All Fishermen Are Liars (10 page)

When Blackie and I moseyed back into camp a little after noon, everyone was already assembled out front with duffels and rod cases. Word from the lodge was that the weather was clearing from the south and the plane was on its way. I just had time to pack my gear and wolf down a bowl of stew before Wes came in low and circled to land on the river.

We flew above the clouds for half an hour, but Wes is an inveterate sightseer, so as soon as we came out into the clear, we dropped
back down to a hundred feet and for mile after mile I watched caribou strung out over the tundra in singles, twos and threes. Somewhere in there we crossed from Nunavut to the Northwest Territories, but there’d be no way to tell either from the air or from the ground. (It’s not that the idea of ownership is unknown here, it just operates on more of an honor system than most of us are used to.) In fact, there are moments in the far north when you feel that you’ve fallen through time and are nowhere at all in the usual geopolitical sense. The only thing that suggests otherwise is the fishing license in your pocket.

10

OREGON

A moment comes on some fishing trips—maybe sooner, maybe later—when you begin to wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. Never mind that it had been raining hard for weeks on the Oregon coast and that the rivers we intended to fish were swollen and dark. Steelhead fishing is stingy with straight answers, but one way this can go is that a flush of high water in March brings steelhead out of the salt, and when the rivers begin to drop—as they must eventually—they’re stiff with bright, grabby fish. Or not, but that’s one way it can happen.

More to the point, it seems ridiculous on its face to call a trip on account of rain in a region that gets enough of the stuff to support a temperate rain forest. When you live in semiarid northern Colorado, a climate this wet seems pleasantly exotic. You picture a version of the tropics with all the green lushness, but without the oppressive heat or the sunburned fun hogs. And anyway, it has rained harder there. One year there was so much rain the salmon couldn’t pick the rivers out of the general deluge, so they just swam across Highway 101 and into the flooded pastures around the Tillamook Cheese Factory.

My flight out was uneventful in the modern sense that being frisked by a stranger is now standard procedure. As usual, some fellow passengers spotted me as a fisherman and asked about my trip. I don’t actually wear a badge that says
FISHERMAN
, but I’m carrying a rod tube and wearing the sweat-stained Filson packer that my friend Ann Ripley calls “that dreadful hat,” so I’m rarely mistaken for a guy on his way to a corporate board meeting.

I’d missed that morning’s exchange of phone calls between my fishing partners. It seems they were rethinking the trip because of even heavier rain than expected, a grim forecast and rivers rising toward flood stage. The way I heard it later, they were exchanging sentiments like, “Dude, it’s not looking good,” while stopping just short of actually pulling the plug.

For that matter, I caught only snatches of the breaking news from Japan of a terrible earthquake and tsunami that had killed thousands and severely damaged several reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. I may have experienced compassion fatigue. That is, the disaster seemed remote, and I was busy retrieving my duffel in Portland, renting a car, threading my way through city traffic and then heading west through the rain. I was just happy to be on the ground and going fishing.

The first I heard about tsunami warnings for the Oregon coast was from one of those lighted highway signs that usually warn of road
conditions. I thought about stopping, but the sign hadn’t said to turn back and there were other cars going in the same direction, most with Oregon plates. I thought these locals must know the score. Then it occurred to me that that’s what every lemming in the pack must think.

At a gas station in Garibaldi, a guy said the tsunami had already hit farther south, causing plenty of damage, although less than had been feared. “Course, there can be more than one wave,” he added, “but I wouldn’t sweat the tsunami, I’d sweat the plume of radioactivity on its way from Japan.”

I was the first to arrive at our rented cabin. As per the landlady’s instructions, I worked the combination on the cellar hatch, ducked in to turn on the electricity and get the key from under a tin can, and then let myself in the front door. There was moss growing on the welcome mat. The firewood stacked on the covered porch was technically out of the weather, but it was visibly damp.

I knew that before a tsunami hits, the sea recedes, giving the fleet of foot time to dash for higher ground, so I peeked out at Tillamook Bay through the window over the kitchen sink. Except for being out of focus through the pouring rain, it looked normal. Then again, I’d seen it for the first time only an hour and a half earlier, so didn’t really know how it was
supposed
to look. And of course there was no way to tell if the stiff breeze off the Pacific carried an invisible freight of radioactivity. At times like these it’s worth reminding yourself that every step we take, even on a trip from the couch to the refrigerator, is a journey through time into the unknown. The only way to be sure how a fishing trip will turn out is to not go, but the regret that can dog that decision is the kind that breaks spirits and ruins lives.

When my writer friend Scott Sadil pulled in that afternoon, he filled me in on the talk of canceling the trip. There’d been serious dithering right up until the moment they realized I was already on the plane, at which point they’d decided they might as well soldier
on. Scott was grinning as he told me this, but then writers have a unique perspective on these things. Sometimes the disastrous trip makes for a better story than the one where everything goes right.

I’d managed to get a smoky fire going in the stove using damp wood from the porch, but along with the groceries, Scott had brought a load of bone-dry oak and cedar that would come in real handy. I always get a rush of confidence when a fishing partner reads the conditions right and comes prepared. I think, It’s gonna be okay; at least some of us know what they’re doing.

When Rob Russell pulled in after dark towing his drift boat, he was all smiles and confidence. Rob has since come in out of the cold with a job selling fishing books, but he was once a steelhead guide and still exudes the kind of optimism that repels doubt the way a tight shake roof sheds rain. We were three guys going fishing in a flooded river in the rain. What could go wrong? Scott and I had been lounging and talking, but suddenly there was activity. Dinner was rustled up, the coffeepot was primed for the next morning, and there were fly boxes to be picked through, leaders to be tied and drags to be adjusted.

The river we launched on the next morning was bank-full and opaquely green, like thin pea soup. It looked pretty good. A little higher and faster than you might like, but still with defined runs where steelhead could lie up. We fished heavy tips and big, weighted flies according to the common wisdom, but Rob didn’t think I was getting deep enough in the heavy current with my type-8 sink tip. He let me fish for a while, but finally couldn’t stand it any longer and handed me an old Burkheimer rod loaded with a 550-grain Skagit head, a two-foot cheater, ten feet of T-14 sink tip and a four-inch-long Intruder fly with big lead eyes. I’m not much of a Skagit caster, but after a few false starts, I was lobbing this depth charge across the river and ticking gravel in the tailouts. I was feeling the surge of conviction you get when you believe you’re in the zone and was, incidentally, rethinking my entire spey casting program.

Not long afterward I hooked a sea-run cutthroat—a nice fifteen-incher, but still a disappointment. It was a momentary heart-stopper, but the strike was light and hesitant and I knew it wasn’t a steelhead even as I was tightening up. When you’re fishing deep, the take of a steelhead feels like the smooth, deliberate motion of someone lifting a watermelon into a shopping cart. Even before you set the hook, you get an intimation of weight and strength.

When we got off the water that afternoon, we went to look at another nearby river. It was pretty well blown out, but we each made obligatory passes through the one run that still held its shape.

On the way back to the cabin, we stopped at a place on the bay for a few dozen oysters fresh from the boat. It had been breezy on the river, but out here in the open there was a thirty-knot wind, whitecaps on the water and pulsing sheets of horizontal rain. The bay was churned up brown, but we could see the greenish plume of current from the river we’d been fishing extending for thousands of yards. It was easy to imagine steelhead coming in from the North Pacific, sniffing out the first scent of their home river and nosing deliberately up the familiar-smelling current.

At the door of the oyster joint, I remembered a childhood filled with women saying, “Don’t you track mud in my kitchen!” and tried to shake off and dry my feet. But the guy behind the counter waved us in past the more or less permanent
CAUTION, WET FLOOR
sign. The oysters were raw, cold, slimy, and salty with a dash of Tabasco. Like winter steelheading, they’re an acquired taste.

At the cabin we got a fire going in the stove, hung our waders and rain gear around it to dry and tossed the rest of the clothes we’d been wearing in the dryer. This was the first time all day that I realized I was soaked nearly to the skin. I’d just gotten used to it, the same way a frog sitting in a pond no longer notices that his ass is wet.

Scott had an errand the next morning. He had to drive an hour south to give a presentation at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology,
where he was ensconced in the writer-in-residence program. He said that when he was awarded this honor, they probably hadn’t expected him to check in to his secluded cottage and then immediately leave to go fishing. On the other hand, they knew what kind of books he wrote, so they couldn’t have been completely surprised. He said that so far no one had batted an eye, but if it came up, he’d say he was doing research for a story, which would be just true enough.

While Scott was gone, Rob and I did some wade fishing in the same water we’d floated the day before. The river was high and off-color, but the runs still looked good and I thought it was only a matter of time. I kept picturing a big, bright steelhead fresh from the ocean charging around in the confines of the river like a bull in a china shop attached to a ten-pound leader, but no dice.

We drove upstream on a logging road to look at some water above the first put-in. The river was narrower up there and most of the runs we looked at were flowing too high and fast. One looked marginally fishable, but there were already two guys parked there stringing up spey rods.

Farther upstream we walked out on a one-lane bridge to look at a beautiful pool. There was a deep slot on the far side and a long sloping tailout. You’d have to swing the whole thing from one spot on a short gravel bar, but it was doable. After I’d looked at swollen rivers for a day and a half, this was as pretty a pool as I could remember seeing. Even the color of the water was that smoky grayish jade I think of as “steelhead green.” The same kind of water a client of Rob’s once thought looked like toxic sludge.

We were standing there hoping to spot a steelhead holding in the tail when four guys paddling brightly colored plastic kayaks came under the bridge and headed into the pool. We cringed, but they cut to the inside to set up for the next rapids and missed the sweet spot by thirty feet.

Rob fished the run a little more cleanly than I did, but we both
managed to swing flies through all the good holding water and right into the soft spot at the tailout where I fully expected a pull. I understood that from there a single flick of the tail would take a steelhead into the rapids and there’d be nothing I could do about it. I remembered a friend telling me he’d hooked a steelhead on a tributary of the Skeena in British Columbia that took him so far and fast around the next bend that when the fish broke off, his backing was stretched across dry land.

But again, no dice. Maybe the fish were there, but they were sulking. Or maybe they hadn’t made it this far upriver in the high water.

We waded off the gravel bar and climbed back up to the truck. Rain was falling outright on the river’s surface, but under the canopy of trees it was more of a fine spray punctuated by steady drips. We were waist-deep in ferns, and the crowns of the massive western red cedar and Sitka spruce trees were out of sight in the low ceiling.

Scott got back a little after noon. He said he’d talked a little about writing and fishing, tied a simple Green Butt Skunk—which had amazed the audience at the Center—then made his escape and headed back to the river. That first afternoon at the cabin Scott had said it was odd for a writer who thinks of himself as a journeyman to be thrust into the company of people who were encouraged to think of themselves as Artists. I quoted Richard Russo to the effect that art is just “solid craft with a dash of style.” (Actually, he said “maybe” that’s what it is, leaving himself some wiggle room.) Scott agreed that it was best simply to do what you do and let it stand. Whether or not you’re an artist is something other people get to decide. What the artist himself thinks is immaterial.

There was still time for an afternoon float and we launched on an empty river. If other boats had gotten out ahead of us, there’d still be trailers at the put-in, but the parking lot was vacant. It looked as though everyone had bailed except those two diehards on the logging road that morning. We waded some runs, but swung most from the
boat, if only because the river had come up and there was no place left to stand.

We ended up anchored in a good run one long bend upstream from the takeout, trading turns swinging from the bow. Hope remained high. If tide fish were in, this is where they’d be and there was no earthly reason why one of us shouldn’t hook one. I’m far from adept at this, but I know enough to get by and I’m comforted by the knowledge that although a good steelheader owns many skills that serve him well over the long haul, he’ll sometimes be out-fished by a persistent klutz.