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

by Ian Frazier

  Because of all the moisture, wildflowers spread over the slopes of Pattee Canyon a minute after the snows were gone. Buttercups bloomed along the creekbed all the way from the heights to where it meets the river, and at some point yellow flag irises escaped from a garden to join them. The yellow flags were still blooming along a ditch bank in July, when Pattee Creek had dwindled to a ribbon of water, clearer than air, that you had to part the streamside grasses to find.

  (1998)

  BAD ADVICE

  Some years ago, on a camping trip in the pine woods of northern Michigan, my friend Don brought along a copy of an outdoor cookbook that appeared on the best-seller lists at the time. This book contained many ingenious and easy-sounding recipes; one that Don especially wanted to try was called Breakfast in a Paper Bag. According to this recipe, you could take a small paper lunch sack, put strips of bacon in the bottom, break an egg into the sack on top of the bacon, fold down the top of the sack, push a stick through the fold, hold the sack over hot coals, and cook the bacon and egg in the sack in about ten minutes.

  I watched as Don followed the directions exactly. Both he and I remarked that we would naturally have thought the sack would burn; the recipe, however, declared, “Grease will coat the bottom of the bag as it cooks.” Somehow we both took this to mean that the grease, counterintuitively, actually made the bag less likely to burn. Marveling at the “who would have guessed” magic of it, we picked a good spot in the hot coals of our campfire, and Don held the sack above them. We watched. In a second and a half, the bag burst into leaping flames. Don was yelling for help, waving the bag around trying to extinguish it, scattering egg yolk and smoldering strips of bacon and flaming paper into the combustible pines while people at adjoining campfires stared in horror and wondered what they should do.

  The wild figures that the burning breakfast described in midair as Don waved the stick, the look of outraged, imbecile shock reflected on our faces—those are images that stay with me. I replay the incident often in my mind. It is like a parable. Because a book told us to, we attempted to use greased paper as a frying pan on an open fire. For all I know, the trick is possible if you do it just so; we never repeated the experiment. But to me the incident illustrates a larger truth about our species when it ventures out-of-doors. We go forth in abundant ignorance, near-blind with fantasy, witlessly trusting words on a page or a tip a guy we’d never met before gave us at a sporting-goods counter in a giant discount store. About half the time, the faith that leads us into the outdoors is based on advice that is half-baked, made up, hypothetical, uninformed, spurious, or deliberately, heedlessly bad.

  Greenland, for example, did not turn out to be very green, Viking hype to the contrary. Despite what a Pawnee or Wichita Indian told the Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, there were no cities of gold in western Kansas, no canoes with oarlocks made of gold, no tree branches hung with little gold bells that soothed the king (also nonexistent) during his afternoon nap; a summer’s march on the Great Plains in piping-hot armor presumably bore these truths upon the would-be conquistador in an unforgettable way. Lewis and Clark found no elephants on their journey, though President Jefferson, believing reports from the frontier, had said they should be on the lookout for them. And then there was Lansford W. Hastings, the adventurer and promoter of Sacramento, purveyor of some of the worst advice of all time. He told the prospective wagon-train emigrants to California that he had discovered a shortcut (modestly named the Hastings Cutoff) that reduced travel time by many days. Yes, it did cross a few extra deserts and some unusually high mountain ranges; the unfortunate Donner Party read Hastings’s book, followed his route, and famously came to its grisly end below the narrow Sierra pass that now bears its name. According to local legend, the air in the Utah foothills is still blue from the curses that emigrants heaped on Lansford W. Hastings along the way.

  People will tell you just any damn thing. I have found this to be especially so in establishments called Pappy’s, Cappy’s, Pop’s, or Dad’s. The wizened, senior quality of the names seems to give the people who work in such places a license to browbeat customers and pass on whatever opinionated misinformation they please. When I go through the door of a Pappy’s or Cappy’s—usually it’s a fishing-tackle shop, a general store, or a bar—usually there’s a fat older guy sitting behind the counter with his T-shirt up over his stomach and his navel peeking out. That will be Pappy, or Cappy. Sometimes it’s both. Pappy looks at me without looking at me and remarks to Cappy that the gear I’ve got on is too light for the country at this time of year, and Cappy agrees, crustily; then I ask a touristy, greenhorn question, and we’re off. Cappy, backed by Pappy, says the rig I’m driving won’t make it up that Forest Service road, and I’m headed in the wrong direction anyhow, and the best place to camp isn’t where I’m going but far in the other direction, up top of Corkscrew Butte, which is closed now, as is well known.

  What’s worse is that I crumble in this situation, every time. I have taken more wrong advice, have bought more unnecessary maps, trout flies, water filtration devices, and assorted paraphernalia from Pappys and Cappys with their navels showing than I like to think about. Some essential element left out of my psychic immune system causes me always to defer to these guys and believe what they say. And while the Lansford W. Hastings type of bad advice tells people they can do things they really can’t, the Cappy-Pappy type of advice is generally the opposite. Cappy and Pappy have been sitting around their failing store for so long that they are now convinced you’re a fool for trying to do anything at all.

  Complicating matters still further is Happy. She used to be married to Cappy but is now married to Pappy, or vice versa. Happy has missing teeth and a freestyle hairdo, and she hangs out in the back of the store listening in and irritatedly yelling statements that contradict most of what Pappy and Cappy say. The effect is to send you out the door as confused as it is possible to be. What’s different about Happy, however, is that eventually she will tell you the truth. When you return your rented bicycle or rowboat in the evening, Pappy and Cappy are packed away in glycolene somewhere and Happy is waiting for you in the twilight, swatting mosquitoes and snapping the elastic band of her trousers against her side. You have found no berries, seen no birds, caught no fish; and Happy will tell you that the birds were right in front of the house all afternoon, the best berry bushes are behind the snow-machine shed, and she herself just caught fifty fish right off the dock. She will even show you her full stringer, cackling, “You gotta know the right place to go!”

  Of course, people usually keep their best advice to themselves. They’d be crazy not to, what with all the crowds tramping around outdoors nowadays. I can understand such caution, in principle; but I consider it stingy and mean when it is applied to me. There’s a certain facial expression people often have when they are withholding the one key piece of information I really need. They smile broadly with lips shut tight as a Mason jar, and a cheery blankness fills their eyes. This expression irks me to no end. Misleading blather I can put up with, and even enjoy if it’s preposterous enough; but smug, determined silence is a posted sign, a locked gate, an unlisted phone. Also, I think it’s the real message behind today’s deluge of information-age outdoor advice, most of which seems to be about crampons, rebreathers, and synthetic sleeping bag fill. What you wanted to know does not appear. Especially in the more desirable destinations outdoors, withheld advice is the most common kind.

  I craved good advice one summer when I fished a little-known Midwestern river full of brown trout. Every few days I went to the local fly-fishing store and asked the guys who worked there where in the river the really big fish I had heard about might be. The guys were friendly, and more than willing to sell me stuff, but when I asked that question I met the Mason-jar expression I’ve described. I tried being winsome; I portrayed myself as fishless and pitiable, told jokes, drank coffee, hung around. On the subject of vital interest, nobody offered word one.

  I h
alfway gave up and began driving the back roads aimlessly. Then, just at sunset one evening, I suddenly came upon a dozen or more cars and pickups parked in the high grass along a road I’d never been on before. I pulled over, got out, and crashed through the brush to investigate. There, in a marshy lowland, was a section of river I had never tried, with insects popping on its surface and monster brown trout slurping them down and fly rods swishing like scythes in the summer air. Among the intent anglers along the bank I recognized the fishing-store owner’s son, one of the Mason-jar-smiling regulars. The experience taught me an important outdoor fact: Regardless of what the people who know tell you or don’t tell you, an off-road gathering of parked cars doesn’t lie.

  In case you’re wondering, this particular good fishing spot was on the Pigeon River near the town of Vanderbilt, Michigan, upstream from the dam. It’s been years since I fished there, so I can’t vouch for the up-to-dateness of my information. But unlike smarter outdoorsmen, I am happy to pass along whatever I can, because I myself am now gabby and free with advice to an embarrassing degree. I noticed the change as I got older; I hit my mid-forties, and from nowhere endless, windy sentences of questionable advice began coming out of me. An old-guy voice takes on its own momentum, and I seem unable to stop it even when I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes when strangers ask me for directions on a hiking trail or just around town, I give detailed wrong answers off the top of my head rather than admit I don’t know. When my hearers are out of sight, my reason returns and I realize what I’ve done. Then I make myself scarce, for fear that they will discover my ridiculousness and come back in a rage looking for me.

  Outdoor magazines I read as a child featured authoritative fellows in plaid shirts and broad-brimmed hats who offered sensible tips about how to find water in the desert by cutting open cacti, how to make bread from cattail roots, or how to predict the weather by the thickness of the walls of muskrat dens. I wish I had down-to-earth wisdom like that to impart, but when I search my knowledge, all that comes to mind is advice that would cause me to run and hide after I gave it. The one piece of real advice that I do have is not outdoor advice, strictly speaking; I think, however, that its soundness makes up for that drawback. It is true virtually every time, in all lands and cultures. I offer it as the one completely trustworthy piece of advice I know, and it is this: Never marry a man whose nickname is “The Killer.”

  Other than that, you’re on your own.

  (1999)

  CATCHING MONSTERS AFTER DARK

  The biggest fish come out at night—or so I have believed, ever since I was a teenager and began to be abroad a lot in the night myself. At sixteen I used to stroll from my grandmother’s house in Key West down to the shrimp-boat docks just after sunset and watch tarpon bigger than me swim around among the pilings eating shrimp scraps. They were like sea monsters, with their scale-plated sides shining under the dock’s mercury lights, gulping and breaching in the black water an arm’s length away. Once, I brought a deep-sea rod with the intention of casting a tarpon plug to them; but as their tails carelessly slapped the sides of the shrimp boats, I got an idea of the close-range violence that would follow and I didn’t make a cast.

  Sometimes with a girl cousin about my age I would borrow my grandmother’s car and drive at night to a highway bridge north of town to watch barracuda. Usually one or two of these long, narrow, crocodile-smiling fish would be waiting below a streetlight in the brightly lit water right beside the bridge’s deep shadow. On the fisherman’s catwalk we stood above them; now and then one of the barracuda would shoot forward like a bolt and then slowly return to his former position with his jaws chomping. I told my cousin that the barracuda were grabbing little fish that had come out from the bridge’s shadow and had not yet adjusted their eyes to the light. I was right, for all I knew—why else would the barracuda choose to hunt there?—but I offered this explanation with all the bogus confidence guys like to assume on dates.

  I’m old and married now, but I still pursue fish at night. Some summers I do most of my fishing only after the sun goes down. Fishing at night still holds a teenage excitement for me, a keyed-up anticipation of the unpredictable rendezvous waiting out there somewhere in the dark.

  It’s scarier, too, than fishing during the day. Some years ago a fly-fishing magazine had on its cover a photo of a giant brown trout a man had caught night-fishing on a Pennsylvania stream. The hooked fish, apparently too big to lift out of the water for the picture, gaped halfway above the surface in the beam from the angler’s headlamp; the trout’s upper jaw was cantilevered inside like a church, and its round gold-and-black eye stared back, glittering and nocturnal and malign.

  That photo, spooky as it was, inspired me to take nighttime fishing much more seriously. Not long after I saw it, I went on a fishing trip with friends on the Pigeon River in northern Michigan. One night, as my tentmates were crawling into their sleeping bags, I suited up with waders and gear and set out in the buzzing darkness of late summer to catch a monster of my own. By flashlight I followed a streamside trail and then stopped at a deep pool where I knew a big brown trout had to be. I sat on the rocks beside the water and bent down with my flashlight in my mouth and began to tie on a fly, and as my lit-up fingers were moving in the intricacies of the knot, suddenly a big mouth lunged from the darkness and bit me on the side of the hand. I yelped, kicked over my fly box, sent the flashlight flying, and ran away up the bank. After a few minutes of deep breathing, I found the flashlight and investigated. Close to where I had been sitting the light picked out a squat toad about the size of a small teapot; my fingers moving in the light no doubt had looked like food to him. I got well away, tied on my fly, and waded into the stream, but my nerves were shot and my heart wasn’t in it. I could still feel the coldness of that toadmouth on my skin. After a few casts I headed gratefully to bed.

  I kept on trying, though. I spent many late nights on the water, summer and fall. On the Yellowstone River in Montana I fished some nights in darkness so murky I could hardly see the end of my fly rod, let alone the bushy White Wulff dry fly I had on. The biggest challenge at first was wading into that river’s strong current more or less blind. (Of course, I had scouted the water beforehand in daylight.) Fishing with so little sensory information to go on was an act of faith; casting, letting the fly drift, and casting again became odd ceremonial gestures. Staying focused was a problem. And then, as I picked up the fly at the end of a drift, something huge grabbed it. The feeling was as if a dream had reached from the darkness and yanked hard on my arm. We battled frenziedly, in complete and mutual confusion, me spinning around and nearly falling in the current, the fish pulling with electrified desperation in one direction and then another. I never saw a glimpse of him, not even a splash or the ripples of his wake. After a short, endless time, he bent the hook out and got away. I remember him better than fish I’ve landed.

  Sometimes I run into other night-fishing guys. On the beach at Sandy Hook on the New Jersey shore one fall there were hundreds of us assembled in the predawn hours, fishing for striped bass. All along the pale line of surf you could see us, vaguely human-shaped presences slightly darker than the sand. We passed one another on the beach, sometimes quite closely, with no sign of recognition, like sleepwalkers ghosting through a dreamscape in which each was alone.

  This etiquette of the sleepwalker also applies on Western trout streams, I found. Guys—night anglers are usually guys—would appear from the darkness, move past me, and fade away without a sound other than the clicking of stones beneath their feet. Only back at the cars, illuminated by the headlights as we showed one another our catches, did we become three-dimensional beings again and regain the use of our tongues.

  Naturally, the conversations never went much beyond fish and fishing. Personal subjects, such as why we were out there in the middle of the night in the first place, didn’t come up. I could tell, though, that most of the nighttime anglers were middle-aged family men like me. I noticed in
fant-restraining seats in the backs of their vehicles or pink plastic bottles of children’s strawberry-scented sunblock on the dashes. I guessed that they, like me, had become nocturnal because of the forces of domestic life. They had no doubt discovered that if you return from a pleasant afternoon on the river to find the washing machine overflowing, the kids crying, and a bunch of relatives about to arrive, then you will be in for some unhappy discussions with your wife, and on the losing end of them, as well. But if you leave to go fishing with everyone tucked safely in bed and return after midnight with them still sleeping, you’re free and clear. Plus you feel harmlessly sneaky, which is always important in a marriage.

  Fishing at night on the Bitterroot River near Missoula, Montana: during the last several summers I’ve developed a routine. I do the dishes, read to my daughter, say good-night, load my gear in the car, and go. My favorite fishing spot is a twelve-minute drive away, alongside a commercial gravel pit whose chain-link fence the river is always undercutting and dragging away. The water there is deep and powerful. Upstream from the fence is an overhanging bank on which I can perch right above feeding trout (one advantage of fishing at night is how close you can get to the fish). Within earshot, beyond some trees in the direction of town, is an outdoor theater that features musical comedies, and sometimes I hear the faint sounds of the show’s finale just as the moon begins to rise. The disk of the moon’s reflection slides around on the ripples of the current, making indecipherable scribbles like the tip of a lighted pen. Then sometimes in the reflection little fissures begin to appear, each accompanied by a tiny sucking pop—big rainbow and cutthroat trout are feeding on floating mayflies. I dangle my fly in the vicinity of the reflection, and whenever I hear a pop, I pull the line. Every once in a while the hook makes contact and a heavy trout suddenly threshes the surface, shattering the reflection to fragments, and then races across the river, taking line and leaping in spray that glows with a dim phosphorescence in the moonlight.