The Longest Silence

Midstream

I LOOKED OFF the wooden bridge and into the small river I had come to like so well. Nearly covered with yellow cottonwood leaves that diagramed its currents as they swept toward one another around the framework of the old boxcar out of which the bridge was made. A cold wind eddied down the river into my face, and I was ready to decide that to everything there is a season and that trout season was over. Fall gives us a vague feeling that the end of everything is near; here I felt that when the snow melted in the spring, my little river would be gone.

I don’t know if it was literally the first time I saw that river, but it is the first time I remember seeing it. I came down the side of the basin riding a young mare. I could see, first, the treeline of the small river, then, here and there, flashes of its runs and pools as it made its way through the pastureland of its own small valley. There were a few bright and geometric lines where irrigation ditches cut diagonals from its more eloquent meanders, and a few small flooded areas where the water had stopped to reflect the clouds and the sky. It was a river with an indifferent fishing reputation.

Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time doesn’t seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for. Older anglers set foot on streams the location of whose pools is as yet unknown with a trace of inertia. Like sentimental drunks, they are interested in what they already know. Yet soon enough, any river reminds us of others, and the logic of a new one is a revelation. The pools and runs we’ve already seen help us decode the holding water: the shallow riffle is a buildup for the cobbled channel where thick trout nymph with mirror flashes; the slack back channel with the leafy bottom is not just frog water but a faithful reservoir for the joyous brook beyond. An undisturbed river is as perfect a thing as we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.

The first evening I fished the river, I walked through a meadow that lay at the bottom of a curved red cliff, a swerving curve with a close-grained mantle of sage and prairie grasses. It could be that the river cut that curve, then wandered a quarter-mile south, but there you have it: the narrow shining band, the red curve, and the prairie. As I sauntered along with my fly rod, hope began to build in the perceived glamour of my condition: a deep breath.

On the edge of meadow and next to the water, there was a stand of mature aspens with hard white trunks. The grass was knee deep. White summer clouds towered without motion. Once I’d crossed to that spot, I could make out the progress of small animals fanning away from my approach. I hurried forward in an attempt to see what they were, and a young raccoon shot up one of the slick aspens, then, losing traction, made a slow, baffled descent back into the grass. By shuffling around I managed to have four of them either going up or sliding down at once. They were about a foot tall, and something about their matching size and identical bandit masks, coupled with their misjudgment of aspens as an escape route, gave me a sense of real glee at the originality of things. The new river gurgled in the bank.

I walked in and felt its pull against my legs. Current is a mysterious thing. It is the motion of the river leaving us, and it is as curious and thrilling as a distant train at night. These waters, pouring from high in a Montana wilderness, are bound for the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that so much as a single molecule of the rushing chute before me was headed for Tampico was as eerie as the moon throwing a salty flood over the tidelands and then retrieving it. Things that pass us, go somewhere else, and don’t come back seem to communicate directly with the soul. That the fisherman plies his craft on the surface of such an element possibly accounts for his contemplative nature.

I once thought this was somehow not true of aircraft, that they were too new and lacked mystery. But I lived for a time in the mountainous path of B-52 nighttime traffic. The faraway thunder that rose and fell to the west had the same quality of distance and departure one loves in trains and rivers. On a pale summer night, I made out the darkened shape of one of these death ships against the stars, casting its shadow against the prairie.

Today I stopped fishing to watch a little water dipper, one of those ouzel-like nervous wrecks that seem not to differentiate between air and water, and stroll through both with aplomb. I associate them with some half-serious elfin twilight, a creature that, like the raccoons, suggests a playful element in creation. I began to feel the focus that a river brings as you unravel the current in search of holding water.

The learning of this river corresponded with the waning of runoff. My casting arm was still cold from winter, and I waded like a spavined donkey. I am always careful to go as light as possible early on, knowing that mishaps are likely, and the matter of getting over round, slick rocks, judging the depth and speed of current don’t come back immediately. You feel timid. Later in the year, you make long, downstream pirouettes in deep fast water that you’d never chance when you’re rusty.

Getting rid of stuff is a matter of ceremony. The winter has usually made me yield to dubious gadgets, and I’m at war with these if the main idea of fishing is to be preserved. For example, the net can go; it snags in brush and catches fly line and if it’s properly out of the way, you can’t get at it when you need to. Landing fish without a net adds to the trick and makes the whole business better. Make it one box of flies. I tried to stick to this and ended up buying the king of Wheatlies, a double-sided brute that allows me to cheat on the single-box system. No monofilament clippers. Teeth work great. Trifles like leader sink, flyline cleaner, and geegaws that help you tie knots must go. You may bring the hemostat, because to pinch down barbs and make quick, clean releases of the fabled trout help everything else make sense. Bring a normal rod, with a five- or six-weight line, because in early season the handle you have on hatches is not yet sufficient and you must be prepared to range through maybe eight fly sizes. Weird rod weights reflect armchair fantasies and often produce chagrin on the water.

By now, I had begun to have a look at the river. Cutting deep through hard ground, it was like a scribe line at the base of sine and cosine curves of bank banded at the top with a thin layer of topsoil. The river bottom was entirely rocks, small rounded ones, and on either side were plateaus of similar stones, representing the water levels of thousands of previous years. A few mayflies drifted past in insignificant numbers. I understand that mayflies bear a rather antique genetic code themselves, expressed in size and color, and my hope is that if things pick up, I have the right imitations in my box.

As I face new water, I always ask myself if I ought to fish with a nymph or not. Presumably you don’t walk directly into rising trout. Camus said that the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide. This is rather like the nymph question. It takes weight, a weighted fly, split shot. Casting becomes a matter of spitting this mess out and being orderly about it. This requires a higher order of streamcraft than any other kind of fishing, because it truly calls upon the angler to see the river in all its dimensions. Gone are the joys of casting, the steady meter and adjustment of loop that compare well to walking or rowing. The joys of casting are gone because this ignoble outfit has ruined the action of your fly rod.

Still, you must show purpose. American shame about leisure has produced the latest no-nonsense stance in sport, the “streamside entomologist” and the “headhunter” being the most appalling instances that come readily to mind. No longer content to contemplate the relationship of life to eternity, the glandular modern sport girds himself against the waste of time. Small towns used to have a mock-notorious character who didn’t feel this way, the mythical individual who hung the GONE FISHIN’ sign in the window of his establishment. We often styled him a barber or someone equally remote from life-and-death matters. Sometimes we let him be a country doctor, and it was very rakish indeed to drift grubs in a farm pond against the possible background of breech birth or peritonitis.

In the shock and delight of new water, my thoughts were entirely ineffective. What is the relationship of the bottom to the surface, to the landscape through which it flows, to the life of the air around it all and the vegetation that alters the wind and interferes with the light? In other words, should one fish that deep outer bank — shaded by a hedge of wild junipers — with a nymph, or would it be better to imitate the few pale morning duns that are drifting around but not yet inspiring any surface feeding? In the latter case, that glassy run below the pool is the spot. For a moment, I avoid the conundrum by turning into another river object, a manlike thing with the unmoving fly rod. Because time has stopped, I really don’t concern myself with an eager companion who has already put three on the beach.

Mortality being what it is, any new river could be your last. This charmless notion runs very deep in us and can produce, besides the tightening around the mouth, a sweet and consoling inventory of all the previous rivers in your life. Finally, the fit is so perfect that it creates the illusion that there is but one river, a Platonic gem. There are more variations within any one good river than there are between a number of good rivers. I have been fortunate in that my life-river has a few steelhead in the lower reaches, as well as Oregon harvest trout and the sea-run browns of Ireland; Michigan brook trout in the deep bends, braided channels in hundred-mile sections from the Missouri headwaters trout theme park; and, here and there, the see-through pools of New Zealand and the dark bends of Tierra del Fuego rivers where sea-run browns roll so profoundly. Fire and water unlock the mind to a kind of mental zero gravity in which resemblances drift toward one another. The trout fisherman finishes his life with but one river.

All this is getting fairly far-fetched. Still, like the trout, we must find a way of moving through water with the least amount of displacement. The more we fish, the more weightlessly and quietly we move through a river and among its fish, and the more we resemble our own minds in the bliss of angling.

I came to a pool where a tree had fallen. The leaves were long gone, and its numerous branches tugged lightly in the slight current that flowed through the pool. A remarkable thing was happening: a good-size brown was jumping among the lowest branches, clearly knocking insects loose to eat. Every three or four minutes, it vaulted into the brush over its window and fell back into the water. I knew if I could get any kind of a float, I would have a solid taker. I looked at all the angles, and the only idea I could come up with was that it was a good time to light a cigar. In a moment, the excellent smoke of Honduras rose through the cottonwoods. I waited for a solution to form, but it never happened. In the end, I reared back and fired a size 14 Henryville Caddis into the brush. It wound around a twig and hung in midair. The trout didn’t jump at it suicidally, nor did I get the fly back.

Angling doesn’t turn on stunts. The steady movements of the habitual gatherer produce the best harvest. This of course must be in the service of some real stream knowledge. But some fishing, especially for sea-run fish, rewards a robotic capacity for replicating casts, piling up the repetitions until the strike is induced. I once thought that the biggest things a steelheader or Atlantic salmon fisherman can have — not counting waders and a stipend — were a big arm and a room-temperature IQ. Now I know better, having found out the hard way.

The river made an angular move to the south into the faraway smoky hills. In the bend some workmanlike drywall riprap reflected the Scandinavian local heritage. The usual western approach would be to roll an old car into the river at the point of erosion. Instead I found neatly laid cobbles that gave the impression the river was slowly revealing an archaeological enigma or at least the foundations of a church. But for the next forty yards, the clear water trembled deep and steady over a mottled bottom, and I took three hearty browns that flung themselves upon the bright surface of the run. When I was young and in the thrall of religion, I used to imagine various bands of angels, differentiated principally by size. The smallest were under a foot in height, silvery and rapid, and able to move in any plane at will; these three trout fitted neatly among those imaginary beings.

The river lay down at the bottom of a pencil-thin valley, and though I could see the wind in the treetops, I could barely feel it where I fished. The casts stretched out and probed without unwarranted shepherd’s crooks, blowbacks, or tippet puddles. I came to a favorite kind of stretch: twenty or thirty yards of very shallow riffle with a deep green slot on the outside curve. In this conformation you wade easily in thin, fast water and gain a bit of elevation on your quarry. The slot seemed to drain a large oxygenated area, and it was the only good holding water around. Where had I seen so much of this? The Trinity? The Little Deschutes? This, too, had slipped in the telescoping of rivers.

I couldn’t float the entire slot without lining part of it. So I covered the bottom with my first casts, doping out the drift as I did, preparing for the long float through the heart of the spot where I was sure to raise a fish. The slot was on the left-hand side of the river and contoured the bank, but the riffle drained at an angle to it. A long, straight cast would drag the fly in a hurry. When the first casts to the lower end failed to produce, I tried a reach cast to the right, got a much better drift, then covered the whole slot with a longer throw.

The Henryville Caddis had floated about two yards when a good brown appeared below it like a beam of butter-colored light. It tipped back, and we were tight. The fish held in the current even though my rod was bent into the cork, then shot out into the shallows for a wild aerial fight. I got it close three times but it managed to churn off through the shallow water. Finally I had it and turned its cold form upside down in my hand, checked its length against my rod and removed the hook. These, I decided, were the yellowest, prettiest stream-bred browns I’d ever seen. Then I turned it over and lowered it into the current. I love the feeling I get when the fish realize they’re free. There seems to be an amazed pause. Then they shoot out of your hand as though you could easily change your mind.

The afternoon wore on without specific event. The middle of a bright day can be as dull as it is timeless. Visibility is so perfect you forget it is seldom a confidence builder for trout. The little imperfections of the leader, the adamant crinkles standing up from the surface, are clear to both parties.

No sale.

But the shadows of afternoon seem to give meaning to the angler’s day on about the same scale that fall gives meaning to his year. As always, I could feel in the first hints of darkness a mutual alertness between me and the trout. This vague shadow the trout and I cross progresses from equinox to equinox. Our mutuality grows.

A ring opened on the surface. The fish refused my all-purpose Adams, and I moved on to an even-depth, even-speed stretch of slick water that deepened along the right-hand bank for no reason: there was no curve to it. The deep side was in shadow, a great, profound, detail-filled shadow that stood along the thin edge of brightness, the starry surface of moving water in late sun. At the head of this run, a plunge pool made a vertical curtain of bubbles in the right-hand corner. At that point, the turbulence narrowed away to a thread of current that could be seen for maybe twenty yards along the smooth run. Trout were working.

I cast to the lowest fish from my angle below and to the left. The evenness of the current gave me an ideal float, free of drag. In a moment of hubris I threw the size 14 Adams, covered the fish with successive casts for about five minutes while it fed above and below. I worked my way to the head of the pool, covering six other fish. Quickly, I tied on a Royal Wulff, hoping to shock them into submission. Not a single grab. The fish I covered retired until I went on, then resumed feeding. I was losing my light and had been casting in the middle of rising fish for the better part of an hour: head and tail rises with slight slurps. There were no spinners in the air, and the thread of the current took whatever the food was down through the center of the deep water beyond my vision. This was the first time all day that the river had asked me to figure something out, and it was becoming clear I wouldn’t catch a fish in this run unless I changed my ways. The selective trout is that uncompromising creature in whose spirit the angler attempts to read his own fortune.

I tucked my shirt deep inside the top of my waders and pulled the drawstring tight. I hooked my last unsuccessful fly in the keeper and reeled up the line. Wading into the cold, deep run, below the feeding fish, I felt my weight decreasing against the bottom as I inched toward the thread of current that carried whatever mysterious thing the fish were feeding on. I was suddenly very close to taking on the river and barely weighed enough to keep myself from joining the other flotsam in the Missouri headwaters. But — and, as my mother used to say, “it’s a big but”—I could see coming toward me, some like tiny sloops, some like minute unfurling life rafts, baetis duns: olive-bodied, clear-winged, and a tidy size 18.

I have such a thing, I thought, in my fly box.

By the time I’d moon-walked back to a depth where my weight meant something, I had just enough time to test my failing eyes by connecting a little olive-emerger and a 6X tippet viewed straight over my head in the final light. At last, the thing was done and I was ready to cast. The fly seemed to float straight downward in the air and then down the sucking hole the trout made. It was another short, thick, buttery brown, and the fish that kept me from flunking my first day on that river. It’s hard to know ahead of time which fish is giving the test.