2021

What’s in Your Wader Pocket?

On the benefits of being a messy angler

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

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From the Brink

Some thoughts on fishing and work-life balance

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

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Lake Life

Needing a break from winter, the author shares a story of spring.

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

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First Fish

A new post for the New Year

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

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