One Fish, Two Fish, Nice Fish, Hog

hog

There is a hierarchy to the words you use to describe landed trout. It’s a loose hierarchy and probably depends on what waters you are fishing. For me, fish are sorted into the categories of dink, not bad, good fish, nice fish and hog. It is socially acceptable to describe your own fish as a dink or not bad and maybe even to call one of your own fish a good fish, but for nice fish and hog it is more appropriate (and satisfying) to wait for another angler to call your fish ‘nice’ or ‘a hog.’ None of these categories really work on a small brookie stream in which a 10” fish is as big as it gets.

A dink is self-explanatory, it is anything bigger than a fry to about 9 inches. If it’s been a slow day and one of the few fish you’ve caught, then a dink is a welcome sight. It’s a fish and you caught it, you’re not skunked. Dinks can be kind of fun, they come in quick, but sometimes they go nuts on the end of the line and they still merit at least a glance at them before you through them back. Maybe they have nice colors, or you want to check if they still have their parr marks. A friend of mine had taken a trip to Montana and had a disappointing day; they hadn’t caught many fish and the few they had were mostly dinks. Their guide was trying to make the best of it and when my friend pulled in a dink, the guide said, “that’s nine inches of turbo!” with false enthusiasm. It kind of summed up the whole experience for him. Dinks happen.

A good fish is a trout that you’re not embarrassed to land. Its length is from about 11 inches to 14 inches. If you’ve been fishing for any length of time, you’re probably not going to want to take a picture of a good fish, but as you land a good fish, someone in the boat will probably say, “I’ll take that all day” and mean it. A good fish will have some fight and it is undeniably a ‘real’ fish. Depending on the stream and your own expertise a good fish might be a great accomplishment. My personal Everest is the lower Savage River in western Maryland. It’s a tough river with picky wild brown trout. They demand a perfect drift and the right fly. If I do manage to hook one, there is no guarantee that it will be landed. These are wild browns who will fight all the way to the net and then keep fighting. When I wade the Savage by myself and catch a good fish, I’m ecstatic. A good fish can be a great fish under the right circumstances.

A nice fish is a trout from about 16-18 inches. It’s a no doubter fish that when you land it someone on the boat will say, “that’s a nice fish,” with an emphasis on the nice. When you’re starting out, you will probably lose a lot of nice fish and when you start landing them with any regularity, you’re at the next level of your fishing game. You will probably want to take a picture of a nice fish, especially in the early days when you’re not at all sure that there are more nice fish in your future. I just got back from a trip to Tennessee and early on the first day, I landed a nice fish. A rainbow that was probably sixteen inches. We were still anchored at the put-in; the guide was rigging D’s rod and it was maybe my third cast. I pulled it in and my guide asked, “you want a picture?” Without thinking about it too much I said, “nah, but let me get a look at him before we let him go.” I hadn’t realized it, but that was a major step for me, catching nice fish stopped being this big, almost accidental occurrence and has started to be something of an expectation, but still a pleasant experience. It was the first time I had fished with this guide and it also got me some street cred (or stream cred) with him. He later told a mutual friend that D and I are good people (we tip well, so that helps). And the cherry on the cake: a wade fisher also gave me a “nice fish” as we released it; that guy is a class act, whoever he is.

A hog is a big ass trout that puts up a fight. Most of these still break me off or come unbuttoned. A hog can be 19” long if it’s a fatty, but I would argue that any trout 20” or more is a hog. I don’t land many hogs, but I’m starting to hook them with regularity, which I take as a good sign. I’m sure there are people out there for whom 20” is nothing special, but I hope I never become one.

On our recent trip to Tennessee we had a couple of run ins with hogs. The first was a brown that slammed D’s midge at the end of her drift just as she was picking up to recast. It must have thought that the fly was an emerger that was getting it away because it hit that fly hard. D went from gently recasting to fighting a hog in a second and did pretty well, but the circumstances didn’t favor her. The fly was already well down stream and she never really got a great hook set. The brown jumped a couple of times and we could all see that it was at least 20” and absolutely a hog. With each jump me and Sam, the guide, would each let out a big “woah!”. It broke off though and we were just left with the memory and the adrenaline. The second run in with a hog happened that same day; it was late in the afternoon and we were getting close to the takeout. Fishing had slowed down considerably, and we were all chatting comfortably when my indicator went down and I set the hook, but then my line didn’t budge. I had hooked a stump, but then the stump shook its head. “I think this is a nice fish,” was all I got out and I started to wind in the slack to get this fish on the reel right away. I never saw it, but it took off right at the boat. I was reeling to keep up, but it was hopeless, he went straight at me, under the boat and used the slack to shake my #20 midge off in a second. In retrospect, I should have just stripped in the line by hand and worried about getting him on the reel once I had him under more control, but I didn’t. I’m always haunted by these kind of encounters, the ones where you never even see the fish, or only get a quick glimpse of it before it disappears forever. Those kinds of fish take on a mythic quality and become legends you tell yourself so that you’ll be ready next time. They become your own personal Loch Ness Monsters.

The next day, I had my final encounter with a hog during our trip. We were fishing with Patrick, one of my favorite guides on a stretch of water we both really like. There are some big fish in this water, but not in high numbers. You don’t get a lot of strikes, but when you do, it’s likely to be a nice fish. It keeps you on your toes. There’s not a lot of talk in the boat, everyone is concentrating on the fishing, getting a good drift and making sure you don’t miss the hook set. D had landed a few nice fish already, but I hadn’t. I had missed two strikes and the morning had gone on long enough that a slight panic was setting in. Too early to worry about getting skunked, but if it went on much longer, I might get some razzing from Patrick and some pitying comments from D. I was about 30 minutes from the dreaded “do you want to take my spot at the front of the boat? I don’t mind.” Shudder.

Then the indicator went down and I set the hook. A solid set and instantly the line was alive with something substantial on the end of it. Hallelujah, it sped off upstream away from the boat, not towards it. The fish put itself on the reel by taking off away from me. Then it started peeling off line and then I was close to my backing. It was hauling ass up stream, into the current. Finally, I got it to slow down and when it came back at me, I was able to keep up with it. Each run, I was able to reel in more line and each run it ended up in a little shallower water than the last time, now it was just below the surface, running under the boat, but not so deep that I couldn’t control it and then Patrick got it in the net. I had caught the hog. Now, if God forbid, Patrick dropped the net or it slipped out, that was on him. I had caught the hog. I had witnesses. But Patrick of course, didn’t drop the net, we got the fish in for the pics and to measure it. A fatty shaped at 21”. Not any kind of record, but a no doubt hog, my first real hog if I’m being honest. I hope there are bigger fish in my future, but I doubt there will be ones that I feel as good about. For once, we got my little Nessie in the boat and I have pics to prove it.

Cabin Movie Night

cabin

Movie night at the cabin has both higher and lower standards than movie night in your regular house. A good cabin movie can have lower standards when it comes to objective quality (in fact, I would argue a good cabin movie should kind of suck, but in a very specific way), but it has higher standards when it comes to its emotional/nostalgic qualities. A good cabin movie is one that you’ve seen before, but not in this century, or it’s one you’ve seen hundreds of times and can recite lines from. A good cabin movie benefits from you being slightly drunk while you watch it. But the absolute best cabin movie is one that you loved when you were younger, but that your spouse has never seen. The best cabin movie is discovered when one of you says to the other in disbelief, “you’ve never seen….??!! We have to see if it’s on Netflix right now.” Think Cannonball Run, or Big Trouble in Little China; something that is slightly cheesy and slightly embarrassing to like.

It’s the kind of movie that if you were flipping around the channels at your house, you might say to yourself “I love this part,” and watch until the next commercial, but at the cabin, it’s a movie that is a scheduled event, with popcorn and pausing when someone goes to the bathroom. A good cabin movie is at its best under the following conditions: when everyone is tired from doing too much for too long, or when crappy weather prevents you from doing much of anything. A good cabin movie comes from a slight sense of panic that you need to squeeze a little more out of your cabin time. The best cabin movies are watched when it’s pouring rain, when you’re too tired to do much of anything else, or when you’re snowed in with a fire going.

Your mood is very important for cabin movie night. Everyone must be on board. All it takes is one person in the group to “not get it” and it’s not cabin movie night, it’s just crappy movie night. Low expectations are important, but that’s not the same as no expectations. Low expectations let you forgive the glacial pacing of older movies or absurd plots to still genuinely enjoy the movie. No expectations mean that you’re just vegging out in front of the TV, waiting for death.

Selecting your cabin movie viewing companions is also very importantly. Ideally, you want people who know each other well enough that they can just shut up and just relax together. If you don’t know each other that well, a good cabin movie can accelerate the friendship, I feel like what kind of movie a person will sit through tells you a lot.

What doesn’t work is trying to watch a cabin movie with anyone who is the least bit uptight; there’s nothing like prolonged silences during the watching of a movie during a cabin weekend to push the insecure over the edge. The first chuckle at a joke they don’t get and it’s therapy time! In general, with the uptight you want to keep it light, active and moving until they go to bed, or better yet: home. Treat the uptight and insecure the way you would a child and you won’t be far off: it’s always about them and the minute you forget that fact they will make a scene at a restaurant that may or may not involve poop.

I think comedies make for the best cabin movies, but a good thriller can work too. Most of early Mel Brooks movies work well and so do Alfred Hitchcock films. A good cabin movie is one that as you’re watching it you say to yourself, “I forgot about his scene this is great!”

But the absolute best cabin movie is one you love that your spouse says that they’ve seen bits of it on cable, but not the whole thing. One of my wife’s favorite old movies is When Harry Met Sally. I realized that I had never seen it and there we had a great cabin movie night. She had never seen The Jerk and I got to see it through her eyes as we watched it in front of the fire. Watching her laugh for the first time at “he hates these cans!” and “the new phone book is here; the new phone book is here!” is better than when I laughed myself silly in 1979. Watching a movie you love from your youth with the person that you love right now is like taking her back in a time machine. It’s a way to say to her, “see this is why I’m like this and you’re stuck with me.”

Review of Trash Fish by Greg Keeler

There are two great tragedies in the annals of fly fishing literature: that Norman Maclean didn’t write more and that Greg Keeler didn’t write less. I had the great misfortune of spending the length of the book Trash Fish inside the head of Greg Keeler and I can confirm it is an exceptionally vile and puerile place.

Keeler’s book is described as a fishing memoir, but it is so much less. It’s not as much about fishing as it is about failing at life and then going fishing, but without learning anything in the process and then failing at life some more before going fishing. Keeler writes in the tradition of the incredibly self-involved who believe that their every experience is meaningful and deep, when in fact a lot of them are just kind of pathetic. There is no growth here, no self-awareness. Keeler starts this memoir as an unpleasant child and ends it as an unpleasant old man. He does terrible things and he learns nothing. He thinks his selfish behavior is adorable and that responsibility and doing the right thing is somehow selling out.

The author never misses out on a chance to let himself off the hook. He abandons his gravely ill wife and children to run off with a young woman, but he doesn’t own up to it. He refers to this period as when his wife got sick and he had a midlife crisis. See? Keeler is a victim too, he’s just afflicted with a midlife crisis, not, you know, a horrible person. In one of the most pathetic affectations of a heavily affected book, he writes about his penis as a separate character, Dick. Dick is the one who gets Greg into trouble, but as any real man knows, that a sad lie that the weak tell themselves. It’s also an incredibly worn out joke that most men stop making when they are in their early 20s.

Keeler leeching off young people is a theme of this book, although he doesn’t seem aware of it. Again and again, he is picked up by former students, or people young enough to be his children, and ushered through life. Keeler doesn’t seem to understand that this is because he is a man-child and that adults have gotten to be adults by learning to avoid people like Keeler and to keep his sad brand of chaos out of their lives.

Keeler has some children, but they’re pretty much props to him. He recounts in one episode how his wife is tripping on acid, holding their baby and threatening Keeler with a kitchen knife. The whole episode is presented as some kind of zany counter-culture moment in their bohemian lives, not a profoundly disturbing moment of failed parenting. The two deserved each other, but their poor kids deserved better. He notes at the end that one son lives in Washington, DC; gee, it’s almost as if he’s trying to get as physically as far away from his parents in Montana.

In another episode, Keeler recounts how as a professor at a university in Louisiana, he discovers that one of his colleagues is forcing poor black women to have sex in exchange for passing grades. Keeler thinks this is funny, his wife to her credit does not, but neither of them, you know, actually do anything about it. Because they are both idiot children, it doesn’t occur to them to act like adults and try to help these poor women. Once again, they failed a test on the ethics of being a basic decent adult.

For all his failings, Keeler is incredibly judgmental of other people. He’s constantly making nasty references about people who he considers to be establishment and squares and all I could think was, “I bet that guy you just made fun of hasn’t abandoned his gravely ill wife and children.” Keeler is a bad person and that’s his problem and a problem for the people around him, but he is also not a terribly self-aware bad person and that’s a problem for his readers. A jerk can be a good writer, but being a jerk doesn’t make you a good writer, it just makes you a jerk. You’re probably wondering why I finished a book I hated this much. Two reasons, first, Keeler mentioned John Prine at one point and I’m a huge Prine fan, I kept reading in the hopes Prine would turn up again, but no such luck; and second, I started writing this bad review in my head while I was reading the book, including the opening sentence, which I’m quite fond of and wanted to use.

Rain, a dog, a cat, a cabin and a dead man

Things got way off the rails this summer. So far off, I couldn’t see the rails from where I ended up. We got a dog, Bartleby and a cat, Doah. They ended up taking a lot of attention. I can’t abide a poorly behaved dog and I judge people who have poorly behaved dogs. So, I started putting in time with the dog. He’s still goofy and a puppy who gets into trouble, but it’s within the normal limits. Doah is a cat, she’s fine.

The cabin we bought has taken a lot more time and money to get on track than I anticipated. Like, a lot more of both time and money, but it’s about there and we enjoy it when we’re there. It’s clear though, that this was no investment, it’s a luxury. A base for us to launch our fishing adventures, if it would every stop raining.

Which brings me to the rain. It will not stop raining. Just rain and more rain. Fishing trips cancelled, sitting on the porch watching the rain, rain and more rain. There are a couple of bears in there around the cabin and snakes, lots of snakes this summer. It’s the summer of the snake and bear. Snake and Bear would be a good pub name, or maybe a bronze age comedy duo, “people from beyond the river hunt and gather like this, but people of the hill hunt and gather like this.”

The rain has blown out the South Fork. It doesn’t just have that chocolate milk look that a blownout river will get. It often has that reddish tinge of a profoundly blown out river; it doesn’t look so much like chocolate milk as red-eye gravy. When you glimpse it through the woods, you’d think it was dirt road, not a river. On the rare occasions when it settles down, you notice debris and mud high up on the banks well past and in the branches of trees. I only managed to get out on the water a few times this summer. Brookie streams that are normally so skinny by late summer that you wonder where the fish go are raging and blown out. Everything is kind of sodden and limp.

The dead man was my father who died at the beginning of the summer. Things got off track, things slipped. This blog was one of those things.

Bartleby

So, that’s Bartleby, our new 8-week-old mutt. We broke down and got a new dog. We had visions of immediately hitting the water and the woods, but alas. Bartleby is a puppy and I had forgotten how much work and attention puppies require. Also, he’s scared of everything and I mean everything: plastic bags, a rubber ball, a magazine and once his own tail. He’s slowly getting confidence and exploring his world, but it’s going to be a long time before that dog is riding around with us in our canoe.

We wanted a short-haired male dog this time because Millie was a long-haired female. We wanted the opposite of Millie so that the new dog wouldn’t invite comparisons. Bartleby is definitely the opposite of Millie, Millie was part chow and she had this calmness, even as a puppy, that Bartleby does not. Millie would have these brief bursts of playfulness, but a lot of the time seemed to be watching the world with a gimlet eye.

We’ve only had him a couple of weeks, but his personality is there. Bartleby is just a goofy dog. He’s a beagle and whatever mutt and had been moved about every two weeks before we got him. He still hates riding in the car, I’d guess because ever car ride has meant a new home, new weird smells and new people to get to know. He also hates walks, they freak him right out. We live in the city so a walk means cars and people and lots and lots of smells. For now, a walk means that I carry him to the end of the block and put him down and we race back to the house. We’ve taken him to the park a couple of times and he’s slowly, slowly getting to see its appeal. But even these short little excursions wipe him out; we come back from our walks and he crashes hard for hours, the house is becoming the safe space where he can process the kaleidoscope of data that the city street presents.

The ultimate goal, of course is to make Bartleby a fishy dog. One who will come along on the canoe or on hikes in the mountains to fish for brookies; a dog who will chase a stick into the pond at out cabin and then flop down on the porch while we sip bourbon and watch the sun go down. All that’s a pretty long way off right now. Like I said, I had forgotten how much work puppies are and I had forgotten how much work we put in to Millie. We trained her 20 minutes every day on the basics: come here, sit down, drop it, and how to walk on a leash. And the peeing, I forgot about all the peeing in the house, never mind that Bartleby soiled a Persian rug not two inches from a stain Millie had made at the end of the last century when I went through this last. Right now, it’s pretty hard to imagine Bartleby doing much fishing any time soon.

I realized that I was going to have revise my expectations for Bartleby’s evolution into a Dawg the day I came home from the store with a squeaky ball for him to play with. I called him over and dropped the ball on the floor in front of him which is when he let out a whimper and went to hide under the sofa. Okay, so maybe we should hold off on any hikes in the mountains until Bartleby is a little more confidant around a rubber ball.

But I still remember the first time I caught a fish in front of Millie. She was sitting up on the bank with D and I pulled a bass out of the water. She had that look that dogs get that says, “I’m impressed.” I can’t wait for Bartleby to see his first fish, I just hope it doesn’t send him yelping for the shelter of the underside of the nearest sofa.

My Verdict on Saltwater fly fishing is in: meh.

meh

As I mentioned in my last post, D and I went on a package saltwater fly fishing trip. I got a text from the fishing manager of the nearby Orvis shop asking if we would be interested in joining the excursion after another couple had to cancel. We had been talking about trying salt and this seemed like a good way to get an introduction. I guess it was, it’s just that neither of us really liked it all that much. Full disclosure, we probably would have liked it more if we had caught more fish, who wouldn’t?

I get that other people like it, but I just found it all underwhelming. For me it didn’t scratch the fly fishing itch. It also didn’t help that we weren’t in love with the lodge. The lodge was clean, very well run and staffed by very nice people who sincerely worked hard to make sure people had a good time, but it wasn’t for us. It was one of those all-inclusive places at which you ate meals together at common tables. It kind of felt like you were on a cruise and not really in another country and D and I are very much not cruise people.

Let’s start with the group meal, the whole thing only works if everyone is on their best behavior and that never happens. On day one, I introduced myself to a tablemate and asked where he was from, he said Richmond, Virginia. I said something like, “I’ve been there, it’s a great town (I always try to say something nice about where someone is from, because, why not?).” He asked me where I was from and I said Washington, DC to which he replied “Northern Virginia is not Virginia, I’m from the real Virginia,” to which I replied, “We live in DC, not Virginia.” He than said, “that’s even worse.”

It takes a certain kind of person to insult someone to their face for no reason within five minutes of meeting them. I have absolutely zero patience for this kind of jerk and will ditch them unreservedly. But for the moment, I was trapped at the table. I switched to talk to fishing, where does he fish back home? He named some rivers where he fished for smallmouth bass, I mentioned that I fish the South Fork of the Shenandoah a lot and he informed me that “the largemouth have taken over the South Fork and there are hardly any smallmouth in it anymore.” Like I said, I have zero patience for this kind of thing so I said, “what are you talking about? I fish it twenty times a year and catch hundreds of smallies, there are largemouth in spots, but the South Fork is a smallmouth fishery.” To which the jerk proclaimed, “the smallmouth have been pushed out.”

Jerks usually talk in pronouncements and often have nice spouses who you instantly feel sorry for. This guy was no exception. I refused to say another word to the guy, but engaged his long-suffering wife in conversation. She was very nice, interesting and was retired from important work that she talked about with passion (I’m not saying what it was because I want her to have some anonymity and peace). Jerk cuts her off and starts blowharding about some nonsense. Sorry ma’am, but I can’t save you; I made the mistake of sitting next to him at dinner, but you made the mistake of marrying him. For the rest of the dinner I physically turned away and talked to people at the other end of the table and for the rest of the trip I avoided the jerk with great alacrity.

When I’m on vacation, I don’t want to have to avoid people who tell me they hate my home town and are jerks to their wives. I don’t want to eat with them and I don’t want to have to work to avoid them. There is something about the all-inclusive experience that attracts these kinds of people; people who are jerks to your face and then are puzzled why no one will talk to them more than once.

Now the fishing, we head out in a panga with our guide and here is where I get my inkling that I’m not going to like this kind of fishing. There is a lot of downtime, a lot. First we are in the boat for an hour to get to where we are fishing, okay, I drive a long way to get to streams, but its’ weird to be on the water and still not be at the fishery. Then we take turns to fish, which is weird. You know what I like? Fly fishing. You know what I don’t like as much? Waiting my turn to fly fish.

On a stream, D and I will fish a pool or two together and then one of us will head off to do their own exploring, coming together every occasionally, to compare notes. In a drift boat we are both fishing, but in a panga, you take turns and wait and wait and wait. Some of the anglers on this trip were paired with guys who were all about getting their clients in to some fish and getting some early success; these guides took their sports to spots where they could blind cast and have a chance at a hookup. Our guide was more traditional, for him fly fishing the flats is sight fishing and casting to specific fish. Over three days we saw maybe six bonefish and caught a couple. I would rate the experience in the Not Skunked Category in my system for rating fishing trips. From worst to best, my categories are:

It’s Nice Just to be Outside
Not Skunked
We got in to some fish
We Had an Amazing Day
If I Quit My Job, I Could Do This Everyday

The Guide was a good guy, but he had his program and if it wasn’t working, or if the sports couldn’t get with the program, oh well. After the second slow day with the guide, we were talking about maybe asking the lodge to make a change with our guide when something extraordinary happened. We were finishing up the day, maybe hitting one more spot when the guide spotted a Belizean teen on a beach with an American fly fisher. The teen was waving to the boat to come in to them. Our guide knew the teen and we went over.

It turns out that the teen was the apprentice of a guide from town who had taken out this woman and another client (also a woman) from a local hotel for some fly fishing. The guide had left the teen and the woman on the beach while he took the second client into the mangroves for some fishing. He had dropped them off at 8am and now, at 2pm he still had not come back. They had been stuck on that beach with no shade, no food and no water for seven hours. At one point, the teen had found a bottle of water floating in the ocean and the two had split it. We gave them water and a ride back to their hotel.

The client who had been left on the beach was much more collected than I would have been. When we pulled up, she had the wherewithal to give us a concise update on her condition and a quick fishing report, “We’ve been here since 8am, our guide never came back with my friend. I caught one small barracuda broke off a big bonefish on the rocks on a Christmas Island special. That was my only fly.”

Now, that’s a bad guide, considering recent events and in homage to the gods of fishing, we decided to give the guide another chance and didn’t ask the lodge to make any changes. We had another slow day on the water and then spent the last dinner trying to avoid the jerk before scurrying to our rooms to pack. Since we’ve been back, I’ve been monitoring the news from Belize to make sure that the second client from the bad guide hadn’t come to some bad end that would require me to reach out to the authorities. Between the jerk at dinner, the waiting to fish and the rescuing of marooned anglers, like I said: meh.

Salt

car

I’m heading to Belize this week for my first attempt at saltwater fly fishing. The trip fell in to our lap, the manager of the local Orvis texted me that two people had dropped out of a TU group trip to Belize and would D and I be interested? The price was very reasonable for what you got, four nights, 3 full guided days, and meals, beer and rum included. Plus, you got an Orvis H3 rod (man, are they ugly rods). I prepped myself to plead my case to D, but when I asked her if she wanted to go, she just said, “yeah, that sounds awesome.” Oh, how I love that woman.

Since then, it’s been like kids waiting for Christmas: it seemed like it’s taking forever to get here, but also, it seems like it’s snuck up on us. I’m writing this on Monday and we leave Saturday morning. It’s here, it’s happening; now what? I mostly fish for trout and bass and I’ve never been what you’d call an elegant caster. I can usually get the fly where I want it to go, but it’s rarely pretty. I’m a better caster when no one’s looking and when I’m not thinking about it. Now, I’ll be trying to cast farther than I ever have to on my home water brookie streams and in front of a bunch of strangers. This is where I plan to make use of the complimentary rum.

The trip is intended for beginner saltwater anglers, so I just need to relax and focus on that first fish on the fly in saltwater. After that, the next fish and the next. Being the kind of guy who thinks too much, I’m kind of worried that I’ll like it too much. That I’ll become one of those annoying guys who can’t enjoy regular fishing-hole fishing. The kind of guy who caught a muskie once and now can’t shut up about it and for whom brook trout and smallmouth no longer have any allure. “I don’t even bother with these local streams anymore, let me tell you about the bonefish, he’s a wily opponent. Did I ever mention they time I fished Belize? Hey, where ya’ goin’?”

In preparation for this trip, this past weekend I went fishing for brook trout in a skinny mountain stream in the Virginia mountains. I thought it would be a nice bookend to the week, start it with a brookie, end it with a bonefish (actually, in my imagination, I end the week on a tarpon, but I thought that sounded grandiose so I typed bonefish). It was a nice little brookie trip. Early in the season there is this one window in the afternoon when you catch all your fish, but you never know when it’s going to start or stop so you need to pay your dues and fish out each cast and get the skunk off the year.

The week before there had been this fierce wind storm. Trees were down all over the woods, including a few across the trail. I had nowhere to be so I just started walking upstream until I felt the edge of the workweek was off and started throwing my fly. I resisted the urge to start fishing right away and just waited for some sense of calm to come over me. Slowly, the work thoughts stopped. I got to this one pool and remembered that last summer a snake and I surprised each other there and I had let out a yell that they probably heard up at the ranger station 3 miles away. Seemed like as a good a place as any to get started.

I caught my fist fish of the year on a sweet little cast over a fallen tree and through a tunnel of branches. It was one of those moments when you just know you’re going to catch a fish and she’s right where she’s supposed to be. It was such a nice cast that I immediately got overconfident and put the next cast into a tree with my back cast. The universe maintains its balance.

Now it’s Monday and I’ve completed work on this big project I’d been working on. My job has gone from this intense work pace to this weird calm before the next crisis. My goal is just to tread water and maintain things until I can get on that plane this Saturday. Don’t let anything fall apart, but don’t start turning over rocks looking for trouble. Just get through the week and pretty soon, you’ll be sipping rum and throwing Christmas Island Specials to bonefish and permit. Now, I just have to make sure the universe plays along, no big moves, at least not for the next five days. Come Saturday it’s put your phone into airplane mode and hope there’s no signal on the flats. My deputy is a capable young man who I’m sure will figure it out (whatever it is). Just get to that boarding time and then the biggest problem you face is whether you want to hit the bar or the pool first when you get off the flats.

I was kind of complaining about how crazy work got in February, but I was secretly pleased. I’ve always enjoyed my vacations more when the first twelve hours are spent in this kind of frazzled stunned silence from being overworked. I think I like the idea that I’ve deserve my treat and that no one who’s been watching can question that I’ve earned it. I like how the tension slowly, slowly seeps away until it dawns on me that I’m relaxed. There are phases to it: there’s the hurry up and relax phase when I can’t get my mind to settle and I try to do too much; then there’s the “this is nice,” phase when I have to keep pointing out to D that we are in fact, relaxing; and then there’s the just being phase, where it all just feels normal and right and there’s no need to point out much of anything. One of my favorite vacation memories was me and D sitting on a beach when I was on a break from Iraq just watching a ship travel from one side of the horizon to the other; that’s it, just sitting there drinking beer and watching a ship go by, but more than ten years later and I remember it clearly. What had come before had been hard and what was coming next would be too, but today there was no expectations for me, but to watch that ship; I remember the color of the beach chair I was sitting in.

Part of what I like is the juxtaposition of work stress and fly fishing calm. I like that it’s chilly and a little snowy here and that’ll I’ll board a plan in the dark and in the 30s and step off in to Caribbean sunlight and the low 80s. I love that I’ll go from having to decide what to do about a problem employee on Friday to having to decide between the fish or beef on Saturday. Soon I’ll be in a place where as long as I don’t hook D, the guide, or myself, the trip has been a success. Then, it will be over and I’ll be back in the stress. The universe maintains its balance.

Rivers I’ve Met

mist

There are a couple of rivers I feel like I know pretty well, or at least that I know better than other rivers. I think to really know a river you have to experience in all its different moods; during all four seasons; during high water; during drought. For just a brief moment, I can hold all of a river in my mind as this living thing. The water, the birds, the fish, the snakes; for just flash, it’s all one thing that we call a river. Then it all dissolves back in to the components that make a river, the rocks, the pools, the riffles, the occupants. Maybe I should have called this piece, “Rivers I have loved” because there are rivers that I know and in the knowing I have grown to love them, but that title strikes me as pretentious and I don’t know if the rivers love me back.

There are a couple of rivers, streams really, in the Shenandoah National Park that I’ve come to know well. Streams snake all through the Park, so you pick a couple and get to know them. At first they all seem pretty similar, but the better you get to know them, the more unique they become. This one is fast and talkative, this one is slow and shady, that one has a lot of mushrooms along its upper reaches. Once you’ve picked a couple you’ve earned the right to call them your favorites and irrationally like them more than others.

One river that I feel that I know pretty well and that I love above all others is the South Fork of the Shenandoah. It’s big and ungainly and dirty in places, but if you know where to go, it’s as wild and free as any river. I read once that the Shenandoah river system (North Fork, South Fork and Main Stem) are some of the oldest rivers in the world. I don’t know if it’s true, but it gives the ‘Doah a quiet dignity. Some folks may abuse it, but it’ll be there long after they’re gone and it knows a thing or two.

Whenever I’m anywhere near the South Fork, I’ll check in on it. There are a couple of boat ramps that I’ll drive to and just kind of hang out to see how it’s doing, let it know I’m doing okay. It’s as close as I get to religion. I’m a Shenandoahist, I believe the world would be a better place if people behaved in a way that was in the best interest of the Shenandoah river system. Once we got them squared away, we can spread out to the rest of the world. Couldn’t hurt and you can sleep in on Sundays if you want, I don’t care.

I was standing on a low dam looking over the South Fork one winter day when another car pulled up. A woman and a man got out. She walked over to me and said, “we’re visiting from China and we don’t want to fish or swim or anything, we just want to look at the river.” I said, “good for you.” My first Shenandoahist converts. After they drove away I realized I was wearing green pants, a tan collared fishing shirt and a green ball cap. They thought I was some kind of park ranger and they were making sure they didn’t have to pay a fee. I’d like to think that when they got home, they told everyone how laid back American officials are and that there are apparently no fitness qualifications whatsoever.

I like that I’m getting to know this river, and as I do, realizing that I really don’t know anything. The more I know, the more I understand what I don’t know (someone put a dollar in the metaphor jar). I’ve arrived at a couple of observations on my own that are almost surely kind of obvious. It’s fun being a 21^st century explorer who refuses to look things up. I get to name and discover things that have been named and discovered for centuries.

Among my inane revelations: after the South Fork has been blown out, two days after the herons return to hunt, the streamer fishing will be amazing; and when you first start seeing the red bud in the forest, the brookie fishing will be good in the afternoons. One that was told to me, but that I want embroidered on a pillow: “when the dogwood leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear, it’s time to start fishing for bass.” Translate that one into Latin and you could chant it at Shenandoahist mass, if we weren’t all out fishing and skipping church.

One of the things I like about fly fishing is that you hang out in the river and that if you do that enough, some pretty cool things happen. It’s this aspect of fly fishing that is the hardest for me to convey to non-anglers. I’d imagine it’s the same for hunting, spend enough time in the woods being quiet and something cool will happen. I remember standing quietly in a stream as a beaver floated right over my feet, he never knew I was there. Or the time we saw an osprey take a trout that I would have been thrilled to catch.

If you start to experience those things and a lot of little ones that don’t sound like much when you write them down, it begins to feel like you’re in some secret society. That you’re being shown how things really work. Fly fishing is my entry into this secret society. It’s my reason for being in the river and it gives me a way to interact with the river in a way I wouldn’t if I was just going for a walk. I start to notice the fish, then the bugs, then the birds and I start to blend in to it all. For a moment there, I’m just another part of the river. It never lasts long, but it’s there for a flash. You can try to put a name on it if you want, but there’s no point. It happens, you know it when it does and you miss it when it ends.

I’m usually alone when I’ve experience these flashes, but it can happen when I’m with my wife D. It can never happen for me if I’m with a person who can’t shut up for a minute; someone who finds it all too much and has to fill the quiet with BS. I tried to introduce my brother to fly fishing and he just couldn’t let go and in my experience you have to let go of a lot before you get good at fly fishing, mostly you have to let go of ego. It’s hard, you’re probably going to suck at it; for most people, it’s a pursuit that involves a lot of failure before you have that success. You have to let go of your baggage, just be in the water.

I’m probably the wrong one to try to teach my brother fly fishing. There’s this weird defensiveness that creeps in to the relationship, a hostility from growing up together in an abusive and dysfunctional home. Sometimes it seems like my brother is still seething from things that were justifiably bad, but it’s been decades. Let’s go fishing, let that BS go.

Easier said than done, of course. Sometimes I wonder if he’s just seething when I’m around, a reminder of a bad childhood. I’m trying to give him access to my secret society, but I feel the weight of not letting go, the frustration at not being immediately good at something, the anger and resentment and I immediately know that not only he won’t be experiencing one of these flashes of, whatever, today, but neither will I. There’s too much to unpack and not enough time. I can’t get there with him and I want to get there more than anything else, so I’ll have to leave him behind. Maybe he has his own secret society that I can never join. I hope so.

My wife, D is the only other one I’ve been able to get to join up. I had been fly fishing for about a year when I got her to try it. She points out that before I invited her to try fly fishing, I had tried everything in my power to find another fishing buddy: my brother, some people from TU, and this one guy I met on Facebook (I might have to write that outing in a separate entry, it got weird). Finally, I asked her to come fishing with me.

She had bait fished a lot as a kid with her gandpa and picked it up much faster than I did. She’s good. Sometimes it’s annoying, but mostly I’m sincerely glad for her. Last year in Montana we were fishing with a guide who hadn’t said much all day (D thought he was stoned) and out of the blue he said to my wife, “you have such a pretty cast.” Because he hadn’t said much all day, we both kind of jumped.

D and I have been together a long time. I’m fortunate in that I can say I’m happily married. It’s amazing how many I people I know who can’t just say that without some hemming and hawing, “we’re happy, but…” D and I are happily married and because of that, we don’t have to do a lot of unnecessary chitchat. We’re completely at ease with each other and don’t fill the space between us with a bunch of BS.

I remember one time, D and I were sitting on the bank of the South Fork, looking at the river. We weren’t talking. We were just watching the river and the trees go from crisp to fuzzy as the sun set. It was summer, and it was probably around nine. As it darkens, you realize the far bank of the river is kind of vague and then sometime later you realize that you can’t really see the far bank of the river anymore. And then, BAM! a bald eagle came down from the sky and snatched a squirrel out of the tree in front of us and took off down the river with it squeaking in its talons. Then the quiet returned and the river kept flowing.

Guides I Have Known

driftboat

I fish with guides and I fish by myself. I tend to use guides when I’ve traveled a ways to get to the water. We’ve been to Montana a couple of times and did floats with guides for everyday of the trip. I figure that if I’m going to fly to Washington State, rent a car and drive three hours, I might as well try to get the most out of the trip and hire guides. Also, I might hire a guide for new water than pick his brain about spots where I can fish on my own. One of the hardest things about new water is figuring out where you can legally access the water. The last thing I need on my day off is some conflict with a local.

Closer to home, I have two guides I use regularly for floats; one for the South Fork of the Shenandoah in Virginia and one for the a couple of rivers in Tennessee. We try to get out with both of them a few times a year and we look forward to the floats for weeks ahead of time. Right now, I have a float with my Shenandoah guide on the books for April and with my Tennessee guide in May. Not only do we catch a lot of fish when we float with these guys, we also have a blast. They’re both very different people. CT, the guide I fish with a lot in Virginia is a retired park ranger. Patrick, the guide from Tennessee, is a young guy in his twenties, just starting out in life. But what they both have in common is that they give a damn. They sincerely want people to have a good time on the river, while respecting it. The care about their clients and they care about their rivers.

We did a float with a guide once in Arkansas and for lunch, he got out a camp stove and made this elaborate meal on the shore. It was nice, but a little weird. It definitely established who the sports were and who the clients were. Both Patrick and CT have a much more relaxed approach to lunch, Patrick has some sandwiches from a local gas station and some chips you can choose from and with CT, we just bring our own lunch. In my opinion, the best lunches on fishing days are simple and eaten in the boat while staring at a rising fish that you plan on casting to as soon as you’re done eating. Lunch is a chance to catch your breath, go take a leak and then get on with it.

Both Patrick and CT are the kind of guys who likes to stay busy. I asked CT what he did on his day off one time and he told me, “I was going to go fishing, but I didn’t feel like dragging the boat out on my one day off this month, you know what I mean?”

Me: “yeah, I could see that.”

CT: “so instead, I just grabbed my chainsaw and cut up this dead ash tree to lay up some firewood for the winter, you know?”

Me: “No.”

Both Patrick and CT seem to be as happy as either I or my wife are when we land a nice fish. Patrick’s a highly technical trout fisherman who enjoys talking fly tying and presentation strategies. CT does some wade guiding for trout in Virginia small streams, but we usually fish with him out of his drift boat for smallies. Like I said, he’s a retired park ranger and a lot of the float is just him telling us stuff he knows about the history of the Shenandoah Valley, the ecology of the river, the names of trees along the bank, or some crazy story about a tourist doing something dumb from his ranger days.

Maybe because we’ve been fishing with CT a long time, or because we’re fishing for smallies and the occasional bluegill, CT floats are relaxed. We know we’re going to catch fish, probably a lot of them, and let’s all just take what the river gives us. D and I have been fishing with CT a few times a year for about four years now and it’s as comfortable as it gets. It’ll usually start out with him saying to me, “get one off that gravel bar while I rig up D’s rod. You think the Nats are going to make the playoffs this year? Hey D, how’s your dad doing?” and we’re off. No lie, I have had hundred fish days on a CT float. The South Fork is a numbers fishery, but they’ll be some nice ones in the mix. One time, my back cast hit the water and when I came forward with it, there was a bluegill on the line. Bass fishing is convincing yourself you’re a hotshot and trout fishing is about taking a big old ose of reality.

With Patrick, the quarry is browns and bows. The rivers we fish in Tennessee haven’t stocked brown in over 20 years, so if you catch one a brown in either river, they were born wild and free. Both rivers have stocked rainbows and also wild bows. One river in particular has a population of beautiful wild rainbows and you know as soon as you see one in your net in didn’t grow up in any tank. D, Patrick and I all enjoy these wild bows. Their colors are amazing, deep red stripes, green backs and sides that are almost bronze colored. Their fins are crisp and they fight all the way into the net and then keep on fighting. You catch a couple of those then hook in to a stocky twice its size and you know immediately, the stocky gives up as if it gets that the deck has been stacked against him since day one. Get a stocky to the boat and he’s all beat up, fins rubbed smooth, no color and they look like they should have jailhouse ink and be smoking a cigarette. Patrick calls them junkyard dog fish.

As a trash talker myself, I really appreciate Patrick’s ability to give me grief. Last year, I broke off a big beautiful rainbow, easily 25 inches. We could see it in gin clear water feeding with a bunch of smaller trout. I had picked off some of the smaller ones behind the hog and was going for the big boy. Patrick told me that when I hooked him, he was going to take off like a rocket and in this shallow water, he’d break off pretty easy if I didn’t let him run. Then I got him to eat my fly and he took off like a rocket in shallow water and broke me off. I had him on just long enough to realize that I had hooked him against all odds, then I was holding slack line in my hand.

D said, “oh, sweetie, I thought you had him.” Patrick said, “don’t worry about it, you’ll get another shot like that in about 20 years.” We decided it was a good time to break for lunch. Twenty minutes later, halfway through my sandwich, Patrick asked me how old I was. I told him fifty. “Okay,” he said, “so in 20 years, you’ll be 70, you’ll get another shot at a fish like that sometime in your early 70s. That’s if you can still get out on the water. Yup, sure would have been nice to land that fish. I have the camera right here, good light, would have been a good pic.” Patrick’s smart enough to figure out who he can talk trash to and who he can’t. Another angler, I’m sure he would have been, “don’t worry about it sir, I couldn’t have landed that fish, it was good angling just to hook him.” I take it as a compliment that he was busting my balls.

I booked my trips for next year with both Patrick and CT the day after that float.

Spiritual False Cast

Savage River

You can make yourself crazy over casting. You can worry about it so much it ruins your fun. Fly fishing becomes some kind of angst ridden battle with your demons. If you’re not careful you can go from trying to get more accuracy and distance to your cast to wondering why your high school gym teacher seemed to have it out for you. And the more you try, the worse you get. There’s an old baseball cliché that seems to apply to casting: don’t try harder, try easier.

In baseball, the epitome of trying easier has got to be the Nationals’ 3rd baseman Anthony Rendon. He just goes out there and hits and fields and runs the bases. He looks like he’s having fun and he seems like he knows he’s got it good. Playing baseball is a pretty good way to make a living, even if the season is 162 games long. Everything about Rendon’s approach to the game seems to say that he knows there are people out there who have jobs that require them to work long hours and do sometimes dangerous work, or to sit in a beige box all day to feed their family and that he gets to play baseball.

Same with casting, you’re on a river, casting a fly. It’s pretty. Even if your boss is a jerk, the odds are that he’s not going to be able to find you here in the middle of the stream and give you a hard time. You are as far away from your problems as you can get. Unless your problem is that you can’t seem to catch a fish. Then, being in the middle of a stream with a fly rod and failing can begin to look like a big fat metaphor for every other problem in your life.

If you wanted fish so badly you could cast a spinner, or a worm, or you could just go buy a fish at the store. You want to catch a fish on a fly because it is so &*^% elegant! Why isn’t the fly going where I want it to go? Don’t’ break your wrist, keep the rod tip on a plane, keep all these actions together and cast. No! Not into that tree! What is wrong with you?! This is supposed to be fun, why isn’t this fun?

On July 29, 2014 during a game with the Marlins, Anthony Rendon yawned during an at bat. Seriously, between pitches he let out this big, lazy day yawn. That is not a guy who is struggling to get out of his head. That’s a guy at one with the universe; that is Buddha in a Nats uniform. To be that good and to appear not to care? That’s a perfect loop heading out over the cosmic stream of consciousness to land along the log of enlightenment to drift drag free over the platonic ideal of a trout that may not really be there. (Author’s Note: this metaphor has gotten away from me and is currently scuttling around the office baseboards; an exterminator has been called).

I struggle for that inner peace; I want it desperately and if I don’t get it, I demand to speak with the manager! You see my problem, I’m an American through and through and as such, I see journeys of self-discovery as transactional: “One inner peace, please.”

When you start out, there are so many variables. There are so many it’s impossible to figure out which ones matter and which ones don’t. There are variables that you don’t even know about. There are variables you accidentally change while trying to change other variables. That’s true when you first start out life and when you first start out fly fishing. When you first start angling, catching a fish seems like an accident. It’s like that moment in Bull Durham when Nuke Laloosh throws a perfect pitch and then asks himself, “God, that was beautiful. What’d I do?”

Try easier, that’s the key. Just put it out there and the cast is what it is. Accept that you are trying to do an impossible thing: you want your fly to drift as if it is not attached to your fly line, but it is attached. Every time you go out, you get a little better, but you are getting better at what is an unattainable ideal. Put aside the ego, put aside the drunken monkey chattering in your head; be like the trout in the current, waiting for what the river brings him. Take what the water gives you and be happy with it.

Who cares if I catch the trout? Not the trout and certainly not Antony Rendon. I hope someday that I won’t care either.