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This essay first appeared
in slightly different form in The Yale Angler's
Review:
Among the Hang Gliders
Even before there was a movie, there was the
book. The movie is Robert Redford's adaptation
of A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean,
and many Montanans have referred to it with
great contempt, especially since it has caused
legions of tourists to descend on Bozeman,
Missoula, and Helena every summer, not to
mention the real estate developers, movie
stars, and—best of all—exhorbitant
property taxes that have come with the state's
newfound popularity to make life more complicated
for the average Montanan.
But this story goes back to
the late seventies, when A River Runs Through
It was still only a book. In fact, it wasn't
even available in paperback. I read it and
thought to myself, "This looks like a
great way to fish." And it was. I took
flyfishing lessons from a fellow named Doug
McNair, and our final exam took place a few
hours from my home in
Seattle near Morton, Washington, on a tiny
stream called the Tilton River. For most of
that day a dozen or so of usthrashed around
and surrounded a small number of planted rainbow
trout planted in its waters. For all we knew
these fish had been genetically programmed
to grow at astounding rates when force-fed
liver pellets in fish hatcheries, and self-destruct
by striking any lure or fly in their vicinity.The
day ended with few fish caught, and I remember
saying to myself, "There must be more
to it than this." There was, and that
is the subject of this story.
A year or so went by, but I
still hadn't had any angling adventures worth
noting. At that time in the local fishing
community and circulating in the gossip at
Seattle area fly shops was talk of the seep
lakes of Eastern Washington. These were lakes
in the hollows and coulees of the desert on
the other side of the Cascade Range that hadn't
existed a few years before. They had come
into being only because the Grand Coulee Dam
and Potholes Dam had raised the water table
when the lakes behind them were filled. Several
of the new lakes had been set aside by the
Department of Game as "Quality Water"
with a restricted limit, and the rest was
history. The rich waters came to be filled
with large trout which, even though they were
planted and anything but native fish, fought
hard and had been known to leave anglers gasping
with excitement.
To fish in these lakes I first
had to get directions, so I enlisted the aid
of a parent of one of my students, Larry Wheeler,
who had been going to them for years. It was
necessary to walk into the lakes across an
old railroad grade, and one of the amazing
things about this man was that he drove a
vintage car—a Nash or Studebaker or Dodge
Dart—that had actually sustained damage
to the front fender where it came down around
the chassis from bouncing over those very
same railroad tracks in the early days when
it had been possible to drive to the lakes.
Accompanying
us were two of my students who had been lured
by my rhapsodizing about catching large trout
on fly rods. Kris Moe and Chris McKey were
close friends, and though they might at first
have been confused because of their first
names, it soon became apparent that they were
quite different. Chris was low-key, sweet-natured
person and very nearly a
perfect student, but he wasn't given over
to emotion in quite the same way that Kris,
who was bigger and played on the basketball
team, was. Yes, Kris was more of a worrier,
but compensated for the higher stress level
by being possessed of a delightful ability
to laugh at his own foibles and project a
warm, yet ironic smile into the furthest corners
of the room.
Off we went. It was a lovely,
sunny May morning, and back in those days
hang gliders would catch the thermals off
the north-facing cliffs of the Saddle Range
and drift down a couple of thousand feet to
the desert below. It seemed propitious to
look back over our shoulders as we hiked toward
the lake and see these colorful shapes slipping
downward, silhouetted against the nearly perpendicular
rock walls behind. Larry took us along a trail
to the shore of the lake, suggesting that
we fan out and fish the shallows where we
might stand in our waders. I followed him
a little
further east to where the path sloped sharply
upward, though, and he pointed out into the
beautiful, clear water and said, "Shhh."
For there were cruisers that
day along the lake shore, and Larry loved
sight fishing for trout more than any other
method. He crouched low to the ground and
began to pull his line vigorously from the
reel, single hauling it out into a loop as
fast as he could. This was back before specialized
nymph and pupa patterns made lake fishing
as precise as
it is today, and, as for access to the lake,
there were probably as many people wading
as there were out in boats they'd carried
in. Nowadays ninety-percent of the people
who come to the seep lakes fish from float
tubes, but then things were different. Wheeler
fished a big Carey Special on a 4XL hook,
and he was obviously planning on using this
ultimate "general" pattern to make
an impression on the fish. It did so, and
almost immediately he was fast onto a big
rainbow which went screaming out into the
deep water in its bid for freedom. I must
have said something like, "Whoa, cool,"
as he brought the fish in and released it,
though I did have the good sense to leave
him alone as he continued to stalk fish from
the high ground. I'd been flycasting about
a year, but even then I knew there was a great
difference between learning to roll-cast from
the Greenlake casting pier near home under
Doug's watchful eye and
actually sending a loop of line far enough
out into Lake Lenice to put it in the way
of a cruising fish, all without spooking it.
A limited amount of conventional overhead
casting was even possible from the rock slopes
where Lawrence had positioned himself, but
precious little, and locust trees and sage
brush seemed to obstruct the ambitious angler
at every turn.
I walked back to where Kris
and Chris had waded out. None of us had neoprene
waders that day. I'm not sure they were even
on the market back then, so, though the air
was sunny and warm, the lake water was cold
as it pressed against our knees. We fished
for a while, and then I saw Chris raise the
tip of his rod as it curved and pulsated once.
Just as quickly, it was straight again. Kris
hadn't seen the strike, and a few moments
later said, "I wonder whether there really
are any fish in here or not."
"Just you wait,"
said Chris, who had by now tied on another
fly and was throwing his line back across
the water to the same spot.
I looked down into the depths
to see a small, pale green swimming creature
attach itself to my waders and begin to climb
upward. "A damselfly," I thought.
Taking out a size eight pheasant tail nymph
that I'd been told was a fair imitation of
a damselfly pupa, I then began to play a game
with myself, thinking of how to best cover
the water out to
the edge of the weeds toward the dropoff into
deeper water. It made sense to cast once straight
out into the middle of the lake at a ninety-degree
angle, then off to each side, perhaps occasionally
even casting into the very shallow water perpendicular
to shore. My mind was completely absorbed
in this Euclidian line of thought when something
happened that was so mysterious and transforming
that it could never be described by lines
or angles of the fly line and rod itself.
No, this force was not only sudden but seemed
to represent a sort of crisis of one world
meeting
another. I never even saw the fish, but I
saw then why Chris had said "Just you
wait," and I understood in small measure,
too, how wonderful the waiting would be in
future. The take and sudden breakoff of the
big rainbow was really more like an explosion
with no aftermath, a blast in which the only
damage was the breaking off of a fly from
the rather detumescent-looking fragment of
tippet that remained.
All of us broke off fish that
day. We couldn't say quite how big they were.
Three pounds? Five pounds? We weren't using
any tippet lighter than four-x, but it's also
worth remembering that none of us had had
any experience with trout this strong, big,
and unpredictable—nor were our knots
particularly well-tied. Just a few minutes
after that first strike
another fish had spared my tippet by only
slashing at my nymph. It left me to retrieve
a pathetically mutilated fly whose folded-back
pheasant tail fibers had been ripped through,
a fly whose wing case was transformed into
what looked like a partially opened parachute.
Since then I’ve heard people say that
the beaten up and chewed version of this or
that fly works better than the original; from
time to time I've even believed them, but
if they could've seen this pheasant tail nymph,
they wouldn't have wasted their time on such
a story. It was mangled so badly that it looked
more like Jim Hendrix's hair after a performance
than the original pattern.
Since the three of us broke
off or otherwise lost so many fish that day,
in my memory it becomes transformed from the
utter failure it seemed at the time to a triumph
in which I recall the quickening pulse every
time a fish would make a sharp, panicked pull,
then break free. But it was more than that.
In my mind's eye I can see those same fish
on a blistering hot August day crashing to
the surface to take blue-bodied adult damselflies.
Or in the early spring cruising the shallows
gulping down chironomids, their mouths moving
as they circle tightly in a small bay where
the tiny black
swimmers are wriggling toward the surface.
Or, perhaps best of all, lying still under
a foot of ice when the temperature drops down
to 0 degrees in early January and there is
hardly any movement at all under the surface
of
the lake except for the occasional doomed
scud flitting from one strand of weed to another
in the darkness down near the bottom.
Larry caught a few more fish
sight casting that day, but we three neophytes
never really did figure out what had hit us.
It was an odd mixture of exhilaration and
frustration we felt walking back toward the
car, the pastel hang gliders still drifting
imperceptibly downward on that spring afternoon,
back when few people realized just how dangerous
hang gliding could be. I've thought about
the day a lot since then. Kris has become
a doctor. Chris joined the Navy and a few
years ago was a submarine officer. Both still
looking below the surface, it would seem.
How appropriate, that in the company of the
man who'd smashed up the underside of his
car bouncing over the old railroad tracks
to visit Lake Lenice, we three would find
ourselves searching for invisible forces out
of sight, forces that were, that day at least,
too powerful for us to control.
When we three stepped into
the the path of these big, feeding trout,
it was as though we'd momentarily become wild
and unpredictable like them, linked as we
were by a slender, optimistic thread of monofilament.
For just a second they had been tethered to
us, and for that brief instant our hearts
raced in the expectation that we might tame
them. And whether the strike took the form
of a sudden speeding up of line as it took
off at an angle to the rod, or a rattling
of the plastic flyline through the guides
as the sudden, unbearable tension of a big
swimmer in a state of alarm made itself felt,
it was always something that gave us wonder,
something that would never lose its mystery
for us, coming as it did from a world we could
only view darkly and from a distance.
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