All Fishermen Are Liars (3 page)

If I had to guess how many grayling I landed over the next few hours, I’d say it was in the neighborhood of fifty, with a combined weight of something like 125 pounds, and the phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” stuck in my mind like an annoying song. So I quit. I wasn’t bored, but there’s a point—different for everyone, I suppose—when you have simply caught too many fish too easily and are in danger of not only missing the point, but also of abusing the very thing you claim to love and came so far to see. I’ve been fishing long enough to have a few memories of big, easy hauls that are tinged with shame. I didn’t want this to be one of them.

I found Mike a few hundred yards upstream squatting on the bank cleaning the regulation five-pound lake trout for lunch. “You want a grayling to go with this?” he asked, pointing at the fish with
his fillet knife. I said, “Sure,” stepped back into the river and had a two-pound fish on my first cast. In this part of the world, backcountry travelers refer to grayling as “river hotdogs.” “If there’s nothing else to eat,” they say, “you can always catch a grayling.”

Frank hadn’t landed his record fish. He’d hooked a large lake trout on two-pound tippet that would have qualified, but after he played it carefully for over an hour, it threw the hook. He seemed more amused than disappointed. A record fish would have been fun, but he wasn’t about to let it ruin even a single morning, let alone the whole trip. The fire was cozy and smoky and the air was redolent with the aroma of cooking fish and beans. Frank looked around and said, “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?”

After lunch I offered to go back downriver to stay out of his way. I thought I’d explore a little, look for more wildlife and maybe see if I could get a grayling to take a dry fly, just to mix things up. But Frank said he’d taken his shot and now he was just fishing. “String up your 8-weight and catch some of these lake trout,” he said. So I did.

3

K BAR T

As I was driving west across Colorado on Interstate 70, there was a specific quarter mile where the public radio and classic rock stations I’d been grazing through all faded to static and were replaced by country and western, and preachers. The exit for the town of Silt was in the rearview mirror and the Colorado River was off my left shoulder. I’d crossed the Continental Divide some ninety miles back and could have made the Utah border in an hour, but it was only then that I felt like I was officially on the West Slope, where the airwaves are
filled with pain and redemption plus livestock reports on the hour.

This was one of those rare times when I’d allowed myself to get too busy for someone with my lazy temperament and was consequently feeling a little sorry for myself. I’d just gotten back from a long trip to northern Canada and had spent days mowing through the mail, messages, bills and chores that had accumulated while I was gone: the boring adult obligations that are all important in one way or another but that add up to drudgery when there are too many of them at one time. In two more days I was supposed to be at the Fly Tackle Retailer Show in Denver, where I had what I’ll describe as “business,” although to an independent observer it would just look like a bunch of people standing around talking about fishing.

I know, it doesn’t sound that bad (you’re probably busier than that on your average weekend), but for most of the year I live the kind of slow-paced sporting life where being rushed means not having enough time to loaf between fishing trips.

In the meantime, my friends Mark Weaver and Buzz Cox had invited me to come over and fish with them on the K bar T, a small fly-fishing guest ranch they operate on the White River near the town of Meeker. The scheduling could have been easier-going for my taste. I had a scant two days with a five-and-a-half-hour drive each way, leaving barely more fishing than driving time, but these were the only two days for weeks in either direction when they weren’t booked with paying fishermen and could accommodate a freeloading friend.

I’d heard a lot about the place, mostly from Mark. They had a refurbished hundred-plus-year-old ranch house, two miles of the White River, a mile of spring creek and maybe half a mile of a small freestone stream flowing across a hay meadow. The place could handle as many as eight fishermen at a time, although they were more likely to have between two and four, which sounded like a more reasonable number, even if it cut into the bottom line. I was eager to see it and I think Mark and Buzz were just as eager to do a little fishing
themselves. Contrary to what some think, guides and outfitters don’t get to fish that much. Instead, they’re busy doing the countless, mundane, mostly invisible things that allow their
clients
to fish.

I’d never fished the White before. I’d heard it was a good trout river but that most of it was private and what public water there was could be hard to find unless you were a local who was already dialed in. Of course, it’s in the nature of rivers like this to be private, at least here in Colorado, with our unenlightened stream access laws. Much of the state is a beautiful but steep, infertile landscape and back in the homesteading days the first settlers grabbed up the river valleys with their flat meadows and year-round water. Desirable real estate being what it is, most of it has stayed in private hands ever since. There was a time when you might have been able to sweet-talk your way onto places like this with a six-pack of beer and the promise of a limit of cleaned trout. Ranchers were often proud of their fishing, but they seldom had time left at the end of a long, hard day to fish it themselves, so it was mostly appreciated by visiting relatives, friends from town and the occasional polite stranger.

You can still wangle access from time to time, but many of these places have now been leased to outfitters to help pay the property taxes or sold outright by people who saw the family spread less as a heritage and more as a grubstake to a different life. The consequence is that some of these places are now fished much harder than they once were and by a different class of people: in extreme cases, those who think roughing it is wearing an L.L. Bean sport coat instead of the usual Louis Vuitton.

I got off the interstate at the town of Rifle, gassed up, grabbed a cup of convenience-store coffee and headed the forty-some miles north on State Highway 13 toward Meeker. The speed limit is sixty, but this is the kind of lonesome two-lane blacktop where you stand an equal chance of being passed by a young buck doing eighty in a dual axle pickup or getting stuck behind an elderly rancher going eighteen
miles an hour in a thirty-year-old station wagon. It also pays to keep an eye peeled for cattle. Over here the yellow signs along the shoulder still say
OPEN RANGE
, while on the east side of the Rockies too many people didn’t know what that meant, so they changed them to
CAUTION, COWS ON ROAD.

I mention the drive in some detail because the journey itself is the destination, as the Buddhists say, and because it was somewhere up this road that I stopped feeling pressed for time and was suddenly just going fishing. Of course, going fishing always seems like the answer, even when it’s not clear what the question was.

I got to the K bar T a little after eleven o’clock and was greeted by Princeton, who passes as the ranch dog. Princeton is the result of a romance between a Chihuahua and something small, white and wiry. He’s a friendly little guy with a head smaller than the average house cat and he’s smart enough not to venture out into the open where he could be picked off by a golden eagle or red-tailed hawk by day or an owl at night. Given time and an overriding affection for all dogs, you get used to him and remind yourself it’s not his fault that he looks like a wet chicken.

After a quick, early lunch, Mark and I drove half a mile across a meadow and waded up a shallow side channel to the river. (Buzz had unspecified ranch business to take care of and said he’d try to join us later.) Here in its upper valley the White is what a Coloradan would call a medium-sized river. It was the second week of September, so it was low enough to be a little bony, but you still had to search out a place shallow enough if you wanted to cross. Mark said it wasn’t floatable this high on the drainage except maybe at the height of spring runoff when it would be pointless to fish it.

The ranch is at an elevation of a little over 6,000 feet—almost exactly the same as my place on the other side of the mountains—so I knew that by the end of the month there’d be a hard frost, a glaze of morning bank ice along the river and maybe a dusting of snow. But
for now it was still hot, windless high summer: the kind of indolent weather that makes you think of a lawn chair in the shade and a good book. Mark said the last group they’d had in had landed over three hundred trout from this stretch of the White in two days. That’s a good testimonial, but it also meant that most if not all of the willing trout there had felt a hook recently and no doubt still remembered it.

Mark left me at a deep, complicated bend pool with an overhanging cottonwood on the far bank and walked upstream to the next run. I ran a size 12 hopper through several current seams and finally got a fourteen-inch brown trout. Then I made a long cast with a hard upstream mend to the shady slick on the far bank. Three things happened simultaneously: I saw that I was at the wrong angle for a good drift, a large trout turned downstream after the fly and the fly itself began to drag enough to leave a wake. Naturally, the fish smelled a rat and disappeared. Chances are he’d had an unpleasant run-in with a grasshopper in the recent past. I waded upstream and made a dozen more casts with better drifts, but the fish was spooked and wasn’t about to take a second look.

The rest of the day went very much like that. We started at the top end of the ranch property and leap-frogged downstream, cherry-picking the best-looking runs. This was beautiful water with long, cool, oxygenating riffles pouring into deep, fishy pools, glides and cut banks. But as good as it looked, strikes were scarce and what at first looked like good takes were often large trout turning away at the last possible second, splashing the fly with their tails. Buzz joined us for a few hours in the middle of the afternoon and landed the biggest trout that was caught: a fat cutbow I’ll guess at seventeen inches. But for the most part, the fish seemed reticent and spooky, and even those that were tempted usually thought better of it in the end.

I tried a weighted nymph dropper behind my grasshopper, but it didn’t help. Neither did swinging a Muddler Minnow. Fishing a brace of nymphs with weight in the deeper runs got us whitefish. Some of
them were nice and big and plenty of fun to catch; they just weren’t what we were after. The few trout we did get were the smaller ones, at least compared to the dripping hogs in the snapshots at the ranch.

There’s an entire school of fly-fishing literature dedicated to techniques for catching trout under difficult conditions. None of it is wrong, but much of it ignores the obvious fact that even the best rivers have their off days, just as even the finest musicians have those nights when they’d rather be home watching
I Love Lucy
reruns than playing another gig. The truth of the matter was put succinctly by the hundred-year-old Michigan angler Rosalynde Johnstone, who once said, “Any fish will bite if the fish are bitin’.” Taken either literally or metaphorically, that may be all you need to know.

Buzz left after a while to do more unspecified work. Mark and I fished until dusk, hoping for an evening caddis hatch, but nothing much happened. As hot as it had been during the day, the air chilled quickly when the sun got low, and there weren’t many bugs. Mark seemed a little disappointed, as guides often are when what they know to be good water doesn’t fish as well as it could. I wouldn’t have minded hooking one or two of those big trout that refused my fly, but mostly I was just glad it was me fishing instead of a paying customer who might not have felt he was getting his money’s worth. Those high-score days the trout counters are after do happen from time to time, but it’s easy to forget that they have lasting if not permanent effects. By all rights, a stretch of water like this should be rested for a week after a three-hundred-fish pounding.

That night Buzz’s wife, Rose, fried several chickens with rice and gravy, green beans, coleslaw and cornbread. Rose does the cooking at the K bar T—as she did at High Lonesome Ranch, another fishing outfit south of there where I’d first met these folks—and she’s real good at it. Food is important to fishermen. Success, failure and the infinite gradations in between all make us ravenous, and bruised egos at the end of slow days respond especially well to good cooking.
Every outfitter knows that there are people who use a fishing trip as an excuse to do things they’d never think of doing at home. The most manageable of us simply eat too much and fall asleep.

Buzz was quiet at dinner, but then he’s always quiet. He’s a large taciturn man with the physique of the movie version of a Navy Seal: a large neck, barrel chest and arms so muscular he can’t quite drop them to his sides. Even when he’s relaxed, he looks like he’s about to lift something heavy. He grew up in family fishing camps, got it in his blood and has guided himself for the last twenty years. Rose told me that when he announced a few years ago that they’d be running a lodge—effectively going into what’s now called the “hospitality business”—she had her doubts. But as it turned out, Buzz’s unthreatening but imposing presence and minimalist conversational style make him a more effective camp manager than the usual talkative glad-hander.

The next morning Buzz, Mark and I drove over to the spring creek, piled into a four-seat ATV and motored up to the top end on a narrow two-track through thick willows. Like all the water on the ranch, this creek is unimproved: basically a mile of willowy marsh with beaver ponds and channels running through it. The springs run all year, but they gush in the spring and dribble in the fall in response to the river-fed water table. This late in the season the water was low and the current imperceptible. It was pleasantly cool early in the day, but the water was excruciatingly clear, the air was dead calm and the sun was bright. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky except for a few wispy mare’s tails clinging to the peaks of the Williams Fork Mountains on the eastern horizon, where they’d do us no good at all.

Mark said most of the water would be too low to fish this late in the season and that our best shot for trout would be in the big beaver pond at the head of the creek. On the way up there, he told me they didn’t bring all their fishermen here because even in less demanding conditions it takes at least decent casting and a minimum of finesse to fish it. I think he meant that as fair warning.

I don’t estimate the size of ponds well, but I’ll say this one covered more than one acre, but less then two. (Or maybe more than two acres, but less than three.) There’s no telling how deep it was, but by late summer the weed tops had grown to within inches of the surface. There was a small pod of apparently large trout boiling out at the end of what looked like my longest cast and a few others working above the beaver dam off to our left. Wading closer was out of the question. In water like this you’d sink to your armpits in black muck within three steps, and even if you didn’t, your spreading ripples would spook the fish.