The Longest Silence

The Big Hole

I FISH ALL THE TIME when I’m at home, so when I get a chance to go on a vacation, I make sure to get in plenty of fishing. I live in south-central Montana, and because of drought and fires this year it resembles one of the man-made hells such as the Los Angeles basin. I make a trip every summer to fish the Big Hole River, and this year, knowing it was somewhat out of the range of smoke and ash and heat, I particularly looked forward to it. My friends Craig and Peggy Fellin have a small fishing lodge, with a capacity of eight, and I was perhaps their most regular annual guest.

Montana is so large and contains such a diversity of distinct regions that a trip from where I live to the southwesternmost corner, the Big Hole, provides a tremendous transition of environment, change of weather, change of terrain, and culture. The Big Hole ranchers are different from others in the state, and many of their farming and stock management practices also differ. The age of that district is seen in the old ranch headquarters, the hoary barns, the places founded by Frenchmen and fur traders, the stables that once held famous racehorses and, one valley over in the Bitterroot, the old mission churches.

But to head across Montana this year is alarming. With limited annual rainfall, much of its appearance is desertic to begin with. But this year the yellow desiccation of midsummer crawled closer to the green shapes of mountains, until finally the wooded high country stood in ghastly attendance over what looked to be a dying landscape. Then all the fires began, first in Yellowstone, then in the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall areas. Inspired by this festivity, Missoula arsonists began to have at it until the feeling began to be that, generally speaking, Montana was on fire.

Water had become fascinating. It was fascinating to water the lawn. It was fascinating to direct a fine mist at a flowerpot. It was fascinating to take a bucket and measure the flow that filled the tank that watered my cows. It was fascinating to watch the saddle horses dip their muzzles in a spring. Suddenly other things in the landscape were not interesting. Wind generators were not interesting. Electricity was not interesting. Power lines were not interesting. Telephones were not interesting, and all the wires and relays over the prairie that laced this largely empty region to the fervid nation were not so very interesting anymore. Water had become the only interesting thing. It had rained one-quarter of an inch in three months. I had watched water-laden clouds go overhead at terrific speed without losing a drop. Montana was getting less rain than the Mojave Desert. The little clouds that look like the clouds on a baby’s crib were the sort of thing you wanted to shout at. Wind beat the ground on the rumor of water. Stockmen hauled water to battered, unusable pastures for their cows and calves. Forest springs remembered by generations suddenly evaporated.

I drove west on the interstate along the Yellowstone River. A long Burlington Northern train came around a curve in the river in the dry air, approached in silence, then was alongside me at once in a whirring rush of metal and movement. Astonishingly, the air was filled with a train smell, an industrial odor that stood out sharply in the drought-stricken air. But the ash in the air was from the fires, and the smoke that poured out from the valley of the upper Yellowstone had the inappropriately sentimental tang of autumn leaf-burning. Still, the train rolled on, and the first thing one wondered was whether or not it was a machine for starting fires.

As I climbed toward the Continental Divide, things did seem a little greener. Some of the hay meadows actually looked like they might be producing hay instead of emergency pasture. Passing through the round red rocks of Homestake Pass, wadded together like enormous pencil erasers, I descended toward Butte and stopped to refill my tank. While the attendant cleaned the windshield, I stood inside the cool gas station and looked at pictures of Our Lady of the Rockies, now under construction. Great cranes brought workers and their equipment to her vast robes. A helicopter arrived with her head. No other town in Montana felt so strongly about the Virgin Mary, and it brought to her memory a mighty effort.

As I headed south toward Idaho and the Missouri headwaters that I love to fish, I entertained some nervous thoughts. I knew that sections of the Jefferson, the Red Rock, and the Big Hole itself had dried up because of irrigation. Montana has no provision for decreed instream use of water; in a bad year, agriculture can take it all without regard to fish or the fishermen who spend more than a hundred million annually. Montana farmers and ranchers make thousands of new enemies each year over this issue, and those enemies are becoming a political force that would like to review not only the efficiency of their water use but other subjects as well, such as the constitutionality of their grazinglease arrangements on public land. Vestigial rivers flowing out of the smoke only make the plight more emphatic.

I took the turnoff toward the Divide and saw the Big Hole for the first time in a year. The extremely low water merely percolated through rubble rock. Nevertheless, the beauty of the river’s narrow valley, the sage-covered walls, and the slit of railroad bed on the far bank seemed quite intact.

I turned up the Wise River from the town of that name. The river headed into the Pioneer Mountains, and as I started up its valley I eyed its floor with but one thing in mind: Any water? A short time later I unpacked in my wonderfully comfortable little cabin by the side of the river. Water raced by! Irrigation water went overhead on a trestlelike affair. Standing underneath it on my way to dinner, I could smell the cold runoff dripping down the timbers that held it up. I was starting to feel encouraged that my fly rod might not have been a purely comic utensil. There wasn’t even any smoke in the air.

I had a beautifully prepared meal with the Fellins and their guests. This small lodge seems to attract fairly serious fishermen. So the gloomy enthusiasms, the bursts of ill-directed sexuality, the unwelcome appearance of the alter ego, the showdowns between couples, and the displays of minor violence that one associates with high-powered sporting lodges are absent here. One dines well and sleeps contentedly, storing maximum energy for the rivers.

I headed for my cabin early and the Fellins’ big Labrador male accompanied me partway. He didn’t stray far, because in the nearby bush were moose who chased him back to the house. It is a great pleasure for a family man to sleep in some building by himself once in a while; I slept the night away in a kind of mock-bachelor bliss, the windows wide open and the chilly mountain air pouring over my lofty comforter. My first home was made of logs, and the smell and solidity of those structures restored my highly eroded sense of well-being. I began to think of sallying forth with fly rod in hand to tune and sample the universe in the name of trout. This has been an issue of consequence since my bowlegged early childhood, and the feeling has grown stronger.

The morning of a beautiful summer day in Montana. What more could be asked? Hawks threw their cries against tall red cliffs along the Big Hole, then soared into transparency against the brilliant blue sky. The peculiar sluicing movement of the dewatered but still beautiful river at the base of the cliffs and railroad bed, the powerful sage smell, the bright yellow clusters of drought-resistant resinweed, and here and there the slowly opening rings of feeding trout brought me on point. I suddenly longed to see the loop of my line stretch over moving water. The float, the gulp: This way, please.

We went to a portion of the river that split into two channels, one of which slowed down considerably and presented an ideal place to ambush fish feeding on tricorythodes, better known as “tricos.” These are minute, clear-winged mayflies as beautiful as all the mayflies whose poetic forms have found their way into the imagination of sportsmen, certain of whom have taken pen to paper.

By the time we reached the stream the duns were hatching and the forms of rising trout, variously called “sipping,” “slurping,” and “gulping,” opened upon the water. Duns are the immature forms of mayflies, recently transmuted from the nymphal stage, and they are reasonably easy targets for trout. The tricos are unlike other mayflies in that they complete their cycle in a matter of hours instead of days. To the angler this means that good fishing is to be had while the duns are on the water. A few hours later there commences an even better stage, the spinner fall. Duns that flew up above the riffles molt to achieve sexual maturity in a whirlwind of sparkling mayfly turbulence, then return to the surface of the streams to lay their eggs. At this point they are duck soup for feeding trout, and the alert angler may now slip up and still manage to catch a few.

During the emergence of the duns, I managed to catch several small but handsome and always mythologically perfect and wonderful brown trout. Trico fishing is never easy, because the flies are so small, size 22, and they’re hard to see, especially if one uses a truly imitative pattern. I ended up using a small Adams, which says “bug” to the trout in a general yet friendly and duplicitous way. I was swept by the perfection of things: the glorious shape of each trout, the angelic miniature perfection of mayflies, and by the pure wild silk of the Big Hole River. For such things are we placed on this careening mudball.

Overhead, the duns had accumulated in a glittering, transparent mass. We awaited the spinner fall. The duns gradually stopped emerging. The trout that had been feeding in the riffles tailed back into the slick water. We watched and waited for thousands of these sparkling creatures to fall to the hungry trout. Then the wind came up and blew them all away.

We were able to float one section of the Big Hole, though the long riffles were shallow and noisy under the boat. Floating is a fine way to fish western rivers, where the slow and careful dissection of pools is less appropriate than it is in the trout streams of the East. Though drift boats have proliferated beyond reason, it is also a terrific way to see the country while maintaining an air of purpose. As you float, the all-important bank unrolls before you through the course of the day like a variegated ribbon of earth and water.

It is also the fastest way to get the feel of a new river. On the Big Hole are elbows and back eddies and turning pools of white foam. There are dropping chutes of long bubble trails that hold trout. I’ve always thought the Big Hole had more midstream trout lies than any other river I know. Pockets behind boulders are favorite spots, as are places where bottom structures cause angular turns of current where trout can shelter yet enjoy a steady procession of foods.

The wind followed us to the Beaverhead River that evening. With its brushy banks and downed trees sweeping the undercut banks, it looks almost like a Michigan or Wisconsin trout river. It also has the largest trout in the state, and when conditions are difficult, as they were that evening, it’s easy to see how they got to be so big. Almost as soon as the fly is presented in one of the holes and notches along the bank, it’s time to pick it up and look for another place to cast. To lose your fly in the brush in front of you on the Beaverhead or in the obstructions behind you is equally easy. The wind really defeated us that evening. Craig rowed heroically, trying to keep the johnboat in position. At dusk we stopped to fish a small run during an intense hatch of caddis, and in the cloud of insects seethed myriad bats. It seemed impossible to cast through the swarm without snagging a bat. I managed to catch a few of what Craig called the smallest fish ever to be caught out of the Beaverhead. But it had been a sixteen-hour fishing day, and my thoughts lay entirely with the down pillow on my bed in the cabin on the gurgling bank of the Wise River.

The next day, another banquet breakfast: baked eggs with asparagus spears, oatmeal pancakes, sausages, honeydew melon, homemade cinnamon rolls, coffee, and the kind of sleepy, merry conversation I associate with the beginning of a day astream. Then we were off on a different kind of junket. This time we drove awhile, parked the truck, and took off on a cross-country hike. I noticed that many of the wildflowers that had disappeared in my drought-ridden region still bloomed here. We had a leisurely walk along an abandoned railroad bed and along the pine-covered slopes of foothills. An old Confederate whose plantation had been burned during the War Between the States had first run cattle here. Then gold-mining ventures, real ones and swindles, found an agreeable setting in the little valley. Now it was ghost towns and trackless railroad bed, sagebrush reclaiming it all into marginal pasture. I picked up an ancient rail spike and slipped it in my vest to take home for a paperweight.

We traversed a high slope above a river too small and fragile to be named, and descended to begin fishing. The water looked plain and shoally, inconsequential and dimensionless from above, but like so many things in the West that seem flattened by distance and separation, this little river was a detailed paradise at close range. Rufous and calliope hummingbirds were feeding in the Indian paintbrush along the bank, and the thin-water stretches were separated by nice pools. One pool in particular lay at the bottom of a low cliff and held enough water to imply good-size trout. I approached it cautiously and found fish feeding on a hatch of midges. Beneath them several good ones were nymphing and flashing silver messages up through the clear water as they turned on their sides to feed. But the trout were difficult, feeding with extreme selectivity on the midges. I caught a couple of small ones before deciding the pool was spooked, then moved on vaguely acknowledging that I hadn’t quite met the challenge of the midges. When flies get much smaller than size 20 and the leader lies on the water’s surface like the footprints of water spiders, my confidence begins to dwindle.

Then, at the bottom of a small chute, I caught a nice brook trout. This is not the most common fish in Montana and, though it was introduced long ago, its accustomed venue is elsewhere. It is a wonderful thing to be reminded of the variety of beauties displayed in the quarry of trout fishermen. You want to cry, as a local auctioneer does at the sight of a matched set of fattened yearlings, “My, oh my!” The brook trout has a silky sleekness in the hand. Browns always feel like you expect fish to feel; rainbows often feel blocky and muscular; the brook trout exists within an envelope of perfect northerly sleekness. He is a great original, to be appreciated poetically, for he is not a demanding game fish. Some of the most appalling arias in angling literature are directed at this lovely creature, who was with us before the Ice Age.

I moved along the stream toward the end of my trip, thinking about my own part of the state. There the tawny hills had an almost glassy hardness from lack of water, and the handfuls of cattle grazing on them cast hard and distinct shadows, as if standing on tabletops or flooring. I intensely valued the stream-bred rainbows I’d caught, small-headed relative to their breadth and wonderfully marked with bands of stardust pink. This unpurposeful note of festivity is matched by their vital show when hooked, by their abandoned vaults for freedom. The great privilege is the moment one is released, when the small, strong fish moves from your hand to renew its hold upstream. Then it’s time to go.