Requiem for a Radical
Washington Post Magazine | May 13, 1990
What I know about trout fishing is that it's done in green places, on quick-moving water, with unlikely equipment - and I'm mad for it.
That Idaho night, the trouting took place in a moonrise, on the Henrys Fork of the Snake, with the Centennial Mountains rising on one side and the Tetons on the far other and with lodgepole pines standing up on the near bank like spooky 60-foot stalks of corn. I was with Ernest Hemingway's middle son, Patrick. I had been interviewing him and his wife for a story all afternoon, and suddenly, after a 9 p.m. dinner, he said, "So why don't we go out?" You see, I just happened to have brought along my gear.
I remember how we walked single file, like clunky Indians, down a silvered path, and how Patrick entered the stream so noiselessly. The water was very cold and up to our waists. I had on my old oft-patched insulated Marathon waders and kept wondering if this was the moment they were going to spring a fatal leak and send me waterlogged and bawling to the bank. Everything was so quiet, so absent of urban sounds. For the first 15 or 20 minutes of the fishing, I couldn't stop myself from shaking. I had been a fly fisherman for about a decade by then, but I was sure I was going to make an angling fool of myself in front of one of Papa's boys. I felt like the passionate amateur who's blundered onto center court at Wimbledon with Boris Becker grinning murderously across the way. But it all worked out wonderfully: Patrick didn't laugh once, and I caught half a dozen trout, if not with elegance at least with passion. Patrick, who was nearing 60, had a black graphite rod and I believe an Orvis reel and a weight-forward, floating, tapered line to which he had knotted a Size 16 Elk Hair caddis dry fly. A Number 16 caddis is tiny enough that three of them would sit handily on your thumbnail. That is part of the wonder of this sport, of course: It's so improbable, from the stick in your hand that weighs two ounces and quivers to your heartbeat, to the lure on the end of your leader that's but a little blow-away wad of glue and hackle and hook but which somehow, if fortune is smiling, is able to deceive one of God's wildest and most threatened creatures.
In the gathering dark of that June evening, the water seemed to lie around us like glass. We stood about 15 yards apart. Fat pulpy rainbows began rising to our casts. You couldn't quite see them but you could hear them sipping and slurping and breaking the water. A screech owl called, and somewhere bullfrogs answered. Patrick worked his rod like a wand, sending a peach-colored line in great noiseless loops far out onto the stream. We fished for about an hour and barely spoke. But at one point, after he'd reeled in a particularly beautiful rainbow and held it at the surface of the water in one hand and expertly removed the hook with his other hand and then studied his prize for an instant more before delivering it back to the inkiness from which it had come, Patrick called over to me in the softest voice, "I love fishing after dusk. It's called fishing off the mirror."
Later that night, I drove alone toward another part of Idaho. I drove until long after midnight, unwilling to let my experience on the Henrys Fork go. And then I pulled over and found a dumpy motel and slept the sleep of the angels. I CAME TO IT LATE, NEARLY IN MIDDLE AGE, AND FOR that and other reasons I'll never be a virtuoso. There's too much I don't know. I don't possess the natural gifts for it. Sometimes I feel like a crazed and vain Zelda Fitzgerald trying to fashion herself into a ballerina. (I remember reading that she was so obsessed with proving to husband Scott she could do it that she worked at it until her toes bled.)
I don't tie my own flies and my expertise at identifying the streamside hatch is somewhat in the joke category. But damn how I love this sport, damn how I go every chance I get, damn if it hasn't worked its way into my family life, my work life, my travel, the little reading time I have, my waking consciousness, my dreams. And damn too if I somehow haven't managed in all of my inelegance and middlingness to catch my share of iridescent brookies and mean-as-hell browns and black-spotted cutthroats and most especially red-streaked rainbows. Of all of them, the rainbow is the most beautiful trout, at least in my view. He is the one who'll break the water, twisting and spinning upward two and three feet into the spray, mocking both you and gravity, furious to have been so fooled, using every foot of your line in a great sizzling run. I've been so exhausted after several such bouts that I've had no choice but to go and sit on the shore and try to get my courage back.
Richard Hugo, a poet I love much and tend to read late at night, when my wife thinks I am unduly morose, once wrote this about a rainbow: "When evening pulls the ceiling tight/ across his back he leaps for bugs." And, in the same poem, more metaphysically: "I wedged hard water to validate his skin -- / call it chrome, say red is on/ his side like apples in a fog." Well, I have wedged some hard water to find rainbows, and I have seen the curve of red on his side that looks like apples in a fog, and I can tell you it becomes an addiction, something you feel you must have to survive. Hugo was a great Montana fly fisherman and poet who was fat and had an ugly porcine face and was terrified of women for much of his life, but never mind: He wrote beautiful poems; he'd found the gift of rainbows.
When I am on a trout stream, bulked up and blissful, I feel hope for the world, or at least for my own life. My burdens no longer seem so oppressive. I have the strength to come home and face the rest of my life. Someday I hope my children will feel about this sport as I do. They are just getting to the age when I can take them. I can't wait. I THINK WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT BEST IS THE WATER IT- self. You can't fish for a trout in a filthy place. Cold pure water is what a trout must have. It's the only way he knows to survive. Where I grew up, in the smokestacked Midwest, the creeks and rivers were dirty and most of them were torpid in their movement. There was no such thing as seeing bottom. I thought this was how all rivers were supposed to be. And besides that, I thought fishing was something you did with a stiff pole and a heavy lure, sitting in a boat or standing on a bank. I had to wait nearly half a lifetime before I could know the pleasures of slipping into fast-moving water, where the world seems to be swirling about you, and then looking down into a place that's so unpolluted you could practically count the pebbles at the bottom.
Trout water riffling over stones in spring sunlight: This is a goose-bumping sight to me, and has been, and will be for whatever seasons I have to come.
"Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it," wrote Norman Maclean in the greatest book anybody will ever write about fly-fishing and losing your brother. The opening of that 104-page novella begins thusly: "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing." And the final five words are, "I am haunted by waters."
I once stood on the pineboard porch of Jimmy Carter's north Georgia one-bedroom cabin and saw, not 30 feet away, thousands of gallons of cold mountain water crashing and boiling against huge boulders, sluicing down ledges of outcropping granite. Carter wasn't president anymore. He'd had other disappointments in his life. But that very morning, at dawn, he'd caught a 10-incher on a black gnat pattern that he'd tied himself with deer hair, and his pride in telling me was simply immense. Glimpsing Jimmy Carter's private stretch of trout stream on Walnut Mountain at the tag end of the Appalachians seemed to tell me something about him that I doubt a lifetime of watching him in Washington would have given me. I was there to interview him for a book about the outdoors he'd just written, and when I admitted to him a little shyly that I too was a fly fisherman, of no repute but some devotion, he flashed the old toothy, almost painfully disconcerting Carter grin and then cocked his thumb at me. "Isn't it beautiful?" he said. The warmth was instantly there. And then he was back to business and we got down to the interview.
The trouble with trying to write about something that means so much to you, especially if you've come to it late, is that you can start to sound overwrought. Fly-fishing isn't going to save my soul -- I know this. Like baseball and the art of folding Japanese paper flowers, it probably has deep inner meanings and spiritual dimensions, but damned if I am going to try to identify them. Maybe someday, another quarter of a century from here, though I hope not. Because generally, I think a person should be grateful to have found a passion in his life. If he spends too much time trying to define it, the passion is liable to vanish on him. At least this is my superstition.
So let me say here and be done with it that what I know about trout fishing in America is that it's done in green places, on quick-moving water, with unlikely equipment, and for these reasons and some others, I find I am generally mad for it. MAYBE SOMEDAY I'LL EVEN OWN A BAMBOO ROD. ONLY the finest Tonkin cane, also known as tea-stick bamboo, is used in the crafting of these exquisite instruments. Whole books have been written about the iconography of the split-cane rod. (Ernest Schwiebert's Trout Tackle is perhaps the best known.) As I understand it, Tonkin bamboo doesn't come from the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam but from somewhere in southern China. Split-bamboo rods can cost into the thousands, and owning one is a little like owning a Stradivarius. They get passed down in families, granddads to grandsons. They have delicate silk wrappings and saddle-leather cases with poplin protective sacks. Their shafts are redolent of generations of tung-oil varnish. Payne, Leonard, Garrison, Orvis, Winston -- these are some legendary bamboo rod names. Hoagy Carmichael Jr. is a latter-day cane-rod maker. His dad wrote the songs, he makes the rods. I love the songs. I'll take the rods.
My own fly rod is made of lowly fiberglass. I haven't even graduated to graphite yet, which is state of the art continued on page 41 TROUT continued from page 22 among fly fishers now. I keep it in a silver metal tube in a green cloth sack in a cluttered downstairs closet, along with the rest of my trout gear and the dozens of back issues of Field & Stream and Fly Fisherman that I know I'll never get around to reading. I don't think it cost more than $70 when I bought it new. I got it in 1980, after I had outgrown my beginner rod and after I had lost a second rod that wasn't half the quality or delicacy of this one. There have been times on winter Washington nights when I have padded barefoot downstairs in my pajamas and gotten it out of the tube and attached its two four-foot sections and then stood there in my Mittyesque absurdity -- sans fly, sans reel, sans waders, sans fish -- to feel the thing tremble once more in my fingertips. I would hardly trade it now for a ranch in Texas. Well, I exaggerate.
I bought this rod in the high-mountain desert country of northern New Mexico. We were living that fall in Sante Fe, and I was trying to write a book about my boyhood studies for the priesthood. Afternoons on the Pecos, which is deep in the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, were a way of getting my sanity back.
There is so much to learn about fly-fishing. Just the other day I was reading a trout book and came across a fly pattern called a Kettle Creek Hendrickson. Hey, I thought: That's my name. The Hendrickson fly was first developed on the Beaverkill in the Catskills, but the Kettle Creek variety was tied by Jack Mickievicz while fishing Kettle Creek in Pennsylvania. I've never seen Kettle Creek. Maybe someday.
Trout streams have word magic in their names: the Big Wood. The South Toe. The Yellow Breeches. The Silver Fork of the American. I have been on all of those. Trout flies also have poetry in their names: an Orange-Tailed Humpy. A Pale Evening Dun. A Blue-Wing Olive. A Gold-Ribbed Hare's Ear. I couldn't begin to give you the Latin, but trout flies have Latin classifications too, and I am someone who studied Latin for seven years. I see now that it was preparing me not just for the altar but for the stream.
Not all trout streams crash and boil. Some are quiet as English handmaidens. Those are the ones that are practically lethal in their ability to refuse you a fish. The Letort in Pennsylvania, near Carlisle, is such a stream. It's one of the fabled limestoners of the world, its brown trout growing unimaginably fat every spring on the scuds and cressbugs that thrive in the stream's rich plant beds. I couldn't catch a cold on the Letort Spring Run. I've been skunked there every time. I've heard that my father-in-law, a nearly lifelong Pennsylvania trout fisherman, used to approach the Letort from 50 yards off on his hands and knees. He didn't want to spook the trout, but in deeper ways I like to think the approach had to do with his feeling not just for the Letort but for fly-fishing itself.
He died last summer. By the time I really got to know Pop Moffatt, his fly-fishing days were over. He had lost the feeling in his legs and couldn't wade any longer. But I used to call him on the phone after I had been to a stream, and his vicarious pleasure in hearing about it was something that brought us together in his closing years. He always questioned me closely about the water conditions and the hatches, and I would always fumble for answers. He kept urging me to try nymphs and wet flies, because theoretically you can catch more fish that way. But it takes more skill than I have to fish with a wet fly. So I keep on using dries. Dry flies dance on the surface, not underneath, and you're able to see the explosion of fish and water at the instant of the strike.
I wish he were here so I could tell him about my most recent experience. It was only several weeks ago. My wife was out of town, and our kids were in the good care of our sitter, Mildred, and so I suddenly decided to go up once again to Big Hunting Creek in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. It's a stream I have fished perhaps 150 times over these past 12 or 13 years. My wife swears that the car knows its own way to Thurmont. I can walk out the door of our home on Capitol Hill and be streamside in 80 minutes flat. It's not the pristine fishing experience of, say, Wyoming, but it'll do. I am thrilled Big Hunting Creek is so close.
It was a Monday afternoon (okay, I skipped out of work), and I had the stream largely to myself. I started at the bottom of the two-mile catch-and-release section and worked my way up the mountain. Big Hunting was running extraordinarily clear; there was a good amount of water in it due to the winter runoffs. I began with an Adams. Nothing. After an hour I sat on a rock and pulled out the ham-and-Swiss I'd packed in my trout vest. I sat there watching this purling little two-hearted river and telling myself, But, listen, you don't have to catch anything. You're out here. It's so damn beautiful. I got back on the water. This time I changed to a caddis. Whop. He hit it and took off running. I netted him, extricated the hook, slipped him back. In the next pool, not 10 minutes later, same fly, another fish. By the time I went home that afternoon I had caught five or six. They were successively larger only in my imagination.