Troutsmith (14 page)

I've heard Ohio described as “the sportsman's hell,” but looking back I can't think of a bleaker, more depressing place for a young outdoorsman to live than the hundreds of square miles of tract housing that sprang up like mushrooms around Chicago during the late 1960s and early '70s. Nature was hard to find, and what little there was required a car to get to. My fishing options were ugly and very limited, but in an odd way I was better for this. The public library was within biking distance, and I was excited to find a large selection of fishing books in what will always be my favorite Dewey decimal: 799.1. It didn't take me long to discover that most of the books were about fly fishing for trout. I had never seen anyone fly fishing except for Lee Wulff, Curt Gowdy, and Bing Crosby on the
American Sportsman
television show. Even so, when I read Ray Bergman's
Trout
and Robert Traver's
Anatomy of a Fisherman
, I was hooked. I still think that two hallmarks of an accomplished outdoor life are catching a sixteen-inch trout on a dry fly and shooting a ruffed grouse on the wing with a 20-gauge double.

By the time I was fourteen I'd scraped together a fly-fishing outfit. A minimalist by circumstance (odd jobs, paper route money, girls, and an abiding love of the outdoors never yet made a rich man), I had an eight-foot Garcia “Conolon 3-star” green fiberglass fly rod, a Heddon single-action fly reel that was such a bald-faced copy of a Hardy LRH that the parts were interchangeable, a level Cortland 333 #6 floating line, and a Perrine aluminum fly box stuffed with hand-me-down flies (some mounted on snelled loops) from Granddad and various uncles. My folks noticed that a few small items mysteriously vanished from our house, including Mom's nail clippers and Dad's needle-nose pliers. For a leader I just pirated a few yards of Trilene from Dad's spinning reels. With a six-foot piece of 10-pound test knotted to a two-foot strand of 6-pound test “tippet,” I was all set. In my first year of fly fishing I didn't have a vest, and I didn't need one. All the tackle I owned fit neatly inside a rubberized canvas creel that did double duty as a fish carrier. I did everything I could to be ready to fish a trout stream with my fly rod if an opportunity came my way.

I had already caught a few trout by this time. One evening at a KOA campground just off of I-70 west of Denver, I fished a tumbling little stream that coursed right next to our campsite and caught a ten-inch rainbow trout. It was exciting to catch a trout from a stream, on my own, even though I caught it on a crappie jig that I fished with a spinning rod. When I was in the seventh and eighth grades, the Village of Schaumburg stocked one of the municipal swimming pools with rainbows in late October and charged people a dollar to catch two fish. Sometimes I tell people that I caught some of my first trout from Illinois's famous Meinecke Pool, which is really true. Crappie jigs were fairly successful between the lane lines in the three- to six-foot-deep areas, but my ace in the hole was Velveeta “cheese” molded onto a hook and fished with a slip-sinker rig in the deep end beneath the diving boards.

Young people everywhere are idealists, and what I clung to was an ideal. We lived in concrete canyons and acres of pavement, first in the city of Chicago and later in the suburbs. I attended a junior high school that had chains and padlocks on most of the exterior doors and a principal who was later prosecuted for “misappropriation of funds.” Richard Nixon was president. The Vietnam nightmare dragged on. But in my mind I lived in trout country. Week after week I kept checking the same books out of the library: Ray Bergman's
Trout
, Robert Traver's
Anatomy of a Fisherman
, Ernest Schwiebert's
Nymphs
, Larry Koller's
The Treasury of Angling
, and Howard T. Walden's
Familiar Freshwater Fishes of America
. I set a national record for daydreaming by a ninth grader and I wasn't thinking about sex, well, not always. In my mind I fished the Catskills with Ray Bergman or smoked Italian cigars with Traver beside a remote Michigan beaver pond. I picked dead mayflies from streamside cobwebs in search of clues to match the hatch. I slept in sunny green meadows along some lyrical New England brook, reveling in what Howard T. Walden characterized as “rural peace, unmachined enterprise, and nature left to herself.” The spring season was especially bad. I remember walking home from school on the first balmy March afternoons, watching rivers of snowmelt in the gutters and storm drains, and thinking “for today, and maybe all this week, trout could live there . . .”

When school finally let out for the summer we took our annual vacation to southeast Pennsylvania, to trout country. Not great trout country, but there were trout living in trout streams as compared with Cook County, Illinois, where there were almost no trout and certainly no trout streams. The Bushkill in Northampton County was well known among Pennsylvania anglers as a sorry, ugly cuss of a trout stream. Some people called it a working-class trout stream. The river was trapped between gray concrete barriers where it ran through the city of Easton. Believe it or not, there was a catch-and-release area there at one time. Above town the Bushkill's upper reaches were surrounded by tract housing and channelized in the name of “flood control.” Pale, flabby hatchery brown trout, rainbows, and palominos were stocked by the Commonwealth three times each season, and most locals quit fishing the stream a week or two after that last stocking day. Still, the Bushkill had a couple of things going for it. Granddad and most of my uncles fished it regularly, and I could pedal my bike there any day I wanted to fish. And pedal I did, three or four days a week, all summer long; wading wet in sneakers and blue jeans, getting soaking wet if it rained and sunburned if it didn't. I don't think skin cancer had been invented yet. Slogging up and down the stream, day after day, and living on a steady diet of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Coca-Cola made me leaner, fitter, and browner than I've ever been since. But no trout found their way into my rubberized creel. Sadly, I did hook a few trout that escaped after short fights. It still hurts even today when I think of them. Stream temperatures must have been pretty high, because the fish I did catch were bluegills or
fallfish
, a red-finned minnow native to many eastern trout streams that can run as large as eighteen inches.

All too soon it was August and nearly time to head back home to Illinois. One day my mom decided to make the drive south and west to Berks County, to what she called Pennsylvania Dutch Country then and we call Amish Country in Wisconsin today. Empathy Gardens was on the itinerary, and when Mom mentioned the name something stirred in my head. Dim memories of a breezy midsummer day long before . . . sun-dappled leaves . . . wind in the hemlocks . . . crashing whitewater so loud that no one could hear me, or they pretended not to . . . Dad holding me up so I could see over the bridge . . .
wavering shadows deep in the water, just ahead of the big rock
. I threw my gear into the trunk of the big AMC Matador and didn't say much during the trip.

My uncle couldn't give me a very hopeful report of the trout fishing prospects when I tactfully brought up the subject at least thirty seconds into our conversation. Years before, when he'd quit a successful civil engineering career to retire to the resort, there had been some fine speckled trout in the stream. He even had pictures of two-pound brookies caught from “the pond,” a reservoir behind a small dam that generated electricity for the cabins. However, in recent years the pond had mostly silted in because of runoff from construction sites upstream, and my uncle was in the midst of a long, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle to force the builders to leave a buffer strip near the creek and dredge the silt from his pond. “Fish the creek if you want to,” he said, “but you're probably wasting your time.”

I wasn't discouraged. Bieber Creek couldn't possibly be worse than the Bushkill. I had seen trout in Bieber Creek. I knew they were there. Until that day I had
hoped
to catch a trout on a fly, but now for the very first time I
expected
to catch a trout on a fly. That is the essential difference between the novice fly fisher and the veteran.

The whole day seems like a dream now as I look back down the tunnel of the years. I was shaking so hard I could barely get my fly rod together and the line strung through all the guides. How many times, even today, do I miss that one snake guide in my excitement to get to the river? The fly was a #12 Hare Fly, a scraggly local pattern something like a Gold-ribbed Hare's Ear Nymph that got its finger stuck in an electrical outlet. The dubbed fur stuck out so far in all directions that the overall silhouette of the fly was more like a Bivisible or Woolly Worm. I liked the Hare Fly because I could fish it dry, wet, upstream, downstream, dead-drift, or twitched on the retrieve; the fly could do whatever the circumstances demanded. I still carry a few in my boxes, and every so often I fish one for old time's sake. It's funny how many educated trout that should know better still love this furry little beast of a fly.

As I walked down the gravel lane, cool and shady beneath the spreading branches of yellow birch and hemlock, I was surrounded by the noise of cold, clean water rushing wild and free down the narrow valley. I stepped through a portal. My everyday world no longer existed; it had no power over me, and I was alone and free to do as I wished. There was the fieldstone bridge over the tumbling stream, and as I approached it I slowed to a stop as I became aware that the first significant choice of my life was before me, that it was important and irrevocable. The rest of my time on earth would depend on what I did right now. I could stop deluding myself, turn around, and face reality. I could throw my crude, cheap excuses for tackle back into the car and rejoin the people who said I was crazy to pass up a picnic lunch to go fishing in a stream that didn't have any fish. Or I could cross the bridge.

I crouched down and tiptoed across, staying dead center and not daring to look over the parapet. Then I slipped down to the waterside on hands and knees, making no more disturbance than a dandelion seed in the wind. My first cast was a good one. The fly drifted down the bubble line toward the face of the big rock. There was a flash of boiling gold; the line throbbed, the rod bucked, and a wild trout leaped. There are precious few moments in this life when our ideals are realized, no matter how hard we work to achieve such things, but that was such a moment. Just a foot-long brown trout, a commonplace, but more important to me than all the money, power, or fame in the world. Nature was truly generous that afternoon. More trout were caught, and still more, from plunge pools below stair-step waterfalls and from swirling pockets around boulders polished smooth by the racing water. At the end of the day I laid out my catch on a bed of clean moss. There were four brown trout and one rainbow, from eight to thirteen inches in length. I carefully arranged them from largest to smallest, replayed the details of their capture, and admired their clean lines and carmine spots against flanks of burnished gold. I sat alone in the shadows beside the roaring stream and stared at the trout for a long time. I have never regretted my choice.

The dry chill of a cold Yellowstone morning greets me as I step outside the tent and start our morning ritual. A thick layer of frost coats the purple fireweed beside the tent. Off to the east rise the sun-splashed heights of Abiathar Peak and the Thunderer, two mountains in the Absaroka Range, which forms the east wall of the Yellowstone Plateau. Behind the picnic table Mount Hornaday is golden in the clear morning light. Just twenty yards from the tent Pebble Creek busies itself cutting and polishing the smooth stones of its wide bed, murmuring the ancient spell of running water as it courses through the campground on its way to Soda Butte Creek, and eventually to the moody Lamar River. The sharp-sour odor of sulfide, blue spruce, and fir is heavy in the air as I clatter about in the truck and pull together the ingredients of a camp breakfast. Soon the little single-burner stove is roaring like a rocket engine, and the strong aroma of fresh, hot coffee is enough to lure even Teresa, a Florida native, out of the warm comfort of her sleeping bag.

Over Pop-Tarts and trail mix we plan and map out the campaign for the day. The upper Pebble Creek meadows are a stiff five-mile hike up the trail from the campground. There jewel-like cutthroats would smash our floating crickets and 'hoppers in every pool and pocket, but neither of us feels up to the steep climb of several thousand feet this morning. Soda Butte Creek and the Lamar are good starters, but heavy rains the past two days have both rivers bank-full and running chocolate with volcanic mud and clay. In the end we decide to spend the morning fishing Trout Lake, one of our favorite places in Yellowstone.

Trout Lake is one of the rarest water types in the park. The rock cradling its twelve-acre surface is mostly dolomite, which exposes the groundwater percolating through it to high concentrations of magnesium bicarbonate. As a result, Trout Lake has a strongly alkaline pH, and its turquoise shallows are unusually rich in trout food for a high alpine lake. Except for Mount Hornaday towering over it, at first glance Trout Lake looks like a giant Wisconsin spring pond. The likeness is more than skin deep. Their aquatic invertebrates are similar, and since Trout Lake is close to a major road and has large, obvious trout patrolling the shallows in plain view, it's quite a popular fishing spot. However, as many anglers have discovered to their chagrin, the big, beautiful rainbow and cutthroat trout can be evil, wicked devils to catch.

Midmorning finds two intrepid Wisconsinites huffing and puffing their way up the trail from the little parking area to the lake. Though it's only a half-mile walk, that half-mile is nearly straight up the side of a steep, boulder-studded moraine. Midwestern lungs lose something at an altitude of eight thousand feet, but we stagger on gamely with our fly rods in hand. Near the top of the moraine is a huge Douglas fir, one of the largest trees in the park, and a convenient rest stop where we can renew our commitment to regular physical exercise. The Douglas fir is an old friend, and we take time to greet it and ask how things have been going in the years since our last visit to Yellowstone.