The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors

by Ian Frazier

  When I moved from New York, I chose a small Western city where the fishing is great. Sportfishing here is a medium-sized industry with a multiplicity of fly shops and guide services and hotel packages for anglers. In late summer they pour off the connecting flights from Salt Lake City or Minneapolis-St. Paul, fishing fever in their eyes. But evidently what they’ve been dreaming of all year in their perhaps congested hometowns isn’t the productive stretch of riverfront I know about next to the lot for Les Schwab Tires, where the outdoor address system occasionally rasps, “Horst, you have a call on line one.” No, they want to get away from Les Schwab Tires and its highway-strip ilk, understandably, so they head for wilder places not far off. This means that in town, even at the peak of the season, often you can cast to rising fish for hours without another fisherman to be seen.

  Not that the river or its banks are deserted. For starters people live here, off and on, and set up mini-camps in the bushes. Once, I came out of a slow pool pinstriped on its surface with the reflection of power lines overhead and nearly brought my wading shoe down on a washcloth, toothbrush, and tube of toothpaste laid out neatly in a row on a shoreline rock. I’ve encountered clothes, and occasional furniture. On hot days, people set up lawn chairs in the shallows. Weekends, crowds of floating recreationists on inner tubes or rafts go by practically every five minutes. An angling friend says that if the fish in town stopped feeding every time a floater went by, they’d starve to death. I have been offered beers, and plenty of advice, from the passing flotilla. A guy speed-paddling a canoe almost ran me down. And then there was the woman in the bikini on an air mattress going over the little falls at the weirs. My friend once fished all the way through the city limits from west to east and wrote a series about the experience for the local paper. He was stopped in his upstream progress by policemen in chest waders searching for a murder suspect who had ducked out the back way of a motel and holed up on a little island in the river. They caught her, and she got life in prison. I think of her every time I fish there.

  My favorite place these days is out by the golf course on the edge of town. Last summer I caught one of the biggest trout of my life in the deep water at the riprap below the seventeenth green. I had gone out for just an hour or so, in an idling mood, intending to fool around with a lightweight rod I hadn’t used in years. Grasshoppers were everywhere, so I found a beat-up hopper in the fleece of my vest, tied it on, and cast to some rises upstream. It sank; there was a turmoil under the surface, the line pulled tight, and a rainbow made a long horizontal leap toward shore. Then he did a kick-turn like in a swim meet and sped for the deepest water in mid-river. Immediately the fly line—I had no backing—shrank to a few coils left on the spool, the rod tip was dowsing toward the surface like mad, and I was splashing downstream among the riprap. For a while he held still, the line vibrating. Two people drifted past in a raft, and the fish suddenly jumped high next to it and fell back broadside with a whumping splash like a thrown dictionary. More minutes followed. Finally he came swooning to my net, and I took him to a triangular-shaped piece of water among the rocks and measured him against my rod, which he seemed to be about half the length of. I revived him there, balancing him upright with my fingertips, almost embarrassed at my luck, at his size, at the otherwise-ordinariness of the day. Golfers continued to play, oblivious, not ten feet above me. They were talking about whose turn it was to putt; one said, “I think you’re away.”

  The next thing I knew, I was home. My wife and children were doing just what they had been before I left. My wife says she can tell at first glance or by the sound of my voice whether I’ve caught a fish, so she knew I had. But how to convey that I’d caught a personal-record, immense, tail-walking wild rainbow out there by the seventeenth green? I tried; the commotion attracted the children: “What happened?” “Daddy caught a big fish.” “Where is it?” “He let it go.” “Oh.” And they returned to Darkwing Duck. An advantage of fishing someplace far from home is that there’s plenty of time, during the anticipation going and especially during the recap coming back, for a big fish to assume its proper proportions in your mind. When I had pictured catching the biggest trout of my life, I hadn’t expected it would arrive unremarkably in the midst of daily occurrence, like the mail.

  Rivers with good fishing are prettier than rivers without. Sometimes I have passed by pieces of water I knew were dead, and I could hardly stand to look at the fraud of light glittering on their ripples. But knowing how many fish this river holds causes me to keep a respectful eye on it as I’m doing errands nearby, even when the possibility of fishing is remote—in winter, when the river is a conveyor moving odd lots of ice, or when the temperature suddenly drops to 20 below and wraiths of steam hop from it, or when a cold spell lasts for weeks and it almost freezes over, leaving a crevice in the middle through which you can see the fast-flowing water below. Then, after ice-out in the spring, the river picks up speed until it’s running ten miles an hour of brown torrent bank to bank, so full it piles back on itself in rapids of brown foam, and the glare off its surface reminds me of several recent news stories about those unfortunates it has drowned. Then the swelling subsides and the water starts to clear, and again people peer into it like kingfishers from the pedestrian walkways along the bridges.

  This river, and another that runs into it nearby, made the level valley the city sits on. They used gravel, which they now cut their way through. In town, the roads and buildings are up on the gravel banks, and the river is below; the arrangement suggests the verticality of ecosystems and the dependence of the high upon the low. You’re reminded of this at almost every corner, where someone has painted stencils of fish on the sidewalk above the storm drain, along with a warning that whatever goes down the drain ends up in the river. Always, the end of a fishing day in town means a climb up from the river world into paved civilization. I often fish by an industrial gravel pit where various machines stack river gravel into heaps and onto trucks. When the wind is right, dust blows from the pit onto the river, leaving a slick; during the day, the noise of engines rises and falls. But the banks are twenty or thirty feet high, the water is deep and slow, and the trout are in the twenty-inch range.

  Last summer I went there many nights after dinner. This is a pool that everyone knows about, so the fish see a lot of anglers. Even the whitefish and squawfish here are selective and the rainbow trout’s knowledge of fly patterns is postdoctorate. One evening I tied on fly after fly while rises splashed like hailstones all around me. That kind of can’t-win-for-losing situation is addictive to me, and I kept at it until full dark. Then the rises began to taper off, and bats went by clicking like Geiger counters, and a manifestation in the air above gave me a start, until I connected it to the silhouette of a heron rising into the lighter sky above the tree line. I climbed back to my car trailed by minor rockslides, and I took off my waders and vest and headed for home. Now points of red shone from the radio towers on the peaks encircling the valley, and a glow from the city spilled upward onto the mountains like light from an orchestra pit before the curtain goes up. I drove slowly through the warm air with the windows down. The hiss of a lawn sprinkler announced the outskirts of a residential district; less-important traffic signals had been switched to flashing mode. When I pulled into my drive I saw that lights were still on in my children’s bedroom. I had missed reading to them, but would still be able to say good-night. I felt a complex pleasure, the sort that is said to be provided by following rules of meter and rhyme. Here, as everywhere, ecosystems interlocked.

  (1999)

  FROM WILDERNESS TO WAL-MART

  Near my house, in a small city in Montana, is a creek called Pattee Creek. I pass by it often, on my way to the supermarket or the dentist’s office. It runs through a ditch between front yards and the street, through a cement channel, into a small marsh behind the dentist’s office, and through a culvert at the other side of the marsh. It comes out of a canyon called Pattee Canyon, a fold in the mountains that encircle t
he town. People around here seldom think about the creek except during the time of spring runoff, when suddenly it arrives chocolate brown and foaming and full, piling up at the culvert at Higgins Avenue like carpet skidded on the floor. At such times it is liable to flood whole neighborhoods of yards and basements. City workers watch it warily and measure its flow with metal tape measures; sandbags go on sale at the Army-Navy store.

  Often, while that is happening, the mountains where Pattee Creek begins are still snow-covered and linen white. Leaning back in the dentist’s chair, I can see them gleaming in the far distance. Pattee Creek extends from there almost to here; from near-wilderness to my dentist’s back door.

  In the spring of 1997 the snowpack in the mountains was twice as deep as usual. During warm spells people braced for the runoff, and the local paper ran headlines like HERE IT COMES! Sap dripped from maple tree branches broken by the wind; crocuses grouped like flights of darts along the sidewalks; and a general restlessness set in. The city waited, like an apartment building where men are lowering a grand piano down the stairs. As the number of watchers along the rising margins of Pattee Creek grew, I sometimes joined them. I can watch flowing water for any amount of time. Also, I like to mess around creeks. I find them companionable—flowing water of just the right scale. As the spring progressed and the snows unlocked, I rambled along the whole course of Pattee Creek, from the culvert by the parking lot at Wal-Mart to the mountaintop twenty miles away.

  MARCH 21

  I want to know where all this water is coming from. I drive up Pattee Canyon Road, which winds and narrows up the canyon, jumping the creek again and again on its way. I continue beyond where the sidewalk stops, past the farthest lawn, up into the colder canyon air. Here the creek tumbles through a melting and pockmarked mini-canyon of snow and gravel, the ruins of the berm the snowplow left alongside the road. I pull into a state-forest parking area and get out and walk. A mile or so farther up the road, the berm has not yet melted and still completely covers the creek. The berm is as high as my head, still its old midwinter self, a tough amalgam of snow and ice and road sand and oil and beer cans and muffler parts and yellow paint chips from the no-passing stripe. It looks like a collaboration between man and nature that nothing can destroy. I lean against it at full length and press my ear against its gritty chill. From far underneath, Pattee Creek is a dim, insistent murmur.

  Today, in my search for the creek’s source, this is the best I can do. The snow that looked so white from the valley is actually old and winter-worn. Here and there an unsullied snowfield rises in a shaded part of the mountain like the tail fin of a giant airplane. But under the trees the snow is furry with pine needles and bits of moss, and it grabs the ankles soggily. About every third step, I fall through to my waist—so forget it. Ribs of a winter-killed deer sit atop a snow patch, neat as the beginning of a sailboat model. From the base of a snowbank in the sun, meltwater issues in a wide, flat sheet.

  MARCH 31

  Along the course of the creek through town, sandbags are everywhere. In some of the low-lying neighborhoods, sandbag emplacements laid neatly on the property lines give houses a military air. The city has diverted part of the creek onto a public park, where it rises shin-deep in the baseball field; other than that, no serious flooding so far.

  Up in the canyon, plenty of snow remains. In open, sunny places, clear meltwater flows with no visible bed across the pine-needle floor. Thin sheets of water run over the road, now one way, now the other, and riffle in the potholes. A capillary web of little streams connects and connects again, gurgling from a dozen little canyons down to the main creek. On the surface of a pool where a tributary joins, a pinwheel of foam turns like a hurricane seen from the air. Helmeted bicyclists whir past, stripes of mud spattered up their bright-yellow backs.

  APRIL 14

  My wife drops me off at the trailhead in the canyon, as near as I can get to the top of the creek’s watershed. The snow has shrunk back into the places of deepest shade, and walking is easier. I follow the creek up and up, taking the larger branch every time it divides. Soon the flow is a two-foot-wide streamlet coming down one rut or another of a logging road through a ponderosa forest. I’m high up now, and breathing hard; ridge light beckons ahead.

  At a switchback in the logging road, the streamlet ends in a wet patch around an upwelling of water the size of a serving platter: a spring. On the bare mountainside above are two or three smaller wet patches, each draining into the one below it. From the topmost seep, a wetness of black mud marbled with tan sand, about ten inches across, flows a noiseless trickle the width of a braided belt. And from there on up, the ground is completely dry. This, multiplied, is the source of Pattee Creek.

  I continue to the ridgetop just beyond, scaring up a grouse whose wings make a sound like sails luffing in a stiff breeze. On the ridgetop, to my surprise, is another logging road. From it the view to the east, away from the city, is vast—a wooded canyon crossed with powerlines, more mountains, and far silver-blue snow clouds piled high. A squirrel chatters, dropping pinecone shards through the branches. A chickadee sings. To the west, amid the woodsmoke- and smog-blurred cityscape spread out below, a speck of light flashes, maybe from the windshield of a turning car.

  I walk all the way back down to the city. Going this direction is more pleasant—I can see why water prefers it. It’s two hours of walking to the first red-winged blackbird song, two and a half to the first redwood deck and barbecue grill. On the front stoop of a streamside house, a woman turns, holds up a paper sack, and asks someone behind the closed screen door, “Now, you’re sure you don’t want these sweetbreads?” It’s about a three-hour walk to there.

  APRIL 24

  Still, the water comes. In town, Pattee Creek splashes along its concrete channel night and day. People who live by it must be getting tired of listening to it. A gray-haired woman in hip boots eyes it from her yard, while another woman stands by a culvert with a garden rake, ready to fish out obstructing pieces of trash. The only place the creek seems to pause in its entire course is in the marsh behind the dentist’s office. Here it tops off the marsh’s connecting ponds right to their grassy rims with water the color of coffee and cream. Ducklings zip across the surface, their paddle-wheeling feet a blur. A pair of muskrats work the margins; last year’s cattails disintegrate to down; birdsong rises. Streets and buildings enclose the marsh on all sides, and no doubt would cover it over if they could. Too expensive and troublesome to fill in, this ignored little wetland survives.

  For the creek, it’s still a long way to the river. Emerging from the marsh’s outflow it reassumes its character, keeping to a single channel for a couple of blocks past an apartment building, a self-storage place, and a condominium development. Then it comes to a headgate and splits into several smaller channels that dodge under fences and across back yards like a bunch of kids running from the police. The channel I follow goes down alleys, between houses, under a makeshift plank bridge on which someone has written “Tyler is in trouble,” right by a basement window with video-game controls and a tissue box on the sill, past traffic lights, under the apron of a Surejam convenience store, behind a store that sells hot tubs, and along the railroad tracks leading south out of town.

  This is the city-limits zone, of discount stores spread amoebalike on the horizon and sky-high gas station signs. The stream crosses under the tracks, running now through a bed that is like a rain gutter between the railroad and a four-lane highway. The highway and the tracks begin to rise and the streambed to descend. As tires bump on the steel joint of a highway bridge, the stream beside it goes over a ledge, down a fifteen-foot grade of jumbled rock, and into the Bitterroot River.

  We have reached the mouth of Pattee Creek—or of the bureaucratized, channelized subsection represented here. Its water arrives tumbling and foaming, sending bubbles in a slow upstream eddy along the shore. The eddy bends out toward the main current, and the Bitterroot, flowing full and fast, speeds it away. When the bu
bbles burst, they leave rings on the moving surface that lose their circularity like smoke rings in a breath of air. On ahead is the Clark Fork River, Pend Oreille Lake, the Columbia River, and the Pacific Ocean.

  Much of the natural world now resembles Pattee Creek. It coexists with pavement; it goes about its business usually unnoticed; and it has a reputation as a nuisance. It’s the moles in the lawn, the black ice on the interstate, the sinkage under the patio. For some reason, I prefer it to nature of the more remote and pristine kind. At least on the shores of Pattee Creek, I don’t fear that my very presence is making it less pristine.

  As the runoff went on and on—through May, through June—it showed its disregard for popular opinion. We wanted it over; the mountains were like a stadium parking lot taking forever to empty out. Luckily, there was never a big surge of flooding, no great hot spells or rains; most of the basements in my neighborhood stayed dry. The Pattee Creek drainage was mostly clear by mid-May, but elsewhere in the mountains the snows hung on. The rivers by the end of June were still too high and muddy to fish in. The Forest Service said that the high flows had undermined many streambanks and that people should stay off them. I ignored this warning; while kneeling to free a fishing lure stuck on a root just below the waterline, I felt the entire bank beneath me give. I went with it, clear over my head into the Bitterroot River. I could not believe that on the twenty-third of June any water could be so turbid or so cold.