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