The benefit of living near trout water is that for the first time in my life I get to
fish the same river all year, over the course of the seasons and through all of its
cycles. In my previous role as weekend warrior I traveled to my favorite trout
streams every few months, and while over the years I gained a sense of their
rhythms, the day-in-day-out river knowledge always eluded me. You come to
know a river as you come to know a person — spend enough time together and
you start to understand their topography, their twists and turns, how they
respond in different situations. Rivers, like people, change constantly. One year
the spring comes earlier or the summer is hotter. And one year the snow pack is
higher and runoff lasts longer, but a river’s rough outline is the contours of a
“self” that feels familiar despite its fluctuations.
Runoff
I landed on the Eagle River during perhaps the most difficult fishing season of all
— spring runoff, when the mountains empty themselves of snow, engorging the
whole watershed down to even the smallest creeks. Never does the river feel
more adversarial. The violent, roaring water frightens me. I watch people
descend the rapids in all number of inflatable and float-able objects, and I
question their sanity. Pressing myself tight to the banks, the willows poking my
neck and sides, I have all but forgotten the art of casting. All I know now is dap
and lob and keep the rod tip out of the bushes. But there are still fish to be had.
They live on the inside, bunched together in pockets and small indentations in
the bank, sheltering from the inundation. It almost seems unfair to fish for them
at this time of year, displaced as they are by the sheer quantity of water. And god
help you if you hook into one and it darts out into the fast current. Even a small
fish seems to fight like a tuna beneath a mountain of white water.
Caddis
After braving the torrent of spring, the fish are hungry, and they’re hungry for
caddis. Wave after wave of these insects bring fish shooting to the surface in
missile-like fashion. Sometimes they want their snack skittered, sometimes
sunken and swung, other times they want that spray of elk hair bobbing on the
surface like a toy boat. There are many shades of caddis, and an angler could
spend a lifetime learning to fish this hatch alone. As the sun sets into evening
and the light fades to darkness, the fish become indiscriminate, launching
themselves after anything that even remotely resembles a tented wing, desperate
to take their fill. I fish until the twilight obscures the river bottom, until I can no
longer see to tie on a fly, until I can only hear the fish slurping and cast in their
general direction. Finally the night has won, and my better judgement sends me
wading blind, back to the riverside. Scrambling up the dusty bank in the weak
beam of my headlamp, grabbing to the roots of sweet sagebrush, clutching my
net in one hand, rod in the other, I pray that a cougar hasn’t caught on to my
nighttime bush-whacking. In the water, I am a stealthy, shrewd, persistent
predator, and on good fishing days I am my superhero self. Out of the water, I
am clumsy and bumbling, and not at all keen on becoming prey.
Hopper-Dropper
Ah, the hopper-dropper rig — a fat, foam-bodied terrestrial with a weighted
nymph suspended under it — admittedly not my favorite to fish, yet annoyingly
effective in the late summer and early fall. The hopper-dropper rig is a means to
an end. Yes, I’ll catch fish on dead-drifted nymphs, but I prefer dry flies. A
hopper take? Now that’s a different story. A big brown trout who rests in the
pocket water or shoots out from under a downed tree on the bank to take an easy
meal is a fish worth an angler’s patience. I fish the hopper-dropper rig for the
hopper, and the droppers keep me from getting bored while I’m waiting.
The Golden Hour
There is a sacred time on the river, in the fall, when the temperature begins to
drop, and summer starts to slip away. One feels a sense of urgency. I go out in
the evenings after work and cast as hard as I can for a few hours, knowing that
each day I’ll have less and less time. The sun begins to drift below the mountains
earlier, and somehow the dusk seems darker. This is the time when the leaves on
the willows and the cottonwoods turn bright gold, forming a cathedral of
flickering yellow along the river banks. The raw beauty takes my breath away
and is all the more sad and sharp for the knowledge that in a few short weeks
this too will be gone — the last gas of the season. There are still hatches, to be
sure, but they are fewer and less frequent. I pick up a rock and the crawling,
squirming nymphs that once covered the stones have largely disappeared. A few
caddis husks and midges here and there — that’s all. I know that in a few weeks
I’ll be back to fishing size 22 patterns on a strike indicator, so I tie on a streamer. I
range and prospect and pound the banks, night after night. I fish until the
distant horizon becomes yellow-orange, and the downstream pools resemble a
black and white photograph — slick and gray with dark shadows, the last light
reflecting off the swirling water behind rocks and crisscrossing currents. We are
sliding into winter. I can feel it in the sting of my fingers after putting my hands
in the water to release a fish. I can feel it in the cold tips of my ears and nose.
Day is done.
The Doldrums
Can you fish in the winter? Yes. Should you? That’s debatable. My observation
is this: only the addicts are out in winter. Am I an addict? Yes I am. I thought I
was a reasonably competent angler until I fished through the winter in the
Rockies. I thought I had a handle on things and that given enough time and
persistence I could figure out where the fish were and what they wanted to eat,
but the winter knocked me down a few notches. I needed it, really. First and
foremost in angling, be humble. To fish the frigid waters of winter I had to start
again from nothing and build up new skills and a new set of rules. Fortunately
other anglers were generous in sharing their knowledge, and that made all the
difference. And what the Rocky Mountain winter lacks in fishing productivity it
makes up for in sunshine, pristine snow along the banks, lattice patterns in the
ice among the river rocks, and a profound silence that graces only the coldest
days. Next winter I’ll be out there again, and I’ll be ready.
Early Spring
In so many places where I have lived the early spring is a disappointment. It is
more or less still winter — not warm enough to take your coat off, and marred by
intermittent snow storms and mushy, slushy sidewalks. On the Eagle, early
spring is the reward you earn after toughing it out through the sparse fishing
months of December, January, and February. Fish start feeding a bit more again,
and you may catch a BWO or midge hatch —a gift after so many long months of
watching a strike indicator. Those of us who live in North America often refer to
spring as a period of renewal, rebirth, and hope. As an angler, early spring in the
Rockies feels like all of these things, and this year, for the first time in my life,
early spring was, well, what spring should be.
Coming Home
I used to feel that leaving the river was a time of strife. When will I see you
again? How long until I come back? The uncertainty and the sadness was
palpable and made always for a bittersweet end to all of my fishing trips. Now
coming home after a long day on the water is one of my favorite rituals. Driving
East through our little valley, watching the storms that gather among the high
peaks roll across the landscape and recede, the feathered fringes of thunderheads
signaling much-needed rain, I no longer feel the sense of longing that used to
accompany my after-fishing drives. Instead, I feel grateful. I’ve said goodnight
to the river and left it to continue in its course as I go about my other business,
knowing that my waders won’t have time to fully dry before it is time to use
them again. Seasons on the Eagle ebb and flow, and the river is always a
mercurial beast, but I know her now. I am always there, patient and
accommodating, and my fishing is unfraught. I like it this way.
-EH, May 2021
A Year on the Eagle Read More »
Last week I pulled up to one of my favorite fishing spots, not a single car on the side of the road. I grabbed my rod and practically ran to the water. Trout splashed and rose for caddis, and good fishing seemed imminent. I reached into my pack for my tippet, pulled at the tag-end, and was left with a measly four-inch strand — the last of the spool. The fragment waved slowly in the wind, my elation turning to a seething self-loathing.
How could you forget to check your gear?
I dumped the contents of my pack onto the bank, searching feverishly among the fly boxes and half-empty Gink bottles for an extra spool that wasn’t there. Facing the prospect of six hours of fishing sans tippet I felt a rising sense of desperation, but as I muttered a series of scathing expletives and cursed myself for my thoughtlessness, I had an idea. I reached into my wader pocket, sifting through wrappers, wet paper, old hooks and — how many tippet pieces are in here? Enough to tie on a dry fly? Oh hell yes.
Five minutes later I was standing in the river casting to a pod of rising fish, my caddisfly tied to three sections of lightly-used monofilament. Not surprisingly, the fish didn’t care. They rose to gulp my fly while I grinned and smugly patted my chest. Who needs a knotless leader when you have a wader pocket?
My wader pocket is a bottomless hole, a Mary Poppins carpet bag. Housing the remnants of hours on the river, it is fly shop and fridge, trashcan and desk drawer. Any self-respecting human would clean it out once in a while and remove the stray tippet that tangles in the zipper teeth like unbrushed hair. I would not be surprised to pull out a lampshade. Yet, there are so many days when that wader pocket is my Hail Mary.
Hungry? There’s a granola bar in there somewhere, or maybe some Cheez-Its and a beef stick if they survived the dip I took in the last hole. Fly dinged on a rock? Hold on… down at the bottom is a hook hone. There are spare flies and strike indicators, hand warmers, candy, sunscreen, half-soaked plastic bags, and fishing licenses from four different states. Take your pick.
I can’t be bothered to organize this mess. The only thing I care about is finding fish. I keep my eyes on the water, watch for rises, and unzip that pocket without even looking to pull out a snack or tuck away some trash. It’s liberating. And I take comfort in knowing that no matter what the circumstance I’ll always have exactly what I need.
You can keep your spotless, spanking-clean chest-highs. These stink-footed waders and their soggy pocket save my ass every time.
-EH, July 2021
What’s in Your Wader Pocket? Read More »
Today was another day that I didn’t go fishing, which leads to another week that I haven’t gone fishing. I had the best of intentions. I told other people I was going. I had it on my mental “to do” list (get through your 8:30am work meeting, then get the heck out of the house). I had checked the weather (warm with a little bit of snow). I knew where I wanted to go. Still, here I am at four o’clock in the afternoon eating soup in bed.
I’ve forgotten what this feels like. After a year and a half of unemployment (bad for my bank account, good for fishing), I’m now gratefully re-employed, and I’ve forgotten how difficult it is to find that Holy Grail of contemporary society: work-life balance. “Do something you’re passionate about,” they say. “Find a job that is fulfilling and important, where you can be a positive force in the world.” What they fail to tell you is that the good work will often take everything you have. Why is it good work? Because you have to attend to it with your heart and soul. You have to use all of your physical, mental, and emotional resources, and on a hard day there will be nothing left, not even for the fish.
I’ve met a few folks who seem to have found the answer. And when I say “a few,” I mean they are unicorns. If you’re Mother Teresa, of course you can hack it. If every fiber of your being is built for altruism, perhaps you can survive on that impulse alone. I’ve also met folks who are incredible time managers, speed readers, delegators, Yoga masters. They’re extraordinarily good at drawing boundaries, or maybe they have a photographic memory (these are just some of my working theories). Everyone else I know is either burned out or teetering on the edge, bouncing between exhaustion and having a few days off.
Somewhere in the back of my mind are vague thoughts of how this likely relates to capitalism, to the commoditization of humanity, to the way in which we are cogs in the wheel of a big machine that is eating us up and spitting us out, our resistance stifled by the overwhelming need to take a nap. And it dawns on me that today I’ve made a terrible mistake. In my cortisol-induced coma I forgot that I am always, always happier if I can get outside with my fly rod, no matter how cranky or crusty I feel. In 16 years of angling I have never once said “gosh, I really wish I hadn’t gone fishing today. I wish I’d stayed at home.”
So I recommit myself to the following mantra: Do not think that you are better off giving in. You must always remember that there is nothing more apt to bring you back from the brink than watching a fly line float on water.
-EH, March 2021
I have a favorite lake I fish during spring runoff. It’s close enough that I can climb there in an hour of steady hiking, and by the end of May I can make it up without snowshoes. It’s not a remote place, but the hikers who visit intermittently throughout the day rarely stay long, and it leaves me with significant stretches of time where I get to be alone with the water and the fish and the weather. I suppose it would be accurate to call it an alpine lake. It sits at elevation, but below tree-line. Still, it lacks the pristine, turquoise-blue, almost aseptic water that characterizes most of the lakes you’d hike to here in the Rockies. It has a muddy bottom and a tannic, red-brown color that reminds me of my home waters back in the Midwest. But you won’t find pike or musky or even bass here in the high country. This is a trout lake.
In late May and early June the lake is cold from snow-melt. The first time I came up to fish I took my shoes and socks off, stepped into the water and promptly jumped right out. Wet wading in the spring is a recipe for frostbite. But the pine trees tuck in close around the lakeshore, and getting a roll cast out is virtually impossible. So I found a rock — “my rock.” It sits out in the lake a couple of meters from shore, and if I scamper across a few small stones I can make it in bare feet without doing too much damage. From there I can sit or crouch and cast 180 degrees around me while keeping my feet dry.
Sitting on my rock, waiting to find a fish, several seasons seem to pass within the span of an hour. In late spring, the weather still vacillates between winter and summer. When the sun fades behind the clouds, the temperature drops rapidly, and I have to pull up my hood to avoid shivering. But the jet stream moves clouds quickly, and soon the moment passes and there is warm sunshine. The fish seem to vary their patterns along with these changes. Consistent dry fly action disappears when the skies darken and wind whips the surface of the water into small, choppy waves. During these times I wade back to shore to drink water and eat a snack, or I perch on my rock and scan the lake for signs of activity. It pays to be patient when you’re lake fishing.
The lake’s inhabitants are savvy. They’ve been through this routine before, and they catch on quickly. Always moving, scouting the water for an insect snack, they are hungry but they’re not stupid. They will inevitably move their feeding to just outside of my casting distance, rising two feet away from where I’m able to land my dry fly. These fish are infuriating but also endearing. When I do manage to drop my fly in front of their path, a gentle twitch usually does the trick. They gulp it slowly and come to the net relatively easily. After a long winter under the ice, these fish are gray, with spots that start out sparse and become a dense cluster towards the ends of their tails. They have bright pink gill plates, a dramatic contrast to their pale bodies, and a telltale slashed throat.
One day I decided to do a walkabout, and I followed the trail to the waterfall, where a creek pours into the lake from the mountains’ upper reaches. Here the bottom becomes shallow and stony, and the water streams in through variegated channels. In a clear pool carved out by the rushing current, cutthroat gathered, facing the oxygenated flows that carried what I imagine would be an abundance of aquatic macroinvertebrates — trout food. Unlike their cousins who cruise the lakeshore, these fish had found a spot where it was worth staying, and watching them swerve in and out of their feeding lanes to pick up nymphs as they floated by made me feel as if I was witnessing some kind of trout nirvana. Of course, there is always a price to pay for easy living, and I imagine that these fish in the shallow, clear water are much more susceptible to the redtail hawks and bald eagles that call these mountains home, but on this day there were no hungry raptors circling.
Being alone at the lake can make me feel small, vulnerable even, especially when a storm rolls in and the sound of thunder reverberates off the rockslides and pine slopes. I can hear it as it comes closer, bringing with it the wind and the driving rain, and sending me sliding down the rocky trail towards home. In these moments I feel my humanity in its most raw form. I too am an animal, a creature, one moment content and the next a target for an errant lightning bolt if I’m not careful. I’ve always felt this dichotomy of serenity and feral hypervigilance while I’m in the mountains. It feels both beautiful and terrible, a reminder that one day I too will be plucked from beneath the waterfall and carried away into the heavens.
-EH, February 2021
2021 kicked off with a bit more consternation than I had bargained for — a new COVID diagnosis for a family member and a whole lot of worry. So I did what any self-respecting fly angler would do: I buried myself in a fishing project. I had acquired a new rod, long and lean for Euro-nymphing, and I set my mind to learning how to use it.
The problem is, it’s winter, and there is not a lot of open water. A creek runs through town and still hasn’t iced over completely, so I decided to stage my efforts there. The flows are low and the fish are spooky, but the banks are shallow enough that if the ice breaks and a foot punches through I won’t drown. I’ll just feel silly. It’s pocket water and technical fishing. I figured I might as well start with something challenging. If I could learn to use these techniques here, I could probably use them anywhere.
I spent two days experimenting and making lots of mistakes. The only fish I saw were those I managed to spook and practically step on. But the days were sunny and beautiful, and despite fishing near a couple of public parks, nobody bothered me. I was 20-feet down from a car lot, but I was lost in the snow and the deep eddies behind boulders, where I could see the grey torpedo outlines of rainbow trout shivering in their feeding lanes. I tried to imagine what it’s like to never be able to rest, to never be able to stop, to always have to keep yourself afloat like a fish. Perhaps now more than ever I’m able to understand.
On the third day I started to get the hang of things. I started to figure out how high to stop the cast, how far to extend my arm on the lay-down so that I had the right amount of leader on or off the water. I started to gain some control, and I started to figure out which techniques I needed to use where. It was only a beginning, but it felt good. I cast up towards one of the pools I had been fishing repeatedly over the last few days. I knew exactly where the fish were holding. Finally I made the right cast with the right line placement. I saw the leader bolt upstream, nailed the timing on the hook-set, and caught my first fish, a small, bright rainbow. A little brown trout came later in the afternoon in another pool, when I let my nymph drift down deep. At first I thought I’d snagged the bottom, but I set anyway, and again I drew a fish to hand.
I didn’t take a lot of time with these fish. It’s cold, and I could only leave my hands in the water for so long before they started to burn. I couldn’t lift the fish from the water for fear of their gills freezing, but I admired them in the net and carefully let them go, their miraculous forms burned into my memory. These were my first fish of the New Year, my first fish of 2021, a year that holds as much trepidation and foreboding as it does promise, a year that more than any other looks awfully uncertain. These two fish, living and swimming in 36-degree water, surviving brutal winter, I welcomed them into my net and released them back into the world, and I want to, I have to believe that they were harbingers of something good.
-EH, January 2021
I love going out with a pack of girlfriends to cheer each other on while we take turns fishing (and drinking beer). If I hook a big fish there is plenty of whistling and whooping. It feels good to get high-fives and fist-bumps after a nice catch. I would not trade these memories for anything. Still, the more I fish, the more I value the days when I am stalking the banks by my lonesome, and I find it is often the fish we catch alone that are the most significant.
I remember a story a seasoned salmon fisherman once told me. He was fishing solo, spey casting and swinging flies on a storied Atlantic salmon river. He knew the water and the patterns of its inhabitants well. He was a confident and experienced angler. He hooked into a sizable fish that ran him into his backing several times. He fought this salmon hard and long, and eventually was able to bring it in, but not without first exhausting it. In hushed tones, he relayed to me how he cradled the fish in the water, speaking to it softly, trying desperately to revive it. He wept and apologized to the fish, begging the salmon to hold on. Slowly the fish recovered and swam away, but the fisherman told me that this experience changed him. It humbled him in a way he had never before been humbled as an angler or as a man.
I recount this story because I was greatly moved by its telling, but also because the image of a fisherman weeping over a fish that is dying in his arms somehow illustrates the drama and the personal nature of the relationship between hunter and prey — a drama that often unfolds while no one is watching.
I do not have a tale that is nearly so remarkable, yet I can think of a number of solitary moments with fish who, each in their own way, left their imprint on my consciousness. Recently I hooked and landed a 19-inch rainbow trout on my home river. She came into my net on a day when I felt lonely and isolated, and the brief seconds I spent in her presence filled me with a renewed sense of hope. I remember a cutthroat trout, caught unexpectedly in a run I fish often. She had somehow survived alongside the browns and bows of this Western river, and she felt like a gift, a holdout from an earlier time. I remember a beefy brown who, sheltering behind a rock, eluded my streamer for two days before I finally caught him by sneaking up from below his hideout and twitching a big terrestrial across his nose. And then there was a young brown, slender and vigorous, who swallowed my caddis too deep and bled from the gills as I released him to die in the waters where he was born.
I caught these fish in gratitude, in joy, in victory, and in deep sadness. And there were many unnamed, unremembered fish who I caught after weeks, sometimes months of being off the water, who reminded me that there was still a true life to be lived if I was persistent and dogged enough to chase it.
On the days when I am by myself, I rarely bring a camera to the river, and when I do I feel irked by its presence, by the intrusion of an unwanted onlooker. Living in social media’s constant shadow, I cherish my private fishing memories now more than ever. They are the stuff of both wide-eyed campfire tales and quiet moments. And if I catch a monster, for a brief second holding its life in my hands, I am happy to have the encounter go unrecorded. For here, at last, is something untarnished in a world of compulsive posturing and posing, something that belongs only to me, and to the fish.
-EH, December 2020
The Fish We Catch Alone Read More »
Some things are more important than fishing. Blasphemy, you say? I don’t know. For the past two weeks, getting on the water has been last on my mind. This is unusual. Normally being in the river is like air, like life itself, but now I feel a weight that is heavier than anything I’ve ever carried. That may speak in part to my relatively easy life, but it isn’t only that. Things have happened that I did not think were possible, things I almost cannot bear to see. The last few years have been an education, and not a good one, though in hindsight necessary.
Even now I sit on my couch not knowing what to do with myself, not knowing where or how to get started. I try to imagine what it would feel like to catch and release a trout again, an activity that has been the greatest pleasure of my life. But today when I think about a fish gliding away from my hand, its tail slowly swinging back and forth, I feel only sadness and a sense of irrelevance. What I feel is grief, and in the face of this grief a trout is, well, only a trout — beautiful, sleek, and magical yes, but still just a fish.
Today I will let the fish have their river, and I’ll feel some sense of gratitude that fish do not know or understand the struggles of man. They have their own struggles, of course. Let them be. I once thought that the life of a fish and the sound of the river was the one true thing and the only thing that really made any sense. Maybe it still is, but today I do not want to lose myself in that perfect moment of catch and release. The idea is almost abhorrent. This is not a time for joy. All I want right now is peace.
-EH, November 2020
Some Things Are More Important Read More »
Some days the smoke from the wildfires is so thick I cannot see the mountains across the valley. The yellow, acrid air creeps under the doorjamb into our garage. I wet a towel to stop it from coming into the house. Every morning I wake and think: “today will be different,” but the smoke stays — persistent, suffocating.
The river is dropping and drier by the day. In its narrow, upper reaches it is now more rock than water. I cannot bear to look at the fish. They struggle to seek colder flows and vital oxygen. They dart into fast water or pile into pockets, but there are few deep pools left. There is nowhere for them to go. They face forward and hold on.
I stay inside and remind myself to count my blessings, making lists in my head until they become rote. But I don’t remember the last time I held a friend close. I scarcely remember the last time I saw my sister, my father. I don’t remember what it was to walk and talk with impunity. I am distant and perfunctory, even with those I love — shuttered, gutted, cold.
Some days I turn to my neighbor and I no longer recognize their face. In their countenance is something I cannot understand, something that frightens me. I open my ears to listen, I open my mouth to speak, but I feel a boiling anger rise like bile in my throat. It feels like hopelessness. It feels like despair. I am losing my humanity. I face forward and hold on.
The sun rises on a brittle landscape, a hotbox ready to burn, and I wish to god that it would rain.
-EH, August 2020
More Rock Than Water Read More »
It is evening on the Eagle River in Red Canyon, one of my favorite haunts, and already things are not going as planned. My stream thermometer reads 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Usually when I put my hand in the current I feel the chill of the water like a blade, but today it feels more like a bathtub. It’s getting warm on the Eagle. 90-degree days and weeks without rain are tough on the river and on the fish. I decide that if the water gets any warmer or if the fish look sluggish I’ll call it.
Despite my anxiety, the fish are active. Small rainbows take caddis and yellow sally patterns intermittently, but not consistently. Occasionally a trout shoots up to the surface and clears the water to attack an emerging insect. I switch to soft hackles. The fish take my flies on the swing, and hit after hit comes in rapid succession. Finally I hook into what feels like a larger fish, but after a determined head shake and too much pressure on my end, the rig snaps below my double surgeon’s knot, and I lose both flies.
There is little that upsets me more on the river than leaving a fly in a fish’s mouth. Who knows how deep it was anchored or the harm it may cause the fish as it goes about its daily life? It is a cardinal sin of fly fishing, and no matter how much penance you pay, you can never set it right. Warming river, injured fish, and on top of that I realize that the flies I’ve lost are the last of those patterns in my box. I try in vain for an hour to find something else the fish will take. How about a caddis pupa or another soft hackle with a darker body? Nope. Not fooled. “I deserve it,” I think to myself.
I can tell I’m losing daylight and running out of time and patience. I don’t want to bother with a nymph rig. I want to see and feel the take. I tie on a caddis again and finish out the night with rising rainbows. None of them are large, but they are smooth-backed and vigorous and as always I feel an intense, almost painful heartache for each one. I’m sorry I hooked you. I love you. By the time I reel up my line the beauty of the evening has deepened along with the shadows. The Red Canyon walls throw an orange glow onto the water that wavers and pulsates, carved out by the current riffles like scales on a flaming snakeskin. “Polarized glasses,” I think to myself, but then I realize I’m being cynical and ungrateful. This here? This here is the center of the universe.
-EH, July 2020
