All Fishermen Are Liars Read online

  The next morning Wendy and I floated a stretch of the Chippewa River. It was a warm, sunny June day after a week of steady rain, so we dawdled more than we normally would in the morning to let the water warm up. On the drive to the river, the woods looked lush and steamy and there were fresh puddles on the shoulder.

  This spell of soggy weather had gone on intermittently for weeks by then and was shaping up not as an isolated event, but as a definitive break in the drought that had kept the rivers worrisomely skinny for the last several years. It’s an article of faith in the Midwest that when rain spoils a picnic, “at least we need the moisture,” but in this case it was God’s own truth.

  The Chippewa was now bank-full and Wendy’s sense of relief had settled into a kind of suppressed giddiness. Fluctuations in the weather used to be just that, but now, with everyone looking over their shoulders at global climate change, there’s the fear that any extreme could become the new normal. And when you guide fishermen for a living, the thought of your rivers drying up is the stuff of nightmares. So Wendy kept pointing out sunken gravel bars that had been bone-dry last year and submerged rocks that used to be ten feet up the bank. She really wanted me to visualize it and I did remember walking the boat over some bony spots on this river a few years before, but in the end I was just another tourist whose curse is never to fully comprehend the backstory.

  We caught nice-sized smallmouth bass on top water bugs at what I thought was a fairly good clip. There’d be fifteen minutes of fruitless casting followed by a fishy bank where I’d get five hits and hook and land two or three fat bass. Wendy said the fishing was slow, but then guides endure so many clients who expect nonstop thrills that they sometimes lose sight of reality. In fact, this was perfectly good fishing for someone who still believes—in spite of a lifetime’s worth of evidence to the contrary—that catching fish is pretty unlikely. Most of the fishermen I know fully expect to land something when they head out in the morning, but for some reason I’m still as skeptical of the whole business as I was at age five when I first lowered a baited hook out of sight over the gunnel of a rowboat. I was the kind of kid who was easily fooled and some mean older boys had already sent me on a snipe hunt, so I thought this could be yet another practical joke.

  The bass were scattered that day, as they tend to be in a river that’s recently risen several feet. You can get technical about what this means to both fish and fishermen, but it comes down to bare statistics: You’ve got the same number of bass as before, now spread out in twice as much water and as puzzled as you’d be if your neighborhood suddenly doubled in size.

  Of course, when bass get flummoxed, they hunker down in the thickest cover to wait things out, so the best cast was one that tucked the bug in so tight that its rubber legs were hugging a rock or log. The fish wouldn’t move far for a fly, but when it was right where they wanted it, you’d get those quick, precise takes that are unlike those of any other game fish.

  Smallies have the air about them of being all business. They’re compact, chunky and muscular; greenish-bronze-colored overall with broken brownish olive vertical bars to break up their silhouettes. They’re so beautifully camouflaged that sometimes it’s hard to see one in clear water even when it’s within a leader’s length of the boat. In the hand they feel hard, cool, slick and vaguely grainy. Every few years some fishing industry wonk declares that smallmouth bass are poised to become “the next trout” in some bottom-line marketing sense, but so far they’ve persisted in being just what they are. If a brook trout comes off as a delicate creature on its way to a party, a smallmouth bass is a guy in coveralls clocking in at work.

  I bore down and made some accurate casts, some of which drew strikes. Every once in a while, Wendy would quietly say “Nice,” the single word that, coming from a guide, makes a fly caster’s heart soar. Of course, other casts fell far short of accurate, as usual, leaving me to wonder what the hell just happened. When you make a near-perfect cast, or even two or three real nice ones in a row, you naturally wonder why they can’t all be that good because apparently you have it in you. Likewise, when you occasionally say just the right thing, you wonder why you say the wrong thing so often.

  The next day the rain was back, and Larry and I floated the Namekagon in a steady, daylong downpour. Foul weather adds an emotional dimension to the boondocks, and although the river was within sight and sound of a state highway in places, it looked as remotely beautiful and deserted as a tributary of the Amazon. We had it all to ourselves. No one else was dumb enough to be out in a boat in the pouring rain.

  We caught bass at a leisurely pace through the morning, alternating between Larry’s current favorite bug, the Umpqua Swimming Baitfish, and some fabulous bass bugs that had been sent to me out of the blue by a Frenchman named Jacques Bordenave, who had read and liked some of my books. These were some of the most flawlessly tied deer-hair bugs I’ve ever seen. Jacques had designed them brilliantly along the lines of a Whitlock Diving Frog, only more elaborately colored—“for the pleasure of the eyes,” he said—and with wider, flatter bodies that made them dive deeper and wiggle more seductively. The fish liked them and so did the half-dozen bass fishermen I showed them to. They all wanted to know where they could buy some, and I enjoyed putting on airs by saying that they were tied for me privately in France and were unavailable commercially.

  It must have been midafternoon when the fishing shut off completely. The water temperature had been cool to begin with and according to Larry’s digital stream thermometer, the rain had been chilling the river at the rate of about a degree per hour. Bass are all about water temperature, and when it approaches and then passes their lower avoidance level, the jig is up, simple as that. We anchored out for lunch and sat with our backs to the wind, hunched over to make dry spots just big enough to keep our sandwiches from getting soggy. At this point someone is required to say, “You know, there are people who wouldn’t think this is fun.”

  I can’t recall if I kept casting as we rowed out, or just watched the river go by. I know there were several miles to go to the takeout, but in my memory, the day ended while we were still hunched over our ham sandwiches. My notes don’t help. All I wrote in my trip log that night was “Tuesday it rained.” What else can you say?

  Wednesday was still raw and gray, but the rain had petered off to intermittent, gusty squalls. There were periods of as much as half an hour when you could lower the hood on your rain jacket. This increases your peripheral vision and relieves the claustrophobic sense that you’re casting from inside a culvert.

  Larry took me to a stretch of the West Fork of the Chippewa that he hadn’t been able to fish for several years. The river here flows through flat country with a current so imperceptible it gives the impression of being a long, skinny lake. But to get in there you have to negotiate a quarter mile or so of rocks and riffle below the put-in that, until recently, hadn’t had enough water to float a drift boat.

  Larry said we might get a musky in here and the place had that look to it. Dense mats of wild rice, bulrushes, cattails and arrowroot bordered the slow channel. The water was clear but stained the color of strong orange pekoe tea from all the rain percolating through a forest floor made of pine duff and dead leaves, giving everything under the surface a metallic reddish cast. It was the perfect place for a big ambush predator with the unlikely combination of glacial patience and a short fuse.

  Muskies are a fact of life in these rivers; so smart bass fishers tie their flies onto fifty-pound fluorocarbon shock tippets to avoid losing too many expensive deer-hair bugs. Some traditional musky lures can be a foot long, but early in the season muskies eat the same frogs, mice, crawdads and small baitfish that bass do. On previous trips I’d caught a few muskies by mistake while bass fishing, and at other times I’d targeted them specifically—with equal results and using the same flies. Whether I expected them or not, they were among the nastiest things I’d ever hooked on a fly rod. Of cours
e, I mean “nasty” in the best possible sense.

  Larry opened one of his briefcase-sized plastic fly boxes and handed me a large gray and white swimming baitfish pattern with an orange band around its middle. It didn’t look like any living thing I’d ever seen, but it looked good and I obediently tied it on. There’s some intuition to fly selection and on his home water I trust Larry’s more than mine.

  In a deep spot in that short stretch of fast water, I hooked a small bass off the bank and missed a musky I didn’t see but that Larry said wasn’t that big. It was a beginner’s mistake. With the fly still in the water, I’d glanced up to look for the next spot at the same moment that I began the strip for my back cast. The fish naturally chose that instant to nip at the fly. There are a thousand things to know about muskies, but only two that are crucial. One is that if a musky follows your fly and you stop or even slow the retrieve, he’ll lose interest and go away. The other is that he’s fearless and will often follow the fly right to the boat, so you should never, ever take your eyes off it.

  I picked up a few more small bass that day, but mostly it was the long, steady slog of musky fishing, where it can be hours if not days between strikes. Once an ominous bulge followed my fly for a few feet off a bank, but nothing came of it. Later, on what had become just another one of hundreds of casts, there was a sudden, violent rush of water and a splash that resembled an anvil dropping in the water. Out of shock and awe, I set up too soon and ripped the fly away before the big musky could grab it.

  Larry put on a professorial voice and said, “In my role as guide, I’d now normally say that you should wait till you feel the weight of the fish before you set the hook, but there’s nothing I can do about fifty years’ worth of ingrained reflex.” In other words, you fucked it up, but then you already know that.

  On the morning of what would have been my last day of fishing, I was awakened before dawn by what sounded like a street sweeper going by outside the window. But it didn’t go by, and when I got up to look, it turned out to be the roar of pounding rain punctuated by flashes of lightning. When I heard Larry come in to open the shop, I went downstairs and we stood with cups of coffee looking out at a frog strangler that all but obscured the ice-cream shop across the street. It would have gone without saying, but after a clap of thunder that rattled the windows, Larry said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going fishing today.”

  The day before, Wendy and I had done a float on the beautiful Flambeau River, where I’d caught just the right number of bass—enough to lose count, but not so many as to ruin the sightseeing—including one late in the day that was as close to perfect as they get. He wasn’t all that big, but he had nosed into a narrow divot in the bank like a car parked in a garage. My cast put the deer-hair body of the fly in the water with its tail lying on the grassy bank and the fish all but crawled up on dry land to eat it. Wendy said, “That guy was holding a little tight.” That may or may not have been the last fish of the trip, but it’s the last one I remember.

  Back at the fly shop, two customers in full rain gear came in after shaking off like wet dogs on the front steps. They were dressed for fishing and bought some flies, but instead of bustling back out again, they joined Larry and me as we stared blankly out at the downpour. I was thinking about my long drive home, which would take the better part of two days. Larry might have been thinking about the clients he had booked over the coming weekend, when even if the rain stopped, the rivers would be too cold for bass. He’d have been weighing a few days of poor fishing against the enduring condition of the rivers and taking the long view.

  The customers had been all bluster and determination when they came in but now seemed on the verge of changing their minds. All four of us just stood there for what seemed like the longest time.

  20

  MARCH

  There can be dead spells in the sporting life. Droughts. Bugaboos. Runs of bad luck. Sometimes they seem to build from an innocent catastrophe that, in hindsight, looks like a precipitating event. For instance, I’ve just finished writing a book and am getting ready for a late winter steelhead trip to the West Coast. I’m a little burned out and this is just what I need: a long stretch of time away from the desk stepping and casting with a spey rod. This isn’t mindless fishing as some claim (a friend who says it could be done just as well by a zombie is wrong), but it’s true that it doesn’t demand a lot of deep thinking.

  But then the trip is abruptly canceled. One partner has unexpected work conflicts and he owns the company, so can’t pawn them off. The other partner and I decide to go without him, but then he tries to move a large safe by himself and detaches a tendon in his left bicep. He says he could hear it break as well as feel it. I imagine it sounding like a rubber band snapping inside a wet plastic bag. This after I ask if he needs help and he says, “Naw, I got it.”

  I forgive him for wrecking the fishing trip the way you forgive a puppy that eats the couch because he doesn’t know he shouldn’t. This is a big guy who not only doesn’t know his own strength but is also unclear about his limitations. Once while four-wheeling, I watched him jump out of the truck and try to move a Volkswagen-sized boulder that was blocking the road. It would have taken a backhoe to so much as budge this thing, even if it hadn’t been attached by the roots to the entire span of the northern Rockies, but he was genuinely surprised that he couldn’t just roll it out of the way.

  He has an operation to reattach the tendon and for the next six weeks can’t even use that arm to lift a coffee cup, let alone cast a spey rod. I think about going on the trip by myself but don’t have the heart for it. The biggest steelhead can come in late winter, but they come so seldom they can begin to seem nonexistent, and the weather is always grim. I try to picture the long fishless hours alone for day after day in the usual cold rain. It’s a romantic image, but it keeps going out of focus. I enjoy fishing by myself, but there are some sports—and winter steelheading is one of them—where you need a partner to help you cowboy up. Otherwise you can spend too much time in warm, dry cafés and motel rooms wondering why you drove twelve hundred miles when you could do this at home.

  A canceled fishing trip creates a specific vacuum that can’t be filled with just any old thing, so I make several day trips to the famous tailwater a two-hour drive to the south. Fishing reports from the fly shop down there are generically favorable but lack the enthusiasm you hope for. On the other hand, a guide I know says he’s whacking them pretty good down around Long Scraggy some days. But those apparently aren’t the days I’m there. On my best afternoon I manage to land two small, confused-looking trout. One is hooked fairly in the mouth on a miniature Glo Bug pattern known as a Nuclear Egg; the other is foul-hooked under a pectoral fin. I tell myself he went for my size 22 midge pupa and missed, but know in my heart that he’d been minding his own business when I inadvertently snagged him.

  The small tailwater closer to home has stayed locked up with ice through the canyon longer than usual. It’s been a colder and wetter winter than normal. Not by a lot—just a few degrees and a few inches—but global climate change has taught us that it doesn’t take much to make a big difference. Even friends who aren’t old and cranky have been complaining about the hard winter.

  Still, if you’re a fly fisherman in the Colorado Rockies, you push spring hard knowing how short it will be and how early the window can open. Even after forty-one years here, I can’t get used to hearing my first meadowlark during a snowstorm or seeing the freestone rivers get wide, deep and brown just as the cottonwoods begin to leaf out. By the time it’s what most would think of as fishing weather, with green grass, flowers and birds singing at dawn, the rivers are in full runoff and it’s time to pack your stuff and blow town in search of clear water.

  Meanwhile, up in the canyon, I’m reduced to teetering out on the shelf ice to dredge nymphs in the occasional slot of open water. I manage to hook a few trout, but I keep wondering what I’ll do if t
he ice breaks loose with me standing on it. I’ve felt thirty-four-degree water go down my waders before and that vivid memory makes it hard to concentrate. And there’s the story of the fisherman who drowned when he was knocked down and pushed under by a floating ice sheet. That was on a different river, bit still . . . Then the Highway Department closes the canyon road to work on the bridges, and that’s that for a while. It’s almost a relief.

  I check out a stream at a lower elevation that’s recently been stocked with a kind of hybrid rainbow that’s supposed to be resistant to whirling disease. I’ve been wondering if this is a good idea. The wild browns in there have a natural immunity and seem to have held up fairly well against this insidious foreign parasite, and although there aren’t a lot of them, I suspect there are as many as the stream’s modest biomass can support. Still, I’m curious. I fish a small brown fly I think they’ll take as a pellet of Trout Chow. The fish are cute little baby rainbows with parr marks and they’re all a uniform four inches long. Most can’t get a size 20 fly sideways in their little mouths, and when one does, the trick is to set the hook without flipping him over your shoulder. I spot a few larger browns, but the eager babies always beat them to the fly.

  This gets old quickly. On the walk back to the truck, I flush a blue heron that’s so full of these little stockers he can barely get airborne.

  I drive over to the West Slope to check out another small tailwater, crossing a 13,000-foot pass with icy, fifteen-mile-an-hour switchbacks near the top. The snow up there would be chest-deep on an elk if the elk hadn’t all wisely migrated to lower altitudes to wait out winter. At that altitude it’s well below freezing, the sky is a cloudless, robin’s-egg blue and the snow is so bright I can hardly look at it even through sunglasses. I’m the only vehicle up there that doesn’t have skis strapped to the roof.