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

by Ian Frazier

  But then one fortunate night—it had to come—later in the year, almost at the end of summer, when Don was in Missoula with his family, he and I went to a place on the Bitterroot which I’d been trying for weeks. It was a long, deep, straight stretch with a high riprap bank and plenty of room to cast. We fished, the sun went down, the bats and swallows flew, and not much happened in the mayfly department. A few caddis flies were on the water, but almost nothing rose to them. It got darker. I could hardly see Don on the rocks maybe twenty yards downstream. Huge fish lived in here, I knew. They might go a whole evening without rising once, and then, just as you had quit and were walking back to the car, one of the giants would rise with an insouciant gulp and a splashy tail fillip for farewell, to give you a thought to sleep on. So we stayed and stayed, into full gray-black darkness. Then, casting next to the rocks with a size 10 yellow stone fly, Don hooked something big. He shouted the few incomplete comments you shout when you’re in the middle of fighting a big fish. I could hardly look, I was so afraid it would get away.

  And then, gloriously, he netted it. We took it home and looked at it on the newspaper we’d spread on the counter beside the kitchen sink. The fish was a fat, hook-jawed rainbow more than eighteen inches long. Don’s wife, Jane, took a picture of Don holding it up with one hand under one end and one hand under the other. For years, this was the picture of Don that his students found when they logged on to the Web site for his Internet class.

  4

  In the Clark Fork River late one fall, I caught a rainbow-cutthroat hybrid that was almost nineteen inches. I was fishing with Daryl again, and he pointed it out to me: an eccentric fish rising in a backwater pool by a scrubby bank, where I would never have expected a big fish to be. I hooked him with a long cast and fought him for many minutes. Cutthroats are so named because of a crimson slash on their throats beneath the gills. This fish, seen up close in the sparkling, buckskin-colored water, was bright as a Christmas ornament yet completely camouflaged.

  In the Jocko River, on the Flathead Kootenai-Salish reservation north of Missoula, I caught one of my best-ever browns. My friend John Carter, a lawyer for the tribes, kindly took me fishing with him there. I hooked the fish on a weighted stone fly drifted deep through a narrow, brush-lined channel. If the fish hadn’t taken the fly, I probably would have snagged the hook somewhere down in that branch-filled underwater world. When he struck hard and then came bolting out of there, I embarrassed myself, shouting uncoolly at the top of my lungs for John to come and see.

  In the Bitterroot again, by a golf course that contributed many stray balls to the riverbed beneath my wading boots, I caught another big rainbow on a tiny fly. The trico spinnerfall was an almost continuous mat of insects on the surface, and the trout weren’t so much rising as just waiting there with their heads half out of the water, straining the food whalelike through their jaws. Some days I tried the most difficult fish I could find; for many evenings in a row I fished for a highly discerning fish that rose regularly in an unhurried rhythm always in the same spot, and which never honored me with a single strike or even a rejection, though I showed it half the dry flies I owned. During the grasshopper weeks of late summer, with my mind on something else, I caught the biggest trout of my life on a quick trip to the river in the middle of an ordinary day.

  I fished at all and sundry times, unsystematically. If I went downtown to do some errands and saw fish rising in the Clark Fork, I might lose my head and forget whatever plans I’d made and run home and get my rod and try to catch them. Having so much good fishing close at hand was not always as comfortable as it sounds. Fishing hovered in my mind as the constant alternative to anything I was trying to do: Should I earn money to support my family, or fish? Should I drop the car off at the repair shop and walk home, or drive to the river and fish? Often the pressure and uncertainty made me irritable.

  After we had lived in Missoula for three years, we decided to move back East. I have spent a lot of my life ricocheting between the West and the East, and a while ago I quit trying to figure out why. My wife and I missed New York; our families are in the East; we like the anonymity there; we knew we would come back to Montana again anyway. To us the decision did not seem so unreasonable. To many of our friends in Missoula, however, going back East—and, worse, moving to New Jersey, where we had bought a house—was wrongheaded to the point of negligence, even treachery. Real estate being the all-consuming middle-aged topic that it is, many of us now devote more mental energy to thinking about exactly where we would live than our forebears spent on questions of the soul and its salvation. For us to say we were leaving big-sky Montana for crowded, polluted, rat-eat-rat New Jersey—from a certain point of view, it was apostasy.

  Once we had decided to move, my fishing fell apart completely. The freight of specific and unspecific guilt I carry with me just routinely, which always becomes a bit inflamed on a trout stream, now raged out of control as I tried to get in some fishing during our last few months there. What a skunk I was, what a trespasser! Stomping these pristine Western riverbanks in my starchy East Coast waders, I was the cad still living with a woman he knows he is going to leave. All my efforts on the river ended in chaos and rebuke. I thrashed in the brush, caught my backcasts in trees, spooked feeding fish, lost fish once I’d hooked them, popped flies off in fishes’ mouths. Once I made a beyond-miraculous cast to a tiny pocket of water between the forks of a tree branch in the river, and something huge took my fly and, ninety seconds later, agonizingly, was gone … Some of my angling failures of those months pain me still.

  Time moved slowly and then quickly, the way it does. The morning arrived when most of our stuff was in boxes and a moving man with a West Indian accent was walking around the house putting little numbered labels on things. On one of our last evenings I went to the Bitterroot, to a section of river with a gravel road on one side and a dairy farm on the other. It’s not the most productive place to fish, but it’s an uncrowded one. I didn’t want to talk to anybody or have witnesses to my current phase of ineptitude. The date was late August. Hot weather had made the river low and tepid and the fishing slow. A creek enters the river near this spot, and its piled-up gravel delta is a good platform from which to observe a stretch of deep, slow water by some banks of tall grasses upstream. I rigged my rod and watched. Not much rising. The sun on the horizon sent shadows of the cottonwoods clear across the river. A party of boats came by, almost invisible, just voices in the cottonwood shadows; when they passed through the lines of sunlight in between, the red and orange and yellow kayaking wear of the paddlers lit up incandescently.

  I waded into the river. For a period I just stood and watched with my fly in my hand and my line trailing in the water, ready to cast. Little enough was going on, and the fish were rising sparingly; that was lucky for me, in a way, because I could maintain my mood and not get too nervous and shaky. At last light I caught a cutthroat of about fourteen inches on a Pale Evening Dun. That fish would be the last I caught in Montana for a long time. Then I waded to the shallow water at the edge of the creek delta and stood watching again. The caddis flies were gusting past in blizzards. When I held my flashlight in my mouth to change a fly, they blew by my face like snow in a windshield.

  The last of the sunset’s glow left the western horizon. I heard no rises, or almost none. I positioned my head so that the slightly lighter reflection of the starry blue-black sky lay on the black water. In that faint sheen I saw a small seam appear and disappear. I thought I heard the faintest sound of a rise. The riser might be a minnow, or a leviathan. I had a new Pale Evening Dun, size 16, tied to a 5X leader. (Why didn’t I cut the leader back to a stouter tippet when I changed flies?) I cast to where the seam had been; it opened and I gently lifted the rod. Suddenly my line was headed for mid-river at top speed. The reel was whirring, the line unspooling, the rod bending, pointing to a far place in the vicinity of the Pacific Ocean. For a second, foolishly, I held the line, trying to slow the fish. The 5X tippet parted.
I walked up onto the gravel delta and sat for a while on a log. There were no lights before me, just night and the river; in the blackness the great Bitterroot River swirled by.

  Tomorrow, in the last of the empty cardboard boxes, I would pack my wading boots, still wet, and the rest of my fishing gear.

  5

  Soon after we arrived in New Jersey, Hurricane Floyd hit the East Coast. The storm stayed far enough out at sea that the greater New York area did not get its full force, only its endlessly rainy periphery. Warm rain fell in sheafs, in swaths. From low, ill-looking gray clouds it spilled like a flux. The suburb we had moved to is hilly, and every place that wasn’t level became a waterfall—streets, front steps, sidewalks. Every downward-sloping driveway was a torrent debouching into the street. Basements of houses at the bottom of hills flooded. A house we had not been able to afford in a neighborhood nearby appeared on the news partly underwater. When I got up in the morning and turned on the TV, its first words were “Coming up next: Celebrities’ reactions to the hurricane!”

  Weather notwithstanding, I went into Manhattan on the commuter bus to have lunch with my book editor. I’d been in New Jersey only ten days, and I was footloose, eager to see the city. As I walked downtown from Forty-second Street, very few people were around. The emptiness of the city’s public spaces made the storm’s demonstrations all the more striking, with skyscraper-high curtains of rain blowing everywhere. Some of the storm clouds were only six or eight stories above the ground, and they looked otherwordly as they traveled down the city’s canyons on the wind at forty miles an hour.

  After lunch I wanted to go to the Public Library, but it had closed, so I headed home. The bus, too, was almost empty. The driver hitched up his trousers, shut the bus doors, and backed out of the Port Authority bay with an air of intrepitude. Rain was, indeed, falling harder than before. The swampy plain of the Meadowlands in Jersey just past the Lincoln Tunnel was a storm-darkened North Atlantic seascape with scattered lights here and there that seemed to bob. Low points on Route 3 had turned to lakes with islands of stalled cars. The bus made it through one lake after the next without even slowing down too much. After it turned from Route 3 to the street I live on, however, it came to an obstacle that made it pause. Up ahead, churning across the road, was a creek or river that had jumped completely out of its banks and over the little bridge that spanned it. Foaming like a class 4 whitewater, it flooded around the bridge supports and poured milky brown through the lower parts of the bridge railing. I heard it thrumming against the side of the bus as the driver sucked in his breath and powered through.

  The storm passed. I made many more trips into the city, none as filled with raw nature as the first. After Montana, nature as I had gotten used to it seemed in disappointingly short supply. I had never before lived in a suburb like this—a bedroom community—and I walked all over trying to get my bearings. Remembering the creek or river that had almost stopped the bus that day, I sought it out, explored it. On a normal day it flowed much more sedately than at my first view of it; its shallow water ran clear, at no more than walking speed, through a concrete channel behind a swimming club, and in its own bed again around a wide bend at the edge of a meadow in which stood tall radio-transmission towers. On sunny days the correct designation for it seemed to be the friendly one of “brook.”

  Nobody I asked knew what its name was. No sign at any of its bridges identified it. I followed it through the neighboring suburb of Brookside, where I questioned passersby. The first person I asked was a tobacco-wizened lady puffing on an extra-long who looked at me as if I were nuts. Though standing on a bridge above it, she apparently could not conceive of wondering about its name. Two more people I stopped also didn’t know. Finally I went into a business called Brookside Florists, whose back lot adjoined the brook; I figured that if they couldn’t tell me, no one could. I asked a guy behind the counter the name of the brook, and he gave me a look that would shrivel weeds. “It’s not a brook,” he said uncheerfully. “It’s a river. It’s called the Third River.”

  At home I checked a local map, and found it: a hair-fine blue thread, the Third River, hard to see among the density of New Jersey streets and highways. It started in the hills at the north end of our suburb and wound among the hills of our suburb and many others to the south and east until it joined the Passaic River, which in turn ran into Newark Bay. I had never known a numbered river before. It was the Third, but I could not find the two preceding, or any that came after. Why it’s called the Third River is still a mystery to me.

  Every river has to have a name, however. Knowing this one’s inspired me to like it more. I started spending a lot of time along its mostly-but-not-all-concrete shores. “I’m off to the Third River,” I’d tell my wife as I headed out the door. I saw how it went behind McDonald’s restaurants and muffler shops and Italian bakeries and industrial parks and parking lots, and under an on-ramp for the Garden State Parkway, and through a vine-clogged gully at the edge of a high school football field. I never came across even one kid playing in it, or any sign that its neighbors noticed that it was there at all. I especially admired it after a heavy rain, when it filled with water and roared, still unnoticed, over the rocks and cement and shopping carts in its bed. And all the stuff that floated on it—at occasional brush entanglements across the river, the current deposited its floating detritus, its Styrofoam cups and partly deflated soccer balls and plastic Wiffle bats and chopsticks and packing peanuts, to accumulate in heaps like froth.

  Just down the hill from my house is an unnamed (as far as I know) rivulet, a branch of the Third River. On my walks, I often stopped at a little bridge over it, at first mainly from a perverse affection for urban junkiness. The creek seemed just the sort I dreamed of playing in as a kid, if you took away the bright-orange traffic cone someone had thrown in it, and the pair of corduroy pants, and the soda cans. Like a creek in old-time Ohio, it flowed through second-growth forest of long, skinny hardwoods vying with one another for the light. Though the lawns and houses of suburbia encircled it all around, for this short distance it appeared to be a woodland stream, disappearing beyond a brushy bend as alluringly as I could imagine. And despite the trash, I often saw birds there. Once, a cardinal was singing from a branch over the creek, fresh-paint red in its feathers and black around its eye; and once I peered over the bridge railing directly down into the eye of a mallard duck paddling below. He turned his head flat to the water to see me, expressed an intense ducklike level of surprise, and rocketed away through the trees.

  Once you get the habit of looking for good places for fish to be, you never lose it. Even in the most unpromising water, you mentally note where a fish would hang out, if it could. At the little bridge over the Third River tributary I always did that, scoping out a place just down from the bridge where the creek had carved a bend that someone had reinforced with a wall of concrete. The water was about four feet deep there, a comfortable-looking lie, with a small, tumbling rapids just upstream. Under other circumstances, fish could live happily in that bend. Storm-sewer inflow iridescent with road oil entered the creek from a drainpipe nearby, however, and a decrepit power lawnmower tossed in for good measure, its chrome handle glistening above the water, seemed to reduce the possibilities still further.

  But one day, as I was idly looking into the water at the bend, something moved. I looked again and saw only the creek bottom’s irregularities. I kept looking. There was movement again. Then I saw a little fish holding almost still at the edge of the deeper water. I would have been almost as surprised to see a fish in the stream from my garden hose. As I got closer, I saw more. Fish of four and six inches were facing upstream in the current, moving slightly, sometimes darting around. Farther back in the pool I saw a flash. An even bigger fish, perhaps a foot long, was turning on his side to kind of root on the bottom, the way I’ve seen feeding whitefish and even trout do sometimes in Montana. He came through the pool, doing that sideways nudging, oblivious of me. I don’t know w
hat kind of fish he was, but clearly he lived here, a hundred feet from the traffic jam, just a fish going about his job. As I watched him, I had no awareness of being in New Jersey, or specifically anywhere. For those few minutes I was occupied and at home.

  (2001)

  ALSO BY IAN FRAZIER

  Dating Your Mom

  Nobody Better, Better than Nobody

  Great Plains

  Family

  Coyote v. Acme

  On the Rez

  It Happened Like This (translator)

  Additional Acclaim for The Fish’s Eye

  “It’s hard to imagine a more heartfelt book, or one more lovingly rendered.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A charming and idiosyncratic collection … heartwarming but unsentimental tours of the urban angling scene … If you have any affinity for the outdoors and fishing, or just enjoy terrific writing, read this splendid book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Witty, insightful … This gem belongs in waterproof pockets and urban backpacks.”