A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  All this forms the first piece of advice I have for a flyfisher who has the family along—build the fishing into a hike. The second suggestion is to devote a day to having just the kids catch fish, leaving your own rod back in the car. There’s a guide service based at the marina on Yellowstone Lake, small cabin cruisers that go out after cutthroats. We called ahead for reservations and our guide was waiting for us when we arrived. John was his name—a tall man with a Chicago Bulls cap on who coaches junior high basketball in the off-season in a town just outside the park. He smiled at the kids’ eagerness, but it seemed a bit forced; late August now, he was getting more than a little burned out from the thousands of cuts he had caught in the course of the summer.

  “Maybe we’ll get a laker,” he said hopefully, as he powered us out into open water.

  Lake trout is what he meant, a controversial subject. Some madman had apparently dumped lake trout into the lake, thereby putting at risk the finest wild cutthroat fishery in the world. Who had done it? When? According to John there had been thirty-pound fish caught, and this would indicate the lakers had been in there a lot longer than just two summers. The Fish and Wildlife Service was trying very hard to get a handle on the situation, but they were handicapped by lack of funds; the only way they had been able to afford a simple fish finder for their runabout was when the guides chipped in to buy one for them.

  “I wouldn’t mind catching one,” John said. “Just for the change, I mean.”

  I could see his point. The cutthroats in Yellowstone Lake are not hard to catch, which was fine by me, since I very much wanted the kids to have some fast and easy action. We headed into the light chop in the lake’s center, then, using a distant bluff as his reference point, John got the ultralight spinning gear rigged up, explained to the kids what was required of them, flipped the bails back, let their spinners trail out in the Jacuzzi-like bubbles of our wake.

  Thirty seconds after the line went out, forty at the most, Matthew had a hit. He sat bolt upright on his bench, started reeling in as if his life depended on it, and a few minutes later John landed his cutthroat, held it by Matt’s shoulder for a photo, deftly removed the hook with pliers, and dropped the fish back into the lake (cuts, the big ones, have to be put back here; any laker has to be kept, setting up a situation where you can be fined for practicing catch and release). The moment this was accomplished Celeste had a fish on, and then a few minutes later, just when she worried she would be left out of the fun, it was Erin’s turn, with the biggest one yet. Not five minutes went by without one of them catching a trout, and when once the gap went to six minutes, John (who was studying his watch) acted disgusted and instantly tried a different spot.

  “Slow today,” he said, without irony. “Must be those clouds moving in.”

  Me, I was having a great time, even though I wasn’t fishing other than vicariously. Partly this was from thinking about those cutthroat—how amazing it was they would be so close to the surface in such featureless water miles from shore. Partly—and any fisherman will understand this—it was from the comfortable, reassuring sense of propinquity you get just being near any large and healthy congregation of fish. I asked John about going after them with a fly rod; he insisted I come back in July some year, when you can cruise the shallows and take trout after trout right on top.

  Most of all, though, I was enjoying being out on Yellowstone Lake for the first time. All through the park you’re immersed in a landscape that can feature both an exhilarating sense of expanse and, with those rivers and remote ponds, great watery beauty of much variety, and yet its only when out in the middle of this enormous lake in a boat, seeing the mountains that ring it, feeling on your face the wind that blows up from the Tetons, absorbing with your legs its swells, that you realize you still have much to learn when it comes to both water and expanse—that what you’ve seen in the park is only by way of a preliminary to this fluid masterpiece of water, mountain, and sky.

  After an hour of this—after the kids had each caught a dozen trout—the storm that had been hovering over the mountains all morning now lashed down in magnificent violence right above our heads. We stuck it out for a few more fish, then the kids made a dive for the cabin (which looked so cozy and kid-sized they’d been eyeing it with interest ever since we came out) while Celeste and I crowded in near John at the wheel for the bouncy ride back in.

  By the time we reached the dock the worst of the storm was over; a well-scrubbed sun was already streaming through the pines along shore. We thanked John, wished him well for the coming basketball season. Hope you kill one of those lakers, I told him. He smiled, bashfully, then glanced down at the notebook I only now realized he’d been scribbling in since the moment we docked.

  “Two thousand three hundred and forty-six cutthroats,” he said, with a perceptible sigh. “Trolling, every last one.”

  With our joint expeditions having gone so well, it was time for the old I’ll-go-fishing-while-you-guys-go-sightseeing gambit, one I’ve tried before, though with mixed success. The family always has a good time without Dad, which is just the point: I get lonely without them, actually homesick, and often find the fishing can’t compete with the fun of watching the kids climb a new mountain or see their very first geyser.

  But this time it went well—better than well. I had a good day fishing the Yellowstone, and when I got back to the lodge at night I found the three of them already in the middle of dinner. They waved to me when I came into the dining room, glanced over at each other like conspirators who’ve agreed on a plan, stifled some giggles, seemed on the point of bursting with what was obviously great and important news.

  The story broke upon me the moment I sat down—a collaborative effort told in the rushing kind of multi-part harmony families get so good at over time. This is what happened. After breakfast, according to plan, they had driven to Old Faithful, arriving just after one of its periodic eruptions. Old Faith has slowed down over the years due to earthquakes; for a second Celeste wondered if it was worth waiting the hour or so for the next display.

  A half hour passes—the three of them wander over toward Old Faithful Lodge for a snack. Rangers all around. Lots of rangers. Men in suits and sunglasses, too, looking edgy. The kind of nondescript crowd that gathers in these situations, as if there are always extras stashed behind the shrubbery ready to jump out when needed. Someone pointing toward the sky—“They’re here!” Helicopters appearing over the tree tops, landing in the parking lot in a huge circle made by rangers holding hands. Flashbulbs going off, video cameras, men rushing to get a better position, everyone pointing.

  The president descends. As in, the President of these United States. Wife. Daughter. Walking quickly to the elevated terrace forty feet from where Celeste, Matthew, and Erin stand innocently chewing their chocolate chip cookies.

  “Wave,” Celeste says. Erin waves, shyly. Matthew, shy, not knowing why he has to be, waves, too. President’s daughter catches his eye, waves back, shy herself. Shyness National Park.

  Camera doesn’t work, natch. Names and addresses exchanged with woman next to them, her promising to send picture. President in short sleeves and chinos. President’s wife in floppy hat and sundress. President’s daughter in jeans. Everyone pointing . . . crowd half-turns . . . Old Faithful blossoms toward the sky.

  What an adventure! I’m sorry to have missed it, but not that sorry, since nothing could match the anticipation I saw in their faces when I came into the dining room, the happy eagerness with which the story came bubbling out. It wasn’t until dessert that all the ramifications and little details were correctly tucked away; it was only then that Matthew remembered that someone else in the family had been out searching for stories of his own.

  “Hey Dad,” he said, chomping down on his seventh corn muffin. “Catch any fish?”

  The next few days all had trout in them, even if it was only those small, delightful cutthroats you can catch in the tributary streams while your family enjoys a picnic in the lush un
dergrowth that has sprung up under the fire-blackened trees from the 1988 fires (venerable-looking now, like pillars pitted and smoothed by the forces of time). I slipped away again for a long day on Slough Creek, there were a couple of more hikes, and by our last day there was very little more to ask of our week.

  It seemed greedy wanting anything more from Yellowstone, especially when we woke up to find our fine weather had moved out and it was raining heavily. We drove along the Lamar past the ranger station, the clouds hanging collapsed and crumpled on the peaks that line the road, the buffalo standing motionless, the flyfishers looking gloomily out their car windows, the entire life of the park seeming to have come to a sodden dead stop. Not immune to this mood, tired from our week, we made the mistake of driving on to Cooke City to get something to eat. I hated it from the moment we drove in, the very look of the place; it reeked of poachers and gold miners, stream rapers, “locals” who had moved there from California and were now mewing about how by rights it was their park. . . . Well, it was that kind of day.

  Time to get going. We felt better the second we crossed back into the park, and what’s more the sun was starting to come out now, and as Celeste drove westward I stared at our map searching for one last backcountry lake we could hike to before it was time to head home.

  The one I picked out was just far enough back in the mountains to deter the casual; only three acres in extent, it was famous for the impressive size of its trout—and always had been. As I read later in a history of the park, the lake had been the scene of the first game bust in Yellowstone’s history, when the early rangers had surprised some poachers from Cooke City who were illegally netting out the lake’s enormous cutthroats. A few years later, trout were taken out of the pond to use in the park’s first hatchery, since it was clear they were of a genetic strain it was worth trying to reproduce.

  I didn’t know this at the time—for all I knew, the lake was fishless, as so many in Yellowstone are. We parked on the pull-off, got our gear together quickly as befits old hands, then started up the trail through a delightful meadow whose late-summer wildflowers were damp enough to come alive in the sunshine like, to use my son’s phrase, wet lollipops hidden in the grass.

  The trail met the lake at its timbered outlet. It was a ragged kind of circle, completely open except for the patch of trees on our side, and surrounded by a steep, sandy bank that formed a kind of mezzanine looking down into the ginger-ale-colored (my daughter’s simile this time) water. The alpine meadow started on the upslope edge of this bench; every way you looked, staring through the ribbony partings the sun made in the mist, your eyes ran into blue-gray mountains, the highest with snow.

  Something else was needed before the scene became perfect—and there it was. Just on the edge of the lake, slightly below a raft of fallen branches: a quick swirl of something that immediately disappeared. A cutthroat? Probably. It’s often all we ever see of wildlife, that quick flick of the tail that takes it from our presence, but it was enough to make me appraise the lake differently, notice what I should have noticed sooner: the soft dimpled rings pushed into the surface, not by leftover raindrops, but by rising trout.

  By the time we walked around to the open portion of the lake I had my rod up, ready to cast. As usual in these circumstances, the trout were feeding about three yards past my furthest cast, and the bottom was too soft to wade out even one step more. Celeste kept on going where the trail started to curve, then looked back to take my picture. It’s on the wall behind me as I write, a calendar shot, me following through on a cast, my left hand caught in a tossing motion as it releases the line, my right shoulder curved into the plane of the cast, my rod pointing horizontally toward a doubled loop of line caught at the very moment of opening—all this framed and decorated by the yellow meadow grass at my waist, the pines in the background, the mountains rising behind a decorative cliché of airy mist.

  Classic form—but I couldn’t quite reach those trout. Celeste and the kids watched for a few moments, then, obviously giving up on me, continued on around the lake and vanished over a little ridge. About ten minutes later, while I was still fussing and fretting over my impotence regarding the gulpers, Matthew ducked back over the ridge; in his excitement, the frantic way he waved, I thought of a cavalry scout sent to summon reinforcements.

  “Over here, Dad! They’re over there! Big ones!”

  I quickly reeled in. “Don’t scare them!” I yelled, but he was already gone.

  The first thing I saw as I hurried to catch up was that they were standing well back from the bank, in no danger of scaring them. In no danger of scaring what took longer to figure out. Celeste was pointing and Erin was jumping up and down and Matthew was bending forward with the rigid intentness of a pointer, and so excited were all these postures that my first reaction was that a great white shark had somehow gotten loose in the lake.

  I wasn’t far wrong. It was trout they were staring at, lots of trout, fat cutthroats that were almost twenty inches long. They were swimming around and around the shallows where a narrow inlet stream bubbled in—the kind of frantic behavior you would expect to see in spawning time in early July. But this was late August—what was going on? They were feeding on top, plucking midges from the surface film, and I knew in the first instant of spotting them both what was expected of me and how hard it was going to be to pull this off.

  “Catch them!” Celeste commanded.

  “The reddish one,” Matthew added, making it sound like “radish.”

  “Rip their lips!” Erin yelled.

  The blood lust was spreading, and why not, faced with those beautiful fish we could have reached out and touched with a stick. I put on the smallest Baetis I had in my box, sat down on the bank, flattened myself in the wet meadow grass, slid feet-first into the lake like a corpse being tipped down a plank.

  The ripple pushed the trout back a few yards, but didn’t seem to particularly bother them; in their eyes, I was merely another elk or moose come to drink. I could see now there was a pattern to their swirling; they were moving in a counterclockwise circle between a dead log to my right, the drop-off straight ahead of me, and the inlet stream to my left.

  Cutthroats have the endearing habit of being difficult to frighten, but they make up for this by being inordinately fussy; these fish could get a very clear, detailed look at the insects they were feeding on, and rejected every imitation I tried. I went through pattern after pattern, trying desperately to find a winner; it was no trick at all to get a fly in place well ahead of a cruiser, but they swam right beneath it without blinking.

  In the meantime the family cheering section was if anything even more involved. Up high on the bank, they could see the fish even plainer than I could, and each time one swam toward my fly they were convinced it was coming up to it, and so screamed at me to strike.

  Talk about pressure! I wanted to catch one for them, wanted this very badly, and yet the more I pressed, the more indifferent those trout became, to the point where I had to forcibly stop myself from lunging forward and grabbing one by the tail. Celeste—giving up on me, but tactful enough not to admit this—called that she was going around to the other side of the lake, where we had left our packs and lunches. “Good luck, Dad,” she said—then she was gone.

  The kids, having more faith, squatted down on their haunches to see what would happen. I’d been fishing a 4X tippet until then, but it was obvious now that in the placid water this was far too heavy, so I switched over to the longest 6X tippet I thought I could cast. The submerged log was the favorite place for the biggest fish to linger, though if I hooked one there I would have major problems. Still, it seemed my only option. I edged around toward the inlet so I wouldn’t hook the backcast on the kids, then changed flies one last time. One of my Baetis was more beat-up looking than the others, crippled and squished the way trout like, and this is what I ended up tying on.

  I false cast out the right amount of line, then let the fly drop beside the submerged log, staring
toward it as intently as I’ve ever stared toward anything in my life.

  “One’s coming, Daddy!” Matthew shouted from the bank.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Erin yelled. “It’s going to—”

  Take it! The moment I realized this the fly was gone, and the moment the fly was gone my arm came up and the fish was on. It was one of the biggest trout—there was no mistaking that deep, solid kind of take. My first reaction, even before I was conscious of the kids shouting in delight behind me, was to get enough softness in my line to absorb what I knew would be that first hard double shake of his head, not be broken off right at the start.

  I managed to do this, but it was hardly the end of my problems. The log stuck out of the water like a tank trap deliberately planted to vex me, and a second after getting the necessary softness in the line I was faced with the job of getting just the right amount of tightness in to turn the trout away from danger. Through some miracle I pulled this off, or perhaps it was the fish who did it to himself; faced with the choice of fleeing under the log or fleeing toward the drop-off, the fish picked the drop-off—and a moment later he was out in front of me with plenty of clear, empty water on each side.

  So intent was I on keeping up with all this, so focused on the trout, it was only now that those excited shouts got through to my ears. The kids were war-dancing on the bank, jumping in ecstasy, their hands pressed down on their hats, yelling each time the trout turned. Across the lake, hidden from us by the trees, Celeste heard all the shouting, realized at once what must have happened, gathered the packs up, and came running back as fast as she could.

  The longer I had the trout on the more confident I felt about him, and yet this was dangerous, too, since to take him for granted on so fine a tippet would inevitably be to lose him. Then, too, I had left my net back in the car, so there was the problem of landing him. Leading him carefully back toward the log but in closer to me than last time, I waded around so I stood between him and deeper water, then slowly closed in on him as I took back line, until finally I had him resting within inches of the steep muddy bank.