My friend Don and I have been fishing together since we were boys. He and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Ohio, and have been friends for forty-five years. Don is now a college professor. He lives in Portland, Oregonâa distance from Missoula, but near enough for us and our families to visit back and forth. Every year, sometimes twice a year, Don drove from Portland to Montana to go fishing with me.
Walking down a dirt road in Ohio with Don, both of us age twelve, on our way to fish for largemouth bass in a swamp pond in Tinker's Creek State Park: nowadays, stuck in the traffic jam or looking out at one, even the possibility of such a childhood seems amazing to me. Or fishing for bass in Argyle Lake State Park, in central Illinois, after Don moved there, he and I casting top-water plugs on the reflection of the sunset sky, plugs named Hula Popper and Jitterbug, excellent
bass-getters, which burbled and gurgled on the surface until a sudden popping downsink from below engulfed them and the hooked fish exploded upward, shaking its head in the air and rattling the lure's metal hardware: again, I'm amazed and daunted by that happiness, and at my not realizing then how great it was.
Don has certain things he says. He always has had. Certain ideas or notions or characters he invents occupy his mind, and he plays with them, conjugates and declines them, idles with them as you might idle with a basketball, shooting hoops from various angles and distances against the side of the garage. Indeed, I have seen him play with the latest new idea and shoot hoops like that simultaneously. This idea-play of his beguiles me, and I prefer it to most any comedy I see in movies or on TV, and I repeat his latest invention, and our friends and others sometimes take it up, and it passes, in a small way, into the language. An example? Well, years ago, when he was living in Illinois, he came up with the notion of Huddleston's Mangy Muttsâtick-infested, bladder-problem, mangy, slobbering cur hounds that roamed, according to him, all over the town (Colchester, Illinois), committing various outrages and depredations. Don's disquisitions on the Mangy Mutts often ended with the statement “Someone's-got-to talkâto Pete HuddlestonâaboutâthoseâDOGS!”
When we were fishing in Montana, Don was in a Generalissimo Beerax phase. Beerax (pronounced
Bee-rax
) was a tyrannical figure of awesome power who commanded a vast all-bee army. Many messages that Don left on my answering machine back then were nothing but an expressive beebuzzing. Still, on an insect level, I understood them. To my kids, Don sometimes described Beerax and his army in scary detail: “Column after column, rank after rank, wave after
wave
of drone-bee soldiers, their multifaceted compound eyes perfectly expressionless, their skin hard and chitinous, their long, pointed stingers red-hot, their minds filled with only one thoughtâfanatical loyalty to their commander, Generalissimo Beerax! Day after day, week after week, they pass in review, their marching columns all that can be seen on any TV screen, on any channel, the endless parade interrupted only by news broadcasts reporting yet another victory for Generalissimo Beerax's all-bee armies! You say you want to watch Saturday-morning cartoons? Think again, my young friends! You'll watch nothing but Beerax's drone-bee soldiers, endlessly marching, on every channel! Beerax has a single goal: world domination, along with complete control of the world's precious titanium supplies and the enslaving of little boys and girls like you who he will turn into flesh slugs and put to work in the titanium mines, far under the earth, where radioactive worms fall on you from the dimly lit ceiling!”
Talking about subjects like Beerax, and the beard of country-and-western singer Kenny Rogers, and Kenny Rogers's beard lacquer, and on and on, Don and I fished with a dedication seemingly less than hard-core. We were persistent, however. One spring, while on sabbatical, Don lived in an apartment in Missoula and took courses at the university. During those months we fished all the time. Driven by early-season angling fever, we went out in April, when the river was really too swollen with rain and snowmelt. A downpour started; raindrops landed on the olive-colored water, became gray pearls as they hit, skittered everywhere in their gray-pearl form, and vanished. We got drenched and caught nothing, but I found some oyster mushrooms on a log on a midstream island. We took them home and had them for dinner, cut in slices and sautéed.
Once we happened to be by a bridge over the Bitterroot River forty miles upstream from Missoula when a large early-spring mayfly called the gray drake began to hatch. Fish were rising promiscuously in the deep water underneath the bridge, among the big granite riprap boulders along the shore. Quarters were too cramped for both Don and me to be under the bridge at the same timeâto cast, you had to use a vicinity-clearing horizontal motion of the rod, because of the beams close overheadâso I stood back and watched. A heavy fish was rising in a semicircular basin made by two adjoining riprap stones. The range was maybe a dozen feet. Don tied on a Gray Drake, whipped his rod sideways back and forth, cast, missed, missed again, and finally put the fly right on the trout. Because of the light bouncing off the water, he couldn't see the fly, but from where I stood it registered on the glare like a blip on a radar screen. With the smallest of sips the trout took it under. In the next second the fish felt the hook, bent the rod double with an emphatic thrash, and popped the fly right off. Desolation and misery.
We lost other big fish, too. Did I secretly not
want
to catch them? More troubling, did I secretly not want Don to? I don't know what to conclude. Once he and I went to the ospreynest pool on the Bitterroot just outside the city limits. When we got there, fish were rising in such numbers that I got overexcited and for a while was almost useless. I happened to have the right fly for this particular mayfly, but it took me three tries to tie it onto Don's line. He waded in and cast and immediately hooked me in the shoulder of my vest with his backcast. I unhooked myself and moved upstream, out of the way. He waded into a deep hole we knew about by a brush pile, and a fish rose a rod length away. Don cast and the fish took the fly and made a hat-sized bulge in the surface as he
sounded. Don's rod doused down, down again almost to the water; and then, oh, the horrid deflation, the dawning self-reproach, when suddenly the rod unbent and the line went slack!
But then one fortunate nightâit had to comeâlater in the year, almost at the end of summer, when Don was in Missoula with his family, he and I went to a place on the Bitterroot which I'd been trying for weeks. It was a long, deep, straight stretch with a high riprap bank and plenty of room to cast. We fished, the sun went down, the bats and swallows flew, and not much happened in the mayfly department. A few caddis flies were on the water, but almost nothing rose to them. It got darker. I could hardly see Don on the rocks maybe twenty yards downstream. Huge fish lived in here, I knew. They might go a whole evening without rising once, and then, just as you had quit and were walking back to the car, one of the giants would rise with an insouciant gulp and a splashy tail fillip for farewell, to give you a thought to sleep on. So we stayed and stayed, into full gray-black darkness. Then, casting next to the rocks with a size 10 yellow stone fly, Don hooked something big. He shouted the few incomplete comments you shout when you're in the middle of fighting a big fish. I could hardly look, I was so afraid it would get away.
And then, gloriously, he netted it. We took it home and looked at it on the newspaper we'd spread on the counter beside the kitchen sink. The fish was a fat, hook-jawed rainbow more than eighteen inches long. Don's wife, Jane, took a picture of Don holding it up with one hand under one end and one hand under the other. For years, this was the picture of Don that his students found when they logged on to the Web site for his Internet class.
In the Clark Fork River late one fall, I caught a rainbow-cutthroat hybrid that was almost nineteen inches. I was fishing with Daryl again, and he pointed it out to me: an eccentric fish rising in a backwater pool by a scrubby bank, where I would never have expected a big fish to be. I hooked him with a long cast and fought him for many minutes. Cutthroats are so named because of a crimson slash on their throats beneath the gills. This fish, seen up close in the sparkling, buckskin-colored water, was bright as a Christmas ornament yet completely camouflaged.
In the Jocko River, on the Flathead Kootenai-Salish reservation north of Missoula, I caught one of my best-ever browns. My friend John Carter, a lawyer for the tribes, kindly took me fishing with him there. I hooked the fish on a weighted stone fly drifted deep through a narrow, brush-lined channel. If the fish hadn't taken the fly, I probably would have snagged the hook somewhere down in that branch-filled underwater world. When he struck hard and then came bolting out of there, I embarrassed myself, shouting uncoolly at the top of my lungs for John to come and see.
In the Bitterroot again, by a golf course that contributed many stray balls to the riverbed beneath my wading boots, I caught another big rainbow on a tiny fly. The trico spinnerfall was an almost continuous mat of insects on the surface, and the trout weren't so much rising as just waiting there with their heads half out of the water, straining the food whalelike through their jaws. Some days I tried the most difficult fish I could find; for many evenings in a row I fished for a highly discerning fish that rose regularly in an unhurried rhythm always in the same spot, and which never honored me with a
single strike or even a rejection, though I showed it half the dry flies I owned. During the grasshopper weeks of late summer, with my mind on something else, I caught the biggest trout of my life on a quick trip to the river in the middle of an ordinary day.
I fished at all and sundry times, unsystematically. If I went downtown to do some errands and saw fish rising in the Clark Fork, I might lose my head and forget whatever plans I'd made and run home and get my rod and try to catch them. Having so much good fishing close at hand was not always as comfortable as it sounds. Fishing hovered in my mind as the constant alternative to anything I was trying to do: Should I earn money to support my family, or fish? Should I drop the car off at the repair shop and walk home, or drive to the river and fish? Often the pressure and uncertainty made me irritable.
After we had lived in Missoula for three years, we decided to move back East. I have spent a lot of my life ricocheting between the West and the East, and a while ago I quit trying to figure out why. My wife and I missed New York; our families are in the East; we like the anonymity there; we knew we would come back to Montana again anyway. To us the decision did not seem so unreasonable. To many of our friends in Missoula, however, going back Eastâand, worse, moving to New Jersey, where we had bought a houseâwas wrongheaded to the point of negligence, even treachery. Real estate being the all-consuming middle-aged topic that it is, many of us now devote more mental energy to thinking about exactly where we would live than our forebears spent on questions of the soul and its salvation. For us to say we were leaving big-sky Montana for crowded, polluted, rat-eat-rat New Jerseyâfrom a certain point of view, it was apostasy.
Once we had decided to move, my fishing fell apart completely. The freight of specific and unspecific guilt I carry with me just routinely, which always becomes a bit inflamed on a trout stream, now raged out of control as I tried to get in some fishing during our last few months there. What a skunk I was, what a trespasser! Stomping these pristine Western riverbanks in my starchy East Coast waders, I was the cad still living with a woman he knows he is going to leave. All my efforts on the river ended in chaos and rebuke. I thrashed in the brush, caught my backcasts in trees, spooked feeding fish, lost fish once I'd hooked them, popped flies off in fishes' mouths. Once I made a beyond-miraculous cast to a tiny pocket of water between the forks of a tree branch in the river, and something huge took my fly and, ninety seconds later, agonizingly, was gone ⦠Some of my angling failures of those months pain me still.
Time moved slowly and then quickly, the way it does. The morning arrived when most of our stuff was in boxes and a moving man with a West Indian accent was walking around the house putting little numbered labels on things. On one of our last evenings I went to the Bitterroot, to a section of river with a gravel road on one side and a dairy farm on the other. It's not the most productive place to fish, but it's an uncrowded one. I didn't want to talk to anybody or have witnesses to my current phase of ineptitude. The date was late August. Hot weather had made the river low and tepid and the fishing slow. A creek enters the river near this spot, and its piled-up gravel delta is a good platform from which to observe a stretch of deep, slow water by some banks of tall grasses upstream. I rigged my rod and watched. Not much rising. The sun on the horizon sent shadows of the cottonwoods clear across the river. A party of boats came by, almost invisible, just voices in the cottonwood shadows; when they passed
through the lines of sunlight in between, the red and orange and yellow kayaking wear of the paddlers lit up incandescently.
I waded into the river. For a period I just stood and watched with my fly in my hand and my line trailing in the water, ready to cast. Little enough was going on, and the fish were rising sparingly; that was lucky for me, in a way, because I could maintain my mood and not get too nervous and shaky. At last light I caught a cutthroat of about fourteen inches on a Pale Evening Dun. That fish would be the last I caught in Montana for a long time. Then I waded to the shallow water at the edge of the creek delta and stood watching again. The caddis flies were gusting past in blizzards. When I held my flashlight in my mouth to change a fly, they blew by my face like snow in a windshield.
The last of the sunset's glow left the western horizon. I heard no rises, or almost none. I positioned my head so that the slightly lighter reflection of the starry blue-black sky lay on the black water. In that faint sheen I saw a small seam appear and disappear. I thought I heard the faintest sound of a rise. The riser might be a minnow, or a leviathan. I had a new Pale Evening Dun, size 16, tied to a 5X leader. (Why didn't I cut the leader back to a stouter tippet when I changed flies?) I cast to where the seam had been; it opened and I gently lifted the rod. Suddenly my line was headed for mid-river at top speed. The reel was whirring, the line unspooling, the rod bending, pointing to a far place in the vicinity of the Pacific Ocean. For a second, foolishly, I held the line, trying to slow the fish. The 5X tippet parted. I walked up onto the gravel delta and sat for a while on a log. There were no lights before me, just night and the river; in the blackness the great Bitterroot River swirled by.
Tomorrow, in the last of the empty cardboard boxes, I
would pack my wading boots, still wet, and the rest of my fishing gear.