there is also a craft designed expressly for loners. It is the single-scull. It has close, easily discernible parallels to a fisher rowing a pram around a lowland lake, namely myself. Yet the activity is much different. We may have a boat in common, sure, and a pair of oars to propel it with, but there the likeness is apt to stop. A scull and its occupant attempt to cover a predesigned course in the shortest possible time and are sent off on their journey with others similarly equipped from a starting line on some enclosed body of water that is usually not a lowland lake of my description. Instead it is much bigger, but the rowing takes place in an enclosed bay or quiet reach on a flattened river between dams. A reservoir, then.

Here is how we differ: We flyfishers start out independently, throughout the day, and attempt to cover an unprescribed course in the greatest amount of time. The course is never the same for any two of us. We stop, we start, we turn on a dime, we turn on a silver dollar, we row backwards, we drift sideways, we pound off across the lake like a goosed cormorant, we bump into floating logs approached backwards with an alarming thump, we lose an oar and retrieve it (using the remaining unshackled one as a paddle hook to reach it), we bend to our task like an Olympic athlete when the wind comes up and we are far from our launch site and home. And so forth. We splash a lot, for neatness doesn’t count and our attention is directed elsewhere—say, off the starboard bow where a trout has just ringed and we wonder if we can retrieve line fast enough to cover the rise before it widens to, say, a yard in diameter? Then we decide not to try and press on. Suddenly we are stroking as smoothly as the junior varsity. Whence the change? Well, we’ve just gotten our stroke, as a runner gets his wind numbers one and two. We nudge the shore, disembark, go ashore to pee, for we are proud flyfishers. There are others, alas, who stand straight up in their boats in a rocking sea, unzip, and direct their stream brazenly over the side like a horse that has been drinking beer.

Flyfishers envision themselves a discrete lot and never, never, pee in a river or a lake. We hurry to the beach and relieve ourselves six feet away in the near bushes.

Pull, lift oars, glide: These are our principles. The world sweeps by as though it were riding on a train pulling out of some remote, rural station and it is we who are rendered stationary. The trees slide along, empowered by their own machinery, a vast conveyor belt, while we sit silently, oars hovering, water dripping from our blades as though batter from a pancake spoon. A pair of buffleheads, nearly as small as dippers, works the surface for insects, then, as though linked by a loop of monocord, dive in search of larger quarry, perhaps trout fry. The beaver is gone, it being full daylight, with night being held at arm’s length by an act of will from the sky.

The lake is glassy, like a stare. I prefer this to what is called a fisherman’s ripple. I like to see everything that is going on and a ripple obscures the surface; fishers think it hides the leader and this leads to more strikes. I don’t think leaders bother fish much, if at all. But the fly or lure must look right to them. I glide along and notice, at long last, a single ring inscribe the surface. Then another. I search the mirror around me for a clue to what is going on just beneath the surface. Beats me. There is always the difficulty of deciding whether the action is taking place on the surface or just under it. Men write books about it, but not me. Wiser men have been fooled by surface appearances. All is not what it seems.

Now, when you are fishing lowland lakes on the West of the Cascade Mountains, rarely do you encounter a hatch of the substantial kind that you read about as you go East. Here, many small flies hatch out at once, but the trout seem to ignore them. Why is this? Are our bugs inedible? Sour, bitter-tasting things? Or are the fish fed up on subsurface food? Whatever, matching the hatch is only occasionally called for, and most of the time if the fish can be found feeding they will take much of anything, so long as it is in their stratum. But size remains important. Be not too big is the dictum. Or so has been my experience. “Soup’s on,” is the call of the wild, and the trout are not too fussy as to ask what’s in the chowder.

The trout on this lake are beginning to feed. My trolled black leech, size six, a good searching fly, does not provide a single strike, however, whether I troll it or cast it towards the grassy bank. I have a hunch that is growing stronger by the minute that I’ve rigged up wrong. I need something smaller and probably olive. So I switch over, trying to be fast but not anywhere near so swift as I’d like to be, or used to be, when I was a boy. I go down to three-pound test tippet--I don’t know what the Xs are; never been an X-type person. The tiny fly I select out of one of Timm’s boxes seems huge, though it is one of his smaller numbers. By the way, I am now tying ones smaller than his and they are looking better and better.

What I want to do this evening is to catch a fish on one of his. I can’t say exactly why--it’s more like a challenge I set for myself, one without significant purpose. It’s a game I play often with myself and has something to do with establishing continuity with a past that wants to recede out of reach. Well, I won’t let it go. Let’s let the matter go at that.

After five tries I manage to thread the leader through the tiny eye and am blinking like a sun-struck bat afterwards. Now for the hard part: the knot. All of them will be tough to tie in this cruel glare, but I decide to attempt an improved clinch. Ta-da! It’s easy enough to make the five turns of nylon go back upon themselves. As for threading the end of the tippet back through the loop formed at the eye, well, it is nearly impossible for me to do. But patience and dumb persistence finally turn the trick. The knot now requires another tuck-through, and it is even more difficult. I try and I try, but I fail and fail, and finally pull the clinch up tight without its improvement, which would make it ten percent stronger. This means it might break, but is the best I can do today. If I bust off, so be it, but no flyfisher worth the name ought to break off a trout on a calm lake, with a leader testing three pounds, not even when horsing.

I roll out the double-tapered line to about forty feet and admire how smooth and straight the preparatory cast was. (Often it is better than the one that follows it.) I move the line and fly slightly in order to pick it up in an overhead cast and shoot it a bit farther. A trout nails it with a swirl. Wow. I am into my first fish of the day, without ever having made a true cast. It proves to be a hatchery rainbow of less than ten inches; its rounded fins and tail indicate that its parents never met in real life. Yet it fights well, staying on the surface and splashing and dancing around there, dipping and diving, wriggling hard. It even takes out a bit of line, since the Orvis Battenkill Four has a very light check and I have set it so that it will yield to the least resistance. I bring the fish, lashing, close to the pram, reach down (waving my rod tip crazily in the air in order to do so), and grasp the leader at the last knot just above the fly. The fish rolls, tugging left and right, as I search for the fly in its jaw. There it is, in the hinge, and since it is barbless it backs right out. The small fish rights itself in a half-count, then is off to the tannic depths.

I could have used my long-handled dip net and often do, but this little guy looked like he would prefer a watery release. I now roll out my line, as before, and do a little twitch in preparation for a pickup, pause, and wait for a trout to take the mincing fly. No reaction. So I cast out about forty-five feet, strip in irregularly, and when the knot joining my leader and line are about two feet from my rod tip, lift, falsecast, and shoot again. Another skinny eight feet of line go out. It is about my seated max.

I keep doing this over and over, while sitting, casting toward the sedges, and once I detect a follow, a bulge, a wake, but the fish turns aside as the fly rises up in the water column. Damn. So I cast and cast, gradually feeling my wrist begin to ache from the unusual casting angle I’ve developed to achieve moderate distance while remaining seated; it works the backs of the fingers more than they are used to doing, more than any other daily activity. Soon shooting pains arrive. I decide--since the rises are few again--to resume my troll, using the same fly that produced what is evidently the incidental, fluke trout. Whipping out enough line so that I have about sixty-five feet lying on the water, I leave the skinny yellow stuff piled on the surface like so much continuous spaghetti and reach for the oars. I take one stroke, two, and see the line straighten out nicely from a zigzag course to a slow curl. When the curl reaches the point of tautness, the rod tip suddenly plunges toward the water and, far out on the lake, a trout jumps. It is mine, or will be if everything goes right.

This time line runs off the reel--it doesn’t exactly screech but makes a pleasant whirring sound. Dry gears. Funny how a trout in the air resembles a crescent moon--such is the effect of near distances on the horizon-accustomed eye. The fish continues to swim in and produce slack in the line as I gather it up on the reel (an old steelheader’s hard-learned lesson, once acquired, is rarely departed from, and then only with great effort), and when the line grows tight again the fish climbs back into the air, taking the reel handle from my fingers and making it spin. The reel sings, as they say. A happy song. What fun!

In truth, this proves a second fluke. Let’s be honest with myself. Two trout within such a short period of time, I know I will soon forget the accidental nature of the strikes and begin to take full credit for my success, such as it is. Soon all will be the result of my brilliance, my skill. I draw the trout near the pram and see that it is a couple of inches longer than the first and evidently was recently introduced into the wild; that is, it’s another hatchery fish. This time I use the net and locate the little green fly along the fish’s gumline while the trout is still enveloped in mesh. I reach inside the net and back out the hook, letting the taut fly pop and swing free in the boat, and having to dodge it with my head. The fish in the net I admire briefly; then I sink the net back in the lake and with a swift reversing motion take it away from the trout, leaving the bewildered fish back in its natural element as quickly as it had been withdrawn from it. It floats indecisively for a moment. Then, with a wink of its tail, it disappears into the dark depths.

Trout fishing can be like this, not so fast but furious when it happens. Total elapsed time for the two fish, that is, between strikes, excluding the playing of them to the boat, is about five minutes. This makes for some moderate excitement, if only it will last. And of course it doesn’t. It is half an hour till my next strike and I miss it. I curse and blame myself. Have to, since I’ve given myself all the credit for the first two fish brought happily to the boat.

It’s the other side of the coin, when you’ve given yourself a pat on the back for something you don’t deserve. It’s the price you pay. It makes you think, too. Fishing exists largely in the mind, even while it is happening. Quickly it become memory. I remember twilight eves nymph fishing in Seattle’s Green Lake, when the bite was on in the fall. Earlier in the season the bite would last maybe an hour, but it would be without frenzy. Then, as the year moved towards its close and the water chilled, the bite would become shorter and shorter, cut off by the advance of night and the inability of fishers or fish to see a small fly in the rushing dark. I’d fish into the void, fish by feel, mostly, fish knowing that if I got a leader tangle or a weird, loopy knot I’d be done for what was left of the day, a particle.

The trout were small, the product of last spring’s fry plant in a shallow lake rich with summer food, also yielding occasionally what is called a holdover in the form of one of spring’s planted trout, a rainbow of twelve inches or more. It would double up your rod and make you think you (at least for a misleading moment) that you were into a salmon. Usually our fish would be a pathetic seven-inches. Only a boy might go out after them. Well, I wasn’t much more than that myself.

As fall advanced, the trout put on remarkable growth--more than an inch a month. They’d be respectable ten-inchers by early October. By November, they’d add another inch, though food and feeding was shutting down. The frenzy shrank to twenty minutes, ten, five. In five minutes time you would catch all the trout you were going to get for the most part of the day. I would time my visit carefully, closely, with both eyes on the clock. I would play games with myself. I had young eyes, ones that could see like a tiger into the infernal night to tie on microscopic flies and tippets, and fingers with rubbery flexibility. Up to a certain time of evening I could wrap on another leader and surely another fly. In five minutes of feeding panic, at the season’s close, how many trout could I catch before there was no more light? Six or eight? Often I did.

It was simply a matter of throwing the fly out there, working it a bit, anticipating the strike, sensing the take of the nymph, tightening or else striking hard (depending), then hauling in the fish to hand-release it so I could cast quickly again for another. Fun? It was more frantic accomplishment than joy. Anxiety played a major role. The landing of the trout was an annoyance, something to be gotten past quickly so I could get back to the important part; that was the strike and the hook-up. They are what lie at the heart of trout fishing. It is always so.

Seen another way, such fishing is pure ego, absolute greed. There is a lot of bad dharma in trout fishing, if the truth be known, and it occasionally should be.

What I remember most from those days at Green Lake was trying to figure out ways to get those short-striking trout to hit solidly and be hooked, instead of nipping at the fly or turning away from it without giving it a touch. Sometimes I could see them--the bulge behind the fly, the swirl, even the cruising dorsal fin. They were tiny sharks. Other times I simply sensed their presence in the dark beyond. There is something about trout fishing that is comprised of primal nuances. You think your fly is being followed; you can feel it on your skin, on the hairs on the back of your neck, on the balls of your feet, where the sensitive area lies just behind the toe curl and feels like a tickle. You discern it at some mysterious place that your thoughts can’t quite touch, but you know it’s happening as surely as rain falls on you and your skin and leaves it wet.

At Green Lake I first tried going smaller to hook those fish. I tied nymphs on fourteens, then sixteens. They utilized primarily soft brown hackles, hen feathers, barbels provided by scruffy no-account barnyard chickens, egg-layers all, birds of little worth and no great commercial value. These chickens have the softest feathers, and they are what I was after. The bodies of my flies were invariably peacock herl--either quills or the sword fibers sparsely stacked atop the hook. Often I put a red tail on my flies because there is a general feeling that a wet fly without a red tail is incomplete and loses sixty percent of its effectiveness. I knew this was not true, at the same time I practiced it faithfully. (Some wag defined faith as believing in something you know isn’t true.)

So this was my basic trout wet, and I guess it was a nymph simply because it didn’t have a wing. (A wing would have ruined it.) And after going small, and still getting annoying, frustrating misses repeatedly, I tried tying a trailing hook one size smaller. It worked beautifully. It went like this: tie a short length of three-pound nylon to a hook one size smaller, now a sixteen, with a halibut knot, making it in effect a snell. Then wrap this tightly to the principal hook, a fourteen, with many tight coils of tying thread, starting at the tail, going to the head, and back again, since there is no knot on the main body of the hook to secure it there. Usually the trailing hook contains no materials, but at times I tied it as a tiny duplicate of the larger fly. And often it was just a body and a tail, the tail being red again; in this instance, I wound the soft brown hackle a little longer, so that the second fly would be hidden in the trailing fibers. Thus the second fly rode only a short distance behind the first--less than an inch. Usually the bend of the second fly was simply a fraction of an inch behind the bend of the first hook and, of course, reversed in its position, so that it rode upside down.

And how did it work? Excellently. Nearly all my fish were hooked on the rearward hook. Fairly often the fish had both hooks in its mouth. This produced a problem when the plan was to hook, land, and release the fish in the shortest amount of time possible because of onrushing darkness, greediness also being important, and I was anxious to cast to the next fish quickly and see if I could get another take. One barbed hook, let alone two, posed releasing difficulties. They often hurt the small trout and were time-consuming to work out, as well. So I debarbed first the trailing hook, then the primary one. So in a purely personal sense was catch-and-release fishing born. I discovered that its purpose was not conservation at all, but simply in order to keep on fishing. Time is what really mattered then, not then number of fish you could kill. Only catch.

The trout still took “short,” or often pecked at the fly, but when one of them did strike, it hit hard and often took the fly deeply. Trying to come up with a way to release fish more quickly, it perversely took me longer. Only a few trout proved hooked in the hinge of the jaw or along the gumline, which is greatly desirable, and these were usually trout that took while turning away with the fly. They were probably trout that would have hooked themselves without my striking back. They were the easy fish, the ones you couldn’t miss even if you wanted to. They were the suckers in the pack, fish that if caught and released could be taken over and over again. It is a shame to kill such fish, even if they are pretty dumb.

The fall fish increased in size as the year wore on, until the food supply dropped off and the fishing stopped. And, mixed in, were a few fine holdovers from spring, plus the rare really big fish that were left from the previous year. They would number in your catch about one or two a season.

Spring fishing was very different. Since the bait fishers were out in force, and every lost worm or single salmon egg represents a dietary supplement to the trout’s daily food supply, all the trout that were not quickly caught out soon were on the lookout for bait. This ruined them for flies for weeks, until the baitfishing slowed and the fishers went away in disappointment. Then, for a very short time, the remaining trout (an inch or so longer than when they had left their hatchery Mama, the rearing pond) could sometimes be found cruising around just beneath the surface, looking for natural food in the form of insects. They would take a fly readily, when they were actively feeding, which didn’t seem to be that often, judging by results. But about this time, May first, the Department of Fish and Wildlife made its annual fry plant in this lake and in others. Here they dumped in about two-hundred thousand one-inch rainbows. The fishing halted immediately. Probably what was left of the adult rainbow population began to cannibalize the plant. And then the lake went into bloom; its surface became dense to a depth of several inches with a floating blue-green algae scum mixed with dying weeds.

Fishing stopped for all except a few confirmed bait fishers, who went over to a float about now, and hoped their bait could be seen amid the scum. They’d reel in to check their hooks, every once in a while, to find them trailing snaky green weed. The rest of us had already gone someplace else. To rivers mostly.

Spring on Green Lake was a pleasant time, though often crowded. It was jammed with fish too, planted trout that ran 8-11 inches. They came from the Seward Park Hatchery on the East edge of the city, and because they were such easy victims, the fisheries people developed a method of staggered planting to make them last longer. They’d put some fish in the lake a couple of weeks before the opener, the bulk of the plant a day or two before the opener, and then hold back on a respectable number until about ten days after opening day, when the crowds began to drop off fast because of lack of action. This was the time seriously to approach the lake with the fly, and the time was short because of the upcoming fry plant. It was a narrow though productive window, and I opened it for all it was worth.

One year the department planted some surplus steelhead fingerlings. These were two-year-old fish that had not smolted yet, or else they were smolted fish deemed extra to the department’s river-stocking needs. I never knew which. They ended up in Green Lake, just after the opening crowds began to disperse, and provided marvelous fun for those of us who remained. Of course I am prejudiced in favor of steelhead, at any time, and tend to exaggerate the case for them, even when the reason is dubious or not apparent to all. These trout hit like barracuda, and looked a little bit like them, too, being lean, shiny, and tough. I almost said mean. You knew at the strike that you’d hooked something special. They didn’t take like your usual hatchery rainbow trout, which is a domesticated creature that can be reliably depended on to suck in the fly, jump repeatedly, and splash about, but not really test you or your equipment. The baby steelhead would rip the slack out of your fingers and vault into the sky like an arrow. They never stopped fighting, wriggling, and when you landed one, it would lie across your palm, its body thumping hard and metronomically. That pulse was the rhythm of life.

They were bright silver, true smolts, and when and if you managed to land one (for many were lost), its loose shiny scales came off in your hand, leaving your fingers coated with what looked like flecks from the minting of new dimes. I released most of these fish, but took a few home to eat or to give to special friends. They were delicious. And there was no good reason not to kill and eat them, I reckoned. They’d been put into the lake as surplus for this particular reason. A boy put back trout now--if the truth is to be told--mainly because it was a daily pain to have to clean them all. You’d rather do something more profitable, such as eating your late dinner, watching TV, or reading a book.

Most nights I would average six fish. The limit was twelve, which seems excessive today. Now, six is one more than five, true, the limit presently. It seemed to me at the time a respectable number, from a catching standpoint. In two hours fishing to hook and land six such trout was (and still is) justly rewarding. The fish averaged about ten inches. A nine-incher you knew at once from its lack of body weight and resistance. And an eleven-incher had substance and would take a few feet of line out of your fingers or off the reel, if it had a light enough setting. I began keeping more of my fish, some nights all of them. I had a lot of relatives living nearby and was young and showoffy enough to want to illustrate my expertise to them. I had to do it over and over. It is never enough. Call it grandstanding.

One night was different. I still haven’t figured it out. The North end of the lake is now reserved for children. This wasn’t always the case. It was my favorite place to fish, for I could wade along the shoreline and cast toward the dropoff. In so many lakes this will produce good, reliable catches. It did here. Meanwhile, a pedestrian path circled the lake, only forty feet out, and often bicyclists whizzed by behind me at a clip. Once I nearly took a guy off his bike on my backcast, when he rode right into it, and the only thing that saved me from his rage was that I happened to be standing in four feet of water. He stood on shore, shaking his fist at me, swearing, as I tried to explain that he was the moving one, while I was stationary, and it was he who should look where he was peddling. This is maritime law. But he was in no mood for reason. And I’m not quite sure I was right.

On that special night I took my usual quota of six fish, killing them all in a kind of madness. It happens sometimes, when you are in a certain mood. The smallest was twelve inches, the largest seventeen. Whew. I couldn’t close the lid of my creel on them. When I lugged them home and dumped them in the kitchen sink, preparatory to cleaning them, they filled the basin. It was a huge mess, and I was not in the least ashamed of myself for bringing them back dead.

The next night I was back to the lake early. I cast and I cast, into the gathering gloom, and hooked my usual number of rainbows. All were small again. They averaged ten inches, and seemed even smaller because of the night before. And then the fry plant was made, the lake slowed down, the bloom occurred, and I went away, along with the others. I can’t explain that wonderful night except to say that it was a fluke--the real reason for all great successes, by the way. Maybe it was a combination of the tides and phases of the moon, though I don’t believe in that stuff. Yet it happened and would not happen again for me, no matter how much I wished it would and how often I tried to repeat the situation. And try I did.

One balmy spring afternoon, with a glassy calm beckoning me, I decided to fish early. I tore myself away from my writing and drove to the lake, parking my heap at the handiest curb. I raced to the water’s edge. The fishing was good from shore and I soon caught my limit, which was twelve. I kept them all. Well, it was early season and I had taken only one limit earlier. I thought of all the mouths I could feed. Besides, boys think in terms of limits, whether they keep all their fish or not. It is ever in their minds. As the twelfth trout came struggling to shore, I prepared to leave. I turned in the direction of my car, but it was gone. In fact, I couldn’t spot any of the parked cars. What the. . . ? I had parked at this early hour in a No Parking Four to Six P.M. Zone. Damn. All the while I fished with complete absorption, I had been ticketed, a tow truck had been summonsed and arrived, and my heap hauled away to the impoundment yard.

I stood at the curb looking and feeling helpless, forlorn. Lost is the right word. A driver stopped and I explained my dilemma. My plan was to get to a telephone and start calling around—the police, the towing companies, friends—in order to find out where my car was being stored and how to get it quickly back. But this Samaritan offered me a ride home, and I decided to take it, for the distance was about four miles. We pulled up in front of the first-floor apartment where my wife and I lived and, in gratitude, I pressed the basket of trout on him, all twelve. He declined the first offer, but when I pressed him he gladly accepted them in payment for the ride. It cost me $20 more to get my car back, a lot of money then. I suppose it would be nearer to $100 today.

Back to Lake Eudora and the present.

It is a tranquil evening and the aging angler (me) has lucked into two fine trout already, both of them undeserved. Now the accidental trout is not to be dismissed as of little consequence. No, it means the minor deities who preside over such matters momentarily have us in their good graces, and it is time to push our luck. And if you have had two flukes already, why not hope for more? Don’t we always? These minor gods--who circle the heavens in the form of stars and asteroids--have blessed us for a short, precious while. Bear down--start fishing seriously. No more fooling around with the rod and oars.

To circle the lake, alternating casting and trolling methods, takes just short of an hour. All I have to show for the next circuit is one light twitch of the rod tip that might very well be the product of wave action while quartering into the slight chop that has developed from clouds racing in. A helicopter wanders overhead with a great clatter, banking, turning its grasshopper like body thirty degrees, following the power company’s towers. Recent logging clearcuts, just beginning to green up again, appear against the steep low hills that, in another part of the country, would bear the names of mountains. Two people, both elderly women from the Finn Settlement, wander down to the lake and out on to one of the rafts. It bobs and shifts under their weight. They stare down at the water as if its surface might contain some great revelation—God’s face, perhaps--then turn on dispirited heel and trudge back up the lawn to where the parking area, lodge, and sweathouse are. I see no car there to mark their arrival, so they must be in residence in one of the cottages back out of sight from the lake.

There are no dimples on the lake but swallows all the same dip low and wheel off again. There is a veritable hatch of swallows, then. A few touch the surface and imitate trout feeding. It is an old trick of theirs. Most of the swallows swoop like Frisbees, depart briefly, then return like feathered boomerangs, only to veer off again like so many sparks from a fireworks show. (I think to myself how much bad writing is overly dependent on simile, when what is really required for distinction is elusive metaphor.) Suddenly my rod tip dips and touches the water before springing straight again, or nearly so. Damn, missed another one. As for the earlier two takes, they might well be dreams. It was more than an hour ago, and fading fast.

The lake stands still as an oval hand mirror. It is as though someone has brought an apparatus to the lake and sucked all the living matter out of it, including its trout, leaving behind only barren water, and here am I still, pulling away on my oars, not knowing any better, not realizing the lake is bereft of fish, and all biota. Then a trout rises, as if to call me liar. Now another. Soon the lake is lightly ringed with rises, as if a summer thunderstorm has moved in, the drops large and few at the start, but so substantial that a few ganged together could wet you to the skin. Flies are dotting the surface, too, but I can’t make out their genus; chironomids, probably. They seem to be dark, almost black. But so small. Would trout bother with such midgets? They would if there was nothing else at hand, and they were hungry. This seems to be the case.

So I drop down a size, to sixteen, and put aside my green scud for a nymph that is brownish black. I fish hard for a while, but no strikes are forthcoming, no twitches worth mentioning. I want to give the nymph a fair chance. How long is that? Will fifteen minutes do? Ten? Twenty? I do not know, and give it an indeterminate length of time, one that feels more than adequate. And then I despair at having any success, though I did get a tweak and a twinge occasionally. They hardly count. So back it is to the old, green scud. It has a mixed olive and brown dubbing body (goat, I think), and there are some medium-sized guard hairs that bristle out, as from a worn-out brush. I give the old yellow line a roll and a forward cast, and within a yard of having begun my retrieve have a hard hit, which I miss. The hook point proves dull from a previous night and I touch it up with a file. Curses. Perhaps this is the only fish I may touch for the rest of the evening. And I’ve gone and missed it.

This is not the case, however. I am soon into another. Then one more. In the coming hour I take three, all solidly hooked, as if the fish have been poured back into the lake by the same mysterious apparatus that had sucked them up earlier. Or more like a hatchery truck has arrived and disgorged its contents into the lake in a mammoth stream, all for me, my pleasure. But that is not so. These trout were planted weeks ago and are now used to cruising along the shoreline, selecting items from among the wares available, a food supply changing on an almost hourly basis.

What I want to know is why they waited so long.

Earlier in the season I told a fellow fisher, as I put back a fish in front of him, at a time when the fishing was slow, half- apologetically, “It seems a shame to kill them all, when, if we put them back, they’ll be here to fish for all summer.” He looked at me as though I were mad and rowed off in a huff. Well, I’ve never been known for my tact, though the message is one I believe in as much as the coming dawn. A numeric limit of hatchery-reared rainbows can be bought at the supermarket (already cleaned, no less) for about four dollars. So, what’s all the fuss about? What are we fishing for, if not pleasure? The rise, the strike, the bringing the fish successfully to the net or the hand? It surely is not for the meat.

Three fish now. Will there be more? Full dark is an hour and a half away. The limit is five trout; when I was a slip of a boy it was twenty, and once two fraternity brothers and I sat in a boat held motionless by two opposing anchors and caught sixty hatchery-reared rainbows on salmon eggs before nine o’clock, one opening day morning. I suppose we took pictures of them, all strung out, grinning like idiots. (We, not the grimacing fish.) Its what men and boys do. If so the picture has been mercifully lost.

Still, fishing for limits that one releases forms a kind of gentleman’s target or goal. Five fish, caught and released? It is not a large number. In those olden days at Lac Verde in Seattle (always called it that to myself, in order to make it a shade less prosaic), one of the precepts of our trout fishing was that you were entitled to as many trout as you could catch and release in as short a period of time as you could perform the feat. It used to be illegal, you know. The regulations now encourage it. You may fish up until you retain your limit, putting them back according to your taste and pleasure. This is a modern-day shift. You could have been ticketed for putting back fish. You were expected to catch your limit, kill them, and promptly leave. I remember when sporting good stores--generally those dedicated to flyfishing only--had petitions on the counter urging that anglers be allowed to release their catch and keep on fishing. A fly didn‘t hurt them—well, not much. It was a radical idea. Some maintained that, sure, you could fish until you had caught your limit, then you must quit, whether or not you killed the fish. Thus, you could catch your limit, release them, and then be obliged to leave. Nobody much liked the idea. I did.

It still sounds good to me, however, but not as a regulation. As a personal target, or accomplishment. After all, you have to go home sometime. Why not after five? I’ll tell you why.

Anglers love to pigout. They like to catch trout right up until the last ray of light and rack up terrific scores. The more the better; it can never be enough. Listen to the talk at fishing-tackle stores: “We caught about two hundred in two days, my partner and me.” Such a score can only elicit a wow. Or the competitive boast, “That’s nothing. Me and my buddy probably caught a thousand in three days. Seldom did we make a cast without hanging into one. Boy, did my arm ache at night.” Big grin. Indeed it should ache; paralysis should have rightly set in. (Good idea: It would keep you from ever doing it again.) What does it take to make a grown boy quit catching, even if he stops killing? Five? A top limit of eight or ten? Twenty? Each to himself, but if the number mounts too high, there is something decidedly wrong with him. He is trying to prove something other than he is a good fisher and having great fun.

I get another take after a long half-hour, maybe longer. The rises have settled down to an occasional ring, here and there. I bring the fish rapidly in, then slow my reeling to let it circle the boat once or twice, keeping the suspended oars out of the way, for they will trap and fray the fine leader, if I’m not careful. And it is getting too late to tie on another tippet. The little eight-foot rod is just short enough to manage a fish but not to horse it. The ideal rod for playing a fish in a boat would be about a foot long. Ha. But try to cast with one. Even with eight feet, it is difficult to bring a fish to a waiting net. To do so, the leader knot has to be reeled inside the tiptop, which I don’t like to do because it makes it hard to play out the line again, if the fish should run. But I know I must or the fish will commence to circle the boat and not easily be brought into the net, where it will be released while still in the mesh.

A trout is so pretty that it is a wonder than anybody with a soul ever kills one. The beauty flees in minutes. Yet men and boys kill them readily. I can kill them, too, quite easily, either rapping them on the head with something handy and hard, or else awkwardly bending back their little heads until their necks snap, with my first finger rammed down their throat. It’s a bit grotesque, admittedly, but it is the quickest and most merciful way of dispatching them. And this is what counts most.

Four trout. But I want five. This makes me as greedy as the next guy, the trout killer who must bring home the corpses to prove to himself and others that he has succeeded. How am I any different? In my own mind (the only place that counts for me, in fishing or much of anything else) I like to know that I’ve met a goal I’ve set for myself, even if it was only a few minutes ago. A goal is an arbitrary and meaningless target, but some days it counts for a lot. That special something may vary from day to day, year to year. Today I simply must catch another trout. That’s all there is to it.

The light is beginning to fail. Bad light is a perfect accompaniment to an angler who is not succeeding. Who says? I do. It is the voice of sad experience. Four trout is not enough for me. Five is my magic number for today. “Give me five, God. Please?” Am I praying? It would seem so. Fishing is about the only time when prayer enters my head. Since I am releasing all my fish (not really mine, I know), I tell myself I’m not really greedy, but what else is it? Five trout and I’ll go home, I plead to the sky. Oh? I’ve heard that story before. It is getting dark fast and the rings have stopped, almost as though the fire had gone out under a boiling pot. Not that there have been so many circles earlier, you understand. Now there are practically none. My cause appears to be a lost one.

I head for the public boat takeout, where my wife awaits me with patient rectitude. She likes to come along and help me with the boat, she says. I suspect she knows that it will be hard work for me alone and she is right. She has been reading The Pickwick Papers, and when I ask if the light isn’t too dim, she says no, she has been able to see well enough, up until a minute or two ago. I tell her to turn the overhead light on, for Pete’s sake; the battery is fully charged from the ride. She never does, though.

She helps unload the boat with a rhythm of her own, one natural to her and different from mine. So I meld with hers. First she removes the oars, whereas I’d do the tackle box first, then the rods. She’s back quickly for the boatseat, and I let her. My legs are so crabbed that I can hardly unfold them and stand upright. I teeter for a few moments before the pins-and-needles feeling leaves me. I grab the net, the flyrod, the bailing can. By the time I’m back, she’s poised alongside the gunwale, waiting for me to hoist my side. We lift together, we steady the pram, we advance with it, and it slides neatly into its slot in the Ford Explorer, a bit askew, for the pram has a tiny keel. We secure the hatch with a cinch line and locking buckle, snugging it up tight, in a nautical manner. After all, I’m half-sailor today.

“Four,” I tell her semi-proudly. She knows it to be the truth, for I wouldn’t lie about anything so insignificant. And she would know that I badly wanted five. It is why I fished so late. Overhead the trees have joined together, clasped hands, and enclosed us in a leafy tunnel, through which we must drive if we wish to leave this place, and we do. So off we go, at the end of another twilight’s fishing, headed for a late dinner and the firm knowledge that whatever it turns out to be will be delicious.

In my bones I know I am one fish short of fulfillment. Easily, my case could be worse.

Russ Miller is an old friend. I wonder why I haven’t written about him before? We have known each other for over twenty years and he beats me at any number of things, including catching trout and often steelhead. He ties an awfully nice fly, too. He is an expert chironomid fisher. It is a type of fishing that requires a delicacy and patience I have not yet acquired. It is tedious and has its annoying aspects, as well. It reminds me of the way we used to fish single salmon eggs as a boy, before learning that there were other ways more fun and almost as effective.

People who fish chironomids catch many fine trout, some of them large. It is a fact of life. I know it to be difficult to master. I keep telling myself I am going to learn how, but keep putting if off. Perhaps I am afraid of it. Afraid of failing, as well.

One day when the rivers were high and almost out of their bottle, I ran into Russ at the Fortson Mill Pond parking lot. He was leaving, I arriving, so our driver-side windows were in the right juxtaposition for a conversation, so long as nobody came along and wanted to pass us on this poorly maintained country-spur road. Somehow the talk got around to trout (my idea, probably, for I already had this book in mind and was probing), and I mentioned that I was fishing for rainbows now and had heard much about “this chironomid technique used at Pass Lake,” but was hesitant to try it because I didn’t know very much about it.

Russ kindly spent the next hour telling me expressly how to do it. It was an act of generosity not often experienced in fishing circles, at least not in the ones Russ and I frequent. And to speak frankly, Russ doesn’t have a reputation for candor about subtle flyfishing techniques. Yet he opened his heart up to me. Shamelessly I will pass his information on, with no hesitancy about violating a confidence, as I am sure I am doing. (This will teach you, Russ, not to trust anybody who fishes, no matter how long you’ve known him.)

He starts out with a limber ten-foot rod, one capable of casting a four-weight line. Russ has always been one to be on the delicate side, even when fishing for steelhead. This makes him a soul brother to his friend and distant relative (by marriage, I think), Walt Johnson. Now Russ has a passion for rods. Ever since I met him, he has been obsessed with buying more of them, for the perfect one always lies over the horizon. I have no idea how many he owns. I know he can’t have sold off even half of what he’s bought in all these years, but even if he has he would have to be the sole owner still of about fifty expensive sticks. So when it comes to rods, aside from saying that he is silly and extravagant about them, I’d have to add that he is probably the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to recognizing their differences and leading features.

The reel, merely a place to store one’s line, is unimportant to Russ in comparison, though this is not to say that he doesn’t own his fair share and more. They are generally small and with a light checkwork. Since I have a preference for the exact opposite, Russ and I have made several trades, including a few that have involved a third party, or broker. Bob Ferber has been the go-between. He is a rod-maker. Also, he is a quasi-dealer, one who can never quite make up his mind what he wants, and when faced with a doubtful situation will often choose to buy, or trade, rather than let a good reel get past him and be gone. He spreads his net wide.

Russ is an acknowledged master of flylines and how they should be put together. Alec Jackson and others freely acknowledge this fact. None of the companies really know what they are doing, Russ would argue. (To put words in his mouth again.) Or else there is not a line alive today that can’t be improved by his cutting and splicing it. There is a growing army of skilled fishers who will fish only with lines modified by Russ and sold by him at a fairly modest price, considering the work that goes into them. Such lines are capable of extremely delicate presentation at a goodly distance. “Fine and far off” is what they are designed for, and this is what lies at the heart of chironomid fishing, according to Russ. He recommends a long forward taper or else a double taper, one that can be cast to its furthest extremity, generally about ninety feet. That is a long way off, and I know Russ can do it in the parking lot, for I’ve seen him, but this is not the same thing as standing up in a small boat, or waded deep in a raging river. Or is it? The distance is the same, and in both instances a wind is probably blowing.

Russ’s leader is a modest twenty-three feet in length, but he’ll go up to twenty-six or eight, if need be. This is consistent with the depth of the lake where he is fishing. He wants his nymph to go right to the bottom. It is to drift along slowly on a slack line that is nonetheless kept taut. In order to observe what is going on, he’ll use a strike indicator at the junction of the fly line and leader butt. The fly is small--microscopic, most times. White ostrich herl is used as a tail or wing casing. It is a frequent chironomid ploy. I don’t know exactly how small a fly Russ will go down to, but I’d guess the limit is set my the hook manufacturers.

He uses two anchors to keep his boat absolutely motionless. This takes me back to my bait-fishing days as a boy. We did that, too, and it was so that the line or leader is kept in a straight line, sinking slowly, the leader fully extended, the bait (or fly now) maintained in the same plane or sinking only a modicum faster than the leader. This way there is less chance of the strike being missed--missed meaning not observed and the fish not hooked on the strike back. I recall the strike of trout on a single egg; there is a slight twitch or change in direction of the leader, or else a slight slackening of it. That’s all. The rod tip betrays no action whatever, so you can’t depend on it signaling a strike. A trout has visited your hook. If you lift your tip, it might still be there. Usually though it is long departed. You sense that you’ve had a strike. A check proves you right. You experience that sinking sensation.

Oh, how well I remember it, even though my hook held a salmon egg, the hook’s eye buried in the membrane. I can almost feel it. Some things never recede from tactile memory. The hands remember all. Events are recalled by the slightest nudge of familiarity. And I suspect one reason I don’t want to go through the chironomid-fishing process is because the boat must be positioned exactly like single salmon-egg fishing. Plus the inescapable fact that it is boring on a cosmic scale. My life moves backwards, rather than ahead to exciting new vistas. Or so I imagine them. Yet the pictures I’ve seen of chironomid-caught, catch-and-release trout are awesome. I want some, too. The fish are brutes.

Russ tells me he often anchors in a hogline. The term surprises me, for it is what I thought salmon fishers did only on a huge river. Apparently the chironomid fishers all line up their boats in a queue, as if not to let a single fish past them. It happens to be where the fish regularly feed. It is a chummy kind of fishing and calls for considerable cordiality, often forced, for nobody is more competitive than a fisher. People have been shot in hoglines, I’ve heard. On a minor scale, they have been known to throw things at each other--unopened cans of beer, opened knives, and small hatchets used for splitting kindling. (A hand grenade might be deemed suitable.)

When fishing in a river hogline, the guy with the fish on is supposed to drop out of formation, drift downstream, take his big salmon into a back-eddy, and there subdue and capture it. He is obliged to do this so that the lines don’t get crossed and tangled, and so that the other boats can go on fishing. He who doesn’t drop out gains the ire of the others, who may have to reel in to prevent what is politely called an entangling alliance. Nobody wants to stop fishing, however briefly, for it lessens his chance of a strike. So some continue to fish on, especially if the guy with the fish on doesn’t drop out.

Russ assures me this doesn’t happen on a lake. There are few tangles, but many a word spoken in anger. Stories come back from lakes and are retold over a drink at a fly-club meeting. Often they are horror stories. Russ can be as kind and as gracious as anyone, but like many of us he has his other side. It doesn’t take much in the way of bad manners to provoke it. The trouble is, everybody has a different definition of what good manners are. When fishing is slow, tempers get short, and when one person is hooking most of the fish (as Russ is apt to do) the scene can get ugly, especially if the boats are within hailing distance of each other. In chironomid fishing they usually are.

Could Russ be in effect warning me against becoming a chironomid fisher at Pass Lake? Could he be trumping up a worst-case scenario because even one more man and boat on the lake is too many? No, no; not Russ. He is much too uncomplicated a person to do this. He’s my friend, isn’t he? He wants me to share in the good fishing. Then why does it seem he is setting up impossible conditions, ones that will drive me away? Then, in the next instant, he is urging me to try out this new type fishing and see if it is for me. How could I doubt him?

What Russ is suggesting is that I take my pram to Pass Lake, row its great length until I see a row of boats all snugly anchored, find the largest gap between any two of them, and move right in. “Hi, guys. I’m Bob. What color are they hitting on this morning? And the size, please?” I can imagine my welcome.

I am to drop my anchor over the starboard bow, the other over the port stern, cinch the ropes up tight, and make my first cast parallel to all the others, my strike indicator lined with theirs, like the floats on the Indians’ gill nets. Do they all know each other, these chummy chironomid fishers? Is there an established pecking order? Will an outsider, a novice, be tolerated? Will they share so much as a kind, helpful word to somebody who obviously needs a full paragraph?

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? Well, consider this, on the positive side: My neighbor from the Stilly, Joe Bly, comes back from a day on Pass Lake, sunburned badly, with a Polaroid of a brownie that goes a good 23 inches. He cradles it in his hands like a baby out of the slippery bath, shining, still dripping water, his eyes and the trout’s glowing with the same bright intensity. I’ve got no such picture of myself. I’ve seem snapshots of put-back fish that bug the eyes, rainbows measuring in the mid-twenties, browns just as big.

Makes a guy more tolerant of spending hours sitting motionless in a floattube or rocking boat, eh? Then why not I? Because at this point in my life I’d rather do something else. Call me chicken if you will. Yet I’m picking up all the info I can on the subject.

Not all of my youth was spent fishing in Seattle’s handiest trout factory, right in the center of town. There have been other loves. I remember Lake Windsock fondly: I’ve fished it, off and on again, for fifty years. That is a lifetime for many. It is another lowland lake, one a bit bigger than Eudora, with a similar boggy shoreline, floating logs, and all of the other necessary paraphernalia, including it being unbuildable over fifty percent of its shoreline because it is really a large wetland that ebbs and flows with the rainy season. This is what saves many a lowland lake from imminent colonization and eventual ruin.

When I first joined the Boy Scouts, our troop went out to Cedar River for a couple of days of overnight camping, with some incidental fishing thrown in. I was only mildly curious about river trout, for I thought of myself as a lake fisher. Art Golofon was leader of the Beaver Patrol, myself just another member of a dozen of us. All boys in the Pacific Northwest (and perhaps elsewhere) soon think of themselves as fishers and pursue trout whenever there is an opportunity. With some the pursuit resembles normal proportions, but for others it becomes a kind of mania. Art’s father was a somewhat romantic figure because he was in the movie business--although he did no more than distribute film in metal cans; he worked for the highly esteemed Paramount Pictures, and one of his duties was to take second-run movie film (tightly rewound into their bruised silver-white canisters) around to movie theaters in small towns throughout Skagit County, which lay one county removed from King, where we all lived in Seattle.

Mr. Golofon would set out in his pre-war tan Oldsmobile for the outlying areas and often Art, myself, and his younger brother, Gary (a Scout too, after a couple more years), would be packed snugly in back along with the canisters. We would each have his Trapper Nelson pack board and Boy Scout sleeping bag stowed in the sedan’s commodious trunk, leaving us free to lounge around on the mohair seats, Art in front with his Dad, Gary and me in back with the canisters, the cartons of camper’s food, and the tent.

He would stop first at Arlington (the Olympic Theater--it still shows movies, but only on weekends), then wind on to Conway, Mount Vernon, and Concrete. The drive out was always chocked with excitement for us because Windsock Lake lay on the way. We headed North, along the Smokey Point Highway. Soon after leaving Arlington, the Skagit Flats spread out around us. They provide a perspective reminiscent of the Nebraska plains, only with a few fir-clad buttes off to the East, where foothills of the North Cascades began. Tucked in among the hills was a number of lowland lakes. Windsock was one of the smallest. Its surface comprises 42 acres, and though the lake might be bigger, in the opinion of some, in mine it is about right. Any smaller, it would lose its distinction and become more the idea of a lake, than a lake itself, more like a pond, really, and of little significance. Skagit and Snohomish Counties are dotted with many small ponds and lakes, some you could throw a rock across, if you really wound up, and others that show up on a map deservedly and carry well-known names.

This was the Forties, the war raging on two fronts, a time of relative hardship for many. Most of us weathered it just fine. Art’s father had a special gasoline dispensation because of the morale-raising effect of bringing features to the civilian population that was working so hard to produce the goods that would end the war, we hoped mercifully soon. (Of course the military got to see the films first.) Mr. Golofon had a C-Ration Card and we boys benefited directly from it. He was able to buy the gas that would take us to the lake in early May, when the fishing was best, the water warming, and we could renew for another year our pursuit of the elusive cutthroat trout. He’d drop us off at the lake, shortly after noon, picking us up again after two or three days had passed, and we’d had our fill of camping out in a tent in wet weather. We were always glad and grateful to see him (though we might act otherwise), for it meant a ride in a car with the heater blasting, followed by a return to a home that had lost its ordinariness and could provide a warm meal, bath, and bed, usually in that order.

Windsock was the sole property of a farmer whose huge cultivated slopes produced dairy cattle and whose grazing area came nowhere near the wide, sloping pocket that held our lake. A road wound past his redolent barn, over a knoll, then rounded an alder copse, dropping down to this gem of a low-altitude lake. There was but one place on shore that was without either bog or excessive steepness, and there we camped at a site used regularly by day-fishers to launch their boats. We didn’t need one, for the farmer lent us his, included in the price Mr. Golofon paid him for us to camp there. It couldn’t have been much. We took turns using the boat, usually in pairs, occasionally one of us braving the lake alone.

It was a nice location, though a bit muddy, and nightly we built a huge camp fire in a ring of stones the farmer had provided; it was so we wouldn’t build our fires elsewhere. We dug worms in his manure pile, and packed them back to the lake in a red, two-pound Hills Brothers coffee can, into the lid of which we had pounded air holes with a thick nail. The nightcrawlers we put into a mixture of club moss, coffee grounds, and sand. The idea was that they were to scrub themselves clean and tough. Instead, because of too much moisture, they turned to mush and died. But there were always more to be dug. Usually we fished with the Helin Flat Fish and it is what we caught our few trout on. We also tried popgear in front of our worms and a special spoon called the FST. I don’t recall them ever producing so much as a strike.

The lake held cutthroats. It was entirely a cutthroat fishery and they were all natives, since the rainbow hatchery program was yet to begin extensively. There were not many cutts, but there didn’t have to be, for there were few fishers around. Most of the men had gone off to war, and the few that remained home in essential industries did not have the time or the gasoline to drive to the hills in search of trout. We had the lake pretty much to ourselves.

The fish averaged about fourteen inches, which is a pound or a little more. They were deep-bodied fish and spectacularly green, with heavy black freckling and reddish orange slashes under their chins so vivid that you thought for a moment the fish was bleeding. When you wiped its chin, nothing came off on your fingers. We were always doing this as a kind of visual check.

We fished for them hard, but caught them seldom. Oh, there were a few visitors to the lake who took them with a depressing degree of regularity. One was an old man (of about my present age). He had a boat of his own. Prams they were called. It fit in the back of a pickup truck, just as they do today. A pram, incidentally, is nothing more than a portable rowboat. It is generally under ten feet in length, most often eight, and is suitable for a solitary fisher. If you try taking out a second person in it, the pram’s balance is thrown off badly, and it rows like you were dragging a pair of anchors. It tend to prescribe a circular course, as well. When you pull to the right, it goes to the left, and vice versa. And it takes about five times as many strokes of the oars to go an ordinary distance. This you learn the hard way. You are not apt to repeat it soon.

Our boat on Lake Windsock was a genuine rowboat. It could accommodate one Arnold and two Golofons. If Art rowed, I sat in the passenger’s seat, and Gary rode the bow, and the weight would be fairly evenly distributed throughout its length, about three-hundred pounds of us, and, since the boat had a small keel, it would steer decently, though it rode low in the water and in a mild chop seemed to make no forward progress. It took half an hour to go any short distance. We’d extend our lines over the side, mine in back center, theirs to each side, and pray we didn’t get a tangle. Our eighteen-pound-test braided silk lines looked so much alike that they could never be separated out again and had to be cut free and tied with knots. We tried to avoid this.

I knew that it was a good idea to get my orange Flat Fish out farther than the others, if I wanted a strike. This was important early knowledge. And I would beg Art to let me row, for I knew already what I’ve seen repeated so often since, namely, that he who mans the oars controls the fishing destiny and gets most the fish.

Why this happens is complicated. It has to do with keeping one line more taut than the others and the lure wiggling just right, neither too fast nor too slow. It is best to let the others think that you simply like to row, then do it, whether the lake is flat or wind-lashed like a Jacuzzi. They will believe you, until they realize you are catching more fish than the others put together. And of course this is precisely your intention.

A Flatfish was made of wood, probably white pine, and crafted precisely by hand by workers perhaps using templates. Today it is made of injection-molded plastic, which makes it less destructible and far cheaper to manufacture. It ought to be better, right? It is worse. And it ought to be cheaper, when the former cost is adjusted for inflation. It is not. It’s taken me a long time to comprehend that the price of a product is only dimly related to how much it costs to make it. And I can’t explain why it doesn’t work as well. I’m sure trout aren’t any smarter than they used to be, or anglers much less skillful.

Wooden Flat Fish used to be painted and would show the teeth marks of legions trout, a record of each and every strike, many fish lost, comprising a wonderful life history of the particular lure. It would wear that history proudly and display it to whomever looked at it, usually only me. (But I knew and marveled.) Today Flat Fish come in many daylight fluorescent colors. Some are spotted, some airbrushed with merging colors, some luminous. All work well at various times. But I miss some of the simple color schemes. There were a couple of natural-looking oranges that are no longer available. And sometimes we would make up our own color combinations, or try to duplicate one we’d heard was deadly.

A favorite trick was to take an orange one and paint red spots around it with a woman’s nail polish. It looked like nothing that might be found swimming in a lake, no natural creature, but it worked wonderfully for the old man in the pram who outfished everybody. It never worked so well for any of us. And yellow was excellent, but only sometimes. Also frog, frog-finish being nothing more than a shiny olive, with irregular black amoeba splotches and a dash of ochre thrown in. That comprised the spectrum. No silver, no gold flake: you had to go to spoons or spinners for that effect. Nor black, either. Now black would have been great, we now know, and so would have been purple. I am presently attracted to a black one, with some sparkle added in the form of flakes.

It was fairly easy to come up with an orange Flat Fish with red pokadots. We all had mothers, didn’t we, and they all painted their fingernails from time to time. So we beseeched them; we actually begged. And one by one they gave in to us. Rarely did the bright little bottles come back to them. We hoarded them until they dried out. Who knows, we thought, they might work well with other lures, and we did not want to be caught without. And occasionally we lost a Flat Fish on a buried snag, cried briefly from the loss, then went out and bought another. Naturally, it needed the paint modification.

The dream was the creation of a perfect lure, a plug that would catch fish all of the time. He who possessed it would be the envy of all. He would be greatly admired. Envy was important to us. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Instead of returning home with a single lone specimen of trout, at best, you might have a big bag of native cutts to show off.

It would mean you had mastered the lake, rather than been defeated by it in the form of a skunk, one more time.

It was camping at its best. Three of us around a fire heaped three times taller than it need be, so that our butts froze while our faces and hands and knees roasted. We shivered, sometimes uncontrollably, for long periods of time. Boy Scouts are but children off in the woods, though professing to be knowledgeable and experienced. The opposite is true. On a lake they are on vacation from the strictures of scouting, so they cut loose and compensate greatly, saying “fuck” and “shit” more often than any possible set of conditions require. Saying these words whenever they feel like it, over and over, enjoying the startled ring of them in the air and the shock and violation attendant on them. Those times are little different from today. I still hear the words said, albeit from a distance of time and space. Keep the adults at a distance is the motto.

We told dirty jokes around the fire, jokes that had been heard before and still were not fully understood, not even with new contexts in which to position them: “Me? I was six inches in Snow.” “Joe, go grease up the cat.” “I’d bleed, too, if somebody had cut my balls and pecker off.” On and on, into the night. Every night. And no adults to tell us to knock it off, wise up, clean up our acts and mouths. And we told and half-believed ghost stories, too, horror stories about corpses and blood and amputations. Stories designed to make your skin crawl when you slithered at last into your sleeping bag, always dank and a little damp.

Stories with giant woodland animals in them, prowling the scrub, thin woods much like these, grizzlies eating everything and everyone in sight. They had an uncontrollable thirst for. . . blood! Human gore. And hear the woods ring out from a dry stick breaking in the night, like a gunshot, or experience a series of creakings and cracklings that sounded like the advance of an army, an army of bears. Or could it be the dreaded wolverine—a dog-size creature with the teeth of a piranha? Its bite was lethal.

How much is lost when we our innocence departs and how little is gained in the form of compensation for it. Yet who would wish to go back there to live?

I was reading Ray Bergman at the time, his famous treatise on trout. I believed everything he said. (Still do.) What a writer, what a fisher! Fish were predictable creatures whose rigid rules of behavior could be puzzled out, but man had a superior brain and could outwit them with his Sherlock Holmes-style powers of thinking. He could deduce why they didn’t strike and come up with the logical answer. Fly fishing was simply a matter of gaining knowledge and applying it. So book learning was helpful. (Did I ever think otherwise?) It’s what they kept telling us in school, anyway. When Ray Bergman found the trout in some remote Upstate New York location not biting, nobody catching any, he put his great analytical mind on the problem. Reaching into one of his many flyboxes (the contents of which were duplicated in the book in painter’s colors by a friend of his, a doctor, no less, in plate after plate of patterns), he would extract the exact fly that duplicated what they were feeding on, and those elusive trout would literally fling themselves on his hook and be caught. Big ones, too--bigger than any of us had ever experienced by a factor of two or three.

Would Ray Bergman lie? (Would Jesus?) Would Scoutmaster Blondie Kraemer, who headed our troop and took us to remote watery places, but was not known to fish himself?

With my scouting friends, all disciples of Bergman, by now, I would study the surface of Windsock Lake and find nothing much floating there, the trout not rising regularly, and when they did consent to dimple the surface what they seemed to be taking was so tiny as to barely serve as a canapé for a hungry trout, let alone be capable of sating him. Let’s see--it would take about three thousand midges to comprise a single meal for a solitary feeding trout, and by rough count our lake revealed about two dozen such tiny creatures within eye range. How many lakes would it take to produce what was lacking in that sustaining mouthful? I couldn’t guess. Our cutthroat population would not even rise to inspect (and reject) a Mosquito fly that was perhaps twenty times as large as what flecked our lake’s calm surface, few and far between. So we continued to study the water. Midges in their hatching left tiny rings, mimicking trout, but the trout themselves were not interested in the duns or spinners. (I could never tell one from the other.) Inspection, we had knew, was an important precursor to getting a trout to strike. A trout had to first look at what it would later eat; if it didn’t come up for a look-see, there went all hope of a trout today. And I couldn’t get a single genuine inspection of my fly. Nor could Art or Gary. Oh, how we tried. So we trolled a Flat Fish.

The extent of our despair is hard to communicate to someone who hasn’t experienced it. And if he has ever been there, in our shoes, precisely, it is unnecessary to elaborate our feeling further. He will understand in his bones and his heart beat with empathy. For weren’t we all thirteen once?

“What’ll it be today, Flat Fish or FST?”

“Flat Fish.”

“Flat Fish for me, too.”

“I’ll fish an FST.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Then I’ll use a Flat Fish, too.”

“That’s more like it.”

All of our fish were caught on Flat Fish. It was the weapon of choice among seasoned warriors. You could troll a FST all day, ten hours, and get maybe one good strike, but since the hook was so big (a Siwash) you would invariably lose the fish, and have nothing to show for all your time on the water. With a Flat Fish, especially one encircled with Mom’s scarlet enamel, you might get only one hit, too, but there was a good chance you would hook the fish and land it. With those tiny treble hooks and the (patent pending) Off-Set Hooking System, your chances of snaring a fish’s jaw in any one or more of the six hook points was better than with all the other lures put together.

You beat the odds with a Flat Fish. You hedged your bets. You challenged the gods and took advantage of their inattention to small matters, such as a boy catching fish. We all knew this. With a Flat Fish you might just beat fate, which seemed to consist of getting skunked time after time. But that’s okay--you were immune to depression. After all, you were fishing. It was worthwhile in itself.

It must have rained, rained often, at Lake Windsock, but I don’t remember it, only its muddy aftermath. Did we then huddle under our canvas, water leaking in along the edges, where stakes held it loose to the ground (instead of tight, which we greatly desired), and listen to the drops drum ceaselessly on our roof? I simply don’t remember it. But the lake was in the low foothills and the time was late April or early May. So it must have. Rain pelted the land for days and made of the lake’s surface a nest of pockmarks, as though the water were boiling. Not so. In my mind, the sun is always shining, or at the worse, thinly veiled by cloud.

So let’s assume some rain, or a lot of it. For purposes of truthful discourse. Then Art would have said, “Isn’t it ever going to stop?” It would be just like him.

And I: “It will when we go home.”

And Gary: “Boy, isn’t that the way?” For of course it had rained, and the truth scrubbed from our collective memory. Rain is the normal course of events. The nice thing about a lake is that it doesn’t overflow its banks and turn chocolate when it rains, the way a river does. No, it remains contained. It takes what it gets from the sky and accepts it for what it is, water. Its chief job is to absorb.

Wet canvas and a smoldering fire that often does not often burst into flames is the result. And the rain reins in the wetness of its drops, if that is possible. (It isn’t, not even in memory.) What did we eat at Lake Windsock? Wonderful things, food right out of the can, sometimes lightly heated so that the contents lost their chill, but usually not. Lumpy meat, mostly, swimming in congealed fat. Chicken and noodles, chili, Dinty Moore beef stew (which is largely potatoes and gravy, by the way). And that wonder, Spaghetti-Os. Cold, it becomes a condiment, almost a candy. Since there were three of us, and each had brought something different, and often we got low on supplies, we sometimes mixed the contents of two or more cans together creatively and, lo, we had a unique dinner. And if we liked it (and even if we didn’t), we often bestowed on it a pet name. That name--in every instance-- is lost to time.

“What do you call this?”

“Chicken and beef supreme.”

“Chicken and beef surprise?”

“That’ll do. In fact, I like it better your way.”

“It looks awful.”

“Then don’t look while you eat it.”

“Wait until you taste it.”

“Better?”

“You only wish.”

“Then don’t look while you eat it.”

“Makes me think the dog is sick again.”

“There goes what’s left of my appetite.”

Which is precisely what we were trying to do. Murder the meal. Gag the opponent.

We’d continue to fish, right up to the last minute, when Mr. Golofon was due to pick us up, in hope of a nice cutthroat to show him. Meanwhile, the rowboat was filling up with rainwater. (So it must have been raining, ourselves sodden again or still.) One us of us would bail fast with a tin can saved for just that purpose, err we might sink. And bailing was also required because our boat leaked in a small, steady way.

A loon was being strangled once more down at the far end of the lake. This happened every evening, and again in the morning, while we were still snug in our bags. The bird’s cry was eerie and forlorn, slightly spooky and scary. Heard so often, the horror had not gone out of the event for us. Poor loon, to be murdered so often that nobody would heed its outrage. It was much like the boy crying, Wolf.

Because there were so few trout around, each was large, large on a scale of relative trout values, anyway. Whenever one rose out on the lake and fell back, the sound was if something had crashed down from the sky. A crater was formed in the water, and the circles spread out from the vortex, ever widening. The hole was almost as large as if a toilet had been flushed. We stood marveling. Or, rather, we sat in our boat seats, staring at each. There were not many.

The feeding ring, so rare; the loon; the smell of a fart-redolent sleeping bag; a smoldering alder fire, with its plume that followed your face. These things are permanently lodged in my mind. One thing more. The sight of that old man hunched over his oars in his pram. He not so much as stroked the water as caressed it with their tips. A beautiful, graceful sight. I’ve always tried to row like that and only recently come close. Perhaps you have to have grown old to do it. If you stroke them right, you lift only the tips of the blades clear of the streaming water; they deposit their bit right back, in a tiny trickle from each. There is no splash, no noise. I see him still. And then there is the sharp bend of his rod as a cutthroat strikes hard. He reels it in with a calm, thoughtful patience.

I had a Flat Fish now, just like his, with red spirals painted on it, but I still could not catch trout the way he could. I think his success had something to do with how he worked the boat and handled the oars. He’d fish for a couple of hours, then have a near weight limit. It was a whole lot of fish. Nine or ten, easy.

How we envied him, his calm and lonely success. He needed no audience. Rarely did he speak and always maintained a distance from us that was more than polite. We wished to be just like him—though of course not old. Well, now we are. Old, I mean. Only I still don’t catch the numbers of fish that he did. Nor ones of that size.

Cutthroats all, cutthroats only.

Fifty years later, is it? Lake Windsock in only vaguely recognizable as I approach it, hauling my pram in the back of my new Ford pickup truck. Where the road cuts off at a slant from the McMurray-Conway Highway I see a familiar slant of asphalt; funny but I remember that slope as being dirt. And the climb is about the same grade and distance. After Mr. Golofon, my own father drove me and our family there on several occasions. Soon I was able to transport myself, for my father was generous. Then I had my own car.

Off to my right is an impressive entrance to what appears to be a housing development of fine homes, with an open gate beckoning from between two red-brick whitewashed pillars. I am a long way from the lake still. Only the corner of one house is available for viewing as I whisk by, quickly averting my eyes because of the sharp turn ahead, but it looks to be much more than I could ever afford, and I can imagine the excellent view of the Skagit valley stretching off to the South. How the area has grown and become affluent. It used to be the domain of poor dairy farmers.

Just before the remembered dip to the lake, my heart begins to pound with serious thumps. It is the pulse of memory. On this knoll, when I was in college, my mother, father, little brother, and I all had a wonderful picnic. An old snapshot is what brings it back sharply and prods remembrance concretely. I am wearing a cap with my fraternity’s Greek initials carved boastfully into its turned up back, a round-necked white T-shirt, for it must be a warm spring day, unlike this cool, gray one. We are all hungrily hunched over sandwiches my mother brought out of a wicker hamper, over there. It is she who took the picture, since she is missing from the tableau. A glimpse of the lake is to the left. It is calm as a plate. This is about all I have of Lake Windsock’s past to sustain me.

Today a road veers off to the left, just as the lake hoves into sight, with a sign directing me to the Department of Wildlife public access. I should have guessed. The access is about where we use to camp. The ground is not paved but worn flat and hard from countless tires of cars, trucks, and boat trailers being brought to the lake by fishers like me. Two cars dot the parking area, and down by the launch a large boat is put-put-putting into the wide takeout slot, for it is done fishing. And while I would prefer to share the lake with nobody, a solitary boat is a much better situation than I might expect, this midweek late afternoon in early May.

What concerns me most, however, is the road winding off to the left. It is new. It leads off to homes, I’d guess. Homes on Lake Windsock? How dare they? The answer is, Easily. Lakefront lots have sold at a premium ever since the Second World War ended, a half-century ago, so why should I expect the lake of my youth to be spared development? My boy’s soul is not mentally prepared for such a thing. It is a travesty, but one I must see for myself.

So I park in one of the areas reserved for fishers and walk back to the entrance, and begin to trudge up the drive; the large McPherson’s For Sale sign at its start gives me excuse for trespass, if somebody wants to challenge me and my violation of the Private sign just outside the open gate. The road briefly climbs, then levels off and begins to circle the lake, covering perhaps a scant quarter of its circumference, and disappears out of sight at a turn. My eyes are astonished. Mobile homes--mostly old single-wides--have been shoehorned into slots that must be no more that twenty feet apart. There they stand, all in a row, most of them in a sad state. Rust has streaked their sides and some of them have a green algal coating on their paint. Now I’ve heard of fifty-foot lots, sixty-foot lots, and surely ones of 75 and 100 feet, but the only way that these lots might be created is if a man bought a forty foot lot and was permitted to divide it in half, that is, form his own little sub-division. And why would he do that? Why, to make more money.

If you divide a forty-foot lot in half you have a twenty-foot lot. (I’ve always been good at math.) You put a twelve-wide mobile on it and you have eight feet left over, four on each side. Plenty of room to spare. Much better than if you put in the mobile lengthwise, so that it would have a long view of the lake. To be fair, I must say that the lots are fairly deep, making up in that dimension what they are lacking in width, with enough room to allow a carslip out in front and a patch of green lawn, fore and aft, before the land drops sharply to the lake. There, I see, most of the mobile homes have erected Jerry-built piers, which are dilapidated, and jut precariously out into the water. Some are half in, half out, that is, mainly submerged. They wouldn’t bear a child’s weight.

A few lots, however, have resisted the urge to subdivide and have houses or double-wide mobile homes on them. They look absolutely palatial, compared to the others. Since there is a ridge line along the lake, with rises and falls to it, the better homes on the bigger lots are the ones that have the best view. And what a view it is. A quick look reveals an untroubled expanse of lake rippled like tinfoil under a leaden sky. If you look again, or look longer the first time, you will see a lot of development stretched round the lake and occupying much of its circumference. It is a far cry from the old days. (But who is there besides me to know this?)

The lake is overgrown with homes. They are built everywhere where construction is permitted and many places where it is not. Some houses are raised on posts above winter-high water; it has since receded, leaving them looking like mired storks. And I see some more homes, atop a pretty hill, all very picturesque, that are gazing down at this place, the trailer park. (There is no other apt name for it.) The shoreline in front of me, where I can glimpse it, is broken by an assortment of piers and floats anchored to the lake bottom. No two are like. Everybody has a boat tied up to his dock, or else pulled up on shore.

It is not all crowded ugliness. There are parts of the lake that still have high aesthetic value. It takes a lot to completely defeat a lowland lake. Much of the shoreline remains bog, unapproachable except by boat. It is properly the home of loon and beaver. You can’t drive on it, walk on it, sit on it, build on it. It is useless, for all practical purposes. But it nourishes all sorts of wildlife, insects, flora, fish. What was true of Eudora holds true at Windsock, and for that matter at all lowland lakes. Their remaining wildness keeps them true to themselves. It may be their indefatigable quality. It will keep them halfway honest to their origins and their basic nature well into the twenty-first century. Or so I hope.

It bothered me at first, the caretakers gasoline-powered, self-propelled lawnmowers at Eudora. I thought the whine disturbing, but then I asked myself, What is the alternative? To cut an acre of lawn by hand? I am thinking nominatively of myself. I want to be primitive only on my own terms, you see. But compared to all the human activity at Windsock, Eudora is a virtual wilderness area, sanctified, wisely protected. I take my hat off to the Finns and their foresight. I guess most things today are relative in their state of purity and the tranquillity they may or may not possess. Tranquillity is mostly in the mind, anyway. If you think your particular slice of the world’s pie is peaceful, then it is. At least for the moment.

A man is mowing a tiny hedge with a trimmer. It is electric powered, not gasoline, to give the guy his due, but nonetheless the thing whines like a hornet. The sound travels out over the lake and back again, reverberating, echoing hollowly and resonantly. This colony seems to me a continual madhouse. Somebody is always doing something with a tool that makes a loud noise. I guess I’m old fashioned and hope for too much in the way of a quiet day off in the woods. The fault is mine.

A man is washing his car. He does it from a series of buckets drawn from the lake. This is a definite clue. What, no water under pressure here? No wells—community or private? Impossible, yet here is the evidence. This is Skagit County, and the local government is so hungry to increase its tax base that it would, for a while, anyway, issue a building permit to anybody who could fill out the form and pay the considerable application fee. But state law bars wells from so small an individual property. And it is often the case that the people will not cooperate enough to put in a community water system, usually because the cost to individuals is too high, in their paltry opinion.

If no water is available under pressure (I hope I’m wrong about this, but there is much visual data), then how would septic tanks work? They wouldn’t. So . . . maybe the people don’t have any tanks? Only privies? It’s best not to ask how this would work out. But if you do ask, the answer would have to be that they may have septic tanks without drainfields. The waste goes right into the ground and seeps into the lake. How awful. What a terrible thing to do to a lake. Windsock is on the receiving end of everybody’s toilet and sink.

I simply can’t believe my eyes. Who would commit such a crime? People who want to live along its edge at all cost, that’s who. I continue my walk along the graveled private road, looking for the For Sale sign promised outside the gate, but I don’t see it. Only homes that are definitely not for sale. They seem to be occupied by people not intending to go anywhere soon.

I mosey along, looking wildly, widely, to each side, smiling all the while, a simple stranger on foot. The looks I get are not abundantly suspicious. Good. “Never seen that one before, I wonder what he’s up to?” I grin like some minstrel whose mind has gone South. I bow, I wave, I radiate endless good will, cheerfulness, hoping my attitude will be taken as lack of guile. The message I proclaim through my distorted body language is, “I mean you no harm. Please, don’t shoot. Look—I’m a harmless fisher.”

It seems to be working. Up ahead is the ornate rose-colored script on a field of white which is the real estate sign. Feeling eyes burning on my back that mimic the sun, which is not in evidence today, I go into a dumb-show of having my search rewarded. Here it is, what I’ve been seeking. I shoot my hands up into the air in the universal sign of joyful discovery. (Not really; it is but a trope.) I rush up to the sign and embrace it as though it contains the final clue in a treasure hunt that will make me rich, the envy of all. (No I don’t.) I look right, I look left, I lift my eyes to the gray heavens, I tiptoe to the edge of the grass and gaze straight ahead, one hand shading my brow from an imaginary glare, as though I am looking into a store window that contains harsh reflections, etc. I enter the yard, walk around the mobile home, studying it, as though I intend to buy it (fat chance), seemingly exclaiming to myself with enthusiasm, “Marvelous, wonderful. How great it must be to live here.” All more of the dumb show. But I am thinking, God, what a dump. What kind of a pig would live in such a sty? A pig who is down on his luck and doesn’t really love a lake, or else he’d live elsewhere, so long as it is country and he can participate in the illusion that he is free because there are a few trees around him, and no law to obey because in point of fact there isn’t any; no sheriff, no 911, no volunteer fire department.

Likewise, some people believe that chickens migrate, that is, they can fly and will seek greener pastures, or more barleycorn. (The reason they don’t is because they love where they are and life in a pen or cage.) To me it looks as if everybody is so bunched up here, life can be no fun and will provide no respite from city living. But this is one man’s opinion, and carries no special weight. What I’m after today, when I should be fishing, and soon will be, is a fair assessment of Lake Windsock today, and whether or not the years have been kind to it. So far my estimation is that they have been cruel instead. I beg to stand corrected.

A woman looks at me as though I might steal the laundry she has just hung out on her clothesline. It is, I notice, mostly oversize undies that will never be white again. I smile (though my face is still hurting from my last, long, phony smile at her neighbor) and ask pleasantly, “M’am, can you tell me please how much they are asking for that fine home?” The mockery in my voice is completely disguised, I know. Nobody is better than me at genuine phoniness, the real article.

She recognizes me as just another liar to come down her pike and, perhaps in addition, a possible underwear thief. “Don’t know,” she replies. Then, seemingly contradicting herself, “I hear round a hundred and eighty. Can that be right?”

“Rent?” I ask, still with that confident cheerfulness that I hope will become habitual with me, at least in certain places, such as this one, and at special times.

“Sheet,” she says, with hard eyes and contempt for my financial acumen. I recognize the word, though it is usually pronounced differently. “That’s the sale price. Use to be more. They just finished marking it down again.”

“Sure is nice,” I say, scurrying off with enough sideways motion as to slip handily between two of the homes that are no longer mobile because they have lost their wheels and somehow acquired wooden skirting that comes close to matching their metal sides.

And in a moment I am back at the public access, panting, where the fisher I’d seen approaching shore in his skiff is now bent over the water’s edge, cleaning a nice mess of trout with his multi-bladed pocketknife. A woman comes over to what is left of a picket fence and hollers at him, “Don’t do that here.”

He looks up from his task. “Oh? Why not?”

“We drink the lake water, that’s why.”

“You don’t?” He stops in mid-slit. “Not really?”

It is what I would have asked, too. The exact words. The guy with the knife and I study each other deadpan. It is unbelievable news. They drink the lake . . . and are still alive? A miracle.

Where the boat sits, waiting for its loader, a skim of oil shimmies across the water. It might be gasoline, it might be motor oil, it might be some other awful waste produce. Fish guts from a previous boater lie in three inches of water and I can see that some of the cleaned trout had not spawned yet. Tiny red gills also lie there, along with long fat strings of pink offal. It is apparently where everybody cleans his catch and where she habitually shouts at them not to. The situation is, you might say, dynamic.

A wise man would turn away from the lake at this point his dreams shattered, and seek some new, unfamiliar place, a place without earlier associations, in which to fish. Not me. Instead, I am heartened by the man’s catch of fat trout and want some for myself. They appear to be hatchery rainbows from the Arlington hatchery, up the McGovern Road. I wonder if any of my beloved native cutthroats are left in Windsock? Wouldn’t that be wonderful, after fifty years? It might compensate for the mobile-home plague.

So I offload my trusty pram and shove it down to the thin water’s edge, fetch my gear from the Explorer, insert my oars in their eager locks, and push off into deeper water, one foot wet already, balancing wildly as I forge my way to the boat seat in crab fashion, which I first straddle then occupy, bringing the boat back to an even keel. Extending my oars into the water, I dip first one, then the other, feeling the deliciousness of encountering their liquid resistance once again. I feel a little like a dry drunk lifting the day’s first shotglass to his lips. We are not so awfully different, he and I. I need my watery fix, too.

The thought that the good folks of Lake Windsock drink this slimy brew fades and I see it as merely dark trout habitat. I look down into the tea-stained depths and watch the visibility disappear by inches. I remember the lake as tannic, but not this much so. Here and there I glimpse the same oily smears as I did on shore. It is just like what city mud puddles cast back into your lowered eyes, reflecting the tops of buildings, the reds and greens of traffic lights, and flashes of obscure distant neon. Gradually the lake becomes a lake purely, bereft of people and crowding civilization. It is why people turn to lakes, any lake, for renewal. I search for our camping site, from so long ago, but the shore is so altered, so denuded, that there are no clues by which to identify it, and finally I give up sadly. The most I can say is that it is over that way, to the South. And I point with one hand still holding an oar.

There are trout here still, unmistakably. Or there are trout here again, different ones, probably not the same dominant species. Yet the water looks very much as it did then. I cast over the side the same apple-green scud that seems to work in so many lowland lakes at this time of the year--that did its share of damage in Eudora recently. It is tied on a sturdy size twelve, but I’ve got the pattern tied down to sixteens. The trout had better not want anything smaller, for I am unable to provide it. Thick fingers, weak eyes. I near some familiar-looking weedbeds in a tiny cove. Slowly I rise and, balancing delicately on the shifting balls of my feet, begin to cast toward shore.

When you don’t use an anchor, the shore keeps advancing until you finally have to shove yourself away from it with the tip of an oar. You poke at the brush to keep it at a distance. Without an anchor, you drift around in slow circles and find yourself casting farther back over your shoulder, until your neck locks and you can turn your body no more. Finally you take recourse to pulling on the oars again. Once more. It is most annoying. But even when I have an anchor, have two, I seldom use them. There is something about anchors that is antithetical to flyfishing. They belong to the world of bait.

Or perhaps anchors are for a future that includes chironomid fishing.

The first trout hits with a swirl after about fifteen minutes. That’s just long enough to get hungry for a strike, but not so long that you begin saying your little prayer, over and over, in the area of your mind that you keep forever secret. The rod bends and sticks its tip about three inches down into the water. What a surprise. Well, every strike is, even though you believe that it will arrive at any moment, for a good fisher is constantly vigilant. You wish you would react to a strike quicker, less fumblingly, but know you probably never will, and have long ago stopped taking away points from your performance for your slowness. You have to stop being your own worst critic. (There are plenty of others who want the job.)

It is a misdemeanor, not a felony, however. It is quickly forgotten in what happens next. The pull of the trout is what does it. You are instantly reborn, a fishing fool. You tend to forget (but not for long) the miracle of a trout taking a fly, for whatever dim purpose it has. Being tricked into attacking a bit of feathers and fur is firmly rooted in a trout’s sensibility, and thanks goodness for it, for without it what we regularly do would be even more absurd.

A trout may take because the fly looks good enough to eat or else because the fly has invaded the trout’s territory, and that is unacceptable behavior. This makes a trout a little like a Doberman pincer. But a tad less pugnacious. The fish jumps repeatedly; it is not named rainbow for nothing. It prescribes a repeatable parabola in the sky. This fish is a simple little hatchery rainbow and its sides show remnant parr marks that are being gradually obscured by the paprika-colored skin of residency. It has a blunt, rounded nose, and looks somewhat like a female steelhead of adult size, which does not lose much in its translation from saltwater and back again to fresh.

All of the trout’s major fins look as if somebody has taken a file to their corners. I admit, it gives them a slightly more streamlined look, very much like car manufacturers do to their fenders, every few years. (You had better like this kind of back-and-forth change because it is what you are going to be served today, both in cars and trout.)

A nine-inch fish does not exactly rip line off your reel, no matter how lightly you adjust the check, and it is not fair to pull back on the rod in order to coax the reel spool to spin and let go with a foot or two of line. That is cheating. Snubbed up hard, though, a small trout will cause a rod to buck and plunge. Its tip dips repeatedly to the surface. And even little lake rainbows fight hard before they give up the ghost. Often their little life is at stake, and it is what they are fighting for, sport be damned. I disdain the use of the net I ceremoniously bring along in the boat for anything under ten inches. So I swing in the fish in over the side and catch it in my dry left palm. I decide to keep this one, and whatever others I may catch today, until I have enough for one meal for two, or two meals for one, namely my wife. It is early season and these are planted trout.

Now there are those who give a trout a rap on the head with a pipe bowl. To do this you must smoke a pipe, or else carry one expressly for this purpose, which is an affectation. Instead, I quickly break its little neck by sticking a finger down its throat and bending its head sharply back. This causes the tiny aorta to pump out a geyser of blood in whatever direction you point the fish, you murderer you. (Pardon my vocabulary, but we are talking about inducing death, albeit a simple fish’s, but there is no good point served by pretending it is anything else than murder. We are man, and man kills. Rarely is it in self-defense or for needed food.) If you must do it, for the sake of a fish dinner, do it and get it over with quickly, humanely.

I don’t know about you, but for every fish I kill I am personally involved and die a little (admittedly on a tiny scale). This may be fatuous, more hypocrisy. May an induced death ever give pause. Even the death of a hatchery trout, a fish raised for that express purpose, should induce in the angler the sense that, for just a brief moment, he is what he kills. He is killing himself, however slightly. I don’t want to dwell on this or make too strong a case against it. But why do I shudder involuntarily at the exact moment the trout dies? Answer me that and you will have told me a whole lot about the pair of us.

Once the first fish is dead killing gets easier. It becomes another thoughtless act, or habit. A dead fish is so much dead meat, a quantity of it, and into the creel it goes--or in my case, into the bottom of the boat, where the little silvery corpse will stare up at me for the rest of the day. At the day’s end the corpses will be counted, one more time, rolled up in some old, dry newspapers. Then they will be toted home and proudly displayed: The Catch.

One trout does not a day make, nor an afternoon’s production, nor an evening’s. But it helps. It stands between you and a skunk, which is a clear sign to the world of failure. And it serves to raise the spirits, in every instance. A rainbow is a great fish. It can tolerate warmer temperatures than any trout except the brown; it can handle the cold better than any except the brookie, but a brook trout is really not a trout, as every schoolboy knows, but a char, so does not count exactly, but is so wonderful a fish that it has become an honorary trout, giving no ground to the others, and is perhaps even more beautiful, being noticeably different. Browns are far off, remote. And a cutthroat is much like a rainbow, its true brother, even though a shade more rare and special, at least to me.

I am not so much fishing a lake as revisiting a past, one laden by time and events. Fifty years—fifty fucking years, man! I won’t ask, “Where have they gone?” for nobody knows better than I, though I often forget the details of events, sometimes find myself unable to recall the events themselves, for whole decades even, unable to separate key happenings from the Sixties from the Seventies, keep getting them mixed up with the recent Eighties, which live practically next door. I suppose everybody has the ability claimed special by writers to see himself through foreign eyes, view himself often as a bumbling fool, a ludicrous person, a scarecrow, a fumbler, a pompous old ass, a grim reaper of everybody’s fun, Gloomy Gus, a clown, a dork, a pedant, a nerd, an ignoramus, and so on. It is better to have this ability, I do believe, than to live without it, though often it makes you lament.

All of the men on the paternal side of my family have this great shock of wiry hair that turns white, if they live long enough. And all except for my father, who remained throughout his life clean-shaven, affect as much facial hair as they wish to grow. And we are all skinny, though grown potbellied and slothful with time. In snapshots, or in the mirror, I know myself to be one of them. A male Arnold.

Standing up in a small boat today, waving a slender graphite rod back and forth in the air, its yellow line snaking out and waving back again, my hunched body wobbling above the water, wild-eyed, flailing, I would make Don Quixote appear a calm and patient man. We fool only ourselves with a pompous seriousness.

I observe all this, you see, even as I go about my absurd, daily routines. Yet I know as much. What is more silly, after all, than a grown man with his expensive toys, working harder at fishing than he ever has at some piece of work for some man, in order to catch a trout that will go no more than a foot in length and immediately be released? I know myself to be what I am, as did that other old salt, Popeye The Sailor Man. And what is that, pray tell? Something in this book must remain my secret.

I’ll give you a tip, all the same. A man must learn to live with himself before he is to be fit company to live with somebody else. That doesn’t mean you have to go into the desert, like Jesus, or into the heart of the Congo, like Joseph Conrad, but out far enough to experience the wild, to taste its salt on your lips, and know that it is good. Fishing is, among other things, a purge, a regular excision of the world of commerce and neckties, the getting and earning, a fast-forwarding past the car ads that cry out like harpies; fishing is a laxative for the soul that leaves you reborn with a clean gut into a colony of flowering dogwood and trident vine maple. It is all there for you, expressly. As the waiter keeps urging you to do, one too many times, “Enjoy your meal.” Well, baby, this is the main course.

There is something in the outdoor air that can’t be synthesized. Nor can it be bought. There is no substitute for it, either. If you don’t live on a lake or a river, as I do, you must hop in your car and burn gasoline to get to somebody else’s body of water and breathe in the air above it. You must suck it into your lungs and be loath to let it back out. It is yours, all yours, and you have earned it in several different ways, none of them especially honorable or respectable, if you are to speak the truth and let it be heard. (And, outdoors, nothing-but-the-truth is all that is allowed to be given voice.)

Today you are simply an aging man rowing a pram around the lake of your youth, exalting in what passes before your eyes. Nobody, none of the people in the aluminum-can immobile homes, can take away your pleasure, if you won’t yield it. So--as a good fisher does, one who has fished for a lifetime--you strive to dominate the water. You command it by your very presence to give you a fish. You needn’t raise your voice to do it, either. It is all in the set of your shoulders, as they haul on the oars to glide you to a new location, fly trailing thoughtlessly on the surface. Your intention is to cast toward the hemlock log floating at the edge of what might be a pocket, if this were a river, and bring it back in a series of jerks. But a trout suddenly strikes. A fish nabs the trailing fly as if his future depends on it. And perhaps it does. You are fishing for the creel now, remember. If the trout are small, this comprises four fish apiece; if larger, two each. You will take no prisoners. Sorry, Charlie. Better luck next time, as the ad says. (Except there will be none.)

You are fishing a two-fly rig. This is something new for you, a first. Curt Kraemer, the area fish biologist for anadromous fish but knowledgeable about resident ones, as well, tells you to try it. It is a good method, he says. “Is it legal?” you ask. He looks at you with full, professional exasperation. (There is none worse.) You like the power of being able to provoke such a look from him. It is a joke, he realizes. You’ve put him in a pocket by suggesting that he might be advising you to do something illegal, and part of his job is to make sure the existing regulations are obeyed to the letter.

He brushes the remark aside, as it deserves, telling you what is involved in the new rig. You need a dropper loop, he says. When you look blank, he tells you how to tie one, as if you were a beginner. Of course: it only holds to reason. You begin to remember. It was decades ago you tied your last one. (Steelheaders don’t use droppers.) So, one night, you tie up a few spare tippets with short dropper leaders and longer ones trailing off for what is called the tail fly. You want to be ready well ahead of the necessary moment.

As you row along, keeping half an eye on the line drifting behind the pram, there is a sudden dip and then a hard tug as the rod tip dives into the water. You catch the rod just before you lose it. A trout vaults, trailing white water, and disappears back into its dark element, leaving a wake of bubbles. You feel the light, magnesium Orvis reel grudgingly give a few inches of skinny yellow running line. A good fish, it is behaving a little differently from the first one. Dare you think . . . cutthroat? Indeed you do. The fish has a decidedly cutthroaty feel about it and its fight, not pausing after a flurry to rest up (or whatever rainbows do, when the franticness momentarily ceases) but continuing to struggle doggedly without surcease, as you drag it nearer the boat, the action having a curious sideways motion, first lashing to the right, then to the left, never pausing, not even at the net, which you plunge into the water and miss the fish with, plunge and miss again, and plunge and finally capture the fish in the mesh, head and shoulders first. This is the way it ought to be done, but seldom is.

As it slides to the bottom of the green mesh, you see a flash of red-orange under its chin. Funny but after all the cutts you’ve caught, in all the years, each one seems special and you never lose your sense of wonder, for the cutt is more nearly wild, wild in the sense of not having been processed by man and raised in some artificial environment, than the rainbow. You reach into the mesh and extract your trout gently (as carefully, that is, as you can a struggling fish) and lift it by the leader until you can cradle it in the palm of your less useful hand, the left, still holding the fish in the net, and you raise it clear of the mesh, and still holding it thus you reach for the small hook in the not-large mouth, right there at the corner, the hinge, and you back it out quickly, for it is barbless, all the while you are examining the trout with the eye of the pseudo-scientist, the little boy you are and always have been, ever will be, the boy who has just caught his first trout and is full of astonishment, and you and he are jointly transformed by what you behold, all your former knowledge confounded and rendered nil by your new eyes. It is a cutthroat, true, but it is a rainbow, too. It is a cuttbow or a rainthroat (take your pick), one of Binns’s grotesques, partaking of both species, almost in the same way as a man has the secondary-sexual characteristics of a woman, though greatly reduced in scale, and is therefore both a man and a woman, as he started out in the primordial womb, just as a woman has her masculine side, albeit small and hard to discern, even if you are keen to such things (and I’m not).

You hold a moment of biological time in your hand, the ability of a creature to evolve and adapt to a slowly (over geologic time, that is) changing environment, for the goal of all life is to survive, no matter what, whatever the cost, whatever the price the species may have to pay, in the long run. Thus, this often involves a form of distant incest that must be tolerated, if not approved of. Do not mock it (or me), for it has been the salvation of the species, including man, over the centuries, though of course with its attendant downside, such as hemophilia. So you hold in your wet hand a captured moment of pre-history and thrill at it, and its incredible significance. Then you release it, this wonder, your trout, even though you want to keep it, promised to, and need it for the greedy creel limit you have already fixed in your mind, for this is the first keeper trout of the year, and your small family is hungry for a fry.

You put it back, for it is a libation, as well. You thank the gods for the reward of hope, industry, and application, the fruit of which you hold in your hands, your marked good fortune; in return, you are pledged to return something to them, the minor gods that oversee fishing success, and this release is it, the token. You tell yourself you can easily catch another (ha!), more than one more (ha again!), and you will kill the next trout you capture, even if it is another one of these hybrid wonders. For now you believe (excuse the pun)there are other fish to fry, namely the hatchery rainbows.

The next trout takes after a lull of maybe twenty minutes. The time seems exceedingly long. This fish too is a hybrid, and on the Binns’s scale you’d say it is more cutt than rainbow, perhaps seventy-percent cutt. It wears a decided green cast that healthy rainbows don’t have. Its speckles are much finer and have a random distribution of greater density. Beneath its chin is a pale crimson glow--funny how this varies from cutt to cutt. The brightness of color is no indication of its degree of cutthroatness, you realize, and is unrelated to anything else, becoming an individual characteristic, much like hirsuteness in male humans. It is about as significant as you want to make it.

Two landed, one kept? It is an odd feeling, killing again. How effortlessly can you do it. Man by nature is a murderer, I’ve said, and only a veneer of civilization makes him anything less than a killing machine, hence a mass murderer. He is not fooling anybody, including himself. The fact that our red meat comes to us courtesy of the neighborhood butcher, who hides behind a one-way glass wall much like the executioner at a prison, makes us no less the carnivore than the lion, or less glamorously the buzzard. (I like my steaks rare and aged, as does the buzzard.) But we are not ready to be herbivores. We live in an unhappy time, from the standpoint of evolution, neither this nor that. There are more vegetarians now than there used to be, true, but they don’t live longer lives, not yet. They are poisoned by what came before their changeover. Or is it simply that a given life seems longer because it is lacking in the enjoyment of tasty protein?

Lots of time to ponder while you row. When I first started fishing for larger fish, namely, salmon and steelhead, I faced my first carcass (pocket knife in hand, pointed teaspoon ready to scrape the blood away from the bony pockets along the spine) with trepidation and more than a little attendant nausea. But trout can be quickly opened up and their guts and blood line removed with the thumbnail. Zip. I do it in one fell operation. It is easy and relatively bloodless.

A steelhead or a salmon poses a formidable task. It contains much blood and copious guts. The process of removing them is a slimy, awful operation, and you usually end up in wet red to your elbows. If you stop to think about what you’re doing, you are lost--and you may lose your dinner. But the killer in each of us quickly desensitizes the humanitarian. A few big fish to clean and the mind finds ways of turning off the bloody specifics of the task at hand. The fish gets cleaned, the hands scrubbed free of gore, and one goes on with his life, the fish hanging on a draining hook, as in the butcher’s cooler. Soon the fish will be hacked up and put into the refrigerator, so much meat. Eventually (better sooner than later, with fish) it will be put in the oven and baked. Or cut into steaks and broiled. The aroma of steelhead or salmon cooking overcomes whatever visceral repugnance remains of the cleaning operation. Soon all ooh and ahh appreciatively at the table.

With trout the eviscerating act is conducted on a minor scale. Blood and guts, to be sure, but in small enough quantities that even with multiple fish it is nothing much to be concerned about. Trout are discrete creatures. They contain minute quantities of viscera and their little gullets hold mushy clues to what they have eaten; the general idea is, you match the hatch and the trout will be susceptible to your offerings. I’d say, sometimes, sometimes not. So I dispatch my keeper trout as quickly as I can, breaking their little necks with my forefinger and letting the main artery gush blood mostly over the side of the pram, but often their tiny hearts do not pump the blood out sufficiently, and when I drop them to the floorboards they continue to leak it out. It dries. This in time results in a pram that has rusty smears all over its bottom. It can never be scrubbed entirely clean.

I reflect: If the man cleaning his fish at the Windsock boat launch had been quicker about it, he would never have incurred the wrath of the woman who brought up the subject of her drinking water. And I would have never known about it. But I think he was making a big production about it, showing off his catch and proudly drawing attention to it and himself. So he deserved his bawling out. And the point is a good one.

Rowing on, I soon take another trout and kill it. Three; two dead, with another pair in mind for the skillet’s modest needs. It is the perfect round number, four is, or will be. It is half a old-day limit, a compromise with the present, and a good future quota It is plenty, besides. If fish have to be killed, which is a dubious proposition, let it be in the springtime, when life surges. I have friends who say no salmonids should ever be killed, which denies the fact that they are food, and tasty. But to kill them routinely, often excessively, or to no major purpose, well, that is not what we are after, we seekers of sport, recreation, and some sort of accountable truth.

I stroke the oars and then feather them, their blades dripping water like batter from a pancake stirring spoon. There is poetry in the activity, and in seeing how the thin liquid adheres, then releases itself in a long, trailing line. Stroke and glide; stroke, stroke, and glide some more. It is the pattern of the day. And it is a meaningful one, for it is excellent mild exercise performed for good purpose.

Fish number four hits just when I have nearly abandoned hope. I am standing now, casting toward a log that seems to be anchored to shore, drawing the fly through the water in a series of rapidly conducted little jerks, much like a waterstrider moves across his puddle. Of course my fly looks nothing like a waterstrider, which must have no meat on its bones, no bones at all, in fact, and would probably make a trout a poor meal. My fly--another bastard nymph--is of the attractor type, which means it strives to resemble no specific insect or crustacean but fits the generic pattern, the general template, of what trout eat.

Attraction is the basis for most flies, though this is generally not acknowledged because flyfishers like to think they are imitating nature so exactly that the trout is fooled, which is nonsense. Lee Wulff described Royal Wulff to me as a strawberries-and-cream type offering. The trout have never seen such a dish before, but it looks so good, so scrumptious, that they are not going to let it get by them, for there may be no second chance--just as there was never really a first. So--slurp--the fly is ingested, the fish hooked and with a little luck landed, and either released or kept for the pan.

Today we are doing a little of both, the fish willing. Number four fights with the unfailing doggedness of a cutthroat. It is less a hybrid than the others and might be called pure, if my eye were not hypercritical at this point and believes it can find rainbow characteristics in everything I might catch, including large-mouth bass. This little guy fights well. I gauge its size by how much my rod bows and by the fact that four or five feet of line will run of the reel when I release its handle. Eleven inches, I’d guess, and the trout proves me right when it heaves alongside the pram, its olive sides gleaming. How fine those freckles are, how brilliant the jaw’s slashes, how green the fish. A shame I am going to kill it.

A fish is a fish is a fish, after all. It is food--no matter how much we value it as sport. If a fish has a soul, it is the same whether raised in a pen for eating purposes or in a hatchery for sport or, for that matter, like my hybrid here, born in the so-called wild of the gravely society of Windsock Lake. And if one is going to feel sad about killing a living creature, let him look more closely at what he eats and become a full-fledged vegetarian first. No sense ignoring the death of a pig or cow and grieving the demise by our own hand of a cold-blooded creature, a mere fish, which lives much lower down on the food chain or on the empirical order of earthly creatures. We are at the top of that list and so long as nobody tries to eat us, we remain in charge.

Executed, this fine trout, in the same manner as the others, its head is bent crudely back until its spine softly snaps. Another gusher. More blood in the boat. I am fishing hard for a limit, or rather a short limit, four medium-sized fish to be brought home for a meal. A kind of frenzy comes over me, though. This is not the fine art of fishing with a fly, but The Executioner’s Song instead, rendered basso profundo, or a crass play in four murderous acts.

I fish with deadly intent, quite calculatedly. I am still myself, of course, but a person reborn, a different one from that daily self, the family man, the husband, the father, the writer. I am The Killer, and I embody all of his despicable traits. One more victim, I pray to the minor gods, who deal with these matters, luring willing victims into our murderous hands or else denying them such a hideous fate. I near a minor cove and pull into it, rising to my feet and balancing delicately on my toes, bringing the flyrod into play, stripping in line in what I hope is a series of tantalizing jerks, making the fly behave as a thing alive, or as nearly as I can, given my human handicap. Then I cast again, a short one, inexpert, about forty or forty-five feet out, coming far short of the grassy bank and retrieving angrily, anxious to make the next throw, which I promise will be a better one. Swirl. Miss. Damn.

Cast again, thinking all the while that I am not doing what I intend, the line and leader and fly not behaving as I want them to, cautioning myself to slow down my retrieve, to keep the line lying straight in the water, the rod tip low, lower, the swimming motion induced solely with my left hand, ignoring the rod action. A tiny pluck, with no weight behind it. The rod goes slack. Cast again. Cast and cast, the boat drifting directionlessly, as though through life, the oars trailing in their locks, the pram rocking slightly from my unintentional shifts of weight, myself trying to keep the shifts to a minimum, dampening them with counter-body action, for I badly do not want to fall overboard. And then--wonder of wonders!--there is a solid take, my hands sensing it long before I can bring up the rod, slack accumulating, and then the heavy surging weight of a fish. On the lake only a swirl. Coming back hard, the fish runs and stops taking line in a skyward jump. Rainbow, I know. Pure and simple.

It comes to the boat with a lot of dumb rushes and tail-walking skitters that, pretty and spectacular as they are, are tiring to the fish and pointless, for they will not lead to escape. In steelhead fishing we always say, “Hen,” about an unknown fish that jumps a lot and runs around repeatedly, exhausting itself early. And the corollary is, “Buck,” about a fish that fights hard and deep, conserving itself wisely, prudently, staying long out in the water where there is always the hope (however small) of the hook coming out and freedom arriving on a plate. “Free at last,” is always the prisoner’s exclamation, when the gates swing open wide, and escape is the prospect. And sometimes it works out.

I kill the hatchery rainbow and now have my personal limit. It is a dark fish with rounded fins, and a few weeks ago it swarmed with its brethren for pellets broadcast by a feeding machine in the state hatchery. (State pen?) Since then it has learned a little about natural biota but remains a sucker for anything brown and small and drifting along in the surface film, sinking almost imperceptibly of its own weight. There they lie in the bottom of the boat, the sad shrunken bodies of four small trout, the luster gone from them (in inverse order of when they were caught), their skin paper-like and beginning to wrinkle, their speckles looking like pepper applied by a diner with a seasoning obsession. And then there is the sight of blood on the dull fiberglass bottom dried to dull rust, no, more like brindle brown. I am proud of my catch, but a little ashamed, as well. Is it not always so?

I am free to fish for pleasure now, having done my skillet duty. After all, I am one short of my legal limit and permitted to fish until I kill one more, which I won’t do. My personality is slow to return to the gentle fly angler I’d like to be, or be known as, his heart full of the catch-and-release screed. I will fish lovingly now for my brother, the trout, and will treat him with absolute consideration, free his jaw gently from the tiny sharp barbless hook, return him tenderly to his watery home and move myself away from his lair. Or so I say. Yet I know myself to be the same person I was but a moment ago, the killer of cold-water fish. I will not change; I have simply reprogrammed myself slightly according to my day’s needs and am pretending that I am different. A man is phony only to the extent that he says he is something other than what he knows himself to be, in his deep heart’s core. In other words, if I acknowledge to myself that I am both this nice trout-loving guy and this merciless (though mercifully humane) killer, I am not a hypocrite, a phony; if I maintain I am not both, only the latter, then I cannot be the former, or not purely, and thus must recognize the duplicity in my character. And in my actions. Clear? Well, neither is it to me. But I feel all right about it.

The trout are now slow to come to me, while the light fades, as though in punishment for my recent crimes against the species. It is as if it is okay to kill trout to eat, but not to catch and injure them before release, simply for pleasure. This is the opposite of what is commonly held to be true today. What is it the Indians say about us? Piously, but tellingly, they remind us, speaking of themselves as good examples, “We do not play with our food.” First time I heard it it cut to the quick. Philosophers say the truth will set you free, but I think it makes you truth’s prisoner, at least it does me, and the words have returned at the most inopportune times to haunt me. I hope they always will.

An hour passes, but an hour without a strike is commonplace on a lake, even a good one. Once I wrote in a book about steelhead flyfishing, “Steelheaders are reconciled to skunks, there being so many of them in a lifetime of fishing for these elusive fish, and envy trout fishers because it is a rare day that they do not get a fish or two, and a bunch of strikes.” Did I really write that? How little did I know about trout. If an hour without a strike is an eternity, what is a half-day, a full day? Well, I’ve had my share of blanks, and as with the Indian’s pithy saying about food being for eating, not play, the words continue to gnaw at me. Easy? I’d say not.

An eventless hour on a lake (or for that matter, a river) is never really wasted, or is wasted only if you let it diminish you. There is always something interesting going on. Now to the city dweller what is happening might not be vital or meaningful, both being highly subjective qualities, ones that exist mostly in the mind. But to a fisher of any sort, the world of nature (in the Eighteenth Century it was routinely capitalized, and this constitutes a political statement, however trite) is of paramount value. A man goes out, this fine day, to participate in Nature, and wants nothing to be lost upon him. Once not so long ago I met a man who knew his ducks--he knew all of their names, their species, their small points of identification, their watery habits, their various food sources, all. I did not. Instantly I envied him. I did not let it go at that, not being one to live out the rest of my life in unappeased envy. Now I know all of the ducks, too. I may even know some he doesn’t, though that is an unimportant point and contributes nothing to human understanding. I know as much as I want to know for now and am in continual search for more data, as it comes to me, more small details, such as what all they eat, the different ducks. Books are not specific about this. The knowledge is lacking

What is important is that we proceed through life accumulating information about the physical world and not missing what goes on in front of us. It is okay not to be able to answer questions that naturally arise, but it is not okay to continue on without seeking the answers. The smallest matter of the day may be the most important, in the long run. And the biggest, in retrospect, puny indeed. Such as the number of fish we caught.

Much can be learned from a skunk, for instance. (A skunk is what it is called when you do not catch a fish during an outing.) Or from a near-skunk, which is a long period of inactivity such as I am presently enduring on Lake Windsock. For instance, you may listen to the ambient sounds. Listen closely. (Have we forgotten how?) How often there is an airplane in the background. The droning waxes, it wanes, it fades to a near nothing, it mounts as if in motored anger. In fact, how seldom is there not an airplane around, somewhere, humming faintly. It is hard to escape it or its ramifications. There are more airplanes in the air than ever before in history. (Where are we all going and why?)

And there is the sound of frogs, often muted, which varies greatly from location to location. It ranges from a whine to a roar. I am used to hearing tree frogs--their sharp chirp, their intense shrill choruses in the evening, and the odd fact that a single noise from me is capable of drowning them in sheer silence. Not so familiar to my ears is the deep boom of bullfrogs from a lake that has lily pads etched along its marshy edge. And various birds make their presence known precisely--the shrill rattle of the kingfisher and the way one will scold another and vie for territory and I suppose for food in the form of small fishes. How alike, for instance, are the gadwall and widgeon, but only to the distant eye. How unlike in size, form, color, and behavior, as you draw nearer. And so forth.

The weeds along the shore are separate and distinct, different species. Somebody once defined a weed as a plant that is easy to grow, but nobody has found any beauty in or use for yet. (I like that “yet”; it conveys hope for the near future.) Purple loosestrife is beautiful, though widely considered a scourge. It enhances the edge of many a pond that would otherwise be barren and blank. Yet biologists hate it and are dedicated to its extraction. Duckweed has a subtle intricacy that makes me think of dwarf clover. It is hard to make a case for Eurasian milfoil, I’ll admit, but somebody who knows his botany better than I has probably done it. Perhaps if they harvested the stuff, dried it, and spread it over the flowerbeds it would prove ultimately nutritious. Or over our vegetable garden, where it will help feed us.

On a lake like Windsock, if you gaze repeatedly into its depths, trying to measure with the eye what a Secci dish will better tell you, that is, the true visibility of the lake, you will see many unknown microorganisms suspended in or near the surface film; these give the lake its special character, and will perhaps lead us to separate out the various minute forms from one another. Our knowledge base thus grows. The lake water is much like one of those glass globes with a sylvan scene inside, and when you shake it the imitation snow flies as though you had invented a blizzard. Well, lake water has just such a look. It appears roughly shaken by the lake’s bartender, and all the tiny creatures it contains go drifting prettily into what passes for the sky as do stars in space, forming a veritable constellation or Milky Way. If your eyes are tired from the brilliant light of day, like mine presently are, you may be hypnotized by the sight of so many snowflakes, and your mind goes off on a short-lived galactic journey. Yawn and wipe it away.

On a lake you may see beavers, minks, weasels, otters, muskrats. In fact, you never know what may pop up next. Nature excels in providing surprises. I wonder about the loon from my youth—does it have any descendants? Are one or two of them here, and will call out to me? Sing me a loony tune? My ears strain to hear it. Nothing arrives in the way of sound. Meanwhile I row and cast, row and troll; the lake grows glassy, then takes on a light chop again. It has a feathery look. They call it a fisherman’s ripple by those who don’t know any better. I am lulled into a timeless universe by light and motion, a world in which today might as well be twenty, thirty, yes, even fifty years ago. A man is ageless, at least in his mind he is. I could be a boy still or again—so long as I don’t have to look at myself in a mirror. Narcissus was a boy, after all, and did not have to enjoy himself in glass in old age.

You are as old as you believe yourself to be, Bobo. You are the sum of your past ages balled into Time Present. Thus, you are of no special age—and that pull you feel in your shoulders from so much rowing does not signify the deterioration of your joints or jolly arthritis. Not even weak muscles. It is just what you might have experienced in your youth . . . but from ten times the present effort.

Just then a trout strikes. The lake, in fact, is ringed with rises, but all you see on the surface is the pale fluff from hatched-out chironomids. All along they have been rising to the top and becoming midge flies, flying off, and what you’ve observed dining on them is but fry. Well, something is causing the trout to ring the surface, and even if you can’t puzzle it out, you may capitalize on it, for your experience has been that feeding trout may well hit anything. And sure enough you get your first strike in two hours. It is almost as good as being born again, you guess, not having had that religious experience.

The strike is heavy and you do not have to set the hook, but set the hook you do, as a form of insurance, and the trout responds with a series of small tailwalks, fifty feet out on the lake. What a grand sight that is. You strip this fish in slowly, not playing it off the reel as you have the others, in steelheader’s fashion, from force of habit. The yellow line piles up in the boat. With three-pound test leader, you feel secure in applying some small muscle, and when the trout appears alongside the boat the rod is heavily bowed. (Of course it is a light rod, and it doesn’t take much to bend it.) You reach down and back out the little green all- purpose nymph and the trout, as though surprised, floats for an instant, indecisively free. You touch its flank with a fingertip and it shoots off. You grin, though there is nobody to see it, and it is fortunate, for you know that your grin at such a time resembles that of an idiot and it is just as well it is to an empty sky and lake.

Your greed to catch and kill is replaced by another gluttonous emotion—to catch and release, and catch another just as soon as is humanly possible. You are not sure that this is behavior in any way superior to the former. It may even be worse. But you are possessed, haunted. The first fish hardly sunk back into its native element, you cast again and strip expectantly. Nothing. But on the third following cast there is another take and you are solidly into the fish. Like the one before it, this one is 100 percent rainbow. You know it before you lead the fish into the net. A little smaller, this one is about ten inches. You wish for a holdover but so far are not granted one. The first rule of fishing is to be grateful for whatever you get. Respectful, as well.

Numbers are beginning to swarm in your mind. You have four corpses on board and have put back one earlier fish and two since you stopped being a mass murderer. How many is that? It has to be seven. You need one more fish to fulfill your mythical no-kill limit, which is handsomely mathematically exactly twice your self-imposed kill limit. Is this why you are always begging the heavens for “just one more fish?” Well, that is your plea now and sometimes the heavens will respond. You are into your eighth fish at once. Funny how when the hot fishing starts it is possible to catch an incredible number of trout in so short a period of time. Every trout fisher has experienced this wonder sometime. You’d guess the last four fish were taken in about ten short minutes. Sometimes it is simply a matter of how quickly you can get your fly back into the element. The trout are all queued up and waiting for it, seemingly.

One small part of your mind wants to fish on, for there is an hour of dim light left. But the more rational part of your being tells you to quit now. You’ve had your day, and a little bit more. You reel in and attach the fly to the keeper guide; it is good for only that, and you reflect on how beginners sometimes thread their line through its tiny opening, then are disappointed because they can hardly cast. You laugh. The story is apocryphal, but happens in real life, and recently you met just such a man. As kindly as possible, you pointed this out to him and, lo, all at once he was a medium good caster.

Now you row in earnest. Hard, that is. Your mind is full of happy thoughts. The floating logs you pass seem to be the same logs from your youth, though you know they must have all rotted to primordial mush and been replace many times over. Fifty years. Wow! You remember the saying attributed respectively to (1) a Celt, (2) an old Indian, (3) a pre-Revolutionary Russian, that the time spent fishing is not deducted from one’s life span but rather added to the far end of it. You hope that this is true, that the more you fish the more you move in the direction of eternal life. Or does it merely seem like it, when the trout are no longer in a hitting mood?

You row to the same shore that as a boy of thirteen you steered the farmer’s big boat. You remember how you dug worms in his manure pile and there must have been a billion there, most of them nightcrawlers, and those that were not huge by anybody’s standard you ignored. The war was on, butter rationed, but the farmer’s wife sold you a quart of whipping cream and you bore it home and presented proudly it to your happy mother, who rewarded you and the family with a white cake layered with the white stuff and slathered lavishly all over the top. How privileged you all felt to have it, in those difficult years of war, and it was solely the result of your acumen and the money you had earned cutting other people’s lawns.

Same shore, slightly different landing, a lake that has undergone changes subtle and extensive but remains biologically the same, named fictitiously, Windsock. In your mind’s eye (the only one that matters) you see yourself as others must see you, those on shore, those coming and going and in residence--a white-bearded man of some years bent over his oars, smoothly stroking them as though an aspirant for an Olympics scull. And as you ship them, those oars, and the pram goes into its final glide toward its landing, you scrunch forward so that the bow will ground itself a little higher up on shore and there will be a shorter step to land and you, accordingly, may be less likely to dip a foot ankle-deep in the water. Ah, Windsock; let us stay dry.

You wait for the crunch. There it is. You are no longer a floating object but are allied with the marvelous land again. You step out and both feet remain dry. Small favors. On the shore, regarding you with heavily-lidded eyes behind his little round glasses, is a boy about the same age you were then. 1942. He looks as sulky and contemptible as you did then. You understand the scene fully. A skinny kid, hands jammed into his pockets, a windbreaker zipped up tight to his chin, twisting in his shoes from side to side, sullen. Hair like he’d slept the night with his head inside his sleeping bag, if you know what I mean. Hair going every which way in a hurry.

“Catch anything?” he asks, in a voice absolutely without inflection. I have to call back the words, play them to myself again, to know what he said--though I know what he would say even before he thought to say it. They were my words once.

“Four nice ones.”

“Oh yeah.” He looks. He’s excellent at showing no enthusiasm, I know it is now; masked envy. Admittedly, they are not giant trout. But they are fine specimens.

“One is a cutthroat,” I explain. “The other, well, he’s about half cutthroat. A hybrid. And two are rainbows.”

“What’s the other half?”

“Rainbow.”

“I knew that.”

Of course he did. He’s here, isn’t he? At a fishing lake? The kid’s turned away now. He’s impressed with my catch, I can tell, but he doesn’t want to let on. I see his slightly stooped back as he mooches away, shoulders slunk the way mine are, and were, head heavy on a weak neck, as though he’s grown too fast for it to support him comfortably and he has to wait for the rest of him to catch up and get muscled. Ah, yes.

I wish he’d stuck around long enough to help me load my pram into the back of the pickup. It’s not that I can’t do it myself, you understand, only that four hands make light work where two will struggle. This is an old fact of life. But try to tell it to a thirteen-year-old. He won’t listen, nor would I. He doesn’t care; he’s got worries of his own. I understand. Lack of money is one of them. How do you buy fishing tackle when you don’t have any money and nobody will hire you during summer vacation? You go without or else you shop-lift, which is greatly to be avoided but sometimes happens.

If he’d stuck around, I’d explain how I have a whole closet full of extra tackle; fly gear, too. I’ll spot him a rod and reel, some flies I’ll never miss. Life is not easy for a boy. But then life is not suppose to be easy. This I’ve just reasoned out for myself and I am anxious to impart it to another living soul. Dig? Life is like trout fishing. You’ve got to hang in there. You’ve got to figure out a way, see, to get a rod and a reel and some line, then you buy your first Flat Fish. I did it, so anybody can. They’re three dollars today, but they used to be less than a buck from the catalog stores when Helin still owned the company, and they hadn’t yet been sold to Shakespeare, and then Worden, over in Yakima.

You can paint a red spiral on them with your mother’s nail polish. Or spots. The kid doesn’t know that trick and, not yet being a keen observer of life, there’s nobody to pass it along to him. I don’t have the time myself, even if he’d stand still long enough to hear some or all of what I’ve got to say. My accumulated wisdom, such as it is. Ha. I don’t blame him any.

I go to the Explorer, start it up with a twist of the key, back it to the landing, bringing it as near as I can get to the pram without hitting it or getting my wheels in the water. I haul out the gear in an order very different from the way my wife insists on doing it (wrongly), when she comes to the launch to help me. I cinch the retaining straps snug and open the heavy steel door. Slowly I climb into the driver’s seat--slowly because my knees have grown stiff from being doubled up so long in pram, I tell myself. But age has something to do with it. The trout are transferred uncleaned into a clear plastic bag. It’s an ignominious fate but a practical application.

Now where did that kid go? I’ve got something I want to tell him, something he needs to know--though I can’t put the finger of my mind on it. It’ll appear when he does. All human occasions require a modicum of cooperation or triggering. That’s not it. Something about not quitting too early. Something about economy and thrift--lessons you can’t learn from a book or in a classroom.

Maybe tell him something to make him laugh and break the ice that stretches between generations like glaciers. Something about time and how it rushes past almost unnoticed. But he will be too self-conscious to talk about real problems already tearing at him, and I know he’s already learned to keep his misery to himself. Something about not being alone. But he will see me as the tedious old bore I know myself to be, especially to young people. Try as I will, I cannot eliminate it from my manner, though I hustle like the devil to do so. I am both proud of what might be called my style and ashamed of it. I no longer flinch at evidence of the ambivalence in my person. It is me, moi.

I drive away, my eyes still haunted a little wetly by the image of the kid. I want desperately to establish a connection, however tenuous it may be. But he fades from my active thought and my memory is soon scrubbed clean of the ghost of him.

If there ever was a kid.

First come the swallows, then the nighthawks, and finally, with the fading of the last glimmer, the bats. (I am grateful to Bob Michajla for getting the order straight.) All are after the midges. These are the adults of the chironomid pupae--tiny, fluttering insects that hover over the water and often fall to the surface as spent spinners. Fly fishers are always on the outlook for swallow activity. They believe it tells them something. But often what they see or think they see is misleading.

The other night--back at Lake Eudora in early July to check on things, namely, how late in the season the lake’s trout can be hooked, when supposedly the lowland lakes have gone sour and the trout are either all caught out or off their feed--the action took place before the swallows had anything substantial to swoop after. There were no trout ringing the surface except for the ubiquitous fry. But adults were hitting heartily microns under the surface, as it turned out, and also up in the surface film. A guy trolling spoons had no action and gave me several burning looks when I kept getting strikes and lifting the rod tip. I smiled warmly back. This did not improve his disposition.

The fish were feeding on chironomids. I did not know this and fished a generic fly that looked like the pupae of the midges and also resembled a common little fresh-water scud. I tied them up on light-wire humpback hooks with turned-down eyes, hoping they would be just the ticket. They were. Incidentally, the body was of olive-brown dubbing, with plenty of long guardhairs mixed in; so many in fact that I had to pick out the longest ones, for the hook was but a fourteen. (I know; I said earlier that I couldn’t tie this small, but I found out I can, when pressed by circumstances, and am soon going to attempt sixteens and, gasp, maybe even eighteens and twenties.) The problem with small is, the hooks will catch tiny fish as well as big ones; the lake’s population of fry are growing fast into small fingerlings. Going down too small will catch an unconscionable number of these fine little guys and many will be hurt during the release stage.

You can feel them banging on the fourteens often now, though they seldom get hooked solidly. Smaller sizes pose a threat to their survival. I figure they are growing so fast that in a month or two they will be over ten inches. This is fair game. And if the adults from this year’s hatchery plant grow at a corresponding rate, the lake will have some nice, big fish in it by late fall. The trouble is, I can’t wait till then.

Today the lake seems to contain four year-classes of rainbow trout. All are active. First, there are the fry, newly hatched and feeding voraciously. They range from an inch to three inches long and are conspicuous in ringing the surface. They will eat, or try to eat, most anything. Then there is the previous year’s class, little guys that are five to seven inches long. I am catching my share of these, and it can’t be helped, unless one wants to go down to sixes or fours. If I do, I will miss many of the larger rainbows that are feeding on the same small stuff as the fry. But I am solidly hooking only a small proportion of juveniles in this league that are chasing my fly. And chase it they do: I feel ticks all the time, and sometimes a baby stays on the hook for a few seconds before coming off. The baby weighs so little that it is nearly impossible to set the hook on him. He slides away uninjured, no wiser from the experience. In a moment he is feeding heedlessly again. He will continue to hit the same kind of fly, again and again.

What I’m really interested in is the remnants of this year’s hatchery plant, which are 12-14 inches now, and any naturally produced rainbows from the previous year, fish that ought to be nine or ten inches in length. And of course the fish from the previous year, the four-year-olds that probably came from the hatchery but escaped the nightcrawlers and Powerbait users, and survived on natural foods throughout this spring and into summer. I know from experience they are sixteen inches long and show no lingering signs of having been raised in a hatchery, for their fins have regenerated and the fish have developed the deep, dark coloration typical of a Western Washington lowland lake. The trout look like they’ve been dipped in a mixture of paprika and black pepper. They fight the typical acrobatic rainbow fight that gives them their name. (Okay, so the name is from the stripe down their side; I’ve always preferred to think it is because they keep jumping and arcing through the sky like their namesake bad-weather event.)

Though I’ve tied up four new nymphs, I find I need only the first one on 6X tippet for all my fishing today. It is a welcome practical economy. My first bump occurs as I lengthen out line for my first cast of the day, laying it out time after time on the water until there is enough for a false cast. A tick is all I feel, but I know it is a fish, probably a small one. This indicates that they are feeding near the surface, even though there is a disappointing lack of ringing activity going on. The other three flies, two of them lightly weighted ones(for the hook is fine wire), remain in my flybox; two are tied with some rich beautiful buffalo fur Don Smith gave me at his store, Flysmith, tucking it into a little Ziplock plastic baggie as though it were contraband. It dubs nicely and produces a rich, handsome fly.

Afternoons are often better than evenings. This is another way of saying that the fabled heavy feeding period that purportedly goes on just before dark is often nonexistent. It is a romantic illusion promulgated by somebody (such as myself) who likes sunsets and the soft fade of day into dark. And of course the wind often dies down to nothing at dusk, which makes for pleasant fishing and easy rowing. But I’m finding that the light ripple or chop of mid-afternoon hides a great deal of feeding activity that may not be apparent. It is when the chironomids are ascending and the trout are busily cruising, on the outlook for nymphs and feeding uncritically.

If this is true, if the trout are active and not too selective, they will take a generic fly that is tied to resemble a number of different insects, all of which may be present now. Chironomid pupae, shrimp or scuds, and even caddis larvae that are emerging. It is hard to make a case for imitating mayfly nymphs or damselfly larvae, but the trout do not know this and, once on the feed, may take anything that vaguely resembles what is found on their abundant and various menu.

This is the very idea behind attractor-type flies that look like nothing expressly but everything in general. Size and color are important here. And so is action. Flies must be fished at just the right speed, which usually is slow. Very slowly. Hardly moving, in fact. In the past, fishing little for trout, I had not developed a decent slow retrieve; for steelhead, you almost always fish dead-drift or on a tight swing. And in the fall, searun cutthroat generally require a moderate or fast retrieve. An excruciatingly slow drift is boring to perform, but it is imperative for catching trout. I am grateful to Brian Chan for pointing this out and carefully showing me (on his video) how to do it. I’ll pass it on, since it is a classic technique, and surely in the public domain, ever since Dame Julianna Berners.

Brian calls it a figure-eight retrieve, and I’ve heard it referred to as this before, but it is not really what it is, if you want to be literally correct. The line is brought back in the left hand (if you are a right-handed person) in a series of small coils, each doubled up on itself and the earlier one dropped, or let go of to lie on the water or in the bottom of the boat. (Coils are retained in the hand only with very short casts.) He points out that it can be done only so fast and that speed represents about the top end of the fast retrieve; if you strip and collect the coils, as I am used to doing, you will inevitably retrieve too fast, even if you try to slow yourself down. You will become impatient and soon start bringing in line even faster; it is only human nature. But if you use the figure-eight retrieve, there is a built-in physical limitation that prevents you from gathering fast. And done right, the fly moves wonderfully slow, judging by how my line/leader junction trails along the surface. Ah, just right.

Still it bores me. Well, it ought to, for it is dull work—duller yet to describe. But I respect it. In the past few weeks I’ve hooked many trout this way. And I’ve missed or lost at the strike a large number of them. But I know it works, and if it works it belongs in the flyfisher’s arsenal. It is one more weapon in the quest for trout and in achieving flyfishing effectiveness.

And I’ve done it in the past, too, only not exactly this way, not knowing its name or precisely how to do it. I’ve stripped in slowly with my fingers, but surely much too fast, even though I’ve made myself slow down in order to attract trout. Oh, if I had the figure-eight retrieve earlier, the fish that I would have caught. Or so I suppose. You see, the fly isn’t supposed to be moving at a noticeable rate of speed. But it is nonetheless moving. It is moving too slowly to satisfy the fisher but it is just right for the trout. Somehow, perversely, wrongly, the fisher insists on retrieving too fast. It is as though, knowing this much, he doesn’t really want to catch that trout. (Oh, yeah?)

Then he must insist on jinxing himself.

One reason might be that a faster retrieve hooks fish better. You believe that you will have a higher percentage of taking fish well-hooked and consequently landed. The retrieve itself often hooks the fish, if you are using a small, sharp hook. A trout hooks itself on a very slow retrieve. Try it and see if it isn’t so. I think the reason is because of the trout’s feeding motion. Chironomids and scuds are small, and it takes many of them to satisfy a hungry trout, whatever his size. So he eats often and steadily when he feeds. He gulps in small food items while cruising on his feeding level or stratum. He is ever changing his course, heading this way and now that, so his body is in constant motion, turning to the right and to the left. Moving in this manner, the tiny food is taken into his mouth in ones, twos, or threes, while new food is being searched for, located, and moved towards. The trout swallows what he has taken in the act of taking in more. My wife would say this is the way I eat hamburgers. So--I am speaking first-hand here, you understand--one searches for the next bite, so to speak, while one is chewing on the previous one, swallowing the former, while other recently ingested items are making their way down the food canal to the gullet. (Trout and I both have gullets, you see, while normal people have stomachs: courtesy my wife again.) And while I have given up cruising, trout have not. This is why fishers have such good luck while the bite is on, and abysmal luck when it is not. We all live in wait for the bite.

On Eudora, that afternoon, the wind rippling the lake a little more than I would like it to, I searched for signs of surface-feeding activity but could find none, even though it might be hidden by wave action. I don’t think it was. Now Eudora often has surface rises and they give fishers much anticipated excitement. And sometimes the rising fish do take flies, wet or dry. But often they do not. It is as though the rises mark the end, not the beginning, of the take, which is not the same as the feeding period. And this makes for great disappointment.

Stop to think about it. The dry-fly fisher waits all afternoon for a hatch and serious feeding activity. When the chironomids start hatching and covering the surface, it is usually only the fry that go after them. And the rises are not as numerous or as splashy as might be expected. The fisher casts his tiny dries and hooks a few juveniles and goes home disappointed. He does not know that some of us have been hooking fish all afternoon, when the surface showed no signs of feeding activity. But it was going on, all the same. Once again we were fooled, or allowed ourselves to be.

There is no good reason for trout to signal their feeding by coming to the top and throwing a wake or splash for our visual benefit. When they do, occasionally great fishing can be had, some places. But more often the fish do not take, or take well, and the fisher blames himself for not having exactly the right pattern to “match the hatch.” This is nonsense, at least out here in the Far West. If the fly is of about the right size and color, it will catch fish--either on top, or more likely just under the surface. But it has to be fished just right, which is very slowly. It is too slowly for some, for many of us.

Fishing writers speak reverently about fishing a weighted nymph on a very long leader and making it ascend or rise in a vertical plane. I’m sure this is important. It’s not been my experience, but then my time at this is limited. I am, remember, a recent trout fisher, or more properly a trout fisher again. I can only testify to what works for me in the small number of lowland lakes I’ve fished. But it works well and often. I think lakes vary considerably, one from another. I know of several lakes where surface fishing a size 14 nymph is largely a waste of time. The reason I know this is because I’ve done it and accomplished nothing, though fishing is rarely a waste of time unless you choose to look at it that way, and I don’t. (I don’t because much of my life would be consigned to the trash bin, as my computer calls it.) I would prefer to think of my fishing as field experimentation--a low-life form of scientific laboratory work. This makes it much more acceptable to me and to others, though I do not necessarily live for their good opinion, you understand.)

I am fishing Eudora into summer to see if the trout will continue to respond. This is my premise, my basic approach, my science. So far, so good. They were surface-feeding, or surface-taking, at the end of April and they still are today. There has been a change in the size of the fish, admittedly, and the year-class of the takers, but if anything the amount of surface takes has become greater. Paradoxically perhaps, I am getting more strikes but hooking fewer fish. For instance, back in April, in my first hour spent mooching a fly around the lake, alternately trolling, casting, and retrieving in preparation for the next cast or another brief troll, I hooked three fish and landed them all. No weak strikes or nibbles, no hits from fry or small fingerlings. Just solid grabs, with the rod tip plunging into the lake and line being taken off the reel. Now, in early July, much the same tactics produce a strike from the small fish often, but I fail to hook most of them, or else they come off the hook about half way back to the boat. And the fish are decidedly smaller. They are what we call legals, though barely, and I carefully release them without aid of the net. I do not lift them out of the water and quickly back out the debarbed Daiichi hook with my fingertips. Earlier the net was deemed necessary and would sag heavily from the weight of my fish. It is a good thing these little guys are lip-hooked, for I could not get my fat fingers into their mouths in order to ferret out the hook.

What I’m after, of course, is the bigger third- and fourth-year-class trout. I know they are present because I caught a number of them earlier and put them all back. The bait fishers have dropped off and the trollers are simply not catching anything. The only ones who are are the flyfishers like myself. Almost always, almost without exception, these are the ones who release all their catch. I think of them as brothers (no sisters on the lake this year) and the others as, well, distant non-kissing cousins, you might say. So the fish have got to be here; it only stands to reason. The question is, where are they and how can I catch them, short of trolling on the bottom a great big Carey Special?

It is a beauteous evening, calm and clear. (I’ve always wanted to write that sentence and never dared before; perhaps it is taken unknowingly from somebody else: sounds like Wordsworth to me, and I swear I haven’t read him in forty years.) Beauteous, yes, but it is the Fourth of July. I am at Eudora knowingly, wondering what the Finns will do to celebrate their independence from Finland, or if they celebrate the day when they become citizens of America, along with the rest of us. I soon find the answer.

I push off from shore amid rounds of small-arms fire. It is far off and consists mainly of a distant crackling sound. We and the enemy, it would seem, are engaged in a minor firefight with carbines and automatic sidearms. Here and there a M-16 barks and coughs sporadically. Nothing serious, no heavy stuff. And then there is a single mortar boom. Awesome. Somebody’s put a cherrybomb in a tincan and pointed the can out over the lake. My ears rattle after the sound has died away. Yeah, if I were a kid again, it is something I might have done, on this night of nights, the loud and sparkling Fourth.

The crackle is so loud, so persistent, that I can’t hear the roar of the bullfrogs any longer. That’s a sad state of affairs. Tonight belongs to the public and their simulation of warfare. You might say, it is the night of the roar of the weaponry.

Then a trout hits, but I miss it, right off the boat launch. I have a hunch it was a small one. (But whoever knows?) The Lake Eudora trout, the bigger ones, hit like a bullet and don’t come off. They go after the fly as though it were the last rose of summer and they are the neighborhood florist. And then where other trout leap, Lake Eudora trout launch themselves into the heavens. All right, I exaggerate, I admit it, but this is the Roaring Fourth and my senses are hyper-keen to hyperbole. And don’t I know it, in my deepest heart, there will be an orgy of fireworks, with perhaps (if I’m lucky) Roman candles softly exploding overhead later and spreading their bright rainbow parabolas everywhere, as I row along the edges of the lake. I’ve never experienced it before and am looking forward to it.

There is a lot of time to think while you fish, in spite of what others have said or written about fishing “clearing” their heads, or it being largely a mindless activity. My mind churns while I fish. So for tonight I picture festoons of flames descending on the tails of spent rockets and striking the lake, perhaps even my boat, with a sizzle and a descending gray plume. (What a way to go!)

Can a Fiberglas pram burn, or would it merely melt, like a marshmallow held too close to the campfire? Tune in and find out. Mightn’t my hair catch on fire? And what will be the effect on my dear trout of all those explosions rattling across the water and bouncing back as echoes from the trees? Yes, I truly want to experience it all on my skin and feel the booms in my bones. The explosions begin to come quicker now, many of them, but no rockets are in evidence. I think of Stendahl’s The Red and The Black and the wonderful movie made of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, white puffs rising prettily into an azure sky. Red and white dress uniforms, with drums and muskets. May wars always be fought in idyllic weather like this.

The trout tonight prove disappointingly small. Pride keeps me from saying just how small they are, but it is a little hard to know after the strike whether or not the little guy is still on. Where are the Eudora Giants, the sixteen inchers that take with surge and return the strikeback with a heavy relentless run of ten or fifteen feet? If you check them you’ll break them off, and so you don’t, don’t dare, or later, brake the reel drum. I catch a second little rainbow and examine it closely. How pretty. Now steelhead and Kamloops have a steelie brilliance that makes some folks call them chromers. I’ve often said that a fresh summer run hurts your eyes to look at it in the sunlight. And Brian Chan’s big trout have a similar breath-taking brilliance. At the other end of the spectrum (and of the same species, astonishingly) are these dark little dudes, each perfectly formed. If I were to kill one of them--and I’m not going to--I would find a wad of partly digested insects in its gullet and orange meat, I’ll bet, a sure sign that scuds are a significant part of the diet. But I’m pledged not to kill even one, if it is only to myself.

I’ve underestimated the propensity of second and third generation Finns to love explosions. What, haven’t they already experienced enough war? Around here the only way you can buy fireworks is to go to an Indian reservation. They have a monopoly on small explosives and major types of gambling. So the Fourth is remarkable in that it has set the Native Americans free from certain kinds of financial deprivation by giving them the fireworks concession for the entire state. Thus, every Zebra firecracker or skyrocket or cherrybomb comes from China, but is wholesaled and retailed by our resident good Indians. Judging by all the noise, they are doing very well this year.

There is scarcely a quiet moment, one in which the last explosion has entirely died away. Mostly what I hear is firecrackers ignited at one end of their string and left to dance around on the ground in sharp, fiery circles. My mind turns the sound into writing. Each cracker is a letter; they form words, then sentences, as they explode sequentially. The basic punctuation of all this bursting language is the cherry bomb, which signifies a period--at the least, a semi-colon. Larger explosions from the ignited rockets mark the ends of paragraphs, or else the finish of a chapter. They shake, rattle, and roll my mind and my pram, and make me tremble over my oars. (Well, isn’t that why we came here tonight?) What the racket is doing to the trout is hard to know, for I am in experiencing a momentary striking lull, after having taken four small ones. How pretty they are to hold in my hand before letting go. Surely there are bigger ones present?

Besides the Finns there are two other landowners on the lake. Earlier I had thought they were but one. I wasn’t far off. They are closely related. I’m told by the brother of one, and the second son apparently of the other, that originally the shores of Eudora were owned by one person, their grandfather. But he got into some kind of gambling situation with another man and lost about half his share of the lake.

“Cards?” I asked him.

“Probably,” the man replied.

We were both casting to trout, he from his brother’s dock with spoons, me from my pram with flies, and he was not catching any. I took one and released it, inspiring him to say:

“Pretty small.”

I agreed. Still it was a trout, to his none.

“Imagine losing half your farm from playing poker,” I said, drawing nearer.

“Yes, I’ve thought of that. But it could be worse.”

“He might have lost it all, you mean?”

He smiled. We were brothers in angling, though we fished differently, both beneficiaries of this pleasant, though noisy, evening. He was visiting from California, he said, and didn’t know of a better place to be on the Fourth. Or at any other summertime moment. He came here every year at this time. California had no equal. I smiled my agreement, remembering California well and mostly its best places, which are considerable. The pram passed out of the range of easy conversation. That was fine for both of us, for we had exchanged all of what we had to say. I rowed on. A little later I saw that he had traded his casting rod for a paper bag of fireworks and was tossing Zebras into the air out over the water, in the company of a young man I took to be his son.

I neared the western edge of the Finn settlement. There were people on every raft and dock, the men shooting off their private cache of rockets and crackers zealously, the women watching, while the young swam in the lake. They were mostly teenage boys, silly with summer, splashing around in water they could probably stand up in, making guttural noises, uttering pure nonsense to each other, having a great time. And so was I. Another evening all this activity would greatly disturb me. Today I was prepared for it, one with it and them, the elements, too, a nether creature of water and land and sky, a merman, a foreigner striving to be part of the celebration. But this was hard to do, without any fireworks of my own. I was filled with sad longing. But not for long.

Let the day go bang, I decided, grinning to myself. It was my day, too. And this is how and where I chose to spend it, of all the possible ways available to me. Dear Lake Eudora. I looked round me, for the umpteenth time, wondering whether swimming scared the trout and threw them off their feeding. Now with steelhead, who don’t feed, any small unnatural thing--a silhouette newly poised against the sky--is sure to do it. You don’t want to slosh your feet in the riffle or you will send them scurrying. Don’t make any sudden moves--as the holdup man keeps warning you not to do. Trout are not reported to be so easily scared. With boys swimming in a confined area, however noisily, I wondered how close I might get and still earn a strike. I pictured boys and fish following two separate courses, the aquatic and the other basically landborne, and these two worlds might never meet, cross, or collide, were it not for the Fourth. They would continue to coexist in twin, parallel universes, as it were. Boys splash and scream nonsense, trout continue to feed.

I rowed to within twenty-five feet of the swimmers before thinking, “Close enough,” my line trailing in the water the full length of the flyline. This is about seventy-five feet. Bingo, a strike, though I didn’t connect. Did that prove something or prove naught?

The nice thing about fishing is nothing is ever final. What works today will most likely not work tomorrow. What then? But God’s truth for tonight is that one trout struck while two boys swam less than twenty-five feet away. It is something you can put in your pipe and smoke, though there is nothing much to inhale upon.

Fishing is made up of just such mild epiphanies.

I hook and land four small trout, first time round the lake, which takes about an hour, alternating casting and dragging the fly slowly behind the pram, then retrieving the nymph, using the figure-eight method, though it is maddeningly dull to do. Then a feeding lull occurs, though by now there are a million or more chironomids emerged and fluttering on the surface, and only the smallest trout consent to mouth the occasional dun. I wonder if the flyfishing is not over for the day? I intended to go home early, but not this soon. I fish on for an hour longer--fish into the lull, though I know better. I do so in order to enjoy the splendors of the evening and to see if anything more spectacular will happen, as darkness descends. I guess I need a spent rocket to land in my pram to send me dashing for home.

The air is clotted with midges. Most are of a size, though a few are larger, looking relatively like storks among the starlings. Funny but there are no mosquitoes; perhaps the frogs have gotten them all as larvae. Then I see a few tiny mayflies, which look very different from anything else in air or on water. The trout never seem to go after the duns or the spinners, not around here, anyway. Perhaps they are full up on the emergers or larvae. Much the same thing happens on a river; only the fry bother with the tiny guys and then not often. This happens early in the spring, when there is nothing else around and the fry are desperate for anything alive and swimming that might offer nourishment.

Deep in the lull, waiting, hoping, I watch the blackbirds flickering in the tulles, noting again and forever how the wing patches on the male, yellow and scarlet, blend in flight to a brilliant orange. You can only separate out the colors again when the bird is still. And the female so drab you wonder why the male is attracted to her. Must be something we humans can’t perceive. Bird sex appeal. A little lipstick and rouge might do the trick. And a push-up bird bra.

The male blackbird, black as a polished stone, needs no such enhancements to bring him near her. She is a modest creature, a good mother. If a crow comes near her nest and fledglings she will attack him severely--this brute who is about ten times her size-- and drive away the bully egg- and baby-eater all by her lonesome, though I’ve seen her handsome husband join her in the fracas. When this happens, the blackbirds don’t appear to come near enough to bump Mr. Crow, let alone peck him with their sharp beaks, but he sees the handwriting on the wall anyway and veers away. He decides he may have something else less threatening for breakfast.

Stripping in my line the way Brian Chan told me to do, I get a puny strike. I let out some slack, stroke the oars, pull away from my pile of yellow line lying in corkscrews on the water, then strip in some more. I do this two or three more times and finally take a small fish. Five. How many does a growing boy need to satisfy himself? Sometimes it is many. I remember in college two fraternity brothers and I catching and killing sixty trout, one opening-day Sunday morning, all before nine A.M., and after photographing them (evidence of the crime has been lost to time) and our grinning selves, driving home about ten in the morning, groggy and gravely eyed. The fish got dealt out to whoever would take them; I hope they all got eaten but I suspect they did not. Trout came frequently and with not too much difficulty, in those days.

One more fish makes six and I decide it is enough. Fini, I’m done. It is early yet, too soon for the smart demolition experts to waste their best stuff on the pale sky, where it will be absorbed by the prevailing light and leave only smudges. The jaded audience demands brilliant parabolas. The firecracker crew is done for now; they’ve used up most of what they bought, anyway, and are saving the rest to startle unsuspecting neighbors with throughout the year. There is a pause in the human activity, as well as that of the fish. A strange silence settles down, as I pull on my oars and finally grind ashore at the launch site. Norma is there to help me take my pram out and load it. Her routines are now mine. It’s easy to yield to a helper’s ways.

“A good night,“ I tell her. “Six fish, albeit small.” I say things like “albeit” when I talk to her and she tolerates it. She has listened to such pomposity from me for forty years and hardly hears it, thank goodness. So I am free to express myself luxuriously, as I like to do, when I’m sure no one is paying any attention. It is a little like talking to myself, but with one small difference. An audience is necessary for all forms of human expression. Nobody asks them how they feel about it. Their role is to take it all in uncritically.

Big news! I seem to have acquired a lake. It is not entirely my own--I must share it with about thirty other families. That’s okay. It is not Eudora but another one of the lowland variety. So it goes.

I’ve bought a new home. The public access is directly opposite me, so whoever arrives and launches his boat must put up with my scrutiny. With new eyes, I see it all. I had better back up and explain. I’d never heard of the lake, until a zealous realtor named Martin Howard called me on the phone and told me I must see this one. It had a new house on it I would like. I was dubious, he insistent. So Norma and drove out to see it the same afternoon, a Saturday. A twenty-odd-acre lake had not much appeal to me, I told him over the line, though it fit my new lowland-lake template precisely. But I had more in mind of a lake between fifty and one-hundred acres; that is big enough to develop a chop and to be a real challenge to row across at any time. And the fact that this was a mixed-species lake held no great charm for me. Trout is what I was after, first and foremost. Lots of insect-eaters. Well, this lake has trout, all right, but it also has an assortment of spiny rays. This was not to my liking, either. The house, however, was stupendous, beyond belief. It was a dream home. People kill for such a house. It not only offered 3400 square feet (about three times the size of the house we’ve lived in for the past thirty years), but it was built of cedar, with a tile roof to keep it cool in summer, warm in winter, and its interior was custom designed, with considerable cabinetry of solid oak.

Martin told me I would have to see it to believe it, and even after I saw it I didn’t quite think of it as real and not something out of a coffeetable picture book. Norma loved it from the moment she first glimpsed the kitchen, which was spacious, had an eating island, and a skylight. There were enough cabinets for a restaurant. We simply had to have the house. I reached to the bottom of my deepest pocket and bought it. (It’s nickname is Peanut Butter Sandwiches Forever.) Whatever fish the lake contained would be a bonus. I promptly set out to sample its population with the fly. (If they wouldn’t take a fly, then I’d use a worm, but I soon found out a fly would do the job, most of the time.)

The wildlife utilizing the lake were remarkable, a real change from what I’d been used to on a river. Well, maybe not so different, but more of a change in composition of its motley collection of characters. That first night I cast a fly off my dock and caught a small large-mouth bass. Now everybody in the world (but me) has caught beaucoup bass, ones with mouths both small and large. Not this aging boy. I fished blindly from my long, solid dock. I flipped a small Self-Carey Special at a break in the duckweed and tried a variety of retrieves. The new figure-eight or clench retrieve they ignored. So I sped it up, utilizing some techniques I had used successfully for searun cutthroat in slack water, and soon a bulge appeared behind my fly; I paused in the retrieve, then commenced again, and I had my first bass.

I did not know they came so small and at first thought it must be a perch, many of which I’d caught as a boy. But, no, this was a bass, all right, and had all the bass’s telltale characteristics I had seen countless times before in books. It looked as if you had taken a respectable-sized bass and put it in a Xerox copier and told the machine, “Reduce to thirty percent.” (This is the direct opposite of what Harrison Ford told his computer to do with the fish scale in Blade Runner.) The fish’s twin, spiky dorsals lay flat on its back, its rays jutting up threateningly, while its little tail collapsed back upon itself like a goldfish’s. Its lower jaw was conspicuous, and had I thought to do it at the time I’d have clasped it by what corresponds to its bottom lip when I held up the fish to extract the barbless hook. Instead, I swung the fish by the hook shank until it fell off, ker-plop, into the lake. A few minutes later I hooked another, but it came off halfway in-- the way steelhead often do. And then it was quits for the night because darkness fell.

Quits, that is, from the standpoint of fishing for my dwarfs. Along the edge of the duckweed I spotted a little head bobbing along and thought, “Otter.” But it was too small. I realized, just as it dove inconspicuously, that it was a muskrat. Like bass, they are common to everybody but me. You never encounter them along a swiftly flowing river.

Once, on an earlier reconnaissance of the lake, I’d spotted an otter. It scurried along somebody’s sandy beach. “Only one?” asked my friend, Dana Base, who’s seen as many as eight. A wildlife biologist with Washington State Fish and Wildlife, he has had a home on the lake for eight years. He told me he’d seen as many as five or six at once. They will travel surprising long distances over land to reach a new body of water. So will the beaver, he said. Both are nocturnal--which doesn’t mean they can’t be sighted by day, but only that they prefer darkness and become manic when it approaches. Much wildlife behaves this way.

Overhead a belted kingfishers swept by, emitting a piercing, rattling cry. I marveled again. It is really neat how they swoop. Better yet is how they hover and drop. (Kamikaze pilots shouting, “Ban-zai.”) They always seems to scream so, just before they plummet. And while they are known to be fisheaters, I think they must also eat insects, judging by their fierce little beaks, which look just right for spearing insects of a size, such as dragonflies and damsels. Then, just as the last light disappeared, a clutch of ducks swam by, massed, only silhouettes to my squinting eyes. I couldn’t identify them for certain, under such bad conditions, though a good birder probably could. I guessed wildly. Ruddies? Mergansers? Or perhaps wood ducks, of which Dana says there is an abundance here? They are foreign to me, though I keep hoping. I’ve experienced a wood duck about as often as a muskrat. Which is rarely. What I’d really like to behold is wood ducks in large numbers; I’d like to see them approximating the quantity of tiny large-mouth bass in the lake.

And perhaps I shall.

My first night spent on the lake I awoke about six and saw a faint morning haze hanging about six feet over the water. It was beautiful. It made me think of winter and what cold does to the warmer water. I suppose that is what happened, though it is presently late summer, August. Far off an Amtrac train hooted for a crossing. The bullfrogs were making their usual clamor, after a brief respite. I’d heard them up long after midnight. Well, they’ve all day to sleep in the sun.

“Perfect,” I said to myself and rolled over and slept some more. By then the sun had arched high in the sky and half the lake was bathed in golden light. The duckweed sparkled. A heron sat on my unmet neighbor’s float and preened, or whatever heron do when they are digesting a meal and not actively seeking another one. They arrange and inspect their feathers. And on a different neighbor’s sailboat mast a belted kingfisher perched, surveying his kingdom and apparently finding it to his liking. It was very much to my own.

Funny how men think of Henry Thoreau when nature (he would capitalize it) is most splendid. They never think of how that old curmudgeon would have not enjoyed it in the company of anyone else, not anybody, for he preferred his miserable solitude. Oh, you could make a case for him liking Ellery Channing, I suppose, and, every six weeks or so, a dose of Ralph Waldo Emerson, if a meal came along with it.

It is about 250 yards across the lake from where I stand on my new upper deck, hands on the rail, which is bearing about half my weight, looking out over what is momentarily (because I am unchallenged along its shoreline) my private preserve, digging the reflections coming from its lightly corrugated surface and studying the clots of duckweed that line the shore and reach slimy green fingers out towards the center of the lake. The stuff looms everywhere. It is the color of pea soup--the kind that comes in a foil-lined packet and when hot water is added grows lumps of an unexpected size that when bitten into prove dry to the center. My lake.

No two homes are alike, which is to the good, and each shows its owner’s particular pride in his possession. Some covet a big, green lawn, the kind that requires a riding mower to cut, believing dimly that grass square footage is a sure sign of wealth or social status, the same way certain aging businessmen are committed to the belief that everybody who can afford one drives a Cadillac. But more and more I see signs of understatement and quiet affluence. The owners’ money goes into rhododendrons and evergreen shrubs instead of lawn. And all the houses are well tended and freshly painted. Everybody has a dock and a float, and many of the homes have a rowboat within easy reach. Some have more than one, if you count kickboats and paddleboards. In fact, I should guess that every home averages 1.6 boats, or boat-like vessels.

The lake is ringed with conifers. Most seem to be Western red cedars, with frequent hemlocks mixed in and almost indistinguishable from afar. The two make good companions. And of course there are the stately second-grown Doug firs, seemingly massive and invulnerable, but to us knowing souls the first to spill over in a windstorm. So the skyline opposite me bristles with a shaggy crest of varying height, almost as though it were a minute mountain range; the silhouette is very much like that of the Cascades when seen from a great distance. Today, from here, I cannot see the mountains, but do not miss them however slightly. I’ve got my lake to feast on.

On my left, from my captain’s chair (as it were), I can glimpse the island. At least that is what it is locally called. The lake to the East parts company with itself at a high point of ground that is not very monumental, and, like a river, swings both left and right around it. The island is small and trees rise uninterruptedly from its bushy center. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s divergent paths and the regret that lingers for the one not taken. Today I take neither, occularly speaking, for I am in no position to choose, but am morning-determined to select first the one, then the other, someday soon. This is a promise to myself. The channels do not beckon to me specially, since both are choked with lily pads and coated bank-to-bank with duckweed; to explore them, one will have to part the soupy brew with his bow and push the accumulation of muck out of his way. A formidable task I know from experience, the weed will hang like laundry from his oars and have to be shaken or twisted free--very much like spaghetti tined on a fork. Or else make no forward progress.

To borrow shamelessly from Gerald Manly Hopkins, the lake is evidencing “the shining from shook foil.” Lovely it is, Jer. I’d thought I knew what he meant before, but was wrong, in dead error for most of my life. Now I know in my bones. Odd that Hopkins should have been to Lake Ketchum on an August morn. (Never thought he’d been West of Dublin.) The surface of my lake is much like what happens when you stop down a wide-angle lens to f64 and take a long exposure on slow-speed color film. A lot of spiky rays appear, jutting out at right-angles to themselves, and the overall scene grows starry with points.

Of course I am high, stoned on my lake and the summer morning. Lacking my pram and tackle, I am fishing it only in my mind, though I wish it were the real thing. Mentally I row and cast, row and glide, glide and slide, row some more--whatever the combinations necessary for success today. This is a lowland lake, after all, one among the hundreds that dot the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, in Washington and Oregon and British Columbia. But this one is special to me.

I meet a man. He is not a landowner but a frequent visitor. This gives him certain prescriptive rights. Nearly every morning he appears in his blue van and uncorks a red raft. He dons his orange life jacket (never minding that his colors clash) and inserts his oars in their plastic locks, pops a beige porkpie hat on his head, and begins to weave his way out to the bed of lily pads diagonally across the lake from the public access, is which near to where I am. His oars flash silver in the sun and grow larger in their sweeps as he advances in my direction.

“How picturesque,” sighs Norma, at the sight. I agree, and resist the sarcastic urge to point out that he does not present himself thus for our appreciation. It is indeed a colorful sight--blue van, red raft, bright orange vest, beige hat, blue pants, and white oars that heliograph brilliantly each time he lifts them after they dip.

Since I am the chatty type (try to avoid me when I want to talk; but then again try to engage me when I don’t), I call out to him from the edge of the lilies: “What ho?” or some such nautical thing, and after a friendly word or two Ping Ponged back and forth he explains what brings him here, most mornings early, and then back again, after he’s gone to his nearby home for a quick lunch, to fish silently and contentedly under the sun with his worms, day after day.

“Mostly I get perch,” he says. I ask how big. “My biggest this year is about nine inches.” I do not sigh or exclaim enviously at this, for it is but an insight into the lake now dubbed mine. He continues, unprompted, “Usually they run about six inches.” I scoff audibly. I listen with deep commiseration. He explains how he fillets his perch with a sharp, flexible knife, and fries them up in flour or egg-breaded crumbs in a skillet crackling with bacon grease. This is traditional among spiny-ray eaters.

I ask what else he catches. “The little bass, of course. I don’t keep them. Too small. Sometimes crappies. They’re nice.” He is referring to the black crappie, which is what we have West of the Cascades, not the white. I ask, “Do you ever get a big bass?” No, he tells me wistfully. We both long for one, I can tell. A macro-sized, large-mouth bass would be more than nice. It would be triumphant. I am determined to provide my wife with one or more of every type of fish in the lake, regardless of how long it takes me to accomplish this task. It will be a gourmet feast for one who prides herself on knowing fish and a challenge to find a species that displaces steelhead as her favorite.

“I caught my first sunfish today,” he tells me proudly. In many years of fishing this lake religiously (this means he fishes it on Sundays, too, a time when many fishers are hauled off by wives to church) he has never taken one. That’s a big surprise to me, because of how he fishes.

He uses worms, primarily. I nod thoughtfully. Worms are a serious bait, used by deadly fishers; thus flyfishers are frivolous folks and fill the air with their soaring creations, which are concoctions of fanciful feathers. (Mercy me.) Today I am with him, a worm-fisher in spirit. He is kindly telling me things which many fishers keep to themselves, even when the bamboo toothpicks are applied under their fingernails, and I am appropriately appreciative.

“No,” he replies. No sadness there. Now, what could be more honest or discouraging a statement than that? I know that trout readily take worms. He explains that most of the put-and-take trout are systematically removed from the lake and the water long warmed by the sun before he begins his important summer work. It is as though he concedes them the water and when they are done with it takes what is left over, what nobody else much wants. This reminds me of how the whitewater rafters possess rivers like the Wenatchee until the snowmelt is all gone, then desert the rivers just when the steelhead and we flyfishers arrive. It is a complimentary arrangement. One kindly gives way to the other, or so it seems, when the truth of the matter is that each seizes the water when it is at its optimum best for that person and his sport, then leaves it when it has stopped being pleasant or interesting to him. Or her. But in our minds it is more fun to think of it as a form of natural succession.

The man’s raft looks to be grounded, or else anchored in only a couple of feet of murky water. The lifejacket appears to be excessive, since he can easily walk to shore, should his raft sink. I recognize him as a non-swimmer, and acknowledge that I am not much better myself. Brothers again. I should wear a lifejacket, too. His worm (my robin’s eye tells me) is but a bit of worm, a worm prudently torn in half, perhaps so that it does not extend too much of itself as target to a tiny fish and the rest get nibbled off. I understand. Also, it makes a hard-dug worm go farther--twice or thrice as far, depending. So it is an economical move, besides. It is the old trick of making the bait appeal to the fish. If the perch he seeks are not large to start with, why offer them a steak? A Big Mac of a worm will do the job.

Earlier I saw him lift his stringer, thinking it was the anchor rope, I guess, before making a slight positional adjustment of his raft. Not much of a catch so far this fine morning, either in number or size, my keen fisher’s eye tells me. They might feed the family cat, if that cat were newly weaned. Yet--brother that he is--I utter not a discouraging word to him or sotto voce later in his direction. Would I want him to mock me or disparage my catch, when it is so petty and insignificant? No, I don’t.

That night I venture out on my pier with a Self-Carey Special, a predominantly brown little number that arguably resembles dragonfly larvae or various nymphs recently shed of their husks. Again the tiny bass queue up to attack it. The lake has an endless supply of these stunted creatures and it would be good science to remove many of them, in hopes that the survivors would grow large and prosperous. Let’s see: if there are a million such runts in the lake and a limited (though abundant in summer) food supply, and I killed fifty a night, how many years would it take before I rid the lake of them all, presuming that none of the bigger ones spawn next spring and repopulate the lake with more of their species? But I can’t. There is something in me that dislikes killing anything, regardless of how good the reasons are; I must steel myself each time I conk any fish on the head and deliver it smiling to the kitchen. And there is attendant sadness when I do it, a mourning fore and aft. So all these little guys get shaken off as quickly as I can do it. This is not always as fast as I’d like, especially with Mustad hooks that do not debarb well.

I stand on my dock, cast and retrieve, varying the speed with which I strip in line and also the manner in which I do it, alternating between fast and medium, with sometimes tiny pauses thrown in for the sake of variety; generally at this time of night (late) the faster I can bring in the fly the better, and the fish picks up the fly and swims along with it, so that I can barely perceive that it is on the hook until it turns away, or I have given the rod a sideways tug. I hook a fish about every sixth cast and land about half of those hooked--just as in steelhead fishing; that is, landing fifty percent of what takes the fly (not hooking one every sixth cast, I wish). Meanwhile Norma is pottering round the yard, inspecting the new flowerbeds and deciding as though in time of revolution what will stay and what must depart. It is an awesome power a gardener has. But it is nice having her so near, while I catch fish. (Am I showing off? Hardly, with fish of this size.)

Back and forth through the air goes the yellow line. How effortlessly it soars. What a wonderful caster I am. Of course I am standing two feet above the water and the night is windless. I am reminded of a certain Seattle flyfishing club that gives beginners casting lessons every spring. The nights are generally mild, laid back, and it is not long before the novices see their line sailing out impressive distances. Of course they are standing on a dock, well above the water. How easy it is to fly fish, they think; how cool. So bolstered, they go to some nearby river (such as my Stilly) and wade out deep. The prevailing gale that springs up around eleven A.M. is present and doing its job, which is to blow. It comes from a contrary direction. Suddenly the novice caster (and the experienced one, as well) find they can not get much more than thirty feet of line to obey their wishes and land anywhere near the target. The halcyon days on the pier come back to mock them. Was that really me, they wonder, as the line twines round their neck yet again?

Not my case tonight. I am more pro than I’ve ever been. How splendid I must look from afar, flailing my line as far out as I’d ever like it to go. Only my casting precision is nil; it has deteriorated badly over my years of fishing for steelhead. In fact I am having a devil of a time getting my fly to land within a foot or two of where I aim it, even at a short distance; usually it lights in the densest part of a duckweed patch. Then I am quickly into some noxious green matter, which must be plucked off my hook before I cast again.

I aim towards the weed beds, my fly landing just short of their trailing tendrils, and begin my hesitant retrieve; I try out a host of actions, starting with slow ones and speeding up by degrees, trying to find something that will interest the various spiny rays. I soon learn that a very fast strip is best. The tiny bass go for it, and so may anything else that doesn’t take too long to make up its tiny mind. I’m hoping for trout, of course. That is always my goal, this lover of salmonids to a compulsive degree. But I’m intrigued with what may be in the depths here.

All the while I remain aware of my wife’s corporeal presence, as she continues to work around the edges of her flower beds, familiarizing herself with their contents and making life or death decisions. She’s about fifty feet away when I hook something of substance. There is a quick snatch, followed by a powerful sideways swimming action. Halibut, flashes my memory. This idea is more absurd than my usual ones. The fish begins fighting vigorously. It alternates dashes to the side with easy, forward slithering. My mind is triggered by some other fish from the past, a fish I can’t quite nail down. It was long ago; that much I know.

She is not fast to act, for she has seen me pull this false panic trick so many times as not to take it seriously again. I wait what seems an incredibly long time for her to arrive with the long-handled trout net that was leaning up against the house. At last she is standing beside me, the net dangling from one hand. We look deep into the murky water. It is impossible to see more than a couple of feet. The fish refuses to surface and keeps boring deep.

“A trout would be nice,” I agree. Then it dawns on me; the elusive pinpoint of memory bursts. “It’s a crappie.”

And there it is, the intangible made specific, concrete. Memory refuses to function logically, lineally. It has to be triggered by something frangible. My last crappie must have been fifty years ago. Instantly I am swept back to that time. It is June, I in my teens. I can calculate just how long ago it was, by a single lingering event: Joe Louis is fighting Billy Conn for, I believe, the second time. I am at Cottage Lake, North and East of Seattle, the site of my many adventures, most involving fish. I am trolling my favorite lure, the Helin Flat Fish, one made of wood, the only kind there is. When a trout hits, its tiny teeth leave an imprint almost like a fingerprint; some paint is removed as evidence of the strike. In time these toothmarks accumulate impressively; they form a palpable history of successes and even failures. It is from such things that we discern much of the meaning of life.

Several people, men all, have portable radios tuned to the fight and are out on their floats or docks (as I am in real time out on mine). The fight is an important, worldly event, and even if I wanted to avoid it I couldn’t. I don’t, and neither does anybody on the lake. It is interesting to me, that is, but not as much so as fishing. So I row the boat I’ve rented from Norm’s Resort along the North end of the lake, where most the docks and blaring radios are, keeping half my attention on what’s happening in Madison Square Garden and the rest fixed on my vibrating rod tip, making sure the Flat Fish is working just right. I give it plenty of body torque. It is a splendid June evening, warm and mild, and Billy Conn, the White Man, is landing a few good punches but if the truth is spoken Joe Louis is beating the stuffing out of him. It is only a matter of minutes before Billy falls to the canvas and is counted out. Or so we all believe. It will be Louis’s patented uppercut that will do it. The world is betting on which round. The world and I can hardly wait to find out. And I am too young to have any money on the outcome

My priority is trout. It always is. Cottage is a lake very much like the one I have just come into proud possession of, but is about twice its size at fifty acres. The water is glassy and slick, on that long-ago June; it smells of fish, or whatever flora gives it that musky smell that isn’t really fishy at all, only connotes fish. June, we are past the prime for trout. I fish on. There are some put-and-take rainbows left, true, with the spiny rays just coming into their time. It is a wonderful season, with the best of both possible worlds, or so it seems to this young angler. And here is Joe Louis, to boot.

The lake remains placid into late dusk, my Flat Fish working just the way I like it to--wriggling slowly and almost coming to a stop, then starting up again, almost as though catching its breath or regaining its life. I find that fishing carefully this way, I get strikes in two different situations. The first way is on the perfectly straight-forward rowing course, usually on the third pull of the oars, which gives it a deadly action. The other way is on the relatively fast sweep on an outside turn. You never know which way will turn the trick. Usually it is the straight course.

The strikes are coming every five or ten minutes. There are few misses or lost fish. The rod tip does a little tentative bob, then plunges; the soft tip actually goes into the water on the good strikes, and the rod starts to follow it, but I stop it, almost as a shortstop snares a grounder. I grab the rod at the last possible instant. And often the snubbed-up fish vaults into the air some eighty feet behind the boat (for I believe a long troll catches many times more fish).

Now what makes the evening memorable and, in my eyes, remarkable, is not that the fish average eleven inches in length (which is pretty goodsize), but that half my strikes are from hatchery rainbows and the rest from black crappies. And perhaps every fifth fish is a bluegill--a fish previously unknown to me and proves strong, pretty, but smaller. It is foreign, exotic. A wonder.

Crappies fight better than rainbows. It is how I tell them apart at the onset. Any confirmed crappie fisher will nod knowingly at this outrageous statement of mine. The trout fisher may get on his high horse and argue that I don’t know what I’m talking about, or else am out of my mind. Neither is the case. I know the truth in my depths. Memory confirms it. And this is how I recognize at once (back in the present) my fish is a black crappie. Even though I haven’t experienced one in about fifty years.

Tonight Norma dips the net and holds it half-sunk, as I have many times instructed her to do. Many times. It is as though I believe she has no mind in such matters. I guide the giant pumpkinseed of a fish in over it; it is about the same size and shape as the net’s hoop. “Now,” I tell her, and she lifts. A pound or more of lashing fish fills the net and strains the lever arm of the long aluminum handle. The act unbalances her. The net dips. I grab the rim to guide it to the dock. Beautiful. Every fish is lovely in its own way. It has its own time and season. The lake is must be full of crappies—among other fish. And they will take flies! I slip the barbless hook out of the neat, tiny mouth and though it should be my job to kill the fish and clean it, Norma spirits it away, net and all, and I let her.

After all she is going to eat it. Each of the new species will be an eater. It is another way of getting to know the lake.

crappies—among other fish. And they will take flies! I slip the barbless hook out of the neat, tiny mouth and though it should be my job to kill the fish and clean it, Norma spirits it away, net and all, and I let her.

After all she is going to eat it. Each of the new species will be an eater. It is another way of getting to know the lake.

Besides the denizens, I am getting to know some of the visitors to the lake. These are spiny-ray fishers who arrive after the water has warmed and the trout fishing gone punk. The Perch Man is named John. We talk often now and he knows my first name, too. In the American West everybody is immediately on a first-name basis. It is a little odd, at first, to people coming here from the East Coast, for instance, to walk into a bank and be addressed by your first name by, say, a young woman who wears on her breast a badge proclaiming she is Becky. As you age, you sometimes long to be simply called Mister by strangers out to sell you something, such as a CD or a pair of socks. Or by your neighbor’s young children. Or am I being stuffy and behind times?

John tells me what I need to know gladly, without devious ferreting. Out on the lake by himself every morning and late afternoon, he is in a word lonely, with nobody to exchange fishing success with, and at times his splendid isolation in a rubber raft anchored off some lily pads is too much. We could both do with some company. One morning he reports taking 34 perch. All are of a size and not big. He explains how to fillet them with a sharp knife. Can he eat so many, I wonder--he and his wife? I do not ask at this point. It would be pressing things, and we are on a good terms, and I want to keep it that way. Having experienced animosity on rivers, from being prodded too far, I want to have pleasant relationships with all the people of this lake, whether they be residents of visitors.

I also want to ask John where he gets his worms. This is August, the ground dry as sand, and there has been no rain for two weeks--that hardly enough to measure. He must keep a compost pile or have manure, producing an endless supply of worms, for he fishes often and perch are notorious bait thieves.

Today there are two young men with yellow rafts; they arrive together in the same off-road vehicle, but fish separately, apart. This is the way with good friends. Each to his own fishing. They arrive and depart as one, though, and share information about what the fish are taking. On a small lake they are always with sight of each other and keep visual track. These guys are friendly when I walk out on my dock and hail them. They are fishing with closed-faced spinning reels and casting toward the lily pads near my dock. Already I feel proprietary about the lake and its shoreline. They want to catch my bass, crappie, and perch. One tells me he is fishing for “anything” when I hail him. When I ask about what he is using, he rows toward me and shows me his lead-headed jig with a yellow wiggly thing on the end of it. It is either live rubber or soft plastic. In front he has an odd little spinner contraption that moves the jig sideways, or so it would appear.

“Yellow is best for trout and bass,” he tells me. “Green or black for perch and crappie.”

This is most interesting, for I’ve begun to believe that in order to catch all the lake’s species I will have to resort to worms, which I have nothing against doing, you understand, but I would much rather take them on flies, or on lures that resemble flies, with all sorts of modern synthetics to help me out. Admittedly flyfishing gets pretty close to lure fishing, at times, and lure fishing close to bait fishing, when the lure (or fly) tries too hard to resemble a worm or, say, a living frog.

There is no limit on spiny rays, neither on size nor quantity, in my state. They are so prolific that fisheries managers want the lake to be nearly fished out, each year. There is slim chance. Even if everybody applied himself as dutifully as John, the fish would keep increasing beyond any collective somebody’s capacity to rid the lake of them. The only way to do so would be to poison it out with Rotenone--which is not poisonous but completely oxygen-depleting, which is nearly as bad, but leaves no toxic residue. Life goes on immediately.

When the fisheries managers do this to a lowland lake, they give residents and others plenty of notice; people show up in anything that floats and begin to gather in the fish when they start popping to the surface like corks. Since they are suffocated, not poisoned, they are eatable. Some strange creatures often show up (in addition to the people). The big cagey trout that broke everybody’s leader and the one that never would take a lure, fly, or bait now lie supine on the surface, as big as your arm, completely tame. In fact, they are dead, the brutes. The beloved goldfish that nobody could bear to flush down the toilet and was brought to the haven of a lake turns out to be megalithic. Sculpin by the score appear, tench, catfish, bullheads; you name it.

My friend, Curt Kraemer, the local fish biologist with Fish and Wildlife, tells me the first thing he’d do, upon taking possession of a house on this lake, is put out a worm on a float at dusk and see what is on the end of the line, come morning. This is illegal. What he means is, I should do it. But I resist, being a snotty flyfisher, and to date I have a motley collection of numerous microscopic large-mouth bass, plus one black crappie, to show for my daylight efforts. Further tries with the fly at twilight produce only more minuscule bass. And John, the Perch King, has had only his namesake fish come to his worms, not a single crappie or trout--which strikes me as very odd. I know that earlier in the season the worm fishers were taking more trout than anything else. But now the water has warmed alarmingly. And that determines the fish that will be found taking.

So I hie me to a fishing tackle store where I am known as a fly fisher and sidle slyly up to the counter. Kent Alger is working today. I know him from our mutual flyfishing river. “Got any worms?” I ask him casually. He thinks it is some sort of bad joke, or else senescence has overcome me and I am fishing like a child again. (This is not entirely impossible.)

“Also,” I persist, “I will need some worm hooks.” “With barbels on the shank?” he asks, being one to go along with a gag, provided it is not too long a trip. “Exactly. The size must be six. I want to keep the tiny bass off my hook and catch only big perch.” In my mind is my mentor, John the Perch King. Now Kent knows I am fully demented. Best humor those. A moment later he’ll slip away to the phone and call the booby hatch to come and get me. How everybody will laugh to see old Arnold taken away in a padded van, his sleeved arms tied across his chest.

But Kent’s job is putting merchandise in the hands of customers, so he does my bidding. No snide questions asked. The hooks are Gamaguichi and cost 23 cents apiece in envelopes containing but ten. A lot has happened since I last fished worms. I wince. “Got anything cheaper?” I ask cheaply. “Mustads?” There are no Mustads, it turns out, nor any Wright And McGill. The store won’t carry those for a good reason: there isn’t so much money in them. I must do with Gamaguichis, or do without. I’ve got perch on the brain and must buy what will catch them. As for the worms, he directs me to the bait cabinet. It is an old refrigerator in a remote corner of the store; Ted’s is owned by a man named Mike. It only follows. Similarly, an Everett store named Bob’s for years was owned and operated by a father/son combination; both were named John. Finally the second John changed the name, I suppose to honor his father. Eventually himself.

All of this is irrelevant, of course. It is a diversionary tactic, as well. The matter at hand is the public purchase of worms. In such things I have absolutely no shame. Let the world see me buy worms, I don’t care. I’m used to its scorn.

Worms are now nightcrawlers, whatever their size. Gone is the old-fashioned angleworm of my youth. Like boxes of cereal, they come in two sizes: large and larger. Nightcrawlers are the real McCoy, or else they are something called mini-nightcrawlers. I kid you not. This is the new name for the angleworm. But what a worm it is still. I open the Styrofoam container for a peek inside. I’ve seen garter snakes smaller than these. The price? I had supposed something like a penny apiece. Ha. They are more than a dime. My fifteen worms will cost me $1.75. Take them or leave them. Cheerfully I pay up and do not beg Kent and his fellow tackle salesman, Brian, to keep their mouths shut. I know they won’t.

I also purchase some flytying materials. These are a rubbery material that looks like carded yarn, but separates into tiny, narrow tubes. It is for providing flies with long, wiggly legs. Kent tells me to lash the stuff in an X-shape to my hook, pointing out fore and aft, then wrap on the body and whatever else I have in mind for hackle or wings; the legs will seduce bass, crappie, perch, and the rest of the spiny-ray nation. If not, I can always resort to the mini-nighcrawlers impaled (ugh) on my hook.

There is a bit of a problem at home sneaking the carton into the family refrigerator and having to explain away its contents. “It’s not something to eat,” I tell my wife. “Then what it is?” she asks. When I tell her she is incredulous. There is no chance of them getting out of their prison and distributing themselves throughout her food containers. Their prison is not airtight, admittedly, but it is secure.

At dusk, after some futile flycasting, I bait up for the night, as urged by Curt. (Blame him, not me.) I don’t remember worms wriggling so much. A callow youth, did I simply ignore their painful struggle against this form of piercing crucifixion? Doubtless. Who says the worm does not feel pain? It feels something, I assure you, and having to acknowledge this much I steel my mind and snag the struggling creature a second time. He bleeds a little. My God, worms have . . . blood? Like people? Like . . . me? Again I don’t recall this. And a small quantity of worm intestine oozes out. I try to ignore it but fail. Then I pitch the bobber, hook, and wriggling mass into the drink---about forty feet out and as far as my sidearm soft baitcast will reach. I take up the slack and position the rod in a little holder I’ve fashioned on the swimmer’s ladder with a couple of stout nails. The idea is, if I hook a brute, the drag on the reel will release line before my rod dives into the lake. Or so is my fervent hope. Still, I wouldn’t mind having to buy a new outfit. The old one has lasted twenty years and looks it. The guides are etched from line long being retrieved under pressure.

I have no trouble sleeping, thank you, and do not wake repeatedly and succumb to temptation and in my carpet slippers tiptoe out to the end of my dock and check on how my worm is doing. Or whether it is still present and accounted for. No, I am too mature, too adult, to do this. I in fact hardly think of my rod or worm. But in the morning, even before my orange juice, Sam and I trot out to the dock to investigate. We discover the bobber is out of sight, probably buried in the duckweed mat and the elodea. When I crank on the reel handle, the clutch on the spinning reels begins to release line instead of bringing it back in; I know enough to refrain from any more cranking until I’ve solved the problem, for all I will accomplish is to put a permanent twist in the three-pound mono. This is what destroys line.

I begin to haul in, hand over hand, a heavy bunch of stuff that looks and feels like cooked spinach. I must harvest about five pounds of the limp, foul stuff before I come to the cheery red and brown bobber; it is encased in vegetable matter, as is the leader, the hook, and whatever may be behind or under it. All the while a fish has been jumping a short distance away and I have a strong suspicion it is attached to my line. There is a certain tension and vague tugging that can be from nothing else.

Sam knows. A hooked fish is what excites him. He is the real test of whether I am into something or not. He is barking and running around agitatedly. For years I’ve relied on him to be my strike indicator. He restores my confidence in myself with his fanatical belief in my prowess. He watches intently as I crank in, then handline, the cooked spinach. I decide I need the net for what is on the buried end, but do not want to tow the fish so far into shallow water, where there is even more vegetation to entrap it. So I strike a compromise with myself and the fish: Sam and I go in half way, towing the weed and the fish, and bring the pram next to us by my tugging on the bow rope that secures it to the dock. I snatch the net by the long handle and quickly plunge it into the lake, rearing back. A handsome one-pound rainbow trout drops into the mesh, with about twice that much additional weight in slithery weed.

A trout, at last. But on a worm? Mon dieux! It hardly counts as a catch. I was after perch; perch is what I had the heart of my mind set on. A trout is what the lake (in its consummate wisdom, which is beyond comprehension) decides to give me. Of course I’ll take it. Never look a gift fish in the mouth. Not unless he has swallowed the hook, which mine has. If I’m going to continue to do this kind of fishing, I must buy myself a disgorger. It’s too messy, any other way. It usually involves an autopsy, whole or partial.

The trout, however, is a keeper. The first from this lake always is. This is the rule.

Worm fishing is a throwback to an earlier time, or in my case, an earlier life. It is fun, catching panfish on worms is, and signifies a whole lot of interesting things, not all of them negative. First of all, I still know how to do it. I think like a bait fisherman, and when problems arise can approach and solve them, like any other fisher of bait. There is always a bond among anglers, whatever way they may fish.

In the hierarchy of bait the worm is at the top of the heap, not the bottom. A worm is, well, honorable. I know, I know; a worm is alive. It is not dead, or never been alive, like, for instance, salmon roe. Salmon roe has never been alive and kicking in the same sense that its source, the salmon, was. It is what is left over and utilized after the poor fish’s untimely death. (Whatever death is timely, by the way?) A worm has a fine tradition behind it--some of the world’s best flyfishers got their start on the lowly angleworm. (I need not quote the procession of fine names, I think.)

The worm is not the trout’s natural food, I’ve recently learned. Fish-hatchery managers in Montana had to teach trout how to eat worms. They would shun them, at first, as unfamiliar food. But with a little training in the hatchery-rearing pond, trout were soon going after worms nearly as avidly as the pellet food they were raised on. They found worms wiggly and delicious. But it took a while. You might say, it was an acquired taste.

Following the demise of my solitary trout (pink meated and delicious, Norma said), I persisted in my worm efforts and the following night set my line again, baited with half a nightcrawler (for I am an economical sort). In the morning I was rewarded (if that is the right word) with a fine perch, all of eight inches long without having to step on it. I dispatched it with a sharp blow to the head of my pliers handle, and had to dig deep with their snout to get my expensive hook back, for it was deeply ingested. I report this news routinely, if not proudly. Then I cleaned the fish, triumphant at having caught another species. Norma took a whiff of what I gave her, a cleaned perch, and ordered, “Come here and smell this.” I did, hesitantly.

“They don’t smell like trout, steelhead, or salmon. A different genus, they have their own odor.”

“Well, they have a strong fish smell, yes, but most fish do. You forget. Those fish you bragged about being so delicious when you went to the Amazon, if you could have smelled them uncooked, up close, well, they would have smelled like these. Or worms. It is a warm-water smell.”

Well, that isn’t how it is going, these days. We live on a lowland lake, and it is late summer. My neighbor Tracy, the one with the two-month-old baby in constant tow, caught a perch, her first, the following night on a line set in a manner similar to mine(worm-fishing is contagious, you know) and gingerly accepted a second perch from me in order to make up a meal, albeit a modest one. And still I did not have enough of my new sport, worm fishing.

The following night, at dusk, I put out a set line again, handsomely baited with a fat, wriggly big guy, a maxi, and on a new float rig, one designed not to go so far down into the clutching Elodea. The bobber was would slip along the line, not stay fixed in one location with a bit of toothpick, and the leader was a modest three feet long; if the fish took the piece of crawler and moved off with it, the line would feed through the tunnel in the bobber and the poor fish would not feel a thing until it had turned away with the swallowed worm. By then it would be too late. Guthooked, it would be mine. A renegade flyfisher is one of the worst, having returned to well-learned practices out of his nefarious past. Actually, deep in his mind, he is the same person he always has been, only now he has put aside his veneer of respectability and false pride. He stands naked before his fish, you might say.

The bobber had hardly stopped putting out its ripples and the worm couldn’t have sunk more than a foot before the leader tightened, the bobber stood excitingly on end, and I knew I had a strike. Thin available light streaked the late sky. I grabbed the rod and mightily set the hook, as though upon a tarpon. Immediately a thrashing began out on the lake, not very far off. The fish fought well. “Crappie,” I thought. I was not far wrong.

The fish proved to be a blue gill, a close relative of the crappie and to my eyes even prettier. It was an inch or two smaller than the crappie of the other night, but fought surely as valiantly. Again I had to go for the net. Deep in the green mesh, my eye met a spangle of orange and brilliant blue. This sight took me back, too. The last time I had caught blue gills was in Wapato Lake, in Eastern Washington, amid a large rainbow population that averaged just under a pound and produced one for me of two and one-half. In between, the odd bluegill kept things lively. I had learned at Wapato to respect them. They are a handsome, scrappy fish, although quite small, alas.

I cleaned the fish, after we had come back from giving Sam his nightly walk around the new neighborhood and cannot honestly say the fish was absolutely dead when submitted to the knife. What a tiny mouth and modest head it had. The coloring had faded greatly, as fish-coloring always does, once the fish has been out of water more than a few minutes. The orange on its belly looked like a spawning hue but wasn’t. Again I was careful how I grasped the fish, knowing that those twin dorsals contained spines that would stick me and were rumored to infect badly. I had now caught enough spinyraws to think myself experienced and discovered that I could pick them up by the lower lip, which held no teeth, for they apparently have no need to masticate their food and swallow it--insects or fry--whole. Gulp. I understood at once; when normally hungry, it is often what I do. Clasped at the chin, the helpless blue gill looked a little like a Ubangi.

Proudly I showed my wife my latest piscatorial triumph. Again she sniffed the air near it, not bringing her face too close. “Phew,” was all she said.

“You aren’t going to eat it?” I asked, with consummate disappointment, for my original plan was to provide her with a Smorgasbord of spiny-ray delights, since my fish were apt to be all belly-hooked. And already she was begging off. Maybe Tracy would like another fish, though I suspected what she really enjoyed was catching her own dinner. Still, I would try her.

I had discovered a few things important to me. In two weeks time, fishing solely off my dock, five species of fish had been caught; those that would not come to my fly attacked my worm, namely, black crappie, yellow perch, black bass, bluegill, and rainbow trout. To know what the lake contained, I had to keep fishing--alas, with the worm, for it was now mid-August and, remember, even that rainbow had refused to chase after a fly. To fish on with worms, I told myself, with specious logic, was necessary; it was a fisher’s way of making the lake his own. It is a critical point to understand, otherwise a person might simply think I was greedily trying to catch a bunch of fish.

That is not entirely wrong, but point of fact is, multiple minute bass aside, I had caught but one each of the lake’s principal species. True, there were rumored sunfish in the lake as well, but the population was so small as not to be worth pursuing to the exclusion of all else. Hadn’t John the Perch Man finally caught his first sunfish in so many years of mercilessly slaughtering yellow perch? And I remembered how, so far this year, he had caught no trout, no blue gill, no black crappie, and I had, one of each.

I was triumphant. My goal was a modest one, admittedly. I believed, perhaps wrongly, that I was a better person for having reached it, and I had gotten to know the lake the only way a fisher wants to: by catching each of its species. To do this I had to regress; I had to revert to boyhood practices, and this might give substance to somebody’s claim that I had entered my second childhood. Next comes Alzheimer’s. In the meanwhile, I would enjoy my sporty diversion. It was not yet time to get back to trout.

Trout were not my major love, all these years. Steelhead were. Since it was mid-August, the Dog Days, it wouldn’t exactly be a major step backwards to go after steelhead again with the fly, by way of a respite from all this. It was the only way I had fished for them summers since 1961. It would be foolish not to continue pursuing this wonderful sport, since I was nearly fully moved into the new house, established in the neighborhood (however guardedly and provisionally), and soon it would be Labor Day, and with it the end of summer and the reduced likelihood of catching fresh steelhead in my favorite river, the Stilly.

I continued my tedious self-justification, I know not why. Sometimes it is necessary to fib to yourself, if not outright lie. It is what keeps you going in dry times. Steelhead are trout, after all. They are very much in keeping with my quest for this year, and even with the subject of this book.

My first visit to the river produces no trout of keepable size, which includes adult steelhead. The one-year-plus steelhead juveniles attack the natural-looking fly viciously, as they often do at this time of the year, when cold weather is in sight and they must store up fat for the coming winter. I keep having to shake them off the barbless hook. Instead of using my Spade Fly, I’m fishing a California pattern that is not awfully different from it--Burlap Fly. The trouty young steelhead bang it at nearly every cast, much as they do Spade, and I am convinced (once again) that there is a family of natural looking flies that resemble insects in general and provoke the strike response, year after year. My original thought about Spade, thirty years ago, was that it ought to be banned about July, when the insect hatches become heavy and the incidental catch of juveniles is high. Today I would amend this to include all such flies, including Burlap and Brindle Bug.

I am also led to think that there is a big difference between steelhead holding and resting water, and water that might be termed “nursery water,” for lack of a better term. This is swiftly flowing water that is rarely more than three or four feet deep and has a stony bottom, with lots of bubbles produced at the top. It is here, invariably, the young fish are to be found, feeding. They are nearly indistinguishable from what is widely held to be “trout.” The young, aggressive fish hang about the edge of eddies and strike at nearly anything that resembles food, including twigs and bits of drifting flotsam. It is a competitive world, this aquarium of young salmonids desiring greatly to become adults. Only the top ten percent will survive to go to sea, and of them maybe thirty percent will return as mature fish, ready to spawn for the first time. There is high mortality among them from natural causes and from fishers like myself, even though we take care to release them from our barbless hooks. Some of the resulting death is attributable to what biologists call “the spearing effect.” The hook pierces them fatally in some vital area, such as the gills. We often miss this. And I must admit I sometimes see blood when I release a young fish, and know the fish will probably die.

After so many days on a lake that has grown eutrophic, it is wonderful to be back on a clear, flowing stream, where you can see bottom at great depths. Why, the water looks clean enough to drink. (Don’t, not unless you know yourself to be immune from all gastro-intestinal diseases.) It is as sparkling, pure, as anything that can be found today. And while I hope for a sizable fish, a mature steelhead, when I am fishing floating line with a dryfly attached, or else a wet one, my day is not much diminished at hooking nothing substantial. I leave the river long before dark, happy, feeling I have been renewed as only a river can do the job. All the same, nearing home, I am struck by the disparate beauty of a lake lying dark and supine beneath the sun’s last rays.

My next trip to the river a few days hence produces better results, though the day is a hot one and, for some reason, I am not so happy to be back. It is just another day afield. Maybe I’m fishing too often, too long. I fish methodically through the Pool Dake Traphagen and I call Dead Boy Rock (because a young man drowned here when his rubber raft collapsed upon striking the mid-river boulder, though the river has since moved far away from it and it stands on the edge of the beach) and just as I reach the end of the pool and am mentally prepared to quit, a fish strikes hard and immediately starts leaping on a slack line. The fish is big and bright. Steelhead, I think, and about time, too, but it is only after I have drawn the fish into shallow water that I see that it is a coho salmon, sometimes called silver (and if I didn’t before know why, I surely do now), for it is a brilliant fish and shines in the sun.

It took a red-bodied wingless number with a brown hackle and deerhair tail. Somebody probably tied and named the pattern, years ago, but I do not recognize it as anything other than my own; it is such a classic combination of colors, shape, and size (6) that I have confidence in it, most anytime in summer, but especially late in the year, when the sun is out. It is not so frequent that I catch salmon in freshwater that I fail to marvel at the beauty and unusualness of the fish, and how this species, like the steelhead and no other anadromous fish, spends two years in the river before smolting and heading for the sea. This is the fish that Roderick Haig-Brown said tellingly ought to survive after spawning, if any fish deserves to, but never does. Fervent wishing does not make a an untruth a fact.

I am fishing a sinktip line in this pool for the simple, stupid reason that I believe the fish will not come up on top to strike a surface presentation. Stupid because I have never attempted it and thus do not know the notion to be true. We often treat ideas as facts because we have a fixed mindset on the subject. This is not a good thing to do, but I continue to do it. When I leave this pool, and head for the Elbow Hole downstream, I switch to a full floating double taper and a Gray Bomber for the simple reason that I know it works there, and has, many times. I suppose a wet fly would catch fish, too, but I greatly prefer fishing a floating fly whenever I can in what I term “possible water,” whether lake or river. I have confidence the fish will respond. The fact that none did so on my previous trip here signifies nothing. We dreamers are born over and over, full of renewable hope and faith.

I fish into the sun, for at this time of day, in this particular pool, it is unescapable, and I tell myself it is what I would prefer, given a choice, when it is only be what I usually encounter. Would the dry-fly fishing be even better, if I had the sun at my back, as the traditionalists tell me I should put it? I don’t know and don’t especially care. This is what is available to me and I happen to enjoy it.

Dry-fly fishing, as the sages remind us, is best because it is easiest; it requires the least effort and the angler does not have to think much about what he is doing or have any special skills. Throw it out there, short or long, and let the current do the work; that’s the ticket. Oh, a mend or two might help the drift, every so often, but then mends may unneeded and only serve to give the fisher the sense that he is controlling events--that is, he is master of his fate. In fishing, and in much else, this is illusionary.

I am fishing blindly, and am using this as an excuse not to watch my fly’s long float, for it is impossible to do in such light. My mind is free to wander, and wander it does. I know from other days on this pool this year, different light conditions, that the current here breaks in an almost perfect angle to give the fly a natural, slack-line drift; try to riffle it and you can’t. The fly goes its merry way regardless of any movement you or I wish to give it, and when the pool slackens and slows, even a riffling hitch will not make it wake. It continues along its gentle course, and any fish that takes it is ingesting a naturally drifting insect. This gives me the illusion of fishing classically, satisfyingly, even it there is nothing I can do to alter the float and must abide by it.

And then, out of the blue, as all such strikes arrive, a steelhead rises blind to me and engulfs the fly, and the first thing I know a sizable fish is leaping out in the river and line is being ripped off my reel. The sound of the old Hardy is astonished outrage. It is wonderful to have your floating line pointing directly downstream, while a fish is leaping nearly at your feet, considerably upstream from where your taut line indicates, and you know at once it is the same fish, yours, not another, and soon the two seemingly disparate lines will join and be seen again as the one line they indubitably are and have always been, miracle of miracles. And the fish be on the line securely, as often proves the case, wonder of wonders, in spite of all the anxiety you endure throughout the playing of the fish, right up until the moment it lays its beautiful, sleek, little head on the sand of the beach. And you know it is yours.

The unobserved strike and the simple tightening have hooked the fish in the exact place you would have chosen, given a voice in the matter and a blackboard on which to draw an arrow for the barb (like a banderilla) to be placed. The hinge. Bravo, Toreador. You couldn’t have lost this fish unless you grabbed the line in one hand, pointed the rod tip at the fish, and hauled hard. (Ah, but you didn’t know all this until the battle was over. If you had, you might have been a lot tougher with the fish. But you were . . . chicken. That is the right word. You were deathly afraid of having the hook pull out and losing the fish.)

Your fish now, to kill or let go, a female hatchery fish of just under eight pounds, it is hooked in the hinge of the jaw on the same side as you were standing in the river, the fish facing upstream. This is right and indicates it was no snatch, no fluke. It was a perfect take, for which you deserve zero credit. But you will take it, all the same. The tippet has not raked the teeth of your fish and is as smooth as when you tied it on your leader a few minutes ago. Also, the hook feels sharp, when you prick the ball of your first finger with it as a test. So you leave it on the leader’s end and do not bother with the wise ritual of retying the knot. Your confidence today is without limit. It is one of those rare days. You believe you can do nothing wrong.

And you soon hook a second fish, for the wind is with you and perhaps the benediction of the fishing gods, of which there are many, some powerful, kind, some perverse, ornery. The fish leaps and is off to the races--only you are not part of the races after the end of the first run of about sixty feet. The fish has . . . parted you. You are without fly, even though the leader remains perfect, smooth to your touch its full length. Damn, you think; it is your fault, indubitably. Your one fault (among other faults) is hubris. As though you badly needed a second fish, or your family was depending on you and it for their next meal, there not being any food in the house except some mealy potatoes. Which is patent nonsense.

And that is it for today, all the action. It is enough. You return to the new house (its cedar orange in your headlights), your lake home now, not the tired city, with a dead hatchery steelhead in back, and you walk to the side door with your catch, evidencing the proud carriage of a tired angler who has been successful.

The lake is aglow with a tangerine sunset. There is no loss of intensity between water and sky. They mirror each other perfectly.

The Perch King is reporting incredible catches and I suspect he is not getting them all on his customary worms. I’d guess maybe (ugh) maggots. But he does not come close enough to my dock for me to hail him and hold his feet to the fire which will ascertain the truth. Since there is no limit on perch, either in size or numbers, he is free as a bird to slaughter every perch in the lake--which might be so bad an idea as it sounds. As things stand, he must be thinning down their population noticeably. Now if he’d catch the tiny bass instead, it would be even better. The lake would benefit greatly. But he probably isn’t hurting the lake if kills all the perch the grapevine reports he is catching.

Thirty-four is about an average morning for him. With my spy’s binoculars I see him lift his stringer with a mighty tug and it is laden with splashing golden fish which I, with my newly expert eye, quickly adjudge from two-hundred yards away to be about a pound apiece. Not bad, I think. But what does he do with them all? Bury them in his garden for fertilizer? I wouldn’t put it past him. I’ve been thinking of doing the same thing myself. If it made for super roses. . . ? Naw.

Okay, I’ll admit it, its been getting to me, what old Mr. Perch can do with a measly worm. Now I’m a fisherman first, before I am a flyfisher. I ought to know a thing or two by now. So I hie me back to the worm shop and buy another dozen micro-mini nightcrawlers, marveling at the terminology and the adaptability of the language. This time they cost me more. Well, if they’ll do the trick they are worth it. I right the pram and find it dry inside, though its been raining--rain and salmon being the harbinger of fall. I take two of the sashweights I’ve saved since we replaced the bedroom windows in the old Seattle house and tie them to some synthetic cord that I know won’t rot after repeatedly wetting. So armed, I set off rowing across the lake. I am going to fish where Mr. Perch fishes. No bobber this time, because the Master doesn’t use one, and I’m in no mood for innovation. I want fish. My number six, chemically sharpened Gammiguchi worm hook is debarbed because I fashion myself some sort of sportsman. Catch-and-release . . worm fishing? For perch? Chalk up another first, if only for myself.

I anchor about thirty feet out in a previously determined channel marked by selective eye. It is in a straight line between a sailboat’s mask and a flagpole flying Old Glory. I triangulate out to a point about sixty feet away: This is where John parks his yellow raft. The anchors seem to hesitate briefly then continue their descent when they first reach bottom; I think I’ve struck muck and the anchor is continuing to sink deeper but meeting with some further resistance. I’m not sure whether they will hold me steady or permit a slow drift in a circular course. Time will tell.

I divide a worm into thirds. (The bigger ones I plan to divide into quarters.) The worm does not accept this readily. For my major worm surgery I am forced to use my new cheapy Cabella flytying scissors. Three dollars, and worth every penny. Without anesthesia, the worm comes to life. This proves to me that all animal life, including its lower forms, feel pain, pain that is not awfully different from what people experience, but it is a matter best not to think about at all, at risk of instantly becoming a lifelong vegetarian. This might not be a bad idea, but what I have in mind is enough fish for a meal.

The worm is wiggling excitedly, effectively, as I toss him into the drink. I have no weight attached to my skinny nylon line and leader, but there is a tiny swivel, and I’m sure this acts as a weight. It is about half as heavy as a small splitshot. I find I can fling line and bait about twenty feet, if I use a full-arm sideways motion. This is plenty adequate and provides more distance than I need, for the water is less than fifteen feet deep; I can tell from the way my line sags when the wormy portion touches bottom. Ten or eleven feet down, I’d say. This ought to be ideal perch habitat.

On the way to the bottom one of the microscopic bass grabs the worm bit and ties to depart with it; my line moves sideways, then sags slack. I retrieve quickly and find the worm fragment tugged almost off. I’ve saved it, just in time. I repierce the worm and sling it back into the water for another try. Down, down it settles, until it reaches muck bottom. Another tiny bass clutches it and is briefly retained: this I can sense upon a hasty retrieve, and seeing the tiny creature drift away just at the surface. Is this going to be how it is, another day of fending off these tiny creatures? And—truly--how many times can a worm be reused before it becomes a worthless piece of protein?

Next cast an infant bass impales himself solidly and cannot be shaken off. I must grip him by the lower jaw, as though he were a large large-mouth, and shake him as a terrier does a rag doll. The hook doesn’t want to come free from its bite of jaw. Finally it does and the fish goes sailing out into the lake. Rather than be discouraged and quit, as a prudent fisher might, I blithely bait up again and perform my patented sidearm sling. I am pleased to observe the line reach its maximum outer limit and snap up tight. In a straight line it settles to the surface and begins to sink. Down, down, I see it go, in my mind’s eye. And then suddenly the line darts to the side and the tip of the rod dips sharply. I grab cork and strike back, happily feeling the solid weight of a fish. The fish fights hard and burrows deep, time after time. By degrees I lift it and collect line back on my silvery spool. An orange and green flash in water that is itself slime green tells me, Perch. Here I am, in perch country. This is home to them.

So this is what brings back Mr. Perch, day after day? I am anchored securely in his hot hole. Perch have their internal clocks and chemistry; for reasons known only to themselves they congregate here. Call it Perch Heaven (not “haven,” as I did earlier.) It is where so many perch have met their maker, courtesy of John, the Perch Man. Now it is my turn to nail a few.

I have a small problem, though. I’ve forgotten to bring along a heavy cloth (as he does) with which to grip safely my sticklebacked captive, and I regret it the oversight because I may get stung. Neither did I procure a disgorger. Dim, boyhood memories tell me such an instrument would be invaluable at this time, but I keep forgetting to locate one. My mind, I guess, is still on steelhead and trout.

My perch has swallowed the hook and only the eye looks up at me when I peer deep into its throat. Now you can rip the hook out with the strength of the leader, or try to jam something down the poor fish’s throat with which to try to free the imbedded hook, or you can try a combination of both. I dig out my pocket knife and perform a crude tracheotomy and manage to free my hook. The perch goes over the side, much the worse for wear, and probably won’t survive. I hope that one of my favorite ducks makes a meal out of him.

Not only do I have my hook back, I have most of my worm, or worm bit, and it looks a little worn but still has some wiggle left. Over the side with you, my hearty. There is a long moment of idleness, before another perch, a much larger one, seizes my bait from off the mud bottom and makes away with it, pulling my rod tip to the side quickly. I strike hard. The experienced perch fisher lifts his rod and drives home the point of his hook. I lunge. This time the rod dips into the lake and line is jerked silkily off the reel in a series of small hisses and spits. The perch dives for cover and I arrest its descent. Hey, this is fun.

Mouth-hooked and easily released it is, much like a trout. I’ve been here before. This barred orange-and-green fish must weigh close to a pound. Now if I had a stringer, like Mr. Perch does, I could add this sizable guy to it hooked by his lower lip and throw him over the side, where he would live for hours, perhaps even days. (It is not much of a life, admittedly.) This is what John does with his catch. Gradually the weight amasses. Soon there is an impressive bulk to go along with the sheer numbers. It must be exciting to return to the boat launch and impress those there with signs of one’s prowess. Even if the catch is but dumb perch.

Or are they so dumb? I am having some second thoughts about the vicissitudes of Perch World. If Norma would eat them with relish (or without relish, though it would make them taste better) I could happily catch them in record numbers and tell myself I am providing my family with sustenance. For this is truly fishing. The perch take is sudden and swift. There is a nice air of mystery and surprise about it. The fish are just large enough and vary enough in size to be intriguing. Strikes come often now, but there are long intervals between when I begin to wonder what it is I am doing and to ask myself why I am here.

Perch travel in schools, evidently. This is what I learn from bouts of inactivity, followed by short periods of frenzy. It is not awfully different from trout fishing. In fact, trout fishing stands one in pretty good stead if that person willingly debauches himself by fishing for perch, as I am doing. And worse, if he knows he is having fun.

A perch takes and I miss him. Damn; I retrieve. My worm ending is gone. My fingers dive into the Styrofoam and find vague satisfaction in knowing that not all of a single worm is gone and I won’t have to vivisect another for a while yet. My bit has gone to the worm graveyard, where perhaps it will be reunited with its other bits and pieces, and form one whole integral worm again in Worm Heaven. There I picture all my lost worms enjoying eternity in each other’s company, tunneling around in stinking manure piles, enriching the soil, etc., and whatever else worms do to have fun, when worms get together.

I hook another perch and release it, I feel, with maximum hook-and-release aplomb, yet the guy swims along on the surface pathetically, making a ruckus with its tail, and I’m glad not all the world is there to see it, for it means I am faulty in my put-back technique. The perch is evidently dying, and there is not much I can do about it (Pope or Dryden would write a poem) except feel shame and up-anchor, move toward him, and harvest him with my net--which I am loath to do, for it is a lot of work for the sake of a single perch. Instead I watch him founder helplessly, not too ashamed to halt my fishing. A watery death (for a perch) is better than being used unceremoniously to fertilize some guy’s rose garden, as I suspect John of doing.

I think a lot, you see, while I am fishing. Never on water is my mind a tabula rasa. It doesn’t rest, either. It doesn’t even give itself a coffee break. But often if finds itself lacking in suitable stimuli and subject matter. It must make do with what is at hand. So it invents. It roams the watery world, it imagines, it often gets silly and desperate with what is presented visually. Especially when perch fishing with worms is involved.

In the course of about fifty minutes, I hook and boat six fat perch. Except for the weird guy doing his dolphin imitation upon release, all seem to have shed the hook without serious injury and are back with their fellow students, in perch school.

I prepare to depart. Each weight is reluctant to leave the lake bottom and fights mightily at being asked to, then suddenly gives up the ghost of resistance and (with a Ross Perot sucking sound) literally bounds free, leaving me reeling suddenly slack rope into the boat and nearly plunging over backwards. First one anchor, then the other, surfaces trailing a thick trail of coffee-colored scum on the lake surface as I lunge and haul the anchor over the side. The boat dips sharply as each rusty iron bar comes aboard and thunks heavily to the fiberglass bottom. I am at once adrift and bobbing freely on the slight swell that has come up and covers the lake like a blanket. I head for home, pulling hard, and find it is farther across than I had thought, and takes twice the length of time as I’d planned.

I ease into safe harbor and am greeted by Sam, who has eyed me harshly all the while from across the lake and set up a baying alarm. Norma has tied him to one of the posts that supports the upper deck and I am happy to see he has not pulled it down, along with the house. His eyes tell me I have done the unforgivable, once again, but how do you explain to a manic dog that you simply cannot take him along because in his excitement he would upset and swamp the boat and drown not him (for he swims like a perch) but you, for you are a poor swimmer? Well you can’t, because it is too complex an answer and he won’t believe it, besides.

In a book about trout, if you can write about perch (and get away with it), surely you can write some more about steelhead, which is a kind of trout (rainbow), even though the biologists say both are now salmon, and have a much better chance of escaping unscathed. What, rainbow trout and steelhead . . . both Pacific salmon? Yes, yes--I know. Anybody who believes this, no matter how many degrees he or she may possess, is an idiot. Not even an idiot savant. A dumb fool. I mean, don’t we all have eyes? You look at a steelhead and say sagely, this is a big mother of a trout. You look at a salmon with admiration and say, That is a mighty fine fish, but, man, no trout. A salmon purely. Close to being a trout but no cigar.

So I will write again about steelhead, which I hope we will agree is more of a trout than, say, a yellow perch is. And by the way, a yellow perch is orange, orange and green, not yellow. As I say, anybody with eyes knows a few things, degreed fish biologist or not. Some things are elemental.

It is mid-September in an early autumn and hard rains have fallen unseasonably to tell us that winter is acomen in. There is still time to experience a short fall. I know I should fish for the trout I adore, the cutthroat, but in my bones I am a steelhead fisher and given any choice in the matter, and often I am given one, I will head for steelhead water with the hope of catching just one of the brutes, rather than going off in hot pursuit of cutts and the outside chance of catching a half dozen or more of these exceedingly nice trout that perhaps surpass all others.

Besides, I am a better steelheader than I am trout fisher, as much as I admire what the latter can do. Now if I was Russ Miller, who excels at both, I’d be in a real dilemma. But I’m not Russ. There is really no choice for me because the rains have put all the nearby rivers into muddy flight and the cutts this early and most other times will be low down in the watershed, not up where clearer water may be found today and in the days to come.

So I head across the mountains to the Wenatchee. Weather is different there. There I can usually be found in September, as soon as the air cools, holding office hours and casting the fly, usually on the surface. This year, with a new house to enjoy, and an old one to fix up and sell, it seems ill-advised, not to say stupid, to give up life in a new, luxurious environment for the manifold discomforts of camping in a tent trailer. We do this each year with such regularity that it might fairly be called a compulsion. Yet off we go on another autumnal chase. We set up camp five feet from the river’s edge and invest the trailer’s contents with the multiple electrical and electronic components that make life less than grim in the last years of the Twentieth Century: twin variable-speed hotplates, TV/VCR, microwave oven, AM/FM/cassette deck radio, small refrigerator with even smaller freezer, single electric blanket (hers), etc. We lay out the artificial grass rug and beam approvingly at our instant lawn. We are installed: Bring on the steelhead.

Only none of them consent to come to the marabou fly this fine evening. It is a great pleasure simply fishing the main pool for the first time this year. I am diminished in absolutely no way by the lack of a fish, or even of a strike. In fact, to a peculiar way of ritualized thinking, a strike and a fish would subtract from the esthetic perfectness of the day’s final moments. Oh, yeah. This is only by way of saying I’m not much disappointed. There is always the next morning. I generally do better in the morning, anyway, at least in this pool. And on a good morning, there is the hope of a good evening to follow, a double blessing, and so often it happens to prove just short of axiomatic.

But the morning produces to fish, either, and only two soft hits that I cannot say conclusively were steelhead but one of which was in decided steelhead water, and I can imagine no other fish lying there and coming forward to grab a fly quite so hard. I chalk it up as a possible, but paint no enemy fuselage on the side. I hie myself and my Explorer to Monitor, six miles away, and another favorite pool. (How many there are on this wonderful river.) It rewards me with a feisty hatchery fish of about six pounds. (I’d give it a C+ or B- on the fighting scale.) I kill it and punch my card, as it is called, though there is no longer a little round dot to poke out with the end of my pen but simply a space in which to record the catch data. In ink (because they rightly don’t trust you). A pencil erases.

The fish I clean in the river out in front of my camp, upon my return at shadowy twilight, then immediately lug it up my host’s wife’s house, Bonnie’s, who keeps reminding me that steelhead is her favorite fish. As an added excuse for keeping the first hatchery fish from this river, I remind myself how this very afternoon Larry went out and got Norma a new battery for her car, when hers inexplicably failed to move the starter. We paid him back what the invoice stated. And now the fish. Not exactly a quid pro quo, but close.

It is very different country from what we are accustomed to, rugged and about as wild as anything is allowed to remain, in the populated American West. The landform is ragged, and the river purls smoothly between rocky banks, bending wide, now narrowing into a canyon’s channel. The river is green as a peeled lime. Downstream it takes on a brown tone, largely the result of gathered sediment and algae. But the clarity both places will not diminish until the heavy rains of late autumn. That time’s not far off.

Trout is my topic, and this river has trout in it, as well as steelhead. But since I do not target its rainbows, and my hooks are generally size four, it takes a pretty aggressive fish to impale itself on my iron. Still, I get some trout and marvel at their troutiness, these native rainbows and steelhead parr masquerading as denizens. And there are brown trout in various places in the river, I’ve heard. Bob Strobel caught one better than five pounds. But that was decades ago. Lately, I find a lot of trout fishers on the river; they are after its rainbows. By steelheaders’ standards, most of the fishers are inept; that is, they can’t cast very far or well. But they catch trout, judging by their stories, and some of them are of whistling size. I suspect that nearly anybody casting small flies into the Wenatchee will catch some trout, given enough time spent at his task.

All of the trout fishers I observe on the Wenatchee are practicing catch-and-release. I suspect this is because the minimum size here is twelve inches, and not many trout reach that size; if they are of steelhead stock, they will smolt and migrate to sea long before then. So it is the resident trout that must attain this length in order to be retained. Some do. The limit is two fish per day of this size. Most get put back, from what I hear. (In West side rivers, where there are searun cutthroats and dollies, the minimum is fourteen inches. It’s odd, but those two inches make quite a difference, both in size and in fishers’ attitudes toward keeping fish.) A limit is a pair. A pair of fish, in ye olde fishing bookes, is called a brace. Flyfishers embrace antiquity and often affect the manners of bygone times because they believe it enhances them and their craft; they want to look and act British. It is because our traditions started there. I often have to fight off such tendencies myself and do not always succeed.

Whatever, a pair or a brace of good-sized trout is something to be proud of. And they are thought about right for a single meal for two adult persons. But many persons I know are capable of eating two twelve-inch trout at a sitting. These folks just happen to be of Swedish descent. Now fourteen inchers are more than a shade bigger. A fourteen-inch trout will weigh a pound, whereas a twelve incher will fall short of that mark. So a pair of twelve inchers--at least to me, a confirmed steelheader--is considered nothing to bring home or to brag about. To a trout fisher it is a small catch of reasonable-sized fish, at least when they are measured lengthwise.

A pair of fourteen to sixteen inch searun cutthroat is something to ogle. But few people I know will regularly kill two, even in places where it is allowed. I have done so, and not so many years ago, either. There is something grandly appropriate about a large pair, especially at this wonderful time of year, when there is enough of a run reported in the river, to sit down to a meal of orange-meated cutthroat trout, acorn squash, and hash-brown potatoes. They go well together and, at least to me, symbolize the bounty of the season. Not coincidentally, this occurs just as the beefsteak tomatoes ripen, the pole beans come on, and of course, in Eastern Washington, the Bartlett pears are heavy on the bough with sugar, followed by the D’Anjous. The apples are a month off.

What has this got to do with trout fishing? I can’t quite put my finger on the connection, but there is one and it is important to me. So take this as a digression, lacking any more better reason. Fall fishing for migratory trout (which include steelhead and cutthroat) go hand in hand with the harvest of fruit crops and late vegetables. I can’t think of the one without the other.

Last year on the river was a bit weird. For one thing, a good run of fish came up the Wenatchee in mid-September and only a few of us were around to enjoy the sport. These included Jimmy Hunnicut and Don Mackey, both from the West side, though Jimmy has been living in Plain so long he will argue long and hard to be thought of as a citizen of Plain. And so he is.

We ran into each other between pools, each in his own fishing rig, which these days is either a canopied pickup truck or a rugged four-wheel drive recreational vehicle. We parked in a roadside pullout. Cautiously we began to compare notes. “Not bad, for this time of the year,” one of us begrudgingly admitted. The other agreed. Now Jimmy and Don belong to the same fly club and I am sure had discussed the fishing and the need for secrecy earlier. But both were catching fish, as was I. We wanted to share but were reluctant to give away anything. To blurt out the simple truth was unacceptable in our circles--even more so, if you’ve been around for a few seasons, and we all had been.

A friend of mine calls this “bragging rights.” It is hard to keep your mouth as closed as you wish when the fishing is good and you are among friends, or near friends. My friend, George Johnson, a school teacher from Pullman, whose home river is the Grande Ronde, will also say, “I’m not bragging, mind you, but I’m not complaining, either.” Sometimes pure country can be as explicit as anything in the language and speak the uncanny truth.

This is how we felt. By degrees we admitted that we had been catching quite a few fish. Gradually the grins widened. We were, in fact, knocking them dead, but releasing them all, or nearly all. We were (in girly equivalent) letting down our hair. Men do this stiffly, by stubborn degrees.

This is about as detailed as such discussions ever get. We were, all three, anxious to part and get on to the next pool, each of them different and separated by miles. And the truth of the matter was, a considerable run of mixed hatchery and wild steelhead had entered the river over the weekend, and certain regulars like Mo McGulkin (who can fish only weekends, sometimes, but otherwise will fish only weekends and weekdays, which is constantly and continually) had hit them hard, with great success. What was left over was plenty for us, however. A released fish will hit again and soon. So there were about the original number of fish left in the river, though by now they had probably moved far upstream.

It used to be only catch-and-release at this time of the year. We were used to putting back our fish and found it hard to do otherwise, even when hatchery fish were in abundance and could be kept because they were deemed surplus to the river’s spawning needs. Flyfishers are about the only people will turn out for a no-keep season, until one by one the successful gear fishers found they could catch steelhead, put them back, catch more, put them back, too, and enjoy themselves immensely. So slowly, year after year, the numbers of all kinds of fishers increased. The only thing that kept the numbers down at all was that bait was prohibited. Then the Department of Fish and Wildlife, in all its bureaucratic wisdom, decided to permit an unlimited kill of hatchery fish. The numbers of fishers doubled, then tripled, almost overnight.

The characteristic of the fishery changed dramatically. The catch-and-kill fishers turned out in droves. They are a different breed. While bringing home a dead fish has always been a part of fishing, the catch-and-release ethic originated by flyfishers became so dominant, so prevailing, that on the Wenatchee and some other rivers with fall runs of steelhead to be seen carrying out a dead steelhead was a mark of shame. Only the poachers did it, usually early in the morning or after sunset. Now things had changed. The rules had been reversed on us.

I remember the first hatchery steelhead I killed in the year of the new regulations and how positively immoral it felt to be trailing a fish after me, as I headed up the beach and through the orchard on my long walk back to my car. Fishers used to be proud of being seen in the company of a steelhead corpse, especially if it was big. Then, for a couple of decades, the regulations had stopped the practice. Now the regs had changed again. How confusing. I was within my rights to kill a hatchery fish, and I had a good reason to. This fish was my first this year; it was missing its adipose fin, a sure sign of its hatchery origins; all smolts are clipped just before release.

No matter how many times you tell yourself these things, you feel guilty each time you kill such a magnificent fish as the steelhead, a big trout whose spawn is maturing. You find yourself rationalizing the act, whether you are with other fishers or alone. And your friends feel much the same way. Whatever your answer, the guilt remains. It nags at you. It adds to the hopeless ambiguity of what you do when you go out to a river or lake.

The conflict and guilt are cultural, I’m sure. No Indian would feel guilty about striking a fish dead. Fish are in the water for to catch and eat. They can be bartered. They can be sold. To an Indian they are a form of money. Additionally, they can be ceremonially shared with family and friends as a sign of respect, renewal, and continuity.

It was an Indian who said to the mixed crowd at a meeting I attended and had to do with sport fishing, “We do play with our food after we stop being children.” It was a jab, a blow, that struck me right between the eyes. It was vicious, it was cruel; it was right on the mark. I won’t go into the old matter of how fish don’t feel pain, as we do, or it being a different kind of pain, if they do, pain on a lower scale, pain of a lower order, because this may not be true. Fish may suffer greatly. The reason a fish runs and jumps, and we thrill so, is probably not because of constraint, as is argued, but because it is experiencing pain and terror. You can pretend this may not be the case, but you will never quite believe it or your argument. Eventually you will have to own up to the sad responsibility of what you do. Then catch and release takes on a new light.

Knowing this much, or this little, I continue to fish on. I kill sometimes, but I release my fish much more often now. I try to avoid any mawkish sentiment about what I do, either way. The fish I release I know is exhausted--injured, perhaps. It will probably recover. The fish I kill (and I kill quite a few, each year) I try to dispatch as quickly and as efficiently (I do not say mercifully, but the word comes quickly to mind) as possible, but this generally consists of bashing the fish on the head until it stops quivering. It is an ugly act, a terrible thing to do. In the human world we call it murder. What matter if the victim happens to be on a lower rung of the food-chain than we happen to be? It is willful killing.

Catch and release is not always pretty or nice, either. Often it is insulting, disrespectful to the fish. On TV the other night I saw the producer of a flyfishing video release a small trout and tell it, “Grow up, little guy, and let somebody else catch you.”

What a way to speak to your quarry, your honored opponent. What lack of genuine respect. The condescension made me half sick. I got angry. The fish’s response wasn’t broadcast, of course, but it might have gone something like this: “Not on your life, or mine, Bozo.”

When an undammed river like the Wenatchee begins to rise, it is an awesome event. First comes the wind. It is presaged by a plunging barometer and I begin to sense (along my lateral line, so to speak) the change and grow uneasy. The blue skies gather and an accumulation of fluffy clouds from the West masses over the mountains. The clouds darken. Pretty soon there is nothing but a uniform grayness to the sky and land. Often, about now, the wind hushes. It is a false sign that the threat is gone. A few widely scattered drops begin to fall and hit the dust with a spat. The dark circle starts out small, but quickly becomes nickel sized. At first they are widely separated, those dark dots. Soon they shrink to a yard apart. Now you can cover most of them with the palm of your hand. You know it’s going to be bad.

The watershed of the Wenatchee is subject to intense, ongoing study, as people try to determine what are all the factors influencing the health of the river. Multiple agencies are involved in the process, along with what is cynically called citizen representatives, which generally means people who belong to groups and have little say. If you are an odd individual (and there is nobody odder than a steelhead flyfisher), they don’t want to hear from you. There are avenues through which you may communicate with them, all the same, but they aren’t very effective, which means underlings will read your letters and e-mail, and you will become part of a demographic statistic. If you represent some chapter of TU or FFF, they may pay lip-service to what you say. The game is a bureaucratic one and it has its own pecking order. The Fed is thought to be strongest player. Its staff tends to treat those from other agencies as kindergartners--beginners in this environmental business of life. The state and county authorities feel intimidated, since so much federal money is at stake, and they may miss out on their share of the pie. The politics are complex and difficult. The old saw about it being “a win-win-win situation” is uttered with so much cynicism that nobody will listen today. The game is really about who will lose the least. It is we, the public.

The Wenatchee watershed as an ecosystem can’t be beat. It is hard to get a handle on; it dwarfs the minds and authority of its agency participants. And it is highly changeable. Not for long will it stay the same and behave predictably. In the fall, when the rains begin to fall in earnest, the drops strike harsh, dry earth, and most of the water runs quickly off. It drains into the tributaries and the river itself increases rapidly in volume. Much of the land has been logged of its softwoods; the stands of Ponderosa pine, hemlock, and fir in the Wenatchee Lake area no longer are there to collect moisture from the sky in the form of rain and snow, and release it over a long period of time through the complicated process of transevaporation. So the river floods. Its volume (measured in cubic feet per second) begins to mount and soon exceeds the capability of the river to contain it within its banks.

The river remains fishable for a while, at least theoretically so, even when it becomes brown froth and roars mightily. But soon it is a hopeless cause and even the staunchest fishers depart. If you can catch the river after a modest rise--say, only a true foot--you may continue to catch fish, for the fall season is when they are running. Only then. But soon the river is much too high, and rich brown besides, and the fishing stops. Soon snow arrives, and day-long freezing temperatures; the river drops and ice reaches out from its shores until there is barely a trickle free in the center of the river. The fish hole up and will not bite.

Fish biologist Larry Brown says steelhead will go as far as the Great Northern Tunnel near Stevens Pass; salmon not so far. It is a considerable distance--more than fifty true miles. Any farther than they would be in another watershed, that of the Skykomish, a river that ends in Puget Sound. All this is background for my specific tale. It takes place on the river I fish each autumn. The river provides a kind of trout fishing, but is different from that found in lowland lakes. And yet isn’t all fishing really the same, differing only in whether the water is moving or not, and in the types of fish that live there to be caught?

Last year, about this time, I had a curious experience that has to do with fish, dying, and death. (Stop here, if you don’t want to read about it, and proceed directly to section 37.) The season was still on, but the weather had turned bad and was worsening hourly. The river was rising precipitously and threatening to go out. Each of us who still remained on the river looked at the dim sky and pleaded, "Please, God, one day longer. That’s all I ask.” The fish continued to bite with wonderful regularity.

It was October, with the days shortening down rapidly, and night advancing daily. Daylight savings time was about to end. I rose early to the sight of a river crowding its banks. In fact, the river woke me early with its roar, droning out the highway sounds across from my camp and filling my ears with considerable noise. I snapped on the portable radio to find out what was going on, out in the world, but could not pick up nothing intelligible, neither voices nor music, even with the volume turned up enough to overcome what the river was saying. So I snapped it off and ate my breakfast. Then I prepared to go fishing, but with a leaden heart and a sense of desperation, because the river situation appeared hopeless. My fishing of the Wenatchee looked over for the year.

The rain that had been falling hard all yesterday had slowed and nearly stopped. The accumulated rainfall, I knew, was headed for the river, and what presently flowed was only a fraction of what was soon to come. I had only a few hours left in which to try to catch a fish; perhaps but minutes.

My host, Lawrence Peterson, who owned the vast orchard where each year I was permitted to camp, came by and greeted me with his usual cheeriness. He knows the vagaries of the river and the weather about as well as anybody. He has the naive belief that I can get a fish most anytime I want, though he was witness many of my skunks. Immediately he compounded my problems for the day by announcing that he would like a fish. It wasn’t for him but for a friend.

“Why don’t you give him the one from the freezer?” I asked brightly, for I had also given Lawrence one at the start of the season. Rather than eating it fresh, as I had hoped he would, he had tossed it in the freezer (that halfway house to the garbage can for many, but not for somebody like Lawrence, who is of Swedish descent, and can eat fish like a seal).

“I want a fresh fish for him. You see, he’s very sick, probably dying, and there is nothing he likes more than a meal of fresh steelhead.”

I stood in the soft rain, listening to all this, looking I suppose glum, for it was how I felt. The friend was old, had advanced cancer of the pancreas, had absorbed all the radiation they could give him. He was existing on pain pills and liquids. There was very little he wanted to eat, or could eat. I listened dutifully, feeling my gloom mount. My mind felt like it wore a steel jacket. The weather turned worse. How fitting. The wind picked up and the rain began to fall in earnest, as if to mock what had come before. In a way, I was anxious for the season to end and to get back to work. I had a book waiting to be writ.

It was Steelhead and The Floating Line. It was about three-quarters done and didn’t want to endure any more delay; such things weigh on you. At least they do me. Besides, the Seattle Mariners were playing the Yankees for the American League Pennant. My team had lost the first two games, but they‘d been played in New York, and now we would have them on our home diamond. It was an exciting event. The game was not broadcast in Eastern Washington, not on TV, which is all that counts. For the first time since I’d been a kid there was a championship-caliber team in my city. So one side of my mind was not sorry to see the Wenatchee rise and dirty up. My car was packed, and my only thought had been to fish for an hour or two, then head for home and the big game. And now my friend and host had laid this burden on me.

Yet I felt challenged. As much as I may deny it, I am a fisher and competitive; the words are synonymous. I longed to see if I could do it--produce a fish in so short and difficult a time. Under normal circumstances I would have a few hours before I must head back. Now they were being shortened by the river’s rapid rise. I had maybe an hour and a half. I told Lawrence I would try. He smiled. His look told me he had faith in me. Well, I didn’t. To fail was human, I told myself. It was next to nothing.

Knowing that only a hatchery fish could be kept, and they comprised about half the fish in the river now, made the task more difficult. Yet I had to see what I could do. My fragile reputation was at stake. I was not going to cop out, though I was sorely tempted.

So I fished on down through the Home Pool, the famed Turkey Shoot, under a dark cloud, feeling the ragged need to produce. It was no fun and I had no strike. Well, I pretty much knew it would be this way. My dark cloud crossed the sky and merged with the others. Heavy rain began to fall. I pulled my parka hood on and bowed to the weather. Nothing. Reaching the end of the pool, I trudged back to my car.

I proceeded on to Merlin’s Pool, ten miles downstream and always a good bet in October. The rain had discouraged others and there was nobody in it. Clutching my new, untried Spey rod, I had an unused reel on it, a huge Hardy Salmon Deluxe, and on the end of my floating line and long leader was a new version of Spade, one tied with a body of some crinkly black stuff that sent out weird green flashes whenever light from the sky caught it just right. I waded out into the shallow part of the riffle.

When you push the odds, you might as well give them a good shove, which means trying out a whole lot of new things at once. This is considered bad science. You are supposed to reduce your variables to one, so that if something works, or doesn’t, you’ll know what to attribute it to, or what not to; everything else must stay staunchly the same. An unproven fly on a new line, on a new rod and new reel, is pushing the envelope, admittedly, but what the hell it is fun and it is fishing. A steelhead is a simple-minded, unpredictable creature and will hit nearly anything. This is the truth of the matter. So I rolled out some line and, sure enough, on my second cast in shallow water at the top of the run, a good fish took the fly and made off with it, heading upstream and past me, vaulting continuously. I felt it was well hooked from the start. The tackle worked perfectly and there were no mechanical failures, large or small. By the time the fish slid onto the beach--very much like Edgar Martinis into second, on one of his patented off-the-wall doubles--there were yellow pear leaves floating down the river in droves, along with a lot of other unidentifiable flotsam of an organic nature. One by one the visible landmarks on the far shore were being eaten up by the river.

The fish was a hatchery male of about seven pounds, very dark. It would be foolish to expect a chrome-bright fish at this time of the year, let alone this far up the Columbia. I killed the fish with a driftwood stick that seemed to be solid and was. I thought about making another cast and I thought about the Yankees and the Mariners. I looked at my watch. To make it home for the beginning of the televised game would require steady driving at sixty-eight miles an hour, I reckoned, allowing a minimum amount of time to drop the fish off at Lawrence’s on my way back to camp and making a hasty departure. As much as I’d like another fish, perhaps a bigger one, I knew I had practically no chance on a river this high and brown.

I left the river. Swinging by Lawrence’s in the rain, I laid the dark fish on his shiny macadam drive, rapping on his door with heavy knuckles. “Here’s your damn fish,” I said proudly, “but excuse me for not cleaning it. I’ve just got time to get to Seattle in time for the first pitch.”

He nodded understandingly, as I gunned the motor in preparation for driving off.

I got home ten minutes late for the game, but it had been briefly delayed and I’d missed only a couple of pitches. We won. We took the next three games and won the divisional pennant. The city went wild. Norma and I did, too. Sometimes it is fun to join the herd and be not too much to the side of it. The herd has its perks.

This is not another tale about a man catching a fish under what he deems difficult conditions and bragging about it afterwards on paper. At least I don’t mean it to be. It is an autumnal story, one dealing with life and death. They are not awfully pleasant matters, either. But things do not always happen as we’d like them to, and the world of fishing is not exempt from what happens elsewhere, as much as we’d like it to be. Alas, it is a part of that weary world.

I returned to the Wenatchee the following week during a lull in the weather. The river was high and murky (we call it “out”), unfishable still. I suspected as much. I was back to break camp--a sizable job when done alone, consisting of the exact opposite of setting it up and must be done with more care and attention if you don’t want to damage your lifters and tent material. As I worked away, Lawrence came by to talk for a bit and say goodbye. He was wearing a suit and tie. It was the first time I’d seen him in anything other than his work clothes.

Sometimes men kid each other about their unusual attire. Back in high school, we used to say facetiously, “Who died?” I’m glad I didn’t.

“I want to thank you for that steelhead,” he told me. “No trouble cleaning it. I’ve cleaned a lot of fish, you know. Here and in Alaska.

“I filleted it out and gave my friend half, the very same night. I saw him the next day and he had eaten and enjoyed it. He told me to thank you. I don’t know how he managed to get it down. Next day he went into the hospital. He died the following day. I’ve just come from his funeral. We’d known each other for forty years.”

I swallowed hard. It is the kind of thing that makes you suddenly thoughtful. I didn’t even know the guy, but was deeply moved. Never had a dead fish been put to better use. I was glad to be an integral part of the process. A friend of a friend isn’t exactly a friend, but comes close, when the cards are dealt face down. Then ultimate things matter a lot.

Yet I did not feel as though a friend had died. Lawrence was there to do that. I just felt commensurately sad. It was more of the gathering gloom of October. The man was old and his time had come. Cancer is a terrible way to go, and so many do. Fish and fishing are small things, seen in a larger context. They vanish into insignificance. Fishing remains a sport and a pastime.

Here I was, not yet sixty-five, and at least half my friends were dead. I had recently begun the practice of writing down names, addresses, and phone numbers in pencil in my new address book. The old one, in which I’d used ink, had become crammed with people no longer alive. Then I thought of this man not enough of a friend or acquaintance to be registered in its pages, even in pencil.

You cannot pretend to know anything about trout without having read its literature, for this codifies, summarizes, and records its triumphs and often its failures. You don’t have to have read a lot, but you must have read a little, or else you will be sorely handicapped. There are two books that are to my way of thinking unavoidable, and if your memory for titles is as short as mine, I promise, you won’t have any trouble remembering these. The first is Trout, by Ray Bergman. The second is also named Trout. It is by Ernie Schwiebert. They are as different as night and day. Both are important.

When I was a boy, one of the first books I ever read on the subject that obsesses me was by Ray Bergman. What a wonderful world it evoked. It lodged in my head and remained there, quietly cooking away, as the decades passed. Recently, doing research for a book proposal of my own on great steelhead writing, for occasionally the writing on steelhead has literary merit, I thought of this book and knew I would have to include the chapter when Bergman visited the North Umpqua river, back in the Twenties, and wrote tellingly about his experiences there. So I checked Trout out of the local library and began to flip through the pages of the book whose format and typography were as familiar as the old house in which I used to live. I discovered there was much about Bergman that I remembered incorrectly. Well, it was a boy who had read it earlier. I was looking for an easy story and nothing more.

The library had always provided me with my reading copy of Trout. Later, I’d long longed for my own copy, but had not been able to find one. The book has been reprinted many times, but Knopf for some strange reason had let it go out of print, just as flyfishing entered its period of great popularity and provided what The Wall Street Journal called (not in these exact words) “a viable marketing opportunity.” As a writer I’ve never been able to understand the vagaries of publishers, and each time Edward Hamilton sends me his tabloid filled with hundreds (thousands?) of remaindered books I wonder at the collective wisdom of book publishers, since they have to clear out so many. Surely a spin of the wheel of chance would produce more books that sold successfully than what is going on.

Ray Bergman never changes. He is as dependable as the fish he writes about. And the color plates by his friend, Dr. Edgar Burke, are as constant as the firmament. Each fly is lovingly reproduced and hand-colored by the physician, who is long dead. What a time-consuming labor of love and devotion it was. The flies, well, many of them have passed into the Great Unknown, along with their creators. Nobody fishes them anymore. I’m sure that each seduced many a trout in its time. Their great abundance indicates that trout are not so awfully choosy and will usually go for something about the right size and color as what they are feeding on, the exact imitation not only unnecessary but a great waste of time and effort.

Sometimes his hard-learned lessons lodge in the head and are carried forth into life in the Great Individual Unconsciousness of All Trout Fishers, or whatever it is. It’s what you don’t know you know, or what you don’t think you know but do know. You find yourself on a river or a lake and you try to reason out the situation and come up with some practical solution to the problem at hand of the fish not hitting what you are offering them.

In his article on “The Steelhead of the Umpqua,” we encounter the classic Bergman situation: the problem, the deductive reasoning, the solution. It is almost like having Sherlock Holmes at our elbow, on a stream or lake. Fishing is slow, but a few of the regulars are getting an occasional fish. (How true, how true, says Annie Hall, in the movie of the same name.) Ray suffers a skunk, as do his experienced fishing companions, Clarence Gordon (no relation to Ted) and Dr. Phil Edson (perhaps father of the light and dark Tiger flies, but perhaps not). Ray fishes his fly as the others did--in the classic style that works on this river and was practiced by everybody who was halfway knowledgeable.