A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  So, no excuses. He checked to see his wader belt was fastened, shuffled his boots against the pebbles on the bottom to clear them of weed, then slanted his way into the current, taking a line that would bring him above the island and into the slower water on the far side. Not hard wading, but not easy either—the Yellowstone may be fordable on four legs here, but two legs is difficult. Between the fast current, the bottom that alternates between pebbles and clay, the kind of moral vulnerability you feel when out in any big river alone, the fisherman was more than a little relieved when the bottom started shelving upward again, the pebbles came back, the water left off pushing solid on his waist and took to kicking broken on his shins.

  Safe. He paused, feeling a certain triumph, then turned, startled, at a loud whuffing sound that was even deeper than the river’s whoosh. Buffalo, another long file, coming into the river just behind him. They didn’t seem to do this intentionally, with premeditation; they were grazing at the top of the bank, one or two stepped over, and before they understood what was happening the whole herd was caught up in a mindless inertia that carried them at a half-gallop into the river, where they stood snorting, coughing, and grunting, wondering why they were even there.

  There was no exaggerating the fun of watching them. America is so full of place-names that no longer make sense—Trout Lake, with no trout in them; Cougar Canyons with no cougar—that it was good to be standing in a place that was literally being rechristened Buffalo Ford as he watched.

  Where the bank jutted out into the river was another flyfisher, a woman this time. At this sport for well over thirty years, he’d only seen a woman fishing by herself three or four times, all on this trip, so it was clear the demographics were changing and changing rapidly. This particular woman was no beginner; she cast far and she cast fast, with nothing wasted in her motion. Stocky, she moved through the water with great delicacy and confidence, a disciplined skater in full command. With the sun behind her, the fly line decorating the sky overhead, the wind tossing back her hair, she managed in that beautiful landscape to take on a great deal of beauty herself; an old-fashioned poetical mind might have seen her as the very spirit of the river, and not be far wrong.

  A few pleasantries—How’s the fishing? Fine! Three cuts!—and then he was on his way again, climbing up onto the bank and taking off through the woods upstream. This was easier than forcing his way through the current, but not all that much easier, since blowdown pines were everywhere, and it was impossible to hike in a straight line.

  Where to start? One of the conceptual tricks in fishing a big river is to try to break it up into smaller, more comprehensible channels within the expanse, not be overawed. This is hard to do on the Yellowstone—it sweeps impetuously along, with no thought for a fisherman’s convenience—but not impossible. A hundred yards more of walking and the steep bank crumbled away, widening the river no more than eleven or twelve feet, and yet by this expansion making it lose several vital gallons per second of force. Some pines had fallen with the bank, and their roots were still strong enough to hold the trunks perpendicular to the current, breaking it up even more.

  It wasn’t long before he discovered the limits of this eddy; in tight by the bank all was fine, but eight or nine steps out it was a different story. The current was even faster and harder than it appeared from shore, so there was no going deeper than his hips without being bowled over. The bottom was tricky, too; a coating of pebbles and gravel gave good purchase, but mixed in were elliptical patches where the current had washed the gravel away, exposing the bone-white clay underneath—and to step onto one of these clay patches meant a fast ride down toward Yellowstone Falls.

  Things finally settled with his feet, he began looking about for trout. They were there all right—cutthroats of seventeen and eighteen inches right in front of him, though it took a few minutes before his eyes got accustomed enough to the waters glare to penetrate it, see beneath. Back in New England, where he did most of his fishing, you could go all summer without sight-fishing to a trout, so the experience was a new one to him and exhilarating. He was fishing an attractor pattern just attractive enough to make the trout, as it floated downstream, raise their heads a fraction of an inch, quiver in interest, then—the fraud becoming apparent—relax again in boredom and sink back to their original, tail-slightly-below-head position. The same happened when he fished a nymph, though this time they were interested enough to move laterally in the current to appraise it from the side, even bluff it with a little charge, before lapsing into that same irrefutable indifference.

  He’d always heard these Buffalo Ford cutthroats were picky, and it gave him an odd satisfaction to learn the stereotype was true—it was like learning that all Parisians are indeed rude. It took three hours of hard work before he caught one. Tired of fishing upstream, he climbed back out onto the bank, switched to a sink-tip line, took a long detour inland, then balanced his way out along one of the fallen trees and roll cast a weighted stonefly into the current to let it swing down.

  A fish was on it right away, an important fish. The fisherman was always somewhat casual in playing trout, but there was often one during a trip that he simply had to land, and this was one of those—the fate of the day was resting upon this. And he did catch it, but not without making a spectacle of himself. The fish continued upstream after fastening, but then balked at too much pressure and made an abrupt U-turn, not only stripping out line to the backing, but pulling the reel off the rod, so the fisherman had to grab for it in the current, hold it in his hand, and start down the shallows in pursuit—right onto one of those treacherous clay patches. When he got up again—when with some frantic screwing he got his reel reattached—the trout was still on, though an enormous distance downstream. His fall on the clay had muddied up the river, so it seemed the trout was fleeing the milky gray cloud as much as it was the pressure of the line, and by the time he caught up with it, landed it, photographed it, let it go, he was soaked through with river, sweat, and clay, and yet happy past all description.

  Clumsy, but no fool, he’d packed along some extra clothes for just such an eventuality. Dry, somewhat composed, feeling stubborn, he hooked another cutthroat from exactly the same position, walked over to the bank, sat down on a rock, and played it in comfort, refusing to engage in any more shenanigans.

  He ate lunch on top of the bank in what sundial-like shade a lodgepole pine casts. A nap would have been nice, but he got caught up in watching the pelicans, a bird he had always associated with Florida, not Wyoming. Squadrons of them flew down from Yellowstone Lake, much more graceful than the comic image you get from cartoons. Their whiteness, their airiness, did a lot to cool him off.

  When he got his fill of these, there were buffalo, a few of them anyway. They seemed bewildered by the fallen timber, confused that there shouldn’t be an easy way down to the river; with a few bothered snorts they wheeled around again and headed back to the ford that bore their name.

  The fishing was better in the afternoon—rising trout now, coming up to those tiny Baetis that are everywhere in a Yellowstone August. This was sight-fishing again, at least toward the end of the rise, when a yellow-brown verticality would appear underneath the fly and slowly continue upward through the surface film, remaining there for a long and very visible moment before looping back down again. Hooked upstream, these fish were easier to land, and after three or four the fisherman decided there was nothing more to ask of the day. His total wasn’t high, and yet the point had been made: yes, the Yellowstone was indeed the most prolific trout river in America, the breadth of it, the very substance of the water, alive with the presence of wild and beautiful fish.

  He was taking down his rod on top of the bank when an invisible and yet very real force (strong enough to be felt even with the competition of the river) made him turn around. Where the bank dipped away to let a wet spot seep into the river was what he thought at first was a coyote. A second later it saw him and stopped; it was very obviously trying to decide
whether to continue past him or change direction and retreat back into the woods.

  The fisherman started to reach into his vest for his camera, then thought better of it. Coyotes were nothing new. Coyotes—why, they had coyotes right at home, trotting across their meadow in the course of their daily rounds. No, he wasn’t going to waste film on a mere coyote.

  Like a hungry and very gaunt German shepherd—that’s how he described coyotes to friends who had never seen one. But then something in the animals posture changed, some slight squaring readjustment in the way it was standing, and he realized it wasn’t a gaunt German shepherd at all, but an extraordinarily healthy German shepherd, one with height and muscle, a princely attitude, and all the self-confidence in the world . . . that it wasn’t a coyote at all, but the cherished object of a careful réintroduction campaign, a hero all the media was going nuts over, the subject of all those campfire talks by the rangers: a live and very real wolf.

  A wolf, not ten yards away. There was no fear in this encounter, on either side. The fisherman looked at the wolf, childishly pleased that after hearing about them for so long he should actually be face to face with one; the wolf, for his part, stared into the man’s expression with an alert kind of interest in which something was reciprocated, though it was impossible to say exactly what. Something mammalian at any rate; the wolf’s alertness wasn’t that different than the alertness of the trout, and yet that second, deeper something was much different, a consanguine kind of recognition nothing cold-blooded could ever manage.

  There’s no end to this encounter, not in dramatic terms. The lone wolf turned and walked unhurriedly along the riverbank; the lone fisherman turned and did the same in the opposite direction. When he entered the timber he stopped and looked back—but there they parted company, for that wolf, finding nothing remarkable in the encounter, trotted away without glancing back over his shoulder at all.

  Family Trout

  The conventional wisdom is that anyone who tries to combine a serious fly-fishing trip with a traditional family vacation is asking for trouble. The two simply don’t mix—never have, never will. A flyfisher, reduced to essentials, is someone who’s willing to travel many hundreds of miles in order to feel a tug on the end of a thin piece of line, often finding that this simple enough sensation brings with it various spiritual benefits. Of course not everyone in the family might have the same kind of yearning—there are tugs exerted by tourist attractions and art galleries, Indian reservations and historical sites, water slides and hiking trails—and so another kind of tug is created, a competitive, intramural one, the kind that when it comes to deciding how to spend the day can quite literally tear a family apart.

  And yet it’s so tempting—the idea of taking the family to a place where the fishing is good! The flyfisher arranges things so he has two or three days to himself, vows to be good the rest of the time, agrees the spouse can have a corresponding amount of time to do what she wants, tells himself it will be a terrific bonding experience with the kids. All this sounds great, the deposit is mailed, airline tickets reserved, junior fishing outfits purchased. So perfect are the arrangements that the flyfisher then makes a fatal mistake—he actually follows through on it—and what seems so doable in January turns out to be a fiasco in July.

  For the problems are not only real, but nearly inescapable. Fly fishing is not much fun to watch if you’re nine and Dad (or Mom) is the one doing it; nine is usually too young to master the intricate rhythm of casting, summon up the requisite patience; nine, especially out West, is too young to go wandering off by yourself along a precipitous and fast-moving river. Nine, in other words, is no fun at all. Of course, forty-five can be difficult, too. Here you are, in a situation where by rights you should be at your most demanding and selfish as regards your fun, at the very same instant your family is the most selfish and demanding about their fun. Both parties are right, absolutely right, and yet as anyone who’s been at this game for a while knows, the arguments where both parties are right often turn out to be the most damaging, lasting, and bitter.

  But it can work. With luck, with a willingness to compromise, with some imagination, the right locale, combining a family vacation with a serious fly-fishing trip can work extraordinarily well, and I would like to offer my own family as the happy, living proof. Our trip to Yellowstone was a success from start to finish, in fly-fishing terms and family-vacation terms both, and yet even while we basked in the miracle of this we didn’t fully realize how successful until the very last moment of our very last day.

  If there is one place on earth where the family versus fly fishing trick can be pulled off, it’s Yellowstone. Big as the park is, it’s still relatively compact, at least in the way it combines trout places and kid places. It’s perfectly possible to start the day out on a trout river, be back at the lodge in time to have breakfast with the family, go hiking all day without seeing another person, do a waterfall or scenic loop on the way back, then—if you’ve the energy—go out again after dinner and do some more fishing while the family turns in.

  This became the pattern of our days, right from the start. Driving down from the airport in Bozeman, we stopped in Livingston to stock up on picnic supplies, including flies at Dan Baileys, where the women fly tyers working by their window made a big fuss over Matthew, age five, and gave him some peacock herl as a souvenir. An hour later the kids were running up the boardwalk along Mammoth Hot Springs, marveling not only at the way the earth literally turns itself inside out, but how the elk, even on a hot August day, like to lie in the hottest, steamiest spots. Then it was time to check into our simple cabin at Roosevelt Lodge; after dinner (chicken-fried steak with all the corn muffins we could handle), it was over to the nearby Lamar, where Dad caught trout while the rest of the family had a great time exploring the banks, climbing over the boulders, taking pictures of the buffalo, cheering Dad on.

  This by way of warm-up. Next morning the trip got fully in gear with a hike to a remote lake only a few hundred yards back from the east rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. We’ve found over the years that kids hike best when there’s a real magnet or attraction at the end, and by magnet I mean a fire tower, a cliff, or a pond. Of these, a pond works best; mountain summits, alluring enough to adults, are a bit too abstract to motivate a young child, but a pond, the aura of brightness it carries, the prospect of coolness, is enough to make even a reluctant hiker keep going.

  We parked in the huge empty lot near the Lower Falls, hitched up our rucksacks, tied and retied all bootlaces, stuck a pack rod in Dad s pack, started out. The trail hugs the canyon’s rim for the first mile, and we kept stopping to go gingerly over and peer down. Both kids remained very much in character as they did this. Erin, tall, curious, a determined thinker, took in the depth, the sheerness, the cataract of foaming whiteness an incredible distance down below, and did a little inward double-clutch with her chin—whoa, her expression plainly said, what have we here? Matthew, four years younger at five, reacted like his mother did—this great and glorious canyon made him giggle, set his glasses to jiggling on his nose, and he looked over at us, wanting us to share his fun.

  It was an hour’s hike to the lake—two lakes actually, one set like a transparent soup bowl inside a golden meadow that perfectly doubled it; the other smaller, cup-sized, trickling into the larger via a soft little creek. Trout were rising the moment we arrived, and I started right in on them. Celeste and Erin took their hiking boots off, waded in the cool shallows; Matthew took his boots off, too, then his pants, then his shirt, then, stripped to essentials, went after the salamanders as assiduously as he did at home.

  Something for all of us here. After trying every fly I’d brought along, I found a small black nymph that took them on just about every cast—little rainbows, beautiful rainbows, waiting just beyond the fringe of weeds. I got Matthew to leave off the amphibians long enough to catch one, then it was Erin’s turn, then Celeste’s. When the sun got stronger the women went back under the t
rees for a nap, but Matthew and I kept at it, taking turns with the sunscreen, alternating slugs from the canteen, working our way around the edge of the pond to the narrow inlet where the bottom was sandy and we could wade a long way out.

  Hiking back to the car, as high and happy as the canyon was deep and dark, the kids learned something else about the Yellowstone experience. The parking lot that had been empty when we started was now overflowing with tour buses and cars; the ramps and decks where you walk out to see the falls had long lines of tourists waiting their chance to snap a picture, and a great deal of shoving was going on as people tried to get at the rail.

  “This is nutso!” Celeste yelled—the mob scene suggested more noise than it was actually producing.

  “Bazookas!” Erin said, upping the ante.

  “Crazy,” I nodded. Then, “Hey, let’s get a picture!”

  Seeing a gap, the four of us wedged our way against the wooden rail with the white-green plunge of Lower Falls at our backs. A young hiker stood there seemingly as confused and horrified at the crowds as we were, and Celeste instantly picked him out as the one to ask.

  “Sure,” he said, with a big grin. Celeste handed him the camera, gave him quick instructions, stepped back. “This will be your Christmas card,” he said, squinting—and he called it right. The picture came out perfect, the four of us posed there like we have the falls all to ourselves—me wearing yet another of the floppy hats that have accompanied my life like ludicrous banners; Celeste and Erin with matching grins, the bandannas pulling their hair back so their resemblance, so subtle most of the time, is obvious and striking; Matthew tucked in between us, a natural the moment a camera is near, with a forthright and charismatic grin that’s enough to upstage even a higher, happier waterfall than Yellowstone’s.