All Fishermen Are Liars Read online

  One rainy morning we flew out to the Karluk River, skirting a high rock cliff shrouded in mist and then turning south along the Shelikof Strait. We landed on a wide tidal lagoon on the lower river amid no less than a thousand herring gulls, every last one of them alternately picking at a salmon carcass and screaming at the top of its lungs. The riverbank was littered with dead salmon: mostly spawned-out sockeyes—some nearly whole, others just gull-picked skeletons—as well as what was left of some larger silvers that had been recently eaten by bears. The river itself was a thin stew of decomposing fish parts, bear and bird crap and shed gull feathers. It smelled, not unpleasantly, like an alley behind a sushi restaurant.

  When I started fishing there were five bears in sight on the far bank: two larger males spread out upstream and a big sow with twin cubs downstream. While we were there, two younger males moseyed around the bend downstream, gave us long, disgusted looks as Trent and Chuck walked toward them yelling “Hey bear! Hey bear!” and then waded casually across the river to the far side, never once glancing back.

  Casting along fifty yards of river, I landed several nice-sized sockeyes of five or six pounds. These weren’t the fish I was after, but they’re so bizarre-looking that they’re always fun to catch. When a sockeye enters freshwater and begins to mature sexually, its jaws lengthen and enlarge, its teeth grow big and snarly and its now-deformed head turns a sickly green color. Meanwhile, the body swells up into a tall hump and turns bright red. Compared to the silvery, streamlined ocean form of this fish, a spawning sockeye looks like a werewolf in a Santa Claus suit and is always worth a photo to show the folks back home.

  The silvers were lying deeper than the sockeyes in the slow current, and it was possible to target them after a fashion by giving the weighted streamer a little more time to sink. These were bright fish fresh from the salt that would make two or three long, fast, angry runs before they tired enough for the bulldogging endgame.

  At first I thought it was just my imagination when, after a couple of hours, the current seemed to slow down. By the time it stopped altogether and then began flowing in the opposite direction, I’d figured out on my own that the tide was coming in. The fishing shut off abruptly, and as I continued to cast without a strike, a particularly gruesome dead sockeye that had drifted past fifteen minutes earlier bobbed by going the other way.

  On the flight back we made a detour to scout for more silvers. We flew up the Zachar River with our right wingtip tight to one ridge. That happens a lot and it used to make me nervous until I learned the reason for it. From time to time a pilot flying up a narrow valley is faced with the necessity of turning around because of weather, engine trouble or whatever. If he’s out in the middle of the valley, he may not have room to bank in either direction without hitting one ridge or the other, but if he’s hugging one side, there’s a better chance he’ll have room to turn.

  We didn’t spot any salmon, so we banked over a low saddle and flew down another smaller stream toward Brown’s Lagoon. It was just a boggy trickle at first, but it took on more volume until, a half mile from the mouth, it widened into a single long bend pool with a dark stripe down the outside that Chuck said was a pod of maybe a hundred silvers.

  Back at the lodge the crew was busy cleaning halibut, the largest of which weighed about eighty pounds, and on the porch outside the mudroom I nearly tripped over the caped-out head of a nice blacktail buck. It had been a good day all around.

  That evening a friend of the owner’s, a commercial fisherman named Pete, came to dinner. He was just what you’d expect: ropy arms, big chest, frost-colored beard on a wind-burned face and dressed only in a T-shirt on a chilly, rainy evening. When we were introduced, we looked at each other suspiciously, and Pete asked, “Do we know each other?” I said I thought maybe we did, but I couldn’t quite place him either.

  We eyeballed each other all through the meal and afterward went out on the porch in a light drizzle to pick this thing apart. It took an hour of comparing lifetimes, but we decided we could only have known each other in passing in San Francisco in the summer of 1964, which would also account for our fuzzy memories. Maybe we ran into each other at parties or free concerts, or the City Lights Bookstore, or the Coexistence Bagel Shop or even at the very corner of Haight and Ashbury itself. We probably hadn’t been close friends, but we’d have had to be more than just faces in the crowd to each other for the memory to have stuck this long. We stared at each other in the light leaking from the warm, dry lodge, wondering what forgotten adventures we might have shared. And here we were forty-six years later in Alaska: gray-haired survivors, alive and well and each chasing salmon in our own way and for our own reasons. It was heavy, man.

  The next morning Trent, Chuck and I were dropped off at Brown’s Lagoon by a party of saltwater fishermen from the lodge with the promise that they’d pick us up at high tide in the afternoon. We hiked upstream through a narrow canyon that at low tide was steep-sided and slippery with mud and kelp. At the top of this cut, we broke out into a pretty valley ringed with low, forested mountains half hidden in clouds and followed the little river upstream to the pool full of salmon we’d seen from the air the day before.

  As we strolled around the last bend, we came face-to-face with a large bear at a range of about thirty yards. I yelled “Bear!” more or less pointlessly and the crack in my voice made it a two-syllable word. The bear, bless his heart, turned around and trotted off upstream.

  We walked on to the pool, where I tied on a fly, being careful with my knot while staying peripherally hyperaware of my surroundings. Kodiaks are apex predators and a big adult male like the one we’d just seen can weigh as much as fifteen hundred pounds. They make a strong and lasting impression. I caught two bright silvers on a handful of casts, one from the bottom of the run, the other from the top. Then we sat on the bank to rest the water. We’d already decided this was the best strategy. There might be the odd salmon somewhere upstream, but aerial recognizance had suggested that this was the one and only honey hole.

  This turned out to be a sublime afternoon of fishing. I’d catch two big, hot salmon; then we’d relax on the bank for the better part of an hour to let the pod settle down while talking about the things fishermen talk about. I learned that Chuck and Trent had known each other back home in Montana and that Trent was the older of the two at a venerable thirty-one. Chuck didn’t volunteer his age, but Trent said he was as young as his baby face made him look and not a bad-looking kid, really, except for that great big head. Chuck smiled patiently, apparently having endured this baby-faced, bigheaded business all season.

  I kept looking around nervously and finally said I was worried that the bear was still back in the trees behind us, stewing about being run out of the only pool on the river that held salmon and maybe even working up a grudge about it. Trent said he’d been thinking the same thing, but that he was more concerned that when he’d talked to his girlfriend by satellite phone last night, she’d used “the M word.” That would be marriage, not money.

  I ended up landing six big silvers, the largest weighing somewhere in the high teens, and one lonely little pink salmon that had shown up late for the party. All his potential mates and rivals were already spawned out and dead on the bank, their bones picked clean by birds and their skulls leering vacantly at the sky. I felt sort of sorry for him.

  On the last pass through the pool, the hot-pink streamer I’d been fishing all week finally stopped working and Chuck suggested I try a different pattern: basically the same lead-eyed rabbit-fur-and-tinsel number, except in purple. I asked him what the two patterns were called. He said he didn’t know and, this being Alaska and all, they might not even have names. Then he added, “Tell you what, let’s call the pink one the Haight and the purple one the Ashbury for old time’s sake.”

  My biggest silver came on the last day, which is a nice way for it to happen. We were back on the Karluk, and I tied into a salmon that ran so
far and fast that at first I thought I’d foul-hooked a big sockeye. Trent and Chuck thought the same thing until we saw it was an extremely large male silver with the fly fairly in its jaw, at which point things got serious for a few minutes. When we finally got the fish on the beach, Chuck called it at “Less than twenty pounds, but not too much less” and one of the bigger silvers he’d ever seen.

  I don’t always have the presence of mind to quit on a good fish, but it was late on the last day and my wrist and forearm ached from playing salmon, so I reeled in and found a rock to sit on. Once in a great while fishing can seem like a possible route to the virtues of clarity and restraint. Or maybe there are just times when enough is enough. In any case, I wanted to let this last one sink in, not as a set of weights and measures or a number on the way to the final score, but as a singular, flesh-and-blood fish with a life of its own.

  15

  MONTANA

  We were driving over a dirt-road pass through the Salt River Mountains in Wyoming: two muddy wheelruts running next to the stream we’d fished that afternoon, which, this high up the drainage, was narrow enough to straddle. It was near sunset on a clear September evening, and as we started down the backside of the pass, the valley ahead of us was a bowl of purple shade trimmed in gold. Doug reached over and turned on the GPS unit in the pickup. A meandering red line stretching to a digital horizon appeared on the screen, and a female voice said, “Street name unknown.”

  It was well past dark by the time we found rooms at the only motel in a three-block-long, partially boarded-up town out on the state highway. Dinner was microwaved frozen pizza at a bar filled with roughnecks and cowhands where the country and western music was loud enough to rattle the windows and the betting on a game of 8-ball seemed way too serious. The town cop was sitting in his cruiser across the street, waiting to break up a fight or pick off drunk drivers at closing time. Meanwhile, he was relaxing with a cup of coffee and a cigar, enjoying the peace and quiet while it lasted.

  If I’d had my way, we’d have been camped on that last stream so we could fish one more day, but then the drawback to a four-person road trip is the increased likelihood that some will have to be home before others. As it was, we’d raced down from Montana that morning and spent a few hours on a lovely piece of cutthroat trout water that deserved at least two full days. The plan was to put on another fifty or sixty miles yet that evening, find a place to stay the night and then make it home to northern Colorado with a few hours to spare. It was the kind of rush job that makes you wonder if the quickie can play any positive role in a contemplative sport.

  As it turned out, everyone landed a few pretty Snake River cutthroats and we were back on the road only an hour and a half later than we’d planned. I was the one who held things up. By the time I got back, everyone was already out of their waders with their gear packed and milling around the pickup impatiently. I said I’d lost track of the time, which they understood to mean that I hadn’t really lost track of the time but knew they wouldn’t leave without me.

  This had been a high runoff year in the West and we weren’t the only fishermen who were running around late in the season trying to be everywhere at once before winter locked it all up again. In my home drainage on Colorado’s northern East Slope, the spring snowpack was measured at 343 percent of normal—the highest ever recorded. In other parts of the Rockies it was more like 250 percent; maybe not biblical proportions, but enough to extend the runoff far into what should have been dry-fly season. Even in mid-August, trout that would normally be sipping mayflies were acting more like catfish: holding deep in brown water and feeding by scent and feel. In many streams, fishing anything short of a gob of worms and a sinker had begun to seem like an exercise in style.

  Runoff is normally a good time to travel to other parts of the West, but this year the entire continental mountain range was more or less in the same boat. An August trip to Idaho was canceled outright when the guide said he had no idea when, or even if, the river would come into shape. A July trip to Montana was tentatively postponed until September because, as our contact said, “There are only two rivers in the state that are fishable and everyone in Montana with a fly rod is already there.”

  It brings a man low to live in good trout country and not be able to find a place to fish near home. Some tailwaters held out for a while after the freestone streams got high and muddy, but as the reservoirs filled to capacity with runoff, dams were opened to flush the excess water. (“Excess water” is not a term you normally hear in a semiarid climate.) One small tailwater that fishes well at a hundred cubic feet per second was cranked up well past a thousand, and a few of us drove up there—without fishing tackle—just to look at it.

  Some local guides had their clients dredging nymphs and split shot along the swollen banks of streams where they’d normally be casting size 16 caddis flies. A few beginners thought this was just what fly-fishing is like, while others knew the score but were happy enough to be fishing for trout in beautiful surroundings. But there weren’t many of either, and some outfitters watched the better part of a year’s worth of bookings wash downstream with the high water. It was the last thing they needed in the middle of what some journalists were calling the Great Recession.

  One day in July, I ducked under a locked Forest Service gate and hiked a mile up the closed road to a trailhead on the edge of a nearby wilderness area. Once there I strapped on the snowshoes I’d carried in and headed up to a lake I know at 10,400 feet. I quickly lost the trail under fifteen-foot snowdrifts, but I didn’t think I’d need it. I knew I had to work my way up and west into a large cirque and then, at a point I assumed I’d recognize, cut north, drop into a willow-choked creek bottom, ford the stream and continue on through a stand of krummholz to the small lake.

  This was an experiment. I’d never been up there in deep snow before, and I wasn’t sure that the lake was thawed or if the stream would be low enough to cross, even at the usual shallow spot. But it worked out okay. I missed the ford by a few hundred yards—the snow cover made everything look different—but once I spotted the creek, I knew where I was and easily backtracked. I waded across the creek with exaggerated care, using a stick for balance and carrying the snowshoes under my free arm. The water was ice-cold, and I understood that if I went in I’d be hypothermic in seconds and several miles through deep snow from the truck.

  The lake was open except for a hundred-foot stretch of the south shore where a snow bank hung a twelve-foot-high, windblown cornice out over the water. There were still a few miniature icebergs in the water, as well as the spreading rings from a handful of feeding trout. When I’d left the house that morning, it was sunny and around eighty degrees. Up there it was lightly overcast, breezy and in the low sixties. Before stringing up my rod, I put on the wool sweater and fleece vest I’d carried in the pack.

  I discovered this lake sometime in the 1970s. Of course, it was known to some, including whoever originally stocked nonnative brook trout in it, but it’s well out of sight of the trail that leads to the larger lake above it and it’s off-channel, so you could miss it even if you were fishing up the creek. It’s really just a permanent four- or five-acre pothole fed by snowmelt and spring seeps, but it’s rich in midges, scuds and small caddis, and supports a population of feral brook trout. And to this day it doesn’t appear on any map I’ve seen of the area.

  I fished a small hare’s ear and partridge soft hackle that afternoon and landed eight or nine trout, the largest between twelve and fourteen inches. The brookies here have always been unusually gorgeous, possibly because the breeding season is so early at this altitude that they just stay in spawning colors all year long. In this drab, wintry landscape, they were so brilliant they seemed to be lit from the inside.

  On the hike out I convinced myself that I was the first to fish the lake that year. After all, the ice couldn’t have been off for long and the only tracks I saw were the ones I made coming in. Of cours
e, there are plenty of fishermen around who know these mountains well—a whole generation of them more intrepid than I am—and their tracks could have been erased by sun and wind in a matter of days. But the story I’m sticking to is that I was the first.

  Less than a week later, I was back up there with a friend I’ll call Tom, who by then was living in my spare bedroom. The fish weren’t quite as eager that day, but we caught a few and Tom saw but didn’t hook one he guessed at sixteen inches. As a lifelong Michigan fisherman, he has a soft spot for brook trout, and he said he’d never seen anything prettier than this little lake nestled among stunted Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir under snow-capped, 12,000-foot peaks.

  Tom was one of the over 15 million Americans who were out of work that year, all with depressingly similar stories. He’d been without a job for several years in a state with an official unemployment rate of 16 percent. (When I asked what he did all that time, he said, a little cryptically, I thought, “I fished every day in season, but not always all day.”) Finally he got a job here in Colorado and relocated, arriving with a U-Haul trailer towed by a preposterously ratty old Toyota with a Michigan plate on the back and an expired New Mexico plate in front. He was all but broke by then, and I lent him money for rent and car repairs (which he paid back out of his first paycheck), although he managed to scrape together $56 on his own to buy a nonresident season fishing license. He could have waited six months to establish residency, but that would have cost him half a year’s worth of fishing.

  But by the time we hiked up to the lake, Tom had been laid off from the new job (last hired, first fired) and had lost his house in Michigan to foreclosure. When he had to leave the room he was renting because that house was also foreclosed on, it was largely a formality, since he could no longer afford rent anyway. That’s when I told him to move in with me. He agreed only because it was either that or sleep in his car. I was happy to do it and happy to be able to do it. After all, thirty-five or forty years ago you wouldn’t have picked me out of my crowd as the guy who’d one day be stable and solvent enough to come to for help. Through it all he continued to look for steady work, did whatever odd jobs he could pick up and went fishing whenever he had a day off or even just a few free hours. He was like a kid in a candy store with a whole state full of new trout streams to explore. When I mentioned that it was a shame about the high runoff he simply said, “Well, shit happens.”