The Longest Silence

Runoff

THE FISHING LIFE in Montana produces a particular apprehension that affects fishermen like a circadian rhythm: irrational dread of runoff. Early spring is capable of balmy days, and though the water is cold, the rivers are as benign as brooks in dreams, their pools and channels bright and perfect. But year-round experience shows that in short order they will be buried in snowmelt and irrigation waste, their babied low-water contours disappearing under a hoggish brown rush. Once runoff commences, the weather is often wonderful. The canopies of cottonwood will open like green umbrellas. But it can be a long wait before the rivers clear, a lull so long it seems possible to lose track of the whole idea of fishing.

In early spring, it is time to begin when friends say, “I know I should get out. I just haven’t had the time.” Here is the chance to steal a march, to exercise those fish whose memory has been dulled by the long winter. Crazy experiments can be undertaken, such as photographing a trout held in your left hand with a camera held in your right hand. Before-the-runoff is time out of time, the opportunity to steal fishing from an impudent year.

You know you’ve started early enough when the first landowner whose permission you ask stares at you with xenophobic eyes. His first thought is that you are there to pilfer or abuse his family. Let him examine your rod and scrutinize your eyes. Those of a fisherman are often not so good, so keep them moving. Spot a bit of natural history and describe it for him: “Isn’t that our first curlew?” Above all, don’t say that your dad and your granddad before you fished this same stretch at their pleasure. The landowner of today is unlikely to appreciate any surprising seniority; he’s having hell holding onto the place. Turn and walk calmly to your vehicle. Don’t back to it.

I wandered around the various forks of my home river separated by many miles of rolling hills. One would be running off, the other clear, depending upon the exact kind of country it drained. I clambered down slick or snowy rocks to dangle my thermometer in the water. But in the spring there was, even on a snowy day, a new quality of light, as if the light had acquired a palpable richness that trees, grass, and animals could also feel, a nutritious light coming through falling snow. There had come a turning point and now spring was more inexorable than the blizzards. I knew the minute this snow quit there would be someplace I could fish.

The next morning was still and everything was melting. I went to a small river out in the foothills north of where I live. This early in the year, when I drive down through a ranch yard or walk across a pasture toward the stream, my heart pounds for a glimpse of moving water. Yet moving water has, all my life, been the most constant passion I’ve had. It can be current or it can be tide, though it can’t be a lake and it can’t be mid-ocean, where I have spent baffled days and weeks more or less scratching my head. Today the river was in perfect shape, with enough water that most of its braided channels were full. There were geese on the banks and they talked at me in a state of high alarm as they lifted and replaced their feet with weird deliberation.

As soon as I got in the river, I felt how very cold the water was. Nevertheless, a few caddises skittered on top. An hour later, some big gray drakes came off like a heavenly message sent on coded insects, a message that there would indeed be dry-fly fishing on earth again. I’m always saying, though it’s hardly my idea, that the natural state of the universe is cold. But cold-blooded trout and cold-blooded mayflies are indications of the world’s retained heat, as is the angler, wading upstream in a cold spring wind in search of delight. Nevertheless, the day had opened a few F-stops at the aperture of sky, a promise and a beginning. I caught one of the mayflies and had a long look: about a No. 12; olive, brown, and gray the operative colors; two-part tail. I had something pretty close in my fly box, having rejected the Red Quill and the Quill Gordon as close but no cigar.

A couple of brilliant male mergansers passed overhead. They are hard on fish and despised, but their beauty is undisputed. In a short time they would migrate out of here, though I didn’t know where they went. They were referred to in Lewis and Clark’s journals as the “redheaded fishing duck,” a better name.

The river combined in a single channel, where the volume of water produced a steady riffle of two or three feet in depth. I started where it tailed out and worked my way up to where slick water fell off into the rapids. The mayflies were not in great numbers but they were carried down this slick and over the lip into the riffle. My staring magnified their plight into postcards of Niagara Falls, a bit of sympathetic fancy canceled by the sight of swirls in the first fast water. I cast my fly straight into this activity and instantly hooked a good rainbow. It must have been the long winter’s wait or the knowledge that the day could end at any minute, but I desperately wanted to land this fish. I backed down out of the fast water while the fish ran and jumped, then I sort of cruised him into the shallows and got a hand on him. He was a brilliant-looking fish, and I thought I could detect distress in his eyes as he looked, gulping, out into midair. I slipped the barbless hook out and eased him back into the shallows. Two sharp angles and he was gone in deep green water.

It started to cloud up and grow blustery. The temperature plummeted. I went back to my truck, stripped off my waders, put up my gear and started home, passing the old black tires hung on fenceposts with messages painted on them about cafes and no hunting. I kept thinking that the sort of sporadic hatch that had begun to occur was perfect for leisurely dry-fly fishing, if only the weather had held. By the time I got to the house it was winter again and I was trying to look up that dun, concluding for all the good it would do me that it was Ephemerella compar. Even as I write this, I visualize a trout scholar in pince-nez rising up out of a Livingston spring creek to correct my findings.

When you have stopped work to go fishing and then been weathered out, your sense of idleness knows no bounds. You wander around the house and watch the sky from various windows. From my bedroom I could see great gusts of snow, big plumes and curtains marching across the pasture. Did I really catch a rainbow on a dry-fly this morning?

The next day broke off still and sunny, and spring was sucking that snow up and taking it to Yucatán. At the post office I ran into a friend of mine who’d seen a young male gyrfalcon — a gyrfalcon! — hunting partridges on my place. Within an hour I was standing with my fly rod in the middle of a bunch of loose horses, looking off a bank into a deep, green-black pool where swam a number of hog rainbows. I had been there before, of course, and you couldn’t approach this spot except to stand below where the slow-moving pool tailed out rather rapidly. The trouble was you had to stay far enough away from the pool that it was hard to keep your line off the tailwater, which otherwise produced instantaneous drag. You needed a seven-foot rod to make the cast and a twenty-foot rod to handle the slack. They hadn’t built this model yet; it would need to be a two-piece rod with a spring-loaded hinge driven by a cartridge in the handle, further equipped with a flash suppressor. Many of us had been to this pool to learn why the rainbows had grown to be hogs who would never be dragged onto a gravel bar. They were going to stay where they were, with their backs up and their bellies down, eating whenever they felt like it. I had to try it anyway and floated one up onto the pool. I got a drag-free drift of around three-eighths of an inch and then went looking for another spot.

Geese and mallards flew up ahead of me as I waded, circling for altitude in the high bare tops of the cottonwoods. The air was so still and transparent you could hear everything. When the mallards circled over my head, their wingtips touched in a tense flutter and made a popping sound.

In a little back eddy, caddises were being carried down a line of three feeding fish. I arranged for my fly to be among them and got a drift I couldn’t begin to improve upon, so a nice brown sucked it down. I moved up the edge of the bar to other feeding fish. The geese on the bar who’d been ignoring me now began to watch and pace around. I noted one of the fish was of good size and feeding in a steady rhythm. I made a kind of measuring cast from my knees. The geese were getting more nervous. I made a final cast and it dropped right in the slot and started floating back to the good fish. I looked over to see what the geese were doing. The trout grabbed the fly. I looked back and missed the strike. I delivered an oath. The geese ran awkwardly into graceful flight and banked on around to the north.

This was a wonderful time to find yourself astream. You didn’t bump into experts. You didn’t bump into anybody. You could own this place in your thoughts as completely as a Hudson Bay trapper. The strangely human killdeer were all over the place, human in that their breeding activities were accompanied by screaming fights and continuous loud bickering. When they came in for a landing, their wings set in a quiet glide while their legs ran frantically in midair. The trees in the slower bends were in a state of pickup-sticks destruction from the activity of beavers. A kingfisher flew over my head with a trout hanging from its bill. I came around a bend without alerting three more geese, floating in a backwater, sound asleep with their heads under their wings. I decided not to wake them. I ended my day right there. When I drove up out of the river bottom in my car, I looked back to see a blue heron fishing the back eddy where I’d just caught a trout. On the radio were predictions of high temperatures and I knew what that low-country meltoff would mean to my days on the river.

Spring was here and it was hot. In one day it shot up to the eighties. I could feel the purling melt coming out from under the snowbanks. Runoff was going to drop me in midstride.

I drove away from the places I thought would get the first dirty water, away from the disturbed ground. At daybreak out on the interstate I found myself in a formation of Montana Pioneers driving Model-Ts. This piquancy didn’t hold me up long and I soon made my way to a wonderful little district where various grasses, burgeoning brush, wildflowers, and blue-green strips of fragrant sage had all somehow got the news that spring had sprung. The cover was so deep in places that deer moving through it revealed only their ears, which flipped up and disappeared. An old pry bar lay lost in the grass, polished smooth by use. Ranchers never had the help they needed and they were all masters of prying. These bars had the poetry of any old tool, whether a dental instrument, or old greasy hammers, or screwdrivers around a man’s workshop, especially when the tool owner is not in immediate evidence, or is dead.

The river whispered past this spot in a kind of secretive hurry. I got in and waded upstream, then sat on a small logjam to tie on a fly. The logs under me groaned with the movement of current. I was suddenly so extremely happy, the sight of this water was throwing me into such a rapturous state, that I began to wonder what it could mean. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t something misanthropic in this passion for solitude.

I put my thermometer into the river, knowing already it was going to come out in the forties. Taking the river’s temperature is like taking your own temperature, with all the drama of the secret darkness of the interior of your mouth; you wait and wait and try to wait long enough. Is it 98.6 or am I right in thinking I don’t feel too good? The water was 49 degrees, fairly acceptable for now.

Across from my seat was an old cabin. These old structures along Montana trout rivers are part of their provenance, part of what comes back to you, like the wooded elevations that shape and bend and push and pull each river so that as you try to re-create one in your mind the next winter, there is a point where you get lost, always an oxbow or meander where a certain memory whiteout occurs. I am always anxious to return to such a stretch and rescue it from amnesia.

To reach my pool, I had to wade across the riffle above the logjam and then work my way around a humongous dead cow inflated to a height of five feet at the ribcage. The smell was overpowering but I needed to get to that pool. A mule deer doe was back in the trees watching me with her twin yearling fawns. One was already getting little velvet antlers.

For some reason I was thinking how many angry people, angry faces, you saw in these romantic landscapes, as though the dream had backfired in isolation. There were the enraged visages behind pickup truck windshields with rifles in the back window at all seasons of the year. I remembered an old rancher telling me about a rape that had just occurred in Gardiner, and in his eyes was the most extraordinary mixture of lust and rage I have ever seen. He lived off by himself in a beautiful canyon and this was the sort of thing he came up with. A friend of mine from the Midwest looked at the chairs in a restaurant covered with all the local cattle brands and cried out in despair, “Why are these people always tooling everything?” The pleasures of being seduced by the daily flux of the masses were not available. All the information about the world had failed to produce the feeling of the global village; the information had only exaggerated the feeling of isolation. I had in my own heart the usual modicum of loneliness, annoyance, and desire for revenge, but it never seemed to make it to the river. Isolation always held out the opportunity of solitude: the rivers kept coming down from the hills.

Having reached my pool, having forded the vast stench of the cow, I was rewarded with a sparse hatch of sulfur mayflies with mottled gray wings. I caught three nice browns in a row before it shut off. I knew this would happen. A man once told me, after I’d asked when you could assume a horse would ground-tie and you could go off and leave him knowing he’d be there when you got back: “The horse will tell you.” When I asked an old man in Alabama how he knew a dog was staunch enough to break it to stand to shot, he said: “The dog will tell you.” There are times for every angler when he catches fish because the fish told him he could, and times when the trout announce they are through for the day.

Two of the most interesting fish of the next little while were ones I couldn’t catch. One was on the far edge of a current that ran alongside a log. The trout was making a slow porpoising rise. I managed to reach him and he managed to rise, but drag got the fly and carried it away an instant before he took. The next fish, another steady feeder, rose to a Light Cahill. The dinner bell at a nearby ranch house rang sharply. I looked up, the fish struck, and I missed it.

I caught a nice rainbow by accident, which is the river’s way of telling you that you’ve been misreading it. And then thunder and lightning commenced. I got out of the river. Bolting rain foretold the flood. I went up and sat under the trunk lid of my car, quite comfortably, and ate my lunch, setting a Granny Smith apple on the spare tire. The thermos of coffee seemed a boon almost comparable to the oranges we kept on ice during the hot early weeks of bird season. The rain steadied down and I could watch two or three bends of the river and eat in a state of deep contentment. I didn’t know of a better feeling than to be fishing and having enough time; you weren’t so pressured that if you got a bad bank you couldn’t wait until the good bank turned your way and the riffles were in the right corners. The meal next to a stream was transforming, too, so that in addition to the magic apple there was the magic peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

The rain stopped and I went down to where an irrigation ditch took out along a rip-rapped bank. I had a very nice Honduran cigar to smoke while I watched a heron fish the shallows. The air was still. When I puffed a great cloud of smoke and it drifted across the little river, I imagined it was the ghost of my grandfather, who loved to fish. The ghost glided past the heron, who politely ignored him.

I just knew something was going on. There was a readiness; the rain had barely withdrawn. The sky looked so heavy you felt if you scratched it you’d drown. This was the storm that would loosen the mountain snows, and the glistening fingers of this small river system would turn as brown as a farmer’s hand. Time, in its most famous configuration, was running out. This could be my last day on the stream for a good while. Having broken out of the pattern of home life and work, you might as well keep going.

I crawled down into a canyon made by the river. It was not far from where I had been fishing and the canyon was not that deep. But I needed both hands to make the descent, lowering myself from projecting roots and points of rock, and I had to throw the rod down in front of me because there was no good way to carry it. I found myself between tall cream-and-gray rock walls. The river flowed straight into dissolved chimneys, rock scours, solution holes and fanciful stone bridges.

The sky overhead was reduced to a narrow band over which the storm had re-formed. More killdeer conducted their crazed, weeping, wing-dragging drama around my feet. The storm became ugly and I looked all around the bottom of the small canyon for a safe place to be. Lightning jumped close overhead with a roaring crack. The rain poured down, periodically lit up by the lightning. What little I knew about electricity made me think that bushes were a poor connection, so I burrowed into a thick clump of laurels, became mighty small, and studied the laurel: round, serrated leaf, brownish yellow bark, a kind of silvery brightness from afar. It had become very gloomy. By looking at the dark mouths of the caves in the far canyon wall, I could monitor the heaviness of the rain while the steady rattle on the hood of my parka filled in the blanks. I spotted a lightning-killed tree at about my level on the far side. The river had seemed so cheerful and full of green-blue pools. Now it was all pounded white by rain and only the darker V’s of current indicated that it was anything but standing water.

Then the air pressure lightened. The dark sky broke wide open in blue. An owl crossed the river, avoiding the return of light. The rain stopped and the surface of river was miraculously refinished as a trout stream. I looked at the drops of water hanging from my fly rod. I thought of the windows of the trout opening onto a new world and how appropriate it would be if one of them could see my fly.

The standing water along roadsides in spring is a wonderful thing. On the way home, I saw a flight of northern shoveler ducks, eccentric creatures in mahogany and green, and off in a pasture stock pond, teal flew and circled like butterflies unable to decide whether to land. I wondered what it was about the edges of things that is so vital, the edges of habitat, the edges of seasons, always in the form of an advent. Spring in Montana is a kind off pandemonium of release. Certainly there are more sophisticated ways of taking it in than mine. But going afield with my fishing rod seemed not so intrusive, and the ceremony helped, quickening my memory back through an entire life spent fishing. Besides, like “military intelligence” and “airline cuisine,” “sophisticated angler” is an oxymoron. And if it wasn’t, it would be nothing to strive for. Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.

It was ten minutes to five. There was absolutely no wind. I could see the corners of a few irrigation dams sticking up out of the ditches. The cottonwoods were in a blush of green. I was ready for high water.