The best fly-fishing is always exacting and demanding of concentration. Part of the great pleasure the sport provides is the satisfaction of solving problems, and the more intricate the problems, the greater the satisfaction. Though there are easy stretches and easy days on the Traful, they do not characterize the river’s fishing, and that is as it should be.
Something like this would be more like it: You walk down to a fast glide that is too deep to wade; at the bottom of the glide, a polished black pool eddies out behind a bus-sized boulder. It is into that pool, on as deep a drift as possible, that you want to get your fly. There are dense stands of trees directly behind you and downstream of where you’re standing, so you work out lengthening roll-casts into the middle of the fast water. You find you can reach the pool this way, but the fly isn’t getting deep enough. After a number of failed solutions, you finally jury-rig a cast straight downstream, parallel to the bank, so that you can get a back-cast, release the fly as far upstream as you can on the back-cast, instantly mend the line, mend again, and yes, there is the fly in the pool, deep, and you see the tip of the fly line jerk, and something big comes tight. The fish arrows out of the pool, shaking its head, a rainbow or a salmon over ten pounds, and then splashes down and rips downstream. As you watch the backing disappear off the reel, you realize the next problem that needs solving—to add to your overall satisfaction over Scotch and smoked trout back at the lodge—is how the hell to follow this fish.
Roy Andries De Groot had his criteria for greatness, and I have mine. He insisted that the reception and service at the World’s Greatest Restaurant be flawless; that the dining room be comfortable and attractive but not pretentiously luxurious; and that the food be fresh, perfectly prepared, honest, and surprising. He wanted no affectation anywhere, and wrote in summing up Troisgros that “there had not been the slightest pomposity about the food, the service or the welcome.”
By my criteria, any fishing lodge that aspires to superlative status must, of course, have excellent fishing, i.e., demanding angling for an interesting variety of big fish. It must also offer superior creature comforts, emollients both for the body and the mind for that preponderance of time when you are off the water. Moreover, the place should have a breath of effortlessly understated elegance, and the days spent there must have symmetry, excitement, and spiritual comfort to them. Finally, and perhaps most important, those qualities must extend to days not spent fishing for whatever reason, be it weather or whim.
It is an achingly clear, windy day. You and your wife don’t feel like fishing. Over the past three days you have fished hard and been rewarded with a good number of the Traful’s lovely, problematic fish, and now you are temporarily tired of the tightly focused concentration such fishing demands, and ready to air out a little in this high, fine wind. At breakfast, Maurice asks if you’d like to ride up into the mountains to look for the giant Andean condors that are the western hemisphere’s largest flying birds. He tells you he knows where there is a nest and there are usually two adults and a young one nearby.
This superb plan is quickly mounted, and shortly so are you, on good horses with gaucho saddles covered with sheepskins, and riding uphill with Maurice and Carlos, led by the estancia’s head gaucho and followed by a pack of rangy, big-jawed puma dogs. Over the next two hours you climb 2,600 feet above the valley, over buttes and tan, stony hillsides, in and out of copses of conifers and false ash. Around one o’clock you stop in a glade of trees by a stream for an asado. Lying on moss, you drink vino tinto out of tin cups and eat hard cheese and estancia-smoked salami while the gaucho builds a fire, banks it, and spits a side of lamb vertically on a wooden stake. He spreads the lamb on the stake with twigs, pours hot Chilean aji sauce over it, and pushes the stake into the ground a foot or two from the banked fire.
When the lamb is done, you will cut as much as you want of the charred, pink meat from the bones and eat it with your hands and wash it down with more vino tinto. Then, after a siesta on the moss, you will ride up to the cliff face where the condors nest, lead your horses to the edge of the cliff, their hooves clacking and slipping on the stone, and look out over the estancia and the Traful snaking out of the deep blue lake and through the valley three thousand feet below. And then, perfectly, the condors will appear, like great black gliders, surfing the wind on twelve-foot wingspans, and the afternoon will seem suddenly crowded with superlatives. Tonight there will be another fine meal and good conversation, and tomorrow there will be fishing again on the Traful. . . And all of that is exactly as it should be at the World’s Greatest Fishing Lodge.
*Since this story was written, La Primavera has been bought by Ted Turner.
PART TWO
Gone Fishing
AS WE KNOW, THE MOST IMPOTENT DREAMS ARE THE hardest to shake. In my early forties, my teenage reverie of life as a nonstop fishing road trip returned, fastening onto me like a vampire bat, and in less time, it seemed, than it takes to write this sentence, fishing went from something I simply enjoyed doing and wrote an article about from time to time to a bloodsucking lust. For a while in my life it was all I wanted to do; for a shorter while it was virtually all I did do. Moreover, on the infrequent occasions when I was at home with my family, I became a fishing boor, the kind of seized, one-track enthusiast my wife and I have always avoided: an Ancient Mariner who clutches someone’s arm at a cocktail party, fixes him or her with a glittering eye, and rants on and on about the North Umpqua or the flats at Los Roques.
I developed an unseemly interest in numbers—how many species of fish I had caught, the number of fish I caught on a particular trip, how many continents I had not yet angled. I wanted to go everywhere in the world where anything that passed for a fish could be caught, and even started a sporting travel company to help me do that. My travel was chronic, stripped down, independent, and swift. I no longer had any time for pastoralist niceties, and I developed the nomad’s contempt for comfort and stasis, and for all the little flock-tending rules and conventions that fly-fishing, in particular, seemed increasingly to hang on itself like doodads on a fishing vest. Neither did I have much time for anyone who didn’t appear to me to be putting his life on the line for fishing. I had thrown away my own map and compass for being too slow and gone into a sprinting bushwhack between valleys, and I didn’t want anyone with me who couldn’t keep up or didn’t understand why we were running. I fished a full eight or nine months out of a few of those years. I quit writing books, and then anything at all. I neglected my family, my farm in New Hampshire. I went into what a nineteenth-century psychologist might have called a full swoon over fishing.
On a long-distance call I placed from a phone booth in Tasmania, following two weeks of trout fishing there and in New Zealand, my wife and best friend of twenty-five years offered to quit being both of those things immediately if I didn’t come home. Instead, I went off to catch northern bluefin tuna at Tangalooma with Malcolm Florence, then on to Cairns, then on to stand-up fishing for yellowfin off of Lord Howe Island, then on to Saratoga and barramundi on the Gulf of Carpentaria. I was gone for three more weeks.
Bad luck tends to stalk this kind of lurching imbalance like a hungry wolf. I have always had my share of angling misadventure and mishap, and have only very rarely been the graced, natural angler—Yeats’s “wise and simple” fisherman in gray Connemara cloth—that I would love to be all the time. My father secretly considered me a bit of a Jonah, in fact—a banana on the boat; and many are the times people fishing with me have wondered if my middle name might not be “cold front.” But all that comes under the heading of run-of-the-mill bad luck. What I am talking about here, what befell me in the fishing frenzy of my forties, was Joblike angling misfortune. I became a one-man El Niño. Storms of the century followed me around. I started breaking lanterns nearly every time I stood up.
Fishing is casting a petition into the unknown, and the eternal wonder of it is that almost anything could be down there ready to bite: your heart’s desire; your wor
st fear; even something big enough to pull you overboard and catch you. Like monks, the best anglers are humble petitioners: subtle, quiet, reverent, forbearing. Their sly, insouciant casts hardly make a dimple on the surface of the mystery, and their lines regularly come tight to fish and also to the gentle things they are really fishing for. These are the anglers on whom Lady Angling Good Fortune perennially smiles. What earns her frowns, I learned firsthand, is to come running up before her like a panting, hairshirted John the Baptist with hubris and a rod and begin heaving bowling balls into the lake. If she is in good temper that day, she might simply ignore you. If not, she might hook you up to your very own Moby Dick.
THE NEXT VALLEY OVER
Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do . . .
THE WATER RAT, FROM
The Wind in the Willows
JUNE 6. A GOLDEN MORNING. MY SON LATHAM AND I HAVE Texas-cut French toast and scones with honey-butter at the Chalet in Last Chance, Idaho, drive over Targhee Pass on the Continental Divide, and come down into Montana just a few miles from West Yellowstone. We actually began this trip the day before, but the trout in the flat, oily, maddening water of the Henry’s Fork across from the Last Chance Lodge & Outfitters were too picky in their eating habits to deserve being written about. So we are calling this the first day of the trip—a two-week road-angling tour of Montana that Tom Montgomery and I have been talking about taking for years and have finally put together. For the next thirteen days Tom and I will follow the movable feast of Montana trout fishing from the southwest corner of the state to the northwest, with various friends and loved ones joining in the merriment for a day or two or longer here and there. We will drive more than 1,600 miles one way and fish nine rivers and a half-dozen lakes and ponds on a kickass, blue-highway, blue-plate-special pure Montana road-angling trip: a little planning, a little serendipity, a few coolers full of beer; staying in forty-dollar-a-night motel rooms and eating your five basic meat groups in diners and bars near midnight when you come off the water; some interesting people met along the way; God’s own amount of memorable fishing. And after we have done it, as the Water Rat observed about messing about in boats, there will always be something else to do, and I still won’t be inclined to discuss those Henry’s Fork trout.
At West Yellowstone, Latham and I, in a rented car, follow Tom Montgomery’s trailered South Fork skiff along the absurdly beautiful northwest boundary of Yellowstone Park, then swing west around Hebgen Lake and trace the majestic, trout-rich Madison River north toward Ennis. We have the road virtually to ourselves, and that fact and the chaste greenness of the countryside remind us that we are early, in this first week of June, for a fishing trip to Montana. And while the rewards for being early can be significant—few anglers, uncrowded motels and restaurants, wildflowers, hungry fish—the costs in the wrong year, of high water and miserable weather, can put you out of business. This is a low-runoff year, and we should be all right, I think . . . Unless we get a lot of rain.
We scoot through Ennis, then through the endearing Old West hokum of Virginia City and into the tiny town of Laurin, pronounced, for some Montana reason, Loray. We pull into the parking lot of the Vigilante Cafe right at noon and go inside to meet Ken Barrett, a friend from Bozeman who will join us for this afternoon’s fishing, and John Sampson. John and his partner Paul Moseley are two of the West’s new angling entrepreneurs—young guys with money and brains who love trout fishing and have made it their livelihood and life. After lunch at the Vigilante, we all follow John over to the Ruby River just outside of town, where he and Moseley own and lease eleven miles of water and make some of it available to anglers for a daily rod fee.
The Ruby is a river to get a crush on. Petite and sparkling, with fondleable little curves, purling rips, and winking deeps, you might fight a man who said something ugly about this river in a bar. It also has lots of trout in it, some of them hefty. We wade a little and walk the banks, catching fat browns and rainbows on caddis, beadhead nymphs, and Wooly Buggers. It is leisurely, conversational fishing, framed by the Ruby Mountains to the south and the Tobacco Roots to the north, and as blue-gray clouds boil up over the Tobacco Roots, the willow-sheltered Ruby is an intimately serene place to be. Latham catches his biggest brown trout ever, a twenty-incher. And Ken and I catch up with our long friendship—watch each other catch fish, talk about old junctures, shared friends and pleasures.
We fish until after nine and quit just before dark. Back at the vehicles, Ken and I light up cigars, pull on pile against the wind, and take a draw or two off a long-necked bottle of George Dickel as we break down the rods. Ken is driving back to Bozeman and John back to Laurin. Tom and Latham and I are headed for the Stardust Country Inn in Twin Bridges for the night. I tell Ken about a mutual friend who is said to be starting his own country in the Bahamas. He laughs, his big, tough face creasing, and I think of all the rods I have broken down by cars, road-angling over the years with friends, to laughter and darkness gathering over water.
The road from Twin Bridges to Melrose is everything a Montana backroad ought to be: winding, rising and falling, rough, muddy, and cleaving through stunning, empty, tan-green ranching country. Melrose has two parallel streets on either side of a railroad track that runs through the middle of town, which here is two bars, a fly shop, a motel, a secondhand store called Needful Things, and a restaurant called The Water’s Edge. The water referred to is the Big Hole River, one of the great trout rivers of the West and the reason we are in Melrose.
Latham, Tom, and I meet John Sampson and Paul Moseley at Phil Smith’s Montana Trophy Angler at ten-thirty to arrange for a shuttle for a float on the Big Hole. Phil Smith, Tom tells me, committed suicide last winter. His daughter Georgia now runs the fly shop, which is an extension of her house. The license plate on Georgia’s rig outside the shop reads FISHIN’ GAL.
“So you like to fish?” I ask her.
“It’s my life,” she says with no inflection. “My dad got me into it.” Tom, who has known Georgia since she was a little girl, calls her “double-tough.”
While we are filling out the shuttle forms, a friend of Georgia’s drops in to say she is going to Dillon, thirty miles away and the nearest town with stores. The friend asks Georgia if she can bring her anything.
“You can bring me a vanilla latte.”
The friend looks at her. “It’ll get cold.”
“Not if you drive fast,” Fishin’ Gal tells her.
It is warm and sunny when we put in on the Big Hole at Divide, Latham and I in John’s boat and Paul and Tom in Tom’s. The annual hatch on this river of the huge stoneflies known as salmonflies is over, but Latham and I tie on three-inch long Sofa Pillow salmonfly imitations anyway, because they are fun to fish, and start catching nice rainbows on them right away. The Big Hole also holds brown, brook, and cutthroat trout, and one of the largest wild populations of river-dwelling grayling in the United States outside of Alaska. Here in its middle section, it is purposeful, generous water, with deep runs and bouldery pockets for nymphing, and bouncing riffles and flat tailouts and backwaters for dry-fly fishing. Running through pastureland, olive hills, and steep rock cliffs studded with clumps of evergreen, rich with ospreys, herons, bald eagles, and Cooper’s hawks, demanding attention to fish it well but not fussily technical, the middle Big Hole has provided me with many memorable floats over the years, and it does so again today.
The young entrepreneur fish-hawks from the Ruby, best friends since the fifth grade, are excellent company, anglers, and guides. The weather goes exhilaratingly from calm, sunny warmth to clouds and rain, then wind and snow showers, to clear and warm again. And we catch fish steadily through the changes. Cows bawl from the banks. The wind rises and
falls. The boats float in and out of sun. We cast, mend, watch an osprey, chat and work the fly, and the mayfly pleasures of the day hatch and swarm around us.
A mile or so above Melrose some serious clouds move in spitting and snarling from the south, and we take out in a bruiser sleet and snowstorm that makes me happy for the good hot shower and warm room at the Sportsman’s Lodge Motel. John and Paul leave for Laurin, and we are joined at the motel by Tom Bailey, a friend and fishing client of Tom Montgomery’s from Aspen and a veteran Montana road-angler. We eat dinner together at The Water’s Edge, an unlikely hybrid of backcountry Montana café and New Age coffee bar. It is owned and run by an ex-mercenary soldier named Phil Brissenden and his wife, Carol Perez, an ex-exotic dancer. Here in a town where they still drive cattle down the twin main streets, Phil and Carol serve five kinds of coffee but no alcohol. They have recent bullet holes in the walls, and haddock and king crab on the menu. Phil himself brought us out the appetizer du jour. It was fruit, pickles, squash, tomatoes, and nuts on ice.
The Next Valley Over Page 5