2020

The Fish We Catch Alone

On the meaning of the unobserved catch and release

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

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Some Things Are More Important

The author reflects on her lack of fishing mojo during the election

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

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More Rock Than Water

On living in a time of drought and conflagration

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

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Red Canyon

Angst on the Eagle

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

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The Morning After

On Steelhead and Obsession

Photo Courtesy of Nikki Seger

Steelhead on the brain. The river is far away, but close enough to be dangerous. Sleep comes intermittently, restlessly. I don’t dream — I don’t have to. I see the waking world through a hallucinatory fabric, a veil of blushing pink and silver-brown. I feel a slick, muscular tail in my right hand and open my grip to let the life sift through my fingers and fade to water. It has been more than 24 hours since I caught the fish, but I still can’t shake that feeling.

Steelhead on the brain.  To catch a steelhead you must cast and swing and wait and sidestep, and cast and swing and wait and sidestep, day after day.  It is ritualistic and obsessive.  It is an act of love.  And when you have finally touched a steelhead you will never rest.  People talk about steelhead fishing as an addiction. They say a person will neglect their responsibilities and make questionable life choices to follow that wild chrome.  I understand this now, but I also know it is too late for me.

Steelhead on the brain.  The miracle is not only in landing a big fish. It is in the story of a rainbow trout that swims for the sea, becoming a salt-water-breathing, ocean-braving bullet, fulfilling a destiny that no one understands and no one can explain.  I find myself wondering what it must be like for a fish that grows up among river rocks, downed trees, and caddisflies to find itself adrift in an endless expanse of blue water.  Is it disorienting? Terrifying?  How many times will they make this journey?  What is it like to feel the mysterious pull of the ocean or to smell the sediment of your home waters when you return?

Steelhead on the brain. Waking up early, putting on as many layers of wool and synthetics as I can fit into my waders. Frozen fingertips. Frost on the ground, crunching underfoot with every step down to the water. Set the anchor then sweep the rod, load, and fire. A long, slow swing. I watch through the haze of my breath and the fog of my glasses, but it’s all about the feel of the running line on my fingers. The line is taught, silent, and then two quick jabs, two decisive tugs, and the reel begins to scream.

-EH, November 2018

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Doing the ‘Boo

The author reflects on her first bamboo rod project

I have never felt so much love for a man-made object as I feel for the bamboo fly rod that I made this spring – my first.  It happened slowly, like a gestation and birth of sorts and imbued with the same sort of magic.   Doubled over my workbench, I spent hours planing strips of cane down by thousandths of an inch, curled shavings piling at my feet.   My back was sore.  My hands ached.  I do not have children of my own, and as I sanded off the bits of glue that bound my new rod together to reveal her shining fibers, I found myself wondering if I have become so fond of building things because I have never undergone the catharsis of bearing and birthing a child.

I got to know my little darling first as a culm of bamboo.  Several feet taller than I and smooth on the outside, I would not say she was imposing, but she was solid, whole — perfect in the way that only nature can be.  She had already traveled far, from the rugged hills of Southern China where she was born.  The thought of her growing green and reed-like on those ancient hillsides stirred in me an aching wanderlust, a kind of nostalgia — a yearning for that stranger-in-a-strange-land vulnerability that makes me feel alive.  Now here she was, out in the back of a suburban fly shop of all places, leaning casually against a very American brick wall.  Stranger in a strange land indeed.

Despite her exotic origins, I knew that we would speak the same language.  In time I would feel every bend and whisper of her slender length, as if we shared the same nervous system.  She reminded me of Shel Silverstein’s storybook The Giving Tree, where the faithful tree fulfills every desire of the young boy who admires her.  I hoped that I would be kinder to my lovely culm than the selfish boy from the story.  I hoped that her life would not be wasted and that her spirit would endure the transference from reed to rod.   To be sure, the work of shaping her involved cutting off the soft inner fibers and pith that made up most of her physical being, but I knew that what was left was her essence – her power fibers – the long, even strands that helped her to bear the wind and weather of her native Guangdong Province.  These same power fibers would help her to flex, load, and accelerate the fly line that she was destined to cast.

The morning she was reborn I was filled with anticipation.  12 sections of finely-planed bamboo strips had been glued together to form two hexagonal cylinders of butt and tip section and had been wrapped together with twine, rolled in talc, straightened, and hung to dry overnight.  I took her down and brought her outside into the sunlight.  Slowly, deliberately, I unwrapped her binding and sanded off the hard enamel of her outside — and there she was.  Not the finest rod you ever saw.  Suffering at the hands of a novice, she had the telltale gouges and irregularities where my grip did not fully understand how to guide the plane along her delicate length, but I knew at once that she was true, and she was mine.

— EH, July 2016

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