All Fishermen Are Liars (5 page)

One afternoon when we’d been blown off the lake again, Gene drove us to look at the mine site. He’d given the impression that there was still a chance to stop the project, but it looked like a done deal to me. There were high chain-link fences plastered with
KEEP OUT
signs, heavy equipment everywhere and diesel exhaust in the air. The narrow dirt road we’d driven in on was in the process of being widened to superhighway proportions. Several guys in hard hats
recognized Gene and gave him the hairy eyeball reserved for tree huggers bent on stopping progress.

We drove slowly past the mine to where the Salmon Trout went under the road through a culvert. At this point the river was narrow enough to jump across, flowing out of an expanse of jack pine and alder. Bill walked into the woods and came back in a few minutes to report that there were small brook trout fining in a couple of pools. He wondered if there might be beaver ponds up here somewhere that held bigger fish. Gene was silently glum, leaning against the car with his hands in his pockets. I was uncomfortably contemplating my personal use of copper (I must have gone through pounds of the stuff for the ribs on nymphs alone). Sammy took it all in with an air of puzzlement. I got the sense that he’d rather just fish without all these complications. Me too, kid.

As soon as we got back in cellphone range on the drive home, Gene called Carla. She answered with, “Did you get arrested again?” and he replied, “Not this time.” This may or may not have been a private joke.

One calm afternoon we motored out of the bay, past the mouth of the river, and found a small pod of coasters off a spectacular rocky point. I’d just caught a nice one from under a rock overhang when a man in a canoe paddled over. His name was Paul; he was a self-confessed coaster fanatic and a member of the Huron Mountain Club, which owns the entire fishable length of the Salmon Trout. After a few minutes of conversation, he asked if we’d like to fish the river. We said okay.

Lower down it was deep, slow, brush-choked and estuarine, but higher up it was a pretty little trout river flowing through some of the last old-growth forest in the UP. Below a waterfall that formed a natural barrier, we caught some eight-to-ten-inch brookies that you’d have to describe as coaster smolts.

Later, Paul showed us an old skin mount of a coaster from the
late 1800s. A large brook trout—maybe six or seven pounds—had been skinned in one piece with the skill of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, and the skin had been sewn onto a piece of birch bark with something that looked like sinew but might have been waxed twine. The white birch bark showed spookily through the empty eye socket. There was no approximation of life here as in modern taxidermy. This thing had been dead for over a century and looked it.

I’d heard about the Huron Mountain Club only a week ago, so I had to be told how unbelievable it was to be given access. The club was started by wealthy industrialists (some might say robber barons), it covers almost the entire Huron Mountain range and it’s always been jealous if not downright paranoid about its privacy. Lots of sporting clubs bill themselves as venerable and exclusive, but few can boast of a founding date of 1889 or of making Henry Ford himself wait six years to be accepted as a member.

The club is an almost mythical presence to locals. Some who have lived nearby all their lives claim to know nothing about it. Others tell of hidden motion sensors and armed thugs who descend on trespassers like the wrath of God. Maybe, maybe not, but there
is
a padlocked gate and a guard shack manned twenty-four hours a day by guys who never smile.

Still others claim to have brazenly waltzed on more than once to fish the river without getting caught. Again—maybe, maybe not. Stories about poaching remind me of the tales of sexual conquest I heard in high school. No doubt those adventures did happen, but maybe not at quite the frequency or the fever pitch you’re led to believe.

On the way back to the cabin that evening, Bill said to Sammy, “Someday you’ll tell your grandchildren you fished the Huron Mountain Club
with permission
.”

The next day, back on the lake, Bill had a close call with a big coaster. The fish boiled up after a streamer, darting and nipping as if it knew there was a hook and wanted to bite the thing in a safe place.
The fish was on briefly—long enough to put a deep bow in the rod—and then he threw the hook close to the boat. He was big. Twenty inches easy, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. This would have been a rare keeper, but although we never talked about it, I don’t think Bill would have kept the fish.

Somewhere on the drive down to the airport in Marquette, where they dropped me off, Sammy asked what we thought would happen with the coasters. We said we didn’t know, that it didn’t look good, but could still go either way, which struck us all as an honest but unsatisfying answer. Then Bill tried to lighten things up by saying, “Maybe someday you’ll tell your grandchildren you caught coasters when they were still in the UP.”

I glanced at Sammy in the back seat in time to catch his look. Grandchildren again. I remember age sixteen. You knew there was a long haul in front of you, but spans of time large enough to encompass marriage, children and grandchildren, let alone the possible extinction of an entire fish population, seemed too theoretical to contemplate. And anyway, there were things closer at hand to think about, like the next hockey game, the next fishing trip and that blond girl in study hall—not necessarily in that order.

5

THIS YEAR’S FLY

The best motel in Basalt, Colorado, is the Green Drake. It’s clean, plain, not too expensive and you can guess from the name that fishermen are welcome. The resident dog is named Baxter. He’s a hundred-pound yellow Lab and a friendly and sudden leaner. You quickly learn that when you stop to pet him you have to throw a leg out and brace yourself so he doesn’t knock you over.

You’d have to describe the place as homey, but it hasn’t entirely escaped the gentrification that’s occurred in the twenty-five years
since Basalt was the workingman’s alternative to nearby Aspen. In almost any other town in the West, this establishment would be called the Green Drake Motel, but here it’s The Green Drake: A Motel.

April can be one of the heaviest snow months in the Colorado Rockies, so at this time of year the drive over from the East Slope is a crap shoot that takes between four and eight hours depending on the weather in the passes. With luck, we—my buddies Doug and Vince and I—pull into town by midmorning, check into the Drake and stop at the fly shop to say hello, pick up the latest fishing report and buy half a dozen of this year’s fly.

Last
year’s fly was the Hatching Midge: a plastic-winged, trailing-husk pattern that I thought had too many body parts for the size 18 and 20 hooks it was tied on. I said it was the kind of self-consciously pretty fly designed to catch more fishermen than fish, bought some anyway and caught almost all my trout on them. This year’s fly is the Morgan’s Midge. I buy the usual half dozen without comment.

The next stop is the convenience store for a thermos of coffee and a gut bomb to go for lunch. When it’s all said and done, we make the river on that first day for the second half of the banker’s hours hatch. By the time we get up there, many of the well-known pools are taken, but it’s a workday, the weekend crowd has thinned out and there’s plenty of water to choose from. It helps that the three of us have seventy years of combined experience on this river. Chances are good that we’ll find a few overlooked pods of risers and catch a few trout, and in fact we do.

The guy at the fly shop had said, “There’s no reason to be on the river before ten-thirty,” so the next morning we’re fed, rigged up and on the water by half past nine. This is such an old and obvious trick that it shouldn’t work anymore, but it still does, as often as not. We spread out in two of the best pools on the river and kill an hour sipping coffee as cars filled with guides and fishermen slow down, spot us and then speed up again, heading to their second choice.

Doug and Vince have gone upstream to grab a spot that will keep
two fishermen busy through an entire hatch. There’s a long pool with a wide tailout below an even longer riffly run. This whole stretch is lousy with trout, it pumps out flies like a factory and it’s a rare day when there’s no one fishing it. I can’t see Doug and Vince from where I am, but I know that one of them has taken the pool and the other has staked out the riffle: positioning themselves to block anyone working in from above or below.

This is a famous and often heavily fished river: one of Colorado’s best and some say
the
best for dry flies. It’s not exactly combat fishing, but you do pick up certain passive-aggressive techniques. Grabbing your spot early is one. Parking smack in the middle of small turnouts so there’s no room for another car to squeeze in on either side is another, not to mention fishing in the shoulder seasons when there aren’t as many tourists around. That kind of thing.

I’ve volunteered to fish a smaller spot downstream. This isn’t much of a run, but the sweet spot is a small back eddy against the far bank. If you could wade four feet closer to it, you could get a decent high-stick, dapping dry-fly drift, but you’re stopped short by a steep drop-off, so you’re reduced to trying for a severe pile cast with a hard left-handed aerial mend.

I’ve been fascinated by this spot since I first fished it in the mid-1970s. The first time I saw it, I said to the guy I was with, “I can’t make that cast.” He replied, “Me neither, but if we don’t try, we’ll never learn.” Thirty-some years later there are days when I still can’t make the cast and others when I can just manage it. I’ve caught a few nice big trout there, plus others that were smaller, but still on the high side of average. Two fish is the best I’ve ever done, although even one fish constitutes a victory and on days when the wind buggers my cast or I’m just off my game, I’ve spooked the pool with dragging flies and gone away skunked. It’s a good place to start the day because everything else will be easier.

That morning I go through the normal drill. I tie on the Morgan’s
Midge that worked yesterday, wait for the hatch to start and then wait a while longer, until three trout start rising in the eddy and get into a rhythm. Then I wade out to the shelf, manage several passable drifts and get a thick, heavy fifteen-inch rainbow. He puts up a good tussle on 7x tippet, and at one point I think he’ll get into the next riffle and run me downstream, but then he stops in the tailout and I land him where I stand.

The commotion puts down the other two fish, so I wade to shore and sit on a flat rock that’s been polished by eons of flowing water with a final buffing applied by the asses of fishermen clad first in canvas, then latex, then neoprene and lately Gore-Tex. I check my leader for nicks and wind knots, cut off my fly and tie it back on with a fresh knot, think about cleaning my line but don’t, and try the coffee I’ve left in an insulated cup on the bank, but it’s stone cold. Those other two trout back in the eddy still haven’t started rising again and I don’t feel like wasting the hatch waiting for them, so I walk up to horn in on Doug and Vince. The stretch they’re fishing is big enough for two strangers or three close friends.

Not counting that first day when we’re in a hurry to get to the river, we brew our own coffee, pack our own lunches and do as much cooking as possible in the room to save money. But we always eat breakfast at the Two Rivers Café. It’s half a block from the motel and it’s the last café in town that opens early and that hasn’t morphed into a “bistro” and tripled its prices. There are two schools of thought when it comes to breakfast. I’ve seen Vince start a day of fishing on a bowl of oatmeal, which is fine if you like that sort of thing. But then the hatch can last until three on a good day, which makes it a long way till lunch, so I tend toward eggs, grits, sausage and biscuits at a minimum, adding flapjacks if the weather is cold.

This year it’s sunny, chilly in the mornings and in the high forties by early afternoon. The same week last year we white-knuckled over the mountains in a moderate blizzard and fished for four days in
steadily falling snow and knee-deep drifts. I’ll take either extreme or anything in between as long as the midges are hatching, but all fishing weather can have its advantages.

Midges have been known to hatch heavily on gray, cold days, and trout can be more aggressive when the light is low. Wind sucks for casting (it’s always coming from the wrong direction), but it can mash the flies onto the surface and get the fish gorging on cripples. Trout can be skittish on bright, sunny days, but you have the benefit of being able to spot them in the clear water.

After a childhood spent lowering worms out of sight into dark water, I’ve become a sucker for the visual stuff, which is the only real reason I prefer dry flies to nymphs. I’ll never get over the sight of a trout coming off the bottom in three feet of clear water to eat, or at least look at my fly. Once you get accustomed to this quick glimpse, you can tell if it’s a brown or a rainbow and get a good sense of its size, all in the space of a split second. The brilliant high-altitude sunlight that allows that to happen is also what gives Colorado its high incidence of skin cancer, which is why the wide-brimmed fishing hat is not entirely an affectation. You may look like a doofus, but you’re more likely to keep your ears and nose well into your seventies.

The Morgan’s Midge produced well, as advertised, but one day at a long run known as Rosie’s, I locate a pod of rising trout that don’t like it. Of course, this isn’t unheard of. This is the kind of small, technical river where not even the right fly works all the time and where you’ll now and then see fish refuse naturals out of general paranoia. Still, a fly that’s been working usually fools two or three trout out of a pod of a dozen or fifteen steady risers.

Just for the hell of it, I try the Hatching Midge. I get a brief glance and what looks like a shrug from one small brown, but that’s it. No surprise there. These are fashion-conscious trout that would no sooner eat last year’s fly than they’d wear white after Labor Day.

The Morgan’s Midge I’ve been using consists of a short trailing
husk made of two or three strands of fine, root-beer-colored tinsel, a gray thread body, a stubby wing made of gray CDC and a sparse grizzly parachute hackle tied around a white foam wing post. The post is then cut off flush, leaving a tiny white button that, amazingly, can often be spotted on the water at a range of forty feet or more. I tie the ratty one I’d been using back on my tippet, and in a fit of creativity, cut the wing off with my nippers. Of course you’ve crossed some kind of line when you start trimming pieces off a size 22 fly because it’s too bushy, but that’s what we’ve come to on some tailwaters where sophisticated tackle and heavy fishing pressure have made the fish preternaturally selective.

I catch four trout in seven casts with the wingless fly and then it starts fluttering weirdly on the false cast. When I strip it in, I find that the hackle has come loose and is sticking out to the side. This had been a well-tied fly that had stayed together through something like twenty trout, but nothing lasts forever. I reach for my nippers to cut off the fly and put on a fresh one, then get a wild hair, nip off the hackle and fish it that way. There isn’t much left of the fly now—just the trailing husk, some thread and that little foam button—but it works better than it had before. I get four or five more trout on it before I finally spook the pod.

On the way back to town that afternoon, we stop to see my friend Roy Palm. Roy lives on a private stretch of river—a quarter mile or so of some of the prettiest and fishiest water in the valley—but he’s not one of the wealthy landowners who’ve arrived in recent decades. In fact, he’s an old river rat who wangled his way onto this property in the late sixties or early seventies and has held on through a series of maneuvers that would have given a Wall Street banker a migraine.

Since then he’s largely left the streambed alone, but he’s taken some small browns out to avoid overcrowding and keep the size up and he did build a head-gate-controlled side channel so wild fish from downstream can spawn unmolested. He also built benches at several of the best runs for solitary river watching. When I first fished
this property, it was a jungle of willow and cottonwood saplings, but in recent years the banks have gotten more manicured. It’s easier to fish now, but less wild-looking. There’s been a revolving roster of hunting dogs around the place and two of them—both yellow Labs—are buried in neatly marked graves above the high water line at a place called the Tree Pool. I remember them both as pups, especially Flicka, who once ate my hat.

Over the years Roy has done every job imaginable to get by, but since I’ve known him he’s guided, owned and run fly shops and tied flies professionally. Many of the standard flies on the river first came from his vise (including some rustled patterns that now bear other people’s names). His flies were always admirably spare and simple, but now that he’s more or less retired and no longer worries about selling flies, his patterns have become totally minimalist. The last batch he showed me consisted of nearly naked hooks with a little thread and a wisp of wing or a half turn of hackle: just the barest suggestion of an insect. These flies aren’t what you’d call commercially viable, but they’re deadly, and their delicacy would be startling even if they hadn’t come from the big hands of a man who looks, sounds and sometimes acts like a bear.

Roy’s fishing seems to have gone in that same direction. He was never a fish hog, but by now a day of fishing consists mostly of watching fish feed, examining insects on the water and then tinkering at the vise. He might catch a trout or two to test a pattern, but then he’ll retire to one of the benches again to watch and think—usually with his two current Labs and a fresh drink. Roy reminds me of a character in a James Crumley novel who had “a heart as big as all outdoors—and a liver as big as a salmon.”

You could say that Roy is proprietary about this stretch of river. He’s been fairly generous with access over the years—more generous than I would have been—but when someone has an especially good day, he might mosey out to announce that they’ve caught enough of
his babies and it’s time to quit. They probably felt pleasantly alone up till then, but at that moment they realized they’d been under surveillance the whole time.

It’s widely believed that Roy shoots at trespassers, but that’s not strictly true, although he does have rifle targets set up at strategic places along the river, so that if you
were
trespassing, you might inadvertently stumble into the line of fire of his flat-shooting varmint rifle. Technically speaking, that would be an unfortunate coincidence. When the sheriff stopped by after one incident, Roy shrugged and said, “There ain’t supposed to be anyone back there.”