There are magical
days for fishers, unique because they are both rare and mysterious. These days are also accidents, and don’t fit
naturally into the pattern of causes and effects, though they must somehow be
turned into stories. Last August,
Richard and I drove up to McCall, Idaho, and decided to fish the Brundage
reservoir. This was a trip we both needed. Richard’s wife was dying, though her medical
team continued their attempts to stop the growth of cancerous lung tumor, which
had doubled in size in a year. Death
struggles cannot be contained; they send their tremors in every direction, and
Cheryl’s condition made my own marriage seem vulnerable, a feeling I had not
expected or had ever felt before.
Richard had lived long enough with an ailing partner that the idea of
losing her—and of being alone—wasn’t as terrifying to him as it seemed to me. He
was an attentive caretaker, and when I proposed that we take a day to fish, he
said he would love to. “But let’s see
how Cheryl is doing,” he said. She
encouraged him to go.
Reservoirs hold
the visible memory of the land they flooded.
There are the naked stumps of decaying timber, particularly in low
water, and the rise and fall of water often scores the shore with impossibly
straight ridges, each a few feet apart, which could be steps one might descend
to reach the river that once flowed through there. Idaho was burning last summer—historic fires
in both the desert and the mountains—and the air was filled with smoke, even in
McCall, which is at around 6000 feet elevation.
Here in the West, gaining elevation is the solution to a lot of
problems—heat, inversions, and one hoped, smoke. But when the high country burns the smoke
stays here the fires are. Unlike
fishers, firefighters hope for smoke because it helps suppress the fires. It was a sunny day, but the haze created a
pewter wash over everything, especially the water on the reservoir, and all
else was drained of color.
We launched our
small kickboats, and in the morning the fishing was pretty good. I trolled small streamers, and landed and
released five or six fish in a few hours.
They were pretty fish, many of them rainbow and cutthroat trout hybrids—“cutbows”—with
scarlet backs and golden bellies and sides.
But after lunch, the fishing slowed.
Kickboats are quietly propelled by flippered feet, freeing the hands to
hold the rod, and one of the great pleasures of these small boats is the
comradery of trolling with a companion.
When the fishing goes south, Richard and I often find each other on a
lake, kicking along in unison, and talking now and then. In light of everything—Cheryl’s suffering set
against the somber and smoky gloom of that day—those moments together, floating
high above a lost streambed, seemed especially poignant to me.
When the hatch
started, I heard the fish first, rising to take the flies, and then trout were
all around us, swirling and splashing, hungrily working the surface. I quickly switched over to a dry fly line and
put a big bug on—grasshopper-like with rubber legs. Tying knots when fish are rising around you
triggers a desperation that makes knots harder to tie. The mind focuses on one thing—getting the fly
to the feeding fish. Meanwhile, the
hatch intensified. “Have you looked up
at the sky?” Richard said. When I did, I
saw a rolling cloud of flies. They were
big black bugs with yellow-orange bellies that defied classification—they
weren’t mayflies, or stoneflies, or caddis or any of the usual aquatic insects
that flyfishers typically imitate—and yet they seemed to emerge from the water,
hovering around us and nowhere else on the reservoir. Soon I was casting to the rising trout, my
fly landing on a carpet of floating bugs.
The takes varied from violent to lackadaisical, and before long we were
tying into nice fish, nearly all fifteen inches or more. These were thick, well-fed trout that rose
hungrily from the bottom of the reservoir.
The hatch continued around us for more than an hour, and the feeding and
catching continued, each of us pulling fish to our boats and quickly unhooking
them to begin again. From time to time,
Richard and I would turn to each other and comment on the magic of it all—two
men alone together in small boats in the middle of an eruption of flies and
fish.
When the hatch finally waned, we floated
together for a little while, exhausted but still wondering if somehow the magic
would continue. For a few minutes, the sun wanly broke through the smoky sky,
but the reservoir’s surface went slick, unbroken by rising trout. For that hour, though, Richard had a break
from his death watch. It was an hour
filled with life—the golden flash of rising fish, the frantic flight of
insects, and the steady, back and forth beat of our forearms as we hurled our
fly lines out and away to where the fish were.
Cheryl died a few days later. But
when we returned to Boise that night, tired and exuberant, she was waiting for
us on the back deck at Richard’s house, lying in the dark on a chaise lounge
and wrapped in a white blanket. Cheryl
could not get up to greet me, and yet somehow, in my mind, I see her rising,
again and again.
