26

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 now own a piece of it.

27

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.

“Do you ever get trout?” I ask.

“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.

28

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.

“Quick,” I call out, “bring the net.”

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.

“What do you suppose it is?” she asks.  “A trout?”

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

“How can you be so sure?”

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.

29

            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.”

I say, “You mean, perch will take something other than a worm?”

“Oh, yes.  They’ll take a jig, all right.”

            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. 

30

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.

31

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.

“Smells like perch,” I admitted.

“Then perch smell awful.”

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

“They stink.”

“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.”

“Just awful.  Why don’t you catch another steelhead?”

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.

32

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.

If you stood on your head, you couldn’t tell them apart.

33

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.

34

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.

35

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.

“Good,” I said.  “Pretty good.”

Sage nods.

Don said, “I’m doing pretty good, too.”

Nobody ever says “well,” not on a river.  Maybe in books.

Jimmy said, “Some nice fish around.”

“Big ones, too.”  This from me.

“Some pretty big,” Don agreed.

“Darned big.”

“Wild, too.”

“You betcha.”

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.”

36

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.

“Eat steelhead,” I thought sadly.  “And die.”

37

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.

Pure Bergman.  It is what he professes.

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.

Bergman again.

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.

He writes, “I experimented considerably with flies.  I tried streamers, standard Salmon patterns and all sorts of flies which had brought me success in various sections of North America, but none of them were worth while.”  Umpqua and Cummings, he tells us, were the most effective flies on the river.  But nobody was hooking more than the odd fish.  Then he met a man, Jay Garfield of Tucson, who was.  Garfield had been fishing for five weeks straight and had been uniformly successful, with a top fish of 11-1/2 pounds.  This is good, I know, for wild summer runs, with but a year of sea feeding.  It is the same on my beloved North Fork of the Stilly.

Ray decides to get to know this Mr. Garfield.  There is a lesson here for all of us.  A bit of friendliness doesn’t hurt.  Most fishers, especially successful ones, if approached politely, are susceptible to pass along a tip or two, if not set upon by someone angry or haughty.  Ray knows how to learn from another’s accomplishments.  It is arguably the best way to pick up new tricks.

The lessons Ray learns on this wild Western stream are repeats of ones he picked up years earlier in the East:  fish the water that hasn’t been pounded to death earlier, and you do this by long walking and difficult wading, often having to cross a boulder-strewn river in order to reach what lies untouched.  Also, you may apply some ancient tactic that worked before in other places, on different occasions, for trout.

Ray crosses the North Umpqua and approaches from the backside water fished by everybody from the more accessible shore, after having rested it well.  (It was customary then to light a pipe and smoke it down.  Today, I suppose, all those who have not died from lung cancer simply stand at the water’s edge, chewing gum or else on their tongue.)  He chooses to fish as Mr. Garfield does--dead drift.

Not exactly telling us exactly how the Umpqua fishers are handling their flies and line, we must surmise that it is either on a tight, taut swing or else on a similar cast but with action added, small or large, by hand or rod movement.  He tells us this is a deadly technique he used on difficult brown trout, and if the book is fresh with the reader he will remember just where he read it and may return to his bookmark for guidance.

Ray starts hooking fish like crazy and soon is playing head games with his friends, who are much more experienced at this type of fishing that he, but not doing so well.  Ah, but he is Ray Bergman.  Every decade or two one such superman comes along.  He knows how to learn from others and to apply what he’s discovered.  In other words, he never stops learning.  And when he stops catching fish, it is not for long.  He keeps working on the day’s recurring puzzle.

Lee Wulff, probably the master angler of the American Twentieth Century, was just coming into his prime at that time.  The two men knew of each other.  Ray includes some of Wulff’s new deerhair dry flies in this book; already they are earning a reputation among knowledgeable anglers.  Surely Wulff knew of Bergman’s work in developing translucent nymphs, which differed considerably from their forerunners, the hard nymphs of E. R. Hewitt, the master angler who preceded him.

The year of Trout’s publication is 1938.  It was written, of course, much earlier.  Its formative years were the early Thirties.  I was barely born then.  I know enough about the time to realize that it was difficult for everybody.  Many people, including Bergman and Wulff, found it hard to get jobs.  A man with regular work was a lucky man.  Yet each of the two found meaningful jobs.  And both found plenty of time in which to fish.

Much that was important in fly fishing for salmonids, and trout in particular, were developed during that tough period.  In fact, it would not be stretching the point to say that most of what we know and practice about fishing for trout came into being, one way or another, during those bleak years.  That time was followed about a decade later by a revolution in materials that arrived after the end of World War II and incorporated into flyfishing and fly tying the new synthetics that were developed for purposes of war.

The two revolutions--the one personal, the other technological--changed the face of flyfishing.

38

I must have first read Bergman’s Trout when I was about thirteen.  The book had been out for five years then and was selling well, considering the extent of the Depression.  As a boy I was an outdoor romantic.  Each of us in turn goes through such a stage and believes he is alone in suffering its joys and agony.  Some boys outgrow it, but many of us do not.  We remain dreamy and dissatisfied, and believe in our aching hearts that the woods and water hold the key to our salvation in their hand.  If we can just find the right path.  It is often a lifetimes search.

It was a library copy that I held in my young hand, sweaty and warm from anxiety and fishing fever, perhaps sneaking the book under the covers when I was forced to turn in early on school nights, my mind set on a good two hour’s further read.  And when I went back to reread Trout a couple of weeks ago, starting at the beginning, I remembered a passage that had stirred me deeply and perhaps drew me into flyfishing--the great romance of it all. I kept searching for the passage, anticipating it deliciously, but it remained elusive, that is, unlocatable.  Earlier, in my research for Ray’s writings on the Umpqua, I had expected to come across it, too, and had read both the chapters before and after it, but in vain.  So I quit searching.  Perhaps I had imagined the whole thing.  It was not until I had obtained my own copy recently that I was able to sit down like an adult in charge of his life and begin to read the book as it needs to be read, which is of course from the beginning.

Two-thirds of the way through, stirred again by the prose as I was as a boy (I am not awfully different, in many ways), I began to lose faith in my memory.  There was no such passage as I dimly recalled.  It had to do with an overnight ride on a train to Upstate New York.  As a boy I had thrilled to the clack of the iron wheels and the belch and bellow of the engine ahead, as Ray sat up all night in his coach seat, briefly dozing, as the train plunged into the wet spring darkness.  He arrived at dawn in a mysterious woodsy setting and ate breakfast in a country café, after which he was transported by yet another train, this one a crude shuttle, farther along on his journey, until late mid-morning, when he was met at a remote depot by either a guide or the keeper of the lodge, I never knew which.  Or so I thought I remembered it.

Chapter after chapter flew by, my eyes more than attentive.  I was enjoying myself, but I was also feeling a progressive sense of loss.  Time had stolen something precious from me.  I read about wet- fly fundamentals, dry-fly techniques, sunshine and shadow, the eyesight of fish, water types, pond fishing.  I raced by the section on pond fishing, which had preceded the one on steelhead, and seemed irrelevant, coming to the one on grilse and landlocked salmon; these I read closely and pleasurably.  They were, after all, cousins to my favorite, the steelhead.  Then I backpedaled through the pages; perhaps I had skimmed by what I had been looking for.  No.  I decided to relax and enjoy myself, with what was left of my mind, giving myself completely to Ray Bergman.  I would go wherever he wanted to take me.  Why hurry through it?  It was a pleasant journey.  I began reading about pond fishing (which I had not been much interested in formerly, but now I lived on what might be described as an overgrown pond), and realized that if you love water, moving and still, in all its shapes and sizes, you simply have to pay attention to everything going on around you, particularly what involves water of any kind, for it literally covers the fair surface of the earth.  If you ignore ponds, you will be overlooking much that is important in the watery world, and you will be slighting yourself, and what there is available for your imagination to grasp.

Bergman pays ponds close attention.  It is his usual way.

First he disingenuously disqualifies himself from speaking expertly on either pond or lake, citing little experience with either.  He is a river man.  Then he begins to draw on the little knowledge he has, which turns out to be considerable.  It is a way of disarming your audience and their possible objections to what you may have to say.  And then, by paying close attention, I became immersed in his narrative.  And this is how I came to Cranberry Lake.  It is what I was seeking, the memorable long paragraphs, beginning with the train ride.  It was there, after all!

The episode begins:  “The train ride to Cranberry Lake was an experience which always gripped my imagination no matter how many times I made it.  As I remember it, the train left Harmon, N.Y., around 8 P.M.”

Just as I remember it, too.  Go on, Ray.

“On the way up the Hudson to Albany I listened ecstatically to the clickity-clack rhythm of the wheels on the track and the chill-provoking whistle of the locomotive.  The sounds of the train on the speeding rails and the whistle brought me a vivid picture of the locomotive itself with the driving rods moving at a high rate as we rushed through towns, over bridges, under tunnels and speedily clicked off the miles.  Somehow the trip brought back vivid memories of the old eight wheelers like the 999 of the New York Central, and the 499 of the Erie Which I knew and loved in my boyhood.”

This is pretty good writing.  It was then and it is now.  It evokes a precise, sensory response in most anybody--male or female, but male particularly--who reads it.  The response is primarily auditory, but it contains visual elements as well.  I don’t know whether Bergman was calculatedly doing this, or not, and it does not really matter, for the result is the same:  As a boy it thrilled me and as a grown man I thrill, too.  Of course my boyhood was closely associated with railroads as the dominant means of travel, and the fact that I worked for them while in college surely enhances the romantic appeal.  (I still smile in the night at the locomotive’s wail as it comes to Stanwood Crossing, half a mile away, and slide back into deeper slumber immediately as the whistle fades; I awaken just enough to check my mind’s Hamilton railroader’s pocket watch for the correct time, but already know it pretty closely, to the hour and almost to the minute; I can’t explain it.  At the time I originally read Bergman I had no such experience to draw on and thrilled differently.  There was another source:  I had my own Silver Streak that corresponded to his “999,” and it ran through my backyard.  They were substantively the same train.

I was too young to travel alone to some far off river or pond in which to test my mettle on difficult large brookies, as he had done.  I did it vicariously, as must have been the case for so many males of whatever age in Depression-ridden America and in the years to come.  The fact that the book has remained in print for so many years attests to its appeal over so many generations.  I wonder then why Knopf has recently let it go out of print?  Perhaps tastes have changed more than I thought.

This may explain why, when I walked into Patrick’s Fly Shop, the other day, and asked the young man behind the counter if he had Bergman’s Trout, he replied, “What’s that?”  I turned on my heel and walked out.  Born yesterday, I may have thought.  Further discourse was impossible.  If he doesn’t know this book, or know about it, what does he know, and what business does he have working in a fly-fishing store?  Might I not have to start out my materials search with, “Do you have any hooks?  Those are those black metal things, curved, with a loop on one end and a sharp point on the other.”  I exaggerate, of course, but not by much, and it is a sad laugh that accompanies my undelivered mockery.

Now how on earth can you learn to think straight about catching trout unless you are a graduate of the Ray Bergman School of Reasoning It All Out?  It is impossible.

There is the sensory side of Bergman and there is the reasoning side.  I don’t know which is most valuable.  I know only that I remember him all these years because of the excitement and mystery evoked by his writing, and only secondly by what he had to say of practical value.  Let me steal but a little bit more from him to illustrate the former:

“I never slept very much.  There were too many sensations to be enjoyed.  If I dozed off between Poughkeepsie and Albany I always awoke there and looked out of the window by my berth as the yard engines changed the setup of our train. . . .”

“At Remson I always awoke again, just to get the first breath of the mountain air and the break of dawn.  My eyes were glued to the window to see the spruces silhouetted against the eastern sky.  As dawn advanced I gloated over the rising mist, the tantalizing odors of dank woods, evergreens and wood smoke, the swamps, ponds and streams.  We were in the forest and going deeper into it every minute.”  (Page 307, original edition.)

A bit later in the same chapter is another telling passage.  It is odd, melancholy, and quite different in tone.  Time is compressed in an unusual manner.  The passage becomes layered, quite complex.  The young Ray Bergman of the narrative has joined his companions at Dog Pond, after having caught a three-pound brookie immediately upon arrival; this was followed by a week of very slow fishing.  Then Bergman jumps to a point in mid-life (that is, much later on) and tells us that if he had known then what he knows later he would have caught more fish on that initial trip.  So we gather, or rather infer, that he has returned to the pond throughout his life.  This gives him a rich, multiple perspective on the pond, and on much else, including his life.  This is a type of enlightenment.

We know that he is sitting at his desk, writing the book, Trout, an older man, a man remembering his youth.  Where has it gone?  Well, some of it has passed in fishing.  “Emotion recalled in tranquility,” is what Wordsworth called it.  It is how all important writing is accomplished.  The rest is reporting.  (Almost called it reportage.)  He sees himself as he was when young--almost a boy still.  And with a weird, dual perspective I recognize that I was a boy when I first read it, and I now have aged, too.  He fished the pond in middle age, as well.  Usually his narrative is straight forward and chronological, but now, this once, he leaps forward in time.  He is old, or at least much older, old enough to be married, anyhow.  His wife is with him at Dog Pond.  He is no longer a boy.  (boys don’t have wives, etc.)

He slept some, awakening in the night to a sound, perhaps one magnified horrendously as sounds are late at night, deep in the woods.  The time frame is confusing; it is both time past and what will pass in the book for the late present.  The young Ray Bergman wants it to be a bear making the noise, however terrifying that might prove.  At the same time, he wants it to be no threat.  He grabs a flashlight and sees a big hairy foot disappearing.  He leans over, in the makeshift shelter and says “to the others,” Did you hear that?”  And when they ask what it was, he replies “dramatically,” that it was a bear.

The old or older Ray Bergman now tells us he wishes he could experience the thrill of that night again.  Something has been lost, as well as gained, in the passage of so much time.  “To me that is the only penalty of growing old,” he adds, “--the inability to get thrills from little things that experience finally teaches you are nothing at all.  I am still imaginative but now the imagination merely takes me on momentary journeys into the realms of fairyland.  In those days I really lived what I now imagine.  I even wonder now if there was any reality then.”  (Page 310; new edition, page 84.)

Wow.  This is really something.  If not great writing, it comes crowding close.  In real time (whatever that is) it is winter.  He is at his desk writing this passage, but he is also reliving it with the keen memory only an aging man has for the details and the need for precision.  He is at once young, middle aged, and old, or relatively old, for we know Bergman in 1938 to be not exactly feeble and decrepit.

Then all at once, without any break in the narrative, he is at the lake with his wife.  Where did she come from?  She hasn’t been mentioned before in this chapter.  It is night again, or night still, and they are camped out, and it is the same Ray Bergman still, only he is trapped in time by a trick of memory; he sees things with the aging man’s multiple perspective.

There is another noise in the night, another “What is it?” called out.  His wife shrieks.  He trains his flashlight on what he knows already to be some innocuous creature.  The light reveals it to be a porcupine.  He has seen them before, day and night.  It is probably looking for salt.  He knows so much, you see.

Realizing all this, recognizing the real thing for what it is, is disappointing.  The excitement is gone.  Gone is also the thrill.  But Bergman is transported by incident back to his boyhood, remembering how it was, or how it existed in memory, himself caught up in the wonderful trap of remembrance.  Thrills are still possible there.  But at the same time he knows the present to be what it is, uniform and dull.  You cannot really fool yourself, he knows.  He tells us, “And so the night passed.  Exhaustion finally overcame excited nerves and we all fell into a sound sleep.”  It is how it was, not how it is.  Memory is insidious.  We all must be young men, or boys.  Surely not the aging Bergman, nor the middle-aged one, there at the pond with his wife, many years later.  The  now is then, unreal, mysterious, wonderful:  “We awoke to a cheerful, sparkling world.”  (Or so it must have seemed, in long retrospect.)  “Close by, the waters of Dog Pond danced in the sunlight and invited us to fish.  But I was the only one who responded to the fishing urge.  The others were more concerned in making up lost sleep.”  (Same page.)

And there the wonderful long passage ends.  We are back in the past, the multiple time-transport ended.  The past is fixed, secure, inviolate.  It is locked up in the mind’s amber.  To make sure we know where we are, after so much time travel, Bergman clues us:  “On this first attempt flies would not work.”  He is a boy again--where he most wants to be, and where we want him.  We correctly assumes that in the future flies will work for him; he will have reasoned out the feeding habits of trout and learned how to catch them on artificials.   If flies do not work then, young Ray Bergman will use worms.  He is not too mature for that.  But he soon will be.

I find this revelation enlightening.  After my own recent backward slide to worm-fishing for panfish, and incidentally, catching a fine trout this old-fashioned and unsophisticated way, when flies have failed me, it is nice to know there is some literary precedence for my crimes.

However far back I may have to stretch my arm to reach it.

39

The other Trout is a far different book.  Well of course it is; it was written by another man.  True, true, but Ernie Schwiebert is about as different a person from Ray Bergman as one can find--an university professor (Princeton), an architect, a world traveler, and a writer of considerable scientific knowledge and training.  His two-volume omnibus may be the last word on Salmo and the salmonids.  At least it has never been surpassed.  And it is apt not to be, in one volume, two, or whatever.  Trout can only be appended to.

I’d dipped into and fanned the pages of  Schwiebert’s Trout for a decade or two; nobody sits down to read such a book, at least I don’t, not straight through.  It is in fact an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically.  Its two fat volumes span 1834 pages, including a copious index, which we would be lost without (and within).  Originally printed in 1978, it was reprinted in 1984 in brown cloth binding by Dutton.  The first edition ran two printings, which is pretty good for such an expensive book, though my publisher tells me trout books sell well and have always have, even during the depression, when Bergman’s came out.

Schwiebert’s book was published in Canada as well.  The United States edition is dubbed “A Truman Talley Book.”  This is an editor I knew slightly and who turned down my own book, Steelhead Water, prompting me to heavily revise it.  Small world, the one of fishing writing is.  Schwiebert was already famous among a small circle of fishing affectionados when his Trout came out.  He had earlier published Matching The Hatch and Nymphs.  I can imagine the degree of interaction between Talley and Schwiebert over the years necessary for them to pull so much material together before the book was ready to print; it must comprise one of those significant collaborations in publishing, not awfully different from that of Thomas Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins at Scribners.

Yet Schwiebert is his own man, and I suspect that he fully determined the book’s organization and layout.  His illustrations, both in color and in black and white, though admittedly copied in many instances from photographs, are first-rate.  As one might suspect after even a cursory reading of Schwiebert, his attention to small detail is scrupulous and precise.  His drawings are beautiful.  His architectural education and training serves him well. You could just about construct a trout from his illustrations.  They are really brilliant diagrams.

Schwiebert was the son of a professor and became one himself.  He pays a true scholar’s attention to historical detail in his vast, panoramic, epic concordance on the life of the trout and charr.  He describes the long tradition of fishing with bait and fly from the earliest times.  But flyfishing is his preference and, you could say, profession.  He traces it back farther than Macedonia; its beginning reach into early Chinese culture.  And he brings it all expertly together.  If you want an introduction to the literature of fishing and flyfishing in particular, it is all right there in Schwiebert.  Arnold Gingrich and Paul Schullery are two other good sources for what has been said in print.

Schwiebert excels in whatever he does.  He is the Renaissance Man supreme.  His knowledge of biology is unsurpassed--just look at his entomology, for instance.  He has named many of the hatches of mayflies and lesser known species and sub-species of insects.  His considerable knowledge is there to read in Trout’s two thick volumes, along with exacting information about the biology of fish.  It is probably the one indispensable source of information for anybody who wants to know all about trout.  And about fishing writers, as well, for his bibliography is comprehensive (if a bit outdated today).

Having dipped into Schwiebert’s Trout for about twenty years, using the index to find the particulars of what I was looking for, it was only recently that I sat down and tried to read him as one might an ordinary book, say a novel.  I started with the introduction, as though this were a Modern Library Giant and I was fearful of getting in too deep too fast.  (And, as is often the case with the Giants, one seldom gets farther than a third of the way through the introduction, usually written by a man whose chief task is to interest us in the text and lead us speedily into it, if he’s done his job right.)  So often introductions have the opposite effect.  Not in this case.  And this is odd:  Immediately upon starting Schwiebert’s preface to his own book, I meet Ray Bergman again. 

Bergman was a tremendous influence on the young Schwiebert, just as he was on many of us.  What a shrunken world we flyfishers live in!  It sometimes seems so small that we all ought to know each other, even though there are millions of us and the writers alone are surely enough to fill a small city.

It turns out that Schwiebert came from Illinois.  (I did, too; it is a great place to come from, that is, to leave.)  Winettka in his case, whereas I came from Chicago and Highland Park, another northern suburb of the big city.  This does not link us specially, I know, but it gives us a common starting point, since the city itself is not a provider of trout, let alone any of the other salmonids.  At best it might yield a few bullheads and spiny rays.  Schwiebert caught these as a boy.  Many good fishers have come out of such a meager background.  What it does is provide an environment to be escaped from, or transcended, at the first opportunity.  With Schwiebert it meant trips to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.  I envy him this.  I envy him in many other ways, as well.  He is a good writer and eats high on the hog.

Here, only yesterday, I discovered a kindred mind.  Schwiebert—a kind of brother to us all?  Perhaps.  I am not attempting to link myself with a superior talent as a means to increase my own small status; no, I am merely pointing out the common lineage of many flyfishers and how we strive to overcome where we started out.  In  my case, it drove me to have a home first on a river, now on a lake.

As Schwiebert and I sat as young men, reading late into the night and early morning hours Ray Bergman on trout, I now sit as an aging man reading into a different night about how a young Ernie Schwiebert studied Bergman into a night long-since vanished in to the canyon of time.  I tell you, it is a spooky feeling.  Here recalled in sharp, chronological order by Schwiebert are the same visits Bergman made to Upstate New York that had thrilled me; I had read them again only weeks ago, in order to write this section for this book.  But they had been pleasurable, too. There was Cranberry Lake all over again, only nothing is repeated exactly.  Time modifies events.  Seeing Cranberry Lake through Bergman’s eyes, then through Schwiebert’s, provides a dual perspective.  Remembering the lake seen through their eyes, as well as through my own lens of memory, provides yet another perspective.  Whew.  The vision is a compound one, one enriched by time and counterpoint.  Schwiebert puts it all in sharp perspective:

“It has been almost forty years since the celebrated Ray Bergman first published his classic Trout, and thirty-two years have passed since I spent five dollars of hard-earned allowance money to purchase my first copy at Von Lengerke & Antoine in Chicago.”

Had I needed one, this is my petit madelaine, my Proustian teacake, to open up the door of the past.  (Or is it Pandora’s Box?)  And whose past is it?  Why, Schwiebert’s and mine.  Everybody’s.  Perhaps it is the universal past, the past that all flyfishers have, even if we have not individually owned up to it yet.  (Best do, for you will be better off for doing so.  Trust me on this.  It is our multiple heritage.)

Schwiebert tells us he still has that copy and it holds an honored place in his library--which must be vast, considering all the information he regales us with.  He says, “It is a revelation that completely change my life.”  Ah, yes.  Schwiebert was excited by the train ride and the anticipation of the morning’s arrival at the poind and the prospect of great fishing.  He among millions.  But Schwiebert does considerably more with this material than I and others have done--we who simply respond to it.  He puts it into a complex historical/sociological time frame and reminds us of how things have changed, for nothing remains the same for long.

Now, I had spotted the great revolution in materials after World War Two that produced new flies, new rods, new lines.  I had commented on it earlier in this book.  But I had carried it no farther.  Schwiebert tells us that there are more changes and they are momentous.  Even the trout are not the same:  there is an evolution in species.  Of course.  Somehow I knew this, but needed the point to be driven home.  Schwiebert is the one to do it, and I must acknowledge that he is right.  He is right in the general sense and he is right in most every particular.

Forty years had passed between the publication of the two books, twenty before Schwiebert’s first book appeared and twenty more before his own monumental Trout.  It is important to him that the time frame so precisely reflects this passage and that it has the mathematical precision and roundness of even decades.  At first he dreamed of fishing the same streams as his boyhood hero.  Then he did it.  Later he began to fish the world-famous waters that most people only dream of visiting.  Now it is we who dream as he did when we read the pages of Schwiebert.  Wonderful.  He has taken the torch and run farther with it than anybody else.  I suppose this is the dream of all fishing writers.  And to fish the fabled waters is surely the dream of all dedicated fishers, even if you happen to be a Thoreauvian stay at home like myself.

I must pay further homage to Schwiebert.  I did not value him so highly as I do now, having read him again and at greater length.  I used to find him eager to tell me more about things I thought I already knew enough about.  Perhaps one has to grow older before a writer like Schwiebert’s takes on full value; otherwise he may seem tedious and boring.  The truth is, it is we who are dull and not wise enough to pay close attention and bother to learn what he puts in front of us.

Schwiebert overwhelms us on every page with his detailed knowledge about the biology and habits of the trout, and we do not always respond enthusiastically it is not his fault.  It is impossible to absorb it all at a single prolonged sitting.  Our circuits go into overload and begin to shut down.  We have been conditioned to shallowness and being satisfied with something less than the full picture of what we are offered.  We have learned to depend on inaccurate summaries and to settle for what in reading corresponds to sound bites.

Imagine a world comprised exclusively of tags of information and People Magazine-sized renderings of what we desperately seek:  special knowledge.  It ever is withheld from us.  I would not want to live such a life.  We must constantly fight today for more than what we are provided with—what is skimpily put on hour plate.  In a world of intellectual drought, Schwiebert is an oasis.  Trout is a good place to begin to come to life.  It may also be a good place to end up.  Just think:  all these years, Schwiebert was there, with his monumental knowledge, waiting to be read by anybody with the hunger and deep need for what he has to offer us in his encyclopedia.  But learning is difficult and requires paying the extra time and attention necessary for its pursuit and assimilation.  This is why books exist and why they continue to get written.  It is to convey to others what we have learned so painfully ourselves, over so much time.

40

“Virtually everything has changed in trout fishing since Bergman first published his Trout in 1938,” Schwiebert tells us in his.  (Page xiv.)  “Fishing for native species like the richly spotted brook trout and cutthroat has tragically declined, their populations decimated by mining and timber cutting and agriculture until their survival lies in spring-fed tributaries and back country.  Many classic rainbow streams have been eradicated thoughtlessly, and many are still threatened.  European brown trout have inexorably filled the vacuum that followed the decimation of our native species, bringing problems of shyness and sophistication that have completely transformed both American trout fishing and the philosophical tenor of the American trout fisherman.”

There it is, gang:  The Back To Trout Manifesto.  It is as succinct a summary of environmental conditions as anybody could make, including Aldo Leopold, who is famous for his utterances on the subject.  Written twenty years ago, Schwiebert’s words are as up-to-date as they were then.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc.  The past is with us still .  Irrevocably. (What did William Faulkner say?  “The past is not past.  It’s not even over?”  Words to that effect, anyhow.)

The Second World War serves as an acute dividing line. “Postwar studies in ichthyology have radically changed our understanding of the American species and their patterns of distribution, and have identified several wholly new species of trout,” he continues.  “Fresh knowledge of the physiology, sensory perceptions, behavior, and ecosystemic requirements of both trout and grayling is transforming both techniques and tactics.  Radical changes in fly-dressing have taken place since midcentury too, and in less than fifty years, our studies that began with the late Preston Jennings and his classic Book of Trout Flies in 1935 have expanded and leapfrogged in recent years.”  He mentions his own contributions up to then.  And well he should, for they have added greatly to our sum of knowledge, not to mention the aesthetics of angling literature.

He returns in his introduction to the emphasis on travel by train in Bergman’s book.  It is a constant theme.  But things have changed there, too.  Schwiebert calls it tellingly “cacophonic change.”  This is not tranquil change, change produced by moderate, quiet events.  It is discordant, violent change.  It is change that disrupts established patterns of thought and behavior.  It includes , the coming of airplane travel.  (A jet is certainly cacophonic.)  The jet plane made possible Schwiebert’s reaching out across the planet to fish rivers and lakes not previously accessible except to the extremely wealthy, for travel takes time and time is money.  He refers to this as “the poetry of speed.”  (Page xv.)  I rather like the phrase.

Schwiebert tells us, “. . . fishing tackle has changed explosively, too.  Modern synthetics have worked a revolution in rods and leader performance and lines.  Reels are virtually unequaled in their precision and performance and the strength of their lightweight alloys.  Split-cane rods of remarkably sophisticated tapers and craftsmanship remain available, while fiberglass and still more exotic fibers like boron and carbon graphite promise startling rod performances in the future.”  He adds that “a parallel cornucopia of innovations” has taken place in clothing and waders; in casting techniques; in compound line tapers.  We are now all casting tournament distances.”  Well, some of you, maybe.

I do not agree with the degree of change Schwiebert observes.  Of course he is speaking from a perspective of some twenty years ago, and the changes since then have been more moderate and have modulated to some degree the earlier ones.  Most of the changes he notes have become commonplace and there have not been as many or such large ones since.  Boron went the way of the dodo bird, but graphite is very much with us and dominates the rod-making scene.  The compound tapers of lines have not changed very much, but the materials used in their manufacture have continued to evolve discreetly.  We now have lines that will sink at infinitely varying rates, lines to suit every occasion, lines that will float into an unforeseeable future without the need for dressing or any special care.  We now have lines that ape the silk lines of the past and contain a corresponding specific density.  They are neither sinking nor floating, and are classified as intermediate.  The old lines had much going for them, but tended to rot without extensive care.  The new ones are virtually maintenance free.  Good, good:  the news is reassuring.

What about fly hooks?  As the old song has it, “A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.”  So a hook is still a hook, though admittedly the selection today is vast and the iron used in many of them highly superior to that of the past.  Why is it then that I and many others prefer hooks from the past, along with materials no longer available?  It is not simple nostalgia, at least not in my case, though I have friends who value the past inordinately and old tackle simply because it is ancient and smacks of what they deem better times.  For me, it is because some old things simply work better.

Schwiebert mentions the advent of synthetics.  The new materials that have replaced baby seal fur (endangered because of the unconscionable slaughter to obtain it) are, in many cases, superior.  There is so much new dubbing on the market that it is hard to know what to choose.  Most is of excellent quality.  And the range of colors precludes the need to dye your own or make special mixtures, unless you happen to like watch a blender going round, as with a whirlpool bath.  But there is no satisfactory substitute for polar bear; synthetics lack the special stiffness and shine--though I admit the artificial stuff is finer and permits tying smaller heads on flies.  As is the case with feathers for tying Atlantic salmon flies, there are substitutes that come awfully close to the real thing and often are easier, cheaper, to handle.  Only the compulsively precise and fastidious must have speckled and Florican bustard for marrying their wings.  Others choose from a wide range of colors obtainable in turkey feathers.  But . . . jungle cock?  Golden pheasant crest?  Nothing satisfactory can be found to replace them.  Fortunately both these birds come onto the market in controlled quantities leagally each year, and can be purchased.

Thus the present, the best of it, is a marriage of necessity between the past and what followed it.  Often it makes for an odd couple.  For instance, most of my steelhead flyfishing friends use Spey rods now.  They are not of traditional greenhart or bamboo but of graphite.  They weigh about a third or less than the old-fashioned Spey rods of the turn of the century.  And they outperform them considerably.  But what these anglers do is still your basic Spey-rod casting with double tapered lines--though there are some weight-forward lines and casting techniques that persist.  Fly patterns are often the same as in the past, or are based on former styles, such as from the Scottish rivers, Spey and Dee.

Nylon has forever replaced fat, stiff, unreliable silkworm gut in the construction of leaders--perhaps the single most important of the innovations.  Some of the reels we use are based on Hardy’s lightweight design, utilizing machined aluminum alloys or injection molding.  The favorite drag systems are nearly the same as in the past.  For Spey rods, the size of the reels remains large--about four inches in diameter and wide, in order to crank in more line with each turn of the handle and to accommodate the long, thick floating lines.  In spite of the advances made in disc brakes and multiplying action of gearing, most of us still stick with what worked in the past--the single-action reel, in which one turn of the handle brings in a one spool-turn of line.  And our reels have checks, not brakes, and require hand pressure to slow the runs of a tiring fish.  We are not seeking more efficient methods of hooking, landing, and killing fish.  We are simply looking for refinements that will lead to better sport.

The reels we use have a light check.  It is all that is normally needed.  Now, a check is different from a drag.  A check is a light resistance that keeps the spool from over-running on a strong fish.  The rest of the restraint is up to the angler to provide.  He uses his fingers on either the line or the spool.  I would have it no other way.

A drag does this work for you and guards against a backlash or breakage.  The fish must run against the mechanical pressure and you do nothing but hang on for the ride, waiting for the uniform pressure to bring the fish to a stop.   The drag protects you from burnt fingertips, right up to the point of breaking your leader.  It requires no skillfulness from you in playing a fish.

The difference is important, yet many fishers do not know it or if they do choose to ignore it.  A drag on a reel errs on the side of mechanics and efficiency, two things we may have had enough of in our personal life, away from rivers and lakes.  But a check, ah, it is of the essence.  It is the least thing that stands between a man and his fish; they are separated by a gossamer, a thread.  It is next to nothing.  At the same time it is all important.  Disc drag has its place in salt water, but not in fresh.  It is a case of a little more being too much.

As for rods, Schwiebert saw it coming.  Graphite is supreme.  Trout fishers I know and respect often choose bamboo still for rods  eight feet and under.  And Schwiebert mentions boron in passing.  It was new when the book came out.  It was short lived.  My single boron rod remains in its tube, occasionally brought out on a windy day.  It is admittedly stronger, more slender, lighter in weight, even than graphite; it forms a tighter bow on the backcast.  But it is too powerful--way stronger than I.  It will tire you early, or even injure you, if you aren’t careful.  These are not qualities I want as a companion, when I go out to a river or a lake.

41

Because Bergman is Schwiebert’s “tutor of my boyhood,” it is important to Schwiebert to pay him the correct degree of homage and respect.  His debt is a large one.  Even though Bergman traveled America extensively, albeit by train and by closed car, he fished mainly at home in New York State, near to his beloved Beaverkill--a river he shares with many accomplished anglers, including Schwiebert and Lee Wulff.

When Bergman was ill and aging, a young, successful, debonair Schwiebert paid him a friendly visit; Schwiebert says he would have preferred it to be more than one.  In 1959, too sick to continue writing magazine articles that had helped support him in the past, Bergman stopped.  He had been tapering off.  A bad heart made writing an ordeal.  It took him a month to do an article that used to take two days.  Still, he described these last few years as happy ones.  That’s good to know.

He had hopes to write a new book and to revise Trout again, which was still in print but rapidly becoming a book about the fishing in the past.  He had revised it extensively in 1951 and made it 25 percent longer.  Schwiebert relates that Bergman’s working copy was jammed full of notes scribbled into its margins.  So further revisions were on the way.  But the work was halted and no more issued forth.  Eight years later he died.  By then flyfishing was popular.  Much of its success was due to Bergman’s books and article writing.

Schwiebert gives his mentor due credit, but more as an influence than as the creator of a lasting masterpiece.  I disagree.  The same qualities that thrilled Schwiebert, myself, and so many others is what leads to a masterpiece determination.  The book lives and will continue to do so.  There is nothing in all of Schwiebert’s nearly 2000 pages to excite us so much.  His great wealth of technical information, applied science, and fishing tactics overwhelm, rather than inspire.  There isn’t so much fun in it as in Bergman, either, and that I sorely miss.  Perhaps it is what you give up when you become deadly serious about your subject and have to have the last word, or words, on it.  But for both men, time races irrevocably on.  Words tend to date and age terribly.

Schwiebert believes that the great revolution in materials after the end of the Second World War “inevitably made his [Bergman’s] Trout obsolete.” No, no.  It doesn’t seem obsolete to me.  The relentless application of Bergman’s deductive logic to the fish and his gentle pursuit of the truth of the matter (that being trout are reasonable and the various ways they can be caught on flies regularly determined) have endured and will continue to prevail into a rapidly changing future.  Only the trout doesn’t change.  It remains elusive but ever the same.  And this is the constancy we all require.

Some day soon I am sure a young angler will come up to me and tell me about his marvelous discovery.  “I’ve found a wonderful new book on trout,” he’ll say.  “It tells your everything you need to know.”  “Oh?,” I will ask suspiciously.  “What’s its name?”

“Trout,” he will tell me, with a grin.  “It’s by some guy named Ray Bergman.  Ever hear of him?”

“I think I have,” I will reply.  “In fact, I’ve read it.  A wonderful book.”  And I’ll smile affectionately at this young man, my brother.  Perhaps he is my spiritual son.

When Ernie Schwiebert tells us about Bergman’s book that “its homespun style and rudimentary viewpoint on fishing no longer parallel mine, but perhaps the finest tribute to our boyhood heroes is to build on their foundation rather than to echo their work mindlessly,” I will fiercely dispute him.  The book is much better than this.  It is not a book to be superseded, let alone surpassed, and it is wrong to say so.   Better to say the books are both good, but very different.  Schwiebert’s is an encyclopedia.  An encyclopedia contains much more information and data than any simple descriptive book.  But Bergman tells us more about the sustaining joys of fishing for trout.  He alone comes close to duplicating the intensity and joy of the fishing experience—what going fishing is really like.  And it is this that we require.

Nothing supersedes anything else.  It simply comes afterwards and stands beside the other in time.  It is not awfully different from how in real life one trout follows another—if our luck holds good and we know what we are doing.  Similarly in our angling literature Schwiebert follows Bergman in time.  If one must have to replace another (and he doesn’t), it would be Bergman.  Fortunately we can have them both in our library.

And that makes us doubly rich.

42

Fishing the Wenatchee in September for autumn steelhead, I think of trout, and what goes into this book.  Occasionally some small fish bangs on my number four hook, but generally avoids getting impaled.  “Trout,” I think, not unhappily, mildly glad to be making the connection again.   Every so often a fish commits the big mistake and gets hooked.  I am always sorry about this, as I unhooked the little guy and reflect on the probable high mortality.  The question remains, year after year:  “Are these really trout?”

I don’t mean, Is the steelhead really a trout?  This has been argued into the ground and answered to the satisfaction of many, most of them scientists, if not ourselves.  What I mean is, do the Wenatchee and other streams with access to the sea really have a resident trout population?  Or are these many rainbows of ten or eleven inches that I encounter in the fall really steelhead “gone native?”  Are they fish that don’t want to go to sea?  And what does it all signify, anyway?

I had one of the answers (for there are always more than one answer to a tough question in fishing) given to me by serendipity, which is another way of saying by accident.  It happened like this.  The fishing had been good, all through the month of September, and I had been hooking a steelhead on an average of one every hour.  That is awfully good fishing.  The bad news was, I was losing about two-thirds of them.  I didn’t know whether this was because of the short-pointed hook I was using, manually debarbed for the sake of regulations, or it was just a fluke of statistics, and soon my luck would smooth out in the opposite direction, and I’d start landing fish with a high degree of certainty.  Whichever way it worked out was okay, for I was having a lot of fun.

One fine Tuesday afternoon I hooked five good fish in Merlin’s Pool.   Luckily I had it all to myself, or it would have been fewer.  (Some would have gone to somebody else.)  Two of the fish were barely touched and I thought of them as trout.  But three were decidedly steelhead.  One surged heavily and danced a telltale jig before it came off.  The other I fought for a good ten minutes before my hook came away, inexplicably (as is always the case).  And the third fish was a great one that took hard, ran two hundred feet in a couple of seconds, and jumped high, far out against the far bank.  Then my line went slack.

A terrific afternoon, in my opinion, though not one fish was landed.

Late the next morning, just short of noon, I returned to the pool.  Fresh footprints on the beach told me it had been fished hard all morning. Well, this often happened, and was no surprise.  The water had a funny look to it--funny meaning peculiar and unattractive.  It looked as if it had been thoroughly thrashed.  Now, in autumn, a river will have a certain appearance to it that I characterize as being either red or orange, meaning that a fly of that color is called for.  This is an odd matter and hard to explain so that it doesn’t sound foolish.   Bright sun means red to me; a red fly.  A slant of cold winter light and a brown cast to the water, however, translates into orange—often a combination of brown and orange, as opposed to one of red and yellow.  Do you follow me?  This is patent nonsense, of course, and I know it, but I obey its dictates semi-religiously.

The pool today was neither red nor orange.  Thrashed is thrashed, and denies all color values.  I began to fish on top with a fly that was purple.   (I’ll show them, the river gods who oversaw this thrashing.)  My feeling was one of desperation.  The situation seemed next to hopeless.  After about five minutes of fruitless casting a body came floating down the river in front of me.  Or so I thought.  The shape was dark, it was long, it was clearly human, and it rode face down.  Had I ever seen a body before?  Not exactly.  But I came close.  I will interrupt this tale briefly to relate how I just missed seeing a body about thirty years ago, for this is a cardinal event in a fisher’s life.

My wife, son, and I were out for an innocent Sunday drive.  It happens, even to confirmed fishers.  It was in April, on one of the early fine days that asks to be experienced by car.  Under a strong, cold sun we drove aimlessly South on the interstate.  The Nisqually was one of the few rivers open during the month and I guess I unconsciously headed there, though I had no tackle in the car.  I had fished it only once before, and unsuccessfully, unsatisfactorily.  Which is to say I had a bad time and caught nothing.  But I respected the river and wished to get to know it better.  And rivers are always good to look at.  You might say I needed my weekly river fix.

There was a crowd gathered at the public access, a short ways up from the landing.  This was unusual.  An ambulance brushed by us, its siren silent, traveling at a walking pace, parting the bystanders simply by its presence.  I saw a man walking rapidly toward us.  He was in full river-fisher’s regalia--hip boots, long rain jacket, billed cap.  I recognized him from the Green River, many years previously.  We were not friends but often saw and knew each other by sight.  We were natural rivals, perhaps even adversaries.  We had a different attitude towards fish and fishing.  He saw them as a product, a utilizable natural resource.  He’d catch a steelhead, kill it, catch another, kill it too, then take off for home.  Half an hour later he’d be back, a wild sheepish grin on his face, to try for another pair.  He took great pride in catching and killing fish.

We fished the river from opposite sides at Soos Creek, I having to wade deep water to stand far out in the current, casting to fish in the same glide as he, where I thought there was a point of advantage.  He fished from the shallow shore.

I’d catch a fish, crank it in close, then (with my own version of the sheepish grin) release it back into the river.  This made him furious.  I knew it did.  It was not why I released my fish, of course, but it had something to do with the feeling of satisfaction I had from doing it.

This was in the time of the great returns of hatchery fish, probably in early January.  Between us that day we hooked about a dozen fish and landed nearly all of them--say maybe ten.  Five apiece, I’d guess.  I had killed a fish for eating purposes the day before.  And I know for a fact he had killed five bright hatchery steelhead by dusk.  He was waiting to limit out for the third time.  He didn’t quite make it and was correspondingly grim.  Some people are like that.  Then night closed down.

I had not seen him since that ugly day.

We recognized each other at once.  Fishers do, regardless of how much time has passed.  He held up his hand in warning, as does a crossing guard when traffic is approaching.  I halted.  What now, I thought?  Does he still hold a grudge against me?  No, he was merely cautioning me to wait, to proceed no further.

“I wouldn’t take my wife and kid down there, if I were you, buddy” he said softly.

“Oh?”

“You wouldn’t want them to see what’s on the beach.”  Then he quickly related his story.  On today’s drift down the river, they had come across a body tucked up along the side of a logjam. He asked if I’d read  about a high-school girl and who had disappeared about two weeks ago? She’d been on a horse-back ride.  No, I hadn’t.  They’d found the dead horse a short time ago, but the girl was still missing, that is, up until today.  He and his friend had towed in the body.  It had been in the river for about two weeks.

A chill passed down my spine.  So this is why there was the ambulance, the two police sedans, and all the people who were but Sunday drivers and not fishers milling about?  I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, this man out of my black past.  He was okay; perhaps he had mellowed and now put back some if not all of his catch.  No; some things never change.  Whatever, I appreciated his human decency.  Wife, son, and I turned to leave.  The chill stayed in my bones all the way back to Seattle.  By midnight it wasn’t entirely gone.  Or the nausea.

On the Wenatchee now I thought for an instant of what I had just missed seeing on the Nisqually.  The chill returned briefly.  The body out in the Wenatchee moved; it sort of quivered.  From the top of what appeared to be its head emerged a tube, one designed for breathing under water.  What I had thought to be burnt or decayed flesh was only black neoprene.  It was a skindiver.  He was floating, face down, the length of Merlin’s Pool, swimming it backwards and in exactly mid-channel, where the fish lie.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked angrily.  “This is a fisherman’s pool.  You’re ruining everything.  Have the decency to go around me.  Better yet, head for shore.”

His response was to hold up a gloved hand.  Now, what did that mean?  Could he not hear me, though his neoprene helmet?  I had to presume he could.  So he was cautioning me to hold off--whatever that meant.  I took it to indicate, I’ll only be  here for a moment; bear with me.  Well, that was a moment too long, and I told him so.  How dare he invade my water?

Looking upstream I saw two comrades similarly attired.  It looked like the start of an army.  He was part of the group, a member of the team, perhaps its leader.  One swimmer went behind me (permissible), the other through the pool after the first (not so).  As he approached, I uttered, “You guys have the manners of hyenas.”  Then they were gone, floating out of the tailout and down through the next riffle.

I rested the pool for ten minutes, then hurried through it with a sunk fly.  Perhaps not all the steelhead had been spooked or fled.  But I had no takers, as I knew I wouldn’t.  This was the same pool in which I had hooked five fish yesterday.  I left in disgust.

The next week I was back.  I had been hooking fish elsewhere and had high expectations, for this was my favorite pool.  The water again seemed flat, newly churned.  After a bit of nothing I looked upstream.  Three dark figures stood at the head, surveying it and me.  It was the same threesome.  Dark, semi-sinister, they looked like human otters.  They concerted look they gave me could only be described as hostile.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I told them, this burly three.  You want to play a game of hostile, do you?  I can, too.  They had a vaguely threatening look, but it may have only been their garb and masks.  “You aren’t going to swim through this pool again.  I was here first.  Besides, steelhead are shy creatures.  Go away.  I mean it.”

They stood murmuring indecisively to each other.  I could not hear the words over the riffle’s roar.  Conspiring, no doubt; they were plotting their next move against me.  I decided to press the advantage (such as it were) before they launched themselves like canoes into top of the pool’s swift, shallow water.

“I mean it,” shouted this skinny man of sixty-five.  “Don’t swim this pool again.  Who the hell are you, anyway?  You with some agency, or what?  Give me its name.”

My plan was to find out what agency, the men’s names, their supervisor, the oversight commission, and send off an angry letter or two--perhaps even phone the chairperson.  The crew would have to explain what it was doing.  Up the ladder--the chain of command--would go the responses to my letters or phone call, as underlings were forced to explain their actions.  I smiled to myself.  I knew how the bureaucracy worked.  I had once been part of one much like it.

They were from Fish and Wildlife, said the one who looked to be in charge.  The first dark shape.  He had a waterproof notebook strapped to his wrist, one with a special pen tied to it that would write on its slate surface even when wet.  Neat.  Instantly I wanted one for myself. 

Fish and Wildlife, eh?  Perfect.  I knew many people in that agency and had a pretty good idea of how it worked.  I had acquaintances on the commission.  I could see them at some special Monday morning meeting, asking the divers for explanations.  Why did they ruin fishers’ pools?  All the reason were lame ones  After all, didn’t the agency exist to serve us fishers?  (Answer:  no, not really.)

They continued to conspire, there at mid-stream.  The meeting went on for some length.  During this time nobody had swum the pool.  I felt grateful.  Was I winning?

Finally the ringleader said, “I guess we don’t really need to swim it.”

No?  Why not? I became suspicious.

He explained, “We swam the pool an hour ago.”

Shit, I thought and probably said, my emotions all on the surface again, my temperature rising.  An hour ago?  The pool was just as much ruined for fishing purposes as if they had just swam it.

“What are you looking for?” I asked politely, a real change of tactics on my part.  A little sugar never hurt the pot.  “I know a little about steelhead.  I have, in fact, written a couple of books on the subject.”

They seemed singularly unimpressed.  To my own ears I sounded stupidly vainglorious.  But I had wanted only to gain their confidence, and knowledge of their mission; now that I had stopped them, at least for the time being, I was due for the explanation one professional gives to another, out of simple courtesy.   Or so I tried to set it up.  They didn’t see it that way.  Reluctantly their leader began to explain how they were engaged in a study of the residualization of smolts.  He said this in a throwaway voice that didn’t expect to be understood.  They were speaking to a lay person.   Perhaps they thought I didn’t know what a smolt was.  Or residualization.  Ah, but I did.  They were talking about trout.  A steelhead that has not smolted and gone to sea reverts to trout status.  Poor little guy, he’s missed the last train to Newark.

“Did you see any adult steelhead in the pool?” I asked.

“No.”

“Come on.  This is late September and the greatest pool on the river.  I’ve hooked fish every day I’ve come here, except the two you’ve preceded me through the water.  There’ve got to be steelhead out there somewhere.”

“We might have chased them out.”

I said nothing to this candid admission.

In smaller pools, unlike this one, skindivers will cause steelhead to back down until they come to the tailout.  At the tailout the fish, not wanting to leave the pool, zoom upstream past the snorkler; this is how the diver counts them on his slate.  In this vast pool, however, steelhead were more apt to head downstream and take refuge in unlikely places where the water was still and deep.  By deep I mean approaching twenty feet.

This the men knew, too, for they were competent fishery biologists, with a lot of practical experience under their weight belts.  They walked delicately around me--this group that had already destroyed the fishing until late in the day perhaps, at which time I would be whizzing in my rig toward Seattle.  As they waddled past, I continued the conversation--admittedly one-sidedly and persistence.

“Why do you call them smolts?” I asked.  “Aren’t they resident fish?”

“They were smolts when we planted them.”

It was a good explanation.  Ordinarily the fish are called smolts when they turn all silvery, develop loose scales, and are eager to reach the sea without delay.  When they don’t do these three things, something has gone wrong with the hatchery timetable; they may not become silvery smolts and surely won’t migrate.  Instead they hang around the river, start feeding on whatever is handy, and revert to trout behavior.  They feed.  Anglers fishing small flies begin to catch them regularly.

This is not the plan.  If they do not go to sea, they will not return the following year (or year after) as adult steelhead.  And the big runs of hatchery steelhead provided annually by federal money for mitigating the destruction caused by the dams will be wasted.  Instead of lots of big steelhead later, there will be lots of small trout now.  And the complex, expensive plan to built back the runs of steelhead, and to supplement them with naturally spawning wild fish, their offspring, will be set back one or more year cycles.  So it was and remains a serious matter.

I could picture some angry upper-echelon bureaucrat exclaiming, “Get out there in the field and get me a handle on it.  Just how many juvenile steelhead are there?  What is the percentage of residualization from our plants?  Did any go to sea?  Will there be a hatchery return next year?  What about the year after?”

“How are we supposed to do this?”

“You figure out a way.  Swim the river.  Count them.”

“Count the residualized smolts?”

“Damn right.”

And so this crew of three were saddled with the thankless task of counting fingerlings.  In recent years, the only way they can be told from two-year-old wild steelhead parr is by spotting the lack of an adipose fin, which was clipped just before they were planted.  I maintain that this is nearly impossible to do unless you anesthetize them with chemicals or by electroshocking and examine them closely--stick your face right up next to their vent.  In the water, swimming by you, the determination is largely by guess and by golly.  Thus the percentage of error in such in situ situations is, well, huge.  You might as well try threading a needle in an unlighted closet.  Or as we said facetiously back in highschool, stack BBs.

Or you might try catching them on flies.  No, no.  It is not their way.

So here they were, two guys and a girl (as one of them proved to be, when she turned sideways in her wet suit), dressed in rubbery black, like something out of the movie Halloween, swimming the river nearly every day, counting medium-sized trout on their wrist slates and getting more exercise than they probably needed.  And ruining the fishing for fishers like me.

The smolts had come from the East Bank Hatchery, they told me, on the Columbia at Rocky Island Dam.  They had been taken from “native” broodstock trapped there, fish headed for the Wenatchee and not upstream to the Entiat and Methow.  So they were “pure” fish.  I use quotes sarcastically, for these fish are of historically mixed stocks  and have inbred with hatchery fish to the point where none of them knows his own grandpa, you might say.  And what is worse in all hatchery situations (and most always kept mum among those who bear the responsibility for such insults), fish failing to smolt when they are supposed to and residualizing is a big problem nearly every year.  It is the piscatorial equivalent of a mass miscarriage.

The Wenatchee used to be planted each year with “trout.”  These were truly rainbows from hatchery stocks thought to be resident and non-migratory, though in point of fact and viewed in the reality of hatchery situations over decades surely biologists “made up” for a shortage of resident stocks with young steelhead that were a surplus.  So the issue of what is resident and what is migratory, genetically speaking, may be moot.  And it surely is what concerned biologists would like to be kept “mute.”

Bill Barnett of Wenatchee, a dedicated flyfisher who recently died, was instrumental in persuading the good folks at Fish and Wildlife to stop stocking resident rainbow trout in Tumwater Canyon and encouraging trout fishing there, for naturally spawning steelhead produced nearly identical parr that would--if left alone--smolt and go to sea, coming back big steelhead.  And in time the department, under pressure from the local flyfishing club, did just that.  The young fish that would have gone into the canyon as put-and-take trout were stocked in Lake Wenatchee and Fish Lake instead.  A large (twelve-inch) minimum size stopped trout fishers from anything but catch and release and made most of them go away, at least from the popular canyon region.  In the rest of the Wenatchee trout in the seven- to eleven-inch range were declared steelhead parr and could not be kept.  Only trout twelve inches and longer could be, at least until the autumn steelhead season arrived, when the minimum size for keepers became twenty inches.

Complicated and confusing, everybody admitted.  They didn’t like it that way, nor did the Fish and Wildlife authorities, who prefer to keep things simple for enforcement purposes.  (And so they themselves can understand the regs.)

Now the situation was made even more complicated by the appearance of large numbers of “trout” that by September were near to twelve inches, for a young steelhead given a diet of abundant river food will feed hungrily all summer, having forgotten what it is genetically and believing it to be but an ordinary trout.

Most of the trout fishers had gone away by September, but the word got round about the good numbers of keepable, or nearly keepable, rainbows that were in the river now, and so some fishers stayed on, and steelheaders started catching a lot of these pretty fish on their small dark natural-looking flies.  Soon the river was clotted with both kinds of fishers, hugging the two banks, casting spoons or spinners or flies and having what those not spoiled by having caught the larger fish called good sport.

Biologists did not know what to make of these trout and the fishery for them.  It was unlikely the fish would smolt the following spring, either.  They were too big already; they had missed their window of opportunity.  They were trout, truly trout, and should be caught out, but the minimum size was too small to “harvest” many of them and they would hang around until the following summer, competing for natural food with the native young steelhead and with the introduced wild young steelhead that the river had recently become home to, as the hatchery adults spawned successfully.

Too many fish for the food supply is what it comes down to.  This alone could effect the smolting of wild and native fish, as already had been happening with their hatchery counterpart in the cement rearing troughs.

What to do?  Well, in the absence of anything more concrete and without further bureaucratic risk, continue studying the problem.  That is the usual answer.  Gather evidence, that is, more data.  How many reverted fish are there?  Give us a handle on it.

How?

Count the little bastards.

How many times?

I’ll tell you when to stop.  If you don’t hear from me sooner, you can cease when it ices up.

43

“This blue damsel is in love with you,” I thought, pulling softly on the oars.

for natural food with the native young steelhead and with the introduced wild young steelhead that the river had recently become for natural food with the native young steelhead and with the recently introduced wild young steelhead that the river had become home to, as the hatchery adults spawned successfully.

Too many fish for the food supply.  It alone could effect smolting of wild and native fish, as already had been happening with their hatchery counterpart in the cement rearing troughs.

What to do?  Well, in the absence of anything more concrete and without further bureaucratic risk, continue studying the problem.  That is the usual answer.  Gather evidence, that is, more data.  How many reverted fish are there?  Give us a handle on it.

How?

Count the little bastards.

How many times?

I’ll tell you when to stop.  If you don’t hear from me sooner, you can cease when it ices up.

43

            “This blue damsel’s in love with you,” I thought, pulling softly on the oars.

I am back on Lake Eudora, as I told myself I’d be, sampling the juvenile rainbow-trout population, which had at last count ran five inches.  This was on the Fourth of July.  In August, I’d fished the lake again, but had taken a skunk.  This puzzled me.  I should have been able to get one or two fish to hit, however small.  The lake was warm but not in bloom.  It continued to be a dark, clear lake, with a peaty look and wildflowers blossoming in among the tall grasses along its banks.

Oh, the blue damsel I refer to, that keeps me company as I work my way around the lake, is a member of the dragonfly family, Odonata. It is not a series of blue damsels that keeps appearing but a solitary one, and she (it?) hovers over the passenger seat of my pram, which is otherwise unoccupied.  She wants to be taken for a ride, I reflect, while all the while exercising her wings as a helicopter might, hovering, moving off a few inches, right or left, (stage right or stage left, that is), or to starboard or port.  She will disappear for a minute (leaving my heart aching), but appear (delightfully) after five minutes, as if having gone to the powder room.

I get a good look at her lovely segmented body, the blue bands alternating with black ones, and the bunch of piled up junk aft, that constitutes her thorax and head.  Not particularly pretty, that part, but don’t tell her so.  The wings are magnificent.  They are continually in motion, even when they seem to be still.  Veined, translucent, long, slender, airfoiled, thin as a section prepared for a microscope slide.  Beautiful.

Head ugly as a house fly’s, though, and not particularly feminine.  I wonder why it is called damsel?  Is it because the word dragon is already taken?  Are there male damsels?  Careful here--we are entering a precarious world.  What is the relationship exactly between dragons and damsels?  Do they mate?  Or do damselflies mate only with other damselflies and dragonflies with their namesake?  How do they tell each other apart?  The sexes, I mean?  Do they sniff each other out, like dogs?  Does the female secrete a scent?  If not, is the attraction solely visual?  Thoughts like these occupy a fisher as he rows round his chosen lake, on a given afternoon, no striking trout breaking the tranquillity of the surface or interrupting his perverse reverie.  All is peaceful.  This means nothing is happening.

A few light feeding rings signify the lake is not exactly barren.

I have come close to perfecting the dark-olive scud.  Mine is tied on a special Daiichi hook with a humped back and down-turned eye, light wire, bronzed, debarbed by no other than my own two hands.  (I’d been having trouble getting the barb flat, and consequently my releasing of fish--mostly spinyrays--had been something less than ideal, until Joe Butorac pointed out to me the importance of using flatfaced pliers and, lo, a much improved job resulted, and I’m sure the fish appreciated it.)  The material for the dubbing body is abundant and available under many names.  All is an imitation of baby seal fur and most, at least in one aspect, is superior.  Seal fur floats--first the seal, then the fly.  It can’t be made to sink unless some sort of weight is attached.  This is anathema.  The new stuff is synthetic and of neutral density.  It will do what you want it to do and is available in so many colors that mixing your own in a blender is rarely called for.  Of course I am a return-to-trouter, a relative beginner, so I may not be on to important nuances.  But my dark-olive scud seems to work well on a wide variety of fish and in a number of dissimilar lakes.

The material I use happens to be Bob Borden’s Hare-tron, Number 24, Olive Brown.  In the store, it looked just right for what I had in mind.  It is olive drab; you know, the same color the Army made us wear and finally get used to.  Hare-tron must contain fur of the common bunny, or else the true hare, which is uncommon here, in order to merit the name and not be meretricious.  (Some things must be true to their labeling, or else all is chaos and lies.)  When I say it looked just right, I mean it conformed to what I had in mind:  fuzzy as hell, a bit shiny, long fibered and short, all mixed together, and available a quantity large enough to last me all my life, or so it seems.  From the start it handled well and my flies caught fish.

I’m sure there are materials from other manufacturers that will do the same job equally well, or perhaps even better, but I’m not about to change.  Or other colors, slightly different ones.  What I have serves  me well, and I’ve barely dented the original package.  I’ve tied a couple of dozen already.

Dubbing, as with so many things, comes in clear, Ziplock bags.  This means you can open one up in the store and get a good look at what’s inside before you commit your money.  You can even pinch the stuff between your fingers; the salesclerk won’t mind.  All brands cost about the same.  Competition has pretty much evened out the quantity, too.  Fussy flyfishers have provided the demand for nearly the same color from a single manufacturer.  All vie to offer it or slightly different shades--some with sparkle added.  The fish seem to recognize the difference in subtle colors and fishers have learned what the fish already know.  You can buy sets of packets in a kit to make sure you have within easy reach every color that might interest a choosy trout.  If that is not enough for you, you can blend more from two or more packets and create one distinctly your own.

The fish may or may not respond.

Since dubbing is soft and is to be spun on a thread, the fish’s teeth soon shred it and tear it to tatters.  To counter this tendency, dubbing can be spun on fine wire, twisted on wire along with thread, or ribbed with fine tinsel or wire afterwards, as I do.  It was not until the shredding problem began happening with distressing regularity that I felt the need come up with a solution:  my flies were being returned to me by the fish as stringy, shapeless masses of material.  And then I remembered the substantial solidness of that classic, Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear.  (I capitalize it here, in a change of heart, because it richly deserves the raised letters.)  Year after year it continues to be one of the world’s top nymphs.  I’m sure its rib attracts the fish, in a sly fashion, and also helps hold the fly together when it is being savagely attacked on almost every cast, as often is the case.

When you examine a book of trout nymphs, note how many of them are ribbed with something--generally wire or fine tinsel.  It is not solely for purposes of attraction.  I suddenly see the reason why so many Atlantic salmon patterns are ribbed and re-ribbed.  It is to help hold them together and protect them from the teeth of juveniles as well as adults.  The home rivers of salmon and sea trout are host to migratory trout and salmon parr, aggressive little fish that will attack nearly everything that comes near them.   So, besides getting adult fish to strike, the ribbing on a salmon fly helps protect it and its rare feathers from the nibbling destruction caused by the sharp teeth of fingerlings.

It took tying trout flies to teach me this valuable lesson.

44

I don’t know how important the scud hook is to the success of my fly.  My guess is that its contribution is small.  But I like its look and the odd shape it gives to my fly in the water:  on a small shank, there’s a bit more length to work with, without sacrificing the smallness of the eye and bend of the hook.  And books tell me such a shape resembles not only the scud and some small crustaceans but caddis larvae and perhaps even the larger chironomids.  So it is a shape and silhouette appearing often in nature, and this makes me remember my basic training from Ray Bergman’s Trout:  size, color, shape--in about that order.  Gotcha, Ray.  Thanks again.

If you have to tail your nymph, make it short, pointed, and perhaps of two prongs, or better yet omit it; the dubbing will soon pull out and string behind the fly, giving it an unintended tail that may or may not add to its attractiveness.  And if your nymph must have a head, a head slightly larger and more head-like than the body of your fly, best make it dark, black or brown, unless you are after a chironomid imitation specifically, in which case you might try for a tail or head of white ostrich.  It can be tied in as you would quill, that is, wound, or else its tiny short fibers are grouped together, clipped to a length, and tied in as a bunch.

I’m not sure any of this is vital.  It may only be something with which to intrigue the fisher.  In other words, the trout might not give a hoot.  Just as E. R. Hewitt “invented” the hard-bodied nymph, something we disdain today simply because of its hardness (but don’t overlook its shape and colors, which are excellent), and prefer the R.B. Nymph style, which is softer, but similar in outline, and comes in a wide range of colors, so there are today nymphs that have built upon the past and made use of the synthetic materials that both Lee Wulff and Ernie Schwiebert exclaimed over, when they first came on the market.  This is part of the revolution that Schwiebert says changed everything “explosively.”  We are both its product and its beneficiaries.

Though I’ve seemed to standardize on size 14, at least for the remainder of this year, I have a sneaking suspicion I will soon tie smaller flies, now that I know I can.  Under my magnifier, a 14 looks pretty big and I am able to work with its short shank and my clumsy fingers with some degree of skill and satisfaction.  Bring on your 16s and 18s, I think, in my more successful moments.  For I know that size is often all, and any color or shape, provided it is small enough, will catch fish.  What is holding me back (besides my residual lack of skill in tying small) is the lingering memory of catching so many tiny fish on small flies.  Well, it is the fault of the waters I was fishing, not the flies in themselves.

If you fish in nursery waters and use flies of any size smaller than, say, four (which is huge), you are going to harm some fish children.  Baby steelhead and kindergartner trout.  It is inevitable.  And I have a sad memory of some inept fishers who target such fish, happily catching huge numbers of parr in a day, fish that are barely beyond the fry stage, and these men congratulate themselves and each other on their prowess.  Disgusting.  But I remember setting personal-best records as a boy on Cedar River for “dry-fly rainbows,” that in my soon-to-be-acquired basic-training wisdom I learned were young steelhead, even if they met the trout minimum-size requirement of six inches.  I am not especially proud when I say I released nearly all of these small, spotted fish, even though legally I didn’t have to.  It just seemed wrong to kill them.  And it might have been best for the juvenile population if the river of this young person had kept some of the badly injured ones and had eaten them.  For I know in my bones that they died.

Every year it happens by the millions.  Fish that would return from their sojourn at sea as six- to ten-pound, one-salt steelhead are killed a year earlier by wanton, thoughtless fishers, out to win a numbers game with themselves.  Sheer gluttony.  I am reminded of Charles Eliot Goodspeed’s Angling in America--a tedious chronicle of fish gluttony in colonial days and shortly after, a type of unconscionable slaughter we as a nation are not yet past.  That is the trouble with the lessons of the past:  they are not learned to the point of changing our behavior.  Nor are the past and its crimes ever over with.

45

Today I am happily fishing Eudora again, completing my plan to visit it at least once each month until it closes at the end of October and to note in casual detail the goings on of its rainbow trout population, plus any of the cutthroats and brookies it is rumored to harbor.  It is a pleasant afternoon’s occupation on a fall day with the sun shining distantly, coolly, and some white cumulus piled up on the western horizon as though put there with an aerosol can.  The flora is undergoing a seasonal change and I’m not immune to its beauty.  And I have my little companion, Blue Damsel, who, if not truly in love with me, is certainly in need of human companionship and seems determined to occupy (if that is possible, she or it is so small) the passenger seat of my pram.  As she hovers, I can look right into her multiple-faceted eyes.  Don’t ask me if they are blue, because I can’t see all that well, and don’t want to get any closer, for fear she may kiss me.  (Do damsels have a stinger?)

Autumn is bold and crisp, when it is not sodden and rainy.  Today, a Saturday, it is the former, sparkling, full of promise and good cheer.  The prospect is for a little more late summer.  I choose Saturday for the same reason I perversely chose the Fourth of July, two months ago.  I want to sample the lake at its fullness, which means, alas, at the moment of its maximum human exploitation or utilization.  I want to know how much pressure it will take, this Eudora O’ Mine.

I am, however, the only boat on the lake.  This solitariness I enjoy immensely.  I need to know (where another might just want to know) what the trout have done since I visited here last.  That time was a bust, a skunk.  The little rainbows would not cooperate.  My skills were inadequate to their feeding requirement is another way of putting it.  I failed.  I went home feeling disappointed, mainly with myself.  (The lake itself rarely disappoints, in its passing beauty.)

Today I circle the lake, not quite alone, frequently visited by my new little friend, Ms. Blue, and troll my dark green scud behind the boat on its two-pound tippet.  I’m not sure how many Xs this translates into—six, or is it seven?  The tippet is small enough for aging eyes to line up the tiny eye with and thread it through in three or four quick stabs or tries, if the light is right.  Often it is not and I poke at the tiny fuzzy object clutched between thumb and forefinger of my left hand as my eyes narrow and cross, and my lips become a sketch artist’s grim line.  And even after the leader is threaded, there is still the problem of tying a knot that will hold.  Now I prefer the improved clinch to the turl and believe it to be stronger by a magnitude of two.  To tie the clinch is hard enough, but the improved version requires a second insertion through a loop half or less the size of the first one.  Impossible!  It is tempting to draw up the gossamer to a knot wrongly tied and let it go at that.

Two-pound test?  Better not.

Try again.  And again.  Clip and start over.  Poke some more.  Wish again you had your head magnifier, even though it makes you look like an ear-eye-nose-and-throat specialist, or maybe an outdoor coal miner.

One thing you have learned this spring and summer, greatly abetted by casting for spiny rays from your dock, is how to present a fly softly and accurately at a moderate distance.  It is satisfying now to have the fly sail out over your head, while seated, and land at forty or fifty feet just about where you want it to go.  Within a handspan, anyway.  Which most times is close enough.

But today you are lazy.  You anticipate a pleasant troll around the lake, the fly about eighty feet out in back, the rod leaning against the stern at a pretty little angle, tip extended, handle and reel conveniently close to your right leg, where you can pick it up quickly--though often it is not fast enough to hook the fish.  By trolling, you get into a nice little rhythm of exercising your back, shoulders, and forearms.  It leaves your head and mind free to enjoy the day (or, if you are the type, to brood about a problem).  The boat is, in point of fact, doing all the work of locomotion and fishing for you.  Of course it is your hands at the oars.

Eudora has just enough free-floating logs to make mindless navigation a hazard.  If you don’t pay attention, one will goose your pram from behind.  It’s a little like running aground, but not quite so bad.  You stop with a bang.  For a moment there you think you have hit hard enough to bust your bow and will sink.  But fiberglass is resilient and you bounce off, or else you run up on the log and it turns out to be you are truly aground; with a oar loosened from its lock, you push yourself off.  You hope nobody saw.  You promise to keep your eyes more alert.

Since the logs are of the free-floating type, they never maintain the same position, from visit to visit.  This is called attitude.  They are much like encountering other craft, ones without a pilot to tell you, “Hey, buddy, watch where you’re going.”  Instead the craft and its captain give you freeboard  (Is that the right word?  If not, it suggests what I’m after, which is the freedom to move around at will and make an ass out of yourself.)  The logs are mute, staunch, unforgiving.  But I like having them here--largely the idea of them, I’ll admit.  I know the configuration of them quite well.  In a way, they are like old friends.  We greet each other as individuals and casually brush sometimes in passing.  (I know:  this is carrying the pathetic fallacy too far.)

If I say “familiar objects,” will that be okay?

So, traveling clockwise from the public-access launch, I glide along a bed of tules just changing from green to to yellow and brown, as if to say, “Look here, winter is coming.  Listen up.”  And the wildflowers I saw in dying bloom just a month ago have become dried whisks, brown as toast.  The leafy, deciduous trees sprinkled in among the conifers are undergoing their slow seasonal change--no spectacular dogwood explosions among them, nor the fiery pocks from the vine maples, just a gradual diminishing of green intensity, with a subtle growing volume of gold, cornflake brown, russet, olive.  It is unmistakably autumn, autumn with a bite to the air.

I come to a little bay, a place where my friend Rob likes to park his floattube and cast tiny Adams for surface takes.  It is a style not yet mine and one I admire, albeit from a distance.   Next year is coming up and I promise myself to be more ready, with more advanced techniques at my fingertips.  I gaze into the weedy shallows, tea-colored, and remember the night in spring when he hooked fish his way, while I hooked fish my way, and we never compared notes afterwards to get down to basics, specifically such things as numbers hooked and landed.  But I know that his method, when it works, and it does often, is deadly.  He will outfish me.  The numbers of fish caught by these deadly flyfishers in a short period of time is, well, incredible.

A promontory appears and I must skirt it.  Since the grasses have died back I have learned, to my surprise, that I am looking at a moored log, not at land itself, a log that has accumulated dirt and grasses and sufficient nutrients to grow things, such as wild flowers of red and violet, the ones that are long gone since spring, withered to nubs.  This leads me to other sad seasonal thoughts.  For instance, how much else of what I see and think I know as a fact will prove to be wrong, when examined more closely? I hesitate to contemplate the answer.

There is a soft little bay a third the size of the former one, round a topographical hump, a kind of promontory, and it has a ledge just off from the thick mat of grasses.  It is the home of various crustaceans, I suspect, and I slow my advance and strip in line and throw out a trial cast or two with my virginal scud, but nothing strikes, and those small rings that appear off to the side of my fly count for naught, for they have been appearing since the beginning.  They are too far out to be considered target rises.  Besides, the fish are no doubt tiny.

I continue on around the lake, coming now to its grassy beach, where the inlet is.  Here is a handsome farm, or hobby ranch, a considerable amount of land, anyway, which seems to be growing nothing special, only tall weeds, though there are ancient signs of horses and cows grazing here, and fencing for them, for the one requires barbed wire, the other merely rails, and I see both, widely separated, and an outbuilding that is not quite a working barn but might have served as one.  And there is the house itself, a nice big one, not old, with a barking dog in the side yard, though I cannot tell for the life of me what it is barking at.  A German shepherd, by the tone and timbre.

A dog doesn’t have to have something to bark at, Dodo.  Sometimes he barks just to hear his voice ring out across a clearing, or over a lake, and come bouncing back at him, in muted crescendo.  He does this because he is a dog and, I guess, it feels good to express himself to a world which must seem at the moment totally unoccupied, or else ignoring him.

I like this stretch because the water is deep and still and dark, overhung with tall weeds, and I have hooked the majority of my fish here, while the pram glided along.  But aside from a tic today I hook nothing.  There are two docks jutting out into the lake, and I recognize them eagerly, warmly, because I now possess a dock of my own and am dock-orientated, you might say, where in the spring a dock was just a foreign object to me, a place for someone else to tie up a boat or to walk out on over the water, a thing with no personal significance.  Now I greet a dock as though an extension of myself, my personal property, study it for dockiness and solidness of structure, look to see if there is a swimmer’s ladder, check for weatherproofing of the wood, which most often looks to be raw and deteriorating.  Just like mine.  Sure.

The two docks--separated from each other by five hundred feet--have bench seats and look to have been constructed in order for some aging man in suspenders and workboots to plump his potbellied self down in, on some sullen evening, and dabble a worm off of, or else, standing flat on caulked feet, to cast a small weighted spoon into the coffee-colored depths and snare himself a nice trout for eating purposes.  Mightn’t I not add just such a bench to the dock that now calls itself mine? 

I reach the private boat launch where the Finn settlement ends and see all the upended boats and dories that resemble beached whales marking the end of the season.  They look as though they haven’t been used in some time and are covered with a fine atmospheric dust.   (Obviously I can’t see dust from my disadvantage point, but give a writer a break, and pretend you see it, too.)  Often on a summer’s eve I’ve observed  men come from afar and back museum-quality pickup trucks down, down, farther than to the water’s edge, and launch shaky craft and glide slick as seals out onto the twilight lake, and hurry to troll their Dick Nite spoons against the failing light.  Not tonight

There are two deadheads that are inconveniently located just where I and others would wish them not to be--about twenty feet out from shore, where we must make our turn.  It is too tight a distance to slip between them and the shore, though I am always tempted.  The snags negate fishing my chosen way for a good sixty feet of what I suspect to be prime water--suspect it because I’ve seen men in small boats and tubes anchor there and still fish with bait or chironomid flies and strike indicators.  I’ve had an urge to do it myself.

Now I am paralleling the Finn colony and remembering pleasantly the noisy Fourth of July, and how much fun everybody had, the shooting off of the fireworks and the distant dance where the announcer fairly had to beg the men to choose a partner, and I imagine it was ultimately the line of assembled women, with a shrug and a shudder, who marched across the pavilion and each chose some shy guy to wheel them around the cement floor like a wheelbarrow full of sod.  They are all quiet now, the Finns are, men and women, children too, in late September, though behind the drawn and shuttered windows of their lodges, each dark in its interior, I suspect a number of grim-faced people are living their lives out in less than splendid isolation, lonely as clams, oblivious to the weather, heedless of season and splendor, or lack thereof.  The colony occupies about half the lake, or rather that much of its scribbled shoreline, but going back off into the hilly woods is a much larger amount of acreage available to them.  Finns domiciles stretch off into the gathered woods.  Every few years or so they open up more acreage, and members who have endured the three-year waiting period sign an agreement and are sold a plot of land on which they may do a number of things but not some others, which are forbidden by Finn edict.

Yet it is a wonderful lake on which to be today or any other day and, better yet, to be a boy upon.  Had I such a lake as a boy, mightn’t I have grown up to be different?  Yes, but I could have lost my love of water, moving and still, through the curse of over-familiarity.  So it is best not to grieve the loss of something that might never have been and be happy with the bird that is now being clutched in one’s grip, for it is worth two in the bush of rectitude and regret, and I would wish my life at this point no different from what it is and has been.  My cup runs over, and usually it is with clear, cold water.

And now I round the bend at the end of the colony and come to the popular end of the lake, with the outlet and the Fishing Log, which I used to think was a pier or half-sunken dock.  No, it is floating.  It is some giant hemlock or fir, waterlogged, lodged on the bottom, slow to rot to the point of unsubstantiality, forming a dock (that word again) on which the amassed baitfishers of spring cluster and clot and throw out tiny hooks primed with Powerbait paste and catch their share and more of the put-and-take trout.  They are not so much the enemy as the adversary, to be countered, not destroyed, though after granting them their month’s dominance of the lake I wish there were some way to banish them for the rest of the year.

The good news is, when the fishing slows, they dribble away.  They need a lot of desperate trout to keep up their faith and morale.  They kill all they catch.  They think in terms of limits.  Anything short of a limit leaves them feeling unfulfilled.  And they seem so much alike, noisy and garrulous and rude, that they might as well have the same surname.  When God first exercised the cookiecutter named Joe-Bob, he should have thrown it away after the first few cookies came off the assembly line, for the breed perpetrates itself without any more help, thank you. It is the message inherent in Goodspeed all over again.  Kill.  Kill a lot. 

Hopeless for them, perhaps, but not for me.  Because of their need for limits, and easy ones at that, they leave the lake alone for nearly forty-eight months of the year.  It will not produce enough fish for them.  Eudora will close soon, for six months time, the winter half of the year, so there will be no more fishing for any of us.  Perhaps that is for the best.  These trout (which I am so anxious to experience again, and which for nearly two months now I have come up shy) will be left alone during the frigid months to feed and grow on whatever food they can find.  It will be scant.  And then it will be more fishing of the same type as in the past.  Most of the holdovers will succumb to worms and Powerbait in late April.  This includes the ones we catch and release, for they are often caught later and kept.  I think we put them back partly for the benefit of the opening-day crowd of bait fishers.  (And I had been telling myself that it was for the future--both the lake’s and my own.  Well, my capacity for self-deception has always been large.)

The Fishing Log is unoccupied today.  I reckon it has been so for many weeks now.  Everybody knows you can’t catch trout more than a month after the opener.  They are all caught out, in popular opinion.  So all of the flyfisher folks have been deluding themselves, these past months?  Don’t tell anybody, please, that this isn’t true.  Still, judging by last month alone, August, I cannot challenge the idea.  And so far today I am doing no better.  Ah, but I have high hopes.  You can’t catch trout in a lake in September, eh?  I must know that for a certainty.  “Who says?” is my motto.  I want to prove them wrong.

I have now completed one full circuit of the lake, dragging my dark-olive scud behind the boat, and can report two tics and one good pull.  My report is next to nothing, I know.  I have half a mind to change to a Flat Fish.  No; an eighth of the way round the lake for the second time, I reel in my length of weight-forward floating flyline, cranking the little handle as though angry at the tackle for my poor performance.

A third of the way in, a trout seizes the scud and jumps high into the air, bowing the slender rod and dipping the tip almost into the lake.  I rear back on the rod with a whoop and set the hook, though this probably isn’t necessary.  The trout proves small and I am surprised how strong he is, swimming in the long distance as I gather line into the boat, then deciding to fight it out in close.  Of course it is fighting for its life, something we tend conveniently to forget to remember.  Soon the fish is cruising alongside the pram, keeping its distance.  Yes, small, but vigorous.  I disdain the net and slowly draw the fish to within easy arm’s reach.  The hook is small and provides a pleasing perspective in the front of the trout’s jaw.  I lift the fish slightly out of the water, marveling at its exceedingly dark coloration.  It still wears more than the memory of parr marks, but they are overwritten with a dark sprinkling of tightly grouped spots in a pattern writers often describe as paprika.  Seems as good as a way as any to describe them.  It is a perfect little fish, very handsome, and wild-looking--if there is such a thing today.  Maybe wildness exists only in the mind.

I take up the leader with one hooked finger and with the opposite hand back out the hook.  (I’ve got to buy a pair of trout-fisher’s forceps, the kind with crooked jaws for deep reaching in.)  The fish drops back into the steeped depths and disappears.  I smile.  At least the trip isn’t going to be a skunk like the last one.

In quick succession I catch two more little rainbows, all on the strip, staggering my retrieve in various ways, trying to find the magic one for today.  The successful one (if that is what it is) seems nothing special, but I try to duplicate it and its hurriedness; each time I have a good hit, there is an indescribable moment just before when everything seems to be going well, if not perfectly.  Then the dragging touch of a fish appears and I strike back hard.  All three fish run between seven and nine inches, I must report.  (Hey, don’t hang up on me; trout are trout, and we take what we are served on the platter of the day, gratefully.  Besides, am I not randomly sampling a population that I had hoped were all native fish, ones hatched out of eggs dropped in spring in some gravel bar near the outlet or inlet?  It is too much to believe that this is this year’s crop, grown as though force-fed in a hatchery; perhaps they are last year’s brood and have slowly grown throughout an earlier summer.  The sad alternative is they are from a fry plant of broodstock fish reared in troughs only a few months ago.  This would make them not quite wild but still pretty good little fish.  Half-wild then.  (Is there such a thing?)  To get the answer, in any case, I’ll need professional help.  I’ll have to talk to the folks at Fish and Wildlife.

The strikes stop, and cast and strip as I may, nothing more comes to my fly.  The occasional rings I’d seen around the lake looked to be from tiny fish and were so widely separated that they could not be cast to with any hope for a take from covering a rise.  So I mooch along, trying out a new technique I started working on in spring, when I came across it accidentally and it was successful, and which was brought back to mind by the first good strike of today:  I let out line, stroking with the oars, until I have something close to the original eighty feet out, because I’ve always believed in getting as much distance between me and my  fly as possible--unless of course the fish are already feeding frantically in close.

Then I let the boat glide to a stop, strip in a few times, stop this, strip once more, pause, strip with a different action, all the while waiting for the strike, which is to be sensed more than truly felt and requires a quick pickup or strike back, enough to move all the line through the water and (if there is no fish on the other end) deposit it in careless coils that it will take two or more hard strokes of the oars to straighten out again and make the fly move fetchingly through the water.  I alternate this method, sometimes bringing the fly within rod-pickup distance of the boat, sometimes about halfway back in, sometimes in only a few feet.  Then I stroke the oars again and glide.

None of it worked as it had before, only moments earlier.

One fish might be a fluke, but three?  Three flukes?  In something like ten minutes?

Unlikely.  But often the unlikely happens.  The unlikely becomes a prospect--which is something more than just a possibility.  The more you think about it, or about most things, the more they seems to recede and get farther from the truth.  Even the more likely ones.

In such idle fashion I mosey around the lake in my usual clockwise fashion.  When I near the launch area, I am thinking all kinds of crazy things.  Perhaps clockwise is wrong, the wrong direction for today.  Today feels more like a counter-clockwise kind of day, when I stop to deliberate on it.  If that doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t to me, either, but fishers grow desperate and will try all sorts of weird things because sometimes weirdness pays off.  That is the mystical, unpredictable, nonsensical part of fishing that makes it so attractive.  And so eternally challenging.  (This is another word for frustrating.  It is what you learn to live with and not get mad.  Mad in the sense of angry, I mean; the other kind of madness is what separates us fishers from normal people.)

It’s like when a sixteen will take fish but a fourteen will only produce the odd strike, one which doesn’t result in a hook up.  This is as old as Ray Bergman, but if I remember him correctly, it is two sizes difference--fourteens and eighteens--that was the magical number.  I have nothing smaller than a fourteen, for whatever it was worth.  Probably it was worth nothing, or so I hoped.

Circling the lake once more, trolling mostly, casting occasionally, I have a couple of insincere strikes, then hook one fish solidly while doing nothing special, nothing different.  Four fish brought to the boat.  Well, I’ve done worse--and not long ago.  Years past I decided to be grateful for whatever I got, while at the same time working like hell to make the number larger.  Suddenly I become aware of some guys on one of the docks at the west end of the lake.  They number three and two are casting tiny spoons abetted by splitshot.  The third is old, still fishing, and looks nearly asleep.  The spoon slingers are hooking an occasional rainbow and making a big fuss over it.

I compliment them on their success.

“You got to have the right kind of spit,” one of them tells me.

It is not a particularly friendly remark and I guess he thinks I am asking him for the key to his success, which is not very great.  I had already discerned (a la Ray Bergman, my mentor) what they were using and how they fished their spoons.  I had already figured out (i.e., deduced) that the fish wanted a staggered retrieve.  It had to be fluttering, deceptive, and irregular.  Well, I could do that with my fly, as well.  In fact I had.  Only there were now definite feeding rises, and they came in periods, and what you had to do was wait, looking all the while for surface activity--larger, more slurpy rises, signifying serious fish of a larger size than those ringing softly earlier--and it was only human nature in such a situation to cast to the rise.  It was what lay at the heart of fly fishing.

My pram was too narrow, too short, too unstable, to support me safely while standing to cast; I had tried it several times and it proved a precarious exercise.  But practicing on those small bass from my dock this summer had improved my low-level casting technique, and had given me confidence in where I could place my fly.  With a longtaper floating line, with its increased length of belly that   made it more like a double taper than a conventional forward taper, I could reach out with a lot of line kept in the air, quickly accelerate it, and shoot quite a distance.  The only trouble with this was that the skinny running line tended to make the fly jerk suddenly ahead and, a bit later, weaken the connection with the front end of the line, so that the retrieve was less controllable than it would be with a double taper.  But it was still a workable arrangement.  What I gave up in line control I made up for in distance and this gave me the advantage of a longer working retrieve.

Strikes came frequently now.  It was growing late in the day, but still more than an hour was left before early September dark.  The strikes were vigorous, but I kept missing them.  The fish’d hang on for an instant, as though securely impaled, and then the line would go slack and they be gone, one after another.  I’d curse, as the line sailed back at me in wavy coils; I’d pick it up on the back cast and search quickly for a new target while the line was still in the air.  If there wasn’t one, I’d aim in mid-cast for some previously unfished wedge of the pie that was my casting circle.

I suspected a dulled hookpoint, or one that had gaped slightly from unhooking an earlier fish.  But the rises were coming too fast for me to bother stripping in and examining my fly.  I know, I know: it was stupid of me.  But it is how it was--how I am.  One fish, two fish three, miss, miss, miss.  Sometimes I could see a fish following the fly and try to make my retrieve such that the fish would overrun the fly, then have to decide whether to swallow it or not.  Today, not.  Hey, sometimes it works; other times the fish simply continues on its course and doesn’t take the fly, at least, not that you know of.

Just out from the boat launch and with my wife now in sight, I hooked and lost a good fish.  “Did you see that?” I bragged.  She hadn’t.  It’s funny how wives waste so much of their time out of doors.  They miss fish rising, fish being hooked, and, often, fish being lost.  (They go for walks, read, study the flora, note birdlife.  Selfish things, you know.)  Here I’d hooked and landed eight trout, equaling a personal best for this lake, and the big one I’d just lost would have beaten my record, no matter how inconsequential it loomed to anybody but me.  And she was busy looking elsewhere!

The feeding rings were decreasing.  Did this mean the trout were . . . full?  That they would feed no more today?  And what in the world had they been feeding on?  I could see no solid evidence on the surface.  Mosquito larvae, that of midges?  It is what comprise the vast food supply of most lakes, and judging by the spent adults on the surface (a billion to the ounce) it was what they were after, but only in the larval or nymphal stage, for once again they were shunning the trapped and dying adults on the surface.  This took me back to spring.

What trout do is feed.  That is their business.  They feed not quite all the time but very often.  Many times during the day, if the season is right.  They do this because it is how they grow.  So in a given territory it is usually the biggest trout who will take your fly first.  (Hooray!)  It happens for the simple reason that gourmand feeding is how the trout got so big (big being, of course, a relative term) in the first place.  The fish outhustled all the other trout in the neighborhood.

My ninth trout took solidly, was hooked, played out, and landed.  No different, no bigger than all the others today, I studied it once more closely because I knew it marked the end of the day, perhaps of the season.  It had no special spotting to distinguish it from the others.  But it was remarkably pretty.  So dark, it had the diminished beauty of a near-spawning male steelhead.  And it was vital, alive, unsullied by exposure to the air or time out of water, or by skin shrinkage or wrinkling, all of which happens when you kill a fish.

 It remained vibrant, beautiful, alive.  The sight etched itself into my memory.  Writing this, I see again this unexceptional, important fish.  It would measure eight inches and weigh a fraction of a pound.  This reduced its intrinsic value in no way, except perhaps to somebody right out of Goodspeed’s book.  To a gluttonous killer of fish, that is.

It was time (past time) to beach the boat, load it in the back of the Explorer, and aim for home and a late dinner, exiting through the nippy dusk of a bright day splendid enough to make you suck in your breath with wonder.

46

Both Bergman and Schwiebert (my mentors!) mention getting started trout fishing by using worms.  Ah, worms.  How many of us have done this?  The worm is a creature of low estate and high intrinsic value; that is, trout love ‘em.  This may not be the case everywhere.  I read an article about a fish biologist with the state of Montana who had to teach rainbow trout to accept angleworms as food, so used were they to subsisting on hatchery pellets.  But learn they did, and in short time, too.)  The smell, the taste, the wriggle aspect, the color, the size:  all tell the trout that here is something good to eat.  A worm is irresistible, even in Montana, once the basic principles of wormdom have been absorbed by the student trout.

I began trout fishing in streams with the lowly worm.  In lakes, the ubiquitous salmon egg reigned supreme in my boyhood, and I along with other kids used them exclusively at first.  (Then I graduated to the School of Flat Fish.)  But I’ve learned since that worms work equally well in lakes, especially lowland lakes, which abound in the region where I live.

  It is where I have chosen to live.  For many streams, fat nightcrawler-type angleworms, worms of substance, length, diameter, and wiggle, are ideal bait.  A salmon egg my be found floating around in a stream, especially at spawning time, but never in a lake; in a  lake they are unusual, unnatural, and should be disregarded by trout, but aren’t, let’s face it.  Trout go after them, even though they’ve never seen one before.  The worm, not indigenous to a river or a stream, happens to be deadly there.  It took me a while to learn the truth of the matter.  It’s odd.

As a boy I often fished a small river called the Cedar.  At first, as a boy scout, I fished it with a fly--the perennial Royal Coachman wet—but with a caddis larvae ripped untimely from its case impaled on its bend just beyond the point; it was believed that if the point were covered with the bait, the trout would not be well hooked.  I believed it and still do.  The opposite is probably true, and that might explain all the trout we lost shortly after the strike.  We called the abundant caddis larvae “periwinkle,” but we were technically wrong, for this is the larvae of the Dobson fly.  If anybody had said “Caddis,” nobody would have know what he was talking about.  When it was we graduated to worms I cannot exactly state, but it was not long afterwards.

The Cedar is a rain-fed stream of small proportions, except in winter, when it receives an inordinate supply of water from the skies and swells, fills its banks, and often overflows them in a flood.  The river turns the color of mud.  The nearby golfcourse and the downstream outskirts of the city of Renton become submerged.  Since the town library is prettily built as a bridge spanning the river, the Cedar threatens to engulf the public collection of books, but never quite reaches them, though the nearby streets often run like small rivers.  The library fills with a roar that makes ordinary conversation impossible--which is okay, because everybody knows you aren’t supposed to chatter in a library.

I fished with worms in the Cedar invariably in spring.  This is not to say I didn’t fish with the artificial fly at this time, too, but I didn’t fish it much.  When the stream was high from rain and snow runoff, everybody knew that it was bait time.  It was dumb to fish anything else.  Most fished eggs.  Single-salmon eggs fed into the hand from a dispenser jar, one at a time, were deadly baits, but the worm was even better, it was widely held.  If a boy had a handy, dependable source for worms, he was in business.

He was in business in the sense that he could sell some worms and make some pocket money, but he was also well prepared with what is needed to go fishing and be successful.  Worm fishing was both easy and difficult:  it was simple enough to catch a few trout with worms but it was hard to catch many, to catch them dependably, and to catch big ones, even though everybody knows that big trout “prefer” worms, especially nightcrawlers--which is saying a mouthful, a  mouthful of worm for a trout.  You can feed the trout single-salmon eggs all day long and at dusk have a nice catch of trout of small or medium size.  You fish worms, however, and you might not have so many trout but they would all be big ones.  Or so we believed.  Often it was the case.

What we called trout were of two kinds:  true hatchery rainbows of non-migratory stock that were planted there to be caught out by the likes of us and were yearly replenished, and young steelhead hatched in the stream from eggs deposited by their parents a year or more earlier and which, if left undisturbed, would smolt and go to sea to replenish the species.  Since both kinds fed constantly and were in competition to increase their growth and survive, they could be fairly easily caught on whatever bait you offered them.  Thus, as the put-and-take fish were targeted, the young steelhead were caught.  Many people did not know the difference, the fish looked so much a like.  (The silvery ones were steelhead smolts.)  Over a few decades the wild steelhead runs were destroyed in this river and many others.  I’ll accept my share of the blame.

Two runs of steelhead were in the Cedar, a fair-sized one in winter, and a smaller, more vulnerable one that came into the river in late spring, but did not spawn until a year later.  It headed for the headwaters, but tarried long enough to get fished over.  This was the first to go, for obvious reasons.

Today the run of wild steelhead, summer and winter, is almost gone.  A few hang on.  Runs are easy to nearly destroy though over-fishing, logging, urban development, grazing, etc., but nearly impossible to wipe out entirely.  The vestiges of a run will remain, year after year.  A few are caught each season.  It is almost as though a few surviving fish await the return of advantageous conditions that will allow the run to build up its numbers.  But good conditions never arrive.  Years pass.

We caught “trout” of both kinds and considered ourselves skillful according to their numbers.  But in early May, when the smolts were presumed to have left the river, the Game Department (as it was called then) planted “legals”--hatchery-reared rainbows that were practically indistinguishable from steelhead parr and genetically perhaps derived from the same handy stock (for adult steelhead are easily trapped).  Depending upon conditions in the hatcheries the winter past (water temperature, presence or absence of bacterial or viral disease, physical functioning or malfunctioning of water-flow equipment, etc.) the fish varied in size, one year being six to nine inches in length and other years running up to eleven.  And some years the hatcheries “lost” the entire year’s production, or most of it.

An eleven-inch rainbow trout is a big fish to a small boy, and even to many adult males.  They are just big enough to fight well and draw an admiring whistle from bystanders or family.  I cut my hyoid teeth, so to speak, on the willing rainbows of Cedar River, a challenging stream to wade and fordable in spring in only a few places.  It ran through dairy fields, past a golf course, and in among a sprinkling of homes--some year-round residences, for it was a short drive to Seattle.  There were no freeways then.  The commute required a tedious drive along Rainier Avenue, followed by a slow wend through the city’s outskirts and industrial section.  I reached the river by bus, then hiked a mile or two out of town along the Maple Valley Highway.  The highway was good two-lane blacktop, with a shoulder for hiking on.  Later, when I was sixteen, I had occasional use of my father’s 1941 Buick.

I left home with my wicker creel strapped to me, my telescoping steel rod and tackle bag in hand, and walked to the bus stop.  I’d wait, generally in a drizzle that was by small degrees acquainting me to what was in store when I reached the river.  Seattle Transit would sizzle to a stop and its door hiss open for me.  I’d cram myself inside.  Then I’d ride along for many minutes, looking idly out the windows at a landscape grown already over-familiar to me, bored, anxious, sleepy, restless.  Downtown, I’d walk to the Trailways Bus Depot and wait some more, this time indoors, out of the rain.  (I suppose this resensitized me some.)  The big silver-gray bus appeared in the doorway and I’d mount the embossed steel stairs and plunge into a seat, screwing my legs up against the back of the seat in front of me and shoving its occupant forward.  Then I’d ride another familiar route to Renton.

Never did I actually see much countryside until I’d hiked nearly a mile out of Renton.  Then trees and grassy fields began to take over.  The day would already be well advanced by the time I reached the far end of the Maple Valley Golf Course and the steel bridge across the river over which the Milwaukee Road trains passed on their way East.  On the far side of the bridge I eased myself under a three-strand barbed wire fence and skirted the edge of the farmer’s field, while his cows kept a wary eye on me, threatening to charge this inept city boy if  he got too close to the new calves.  Sometimes there’d be a bull, and I’d keep tight to the barbed wire, ready to crawl like an infantryman on his back under its taut bottom strand if I had to.  I never did.

The idea was to reach a series of runs and pool already known to me from the Boy Scouts.  It is here where we often went on an overnight and also where I’d caught my first small trout on a pole lent me for a moment by a fellow scout.  I used the bait favored by the troop and its best fishers:  fly and grub.  I knew the water well and it was ever in my mind.  I’d dream about my favorite pools and eddies, over and over, replaying fish I had mostly hooked and lost there, making them fight longer and better than they did in real life.  Alone now, where I  had formerly been in the company of other scouts, in what to me surely were the deep woods (for I’d experienced no other), I’d fish intensely with my baits and flies and other lures, eager for what they might yield.  Often it was nothing, or next to nothing.  An undersized trout that was no keeper.

Once in mid-summer when I was about fourteen I stopped at the gravel quarry just outside of town, trespassed stealthily, slipped between cyclone fence and stony hillock, and made my way down to the river.   It was not far.  I began fishing with a Colorado spinner, copper-colored, with a worm behind it probably, and suddenly a whopper grabbed it and took off down the watery chute.  This was my introduction to steelhead.  And while so many others were baffled and beaten by their first big fish, I wrestled mine to a standstill--and licked it.  Then I brained that thrashing five-pound hen with the nearest rock, over and over, until it lay still, its blood on the stones.  Not knowing quite what to do next, I cleaned the fish on the beach and . . . cut its head off.  I don’t know why I did this.  So it would look more like the fish found in stores, perhaps.  Maybe I had some idea of making the fish into a smaller parcel for the long ride home on the bus that I knew would be crowded.

On that bus I was looked at with a mixture of revulsion and curiosity and envy, which I am sure I took for mute praise.  The fish’s tail stuck out of the unlatched corner of the dark wicker creel, where the bulk of the fish could not be contained even by the furthermost notch in the leather belt-type fastener.  Oh, how proud I was.  My first really big fish, and caught and landed without assistance.

Mostly I hooked young steelhead, thinking and calling them rainbow trout, which technically they were, label them Salmo or Oncorhynchus, as you wish.  I’d like to think both names are right, or that it doesn’t really matter, since the fish remains the same. I was never as good as some fishers, and I knew it.  Almost any adult could outfish me.  I was good for a boy.  There were men who were really skilled.  Not all of them fished with bait, either.  As the season bore on, I kept my eye on these experts; usually they fished fly and caught many of the small fish we called “trout.  (Today I’d classify these men as cradle-robbers, the moral equivalent of college boys who date high school girls--guys who prey on the innocent and defenseless.)  And I wanted to be a fisher like them.  I threw my bait into the nursery water, too.  I soon wised myself up.

When I had the car on the weekend (my father was kind and self-sacrificing to a fault) I’d tool out past the gravel pits, the golf course, the farmer’s dung-dotted meadow where I’d camped with Troop 81, and aim for a pretty little tributary stream that entered the Cedar near a place called Meadowvale.  If the trib was big enough to have acquired a name, I did not know or remember it.  But I still see it through the camera-eye of memory.  I view it at f32, you might say.  That is pretty sharp, edge to edge.

Some lucky guy owned a house, right at the junction of creek and river, which was just across a green lattice bridge.  How I envied him.  Imagine living on a stream!  Why, if I had such a house, I’d do nothing but fish for trout, all day long, leaving the stream only when my mother--I mean wife--called me in for a meal.  I’d become a daily fishing fool, rather than only a weekend one.  (I know you can be a daily fishing fool who does not get to fish every day, but his heart and mind are ever on the subject, to the annoyance of everybody who comes in contact with him and tries to talk about anything else.)  When I got a chance, I’d drive to the river, park on the shoulder, don my gear, and join the crowd.  By then I had waders, or at least hip boots, and I’d draw them on, one foot after the other, and step into the cold spring water, never sure at first whether one of the boots leaked or was merely extra cold.

With hip boots, there is always at first the danger of misreading the depth and walking right in over their tops.  This I did several times.  They fill from the bottom up, up to the brim, and become alarmingly cold, all in one motion.  They become so heavy you can’t walk in them.  You learn to avoid the situation after a few wettings by being more careful.  The bottom of the stream is farther away than it appears.  Boots with water in them can ruin an outing.

I’d begin just above the bridge--actually right under it, in close.  Then I’d mosey around its footings, hugging the embankment, not stepping in deep, and reach an upstream shallow riffle, which I’d cross.  The Cedar had many of these which, even in swollen spring, could be gingerly forded, sometimes on tiptoe, once you learned how to read the water.  (It is a book of considerable appeal and difficulty.)  You go in high up and angle across just below the fastest water, moving on the diagonal, but select too sharp an angle and you will find yourself wading too far, too long a distance.  This is tiring, if you have to do it too often in the course of a day.  And when I had crossed successfully, I came to a bit of riprap that now I know the house owner had to purchase and install himself to protect the river edge of his property in order to prevent him from losing more of it.  This I know because I own waterfront property and am hip to its problems and the river’s hungry ways.

The passage brought me to the tributary creek, which was my target.  Because of years of runoff, the trib had a wide, deep mouth.  It called out to me as it called out to the trout.  For them, it provided a source of terrestrial food swept downstream and collected where the streamlet slowed, there at the mouth.  The depth provided by the rocks along its edge was appealing as shelter for the fish.  There they’d been safe from human intrusion.  (The fishing season had opened only this morning.) 

The house owner had deliberately strung barbed wire right down to the water’s edge.  He wanted no trespassing on what he considered to be his private domain.  Water was not something to share, in his opinion.  The law, I knew, was not clear on the matter.  Perhaps he was legally right.  The current interpretation went something like this:  if a stream could be navigated (itself a cloudy term), the adjacent property owner owned to only the water’s edge; non-navigable, it was possessed to an imaginary center line.  By this wide-spread and largely accepted definition, the guy with the house owned beyond where the water ran.  He owned to the center of the river.  His barbed wire carried a sign that proclaimed, No Trespassing.  No ambiguity there.  But I was an eager fisher.  How was I to get around the prickly stuff?

I did so by wading.  It is hard for a man, admittedly, to string one strand, let alone three, around the giant rocks of a riprap and then anchor the wire strands securely and make them tight.  A boy in hip boots pulled high and anchored to his belt like women’s stockings could inch out onto those rocks, being very quiet about it, breathing shallowly, shipping a little water to get around the furthest strand, and if he hooked his boots and tore the rubber, it was what happened nearly every outing anyway, and was only par for the course, which is stream fishing.  Why, you didn‘t know you were truly fishing if your boots did not slosh as you walked.  Water in your boots was your constant companion.

In my case it was my only companion, since I almost always fish alone, then and now.

I felt the bottom come up and meet my rubber soles.  It was a sandy bottom, and I could imagine that later in the year the owner of the house and his children might on a hot day come down to the water’s edge for a cooling dip.  Right now the water temperature hovered in the low fifties.  Just right for worms.  And worms I had in quantity, secreted in my green-enamel, crescent-shaped bait can that fastened to my belt with a couple of metal loops put there for exactly that purpose.  On its hinged lid was a series of perforations that formed (wonder of wonders!) the outline of a fish.  The edges of the holes were red with rust.  It was for the worms to breathe.

Worms fish best without a sinker, Ray Bergman tells us, that inveterate but half-apologetic expert, and I agree; In faster streams a split shot or two needs to be added, especially in cold water, when the trout are “deep.”  Well this was a deep day, was it not?  Dark, too, the water brown from a storm last night.  Cedar River can absorb a lot of rain, though, without going what we call “out.”  It rises, it falls, and the Landsburg Dam that provides Seattle with its drinking water (well chlorinated today) hardly effects its flow, even at flood time.  So it is a nearly natural stream, one that is very appealing to fishers, as a consequence, and does not wear that artificial look that dam-controlled streams have, neither rising nor falling according to the weather, instead flowing evenly on, always nearly at the same height.  Like a dull life.

A slightly swollen stream is perfect for worms.  Bergman says not to forget them in dead-low water, either, when the stream is shrunken by drought.  In other words, they are good at most times.  For a man, let alone a boy, to be successful with worms, he has to be a man (or boy) for all seasons.  This I kept in mind, while knowing that as the spring wore on, the river dropped, the water and air warmed, fishing the fly would grow in its appeal and successfulness.  And I simply could not wait for that time to arrive.  (Yes, I could.)  In the meantime, I fished worms.

I belabor this point because the opening-day morning at the green-bridge tributary of the Cedar was an important time in my evolution as a fisher.  True, I fished it with a weighted worm, but the way I fished it stood at the heart of how I would fish a wet fly, all the rest of my life.  Which has been a wealth of years and a great number of fishing occasions.

I fish a wet fly today as I fished a worm then.

My Horrock-Ibbotson seven-foot bamboo rod, my reel a single-action something (Shakespeare, Pfleuger, Martin, Perrine?), my line braided silk, my leader of that thin new stuff, nylon, my hook a ridge-backed long-shank number six, my lead a buckshot or two, I threw my lightly hooked fat pink angleworm about twelve feet upstream and waited for it to settle to the bottom.

You know what happened.

An eleven-inch hatchery rainbow, fat from the rearing ponds, seized the wriggler and turned sideways with it in his mouth.  My leader zinged off at a sharp angle and I struck back.  The fish was hooked deep in the throat and began to fight for its life.  The commotion caused by the struggle, I feared, would bring the owner to the window and (like Dennis-the-Menace’s neighbor) would begin to turn beet-colored with anger at the sight of me playing one of his trout.  He’d shake his fist, fume, threaten me, slam shut the window, and head in my direction.  Trapped in deep water, I’d be a staked goat to his tigerish wrath.  He’d eat me alive for lunch and spit out my bones.

He did no such thing.  The trout was not noisy enough, or he was too busy, eating his lunch, or he was away in the city, earning the money to pay the mortgage on his fine, waterfront home.  Or else he was off fishing somewhere else, on this opening day of the spirit, finding (as I often do) distant water more appealing than what can be found at home.

I took three fat trout out of the slot at the mouth of the nameless trib before it would yield no more, cast to it as I might.  Those fish nearly filled my creel and came close to touching both its ends, which I recall were sized to accommodate a foot-long fish.  I inched my way back around the rocks that looked very much like my dad’s rockery at home, though constructed on a much larger scale, shipping no more water than I had the first time through, which was but a couple of tablespoons.  I moved slowly downstream, having to cross the river, just as I had earlier, but this time I had the current with me and the crossing took about a third the time and effort.  My creel bounced happily, heavily, on my hip.  Before I secured it there with its little narrow cross-body strap, I stopped and filled its bottom with bracken fern, which I did not have to wet first for the sky was drizzling.

Having to handle the trout again was no displeasure.  They were big enough each to fill my palm and hang off my hand, fore and aft.

I did not catch another trout for a good hour, and by then I had traveled downstream half a mile downstream, fishing through water that had been visited many times already this morning.  I forced myself to stop and eat a soggy sandwich.  The day had turned thoroughly miserable, and water had leaked through the breathing holes of my bait can and drowned my worms.  They had turned into a slimy mess, with hardly any definition to those still alive.  I had better fish them fast.

I took a fish of about eight inches.  I killed it; this was opening day, after all, and we were after limits.  They were 20 fish, so I had only sixteen to go.  (Soon limits would reduced to 15, 12, then 8.)  Projecting my success rate for today, a limit would take me till the Fourth of July.  Undimmed by this prospect, I plunged drearily on.  Already I was dreaming of what I’d do to the remnant trout population, after the river had dropped and cleared for the year, and it was time for flies.  Flies, even then, much occupied my mind--though when I got to the water’s edge I continued to fish bait.

Ray Bergman, in his fine book With Fly, Plug, & Bait (listed I suppose in descending order of aesthetic value), has a drawing on page 11 of how to fish a worm through a pool; five pages later, he has a drawing of how to add a tiny weight to sink the worm very slowly in a backwater or deadwater pool, so that it will take the worm three or four revolutions of the pool to not quite reach bottom.  The idea is to keep the worm behaving so naturally that the trout doesn’t become suspicious or think it is anything other than a worm that has just taken up swimming, that is, been swept into the river by some mishap.  If the worm sinks too fast, the fish will know something is wrong.  The trout may well be frightened away.

Bergman fished worms for trout as a boy, first walking to his favorite creek, then riding there on the new bicycle his father had bought him.  It was a surprise. Upon first seeing it, he thought, “Trout.”  We understand his enthusiasm for the bike.  Having exhausted the nearby waters, he was ready for the more distant ones.  He was thirteen.

I fished single salmon eggs, additionally.  They are called this to distinguish them from salmon-egg clusters, which are the traditional bait for winter steelhead, though they are often used for big trout, too.  Singles came in tiny glass jars with screwtip lids.  The eggs looked like jewels.  But they quickly spoiled after opening, becoming covered with gray mold, even if you refrigerated them, which I generally forgot to do.  Either way, a hideous fungus appeared within a few days, starting at the surface and insidiously extending itself all over all the surface and soon permeating the jar’s depth.  A terrible smell soon replaced the mild fishy one.

If you lit a sulfur match and, very quickly, dropped it still smoking into the opened jar before you jammed on the top again, you might retard the spoilage, but it never worked for me.  The trick was one of those folktales without merit, passed along from one fisher to another.  The jars were costly, and each additional one you had to buy depleted your slim resources from after-school jobs.  Worms cost nothing but were hard to locate, especially when hot weather came and the ground was dry.  You did a heap of digging for the few you found.  And most were scrawny, unfit.  They were to a real worm what a real worm was to a snake.

And where in a city the size of Seattle do you find a manure pile?  It is as foreign, as far away, as old-growth timber.  You might as well try to hunt down a mountain hemlock in your backyard as to hope to find a worm there.

47

The way Bergman tells you to fish a worm will do well for fishing a wet fly.  Even fishing it for steelhead.  It is the so-called dead-drift method.  It should be mastered early in life.  Often the cast is made quartering upstream, gathering in line as it drifts back toward you, then playing out the slack as the fly and line continue past you, sometimes feeding bits of additional line through the guides as the drift continues to swing around and downstream from you.

In steelhead fishing I don’t generally do this.  I cast downstream and across, mend once or twice, and let the whole thing sag in the current, correcting the belly and the length of line behind it by raising or lowering my rod tip, and feeding whatever loose line I have left in my hand as the line sinks, sags, and swings round.  In other words, I fish sunk fly in a special though traditional (among steelhead and Atlantic salmon fishers, anyway) way, and not how I am supposed to fish for trout.  So to fish successfully and well for trout, I have to relearn the upstream cast and drift.  This is not unpleasant to do, though I confess it is difficult for me, at least at first, and I have the feeling all the while that I am not fishing right--that I am doing something exceedingly wrong and ineffective.  In other words, it won’t hook me a fish.

It can be very effective, though.  It is very much like upstream nymphing, or fishing with a strike indicator and weighted fly.  Well, a weighted fly and a worm weighted with a splitshot are not very different.  It is important to me to start thinking in a new and different manner.  (Or as I formerly must have, long ago, but can’t remember precisely.)  Once I start doing this, I usually catch fish.  Some of them are steelhead, too.

And some are trout.  The jiggle with which Bergman retrieves his worm, stripping it in, is much like the way one retrieves a fly, especially a  marabou.  The slower the water, the more complicated and important the retrieve is.  The really good trout fishers have an infinite variety of retrieves, I’ve noticed, ones designed especially for lakes and ponds, and fishers vary their stripping methods often, looking for The Retrieve of the Day, the one that will bring repeated strikes and well-hooked trout.  Usually it is one particular retrieve, and no other, though there are days when no one is better than the next, and mixing them up is what matters, at least at the start.  You can, in fact, employ several retrieves, all within a single cast.  It is this need for variety that keeps flyfishing still waters from being maddeningly boring, or impossibly difficult.

48

As you age, you forget more, or else you don’t remember much of what has happened to you recently, but recall things sharply from long ago.  Or you do if you are like me.  Your nose remembers and so do your hands.  Just as you supposedly don’t forget how to swim or ride a bicycle, simply get rusty in such matters, your hands recall how to tie a fly, for instance, or how to cast with a favorite flyrod, and how to palm a reel, when a sizable fish takes off downstream and threatens to overrun the line on the spool.  This you do by a kind of instinct, or so it is called, when it is thought to be natural.  I think it is more the persistence of memory.  Things are stored in the corners of our mind, mixed in with brain dust, dried leaves, and visions of girls and women once glimpsed and known only slightly that may be entirely untrue to reality.  Yet cling to these images we do.  And we do not let go of our favorite retrieves.

This is a big mistake.

I have only learned the “hand-twist retrieve” recently.  How could I have fished without it?  Somehow I did.  It is a method of bringing in line intentionally slowly, so slowly that it often seems like no line is coming in at all.

Think again.

I picked it up from a video.  It is a good lesson to learn and learn well.  The idea is to handicap yourself with a method that makes it physically impossible to move the line any faster.  Brian Chan says that our impatience makes us quicken the retrieve, even when we know we shouldn’t.  And the retrieve keeps getting faster.  This is wrong.  It is wrong not intrinsically (which is foolish to hold to) but simply because the trout often don’t like a fly moving very fast, if at all.  It has to creep.  No, it has to move even slower than at a creep.  It has only to seem like it is moving.  Seeming to move is just right.

Fishing my new lake has taught me a lot.  Besides helping enormously with the accuracy and placement of my cast--while standing, even when sitting down--I have had occasion to try out a wide range of retrieves, often employing several in a single cast.  This can easily be done, if one keeps one’s mind on a certain narrow track.  Part of this is thinking in terms of the surface film.  It is this tight, rubbery substance (I can come up with no better word to describe it) that the fly moves in and out of, breaking the tension, which often behaves as if it were a live thing.  It is amazing how often a bass or a trout will seize the fly only when it breaks through this film or thin substance, which acts very much like a membrane.

This is of course the air/water interface.  It is where two greatly dissimilar elements come together and form a third; it is also where food is apt to be, to live, or else to get trapped.  Fish pay it keen attention, whether feeding or not.  And so should fishers.  A fly worked carefully in and out of this area will draw strikes most any time the water is not too cold to send fish diving for oxygen down at the bottom.  Or when they are stupid with cold.  So a range of ways of presenting the fly to the fish and claiming its attention is imperative to success.  And at the surface is the most important of these, temperatures being in the normal range.

Retrieves may be named, sub-divided, and categorized almost endlessly.  For practical purposes, it is useful to attach a few names to some of them and give them brief descriptions:

(1) The hand-twist retrieve performed dead slow.

            This is the one referred to earlier as being physically limiting so that the fly will not move as fast as the angler might perform it otherwise.  It is sometimes described as a figure eight, with the line compressed in the hand.  The very action of the fingers and wrist in gathering in the line is so slow, so complicated, so intricate, that the fly cannot be moved quickly.  It is surprising how many strikes it will draw from fish that are otherwise uninterested.  Stop, move, stop, move.  Bang.  The only trouble is, with so gentle a retrieve, the fish has to hook itself, most times, for the strike back (and strike back you will) takes place after the fish has detected something phony and ejected the fly.  Then you strike nothing but water. 

(2)  The hand-twist retrieve performed fast--as fast as one’s physical limitations permit.

It feels as if the fly is galloping along, but it’s not.  It is maintaining a fixed rate of speed--which in some cases is good and in others not.  It resembles the action in a troll.  Of course it can be varied--as can a troll, with aid of the oars and pauses introduced into the boat’s forward motion.  Most anglers use this retrieve to give the fly a steady swim.  There are times when it is the only way to induce a strike.  And it is pleasant to do, relatively untiring; you can fish this way all day and be no more weary at the end than the repeated fly casting will make you.

(3)  The short jerk retrieve.  The number of individual jerks is limited by the length of the fisher’s arm.  The arm acts as a fulcrum, a mini-lever, with the hand swinging through a slight curve as it moves from straight out in front, where it clasps the line, until it is down by the side or back slightly further, pointing to the rear, with the elbow locked and the shoulder thrown back.           

            This comprises about 120 degrees.  The distance the fly is moved is about four feet.  Within this limitation many, many motions may be executed or different ones combined, so it is probably the most useful and versatile retrieve available.  Sometimes the short jerks are all that is needed, with a slight pause in between each, to bring a good strike.  Each tug is about eight inches long.  I haven’t tried to figure out how many jerks take place within a single strip of line before the arm and hand have to be cocked again, thereby producing an unavoidable pause, but they aren’t many.  And the natural pauses that take place are tantalizing to fish.  Mix them up with some other types of strips or jerks and you have the makings of reproducing closely the actions made my many swimming insects and bait fish.

            Add to these the vertical planes or layers of water the fly must travel through--measured, let’s say, in inches or centimeters of depth--and there is a complex and exciting trajectory your fly makes.  If the line is a floating one, as often it is, for this type of fishing, the tendency is for a nymph to sink because of its hook weight and the absorption quality of the materials used in dressing the hook, and it should be easy for the angler to visualize the darting, up and down motion of the fly.  It is a swimming motion and when I observe it it looks most lifelike.  But I don’t think it has to be all that lifelike to attract fish, since the fly is seductive in its own right.

I don’t want to get into this very far at this point because it brings up largely theoretical questions of why fish hit our flies in the first place.  Bergman says they “suggest” insects or bait fish, rather than closely resembling them, and this is good enough for me.  “Whatever works,” as the saying goes.  And things become old sayings, overly familiar to us, for the simple good reason that they are true, their principles demonstrated over and over.

(4) Various strips or jerks that fall in between a full-arm motion and a staccato action, or what might be called a short series of jerks.  These are nearly infinitely variable, and when several are combined in an alternative pattern produce an enticing action that can be either repeated or slightly modified on the next cast or else completely abandoned in favor of some other combination.

            Jerk once, jerk twice, pause, lengthen out the next jerk to about twice the length of the first one, pause, give a full pull for as long as your arm will reach:  do whatever feels right and natural, thinking, “Fish, eat me!”  Let your mind drift to what you will do differently on the next cast, if this cast does not produce a strike.  And if it does, repeat it almost exactly, as quickly as you can, as best you remember it, before the fish goes away or forgets what made it strike a moment earlier.  Even if you think the fish has felt the hook point, try the repeat before abandoning the retrieve or moving on to the next casting target.

(5)  The full-arm strip, repeated just as fast as you can do it.  This is no different from when you have made a bad cast and are anxious to pull in enough line to make a new cast. But—ah--there is a difference, however slight.  This time you want the fly to be retrieved exactly this way--like a speeding bullet.  The strip is designed to attract a fish--to induce it to strike before it has time to make up its “mind” that the fly is not natural, for nothing in its world swims that fast.  The idea is to give the fish one opportunity to take the speeding bullet before it has sped on by.  It is not awfully different from Lee Wulff’s explanation for the success of Royal Wulff:  the fish has never seen one before but it looks so good--Wulff called it Strawberries and Cream”--that it isn’t going to let the opportunity pass by.  So the fish . . . strikes.  And he is solidly hooked.  The speed of the retrieve is what hooks the fish, whereas the very slow retrieves won’t do the job, not unless the fly is very small or swallowed deeply.

Fish, when feeding, or on the outlook for food, will strike many small objects moving through the water so fast that they seem to  inhabit it and thus appear natural.  How do I know this?  From experience and observation.  My explanation for why it is so is only logical, my dear Watson.

This kind of logic I learned at the knee of Ray Bergman, as did Ernie Schwiebert, with a backward nod to that old salmon fisher, Sherlock Holmes.  And how do I know Holmes was a salmon fisher?  Why else spend all that time among the wet and foggy moors?  Holmes had to be there for some good reason.  The salmon, the salmon!  That’s got to be the reason.

“Elementary,” is the nature of my reasoning.

            49

I think I erred in my remarks about the surface film.  Actually it is quite a narrow band--only microns thick.  I was referring to the top few inches of water.  This is quite a different matter.  Fish feed throughout the water column.  The top few inches, however, is most interesting because it can be fished with a floating line (which is always more fun) and because you can often observe the fish dimpling, bulging, ringing, and splashing there.  This gives you a good idea of the effectiveness of any given retrieve, or the illusion that you are doing something clever from which you can measure the fish’s response.

When the fly is dabbled or dibbled on the surface, it will sometimes bring much attention from fish cruising just under the surface.  These are fish on the lookout for food.  This always comes as a surprise, to me, though I keep looking for evidence of it, but sometimes forget to try to present my fly this simple, easy way.  And it is by accident when I do, and find myself fast into a fish without having done anything special to merit it, except bring my fly in quickly on the surface.  Then you may see the flash of a fish in hot pursuit, darting after the fly, turning, flashing silver, throwing a bulge in the water, etc.  The same fish will often pursue the fly heedlessly, doing the same thing over and over, until he takes the fly and is hooked solidly, or else feels the prick of the hook badly enough to turn away for good.  These are dumb trout that will keep coming back, stung, stung time after time, until they are hooked and captured.  But don’t count on them.

At the lake, my home lake, I like casting from my dock for a variety of reasons.  First, it is my dock, and I am still getting used to the water and its various fish populations.  Any fish caught from it, consequently, takes on great personal significance.  In a way the fish is my property; in all other ways, of course, it is not.  Still, I can’t get rid of the feeling that it is my fish, much more so than somebody else’s.  I deserve it.  I guess this is one of the occupational hazards of being a property owner.  It is the same kind of thing that makes people post their property and put up the fences that have long annoyed me.  I’d say that is the down side of ownership.

To take a proprietary interest in the land, lake, flora, fauna, is good, for it leads to a custodial attitude.  It means you will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve and protect what is not really yours but over which you believe you have responsibility and control.  It makes you cut your grass on a day when you’d much rather go fishing.  It keeps you from dumping your yard waste, not to mention your empty beer cans, in the lake.  One of the best examples of this custodial attitude is when my neighbor, Anton Ehler, learned that the resident belted kingfisher no longer had a perch (Anton’s neighbor put away his sailboat and tall mast at the end of summer) and constructed a duplicate, a tall pole with with a cross arm on it.  The kingfisher knew at once what it was for and moved right onto it.  There he daily sits, to both Anton and my deep pleasure.

Anton recognized the kingfisher’s proprietary concern over the loss of its perch and responded with a proprietary act of his own.  Noblesse oblige.  Thus they recognized in each other what was paramount in themselves.  Birds of a feather, or some such thing.  More likely, it was a pair of fishers who acknowledged each other’s needs and values.  It is where the bird waits and watches for fish near the surface.  I was slow in recognizing what was destroyed in the removal of the mast, and its significance to the kingfisher.  It would have taken me a month or more to spot it, and by then the kingfisher would have gone elsewhere.  Anton’s knowledge of the lake is much better than mine, but I’m working on it.  How I’d miss that shrill, rattley scream of the kingfisher, and his squat presence.

We have a number of feeders in the surface film that are not fish.  Besides the kingfisher, they include the great blue heron (who is really gray as a battleship), the swallows (who find their tiny insects there and in the air just above it, plus various surface-feeding ducks who are present for the duckweed.

It is presently October, the water cooling, rain frequent and hard.  Since I never started taking water temperatures in August, I will not begin now, for the simple reason I have no reference point.  I do not know how much the water has cooled in the two months I’ve been here, nor do I really need to know.  It has cooled a lot, and will cool even more; that is all I need to perceive and act upon.  But I am curious to learn how late in the year trout will continue to feed on or near the surface, and for this I do have a reference point, though it is decades old.

I used to fish Seattle’s Green Lake in spring, then stop abruptly when the fry plant was made and the legal-sized trout stopped taking flies, probably because they now had a steady diet of ¾-inch replicas of themselves.  Tasty, eh?  Whatever the reason, the lake went flat and unresponsive, and the fishers went away.  Come September, the fry had grown at a rate of two-inches per month and were now of legal size--six inches, going on seven.  (That is not big, I know.)  They continued at this excellent growth rate until the water cooled and the lake stopped producing insect hatches.  The fish never seemed to feed much on the surface, though there were faint, widely spaced rings on mild spring evenings.  Fry, we thought, probably correctly, for often the tiny fish threw themselves out of the water in their midge-feeding frenzy and we could see what they looked like.  Or else the rings were from the insects themselves.

I became good at nymph fishing for the growing fish and caught so many of them that I used to number my year’s catch of legal trout in the hundreds.  My scores generally ran 450 to 500, though I never quite reached the upper target or exceeded it.  It was more of a half-thought-out goal.  I’d keep some fish in the spring and again in early October, but not many.  I do not believe in feeding the world--at least not in feeding them trout.  So I started fishing barbless hooks--size 12s were about as small as I’d go.  I don’t think I knew there were hooks any smaller, and never investigated the matter, since I fished streams primarily and knew small hooks slaughtered steelhead parr; my own flies up to 12s caught many parr and often hooked them deep in the mouth, sometimes near the gills.  Knowing that many of these stream-bred trout died afterwards, I did not want to repeat my mistakes when it came to lowland lakes and small fish. So I persisted with the bigger hooks.

Because the trout were feeding heavily and trying to develop enough growth and body fat to tide them over till spring, they cruised the lake with their mouths open, so to speak.  There were definite feeding periods, and I learned that you had to get your fly quickly out on the surface, near a feeding ring, if you wanted to catch the fish.  And as the year lengthened out, the afternoon and evening feeding periods became progressively shorter until they practically stopped.  They started out lasting about an hour, but at the beginning of November they were down to five minutes or so each day, and took place only as dark fell.  The frenzy would suddenly commence and just as suddenly it was over.  Whatever fish you caught were compressed into a brief period of action.

This was both exciting and dismaying.  As the frenzy began, they took solidly and I missed very few.  They were about nine or ten inches long by now.  Each night it was as though they had to be coerced into striking again, having forgotten how in the past twenty-four hours.  They would begin to miss the fly, hitting it short.  This is what we called it, anyway.  It seemed as they had gotten fed up, or simply full of food--whatever it was.  Their strike would be softer, more subtle, than last night during the frenzy.  You would sense the strike, rather than feel it, and often you missed what had happened entirely.  But you knew a fish had been after your fly.  You just knew it.

To catch these soft-taking trout, I used to fish a fly with a trailing hook one size smaller than the main fly.  A dropper fly would have caught fish, too, but probably not the same fish that were missing the single fly.  The trailing hook--lashed there on strong nylon--was bare, or else had only a body tied on it; it swam behind the fly and dared the fish to take the feathers ahead.  About two-thirds of the late takers were caught on the trailing hook.  The remaining third was split between fish that took the hook with the fly on it and fish that took both hooks at once.

Peacock-bodied brown hackle (or Coachman) was one of my favorite ties, and I was convinced that a tail of red hackle fibers helped a lot.  Now, I‘m not so sure.  Probably it was unnecessary.  It might have even been a detriment to its effectiveness.  The brightness could have scared the fish off.

It was a nervous time, those last few minutes before full dark.  I smoked cigarettes, and could generally be found standing among the rushes in my waders, a red coal glowing at my mouth, while a white cloud rose above me like steam from a locomotive at the station.  This kind of fishing required great concentration.  It I had.  And I could cast so well a long line that once I took a circling rider off his bike when he came up behind me on the footpath at dusk.  He didn’t think much of my argument that I had the right-of-way because I was stationary and he was under power.  That was maritime law as I remembered it.

He wasn’t convinced and told me to look where I was going.  This made no sense to me because I was going nowhere.  I told him he should look where he was going, since he was moving, was self-propelled, and had the ability to accelerate, slow down, and steer away from me.  I was planted, albeit in the water.  Rather than punch me out, which he could have probably done, he angrily hopped on his bike and rode away.  I kept casting into the pressing darkness, but with a weather eye over my shoulder for other riders.  Fortunately they were done for the day.  And so were the trout.

It was exciting fishing, as the days grew short and the feeding periods briefer.  Sometimes you could actually see the small trout cruising just beneath the surface, sucking in nymphs rising to the top.  I think this is the most thrilling moment in flyfishing.  It puts to shame trout rising freely to insects floating on the surface, or what is called dry-fly fishing.  Your quarry throws away ordinary caution and exposes himself for what he is--a veritable eating machine.  Slurp, slurp.  Winter is hurrying on.  The approach of the day’s darkness takes away his normal defenses and makes him careless.  He has become a glutton for the racing moment.  That moment is the time for us to strike.

Picture this:  a lake of about ninety acres in the heart of the city, surrounded by homes and a boulevard that circles it closely.  Gently sloping blanks, a bicycle path that parallels them about thirty feet away, grassy slopes, a few tall shaggy maples newly rid of leaves, strollers of various ages and sexs, some of them alone, others in pairs, teenagers on bikes or skateboards or roller skates, the occasional dog on a leash ahead of a man with extended arm which results from being towed.  And myself, in hipboots or bigfooted army surplus wetsuit waders, cigarette jammed in my mouth, skinny, young, casting a fly awkwardly and not well with my cheap H-I bamboo rod, hastening against the onrushing night.  And trout--see them, too--trout ringing softly on a lake the color and seemingly oily consistency of molten lead.

I would play a little game with myself.  Fishers often do.  I’d release trout after trout, little guys, some medium-sized, backing out the hook skillfully while they are still in the water, disdaining a landing net (which I didn’t bring along tonight).  Then, as dark grows nearer, I decide I want to keep a few for the pan.  The trout now run nine to eleven inches, fat with summer feeding.  An occasional twelve-incher announces itself immediately by its resolute solidness at striking and the strength with which it claims line from the reel.  The keep limit is twelve, and while I maintain mental track of the fish I release, always thinking in limit terms, the number of fish I murder, when I murder some for the pan, is always small--just enough for a single meal for my wife and myself.  This is usually four, if they are about ten inches long, but if I catch a thirteen-incher, it counts as two ten-inchers, for it is a meal in itself, or nearly one.

You have to surround the trout with plenty of hashbrown potatoes and, if it is October, a mound of golden acorn squash, with brown sugar and butter melting in its concave center.  This comprises my ideal autumnal meal.  At least, it is what I strive to achieve when I go out meat fishing at this time of the year.  (I did not yet know that I really didn’t like to eat fish and was still a brave pretender.)

I release them today, or keep one or two occasionally for my wife.  No longer am I a cannibal.  A cannibal?  Yes, that’s what you are if you eat one of your own kind.

50

Ah, memories!  Remembrance of trout long since gone to their watery grave or more likely into somebody’s frying pan.   As we age, those memories pile up and if, at the time, they were not so keen or great, or were accompanied by cruel hardships stoutly endured, the mind selects its episodes and retains only the best of what went before, or some joyous version of it.  These are what sustain us in hard times, such as now, when early autumn storms have turned the rivers to chocolate and the only good fishing is to be found in books.  It is nearing winter and the calm of my summer lake is receding fast.

My father was not a fisher but tried hard to develop an interest in order to have something in common with his oddball son, who was not accomplished at either golf or tennis, which were his two sports.  So he occasionally accompanied whiny me into a harsh environment not of his choosing and bad weather such as today’s, with first the wind roaring in dryly, then big drops of rain announcing the start of a series of mid-October storms.  One is presently battering my windows as I write this, and causes me to recall how my father was made to experiencing things he normally would intelligently avoid, due to my insistence.  I tell myself that this was good for him, but I’m not so sure.

Once he rowed his office hands raw bringing us all back from the far end of a wild-lashed Kamloops lake, a place he had no reason to be in except having been badgered and coerced into going there by his eldest son, who wanted to fish for these famous trout.  And this was the closest lake to Seattle.  He got us back safely and I was never more proud of him.  The fishing was good.  I caught all the trout but one, and they were huge, by Washington standards.  Two- and three-pounders.  But I remember better another time when he and I went fishing together for searun cutthroats, with an Indian guide on the Olympic Peninsula’s famed Quinault River.

I was sixteen or seventeen, which puts him in his early fifties.  That is, he was fifteen years younger than I am now.  Once more he had taken his wife, my brother, and me to a place where all of us would be comfortable.  It was Lake Quinault Lodge, a tony place.  There was horseback riding for my brother and fishing not far away for me.  It was one of our family vacations, an ordeal in a different way for each of us.  But there was lawn croquet for everybody down by the lake, and we all went at it enthusiastically, blasting each other’s balls to the very edge of the water.

It was a stylish place, with a fine dining room, bar, and movies imported for the entertainment of its guests.  The lodge was booked up weeks in advance, it was so popular.

Because for years I was famous around our neighborhood for being nuts about fishing, I easily persuaded my father to hire a guide to take us down the river where the fishing was reported to be best, unsurpassed locally.  The lake and river were the exclusive fishery of a tribe of Indians, the Quinaults, who had negotiated a contract with the state and the lodge owner to guide exclusively on the lake and river.  A license fee was paid to the tribe for a permit for each person fishing the lake, which bordered on national park land, and for fishing the lower river, which ran through their reservation.  The river could only be fished in the company of one of them, and this required paying another fee.  These were collected at the lodge.  The guide was paid separately.  The lodge provided him with a sack lunch and one for each of us.  They also gave us two tall thermos of hot coffee.

The tribe had sold off most of the timber from its lands to several various timber companies, which had ruthlessly clearcut it,  leaving it buried and looking desolate in logging waste.  The clogged streams soon blew out and destroyed their channels and devastated the land.  It was a sad time in the history of the tribe and ours.  But none of this was apparent on the morning my father and I stood out at the end of a rain-drenched pier and waited for Bill James, our guide, to show up in his motorized dugout canoe.  He was late.  In hand we had the lunch the lodge provided for the three of us wrapped in an oilskin.  Where was he?  He was supposed to be here, at the pier, by seven, and it was approaching eight.  Finally he appeared, grinning sheepishly, looking a little drunk still.

Off we went in the canoe, leaning forward in our narrow seats, one behind the other, while Bill James manned the tiller with great skill.  It was attached to a big Johnson outboard, which he handled as though it were an extension of his arm.  As we neared the end of the lake, he pointed out his home, an unpainted shack, with a new red Pontiac convertible in the side yard, its white top permanently down, bought with his share of the proceeds from the sale of tribal timber.  Even as we sped by, rain fell into the car.  Only a year old, the engine was shot--perhaps he had neglected to put oil in its engine because he was not only broke but poor.  Soon we were past the tiny settlement and approaching the lake’s outlet, which was the mighty river.  It fanned out of the dead water with a slurpy roar.  A few hundred feet downstream loomed the Highway 101 bridge.  Bill James braked us to a stop, as though the river’s surface was oil.  The river continued to speed by.  He dropped anchor.

“We fish here,” he explained.  “Cast toward that bank.”  He pointed.  A car lumbered past on the bridge, rattling it.

I was eager to catch a cutthroat, my father a little less so.  He was mainly along for the ride, though he wouldn’t mind a trout or two.  I had bigger plans.  The rain had thickened:  Olympic Peninsula weather has a habit of closing in like a big gray fist, unless it is one of the six days out of the year dedicated to blue skies and sunshine.  Not one of these today, the existing drizzle was the best we could hope for and represented the last of the good weather, as it turned out.  In slow stages the highway bridge became dim, dimmer, and then disappeared from view, eaten up by a pervasive foggy mist.

We were fishing the traditional Colorado spinner, followed closely with worm.  It’s what the lodge via Charlie recommended.  My lure had two blades on a single shaft, silver on the outside and brilliant copper on the inside.  Now a Colorado spinner is near to round in shape, a little bit egg-shaped, but does not come to a marked point at the lower end of its blade; it whirls smoothly and sends out steady flashes of light, alternating the two colors.  It is most effective and brings all kinds of fish to investigate, at which point they meet the succulent worm that is in close attendance behind.  It is a combination hard to resist if you are a large fish.

The baby steelhead couldn’t refuse it, either.  It was early October, the mild weather only beginning to fade, the water warm still, though here in the rain forest it was admittedly difficult to tell good weather from bad, which was a relative matter.  After catching three or four eight-inch steelhead parr, and quietly putting them back, to his guide’s astonishment, this boy manfully announced, “Let’s head downstream for some searuns.  We don’t want these runts.”

Bill James knew he had a problem on his hands.  Nothing he disliked more than an unruly kid who thought he knew something, especially about fishing, which was the guide’s domain.  Patiently he explained to us that these were the fish, the trout the river had to offer, and all his clients accepted them as trout, along with  his knowledge that these small pretty fish were what they’d come after.  Fifteen fingerlings constituted a limit, and if the guide was any good at his job, you could all be out of here by nine-fifteen.

Patiently I explained to him that these were baby steelhead and no man or boy who called himself a fisher would accept them for trout, though of course they were technically keepers and would comprise a limit if they were all killed.  The river had trout that were really worth going after, namely cutthroats that had gone to sea to get their growth, much as the salmon does, and this is what boy and man, me and my father, were after.  Such fish could probably be found farther downstream.

All this Bill James knew, too.  Few of his clients ever challenged him on fish matters.  What this boy was after could only be found in the slow pools and bank eddies five to eight miles downstream.  It was a long way off.  Going there was a lot of work; it entailed burning expensive gasoline both on the trip down (to speed things up) and on the way back, fighting the heavy current and navigating the narrow, difficult, boulder-strewn channels.  These he knew as well as anything in life.

He remained adamant, I remained stubbornly the same, my father continued to attend to both of us indecisively.  He’d do what the majority determined.  In life he was used to yielding to authority.  So it was a deadlock.  He knew that I knew something, but he had paid for our trip and believed (rightly) that the Indian was a professional.  The Indian was an adult, besides.  But I was his son and not one to be easily put off, he knew.

“Downstream,” I argued, pointing.

“Damn,” said Bill James, or something worse, under his breath, where all such things are best uttered, even though they are meant to be overheard by one specific person, namely me.

So downstream we roared, prescribing an angry J in the water, the big motor kicking into life with a jerk of its lanyard.  He took us next to rocks and boulders packed so tight I couldn’t have put my the blade of my hand between hull and rock, the current pushing us swiftly past them.  Each threat was over almost before it formed.  We came to a slowing of the river about three or four miles downstream, though it is hard to estimate river distances, especially in a canoe.  I cast my spinners to the far bank and began a slow retrieve.  A cutt slammed into the whirling blades and worm; it could not resist a meal of sheer succulence. I let out a whoop.  The fish was about fourteen inches long; it was my biggest trout to date for the year.

I dragged it flopping over the gunwale.  If Bill James had a net, he kept it for himself, stowed away far back in the hull, and brought out only for the occasion steelhead and salmon.  That was okay by me.  We were using six-pound test leader, coupled to eighteen-pound braided line.  It would horse in anything we hooked with a safety factor of three or four.  Soon Dad was into big trout.  For a guy who doesn’t like fishing, he was doing a good imitation of who does.

I remember taking a picture of him with the bellows Kodak my mother thrust into my hands as we pulled away from the dock that morning; she had taken four or five snaps of us together, a moment earlier, as we climbed on board, waved good bye, grinning, and when the prints came back from the drugstore, the gods were with us for once, and she hadn’t lopped off everybody’s head, which was her enduring habit.  There we were, all smiles in the rain, squared away in the frame--almost as we were in real life.  Nor had I decapitated my father, either, by shooting a snap up close, twisted around in my tight boatseat.  The negative is gone, but the picture remains a joyous memento of a weird and wonderful day.

We caught a slew of cutthroats, all of which been to sea, fat from the rich feeding pastures there, silvery and cream and olive.  Lovely fish.  They ran eleven inches (that magical number again, where a trout becomes an adult) to seventeen, and while cutts come larger, assuredly, we did not feel we had been deprived of anything.  These were just right for the pair of us.

We stopped along the river bank for lunch and took slight shelter next to a downed cedar, one nursing tiny hemlocks that looked like parsley sprigs.  A full-sized hemlock spread overhead and covered us with some boughs.  Bill James insisted on a fire; it was his form of hospitality.  The regular nips of whiskey hadn’t warmed him enough, evidently, nor the lodge’s coffee us.  He looked a little wobbly on shore.  The fire would not start for him and stay blazed, so he slopped some gasoline on it and gave it the torch again.  It burst into an enormous yellow flower, which we all leaped back from, but then rushed forward, as it immediately died back to a black smolder.

While Bill James stood staring at it, I dashed off in search of dry cedar, found some on the underside of a downed snag, where it was rotting but bone dry.  I fed it into the dim orange coals and was rewarded with a blaze.  Soon it was roaring.  We gathered round again, toasting our palms and spreading out our fingers.  Bill James gave me an odd look.  It was either disgust or grudging admiration.  We finished lunch and Bill took a final snort from his bottle.  It would have to last him a while.  Then we were off again.  I did not have to urge downstream again.  The motor caught with a snarl and we headed in that direction but only a short distance.  He seemed a little less opposed to my plan.  Once at a good pool, I think he enjoyed watching his clients catch the cutts.

Our limit was thirty fish--way too many by today or any day’s standard.  I suppose we fished until we caught them all, or came very close.  I truly don’t remember, nor do I recall what we did with our fish afterwards, on our return to Seattle.  I suppose we ate some, gave others away, and perhaps friends passed some on to friends.  Isn’t that generally the way?

My father-in-law, twenty years dead, a kind and gentle man who never doubted the conventional wisdom of his day, lives on in photographs from an abundant past, the Thirties.  I see him in a dog-eared, brown-toned snapshot, holding one end of a string of cutts caught near his cannery in Kake, Alaska, that would impress anyone.  The men’s back strained with what they lifted for the camera’s eye. He was not a great fisher, you understand, not even by yesterday’s bait standards, but you didn’t have to be to produce such bags and frequently, up there.  The rivers abounded in silvery fish.  There are probably eighty to a hundred fish on the rope the two men hold suspended in the air.  Did anybody working in a fish cannery want to eat them?  I doubt it.  The purpose of the outing was to catch fish and photograph them, with the fishermen proudly displayed.  Today we would call the event a photo opportunity.  The dead fish were the man-made occasion.  I imagine they were jettisoned later.  They  had served their solitary purpose.

Memory is long but not so long as the list of wrongs all of us have committed, each in turn.  The atrocities continue to mount at every greedy opportunity.  Fishers get sentimental about the fish they catch and kill.  It is one of life’s terrible ironies.  Just think, some of us go through life trying to establish new records (personal bests) for fish done to death by various means, some of them legal, all of them deemed ethical by their practitioners.  Fly, bait, plug, spoon.  It is though the piscatorial world were the enemy, who we can not reach or beat or obliterate in the name of nationalism, business, politics, economic need, and so on.  So we attack and destroy . . . fish?  Runs of fish?  It makes no sense, but then many sports don’t, when looked at with a critical eye.  I guess fishing is no more stupid and pointless in that regard than golf or baseball.

51

Each year it amazes me how the weather can turn on a dime, and one Wednesday you are fishing for steelhead in the mid-seventies and the next week there is fresh snow coating the Cascades, many inches of rain falling in the Puget Sound area, and temperatures dipping into the thirties at night on both sides of the mountains.  Presently wind lashes the cedars next to my lake home and brings down a dense chaff of brown twigs and small green boughs.  I sweep them up continually now, as I marvel at the rapidity of the change of seasons.

Looks like I’m not going to get back to Lake Eudora and complete my plan to fish it at least once a month until it closes, October 31.  Happy Halloween will take place without that experience, that further data for my fishing bank, not unless I foolishly decided to brave the elements and set my small pram bouncing on the lake’s wild waters.  That would be imprudent.

My storm-tossed home lake is a constant reminder of what Eudora must be like.  I go into instant mental retreat.  The duckweed, once thought to be gone, proves to be only in brief, blind eclipse, its tiny green bloom swept by wind to the far end of the lake (somebody else’s direct concern), soon to be redistributed elsewhere by drift, which it continues to do according to some physical process not understood by the likes of me.  The stuff mimics an oily slime from a dire petroleum product lost from a tanker, but differs in how it can be fished through without harm to the tackle and fly.  It then dissolves into super clarity, seemingly whisked away overnight.  My new neighbor down the way, Rick Bowser, tells me how it completely covered the lake, one year, to everybody’s dismay.  It appeared in late spring, held solidly all summer, and lasted well into fall; it was probably the major factor that led to community asking for the three-year study just being completed.  The idea is to reduce the bloom--duckweed and elodea mostly--so that people can swim and boat happily unencumbered again.  Spring, summer, and fall.

Over the radio come reports of traffic accidents that have been caused by so much rain appearing, all at once. It activates the oil from spills long since dried on the pavement throughout the region.  There is water over the roadway, as well, and everywhere a dip appears in the pavement a minor lake is formed.  As I write this, the second terrible windstorm of the fall hits and my computer goes dead in almost the same way as a candle burns out.  There is a tiny hiss and the darkness crowds in.  I lose nearly ten minutes worth of work in the power failure and have to recreate it from memory, half an hour later, when the power comes back on.  The writing is never as good as the first time.  But I am grateful, all the same:  I’ve anticipated a long evening ahead, reading by the Coleman lantern, huddled round a wood fire, nibbling bread and other food that doesn’t need heat for its preparation.  How dependent we all are on our creature comforts and how we take them for granted until they are suddenly ripped away from us.  Especially electricity that provides brightness at nightfall--a time that is slightly frightening to the childlike psyche even with electric lights.

How far we are all away from what Thoreau experienced at his woodsy pond, Walden.  I do not envy him a bit his “simplicity,” raised to the third power.  Remember how he repeated his koan, as though said thrice it were all anybody needed to know?

Wrong! I might shout from my dock to all the homes bordering Lake Ketchum:  “Give  me complexity, complexity, complexity.  I love it!  I’ll never have enough, especially of the electronic stuff!”

My battery-powered radio relates tales of flooding that have just arrived.  What, already?  I don’t believe it.  The calendar date on my wristwatch (eat your heart out, Henry) tells me it is only the 17^th of the month.  Winter, here?  My wife returns from the grocery store with tales of a tree fallen across the road and limbs sprawled everywhere.  “That’s nothing,” I shout gleefully, “we’ve had our first power failure in the new house.  Sorry you had to miss it.”  I show her the lantern and can of fuel I’ve brought out of the storeroom, in anticipation of the outage lasting all night, and am deliriously happy that it has been averted.  The radio, she tells me, says this is going to be the worst winter in 100 years.  Only that long?  I am joyous at the news.  What?  Used to be, they measured only floods in such terms.  Now it is winters.

I picture inky Eudora, its trout population buried in its cold depth.  Their feeding systems are shutting down by degrees, I know, linked to the disappearance of their food supply  The Finns have packed up their summer duds and moved back to town, where they will over-winter, like some family of small animals gone into hibernation.  Booze will help keep their blood from freezing.  Frankly, hibernation doesn’t seem so bad a choice, not at the moment.  Nor does winter-long drunkenness.  I have half a mind to join them in it.

There’s nothing like a spell of bad weather to bring on early cabin fever and make you long for faraway spring.

52

Storm after storm rolls in from the Pacific, prefaced always by wind.  Often the wind stops just before the rain strikes.  Not always.  Sometimes (such as now) the rain falls at a swift slant and gusts cause the cedars next door to lean all to one side.  Mine.  They look like ballet dancers trapped in some collective idle moment.  My home lake is small enough so waves never develop the full amplitude that they do at larger lakes, such as Goodwin, where I can imagine a vast curl of whitecaps extending to the far shore, itself barely visible in the misty rain.  Here the waves are only wavlettes, tiny corrugations in a sheet-metal plate that resembles rumpled aluminum foil, only without so much shine.  I sit indoors, at my accursed writing machine, a computer, looking out the window at what is wet, wild, wonderful.  My mind ventures boldly out into it, trying to feel its force.  But I remain cowardly inside.

My friend, the fish biologist Curt Kraemer, from whom I’ve learned so  much, once told me that, if he bought a home on a lake such as this one, he might put out a set line with a worm on the end of it, and see what he can catch.  The inference is that I should do this.  What, a dedicated flyfisher?  Had he read my mind?  Not a bad idea, admittedly.  So I did.  A fly is nice, but not always appropriate, and I am a ruthless fisher first.  Last night, when the temperature dipped below forty, after catching about 20 small bass on a fly, I put out a worm.  If nothing but tiny bass will take my fly  . . . why not offer the lake something more substantial?  Say, a whole mouthful of angleworm.  (Hadn’t I just finished writing about worms?)  I’ll do it from my dock, of course.  I can tell any flyfisher who questions me that I am “gathering data.”  It’s all part of the fun, the challenge, of a new lake.  I want to learn how many different species I can catch from my personal promontory, the dock.

My float disappears beneath the surface before it is full dark.  This I sensed, rather than saw, for in the failing light even a bright red float cannot be distinguished, nor its absence:  it has to be discerned.  But I knew it was gone.  A fish had taken the bait and dived into the weeds.  Well, let him remain there, all night, because I am not about to go out in this storm, even with a flashlight.  My precise neighbor Anton might accuse me of jacklighting.  He might be half-right, technically speaking.

So the following morning, I wander down to the dock, trusty dipnet in hand.  Sure enough, the bobber is buried and my three-pound-test spinning line points towards shore, right at a thick weedbed.  Now Elodea has a tough, stringy stalk, much like a drowned fir bough inverted in the water, pointed upward.  It has considerable weight, as well.  I crank in a yard or so of weed, feeling a faint pulse on the far end.  Perch, I think, or perhaps (with luck) a rainbow trout.  Neither guess is right.  Slowly the whole sloppy mess of weed trails in.  Sam comes down and watches, very interested.  No barks, just eyes.

Not looking more closely, I plunge the net into the water and captured my fish, weed and all.  It proves to be a catfish, my seventh species from the lake.  Actually, it is a brown bullhead,   weighing a full pound.  Next to a lingcod (and next to a lingcod it would be a handsome dwarf) it is the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen, viewed up close.  It is the creepiest, slimiest, biomass to occupy a freshwater lake.  It has a leathery chin and long whiskers.  In fact, having just caught it, the sight is razor fresh in my mind.  Norma is busy cleaning it, as I write this, and will soon fillet it.  Our neighbor, Tracy (on the other side from Anton and his wife, Carrie) told her to do this.  Fillet it and fry it up in a pan with some butter and herbs.  Norma has said she wants to eat every fish in the lake.  How else do you know what is good, what is not?

“This is the toughest skin I’ve ever tried to cut through,” she tells me, sawing away with a fresh knife, after the first one has failed to do the job.  Perhaps it is dull, she thought.  But this proves to be just as bad as the other one.  It is the fish that is the problem.

“Perhaps I can catch another,” I offer.  “Not to eat, though.  You could gut them and make a pair of shoes.”

Funny, funny.  It is not the right thing to say at the moment, however.  Bloody up to the elbows and farther, the fish is still not filleted.   She glowers at me.  Hey, it is supposed to be a joke.  I really don’t want to go out and set another bait; it is blowing hard, and the rain has thickened into a pudding.

53

I had planned to fish for searun cutthroat today, but all the rivers are running mud.  I’ve not had much luck, under such conditions.  In fact, I’ve not done too well for cutts in the past couple years.  I’m tempted to conclude that their numbers are diminished to explain my case.  But that’s not true.  Russ Miller and Joe Butorac (to name only two) have had some extraordinary days.

Over on the Wenatchee, while fishing together for steelhead, Joe tells me about hitting a run of cutts and hooking thirty of them, one fine day; he describes the hole to me, one I haven’t fished for years, and I head for it the day after my return to the West Side, and fish it hard, as he told me to do (casting far across the riffle-run into the deep slack on the other side and working my fly in rapidly in jerks), but there are no cutts present, or else I do it wrong and they ignore me.  This can happen, too.

I catch a ten-inch steelhead fingerling that has become resident, perhaps from being planted at the wrong time.  I can tell that it is of hatchery origin from its missing adipose fin.  There are many residualized fish in our rivers today, fish that don’t go to sea as they are supposed to do but, for reasons unknown and problematic, hang around and start to feed.  Agency fish biologists don’t want you to know the extent of the problem, but it constitutes a major one in fish management.  Something keeps going wrong in the tanks.  And it is not only in the occasional year.  The fish just don’t do what the biologists expect of them.

A year ago, a month earlier in the season than this, while fishing for steelhead with a floating line deep in a favorite pocket of the Elbow Hole, I caught three different species of fish without moving my feet more than a couple of yards.  I was fishing a Knudsen Spider, which has a body of yellow chenille, with a doubled mallard breast feather wound in front as a simple soft hackle.  The first fish was a cutthroat of about fourteen inches.  I thrilled to it, as I do every cutt that comes slashing at my fly.  I admired its uncommon beauty and the pair of crimson-orange crescents under its jaw.  Then I released it.

A moment later there was a swirl behind my fly and a heavy fish began to run, but would not jump.  Salmon, I thought.  I tried to force the fish into the air and failed.  I played the fish on and off the reel to the beach.  It remained sluggish but strong.

It was a wild, Deer Creek steelhead of about six pounds.  Usually such fish are leaping wonders.  I examined the fish for any signs of injury.  There were none.  The steelhead was dark, as colorful as a Wenatchee fish, slender, perfectly formed, with a pronounced adipose.  Back it went  into the water, as the law requires, though I would have released it anyway.  I always do.  This is a hole heavily poached and the fish need to be given more than a break by the legitimate fishers.

The third fish that hit my Knudsen Spider was a leaper from the start.  Now, that’s the way for a steelhead to perform, I told myself happily.  Yet something was not quite right about the performance.  In the air the fish looked a little peculiar, too.  I tried to ease it to the beach, but it kept boring straight out to the center of the river.  It was a strong fish.  Eventually it turned over on its side and slid into the shallows.

It was a coho, a silver salmon, shiny bright, with only a faint pink flush starting along its sides.  I played and landed it without changing my position in the stream or having to go ashore.  I wanted to protect it from a pounding on the beach.  I cranked it in to where I could grab the leader and, while the fish rolled and thrashed on the surface, quickly backed out the hook.  The fish drifted off.

One of the poachers was watching from the top of the riprap.  He was not with his friends and consequently did not have to impress them with his bold contempt and toughness--the false courage they display in each other’s company.  He spoke to me, as one fisher to another, as though we were brothers, when all he was ever known to do was snag fish, usually unsuccessfully from the standpoint of being able to land them afterwards.  He either broken his leader or the hooks tore out.  Now having him presume to talk to me was something I could not tolerate.  Brothers?  I mean, this is a democracy, when it comes to having a vote, but most of us are not regular lawbreakers, nor do we threaten an endangered resources, even if we are not in complete agreement with the regulations.  We  never try to catch a fish by planting a treble hook in its back.  Nor do we target spawning salmon, and think it is fun to molest and injure them.

“What was it?” he asked, indicating the spot where my fish splashed back into the river.

“A coho,” I replied coldly.  Now, go away, I thought.

That ought to do it.  I’ve provided him with his minimum daily requirement of human conversation for politeness’s sake.  Now leave me alone is what I meant.

He stood there, watching still, silent, a sneer on his face.  This was not a new or unfamiliar tactic.  Another day, when several of the poachers continued to watch me, way past all tolerable decency, I asked them softly, “TV broke?”  I thought it pretty funny and only a mild rebuke.

It provoked a blast of obscenity.

I have this old-fashioned notion that a man ought to be able to fish unregarded, without providing entertainment or visual diversion for those who don’t fish, or who fish illegally, unlawfully.  It is okay, in my book, to check out somebody to see who he is and what he is doing.  It must be brief, though.  Here on this pool, one on a famous flyfishing-only river, poaching among locals is so prevalent that it is unusual to see somebody fishing with a fly in September, when the spawning salmon outnumber everything else except perhaps the poachers. 

A flyfisher must seem an oddity to them, an anomaly, and something deserving of close scrutiny because he is in such a minority.  I am speaking facetiously, of course.  Normally, you check somebody out and continue on about what you are doing.  A fisher has certain basic rights, I’m trying to say, and they are inherent.  One of these is not be put under the microscope.  A man is entitled to his privacy while fishing.  It is an unwritten law.  He is not an entertainer, or somebody putting on a show.  Even if he happens to be a fishing writer, one with no more than average talent but known for having a sharp tongue.  Especially if he has one.

So I said, “You’ll notice the fish was hooked in the mouth.  On a fly, as well.  It was not snagged with a treble hook.  And it was released afterwards.  You may not have seen this done before.  Take note.”

“I don’t snag fish,” he replied, as if hurt by my words.  He appeared to be pouting.  He was alone, that is, defenseless.

“You don’t?  Is this something new?  When did you undergo conversion?”

He continued to stand there and watch me, bored, half-drunk, jobless, a poacher and locally recognized timber thief, one who cuts somebody else’s trees in the night and sells them to local mills on the black market.  I suppose he wanted me to go away so he could get his snagger’s rig out of the bushes and get on with what he and his friends usually did at this time of the day.  They call it fishing.  Well, I’m sorry, but if you come around me, you’ll get your ears fried.  It can’t happen if you keep your distance.  So why don’t you do that?  It’s what I do with you, given any choice.

I took my basic training, you see, on this very river, and it was a tough school, with some excellent tutors, ones skilled in both flyfishing and invective.  It might be called Stillaguamish Nasty.  Be nice to me and I’ll be nice back; I can be one of the nicest guys in the world.  But pretend to be something you are not--tell me you are a legitimate fisher when you are known to the community as nothing but a snagger, a cheap poacher, one who can’t catch fish any other way, a wastrel and a drunk, to boot, nobody lower in his own estimation and mine, come and accost me, bait me in numbers, harass me while I fish, you boldly alone or with friends, and I can be as unpleasant as anybody you’re  ever likely to meet.  Why, I can be even meaner than you.

A poacher, alone, without the cover of darkness or the physical  support of his muscular young buddies, is a mealy-mouthed coward.  He is a country bum, not a bumpkin.  He has never gained the ease of manner that either hard work or deep thought brings.  His main daily concern is about where his next six-pack of Schmitz beer is coming from.  What he does best and most often is surf the TV--usually somebody else’s. Every day he breaks the law in one or several ways.  The local sheriff rarely catches him in the act, or even afterwards, for there is no real law enforcement in the country.  And this guy’d never make it in the city, Seattle, down on First Avenue, because he is too cowardly and not tough enough.

What he wants from me is to know when I am going away.  He wants to get back to what he likes to do best, which is to snag fish.  I am an impediment to his pleasure.

Well, I’m not going to leave, even if I am technically done with this pool.  I won’t give him his bully’s satisfaction of driving me away.  So I linger, continue my casting.

The situation on the Stillaguamish River used to be bad.  Today it is far worse.  There are so many poachers, so little law enforcement, so few fines levied and practically no jail sentences rendered by judges who are sympathetic, being countrymen themselves, that the poachers believe that they can poach with impunity.  And this is true.  More and more of them come forward each year.  Brother teaches brother.  In some families there are three generations of poachers living under one roof.  Snagging techniques proliferate, are passed along from father to son to son’s son.  Tactics become sly and refined.

In the country the poacher is admired.  Those with prowess become locally famous and are respected by those who don’t know any better as great catchers of fish. The law be damned.  It is what a boy growing up in the country aspires to be and represents the sociological norm.  It is not unlike us fishers modeling ourselves on the famous ones we read about in books and magazines.  (It is admittedly a small world flyfishers live in, one set off a little from the mainstream.)  The poacher knows in his dark heart that something is dreadfully wrong with what he does.  Yet he does it anyway.  He can’t help himself.  Nobody really respects him, even if his bag is big.  He can’t compete fairly and everybody knows it.  After all, this is a flyfishing-only river in summer.  He simply can’t catch fish the way the others can—though admittedly it is often difficult. So he cheats.  He expects us to look the other way.  He pretends he is a legitimate fisher--one who fishes with a fly.  Some even poach with a flyrod and reel filled with thick mono.  Then  he gets angry when nobody will accept the charade and treat him with respect and equality.  Why should we honor the liar, cheat, and fraud?

Now this grown-up boy--this poacher and thief--stands before me and won’t go away.  He’ll give me no peace. He is trying to prove some dim something.  What can it be?

Does he seek more abuse, more verbal punishment?  Well, I can provide it.  He has come to the master.  But wouldn’t it be easier on both of us to avoid the occasion?  I speak; I tell him that everybody on the river knows him for what he is, a snagger of spawning fish, a failure, one who can’t fish the way the rest of us do, legally, for he will then catch no fish.  He is a person beyond contempt.  He is a pretender.  (Oh, please go away and let me stop this!)  I tell him he is the kind who will go into a store and shoplift items he has no use for.  The fish he tries to catch and kill are rotten, inedible, worthless on the market or table.  So why does he do it?  For what purpose?

Still he will not leave me alone.  He is a veritable sponge for abuse.  Words are not his domain, but they are mine.  He could beat me easily in a fistfight, but the width of the river stands between us.  (Thank God.)  I wonder what passes through his so-called mind?  It is probably clogged full of visions of comicbooks, candybars, porno mags, Tv sit coms, and all the other dreck of the modern world. What’s a dead black salmon compared to these?

And what does he want from me?  Benediction?  Absolution?  Hardly.

Finally he blurts out what seems to be an effort to salvage his lost pride, pride as thin as a microscope section.  He says,  “My grandfather was one of the best fishermen on this river.”

Is that it?  My God.  I won’t dispute it, though it isn’t true.  I knew the man slightly and he was a pretender.  Maybe the trait is genetic.  But I don’t want to say anything that will keep this boy here any longer.  There is a moment in combat when mercy is the best course.  Or maybe I am simply at a loss for words.  Stunned?  So I bite my tongue.  Later I think I might have added, more kindly than anything I might have said earlier, “Well, your grandfather would be very proud of you.”  That would have contained only the gentlest of barbs.  But the right words always arrive too late.

Finally he leaves.  I watch his slender, blue-jeaned figure walk up the riprap away from me.  He is wearing the uniform by which you may identify him and the other country boys.  It is how they recognize each other and come together in bold numbers, down at the general store in their pickup trucks.  The garb is universal:  Brown Stihl chainsaw cap, red suspenders, caulked boots, denim workshirt.  In the breast pocket of his shirt is the chaw.  It comes in a flat little can, which gets periodically extracted, its lid lifted off, and the thick brown stuff pinched off and jammed between lip and gum on a favored side, causing the wearer’s cheek to bulge like a lop-sided bullfrog.  If he should have some occasion to smile, you will see teeth the color of fresh dung, and perhaps glimpse the quid lolling in the corner of the mouth like something from a swamp movie, where creatures rise up out of the tobacco juice to attack you.

In time he will have to spit out his quid, like a grasshopper does, onto the ground, thereby fouling it, the most innocent earth that must absorb so much abuse today.  Or (worse yet) he will deposit it to the river from his high-bank perch, much as a bird does its scat, broadly cast. It splashes with a splat.  The stuff resembles the excretion of a heron or seagull, but not so pleasant.  Perhaps because it is such a loathsome brown.

little can, which gets periodically extracted, its lid lifted off, and the thick brown stuff pinched off and jammed between lip and gum on a favored side, causing the wearer’s cheek to bulge like a lop-sided bullfrog.  If he should have some occasion to smile, you will see teeth the color of fresh dung, and perhaps glimpse the quid lolling in the corner of the mouth like something from a swamp movie, where creatures rise up out of the tobacco juice to attack you.

In time he will have to spit out his quid, like a grasshopper does, onto the ground, thereby fouling it, the most innocent earth that must absorb so much abuse today.  Or (worse yet) he will deposit it to the river from his high-bank perch, much as a bird does its scat, broadly cast. It splashes with a splat.  The stuff resembles the excretion of a heron or seagull, but not so pleasant.  Perhaps because it is such a loathsome brown.

If you can picture that, now imagine this.  Three, four, a half dozen, maybe a baker’s dozen worth of poachers, all ganged up, all with the same slender silhouette, all garbed alike, all about he same age, all chawing and drinking from beercans, going lockstep through life, into middle and then old age, joined at the hip (or at the beercan), all speaking the same jargon studded with the same meaningless clichés, an endless supply of such males, coming and going down at the crossroads, filling rural America with their numbers until its inherent meanness spills over, engulfing us all.  See them marrying, fathering, rearing children as much like themselves as it possible to do short of cloning.  These country clowns have multiplied like a specific neoplasm, stretching itself off into a future rife with uncertainty and helplessness.  I would like to pity them, but can’t.  They are too underhanded, too mean, too dishonest, to deserve any genuine compassion.

I’d rather ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, but I can’t.  They won’t leave me alone on the river.  What is it?  They keep coming round, day after day, year after year, to ruin my fishing.  They do a pretty good job of it, too.  I have an aging man’s easy wish to keep on fishing a gentle river for the rest of my summers, a river known for its splendid fish that take a fly so well.  Namely its migratory trout and steelhead population.  A river free from false attitudes and dishonesty.

Is that too much to ask?  I think not.

54

It feels good to be back at the lake, though my first love is for running water.  I detect a definite change in seasons.  Where the sun used to beat down (like a gong, I said, exaggerating as usual), now the river rattles from tin rain.  What a downpour!

Flights of ducks arrive daily and some linger.  To correctly estimate the number of widgeons on the lake, start with a hundred, then add a quick count of what shows at the edges of the mass.  That is their prime number.  Multiply by 2.4.  There are several different flocks, but they all know who they are, what particular kind of bird, who their duck buddies are, and they all come together easily, then break apart again, like small groups with a facilitator.  All day long one or another part of the flock takes to the air, wheels, scurries down to the far end of the lake, then alights as a body.  A moment later they regroup.  Soon they will be balled up again.

As they become airborne--with a great rush of air, like wind through dry sedges, or a helicopter alighting a city rooftop--a fair number relieve themselves, and the effect is like hail falling.  The lake is peppered with birdshit, like so many tiny explosions.  They are delivered from a slant.

And there are the shovelers, with their beaks in concert thrust under water, vacuuming up the duckweed and whatever else comes into each individual scoop.  They behave differently.  Norma says the widgeons turn their bottoms up (like cancan dancers) and gobble the tough, stringy weed called Elodea.  Would you believe it--those gorgeous birds actually eat it?  It would be poisonous, if you weren’t a duck.  It must have a terrible taste.  Ducks that eat it must taste terrible, too.  Would this protect them from the hunters’ guns?  How clever of them.

Coots arrive, a half-dozen or so, and buffleheads (a male and two females, but two depart, leaving one the old maid), and one morning there are three ring-necks, again a male and two females.  This seems to be a normal grouping in nature, and when I mention it to  my wife, and its human applications, she says, “Good.  The new wife can do all the cooking and housework, in addition to what you have in mind.”

New dark clouds threaten.  Something there is that loves a storm--to paraphrase what Robert Frost said about fences.  Neither of my two new neighbors have fences, and this is all to the good, in my opinion.  All summer long, whenever a conversation begins about the lovely weather, one by one people here sheepishly admit to a preference for bad.  I remember how one woman said she was looking forward to hard rain.  Well, now she’s got it.  We all have.

My thoughts of a return to Lake Eudora continue to take a negative twist.  Perhaps I will skip a visit this month, October, even though at its end the lake will close to fishing for the year.  I’ve vowed to fish it at least once a month and have kept my promise to date, generally with good results.  Last month’s nine small lake-bred rainbows will have to last me through the winter.  I’m sure I would do less well this month, for the water has cooled a lot and the quantity of surface food has been depleted.  Besides, my lifestyle has changed.  I have a lake of my own, one which I must share with about 70 households, I’ve since learned.  Well, that’s not so bad.  For every good thing on one’s platter, there is a price to be paid.

A lake of one’s own:  would Virginia Woolf envy me?  I doubt it.  She simply wanted a room she could call hers.  This lake-ownership would be contested by all my neighbors, if I were to go public with my claim.  The lake is mine only in spirit, as it is theirs, the same way, in a figurative sense.  We are each full of a sense of responsibility and highly knowledgeable about the ecology of the place. On my walks around the lake I talk to many people and each expresses him or herself in advanced  environmental or biological terms.  What a lot they know.  When they speak of the weed problem, which is chronic, they mention phosphate levels, the historic use of copper sulfate, the prospect for applying alum to reduce the algal growths, etc.  Why, it’s like living next door to Aldo Leopold--the man I always call in my mind, “Leo Aldopol,” in a mindlessly transposition of letters.

By late October, the trout of Eudora have probably grown another inch, perhaps an inch and a half, since last month.  This would place them in the neighborhood of nine and a half inches.  That’s not exactly a race of giants, but are respectable-sized fish.  All the same, I’m not about to bring home a mess of them for dinner, and the idea of catch-and-release fishing for them in this cold and lashing rain is not appealing.  Better leave them in their dark depths for the remainder of the year, growing little, munching a bug now and then from their sparse food supply, and hit them again in spring, when their numbers will be abetted by same-sized hatchery plants.  I wonder if I will be able to tell them apart by eye, or whether I’ll  have to resort to looking for a clipped fin?  (They won’t have one, being non-anadromous plants.)

One of the things that keeps drawing me back to the same places, year after year, at the same time in the season, is to note the small changes.  Minute variations occur on many a theme that is highly personal and striking.  In what is seasonally different lies the richness.

A writer needs to have a certain amount of monotony in his life.  It is how he gets his work done.  Bad weather makes it easier.  Of course it is possible to go fishing in the wind and rain.  Only, as I get older, I find more reasons to keep myself indoors and to be on the outlook for windows in the weather, when I can comfortably go outside again.  Since my house has 13 windows across its front, and a similar amount of glass downstairs, I am in constant visual touch with what is happening out on the lake.  This is important to me.  It consists of much more than counting ducks and noting the changes in wave pattern.  A person living on a lake soon develops a keen eye for light.  Never is it exactly the same twice, and you don’t have to be an Edward Weston to recognize the differences.  The effects of light on water are subtle, but various; therein lies its fragile beauty.  The variety of available light is almost infinite, and always pleasing.

55

All summer long I’ve avoided taking the lake’s temperature--almost as though it were my own, and I don’t want to know if I’m running a fever.  But yesterday I succumbed to the urge and found it was 52 degrees F.  That is more than twenty degrees cooler than when we first arrived here. I remember whistling when I put my fingers in the surface layer and felt how warm the water had grown by August.  Yet I knew that the lake is only 27 feet deep, at its max.  That’s too shallow to provide many cool spots for the fish to take refuge.

Yesterday a window appeared in the bad weather, and it was a joy to watch the skies clear and grow blue again; the lake died to a dead calm.  I said to my wife, “Let’s take the boat out.  I haven’t done a good job of rowing you around the lake.”  The remark requires explanation.   I’d been out in the new boat before--the boat that I negotiated to buy along with the place, plus some overstuffed furniture and an ancient Zenith TV set of mammoth proportions.

Little did I know the boat had broken oarlocks and leaked badly from minute holes along its fiberglass bottom.  Once, when my son was visiting, he helped me haul the boat down to the lake and put it in the water.  It is about twelve feet long and as wide as they make them.  Thus it has great stability.  I plopped the old, unpainted oars in what passed for their locks and learned that one was wobbly, the other held together by a metal thread, but because the water was calm I took Norma for a ride.  I’d been rowing around the lake alone in my old eight-foot pram, which I knew to be sturdy and dependable.   It is too small for two.

It had been a precarious ride.  If the lake hadn‘t been calm as a plate, I might have had to put my back behind the oars and haul on them with Olympic determination.  Instead, I rowed gently out on an oval mirror, taking short strokes and not biting the water too deeply.  We went around a quarter of the lake, then returned to our dock and guests.  The oars managed to stay in their worn locks and not break the frail support further.  But I vowed it would be the last time out for either of us until I had them fixed.  About a month later, we replaced the receivers with stronger ones, ones with hard plastic backing supports, and while the boat still leaked I deemed it safe enough for short voyages, for it contained two large flotation chambers.

So yesterday, with my weather window clear for the moment,  it seemed the right time to show her the lake from the water; all the homes strung round the edge offered a fresh perspective I’d viewed many times, but she had not.  I was eager for her to enjoy it, too, partly because I wanted to discuss it with her.

I took a rod along, of course, and let the line trail out after us, as I rowed first West, then South.  This method is called trolling and is extremely popular throughout the world.  It is as good a way as any to catch a fish without having to devote a lot of time and attention to it, and can be executed while doing other things, such as taking a guest for a ride.  As we moved along, at just the right trolling speed (I saw to this!), we looked at the houses of our neighbors in a way that we couldn’t observe when we glimpsed them from the road.  It was much like when we were searching for a house to buy on a lake, before we’d come to this one, only the perspective was much different.  It had a secretive, watery look that I liked.  Now she was sharing it with me.

These were our new neighbors and we knew many of them by name, mainly those who lived nearest us, plus a few others.  We moved farther away from home and the houses became those of strangers; in a few cases we’d spotted the front of their houses from the perimeter road.  Now we saw their back sides.  Which was which?  My wife gained a fisher’s outlook and a secret knowledge of how these lake people lived.  We were in effect spying on them.  Some were summer people.  A few had their houses closed up for the winter that was rushing on.

I expressed myself aloud, as I often do in her company, a thing which she has learned to endure in silence, most times, or else not attend to too closely because of the monotony of hearing the same story told so many times.  I pointed out how everybody had a huge front lawn, and most of the grass was very green.  My other neighbor, John Mediema, who is a kind of historian on rural matters, tells me that in the past a huge lawn signified the owner’s affluence, for he had no need to graze or farm it, not if he didn’t want to.  It represented idleness and wealth; its owner had not only leisure but money.  The lawn was a sign to the world that he had arrived at a certain station in life and was keen to its status symbols.  He was not modest about them.

If this is correct--and it sounds about right to me--my own big lawn is giving the wrong message.  What it says about me is patently untrue.  I wondered aloud to Norma how many lawns we were serially looking at issued the same wrong statement?  Was it intended to mislead?

“For some it is, but not for all of them,” my wife pronounced.

Once more I marveled at her consummate wisdom and did not ask how she arrived at such a solid conclusion.  I nodded my simple agreement, and just then the first small bass struck and was hooked, and the lawn matter receded into limbo.  I quickly reeled the fish in and released it.  Then I strung out my line in the water again.  For this kind of fishing I like having up to eighty feet of line out, the fly distantly working in a free manner.  The distance is about the full length of my fly line.

Soon another bass hit and was hooked.  The water remained pellucid.  We rounded the cove where Herb, the renter lives, and saw a heavy black man who fishes successfully for perch off Herb’s dock, where he is a renter.  Feeling I knew him slightly and admiring his prowess with perch, I spoke to him familiarly.  He grunted his reply and did not look my way.  Quickly I saw that I had made a mistake.  This man was not my brother in angling.  No, he was somebody else.  Even on the same water, we inhabited different worlds.  I noticed he was fishing bobbers on two different poles. This is illegal.

The next dock over sat a black woman, evidently the man’s companion.  I could not catch her eye either; it was intent on her bobber, which was stationary.  She had appropriated the dock of the absent owner, perhaps with Herb’ permission, perhaps not.  A nice arrangement for them, I thought.  I’m glad I live in my house and can get to say who fishes off my dock; in most instances I’d give them permission.  Both of these fishers had big pails alongside them, which I took to be live boxes for their perch.  They had three identical floats to link them, differing only in color.  They are the kind that stand up on end when a fish is playing with the worm; otherwise they lie flat.  I rowed on past.  It was as though I didn’t exist for them, and I missed the easy familiarity I had with other anglers.

As I rounded the promontory where a handsome new dock stands, its raw cedar gleaming redly from last night’s rain, my rod tip plunged into the water.  Norma, who was studying the lake from an  angle 180 degrees away from me, that is, looking out past me, missed seeing it but saw me grab the rod and lift it for the return strike.  I stripped in hard.  A weight began bucking, sixty feet out.  I worked the fish in and saw it was a perch.  Well, I’d be happy with a perch or much of anything else.  I looked in the direction of the black man, to see if he had seen the strike or my fish, but he was studiously attending to the water in the general direction of where his inert bobber lay.  Well, that was in keeping.

“Do you want to eat a perch?” I asked her.  She had decline several earlier invitations and I expected she would this one, but she said, “Okay,” which surprised me, so I bonked it on the head.

When you grew up in the Great Depression, as she and I did, there is an ingrained tendency not to waste food.  A perch is food, first and foremost and perhaps finally.

I had no cloth with which to pick it up with across the back, as all accomplished perch fishers do, to keep from getting stung by its dorsal spines, no disgorger, no needle-nosed pliers, no stringer, no creel, not much of anything necessary for successful spiny-ray fishing.  I am a trout fisher and trout pose no problems in any of these aspects.  But I managed.

“You can eat it with that catfish you filleted,” I urged.  In a marriage, eighty percent of what you say is redundant.  Actions speak first, but there is a kind of invisible telephony.  Yet people must have a need to talk.  At least I must.

Another little bass threw itself wantonly at my large hook in a suicide attempt and was duly cranked in and returned to the drink.  I neared the area where John the Perch Man has committed so many of his infamous deeds, that is, catching and killing astronomical quantities of perch, and passed the point without a strike, not challenging his record, however slightly.  But as I neared the lily pads to the East, my tip again plunged.  For a moment I thought I’d hooked bottom.  Bottom, however, consented to swim to me in slow stages, and in a few moments a black crappie hove alongside the boat.  Wordless, I handed Norma the dipnet and watched with approval as she plunged it into the lake and lifted it with my crappie trapped inside.

Fish of a species tend, in a lake, to be of a size, namely, the same length and weight.  Thus our perch are nine inches, crappie approaching eleven, sunfish, bluegills, and pumpkinseeds (a close branch of the sunfish and bluegill family) six inches, all a size unchallenging and not difficult to land or especially rewarding, unless it is your first species from the lake, in which case it is overwhelmingly wonderful and triumphant; like an accomplished birder, you add the fish to your checklist.  This crappie looked exactly like the one I’d caught earlier in the year, in my deadly pursuit of species hooked and landed from my dock on fly or, later (despairing), on worm.  Crappies are a pretty fish, and when they come out of the water are immaculate in their freckles, which soon become blurred and dull.  Death does this to everything, I’ve noticed.

Plop, into the bottom of the boat, without a query first to my wife, for I knew she enjoyed the crappie caught earlier and we were after another full meal.  Now there was a pair of spinyrays in the bottom out of the boat.

She beheld all of these events with her usual aplomb, as though the world no longer held any surprises for her, at least ones that might originate with me.  I was not done speaking my piece.

“Now you have three species to dine from,” I persisted brightly.

“Yes.”

“Lucky you.”

I tried to recall an old joke I’d heard about an American in Paris, talking to a waiter, having to do with the similarity between the French, s’ vous plait, and the restaurant phrase “seafood plate,“ but could not get it right, not until the next morning, when she was still half-asleep and we were lying in bed twenty minutes away from getting-up-time, a time of day when she refuses to acknowledge that I am at my funniest.  But I told the joke anyway, as I always do, and--sure enough--she didn’t laugh.  It seemed funny as hell to me and so I laughed for her.

“There’s enough fish for your dinner, too,” she said.

“No, thanks.”

“Why don’t you ever eat the fish you catch?”

“I’m not a cannibal,” I said testily.

She had the crappie and the filleted shoe-leather catfish for dinner that night.  I had ham and the rest of whatever else she served—boiled potatoes and mixed vegetables, probably.  She pronounced both fish a little bland and went to the fridge for the tartar sauce with which to liven it up.

“Does the sauce help any?” I asked.

“Yes.  But it doesn’t make it steelhead.”

Or trout, I thought.  Where in the world are all the trout?  The lake should have a number of holdovers.  They are what I am really after.  I can catch them elsewhere--in Eudora, for instance.  Here they continue to elude me.  Why is this?  Why is fishing both so easy and so difficult?

Yet this mixture of species and fish sizes is interesting.  The lake has variety.  I  never know what is going to strike next.  Seven species to date, all from my dock, with repeats around the lake, fishing various ways but most often with the fly.  With the fly primarily.  Some wag once designated it, “the artificial fly,” I guess so as not to confuse it with a natural bait.

Do people actually put houseflies, caddis flies, dragonflies, etc., on hooks and fish with them?  Is that why we have to insist our fly imitation is “artificial,” or an imitation?

Hey, there’s an idea.  Tie a real fly to a hook and see what bites it.  But, no, that is too much even for desperate me.  The next thing you know . . . maggots for perch.

Move over, John.

56

Where are the trout?  It is my constant question.  I probe the lake, with fly and lure, and the occasional fathoming worm.  But, no, nothing.  I remember the boy who took a fourteen-inch rainbow on a float and worm, first time I ever circled the lake in my pram, dragging a fly behind me, not thinking of lake ownership or anything approaching it.  If in late spring, a rainbow will take a worm (and we all know that they will and do), why won’t one take a worm now?  Is it because they are all caught out?  Did the Powerbait users get them all in the spring?

I can’t believe it.  You can’t totally fish out a lake or a stream, only reduce its trout population to something less than viable.    The fishers go away.  There will still be a few cagey lunkers left.  It is them I seek.  But to find a lunker trout, you have to be prepared for skunks.  A whole series of them.

Following a meeting of the lake-owners association, one that is held at least twice a year and generally has to do with the lake’s chronic phosphorous-pollution problem, I learn a study has been underway for the past three years.  It involves the association, the county Surface Water Management Agency, the State Department of Ecology, and a private consulting firm called Entranco.  It was funded by all except for Entranco, the latter being its primary beneficiary.  The study is enormously well intended and I hope will lead to something constructive being done, and soon, for the weed problem is severe.

The meeting was yesterday, at the middle school, and about thirty of us sat around for three hours on children’s chairs, at low tiny tables, feeling Brobdingnagian, and listened to presentations by the consultants and county in the school’s library, relieving our eyes from time to time by looking at the student drawings pinned to the walls.  Here we were treated to portraits of children, pets, favorite cartoon characters, woodland scenes, etc., varying widely in their artistic ability.

After the presentations were over, we participated in a  discussion of possible mitigating plans.  Phosphorus is the big villain, we were told.  Its abundance produces an excess of different weedy growths.  It’s what happens to a small, shallow lake in summer, when the sunlight penetrates its watery layers and allows plants to grow in an overly nourishing environment.

If alum (aluminum sulfate) is applied, the phosphorus will be greatly reduced and the water will get clearer, but the drawback is that the weed will increase because the sunlight will be able to penetrate deeper.  And I had thought weed was the big problem.  No, it is the nutrient phosphorus.  It comes from a former dairy farm to the South, which is drained by our inlet.  The farmer switched to beef cattle recently, but it was no help.  And in the past he plowed in chicken manure, which worsened matters.  The state Department of Ecology won’t or can’t stop him.  So the lake continues to be enriched year round, and much of the phosphorous is stored on the lake’s bottom of rich muck.  Whenever the lake turns over, the phosphorous rises to the top and is churned.  The process repeats itself, summer and winter, though summer is much worse.

As for the weed, at first it disgusted me, but I am beginning to make my peace with the green, stringy stuff.  It feeds the ducks, as it dies back, and they help greatly with its disappearing process.  I like ducks.  I like them almost as much as fish.  Ducks have to feed; why not on the noxious weed?  The ducks, though, add more nutrients to the lake, more phosphorous and nitrogen.  It is an ongoing process.  But then some ducks help rid the lake of its stunted bass and perch populations.  The circle goes round.

Everything here is in delicate ecological balance.  I am anxious to abet it, not harm it further.  So today, as I strain on  the oars during a mild chop, I pass by the houses of neighbors  unknown to me until yesterday at the meeting.  There was a lot of mingling before, during, and after.  I no longer feel myself such a stranger.  I know a host of people by name.  And I have heard of  others I am anxious to meet.

About half the homeowners belong to the association; the others declined to join because they “don’t want to get involved.”  I understand their attitude.  I contain both points of view.  And I have agreed to be the new water-quality monitor.  For the coming year, I will be part of a state- and county-wide system of monitoring various aspects of the lake and taking measurements at regular intervals.

No, don’t congratulate me.  You know how these things go:  The position was vacant, since the previous monitor (my next door neighbor, Carrie, had to resign it because she had a new baby.)  Somebody suggested me for the job and fingers began to point in my direction.  I tried not meeting their eyes, but failed.  In short, I accepted the appointment.  I tell people the reason I did is because I’d heard a uniform and Smoky-the-Bear hat came with the job.  But they don’t.  What a disappointment.  Tricked again!

Never volunteer for anything; this is something the army taught me.  Volunteering is uncool.  Nonetheless I heard myself telling the circle of homeowners, “Well, it is something I’d be doing anyway.  So, okay.”  I routinely take the water’s temperature, almost as though I were a nurse and the lake my patient.  Also, I measure  the water’s depth and clarity by practiced eye.  I’ve never used an instrument for it, such as the white plate known as a Sicci disc, but I know all about it.  I presume I’ll be issued one.  Or rather, Carrie will give me hers, along with other tools and her files of technical papers, dull as duckweed, which I’ll have to read.  As if I don’t have enough already.

So I decide to go fishing, the new lake monitor does.  The place is where Mr. Perch, aka John, caught all the perch this summer.  It’s just off of Doris’s port bow, as I approach it in my pram.  (She sat next to me yesterday and kept telling me to shush when I whispered sarcastic remarks about the consultant’s presentation.)  I want her to come to the window and give me a friendly wave, for I know her name now and where she lives; I remember seeing her often gazing out of her window.  She is a widow, so there is no Mr. Doris to appear alongside, or out in the yard raking leaves.  It is funny (funny-strange, that is) how many women at the meeting yesterday were lacking husbands.  I guess there are some living husbands who were loathe to come.  That is a consoling thought.  But in most cases they didn’t come because they were dead.  Age takes its regular toll,  here and elsewhere.

I swallow hard in a brotherly way. Women outlast men by more than a decade.  Here is another instance of the truth of the actuarial tables.  I try to picture Norma as a widow, and can do so easily.

Off my starboard bow is Hans’s place.  He is right next door to the public access area and doesn’t like the fact one bit.  Yesterday he righteously proclaimed in a heavy German accent his indignation at having to clean up after the public.  “If I don’t do it, nobody will,” he says rightly, an attitude based on long experience.  The man from Fish and Wildlife, my old friend Dana Base, averts his eyes when Hans says this, as if to proclaim, “Not my department.”  Which is right, too.  Dana’s expertise is wildlife.  His job is not to clean outhouses and remove used condoms from the parking lot.

Hans lives on the edge of the good spinyray water and is famous  for his immaculate lawn.  The public access is on one side of him and a neighbor with a great shedding maple on the other, and while he has no trees of his own on the lakeside (intentionally, I suspect), the neighbor’s keep depositing leaves on his lawn and he and two of his four interchangeable daughters I see frequently raking them up, their long dark-blond hair and rake handles flying.

Today I look for Hans, who for all his complaints and glumness, has a broad, winning smile that I like to see come from behind its clouds.  He is very friendly.  But he is indoors, probably stoking up the fire that eternally points its gray stem at the arching gray sky, mixing smoke with cloud until both are one.

I think as I row, as I fish, as I study the changing shoreline that is always the same.  Trout are largely an idea, a vision whose consummation we constantly seek and succeed at much less often than we’d like.  Constantly we are frequently thwarted.  Ours is a world of imperfection, alas.  Images of sleek rainbows feeding on leeches and larvae, down deep in this shallow steeped lake, the color of coffee, must sustain us.  They are our nourishment, as the phosphorous is the lake’s.  Visions are what keep fishers at their oars.  November arrives next week.  Storms are more frequent now and calm, sunny breaks are apt to be lulls, not the real thing, as the barometer rises, only to plunge again.  I fish in those moments when the lake is peaceful, but these days am nearly blown off the water when a squall moves in.  The rain is only moments off.  I pull on my oars, aiming at my dock, in hopes I will get there before the rain.

Often I don’t.

57

When I started writing this book, my general idea was to pursue trout steadily in lowland lakes, as I had done as a boy, and see where my quest took me.  At the same time, perhaps on a preternatural level, I began looking at such lakes as a potential place to live.  Long ago I had tired of the city, and when my wife retired from Seattle Public Library, there was no good reason for us to remain near the bus routes that took her downtown to work.  Now she was as free as I--I who had been free for years from everything except the personal demons that hound and haunt writers, and make them begrudge to themselves every idle moment that doesn’t lead to writing something meaningful or that will bring in some money.

So I chased after trout in lakes (our rivers here are nearly all anadromous, with trout coming into them only in the fall), while at the same time looking closely at each lake and the houses ringing it, houses so dissimilar and variously priced that I became confused for a while and did not know expressly what I was searching for.  I mean, I wanted a nice house, not a shack or a cabin, but “nice” comes in a variety of sizes and flavors.  And lakes do, too, I soon learned.

Most of the lakes were small.  I guess they were the ones I was drawn to, ones suitable to fish from a pram.  By my definition a lowland lake is not large.  The fact that there are a number of big ones does not disprove my theory, but indicates that I must further refine it, and so I came up with the template of 20 to 60 acres in size--though I surely would happily look at lakes larger, and not so happily at ones much smaller, though I thought of the latter as overgrown ponds.  A hundred acres max, then.  When I came to Eudora, I fell in love with it.  It seemed perfect.  But it was not where I wanted to live.  No, it was a great place to visit and at which to watch the change of seasons.

Dictum:  you do not marry every woman you fall in love with.  At least you had better not.  But you determine to get to know each of them, in turn, as if you were going to.  And eventually you make your decision, woman and lake willing.

Eudora was the lowland lake of my dreams.  It will remain so, along with a lot of others of which I am more than fond.  I should probably name them.  Here goes:  Sixteen, Cottage, Fontal, Hannan, Armstrong, McMurray, etc.  Many more flood memory.  Each had its time and place in my life.  The season was generally spring.  In spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of lakes, and other kinds of love.  As he ages his mind continues to take a romantic turn when March draws round.

A lake is but a lake, an enclosed body of water that appears  stationary but in point of fact is always moving.  It has a current, or multiple currents, that carry an object in a given direction. Toss in a bobber or a leaf and watch it travel.  In this regard, a lake is like a river.  It contains water in motion.  And therein lies its charm, its ever-changing but constant appeal.

I started out searching for a trout lake and came across a mixed-species one, one which had challenges a trout-only lake did not have.  These went in the direction of complexity.  Two important factors were variety of fish size and species.  Now, fishing is a pursuit of the unknown, the unusual.  In fishing my new lake, I never know what I will catch next.  This is quietly exciting.  I’m proud of my eight species, all caught from my dock.  I have a hunch that it is all the species the lake holds.  But you never know.  First it was the tiny bass and the bigger perch.  As the water cooled, the black crappie started hitting.  And a  few bigger bass.  But where are the trout?  How do I get them to hit, so I can experience them the only way a fisher knows--by catching them?  I caught them at Eudora.  Why not here?  Or will I have to wait until spring?

This morning I set out again in my rowboat.  It leaks just enough so that I will have to fix it soon, but it is not a serious leak, and the boat seems safe enough for a half-day trip.  The water seeps through the scuffed fiberglass bottom into two air-tight compartments.  It is a constant slow process.  When I get back to my dock, I will invert the boat overnight and the water will drain out.  The previous owner drilled several tiny holes at the top of the rear seating compartments for just this reason; otherwise, the water would stay inside forever and soon the boat would be too heavy to handle.  And there would be the real prospect of it capsizing.

I move along with a pulsing motion, each pull of the oars propelling me forward and commencing a glide that persists until I dip and stroke the oars again.  The glide and pulse I can lengthen out or shorten up, depending on how I handle the oars.  It is a matter of whim or whimsy with me.  To give the fly or lure an attractive action it is necessary to vary the boat’s speed, and this I do according to the day’s water conditions, or my reading of the wave action.  Sometimes I judge it wrong.  Mostly I like a glassy lake, one without any ripple, but next to that I will accept the slightest suggestion of ripple, one that is next to nothing.

If I fish a Flat Fish, which I like to do when conditions for a fly don’t seem right, I can apply body torque to the boat with the oars and make the lure behave like a living thing--fluttering, sputtering, struggling to escape.  A calm lake is best for this.  If you have to row against the chop, or mooch along with one, barely having to stroke the oars to keep moving, the rhythm of the fly or lure gets lost in the wave action.  This is true whether you troll or cast your fly.  The fishing is better when the fly or lure is cast, retrieved with a variety of methods described earlier.

It is possible to fish a lake as I did Eudora, alternating casting and trolling methods, throwing the line out in the water an easy distance (say, up to fifty feet), and stripping it back in with whatever retrieve seems right for today, and then casting it back out and taking a dip or two on the oars to move boat and fly (or lure) along.  This technique can be practiced for hours on end, without much duplication, until just the right action is found; this is announced by a fish taking and being solidly hooked.  When this happens you try to repeat what worked only a moment ago.  If you can only remember it.

I dislike fishing a lake on the heels of a hard rain.  I think the lake level rises slightly, imperceptibly, and the highly oxygenated water disturbs the fish and throws them off their natural feeding cycles.  The pragmatic answer to the question of whether to go fishing then, at least for me, is whether I can get away.  In the past I’ve had very poor luck then.  And I am quick to attribute it to every cause except myself.  This is hypocritical, I know, for when  my luck is good, I give myself all the credit.

Knowing this much, I must be moderate when I am successful and when I fail.  It is the wisest course.  Most of the time I will not have myself to blame for not hooking a single fish, in a day or half day on a lake.  And when my luck is good, I attribute it to luck, luck plain and simple.  My skills--such as they are--remain constant.  I’d like to think adverse conditions caused poor results.

I’d like to, but I can’t.

58

So what was the result of the outing?  The day’s catch, dude?  Get any trout?

No, nothing but one small perch and a black crappie kept for the skillet.  The crappie measured--get this--a shade more than thirteen inches.  Not bad, eh?  And, just before dark, a large-mouth bass of respectable size.  Ten, eleven, twelve inches.  Not one of the dwarfs the lake is famous for.  We fishers take what we get and are thankful for it.

A crappie that size is impressive--awesome on a micro scale.  Very pretty, as well.  The lake has so many tiny bass and less than gigantic perch that a pound-and-a-half black crappie is relatively awesome.  The state record for such a fish is four pounds, eight ounces.  Whew.  It was caught by John W. Smart--who, if he wasn’t really smart, at least was clever enough to catch it, back in May 1956.  That is over forty years ago.  He caught it in Lake Washington, near to where I used to live.  I would like to imagine he was fishing in the Arboretum, near the University of Washington.  I’ve fished for them there.  I can picture the astonished expressions on the faces of the other crappie fishers when he cranked it in and hauled it up on the grassy beach, flapping like a salmon.  It would have put the ordinary largemouth bass from the lake to shame.

My fish would look like bait alongside his, I know.  But since I hadn’t heard about the record crappie, I considered myself fortunate catching one this size.  Big.  Not a trout, admittedly, but something of substance to tide me over until the real thing comes along.

Something a little more than a consolation prize for a confessed loser.

59

The English landscape painters got it right.  In the spring of the year, and again in autumn, the earth puts on a sensational display, one worthy of spending hours to record in the most exacting detail with brush and oils.  (Photographers can capture the same scene in even more detail in but a fraction of a second, but somehow something gets lost in the process.)  If a painter is of an optimistic bent, he may choose the May countryside for his subject, but if he is of a melancholy disposition, it will be fall he picks, and if his eye is keen to nuances, fall wins out, too, for the subtle gold, russet, umber, and cinnamon tones will delight his fancy and tickle his palate.  He won’t be able to put down his brush.

It is a pleasure to get out on the lake again and see it from this special perspective, as October dissolves quietly into November.  It rained like the devil, all afternoon, and the fresh snow melted in the passes, but a cold snap is due tonight, and we are promised a change for the better.  So, in the lull, I pushed off from my dock. Good fishing after a big storm would astonish me.  I got one weak bite and failed to hook the fish, in slightly over an hour’s working my way slowly round the lake.  The view alone was worth the effort.  What a range of splendid, subtle colors.

I’ll save you the description.  Let’s just say, the sun came out from between some clouds, before it sank for the day into the sea, at the edge of Skagit Bay.  The lake went nearly black, a color towards which it had been heading, all afternoon.  I watched my neighbors turn on their lights, one by one.

Birds and critters tend to treat a drifting pram as a natural object, perhaps one of their own kind, and, so long as it doesn’t crowd them, go on about their business (which is looking for food), but if you approach the same birds and animals on foot, off they go, scurrying, afraid.  The heron emits a terrible squawk, as if grabbed from behind and its tail feathers plucked.

The widgeons all bunch together, tweeting uncomfortably as I near them, softly stroking my oars, then as if motivated by a coiled spring, vault into the air in wheeling bunches, forming quick squadrons, joining together in flight and blending together as one, a hundred birds in a bunch--perhaps two hundred.  What a goosey bunch.  I can send them down to the far end of the lake, if I come too close, or make them veer away from me sooner, if I approach from a medium distance, remaining sprinkled along the shoreline, where they busily go about their business, which is gobbling the last of the duckweed.

These days I sometimes mistake a northern shoveler’s wake for that of a muskrat, the way they move through the water being so similar.  It is a narrow vee.  I haven’t seen a muskrat for ages, though, and the final sign that they really are around is when my neighbor, Anton, turns over his twelve-foot aluminum boat to rid it of rain water, then calls me over to see the nest the muskrats have built beneath it.  It is not unlike a bird’s nest.  Rather than knock it apart to discourage them, he leaves it thoughtfully in place, and when he came back from taking his daughter Haley for a row, covers the nest over with the boat again, almost tenderly.  Now there’s an environmentalist for you.

Muskrats are tolerated, otters are not.  Otters are a messy animal, large, crass, bold, and they kill a lot of fish.  I wish I could find one to hate, as my neighbors do, but the beasts seem determined to keep out of sight.  At the meeting on Saturday, I heard over and over again how otters leave fish carcasses on people’s docks, along with their foul droppings.  They are also reported to kill and eat ducklings.  This really ticks people off, for everybody here is a bird fancier.  Thus Norma and I fit in well.

I am joyous in my lentic environment.  That’s a new word for me with which to describe this particular ecosystem.  It means still water.  The fact that I haven’t found a cooperative trout for my fly is a minor problem.  Yet it continues to bug me.

60

Earlier, I related how I’d fished Flat Fish, flies, even worms happily in my boyhood, and how each of these methods had given me both fish and pleasure.  I said how I could imagine myself doing so again, but little did I know how soon I would.  Life is strange, and one had better be careful about making blanket pronouncements, or else he may have to eat the blanket.

I don’t intend to do that. I’ve given myself an easy out.  At the time, I said it I meant it as a joke; I was trying to make a statement about the nature of fishing--its basics and essentials.  We are fishers primarily, and some of us choose to fish mainly with the fly.  The fly comes second, or is secondary in importance.  It may even come further down the list.  So be it.  Fly fishing is a wonderful sport, especially if you don’t think you are better that other fishers or too lofty to drown a worm, once in a while, or drag a Flat Fish around a lake.  It is your choice.  Bait or gear have a way of bringing you back to fundamentals.

I was hoping for an opportunity to fish this way, after decades with the fly.  It used to be great fun.  Would it be still?  I had to know.  It is a little like a middle-aged man wondering if it is possible to recapture those exciting days in the backseat of a car with a girl one has just met.  But it is safer.  Or am I getting too far afield?  Do you only think of fish?

Now that I have a lake of my own, so to speak, I’ve found that mixed-species fishing calls for some ingenuity.  It hasn’t been required before.  I’d like to keep flyfishing for these various fish, but if I want to catch all of the species, I’d better try some other methods, or I will run out of time this year.  And fishing this other way is fun.

It is late in the year and things (including fish) are shutting down their growth mechanisms.  When I circle the lake in my pram, the water is cool to the touch, downright cold, and the various species are becoming by degrees inactive.  This means they are growing indifferent to food, which is in short supply.  What type of fly will take fish under these conditions?  Is there any?  A deep-sunk leech?  The pattern, please.  If I can take them on bait (worms, that is), I ought to be able to take them on flies.  But that does not necessarily follow.  Artificials then, such as my Flat Fish. Spoons ought to work, too.  But I keep thinking that there must be some kind of fly and retrieve and water stratum that will produce fish more than occasionally.

This is the lesson of Lake Eudora.

The thick line between flies and lures has become thin of late. Blurred as well.  By degrees, flyfishers have adopted most of the devices that lure fishers have used over the years.  Looking at the deadliest flies of today, I have to acknowledge there is not very much difference between them and lures.  Rather than imitate baitfish and insects, they imitate lures.  By imitating lures, flyfishing has lost some of the mystique that separates it from other types of fishing.  This is both good and bad, depending on how you choose to see it.

You may not agree with me, which is fine.  We have different kinds of experiences.  We have lived a different numbers of years and our fishing has varied in its intensity.  There are other things in life.  Fishers are brothers, in a way, or to put it more accurately, since more and more women are taking up the sport, brothers and sisters.  I value the fine congeniality that develops among fishers, under the best of circumstances.  When strangers meet, and the subject comes round, one will say,  “Oh, you fish?  Wonderful.  So do I.”  Etc.  It goes on from there.  “What are they taking today?” soon gets asked.   Or else, “How you doing?  Anything going on?”  The latter said thusly because you want to cut the other fellow some slack, in case he isn’t catching any, or not so many, and he should be able to meet another fisher and not be interrogated under a white light.  Let him take your greeting as a generality.  He can then reply any way he feels, without feeling he is in a corner.

Having said this much, what one often encounters is not so casual or polite.  There are fishers who must catch large numbers of fish, or else feel they are inadequate in some ways not compensated for in the daily world of business.  They need a lift after a week of slights and indignities.  So on Saturdays they go out to knock the hell out of the fish population.  They measure the day in corpses.

Only, the accomplished fish killer is not the real masculine article.  No, he is a man with a problem, a grudge against the world, including the world of nature.  He must prove his prowess, over and over.  And that is bad news for the fish and animal kingdom, which must pay the price for his need and bear its burden.  And bad news for his fellow fishers.

Fishing with flies that have all of the properties of lures may not be harmful to fish in most bodies of water.  But some places they are, were there are enacted flyfishing-only regulations because of weak stocks.  And the exclusive use of lure-like flies can harm the psyche.  It is best to remember that thread-line fishing was so deadly that it was quickly made illegal in most of Europe.  The German Bache-Brown spinning reel and the French Mepps spinner together proved that they could deplete a river or lake of its fish populations in record time, and destroy a fishery that had been around for centuries.  If you read Thaddeus Norris and Charles Eliot Goodspeed to learn how the East Coast of America had most of its resident and migratory fish populations destroyed, even its coarse fish, by simple greed and the absence of any limits to what a man might kill in a day, you will recognize that gross killing is nothing new.

Because many men must prove their worth by dominion over the kingdom of fish, game, and birds, we must have closed seasons and game laws.  If a man does not catch his limit, he believes he is some kind of failure.  The opposite is a sure sign of his proficiency, skill.  It is how men recognize each other.  All seek respect in their eyes.  Thus fishing for pleasure (we really don’t need the protein) is not enough; we must catch copious quantities of fish.  This is true even under the new dictum, the fad  of catch and release (a fad, that is, if we put it into a historical context).  I’m not sure why this is so.  I don’t need to catch my limit, or catch and release some mythical number that signifies prowess.  And if I don’t need to, nobody else ought to need to, either, not if they are looking at our sport and recreation benevolently.

Brass weights on lures--mostly on spinners--are what made fishing with thin monofilament lines so deadly, for the lure could be pinpoint cast to so small a target that a fish could find no sanctuary, lake or river.  Little skill was needed to fish the weighted spinner.  A big pocketbook was useful, for much tackle was lost fishing this way.  Spoons hung up on the bottom, and when they were broken off, long sections of line were left trailing in the water behind them.  Nonetheless the techniques were effective.  A spoon flutters seductively and brings all kinds of fish to attack it from distant stations; a jig on a float will pass over fish without hooking the bottom and without lining them either, a practice that hinders flyfishers all the time and limits their effectiveness.

To fish a weighted fly on a strike indicator or on a true float that contains a casting weight permits this kind of fishing and is ruthless.  Acquaintances of mine do this regularly.  I watch them nervously.  Regulations presently permit its use on bodies of water otherwise restricted to flyfishing as a conservation measure or for aesthetic purposes.  Admittedly, it is hard to define the subtle differences between this kind of fishing, lure fishing, and traditional flyfishing, all which combine sinking and floating elements.  These include flies weighted to get deep quickly, at the same time the line is kept afloat so that the weight does not quite get to the bottom and lodge there, the fly or lure lost.  Always regulatory change lags behind the problem it is intended to mitigate.

  We are living in such a time.

61

If you want to fish a weighted fly, there are several ways to do it.  (I’m no expert, and knowledgeable in only a few of them, but I understand the principles involved and wish to discuss them here.)  The first is simply to buy some heavy hooks.  These are hooks designated 1X strong, 2X strong, etc.  They go up to 5X, which means they have the iron weight and wire diameter of a hook five times as large.  Or you can take an ordinary hook and wrap its shank with lead fuse wire:  some comes bare, some coated with a gray fabric that, I presume, causes it to cling better to the shank.  These are long-time practices and fishers accept them as customary, traditional.  I’m not so sure they should.

Years ago, before the invention of flylines of such high density, ones made with materials many times heavier than the water they displace, Steelheader Peter Schwaub wrapped his hook shank with brightly finished industrial-grade wire, wrapping the coils tightly together, as one does a tinsel body.  And Jim Pray put hollow brass bead heads on his flies and painted them to look like eyes; these were the early optics.  Optics now come in various weights and sizes, ones to fit all occasions for those who feel they need to use them; some are solid, some hollow, and are made of aluminum, steel, brass, lead, etc.  The size of the eye or bead head varies considerably.  A few are heavy, others barely weighted.  There are dumbbell-shaped weights that straddle the shank, up at the eye.  They exist in a wide range of sizes.  Some beads and dumbbells accept stick-on eyes that make them look alive; it also makes them look like lures.  They are much better than what we used to paint on our fly heads with the enamels intended for model airplanes.

As fly weights stopped being internal and became fastened on the outside, flies came to resemble more and more the lures they were designed to imitate or replace.  Somehow it was deemed more sporting to fish a lure that is called a fly than one that is called an outright lure, or one that easily is recognized as a lure.  I would rather call such a thing a lure and be done with it, since it has an easily identified external weights attached.  (On the North Fork, fishing for summer steelhead, which has had various flyfishing restrictions having to do with tackle, we sometimes cut a gift fly apart in order to learn for sure whether it had lead attached to its body, which was illegal.  Usually it did not have; it only felt like it.)

I have no personal objection to fishing a lure and do so myself, but not in water designated as fly water, and when I do fish this way I do not call it flyfishing.  It is something else.  It is a form of spin fishing, even if a fly line and rod are involved.  Let’s not pretend it and we are something other than what we are.

Anglers today are fishing lead-headed jigs with various combinations of feathers, fur, and plastics attached; the lead head is heavy, a great blob, and makes the lure sink rapidly; unless it is checked with a floatation devise, it will be in among the stones on the bottom in a matter of seconds.  To prevent this, a strong float is used, one that will check the jig’s sinking rate and keep it off the bottom.  So we have the classic push-pull situation.  One part of a rig floats, while the other sinks, and between the two many a fish is fooled into striking.

It works.  And it is not awfully unpleasant to do.  I would fish this way in the winter and early spring, if I wanted to, if I needed to, in any water was not restricted to flyfishing.  But I much prefer fishing with an ordinary fly and line, especially if the line floats.  If the fly sinks a little or a lot, of its own accord, its rate managed by me, that’s what lies at the heart of my pleasure.  Most of all I like catching a fish right near the top.  That isn’t always possible.

This year I am trying to fish on top late into the year, a time when the water has cooled considerably.  So far it is working well, though the fish are growing lethargic.  I will probably continue fishing for them a while after they have stopped taking near the surface, then try down near the bottom, until I am convinced that the effort is futile.

62

Sometimes fish strike flies but are not hooked.  This may happen, over and over.  It is most annoying.  It is frustrating and makes the fisher ponder what it will take to catch the fish.  Often there is no easy answer.  Then he starts thinking in terms of fishing something other than flies; that is, lures.  It is a step in the direction of mental defeat.  This happened to me just the other day, right before dark.

I was determined to get a perch to take a fly.  Now, nearly everybody has done it, except me.  Perch take worms like crazy and I’ve been hooking them on Flat Fish every so often, trying to find a rainbow trout in my new lake.  So the trout enigma continues.  Are there any rainbows left?  Where have they gone?  (Answer: far, far away.)  Now the emphasis changes slightly.  What must I do to get perch to take the fly?  Russ Ossenbach recommends a size 10 Mickey Finn.  Hmmm.  Probably no fish in the world would refuse one, if the conditions are right.  And Friend Curt Kraemer, who happens to be the resident fish biologist and most knowledgeable person I know about all kinds of fish, says a woolly bugger in my favorite olive-brown color, or in black, ought to do the trick.  Or in brindle brown.  Or I ought to do well on a Carey Special.

So late this afternoon, at the dire end of October, I set out to get a perch on a special Carey Special that was given me.  It looked to be just right.  It had Flashabou tied behind the Chinese pheasant rump feather and a bright green body--the kind that people wear to a St. Patrick’s Day parade.  It is called Kelly.

I ventured out on a glassy lake an hour or so before dark.  I brought along a spinning rod, with a Flatfish attached, because I knew it is productive under a wide range of circumstances.  I fished the fly first and surprised myself by getting solid strikes in the same places my Flatfish had been hooking crappie and perch earlier in the season.  The fish would hit hard and make me certain I had them securely hooked.  Then the line went slack as I reeled the fish in half way.  So I tried stripping it.  Same thing.  This happened twenty or thirty feet away from the boat and at the halfway point in my retrieve.

“Damn,” I’d say, and drop the rod and let the line trail back out.  Fish after fish banged the big, flashy fly, hung on heavily for a moment, then came off.  I landed not a one.  After a number of strikes, I stripped in and changed to a smaller size fly in a slightly different pattern, one with less flash to it but with the same basic green and brown combination.  The green was sedge, the brown was partridge hackle.  It is more speckled than pheasant rump.

At first there was no action.  Then the smaller, duller fly began to get the same kinds of hits as the first, in exactly the same location.  I’d lunge for the rod, sure that I had hooked the fish solidly on the smaller hook.  Halfway in the fish came off.  Not a one reached the boat.   I’ll tell you, it was a frustrating situation.  I spent an hour doing this and had strikes from about a dozen fish.  That’s not bad fishing--anywhere, anyplace—especially at this time of the year, with the water so cold.

I reeled in and, in semi-defeat, let out the Flat Fish wriggle out to its customary distance of eighty feet.  At first I had no action, and began to think that the fly brings about four times as many strikes as the lure.  Then I had a good strike and began to reel in confidently.  The fish came off, less than half-way in.  Well, well, well.  So much for the tiny trebles and the famed offset hooking of the Flat Fish.  Often the small sharp hooks will catch short or softly striking trout.  Not tonight.  As in the case of the fly, the fish seemed to be well hooked, but proved not to be.  Fly or lure, they wanted it only when it was barely moving.  At a slow speed it is hard to hook any fish, and when you come back on the rod you feel . . . nothing.

Finally it grew cold and a mist began to drop down fast on the lake, as if descending from the trees.  I got another soft strike and--wonder of wonders--the fish didn’t come off.  I reeled in slowly, expecting to lose it again, feeling its strong pulse and tug as it angled over to the side.  Then it came up on top and began to splash.  I knew better than to tell myself, “Trout,” badly as I wanted one.  And it would have been a mistake.  The fish was a black crappie, one of about ten inches.  That is small for this lake.  It was barely hooked on one of the points of a single treble, and I easily shook it off.  I smiled as it slipped off into the tannic depths, all silver and white and green.  At least I wasn’t skunked tonight.  But my satisfaction was short lived.

I began wondering again what kind of fly would both attract and hook fish at this time of the year, do so with a higher degree of certainty.  Sink-rate seemed not important, for the tip of my line was sinking, but not very deeply.  The fly followed wherever the line and leader took it, which in this instance was less than six feet down.  What would hook them better--perhaps a fly with a trailing hook one size smaller than the main hook?  Or else a tiny treble on a tube fly--to gain the same hooking advantage as the Flat Fish?  But even the Flat Fish was failing now.

I was after something less like a fly and more like a lure.  It was your old standardized thinking again.  It comes back to haunt me, as it does everybody else, given enough time and frustration.

Wasn’t this precisely the practice I had recently condemned in others?  Yes, it was, but the circumstances were different, I told myself.  Or were they?  “What goes around comes around”--is the adage.  And how different was it?  I would have a difficult time explaining away the differences and how my case was unlike the ones I had recently blasted.

I was succumbing to what troubled me most in the behavior of others.  And the worst part was, I was powerless to resist it.

63

I understood better the urge that fishers have to capture (if only to release afterwards) the quarry that is so elusive, so difficult to hook and land.  This is the same urge that causes the distinction between fly and lure to blur conveniently.  We think in terms of making our fly more complex and appealing.  To do so, we add this and that.  We supply weight to it, one way or another, as soon as fish stop for a moment taking on top or at the end of the season.  It is a natural thing to do.  But often it is wrong—wrong-headed in the sense of being unnecessary.  It is unproductive, too.  Adding weight, flash, sparkle, or brightness does not necessarily attract more fish, nor will it hook difficult, soft-striking ones.

It is not as though fish can’t see, or have lost their ability to view objects from a distance.  They know what is edible, and attack a fly out of mixed motives.  It may be something good to eat or a threat to their territoriality.  So if we dispense with the threat element, that leaves only food.  The size of the fly must correspond vaguely to what insects are around.  The fish may be saying, “Give me something smaller, darker, more naturally behaving.”  (Or less intrusive.)  Instead we do the opposite.  We affront them with something bigger, brighter, then wonder why they don’t strike or, if they do, fail to get solidly hooked.

Ray Bergman said, “Size first, color second, and the right kind of motion,” or words to this effect.  They are concepts worth remembering.  The problem is one long-time steelheaders often have.  If the fish aren’t striking, go bigger, brighter, flashier.  It is most often wrong.  It isn’t as though the fish can’t see or see well.  I once asked a fellow steelheader how far he thought a fish could see my size six black and brown fly.  It had no flash or fluorescence to it.  “About fifteen feet,” he said confidently.  I thought, “Try a hundred.  Two hundred feet.”  I had no way of knowing how far, of course, nor did he; I was only trying to make a point.  Fish see a long ways, even in off-colored water.  The reason the fish doesn’t take isn’t because he can’t see our fly.  I have no idea why.

You’d have to be a fish to know.  And the fish don’t tell.

I have some ideas on the subject (and am not the type to keep them to myself).  Call them theories.  The only time a larger or brighter fly or lure is called for is when the water is exceedingly dirty.  Ray Bergman often fished a smaller fly then.  It seems to fly in the face of reason.  I’m inclined to go along with him, though.  You might try a different color, too.  But before the color change, I’d be inclined to alter the depth and speed of my fly’s retrieve.  I’d put size and fly speed before color.

I’ve learned a few things about this lake.  For one thing, I’ve discovered where the weedbeds are, which contain the food for most of the fish.  This is important knowledge, for it is where the fish hang out.  And rather than imitate each of these foods, many of which are tiny, bordering on the microscopic, it is more important to suggest them and to try to match their size.  Colors are not so important and can be broken down into three groups:  dark, light, and neutral.  It may not be necessary to come any closer to the right color than this, for we are not matching the hatch, only trying for something close to the right color density.  I say density because I am not at all convinced that fish can distinguish colors, only tones or shades.  But even these are not precise or matter, much of the time.  Weedbed locations.  Fly size.   Color (but only sometimes).  Depth.  These are the key ingredients.

Factor in speed or motion, too.  How many times recently have I had trout in Eudora not take a fly fished too fast or too slow, but only when it had a creepy-crawly action to it, one that was on the slow, erratic side?  Sometimes dead slow.  The slower it moves, the harder it is to hook the fish.  That is why it is so much fun to strip fast and have the fish hit and be hooked by the singular firm motion of the retrieve.  No strike is really necessary then or else the strike is inherent in the retrieve and will result in a hookup all by itself.  Unfortunately, there are not all that many occasions when a fly stripped fast will attract fish and earn a strike.  But when they occur, the fishing is fun and easy.

Tonight was not one of them, nor are many such nights, when in order to get any strike at all, one has to fish a fly (or lure) so it is barely moving.  And dead slow means the loss of time between the tug and the strike back.  Most of the time you will be striking water.  The fish is gone; it has turned away after tasting (testing?) the fly and when the strike takes place the fish has drifted on.  It is a goodly distance away.

The fish is slightly stung.  And an injured fish will not usually strike again.  Not until some time has passed.

64

At the end of October there is snow in the mountains, often a lot of it, and it will remain, if there is no warm rain to bring it down.  Rain may produce a flood.  The rain causes whatever snow is left on the slope to pack slightly, where it will serve as a base for the snow to come and remain all through winter.  It is insulated, protected, by all the layers of snow to come.  The bottom layer forms the snowpack, and is most critical; when there is none, no lower layers, or it is gone, the rivers will make their drop in April and May, and all the summer’s water then rushes to the sea.  This portends a drought.  Lately we have had many drought years, often several in a row.

The first snow usually leads to the first floods, though many times, many years, there is only very high water and no actual flooding, none till a bit later, even though all of the snow has come down in one quick swoosh, and there remains no start to the snow pack.  The rivers run bank full but do not overflow them.  This has been the case this year.   But it is still early.  There will be a flood soon, for the stage is set.  The mountains are prettily crested in fresh white.  I can see them whenever the skies clear and sunshine beams down briefly.  The rest of the time the wind howls, the rain falls in quantities I can’t remember having observed before.  This can last for days.  The present storm--or rather series of storms--has persisted for a solid week.  But then the clouds lift.  The world becomes an incredibly beautiful place again.

All the damp, depressed people rush outside, on reprieve, and do something akin to sunbathing.  They turn their faces up to the great yellow and smile a lot.  They exclaim aloud to their neighbor  how wonderful life is.  Each tries to outdo the other with cheery superlatives.  Northwesterners become friendly, or else do a good acting job of exuding a quality resembling friendliness.  If you hadn’t lived here most of your life, you’d never believe your eyes.  It still comes as a great surprise.  You want to seize the moment, if not the day, and push all outdoor activity to the max.  Me, I want to go fishing.

I decide to make my final visit to Lake Eudora.  I know:  I said I wouldn’t go again.  But my quest for trout makes one more try imperative.  Eudora has nothing in it but trout.  No spinyrays, no trash fish.  I simply have to know whether the trout are still biting.

How different Eudora is from my new lake.  I used to think Eudora was perfect because it had no other species in it.  Now I’m not so sure.  Eudora lacks diversity; the challenged provided by different species and their size variations.  Yet it is immensely appealing.  I must take my chances.  I’ve been keeping my eye on its trout in semi-scientific style since early spring.  I tell myself I need more data to reach any sound conclusions.  This isn’t exactly true.  What I do need is to visit this lovely lake before winter shuts it down, according to regulations.  I want to experience its cold and wet up close.  How is late autumn treating its shoreline?  The colors, please?  Which deciduous trees have shed all their leaves and which leaves still cling by a thin brown thread?

In short, I want to shake Eudora by the hand and bid it good night.  Or good year.

65

The Finns are all gone from their cottages and the grounds have a barren look.  The silence from shore is stunning.  It is almost as though the occupants have been rounded up and interred.  Where do the Finns go when the weather turns cold and sodden?  To someplace where beer and shuffleboard are provided, and a big cheery fire?  It’s a good guess.  From the solitary non-Finn farmhouse comes a tall column of smoke.  Somebody is home, or was home recently, and the fire is burning quietly itself out in the grate.  Or else it has just being started, against the prospect of evening darkness.  Its cheer will be needed.  The night is to be cold and damp.

Once again I have mismanaged my time and find I have less than two hours in which to fish before an early dark brought on by the arrival of daylight-savings time.   So be it.  Norma and I unload the pram quickly and she settles down to read.  It’s Dickens again, the author she’s been systematically working her way through since spring.  Thus Lake Eudora evokes Dickens in my private cosmology, though I can imagine no less Dickensian a place to be.  This is the antithesis of filthy, industrial London of a century ago; perhaps its anodyne.  It’s a pity we can’t transport all his motley characters here and effect their transformation.  They’d become cheerful, calm people, happy as apple pie.

I am all three today.  The bright skies, the low fog pocketed still over the deep dark water, the hush, the occasional ring of a feeding trout contribute to my good mood.  So do the muted littoral grasses, bare hardwoods standing with their arms outstretched, three-quarters bereft of leaves, the staunch cedars; they make me suck in cold air with a sudden gasp of joy.

Beautiful, beautiful.

There is nobody else on the lake today, a Tuesday, with the season to close on Friday, when the month turns over to November.  The absence of competition is a treat.

I’ve learned a few things about my favorite trout lake.  I had to go to some familiar sources for my information.  I find that if I can’t puzzle out something alone, rather than live in nagging ignorance, it is best to seek out answers from somebody who knows more than me.  Often this is the fish biologist, Curt Kraemer.

The trout I’ve watched over for months like a mother hen her eggs are not wild fish at all but fry from a hatchery.  Alas, I’ve suspected as much, but not wanted to believe it.  The hatchery is located up the McGovern Road on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish.  It is my home territory for years and I might have guessed as much.  The place is the Arlington Trout Hatchery and it is operated by Fish and Wildlife.  Each year, around May first, a large quantity of two- to three-inch rainbow trout are dumped in certain lakes that meet the department’s requirements, and are thought will benefit from planting and are capable of providing quick growth for fish at the rate of two-thousand fry per acre.  That means Eudora gets about 40,000 of the little guys; it also explains why the lake goes dead about the same time.  It is a sure sign a fry plant has just been made.

The remaining put-and-take trout stop feeding on the insects they’ve just discovered will nicely replace the hatchery pellets and start gobbling their little brothers.  This is not so easy to do.  The fry are just big enough to pose a difficulty to catch, but they definitely change the eating habits of the trout because each fry constitutes a big bite, nearly a full meal.   This happens about the same time as the lake “turns over,” that is, when the cold water on the bottom suddenly rushes to the top because of a temperature inversion.  It usually limits the trout feeding and they stop hitting.  The fishing holds bad for a month or two.  Smart anglers go elsewhere.  The little trout are free to feed unmolested on all the rich food the lake provides.  If they don’t get eaten first themselves.

This is why they are called natural free feeders and are so easy to catch on flies.  The fry remain small throughout most of the summer and don’t reach legal size until about September.  Then they continue to increase their size rapidly until the water gets so cold all activity shuts down because there are few remaining food sources. I hope this hasn’t happened yet.  Last month--almost exactly one month ago to the day--the trout were eight inches long.

How long are they now?  I simply must know.  And there is only one way to find out, short of resorting to a purse seine.  I row out on the lake and start fishing a fly exactly as I had a month ago.  This is the same method I settled on in late May, once I figured out what worked, what didn’t.  The troll is the lazy man’s answer to the tiring hours spent fly casting.  Casting--at least theoretically, and in reverie--is a wonderful way of relaxing and getting some exercise; it is aesthetically pleasing, as well.  But as the time passes, the shoulder gets sore, the wrist begins to twinge, the backcast drops, and the repeated activity becomes painfully tiresome with each repetition.  It is why so many angers begin to drag their flies around the lake behind their boats, after a short while.

I am no different.  But I found out this spring that a fly moving at a constant speed doesn’t attract savvy trout.  Oh, it’s good for newly planted trout, fish that haven’t yet learned what the lake provides and how such living food behaves.  The trout competed fiercely with each other in the hatchery trough; it was a case of grab it before the other guy gets it.  Or starve.  And die.  This is how survival of the fittest works, especially in a confined location.  But change the environment to a real living lake and everything becomes different.  Food is not delivered in the form of an Oregon moist pellet and it is not broadcast over the surface in copious quantities, all at once, several times a day.  No, food consists of insects and random individuals of a insect species, all in natural movement in a vast ecosystem.  A fly must resemble the real thing and do a good imitation of its behavior.

I learned that the bigger trout, fresh from the hatchery, would go on feeding binges, much as they had at the trough, and they seemed satisfied with food moving through the water column at the right stratum at a steady speed.  This is what a troll does.  I don’t know why this is so, only that it is what worked.  But the little trout, growing up in the lake, become hip to the behavior of the food supply, and small as the fry were at first are not so easily fooled, even though they were in keen competition with each other.  Most of the food was small, consisting of chironomid larvae.  If the size was right, the color close, and it moved at the right approximate speed:  gulp.  If not, they ignored it.

Insects move in fits and starts.  They do not swim along as if on a prolonged journey and need to conserve energy.  They rise from the bottom to the surface with an erratic movement.  Or else they hatch out near the surface and spend most of their energy right there, in the film or just below it, in the first few inches of water.  The trout are always on the lookout for food; the top is where most of it is found, until the water grows  cold--say, in the low fifties and high forties.

My plan was to keep on fishing near the surface, even though my thermometer told me the water was hovering just above fifty degrees.  The fact that trout were ringing meant some of them, perhaps only the smallest, were finding tiny insects on top still and were oriented to the surface layer for a while longer.  Good.

At first I tried the lazy man’s method of flyfishing, that is, trolling, for it is pleasant to pull on the oars and to have your head free to look around at all the natural events that go on around a lake or on the very lake itself.  But after half an hour and no pulls, I realized that nothing was happening, nothing had changed, in this regard.  The fish wanted something presented differently.  I was fishing my favorite dark-olive scud, size fourteen, the same pattern that had worked so well earlier in the year; it had been successful in late September and had brought me nine nice little trout.  So I used it, not needing to change flies from the one still attached from fishing my new home lake.  The scud had worked nicely for bass, crappie, bluegill, green sunfish, pumpkinseed.  The scud had caught them all.  My leader was an old one, a bit worn, frayed, but it was three-pound test.  Three-pound test will land nearly anything that swims in freshwater and has brought summer steelhead successfully to the beach for me (though not more than half the time).  So I  had no reason to change my tippet.

As I was letting out line and stripping it back in, checking the action and the distance, I had a surface take.  A fish boiled at about sixty feet out and I struck hard.  I felt him on for a moment and began to strip in line happily, anxious to check the fish’s size, which is part of the game I play with the trout in this lake.  Size variations are important, at least to me.  Even though learning they were from a hatchery, I had not lost my interest in them and how they had grown.  So I struck, stripped in fast and hard.  Perhaps this will explains how I popped the leader on the strike and lost the first fish of the day.

Dumb, dumber, dumbest.  I am speaking of myself, of course.

Nothing makes you feel worse than breaking off your first fish.  It is always your fault, no matter how good your excuses are or how quickly you are able to muster them.  I examined the leader--what was left of it--and saw that I had lost about half of the tippet.  This meant a nick somewhere in that area.  It had probably happened at home or in transit.  A nick can be felt between two fingers; that is how to examine a leader for condition.  An abrasion simply feels rough and will probably not produce a breakage.  But when a nick is found, you should turn the tippet to the light and look at it carefully--you will want to see if there is a flat shiny side to the nick.  If there is, it needs to be cut and retied.  If it’s not flat and shiny, tug on it firmly and see if it will hold.  (Better have it break now than on a fish.)  Tug a little harder, especially if you have any doubt about its strength at the rough spot. If it still doesn’t break, the tippet is good and can be trusted for more fish and fishing.

I had done none of these things.  I wasn’t aware of any possible weaknesses because I hadn’t looked for them--hadn’t even thought to run the mono through my fingers.  I wasn’t thinking about breakage.  Mistake number one.  The line suddenly went slack on the strike.  Damn, I howled.  Missed ‘em.  But even before I saw the end of the leader, I knew what had happened.  I had popped the fish.  There is a different feeling, line coming in without its resident fly, from a line with a fly still attached, and the difference is significant.  It is all.

There are fishers who would meditate on the event and analyze it to death.  Others might make up a story about a fish big enough to break three-pound leader, and tell it to whomever will stand still long enough to hear it all.  Not me!  I am not one of them.  My fish was less than ten inches long, I am sure, and was not noteworthy.  In no way can I manufacture a story about a whopper that I could tell with a straight face.  And it is important in fishing not to delude yourself. 

I had one more fly of this pattern tied on a light-wire number fourteen scud hook, with a down-turned eye, slightly humpbacked, short-pointed, and carefully debarbed.  (I usually don’t tie more of a pattern until I’m all out--another habitual mistake.  I tied it on, taking longer than I wanted to to thread the tippet through the eye, which is tiny, but normally not all that difficult to do.  I cast the fly back on the water and began to strip it in with a variety of retrieves, or combination of different retrieves.  Twenty minutes passed, twenty minutes of a day already much shorter than I wanted it to be.  Nothing continued to present itself.  I had a strong hunch I was going to get skunked.  Now a skunk is not very important in the grand scheme of things, one’s life, long or short, but it takes on added significance if you set out to do something you deem difficult and challenging (whether it is or not), and then fail.

To fish against time is always a challenge.  To catch a fish on top, when the water is cold and the amount of surface activity is--to give it a happy name--greatly reduced, is another challenge.  To determine through trial and error what the right retrieve is for today before dark ends that day early is yet another challenge.  But this is what makes fishing.  It is taking the unknown head on and trying to beat the odds, often not on conditions of your own choosing.  The fact that the stakes are low doesn’t matter much.  Well, I suppose it does, but we disregard this element and keep pursuing our goal.  This  makes fishing more than a simple matter of catching fish.  We want to make the game interesting.  We are the primary players.  The terms are established solely by ourselves.  Fishing is a mind game, if it is anything more than catching the most fish.  We play it continually.  When we win, the victory is sweet, for we have beaten. . . what. . .ourselves?  Yes, that’s it.   To lose is so much worse, then, more painful, for we have beaten ourselves on terms, rules, we have established without outside help.  It is how it goes.

So instead of trolling--which my back and shoulders and wrist, urged me to do--I keep on casting and varying my retrieve, trying blindly for the successful combination of fly speeds, very much as a safecracker might madly try spinning different combination of numbers on the dial, in the absence of knowing the right ones, and with a mounting feeling of desperation and futility, for the time is growing short.  This is about the time the gambler start doubling his bets.  And then--wonder of wonders!--the trout strikes.  The safe opens.  The wheel lands on your number.  It seems a miracle.  Or, in my line of work, a trout proves to be solidly hooked.

A trout behaves differently from a perch of the same size.  It quickly comes up on top and splashes around, often jumping several times.  (Perhaps it wants one last look at the sky.)  A perch does not do this (splash so), not until nearly the end.  (The perch disdains a look at the sky, preferring you might say a continuing view of the depths, right up to the finish.)  Now in my home lake, I might not know what kind of nine-inch fish I have on the end of my line, way out there, but at Eudora I do.  There can be no doubt; it is a rainbow trout.

Admittedly, some of the essential mysteries of life disappear  when you know almost exactly what your fish look like, down to its size.  No surprises there.  But I’ve heard there are cutthroat in the lake, which are caught pretty infrequently, I suspect.  Wildlife Biologist Dana Base has checked them in creel censuses made on opening day here and other fishers report catching them occasionally.  I’ve heard that searun cutthroat come up the outlet from Jim Creek and enter the lake.  Some stay for a while.  A few of these are big.  And when brook trout, a char, were stocked widely throughout the state, decades ago, by well-meaning men who did not know what they were doing, some went into Lake Eudora, but they could not spawn successfully here and have been dead of natural causes for eons.  So for all practical purposes, the lake holds nothing but rainbows.

My fish proves to be the usual.  How pretty though.  I am glad to see the little guy and to observe that, in exactly a month’s time, he has grown nearly an inch.  I put his length at nine inches.  That is small, I know, but when you are after data, and when the subject of your search is a species you admire inordinately and perhaps excessively, size is not so important.  Growth rate and condition are.  This trout still has vertical parr marks, and wears them much as though they are the subdued pattern in an expensive sportscoat.  He is handsome, and as he lies across the palm of my hand, I admire him for longer than I should.  The smallness of the scud in the corner of his jaw makes him seem larger.  Of course I want this effect.  He has grown less than an inch in those thirty days.  Well, the food is thinning down fast and his metabolism shutting down commensurately.  He’ll stay about this size over the winter, and when the lake closes in three days and he’ll no longer be molested by the likes of me.  He’ll still be here next April, when the lake opens up for fishing again.  That is a consoling thought.

I take another trout of the exact same size, then can hook no more, though I continue to get weak strikes.  I’ve had worse fishing.  I reflect how beautiful the small fish are.  Their image lingers in the eye of my mind, long after we have loaded the boat and left the lake on a bumpy road pocketed with valley fog.

66

We are nearing the end of this book.  I’ve been feeling it for some time, both looking forward to it, the relief, and also dreading it, for it has been fun, too.  There are worse kinds of research to than going out repeatedly on small lakes.  I’ve imagined what the book’s ending might be.  It would take place on a snowy day in November, on my home lake.  As the snow drifted down, I’d whip out my flyrod and tie on my favorite fly (the dark-olive scud), then, darting out among the thickening flakes, I’d run to my neighbor Anton’s dock, and give the water a few casts.  Then on to Bruce King’s, casting madly to my maximum distance of eighty feet, starting at an eight o’clock position at each dock, and not stopping my casting circumnavigation of the water till I’ve reached five o’clock.

I’d strip in line with a variety of retrieves, varying them from the fastest to the slowest, until I got to the hand-twist technique of Brian Chan, which is self-limiting and as slow as they come, trying all the while for just the right combination that would entice the last sluggish fish to hit.

I’d prance from one dock to another, from Bruce’s to Anton’s to my own.  Maybe I’d hook a fish, maybe not.  Then I’d go East, in the opposite direct, to Tracy and John’s dock, and try my casting techniques again, fishing out perhaps counter-clockwise.  What will be will be.  I’ve dreamed it many times.  Maybe I’d cast from along the beach’s grassy lawn, instead.  It might be good from there.  I’d come to the dock of John and Tracy’s next-door neighbors (who are newer than we and yet unmet) and, as the flakes began to blur my vision, I’d send my scud sailing out into the closing year‘s darkness, casting and retrieving mainly by feel, for the sky would be full of downy flakes.  If the fish hit, good, but if they didn’t, I’d move on.  Always-on-the-prowl is my Indian name.

The next house (two away) is newly sold and occupied by strangers; a fence stretches between it and the next house, also an unknown entity, but I’d broach the fence, climb it if I couldn’t walk or wade around it, if there wasn’t a friendly unlocked gate.  Then I’d come to Bob Donahoe’s house, and I was sure he’d understand how important it was to me to fish from his dock in this first snowstorm, for he lives at the end of the line.  He’d put himself in my shoes and my trespass would be explainable, even though I might seem mildly insane.  It is how we lake dwellers are.

This is not how it happened. 

I thought--since there is supposed to be some correspondence to the truth in a book--that if it didn’t really happen, I could make it happen later, after the fact.  This is one of the advantages of writing in retrospect.  I wanted this ending for my book, so maybe it would come true, and when the real moment arrived, one with real snow in it, I’d act out my drama after the fact, so to speak, in order to make it become true, or truer.  That was my plan.  A snowstorm was necessary to my fit sense of things ending.

Anybody who’d read my two earlier books would know that snow is vital to me and signifies completion, an ending, almost as though the whiteness of the snow wipes out all my writing smudges and mistakes and restores the page to a blank, or a pure tablet again.  Silly, I know, but persistent and personal.  There is a white relief when a book ends.  But a psychic darkness often follows.

Yes, my fellow English Majors, writers do add symbolism to their stories, much as a cook lays butter on toast (or mortar is laid on bricks).  It is applied boldly, with a wide brush; somewhat cynically, often crudely.  We don’t want anybody to miss the point, however irrelevant it may be.  The point is important to us, even if it is only symbolic and its purpose and function in the narrative unclear.  We’ll hit you over the head with it until our nail is driven home.  We’ll make you sorry you ever heard of symbolic value or the important points symbols stand for.

But the snowstorm was not to be, either.  Not a flake would fall, though it was the right season for it.  Cold arrived instead, dry cold, the day sparkling with frost that persisted into afternoon, the skies clear and blue, the shoreline (my littoral zone, that is) continuing to wear its lingering sparse mantle of gold, russet, umber, and tangerine.  I fished doggedly on, as the water cooled, getting a strike here, a strike there, maybe a perch, a black crappie, seeking always trout, hoping hard for trout, praying for them, the water growing blacker, the air more crisp.  Nary a trout.  Then the strikes . . . stopped.  I kept on casting at twilight, not quite believing the year was over, but it was.

I am the man, grown old, who was the boy who used to measure his season’s catch of trout by the hundreds.  Remember?  Four-hundred and fifty is a number that comes to mind--not as the greatest year but as a typical one for a young man.  So many trout now seem extreme, gross.  What was I thinking, what kind of man was I?  Greed must have ruled my life.

Catching trout is easy.  They feed avidly, often foolishly, and once you get on to it, and to their ways, they will take your fly, but not always.  Often they will overrun your fly, open their mouths, and suck it in.  Then they are yours.  You slaughter many numbers and feel sickly ashamed of it.  Then you start to return your trout to the water not out of any sense of sportsmanship, or even shame, but simply because you have no use for them.  They are superfluous to your needs.  Everybody you know has eaten his fill.

You remember how America was founded by gluttons--men who ate and drank exceedingly, and when they went hunting and fishing recognized no curb to their killing appetites.  The country was in its full youth, as you were in yours.  Goodspeed chronicled the sad events.  It takes a long time--a lifetime, really--to learn the lessons brought on too much of any one thing.  I mean, I’ve been to Alaska and fished there.  Gluttony is, besides being a deadly sin, the personal form of expression of men who do not see the end of things on the horizon, who believe the future is not dependent on how they express their personal values.  No, it depends on the behavior of others.  They themselves believe they are immune from consequences.

Limits had to be legislated for fish and game, and a lot of other things, for man will kill and kill, wipe his bloody chin, grin widely, and go out to murder again.  Many still believe their manhood is hinged to the act of ritual slaughter.  But as you age, you come to dislike even the idea of killing, even though you can kill fish and game easily, almost thoughtlessly, without chagrin.  This is one of life’s terrible paradoxes.  It is also ironic.  Perhaps, because your own life is nearing its end you value all life more, however mean it is.  Therefore the idea of death and killing take on increased personal significance and is shunned.

The trout is not my enemy.  Neither is it my friend.  Man and trout occupy the same world but live in different elements, air and water, which come together and touch often, if the man lives right.  This means he is constantly on, in, or near the water.  Man has tamed nature and is saddened, disappointed, at the result, a shambles. It is time (past time) to halt the destruction and start giving nature back to itself.  For we are not supreme.  And what is supremacy anyway but a mistaken belief in the right to rule over others?  Rule over what?  The few trees left standing?  A polluted body of water?  A fish or two?

We have reached a time of moral scarcity.  We know ourselves to be envious and destructive, the universe finite.  Its limits cannot be transgressed without huge penalties.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

67

That won’t do for an ending, either.  Snow and casting from dock to dock, along with a tired sermon on the winding down of things.  The end-of-nature theme again.  Let it end like this--and I assure you that it is true, not hokeyed up for the occasion.

It is morning, the end of October.  After a week of rain and near flooding, the skies are bright and clear.  The lake is a brilliant swath of light, weed-free, beneath a buttery sun that says the day is not cold.  Well, it lies, the sun does.  Stumbling from my bed at the writer’s usual time of nine o’clock, I rub my eyes at the window.  I stare in dumb disbelief.  Am I dreaming?  On my dock frolic five river otters.  They are huge.  Dark brown, they look black and seem to be about the same size and coloration as my Labrador retriever, Sam.  But they are sleeker, shinier.  They have a mean look about the jaws that Labs never develop.  They dip in and out of the water with that economy of motion of animals that are not tame.  And they are eating fish and something else, and dropping scat all over my dock.

One of the otters has a duck in its flippers and is eating it like a watermelon.  A duck is even redder on the inside, I notice.  One of the countless widgeon looking for a meal of duckweed has just become a meal itself.  It is how things go.

How much at home the otters are on my dock.  Or is it theirs?  Otter presence signifies that nature still exerts the upper hand. Good, good.  There are still some wild corners of the world, some spaces that have not been widely trampled upon.  I had glimpsed but one otter at a time before I owned my home and was examining the lake by pram; it scurried along what I now know to be the Allens’ waterfront and disappeared into some tulles.  That single otter had seemed elusive, shy.  But this bunch is spectacular.  I had not realized the extent of the otter’s command of his environment, let alone the amassed wild confidence of six of them.

The otters are completely oblivious to me, or else see me as no threat because a watery escape is so near.  They go on with their meal and their play.  I watch them, my own breakfast forgotten.

They are five Darth Vaders, in slick black raincoats.  No, they are more sinister:  they seem pure evil.  I mean, they look evil to that degree.  They take from the lake whatever they want and feel no remorse, nor should they, for what they do is perfectly natural.  It is not corrupted by premeditation.  What I am watching is wild—nature at work unobserved--though I am witnessing it.  Something wonderful is happening.  I am appreciative at the privilege of being here.

The otters move off to a dock once removed from mine.  Anton’s.  This they do as if by prearranged signal.  One moves, they all move off.  They leave behind (besides their mounds of steaming shit) a chunk of raw meat.  Duck.  It glistens redly.  I didn’t know a duck contained so much blood.  I thought it was mainly feathers.

Then from overhead arrives--I swear it!--a mature bald eagle.  He lands on my dock, this great hulk of a bird, snowy fore and aft, furling his wings.  My god, how huge he is.  I’ve never seen an eagle on the lake before, only soaring overhead on one of the thermals, far away, a mere speck in the vast sky.  Now here he is, practically on my lap.  (It is my dock, after all.)  The eagle hunches over the duck scrap and begins to rip at it, devouring it in chunks.  It is somebody else’s catch and I know him to be a cowardly scavenger.  That is far from being the king of birds.

One of the otters returns from a dock fifty feet away.  Maybe he is the guy who killed the duck.  He surfaces four feet off my dock’s bow and glowers at the eagle.  Or perhaps it is only the otter’s normal heavy frown.  Or else he is simply fixing his deep, heavy eyes on the bird.  They look full of liquid.

The eagle takes two steps and lifts off, dipping low over the water.  It’s a defeated bird, beaten by the otter’s hard stare.  Oh, what a look it was!

I turn from the window, saying to the morning air, “Wow, wow.  Did you see that?  Never, never.”  Meaning, never before, in my life.

Then join my wife for breakfast.

Lake Ketchum

8:23 P.M., November 1, 1996, First draft

Computer revised, 4:12 P.M., February 4, 1997

Long-hand revisions completed and keyboarded, May 5, 6:27 PM

Again, the same, July 21, 4:31 PM