by James Dodson
“Dad,” Jack said. “I found bumps growing on the back of my tongue.”
I assured him finding bumps on the back of your tongue was perfectly normal. Those bumps had a point, I said, though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was.
“Dad,” he said, “will you be home for my birthday?”
I assured him there was no chance we’d miss his birthday.
“Oh yeah,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “one more thing. I learned to swim yesterday.”
“No kidding?”
I felt a small lump rise in my throat. I told my son I was very proud of him for learning to swim, as I knew his mother was. It was one of life’s great accomplishments, I said. I told him I loved him and said good night. He told me he loved me and said good night.
“Dad?”
“Yes, Rocket?” He refused to hang up just yet.
“Where are you?”
“Somewhere in Montana. A forest by a river. If you listen you may hear it in the background. Can you hear it?” I held the receiver out the window, aimed at the river.
“I think so.”
“I’ll bring you out here someday soon.”
“Is it dark there?”
“Yes. Incredible stars. They’re the same ones shining over you. Jack?” I thought I knew what was chewing at him.
“What?”
“Don’t worry about those bumps on your tongue. They’re supposed to be there. Okay? Believe me.”
“Okay.” Another stalling pause. “Dad?”
“Yes, Rocket?”
“Where are you and Maggie going tomorrow?”
I thought for a moment, then answered: “To the Grand Tetons. We’re headed home.”
“What are the Grand Tetons?”
I explained that the Grand Tetons were a very high mountain range in Wyoming and told him what the French name meant in English. He laughed on his end and Maggie laughed on our end and I thought how nice it was to hear my children laughing across a darkened continent.
CHAPTER TEN
Song of the Snake
Dear Pocahontus,
This was so cool. We went down the Sneak river in a driff boat and had a guyed named Tom who liked to ski and said we should go see Jacksons hole and showd us some baby trout who were like the oldest fish on earth. I could tell Dad loved it and a big raft came by but the president wasn’t on it but we waved anyway. I left him a letter at Jackson lake Logge to say we could do something if he wanted to but Dad said he prorobly didn’t get the letter. We left there and drove old blue to Jacksons hole and saw some cowboys shoot in the stret. Then we drove threw the montins to Salt lake Utaw and saw the church where the mormens lived and thot about going across the salt lake but it was verry verry hot and we drove to colorotto insted and stayed at a cool ranch called coloratto trials and I rode a horse named Luke all week with some frrends named Lucy and Becca and we saw a very funny show and laughed alot on the last night. Dad rode some two but mossly fished in the san won rivver. Then we went to the new mexxico and camped on a desert mountin and looked at stars. I boght a dream catcher at the indian festival. When the truk blew up in oclahomea we stoped at a gass staison and I got a gatorade and these men towed the truck to ther workshop and took us in their jazzy guys truk to a nice air condission motel to wait in hinton until the truk was ready. We met a verry nice lady who new jessy james. When the truk was ready we left early in the morning and drove to see the oclahomea city bombing but it was dark and I dont remember much but dad said I saw it. It makes me sad to think about. But it made me happy agan to go to gammy’s house.
Love, Maggie Dodson
P.S. That is all for now, Love, Maggie.
Our guide was named Tom Hruska. He had been guiding down the Snake River for five years. In the winter he taught skiing above Jackson Hole. He looked like a skier, leanfaced and good-looking, agile on his feet. We’d booked him for half a day’s trip. He had already made one trip down the river in his drift boat and said the cutthroat were hard to scare up—the late summer blahs.
“Do you think we’ll see the president?” Maggie asked him.
He smiled at her. “You never know. I read he’s rafting the Snake today.”
“We left him a note,” she explained, and Tom glanced at me to see if that was true. I confirmed it. Checking into Jackson Lake Lodge the previous afternoon, we’d learned the Clintons were there on vacation and Maggie had promptly asked the assistant manager for a piece of paper, upon which she printed a note—beautifully, I might add, with two thirds of the words spelled correctly—to “the President of the United Stats.”
“What did you tell him?” Tom was clearly impressed.
“That my dad could play golf with him if he wanted to. He’s probably going to call us or something.”
“I don’t see how he could pass up an invitation like that,” Tom agreed, winking at me.
We added extra tippet to our lines and pinched our barbs because this portion of the Snake was all catch-and-release. With a little luck, we’d be replacing flies right and left and the spare tippet would be necessary. Tom suggested we try #12 Hopper Flies because they were easier to see in the swiftly moving water and then explained about the uniqueness of the Snake River fine-spotted cutthroats we were after. They were technically considered part of the general cutthroat genus, with no formal Latin name of their own, he said, but anybody who fished the river knew that the Snake’s cutthroats were one of the last wild, pure, native trout species of the West, unique as the river they came from, with a fine spot pattern running from head to tail fin, a distinctive rosy-red cheek patch, and a muddy-orange slash under the throat. He had a gut feeling the afternoon fishing was going to be good because this morning’s run hadn’t been.
“These are some of the oldest fish on earth, perhaps even some of the oldest living things on earth,” Tom explained as he maneuvered his rugged drift boat into the Snake’s swift currents. Drift boats, or “Mackenzie boats,” as they’re sometimes called, after the Oregon river of the same name, are an engineering marvel and something of a unique species unto themselves—wide in the beam, shallow-drafting, ruggedly constructed with multiple oarlocks so a pilot can shift positions quickly as the river dictates. Their design recalled to me some of the seaworthy wooden dinghies Maine lobstermen traditionally used to row out to their boats. Both craft were meant to take a pounding and handle anything the elements and currents could throw at them.
The boat began to gently buck and I saw the excitement come into my daughter’s eyes. She was clutching her fly rod, wearing a purple life vest that looked three sizes too big, seated behind Tom in the rear of the boat. I was standing in the boat’s front leg braces in the bow, thinking how the rearing Tetons looked almost unreal, as perfect as a painted stage drop. Tom explained that the thrill of drift fishing was the “hit-and-go” technique of working pools and shallows of the river as we went down, searching for holes where the trout were lazing beneath submerged logs and overhangs or feeding in the swifter current. “These trout have college degrees,” he said with a quick grin before his attention went back to the river. He rowed aggressively for a minute and then, as we suddenly caught a swift patch of current, we accelerated along and he held his oars up, explaining that the Snake River changed shape almost every season due to factors like the size of the spring runoff from the mountains or the summer rains. “The river, as a result, is always changing shape. And I mean radically, too—new oxbows and channels, pools you’ve never seen before. This river can seem so tame at times, like now, in a drought. But turn around and it’s raging like a storm.”
As he said this, we were bucking through some pretty lively rapids, appearing to just miss several large submerged boulders. I knew from canoeing swift waters that submerged rocks can be bad business—snagging a craft just long enough for the currents to flip it. But a drift boat is designed to draft in less than two feet of water and its width makes turning over a virtual impossibility. Tom told us he was heading us to a pool
where he’d had a bit of luck that morning and thought several choice cutthroats might be loitering for an afternoon feed.
From a side channel, a big black rubber raft suddenly appeared, emerging like a truckload of cantaloupes on a busy interstate, bouncing right into our path on small white-capped rapids. Tom used his oars to slow the boat and steer us sharply to starboard. A dozen people were seated on the large raft, wearing bright red safety helmets. Some of them appeared utterly terrified; a few were grinning. Several people waved, and Maggie waved back.
“Is that the president?”
“I don’t think so,” Tom said, and explained to me that guided-raft traffic had doubled on the Snake during the time he’d been working on the river, which was only five or six years. It was becoming something of a nuisance to fishermen, he admitted, though he quickly added that perhaps the rafters felt the same way about the fishermen.
We made our first casts near a rock island where the heavy spring floods had cranked over some large cottonwoods. The river turned sharply right there and a side channel had several deep and promising pools where the current entered through narrow shallows—just the kind of place, in theory, a trout would lie and wait for his lunch to be served. Tom was impressed with Maggie’s basic casting skills and showed her a technique of backcasting her line over an imaginary “brick wall,” making an economical forward movement—or “chopping off the chicken’s head”—then finishing, as her fly presented itself on the water’s surface, with her hands in the attitude of “folded prayer.” “Over the wall, chop the chicken’s head, and pray. That’s my theory of fly casting. If you’re lucky, a big cutthroat is waiting there to snack on it.”
A big one wasn’t waiting, but a small one was. On her fourth or fifth cast, Maggie reeled in a small cutthroat no longer than a school pencil. Tom rowed us onto the shore of the rock island and we all got out and examined the baby fish before releasing him in the shallows. I snapped a photo of the guide and the girl with the baby fish on her line. Another raft bucked past with its occupants whooping and hollering and waving arms like people on a theme park ride. After the fish had been released, Tom offered to take a photo of Maggie and her father backdropped by the Grand Tetons.
We shoved off, then bucked and slashed our way down the Snake through another impressive set of churning rapids, turning out every so often to fish in the lee of rock islands or slower channels. I was surprised each time at how shallow the boat could go without scraping bottom, and Tom explained that a trout was less of a predator than an opportunist who would hang around narrow shallows conserving energy and waiting for his lunch to come to him.
“They’ll feed in as little as six inches of water,” he said, scanning the breaking water ahead. “Of course, that makes them vulnerable to ospreys and eagles. I once had an eagle swoop down and take a trout right off the line before I knew what happened. Unbelievable. You gotta admire skill and speed like that.” Our own theme park ride soon became part birding expedition as we scanned the shore for eagles and ospreys. We spotted several nests and finally saw a small male golden eagle circling way up high, floating on thermals.
Banking into a pool where the river made an abrupt switchback, I made a long roll cast to shallows under overhanging limbs and suddenly saw a flash as a trout took my hopper and ran with it. He felt large but turned out to be only slightly bigger than Maggie’s pencil fish. While Tom doped up a new fly for Maggie with silicone, he talked about how the Snake was born in the waters of the Yellowstone and wandered all the way west to the Columbia. Our boat’s bow was pulled onto another narrow rock island beach and I was wading bare-legged in the icy shallows, making short casts into a promising pool, wanting a bigger trout, seeking something to remember the Snake by besides its photogenic setting and hypnotic song. Changing strategies, I put on a fresh stone fly, a stimulator whose silhouette in the bright sun just might lure a greedy hog to the surface, and aggressively stripped line and worked my way back up the river. I could sense a trophy trout about to sip my fly and run. Carefully studying the river, I moved a few yards every time I cast, allowing my fly to drift with the current for only a minute or so each time. A hundred yards behind me, Maggie and Tom landed another cutthroat, a fine ten-incher.
I fished alone up the river for perhaps half an hour, certain a strike would happen at any second. But none happened. I finally turned around and walked back to the boat, dragging my bare legs through the beautiful water as I went, remembering a Chinese proverb that says something about water that’s too pure holding no fish. Tom and Maggie caught another trout and were now up to fourteen inches.
“This girl can fish,” Tom said, and invited me to share their hole.
I thanked him and said it was a joy just to watch them fish. I asked him if we were typical of his paying customers, greenhorn fishermen anxious to experience the song of the Snake, prompting him to smile a bit lopsidedly. “It’s funny,” he said, adjusting his cap a bit, “you really get all kinds of people out here these days. You get the serious fishermen who just want steady action and no conversation and you get people more interested in the gorgeous country. A few just want to ride down the river. Every client is different. They come with their own set of expectations and every kind of skill. Some want help, some don’t. That’s why I love this job. I love teaching skiing, but this is really something else.”
I asked him if customers were ever disappointed by a day on the Snake.
“Yeah. You get them every so often, some hotshot who blames you if the fish don’t bite. I find those guys really aren’t here to experience the beauty and grandeur of this place, the joy of being on such an incredible river. To them, it’s just about catching fish, an ego thing really. They could be fishing in the Detroit River for all they notice. Some days the trout are biting, some days they aren’t. That’s really the attraction of trout fishing. It’s always a mystery what will happen. You never know if what you do will work but, hey, check out what you get….” He waved at the Tetons with a broad sweep of his arm.
“Too bad it’s not real,” I agreed, smiling at the panorama.
“Is that the president?” Maggie said as another big raft suddenly rounded the corner into view. It sloshed within yards of us and a tubby gent seated at the front did indeed rather resemble our president, though I doubted Bill Clinton would be wearing a T-shirt that jauntily read, Who says white men are confused? I have the brain of a horse and am hung like a Harvard graduate.
—
We finished our run down the Snake two hours later, fishing a pool mere yards from the take-out spot where Tom’s assistant had left his truck and boat trailer. The pool was fairly deep and green, the water fairly sluggish, and suddenly we couldn’t unhook the cutthroats fast enough. I caught a pair of fifteen-inchers in less than five minutes and Maggie snagged an even bigger one that she worked diligently toward the net without any assistance from Tom until the trout got within a foot of the net, spit the fly, and threw up a contemptuous fantail of river water as he sped away. It was a terrific way to finish the afternoon and I sensed it had been the fishing highlight thus far for Maggie, the thing she needed to revive her sagging angling interests.
Tom asked where we were headed next and I replied that we were probably going to mosey into tony Jackson Hole, wet clothes and all, to see if we could scour up supper and maybe a place that had live music. He told us a place that specialized in good steaks and western line dancing and I thanked him sincerely, adding another twenty to the tip.
“Did you like us?” Maggie asked him.
“What?” Both of us glanced puzzledly down at her.
“I mean, were we, like, good clients or something?”
Tom laughed, folding the money into his shirt pocket. He ruffled her hair and said, “You were awesome, Maggie. I’ll never forget you.”
Nice man. Smart dude. Thanks, Tom.
—
Jackson Hole was packed with shopping tourists and there was gunplay in the street. Spectators lined t
he wooden boardwalk to watch the sheriff face off with a couple desperados who’d come to town looking for more than a good buy on Gap jeans. This is how it once was on the streets of old Jackson Hole, boomed an amplified voice. When men settled their disputes with six-guns and frontier justice came from the point of a gun. See how far we’ve come as a civilization? Amos tugged impatiently at his lead and I was sorry to spot a mime working his way toward us in front of the crowd. With a little luck, the desperados would miss the sheriff and shoot the mime before he reached us.
Closer and closer the bandy-legged cowboys edged, hands hovering over six-shooters. In 1965, a UCLA historian wrote a provocative essay in which he pointed out that most of the technology that tamed the Wild West evolved from the Middle Ages, proving 1850s America was really closer to King Arthur’s England than to modern Britain. Archaeological evidence indicated, for example, that spurs and log cabins had really first appeared in Spain and Sweden and that the three principal items believed to be responsible for taming the American frontier—barbed wire, the revolver, and windmills—all had their origins in medieval Europe between 1100 and 1500. Ditto the Conestoga wagon, which brought thousands West, and the stagecoach: first depicted in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the eleventh century. The parallels between Merrie Olde England and the Wild Wild West, believed to owe their existence to waves of European working-class immigrants, were almost uncanny. Both societies were broken down into small independent fiefdoms (or territories) traditionally ruled by the shire reeve (or sheriff) who collected the king’s (or president’s) taxes and who served as justice of the peace, chased outlaws, and meted out swift and often corrupt social justice. Shoot-outs and hangings were commonplace—often considered a crude form of public entertainment—and powerful popular mythologies grew up around the roguish outlaws who refused to be tamed (Robin Hood, Jesse James). Saloons and brothels of the Old West served whiskey, a Celtic invention of the fourteenth century, and cardplaying, which featured face cards of kings, queens, and so forth, was really a portable form of chess.