Fire Season (11 page)

He tells me that once, while riding south on the Pacific Crest Trail, he decided against following the trail through the desert to the Mexican border and turned instead for L.A. There he rode his horse down Hollywood Boulevard and ended up, eventually, in a black neighborhood, staying with a young lady whose neighbors didn’t take kindly to a white interloper with three horses shacking up with one of their own. He was pulled into an alley, a pistol stuck to his ribs, and told in no uncertain terms never to show his face there again. “But hey, women love horses,” he says. “Best way to pick up girls is to ride through a city on a horse.”

About the fifth time I ask the question
Why do you ride?
, he finally decides to answer it directly, instead of with an anecdote: “I get antsy if I stay in one place more than a couple of months.” His stories all have a mythopoetic ring about them. He tells of riding out of the redwoods onto a ridge overlooking San Francisco and being so stunned by the beauty of the night lights of the city, the bridges, the bay, that he simply had to find a way to cross the Golden Gate on horseback. He petitioned the city but was turned down: no stock allowed, a remnant law meant to deter Basque sheepherders back in the day. He decided his best chance was to cross in the middle of the night but he didn’t count on the surveillance cameras—there to warn of potential suicides before they jumped—which tipped off the cops to his presence. He was a quarter of the way across when he was pinched by coppers from both directions. They didn’t take kindly to his request, since he had come that far, to turn a blind eye and let him cross.

Weirdly, he’s no minimalist. He travels with portable solar panels, 12-volt batteries, a laptop, a Game Boy, a cell phone, a shortwave radio, and an infrared burglar alarm that he sets each night around his camp. In L.A. he was nicknamed the Electric Cowboy for all of his gadgets. Before I leave to hike back to the peak he tells me he’s about to retire to his blowup mattress and the NBA playoffs on the radio. “If you’re ever in Montana,” he says, “don’t bother to look me up. I probably won’t be home. But maybe we’ll meet again in the woods some day.”

A
week passes without so much as one hiker stumbling into the meadow. Amid an exalted solitude I become an aristocrat of sky, an aristocrat of time and space. On the FM radio I hear news of war, greed, corruption, hypocrisy—same as it ever was. I do not listen long. I prefer the silence, the sloth, the sweet stupefactions of landscape worship.

Every so often my stripping away of need and worry leaves me eager to be shed of even more. Four walls and a roof begin to feel like an encumbrance. The lengthening days and the coming of the full moon provide the excuse I need to leave behind what little I have in the way of modern comforts, if only for an evening. Even a mountain deserves a night alone now and then.

I stuff my pack with a sleeping bag, a bar of chocolate, a half-pint of whisky, two liters of water, a packet of camping matches. Alice eyes me intently, moans a little, her eyebrows twitching with curiosity. Something’s up and she smells it.
You and me, Spookeen
, I say to her.
We’re going fishing
.

Amid the myriad ways I’m lucky here, I count chief among them my freedom to leave the two-way radio behind at quitting time and hike with my dog and fly rod down to a stretch of trout water seven miles from the lookout and as far from the nearest road. If I hurry down the trail I can play on the creek for an hour this time of year, then hike partway back by moonlight. As long as I’m on the radio by 9 a.m., no one need know my night movements but the owls and the trout. I like the walk as much as I like the fishing, which makes me unconventional among fly fishermen, who prefer their trout water, generally speaking, a heck of a lot closer to the truck.

Two miles down the trail, in a little meadow a hundred yards below me, I see something large and dark rear up on its hind legs, its front paws curled in a tuck before its torso—a bear with its snout in the air. The snout points toward the tinkle of Alice’s collar where she walks a little ways ahead of me. I stop and crouch behind the trunk of a big Douglas fir, spy for a moment on the bear, my veins flooding with adrenaline. When the bear shows no sign of leaving, I clap my hands several times. The bear wheels, drops to all fours, saunters away through the meadow. Alice looks at me queerly, none the wiser. I’m not sure she’d agree that part of the thrill of the walk involves moving through country where neither one of us is the top link in the food chain. Black bear country isn’t nearly as spooky as grizzly country, but black bears have been known to maul a human now and then—generally around campgrounds where they’ve become habituated to humans offering food. Still, their presence keeps my senses preternaturally alert to sounds, movements, colors. At other times of the year, in other places, I’m a man with a debit card, a driver’s license, a Social Security number—a quasi-functioning member of the rat race. Out here I’m a biped with tender haunches and a peculiar smell, too slow to outrun a large predator.

Along the way to the creek, New Mexico locust perfume the fire-scarred ridges with their sweet pink flower clusters, and once I reach the headwaters, bluebells demurely show their drooping blooms, accented here and there by orange and yellow columbine. Down and down we go into a canyon bracketed by orange and pink cliffs and weird squat hoodoo rocks, through groves of aspen and a scattering of huge Douglas fir. The trail meanders back and forth across the creek. Mostly its waters are small enough to jump from bank to bank without wetting my feet, though the farther down I go the more they’re fed by hidden springs, until I’m forced to hopscotch on exposed rocks. Below a twenty-foot waterfall, which acts as a barrier to the upstream movement of the fish, I shed my pack and assemble my rod and reel, tie a bead head woolly bugger on the end of my leader. I call Alice over, give her the basic commands:
Sit. Lie down. Stay. Be good.
The stream is challenging enough for a novice like me. I don’t need the added worry of hooking her in the ear.

What this kind of fly-fishing lacks in poetry and grandeur, it makes up for in finesse and stealth. The narrowness of the creek limits my back cast, as does the overhanging vegetation—for much of its length the stream resembles a tunnel. I’m lucky to find a hole I can hit from fifteen yards away. I sneak up behind boulders on all fours, fish holes hip-high above me from below, cast from all sorts of awkward postures—crouching, kneeling, sitting. I throw a fly into each hole three or four times, and if nothing rises I move on. The fish I do catch are small: mostly eight or nine inches in length, with an occasional thirteen-incher. Some of these trout are mongrels, many of them hybrid cutbows that show both rainbow and cutthroat characteristics. Their colors run the gamut from brownish-gray to green and gold and pink, shading into orange and red, some of them with big black spots on their sides and a telltale slash of orange on either side of the lower jaw. After the McKnight Fire in 1951, ash runoff killed most of the native trout in this stream, or so it was presumed—no one can say for sure—and later the state Game and Fish Department stocked it with various non-natives, dumping whatever was at hand. Before then, the stream was home to the state fish of New Mexico, the Rio Grande cutthroat (
Oncorhynchus clarki virginalis
), now a threatened species reduced to less than 10 percent of its historic range, which once spread across 6,600 miles of mountain streams that funnel their waters to the Rio Grande.

According to scholars, the Rio Grande cutthroat appears in the first written mention of a North American trout by Europeans. In 1541, Pedro de Castañeda de Najera, a member of the Coronado expedition, noted “a little stream which abounds in excellent trout,” likely Glorieta Creek, southeast of modern Santa Fe. Over the past 150 years, mining, logging, road building, cattle grazing, fire suppression, and the stocking of non-native species have destroyed the fish in vast reaches of its range. Increasingly isolated populations remain, most of them in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, cut off from intermingling with their kind in other streams and therefore susceptible to genetic stagnation. Rising water temperatures, as a result of global warming, may also imperil their long-term survival. Government officials have so far denied efforts to list the fish as an endangered species—mainly, they admit, because they don’t have the money for a recovery program.

Some of the fish I catch show the red coloring and huge black spots of native Rio Grande cutts, but intermixed with the rainbow’s pink stripe; some of them lack the cutthroat slash mark on the lower jaw. Others show signs of interbreeding with Yellowstone cutts, another non-native once let loose in this creek. The higher in the headwaters I catch them, the more they look pure Rio Grande. Though their genetics are a jumble, state law permits catch-and-release only with a barbless hook—an admission that though no one quite knows what these fish are on a case-by-case basis without a complicated DNA test, nearly pure Rio Grande cutthroat still populate certain stretches, and, being rarer by the year, they ought to stay here. The fish I land I quickly place back in the water, holding them in my hand just long enough to whisper a heartfelt mantra:
Live long and propagate, my friend
. They may not, in fact, live long; the state Department of Game and Fish is contemplating, among other options, poisoning the stream, ridding it of every last fish, native or non-native, and restocking it with pure Rio Grande cutthroats. Whether it’s a good idea to replace these fish, mongrel though their heritage is, with a mix of wild and hatchery-raised trout of purer genetics—that’s a deeply contested question. Poisoning the fish would poison insects and invertebrates too, though some studies show the insects rebound within a couple of years. Fishing would have to be barred while the reintroduced fish took hold, annoying the sporty types who care less about identifying exactly what they catch than they do about the fact they managed to catch it. I’ve seen men at public meetings on the subject foam at the mouth in anger at the fisheries biologists; I’ve heard state Game and Fish officials bad-mouth the Endangered Species Act for being an impediment to selling sport licenses. I tend to trust the biologists over the bureaucrats, and they tell me the best chance to have a thriving trout population in the stream for the long run is to populate it with fish whose genes evolved over millennia to cope with conditions on site—pure Rio Grande cutthroats, in other words. That places me in the camp of the poison advocates, a position that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies.

At dark I return to the dog, let her sniff my hands, which excites her when they smell of fish; I like to pretend she shares in the thrill of my success. I break down my rod and strap on my pack. The moon has risen above the canyon rim to the east, cool and white as bone china. Our way back is bathed in a bluish light. Three miles below the peak, a little before midnight, we stop in an open saddle at the head of two canyons. I gather some wood, light a fire, spread my bag on a soft spot in the grass. Alice snuffles through the Gambel oak, crunching in the fallen leaves of last year, sniffing for a sign of something to chase. I eat a little chocolate, drink a little whisky. The Big Dipper tips into view, encircled by the treetops around the meadow’s edge, and below it Draco the Dragon’s tail curves. For a while I whistle back and forth with a whippoorwill, trying to call it in close for a look, but it tires of my effort at mimicry and drifts off into silence. Now and then the wind comes up, blows some smoke off the embers of my fire, scents my dreams of trout and bear.

In the morning I douse my fire with all my remaining water and toss dirt on the sodden ash to make sure the coals are dead out. I do not want to be known forever as the lookout who burned down his own mountain.

I
t is the second week of May, and we haven’t seen a spot of moisture since a snowstorm in mid-March dropped eight inches on the crest. I know because I was in it.

My friend Black Larry and I had planned a four-day backpack into the heart of the Black Range, a pre-fire-season look at the high country. We’d chosen a route entering the mountains from the east amid foothills of around 6,500 feet above sea level, climbing ten miles to the crest around 9,000 feet, following the crest north for ten miles to above 10,000 feet, and looping back to our starting point—more than thirty miles in all.

Black Larry has been a friend for years, since the moment he walked into the bar where I worked and we discovered our mutual love of baseball and backpacking—as well as the fact that we shared an alma mater, the University of Montana. (Go Griz!) He’d earned his nickname from an unfortunate tendency to harm himself while mountain biking, having broken a hip, an arm, and a finger in various accidents. Soon after our meeting we undertook to explore every corner of the Black Range on multiday trips. He figured mountain hiking would be less likely to end in disaster than mountain biking. On our first outing we lost the trail and bushwhacked for eight hours only to find ourselves back where we started, minus Black Larry’s hiking poles and about a pint of blood apiece. On every subsequent outing we’ve encountered bad weather: rain, lightning, hail storms. So it came as no surprise when, on the second day of this trip, after a punishing first-day climb up the South Fork of North Dry Creek, we woke to strange clouds and temperatures of 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Being the pyromantic among the two of us, I got a fire going to boil some coffee and heat our frozen fingers and toes. When I shouted at Black Larry to get out of his sleeping bag and get moving, he unzipped his tent flap and thrust his middle finger in the direction of my voice.