Got Bonked

Today I fell on my back and it was, I imagined as I lay there,
a cartoon like slip--feet up and straight out, arms out like a zombie, and a wrinkled
up anticipatory grimace writhing across my face as my parietal lobe connected with
concrete--and then the rest of me landed. Reverse unraveling of anticipation backed
down my face as pain rolled inside my brain from the top of my head down into
my sternum.

I groaned like a bald old man in a 70s sitcom, and looked at
the boot-toes, and raised my fingertips. They were encrusted in snow but I
could feel the icy adhesive, and so all was good, as long as I could stand up
but who knew if that was going to happen and whether anyone would be able to
find me if I couldn’t and what would Pepper the dog choose to do drop the
pigskin and drag me down 6^th street till I came to or the ambulance
showed up dragging a chain?

I now know what a rainbow trout feels like when an angler
lets it go and it wants to take a left turn and keep turning left finning left
and spinning downstream in a perpetual yin-yang of life and death until it
snaps it all straight or becomes otter breakfast.  I can’t say I know what it feels like to
breathe water, or even want it to always be 53 degrees around me (well maybe)
or be stuck in one river drainage the entirety of my life (well, def maybe),
but today when I went to walk the dogs, I forced my balance around the driveway
corner, but my head led me left, and I steered it back right and stayed
straight on the walk and it felt like mental effort so I walked it, then I
wanted to let it go and see if it was still there, and most def it is still
there.

In this concussive state, if I don’t concentrate on swimming
straight I’m in big trouble. I know I shouldn’t drive, and I can’t play with
the dogs very well. Football games are right up my alley, and you know who will
think that an excuse to do nothing tonight, but maybe I will get up and try
carving a slippery turkey with an electric carving knife. Happy holidays and
happy winter. It is here. Start tying and reading!

...My Dog Thinks I Am.

I just finished Greg Keeler’s latest book Trash Fish. I read it for several obvious reasons; Greg is a local fly fisherman, he is an MSU professor in the English department, and my dissertation work is on fly fishing literature. For less obvious reasons, I took a poetry writing class from Greg during graduate school, his book has a cool picture of a sucker with the reflections of what appears to be kids with fishin’ poles underneath the golden pariah, and the back jacket says it’s about “truths about passion, relationships, and the flaws of human nature.” In multiple ways, I have been drawn to this book for months, including the MSU bookstore display with stacks of copies during spring semester. Then, I tried to justify purchasing the book for my composition course this fall themed “The West”, but couldn’t reconcile Keeler’s fishing book on relationships with my course on intricacies of where we live. Therefore, I bought it last week out of my own pocket, or debit card.


Friday I read 162 pages of the book, and at times when Greg refers to himself as Greg, I couldn’t help but wish it was fiction, and I could tie it into my PhD work somehow. Throughout it I also saw Greg, the tall thin guy who responded to students’ poetry with a laid back “Yeah” and nothing else. After several weeks he brought his guitar in, and I might have been high, but I remember laughing, and laughing! He was a professor I admired, because he wasn’t stuffy, arrogant, negative or high culture. He is real.

My friend Robyn was in the class, and after a brief stint as a job placement specialist, (I shall check and see if that is the real title) she is returning to education as an online college writing instructor. I am excited for her, and loved listening for what she might create in the quiet Tuesday Thursday class absences. Somehow Keeler developed an environment that made me long to hear his “yeah” and I don’t think I was alone in that expectation.

But what really touched me about Greg’s book was his ability to delve into the pain that makes life ache. He lost people close to him from cancer. His wife, a passionate, loving woman became a different woman because of her disease. Like many men, as his wife’s sexual interest declined severely with her disease and age, and as his age encroached, he escaped to his youth when he could attract the likes of Muffet Hemingway.

What is critical in this book, what is critical in my own life, and I think a debilitating aspect of American Culture, is out inability to accept ourselves as feelers, and embrace the feelings of others. Doing this makes me vulnerable. To admit I feel sadness makes me weak. To acknowledge that I am not strong, and stoic, and I am affected by others and my environment, makes me unavailable to others who need me. But, the feelings of others, especially the painful, sad, angry feelings cause me to retreat. Where do I go? Fishing. Smoking. Drinking.

Where do I feel the most joy? Fishing. Smoking. Drinking. Being with Bianca, who doesn’t challenge me. Yet. Do I want to feel attractive like Greg wanted to feel in his book. Yes. Do I feel that way all the time? No. Do I feel that way often? No. Rarely? Yeah. Where do I feel successful then? As a teacher of college freshmen, I feel incredibly successful, but I challenge myself always to be better. To improve what I do. To embrace students as they are now, and teach to a world as I think it ought to be is all I can do, and I hope I do it well. Why don’t I strive to be a better feeler of my family’s emotions?

Where else do I feel successful? Catching trout. Not carp, tarpon, snook, redfish, salmon, steelhead, blue gill, bass, or crappie, but just trout. I fished for the rest, and failed. But trout. I can build the fly rod, tie the flies, find the water, find the fish, and catch them. I can play god and let them go or club them over the head and eat them for dinner or give them to my neighbors as a peace offering for my bullying flame-point Siamese cat.

But where do I fail the most? With those who need me to be vulnerable and show I love them even when it might not be reciprocated. Who does this include? My wife, my son, my mom, my step kids. However, my dog shows undivided love. He is never ever ever angry with me, and imagine this, he is my best friend. Does Duke challenge me? Yeah, when we drive and he whines too much. Does he bite me? No. Does he call me names? No. Does he destroy things I have worked hard for? Mmm, no. He doesn’t. If I had him when he was a puppy-probably. My life is the constant longing for the bumper sticker that reads “God, please help me be the person my dog thinks I am”.

I don’t say that to trivialize this topic. Greg did nothing in his book but make the significance of his actions appear flawed. Who is the saint, the hero, the angel in his book? The woman who continued to love him throughout it all. Who are the saints in modern myths? Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. These people loved unconditionally without violence toward their enemies. They forgave. Judy forgave. “So what did Greg do when he realized the depths of Judy’s despair? Did he rush to her side to comfort her? Did he accompany her to marriage counselors? Did he drink and smoke and drink and smoke? Did he start taking prescribed medications? Yes he did all of the above” (207). He adds “She didn’t want to be with anyone but me. Her insides might have been twisted all funny, but her monogamous brain was painfully intact, and even though my state was the reverse of hers, her strength still brought me to tears” (238). Sometimes I am this failed man. But like Greg, I want to get it.

Thirdspace: not this or that,but both, and.

Thinking about Edward Soja’s thirdspace and the relations between regionalism (critical) and the west as always real and imagined space. Only the leisure class of white upper middle class Americans can hop from one reality and imagined space to another. For example, an Atlanta CEO sees the west all day in his imagination at his desk as a place to escape to; it is still edenic, even with the obvious, gaping maws of toxicity in the city of Butte. However this CEO of upper class America can look past the scars and see what it allows him to do. He can see the west as a retreat from concrete and race and poverty and overcrowding. And when he goes there, he can afford to purchase that escape at a fee. The more one spends, the further insulated one can be, and when he is there in that leather recliner in a rented 3000 square foot cabin, sipping Big Sky micro brews or scotch, there is nothing but the myth and the imagination. He bought the myth, and it happens every day in western places like Bozeman, Missoula, Ft. Smith, Big Sky, and other much written about, and therefore mythologized cities throughout Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest. Susan Kollin has written a lot about the mythical status of Alaska as well.


The single dad working in a fly shop for $9.00 an hour and paying $230 a month in child support doesn’t get the insulated fantasy. He gets the labor part, but he gets to watch others live the dream, and he might sit on his stool at the register and imagine one day living that dream. He might fantasize about being a guide, on the river every day, in the sun, hooking up these guys with nice fish. Or, he might determine that he is where he needs to be; fishing in the evenings after work, after the guides are all home and the summer orange glow of 8:00 caddis hatches and spinner falls sit over the willows, is what it is all about. He’s in the know, and he appreciates this place for its gifts that don’t require AmEx.

Others live in poverty, working at Wal-Mart, or suffering from mental illness, roaming the streets of Bozeman with 44 ounce Cokes and headphones. Another rides his bike miles throughout the city collecting aluminum cans in the ditches, which he cashes in for less than a dollar a pound.

So how did this executive get where he is, and what did it take for him to negotiate the business world? Part of this is being born into a culture that emphasizes education, and possibly better educations than others have access to. He probably was told that good schooling opens doors. The more education the better, and this starts in private schools in New England, or Texas, or Southern California. In these institutions he learns to socialize and network, and make ties with professors and peers, and their parents. One parent is friends with Leigh Perkins (maybe that’s going too far, but maybe not) and they take the boys to an Orvis camp one summer. A love of fly fishing stirs within him, an appreciation for nature, and trees, insects, and water.

But the career push calls, and the higher he goes, the more he can buy. He appreciates good rods and cars, and drink, and the career push allows him to keep living it. He lives it more and more and gets deeper into the competition of the workplace and long days leave him zapped on the weekends when the family wants his attention. Eventually, a wealthy corked corporate manager is about to pop, and this month’s issue of Fly Fisherman arrives, and a trip to the Big Horn is described, with blue river pictures and thousands of acres of golden fields spread out around it. He calls and books a trip.

Those in poverty can’t escape it. They haven’t learned the navigation skills, they haven’t learned to read and write effectively. They can’t see past tonight’s dinner.

That is what Neil Campbell and Edward Soja and Susan Kollin and others are talking about.

Who gets the opportunity to declare himself or herself a bum? John Gierach, who I am gaining more appreciation of, published a collection of essays called Trout Bum. The Drake magazine has a trout bum contest where the entrants have to prove how much of trout bums they are through writing e-journals and sending .jpgs to the editor. The even send in digi-video clips of themselves being bums. They are from the same classes. Young middle and upper middle class college age kids in SUVs or Subaru’s. Middle aged guys on a two week bender, and the occasional group of hotties that were probably hired to beautify the pages.

But bums can’t choose to be bums, most of the time, and the homeless don’t have the ability to negotiate different classes of Americana. No way can I lease a Gulfstream to go visit another state. Nor could I rent a Toyota Sequoia for two weeks. My checkbook and my credit limit that! However, I could go down, intentionally, and have at times. I lived in my brother’s dining room for 6 months with a cardboard box for a dividing wall. I even had sex in there.

I have camped for months, haven’t showered for days, haven’t cut my hair for a year, or my beard, and I slept in the dirt at a lot of Grateful Dead shows. But I could always go back up a little way. I could recreate and climb vertical rock because I was bored and needed a challenge. I ice climbed and spent a week in the Olympic Mountains eating granola and Powerbars for the same reasons. And no one doing these things with me were black, or Native American, or rarely Mexican or Hispanic. They were white. A lot Irish, a lot of kids from back east, presumably to enjoy this life before they have to commit to the eastern life. Their money goes further out here. We could afford beer and pot, and gas to drive to Califorrnia to dance for 3 days.

We imagined where we lived as a place to embrace and we chose to work as little as possible to enjoy it as much as possible. The CEO imagines it as a place he needs to work incredibly hard for so he can go here and enjoy it as much as possible. This is a paradox, and each sees the other’s as a paradox, if they think about it at all. Often those metacognitive and othercognition opportunities arise in our lives, and we think about our thinking, and we think about the way others think. I had a wealthy man who just signed an AmEx receipt for over $6000.000 look me in the eyes and say “You must really live the life.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or choke, and I think I just looked down at the til, and made sure his receipt was in the right slot.



Pt. II

Other examples of real and imagined, or ideological space “Jackson always understood that space was ideological and that in analyzing its uses, meanings, and designs on could understand the wider political climate of the age” (Campbell 63). Yeah, like the notion of statehood. Many of these borders and boundaries are ideological, not geographical or representative of a culture’s values. On a micro scale, the contemporary reservation in Montana is another ideological, or political distinction. All one needs to do is go search Montana tribal maps, and a clear picture what was initially determined as tribal land, and what is now tribal land, is purely a result of conflicting values and dominant white capitalistic power. http://www.wimssite.nl/?pagina=hobby&onderwerp=125

Another map of 1922 Montana will help you reflect on how quickly whites realized the value of tribal land (http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/35/00/3526/3526.pdf)

Our common perception of blocks in a city, and in a bigger square, sections in the western ranch world, all are representative of humanities artificial shaping of space, and rarely can we imagine space without these lines lurking in the back of our minds. “As the crow flies” exists as a phrase because of man-made as well as topographical structures. Within fences and section roads and ravines, our western landscape is divided and extended.

In Campbell’s article he refers to Homi Babba’s and Kathleen Stewart’s work as a descendant of Jackson. He talks about seeing the side of the road as a place that tells history of America. I think back to my dad’s experiences as an avid runner in the “country”. He used to comment if he picked up all the cans (primarily beer) he could buy himself a new pair of running shoes every 6 months.

Our roads are lined with detritus of our lives, including valuable $.05beer cans. What does this say about our driving habits, or those of our passengers, or our commitment to the environment, or our health, or our pocketbooks? Without looking in these margins, the history of our behavior would disappear in the muddy floods and rapid grasses of decades. All of these scholars listed in Campbell’s article are working in a 50 year Jacksonian tradition of reframing regionalism “in order to bread down this sentimental, nostalgic vision and to reassert its more radical potential” (70).

The banks of rivers, or the put ins and take outs of stretches of floatable river, would be great places to explore the fringes of fishing culture in the west. What is the detritus we leave behind? Fly fishermen leave strike indicators, boat anchors, sandals, flies and tippet and split shot in willows and submerged limbs. Other river goers leave Styrofoam worm containers, red and white bobbers, Rapallas wrapped in tree limbs and willows, beer cans, escaped or flattened innertubes, and the common super tanker pop cup. In some areas frequented by kids and urbanites, condoms, cigarette butts, bottle caps and firework remnants. Our rivers are more than sanctuaries for fly fisherman, local or not.

It All Started with A Lemonade

It all started with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Erica bought a 12 pack, and while unpacking some groceries in our Madison camp this summer, she said “You should just have one.” So I did. It was my decision. Nearly 45 days later, Louis showed up in front of our new home and as usual, I piled two rod cases, my red River’s Edge fishing bag, and, unlike before, a cube of Coors Light. “That’s a lot of beer.”


“Yeah, I sorta jumped off the wagon with both feet.”

“Well that’s OK” Louis said, as he popped open the cooler. “I don’t think any of us really thought you were an alcoholic to begin with.” I find it funny that so many people have told me that. My dad, my brother, some friends. Anyway, the issue wasn’t the beer, but the quantity, so I put 16 back in the fridge, and brought the rest, not with intentions of drinking all of them, but with intentions of sharing.

When we got to the boat ramp below Highway 89 bridge, Eric went to load his lunch and saw all the beers. He made a comment about how he didn’t need to bring all this beer because it looks like there is plenty.

“I jumped off the water wagon man.” Eric seemed to ignore this, but when Louis said “Yeah, he tried to bring a cube” Eric looked at me and said “seriously?” I felt bad for him for some reason. “Is that ok with you?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s been fine.”

He was pretty quiet, and I jumped in the rower’s seat with a beer and we started off down the Yellowstone. After about an hour, the talk turned back around to my drinking. Eric and Louis asked about my marriage, and if Erica was in Denton this week because of my drinking. “No, Cole has work to do, and she needs to help her mom out while her dad is out of town.”

“Is she OK with you drinking?”

“Are you getting wasted?”

“Do you drink every day?”

“I remember you said you thought you had a problem because you were isolating and drinking alone.”

The questions kept coming as we anchored next to the high bank below Sheep Mountain’s access road. I answered them honestly; one of the most significant issues with my drinking is not beer 1, 2, or 3, it is 4 through infinity. Once I hit a point, to hell with everything; I just want to drink. I have learned that reaction is described as an allergy to alcohol. Once an alcoholic drinks, a craving (crazing) develops that is nearly impossible to shut off.

Then Eric said “I just remember how proud of yourself you were that you quit.” For me that was the clincher. I just sat in the back of the boat as we talked, and I thought this is what really friends do. They don’t let me just fuck up my life and go on with their own. They ask the hard questions and they listen for the answers, and they share their observations and experiences. They asked me if I had people to call if it gets out of hand. They said they were always there to answer the phone if I called. We didn’t cry or hug or get all mushy. Hell we were fishing for the first time together all summer!

The rest of the day we ate lunch, fished from the boat hard, prepared for a massive thunderstorm that skirted us. We saw bald eagles and osprey and pelicans and swifts. We talked about Louis’ new baby boy and names for Eric’s first son due in a week. We even caught a few trout.

I Welcome Comments at the Bottom of Each Post

Please feel free to make any comments or give me any writing feedback or post links to other interesting authors. Thanks!

Paying Our Debts

Today was out of control. I have applied for a one time withdrawal of my retirement account to put my family back on the road of prosperity and terminate our dismal spiral into poverty and indebtedness. I don’t usually admit this type of stuff, but today has been so humiliating, I figure what else is there to lose besides pride. Like my buddy Bob sang so nasaly and meaningfully, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose” (Dylan). With that attitude, I awoke at 7:30 to a phone that has been ringing for months, asking for money I owe, but cannot pay back. I have been hitting ignore on my phone so often, if I had a dollar for each time I would be out of debt.

So this morning for the first time since January, I started answering those calls, and making arrangements to pay them off. It was liberating. Then I received an email from our past landlord. It is one of those emails I expected. He is a multimillionaire from Florida, and his house is listed online in a neighborhood of million dollar homes at $1.28 mil. He has tarpon fishing out his back door. He wanted $5800 for damages to a house that is essentially condemned. We captured dozens of mice from the ceiling. We worked hard on that property, and yet he found enough damages to threat so sue us. My heart stopped and I just had to pray to god. I actually wanted to tie flies this morning, but this email put a crusher on that. We then, via email played the outbidding game, and we agreed upon $3000 dollars and a letter from him that he will leave us the fuck alone.

"gone to the finest school all right miss lonely
but you know you only used to get
juiced in it
No body's ever taught you how to live out on the street
and now you gonna have to get
 used to it
you say you'd never compormise with the mystery tramp
 but now you realize
he's not selling any allibis
and you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
and say do you want to make a deal?"

After talking with people from India to Cincinnati, at 2:00 I packed a bag of dog jerky and water, and tossed my sandals in the trunk for a day of easy going fly fishing on the Gallatin. I was expecting a day of large dry flies used as an indicator, and small bead heads for a dropper fly. This is always fun, and what usually happens is the little guys eat the big fly, and the 12-14 inchers eat the bead head dangling below. The dry then works as a strike indicator, but a careful angler with a good pair of polarized glasses can see those bead head takes before the top fly moves.

I let Duke load up in the back seat of the Buick, and I ambled down to the River’s Edge. First on the agenda there was to turn in my 10 year old Ambush sunglasses because the polarization shifted. This would be something I would expect to happen after being struck by lightning, but since, as you know that hasn’t happened yet, I had no explanation. Just all of a sudden this spring, my left eye wasn’t polarized anymore. Mike took them and will send them back to Action Optics. From there, I grabbed a new 9’ 3x Rio leader, and a new spool of 5x tippet, and two #12 Elk Hair Caddis. Not sure why I grabbed those flies, I was pretty psyched to wet wade the river I have always considered my home water. Well always since 1997.

"Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people tthey're all drininkin
thinking that they got it made
 exchanging all precious gifts
but you better take your diamond ring
and you better pawn it babe."

When I let the Duke out, he ran down to the river to drink. He always runs belly deep, and just stands there feeling the water rush around his legs. I always know I won’t actually start fishing wherever we first hit the water.

I tied on the big caddis pattern to my 4x tippet, and from that fly dropped about 15 inches of 5x. To that I tied a #14 soft hackle red Copper John. I flipped it out to get the line past the tip top, and a 10 inch rainbow ate the dry fly. I hadn’t even really “cast”. Within 10 minutes I had landed 5 trout. It was one of those 1/6 of an hour.

Baby on the Gallatin

At the end of that period I found a baby sparrow hopping around the cobbles at my feet. It was fully feathered, and just a day away from flying. It dashed toward the river and hunkered down beneath a rock with its feet and belly in the river. I approached it from the south, keeping Duke back, and scooped it up. Other swallows swarmed overhead like daytime bats as the little baby screeched at me.

He was super cute, and I held on to his feet to see if he could flap his wings, which he did vigorously. Assuming he could make it through the night, and that maybe one of the many dive bombing me would find him and feed him, I set him up the hill where he scurried into a patch of willows. Good luck little guy. After that, the afternoon passed with a few small trout here, and there, and two really exciting whitefish of 18 inches caught on long casts in the middle of the river. I love hooking them because they are so big and heavy and lethargic. Duke paces the bank behind me waiting for a jump so he can eyeball the incoming subject, but as well all know, whitefish can’t jump, so he just darts his adorable brown eyes back and forth across the greenish surface wondering what all my stumbling antics are about. Finally 20 yards downstream I swing the rosy cheeked beasts into the shoreline eddies, where he gets a good look, and a good sniff, and we let them go.

"You're invisible now
you got no secrets to conceal"


Around 6, well upstream of the riffle I was heading for, I tied back on the #12 Olive Elk Hair Caddis, and with straight upstream casts one foot off the bank, let loose 40 foot casts. That one missed. So did that one. Too far out, around a branch; that one sunk, that one was short in the wind. That one got ate. Small splash=small fish? Thump thump thump. Rod raised high gets slammed riverward. Parallel with the river my rod feeds line upstream toward a racing trout stung in the lip and pissed and my line carves riffles and the fish settles against the upstream side of a rock. I can feel the gnawing in the cork, and as I reel and run upstream, the leader grinds against something subsurface, and when I get there, a tangle of rock and willow limbs separates my 4 and 5x tippet from the 3x leader. Bye fly, bye tippet, bye powerhouse trout.

I re-tie, and walk up to the next 18 inch run of submerged rocks and riffly holding water. Cast, small splash, raise rod tip, feel muscle. Line sounds like a jet engine spiraling off spool into middle of the river, and shadows. No turning this head around toward shore yet. It leaps, Duke pays attention, it leaps again, and I bend and bow in its honor, it’s a big rainbow and there’s no messing around like I would with a whitefish. I high step in my sandals downstream where it’s headed, but it won’t swing in. I stick my rod tip in the fragrant pines overhead. I turn my rod right and stick it in willows. I whip it left toward the middle of the river, and Dukey follows me downstream. I swing the 18 inch hen in behind a small eddy formed against the bank, where Duke feigns biting her, and I scoop her up, and let him smell her, and pop out the caddis from her jaw, and watch as she vanishes into her home. Duke does too.

This scenario happened 3 other times today. When I lost one fish, I screamed at Duke, “This is fucking epic Duke!!!!” That fish rose, was hooked, went to the middle of the river, turned downstream, and I felt the hook come out and re-hook. By the time I could get a good look, she was hooked in the pectoral fin, and I applied a little pressure upward on the rod, and the hook came loose.

Today was a day that reminded me why the Gallatin is my home water. I don’t live in Oregon anymore. If I did, it would be the Deschutes. But now, in sandals and shorts and my new free hat, fishing with my dog in the summer sun, it is the Gallatin. I cannot imagine a better trout stream. The pines smell rich heated by the summer sun. The sun sets early, giving nighttime shadows for 3 hours before dark. The bottom has plate size cobbles that give the McKenzie a run for its slickness, and challenge this 40 year old at every step. And best, hefty trout eat dry flies in late July; an angler can disappear minutes outside Bozeman and get lost in the appetites of fish and the curiosities and loyalties of man’s best friend.

"People call say beware doll you’re about to fall

You thought they were all kidding you

You used to laugh about

everybody that was hanging out

Now you don’t talk so loud

Now you don’t seem so proud

About having to be scrounging

Your next meeeeeaaaaaal. "

Last Night

I fished a small stream last night. Before I went there, I stopped by The River’s Edge. I used to work here, and it was great to go in and see Dan and Steve, and catch up a little bit. We talked more of families and kids than fishing; they don’t care about fishing tales, and I have nothing to prove to them. So we talk about what is important. They gave me a free hat and sold me a River’s Edge RE sticker for $18.95, (inside joke) and a few #18 Parachute Adams.

When Duke and I arrived at the river, the winds from an incoming thunderstorm started ripping up the parking lot dust and shaking the old Buick. While Duke whined in anticipation, I transferred the bugs I bought into my fly box, and with the wind whistling through the opened back windows and the first few drops of rain falling, we began walking through the tall wet grass.

I have made it a goal to get struck by lightning and survive, and my second attempt was last night; however, all the strikes were off in the mountains, and I just got wet. I think I need a little excitement in my life, and something worth writing about.

One of the conditions I despise the most is walking in damp sandals, and on my way to the river, that’s what they were. I don’t mind them immersed in water; it is just the slightly wet part I don’t like. But when we arrived streamside, I didn’t recognize where I was. The water was higher than I expected, or, I realized, the channel was deeper and narrower. I crawled back into the willows and bushwhacked with my four weight Sage behind Duke the path finder. At the next bend, I stepped out, and yep, this is where I thought I was, but it sure looked different.

I am amazed with how much the rivers here in the valley can change each spring. My first job in SW Montana was working for Tim O’Hair in Paradise Valley as he illegally rebuilt the stream bank on the Yellowstone in 1997. Now even this little river can reroute itself, and seal off some fishing holes, smooth out riffles, and pile up water in new places. I looked upstream at the four foot diameter cottonwood lying across what was a shallow riffle, and upon exploring it, found tons of driftwood on the upstream side. In the driftwood were a few super tanker soda cups, a Jagermeister bottle, a baby sippy cup, a flip flop, and two dozen plastic pop and water bottles. Seems all drinking vessels return to the river, unfortunately.

After a brief pensive moment, I saw little trout rising in their splashy aggressive manner, and I tied on an Elk Hair Caddis I just bought. The current was swift downstream, with a cross river eddy that moved foamy water back at me. I cast and mended and supplied the fish excellent dead-drift presentations on a long leader. Not a fish ate it. This lasted a while, and Duke stood anxiously watching the trout rise around the pool.

On one mend, I skated the caddis, and a trout swatted at it. I cast downstream, and lifted the fly, and another swatted at it. I cast across the current into the eddy, and dragged the fly across the choppy current, and a rainbow ate it. I refined my fly setup, this time with a #16 Goddard Caddis, which worked well on the Gallatin two nights ago. Behind it I trailed a bead head caddis pupa I tied out of my cat’s fur. I call it the El Camino. The trout went crazy as I skated both in short upstream and cross stream tugs. I caught browns, another rainbow, and to my surprise and joy, a purebred cutthroat about ten inches. I couldn’t believe that a cutty was in this water, but it made me sense that wildness and nativeness again on a newly shaped river.

At 8:30, the river calmed down, and we walked downstream, sinking in new holes and stumbling over snags in the depths. I tossed the Goddard out one more time in a one foot seam, and hooked and landed a 14 inch brown in the joyless shadows of a million dollar mansion 100 yards away. I poked a walking stick into the riffles and crossed to safety, and Duke swam hard with his webbed paws. He leapt and danced in front of me on the trail back to the car, and a photographer shot Yellow-headed Black Bird families in the reeds and weeds.

Kerby Goes to California

I set my alarm this morning for 5:38 AM. My son Kerby, through is own determination and the generous help of many people in the town of Ennis, and friends and family from Bozeman to Oregon, earned enough money to attend a debate camp in Palo Alto, Californ-I-A. Last year he lost state by just a point, and as a sophomore he hopes to win the whole shebang. So this morning his mother--the same woman who tried to ream me a new asshole on the phone this week (but only via voice mail) because I am a “lame father” who better not take an ounce of credit for Kerby’s successes; this is the same woman who threatened to get more money out of me (blood from a turnip?) and hopes I don’t show up for anything Kerby does anymore--took him to the airport, where I met him, along with hopalong R.J., who pulled into the parking lot at the same time I did. Joe Biden’s United States of America jet was conspicuously parked on the main tarmac. Unlike Kerby’s father, at least the boyfriend and the vice president make a good showing.


Kerby was at the counter with his mother, and after leaving it, I gave him a big hug. He was nervous and excited, and about as bleary-eyed as I was. He said he stayed awake watching movies. His mothering hen told him how to catch a shuttle out of San Francisco, and I gave him $40.00. The mother and bf left, and I stayed around to make sure Kerby made it through the security ok. The line was down the stairs to the main floor, the longest I’d ever seen in our sleep town.

After that, I knew I wanted to head down the Gallatin above Big Sky and fish. The drive down in the dog hair-infested Buick was quick and unimpeded by RVs. I swung into Big Sky which has a new stop light (it’s been a while since I have been there). I stopped at the market, grabbed cookies in the clearance cart, coffee, a pepper jack and turkey sandwich, salty seasoned corn chips, and a pack of Polar Ice. The lady at the counter had no interest in taking my money, and I had to ask her if she wanted me at this side of the counter, or the other. “Oh sorry, he he.”

Then the good part, I went to the second fly shop in town (I avoid the Orvis shops), and Jimmy was just heading in. It was 7:40, and he said he was opening. By now my caffeine buzz was wearing off, and flip flopping into the shop with a hot cup in hand spruced me up a bit. Somehow we ended up talking about my dissertation work, and the guides and Jimmy all seemed interested, until the wealthy whites showed up for their $400 day with a guide. How boring for the guides, taking people and their kids out on the Gallatin. Anyway, with plans to find a pull out above BS, I left the shop with two caddis, two PMD patterns, and a couple of green soft hackles.

Alas, the dream like dip into the Green Gallatin began at mile marker 42, just above the MDT sand site, I slid into the shadowy 9:00 AM river. It was uniformly knee deep, and with a #14 caddis, I laced the 4 weight into a riffly seam next to a rock. A six inch rainbow ate it right away. This happened over and over, and by 11:30, I had caught enough, and thought I needed to sit and read Paul Schullery’s tongue in cheek titled book Fly Fishing Secrets of the Ancients. I found a cozy little bank side spot piled with dried mounds of pine needles and sand from runoff packed into caverns below the roots of trees. As I peeked into those, I found a strike indicator, and the lid of a fly box. After reading for an hour, I grabbed my Therma-Rest, and napped for two hours. I needed that rest, and have never slept along a river in the shade under large pines. I dreamed of scuba diving in a McDonald’s.

When I awoke, I was soaked in sweat, and square shoulders and a neck were imprinted in moisture on the Therma-Rest. It looked like someone spray painted the pad while I slept on my stomach. I laughed, and went up to the Buick to chug some water. I looked across the river to the ten foot cliffs where I had caught several rainbows, and the air above the river was still, without a bug in sight. I decided I should head back to Bozeman, and see what was happening back at the house.

On the way home I stopped above Deer Creek bridge, and, hidden from the highway, stripped and slipped into the cool, deep pool to wash the bug spray and sweat from my body. I held onto a submerged log and let the current run over my body. After a while, I stood straight up, and turned into the sunshine, where an elderly woman stood 20 yards away, watching her caddis drift downstream of her latest cast. I am not sure her fly stopped, but my heart did, and hers probably did too, as a naked, hairy, bald, sunburned man 25 years her junior rose from a chilly trout stream. I just waved, looked down at my snail shriveled manhood, peeking wrinkly and timidly in the late afternoon sun, and slinked to the trees where I dressed and crossed the highway embarrassed, humbled, and enamored by Montana, again. I look forward to my son experiencing the shock of leaving Montana, and coming back.

Write What Is Important (But Who Am I To Say)

I have just finished a four week writer’s workshop with 21 of the most incredible teachers. What I saw was dedication to their craft, commitment to their students, and a desire to be better writers. Ultimately, these three add up to an investment in their own humanity, and mine, and the increased sense of our students’ connection to the world.


Post writing class, I have been in the fishing loop. Cole and I fished the Gallatin on Sunday, and I caught a 9” brown on a Goddard caddis and rainbow about the same. Cole had 5 inch ‘bows chasing his flies all over the river, but they were hard to hook.

Today I drove to Ennis to see my 15 year old son Kerby, and we went to our regular lunch spot the Pharmacy, and I finally tried the sour cream chive fries, and had the special of chicken sandwich on sourdough bun, and he had the cheeseburger. I am amazed, not at how much he can eat, but how easy going he is, how grown up he is, and how huge his feet are. He told me today he feels like a bum because he just gets up and puts on clothes. He has been wearing a Dodge headband he found. I like that about my son. In a couple days he leaves for Palo Alto, CA to Stanford for a debate camp. He’s excited about that, but he is normal, and Great America and $5 pizzas are also really exciting. I love all those things about my son as well.

Arriving back in Bozeman, I washed the Explorer, and found Louis in front of me in his company car "Rainy" at the westbound light at Four Corners. I called him, and through the rear window of his Suburban, I watched him lift the phone to his ear as he answered "Hey Jeff". I asked him to look behind him- surprise!  Within a couple of sentences he said he really wants to go fishing.

Now that I have had some time, I have been doing some reading for my doctoral work. Lately I read Paul Schullery’s If Fish Could Scream which blew my mind, and today I have picking through John Holt’s Knee Deep in Montana’s Trout Streams. When I checked this latter book out for the year I am allowed as a graduate student, I had no idea how much it would read as a guide book. Holt spends a lot of time in the 19 year old book telling anglers how to catch Montana trout in places I have not fished. I recoil at the pedantic nature of the book.

However, there is one chapter that really carried some substance. In “Clark Fork River (Upper Section)” Holt finally gets into what is important. Olive wooly buggers on the Musselshell, or tiny nymphs on the Big Horn are not odd. However, what is important is what humans, (what MAN) have done to major river drainages in the west in the quest to conquer and prosper. In this chapter, he describes the devastation of the Clark Fork drainage, which includes the Rock Creek valley, all the way down to the Columbia River valley and ultimately the Pacific Ocean. In human kind’s quests for progress, electrifying the world, we also created an ecosystem disaster, and Holt nymphs deeply about that.

The rest of the chapters I have read so far “Big Spring Creek” “Big Horn River”, “Gallatin River”, barely describe what is really important in fly fishing now. In the chapter on the Big Horn, he complains about the crowds, but does nothing in regard to the tribal implications of thousands of white men fishing tribal water. To me, that is huge in 2010, and maybe in 1991 it wasn’t. Actually, in 1991 it was, but minds weren’t ready.

Like a lot of old fishing books, we see a snapshot of time, when minds in America weren’t ready for the next step, the next lifting of the veil. Where my work will lead me I am not sure, but I hope my polarized shades can cut through the glare of centuries, and see things for what they are, or ought to be.

Release-a short story

Release


By Jeffrey Hostetler



The fall fishing on the Bighorn was ok-good anglers realized that grass breaking off the bottom was a nuisance, but they could carefully deliver their flies between the floating rafts of knotted river vines. That was where Tom’s friend Eric hooked, landed, measured, and his five fishing buddies photographed the 26 ½ in rainbow. It was recorded, and the images were posted on Facebook and emailed to angling friends nationwide.

The next summer Tom waded the lower Madison in June, post runoff, alone, below Black’s Ford. He stripped Clousers and Zonkers and sculpin patterns in the five to foot troughs that divided the easily wadable weed beds. That is where he hooked an anchor, a lunker, the fish that throttles the reel’s drag, and races the angler’s heart with fear that he will lose it and excitement that he will see such a specimen stung on the end of his line. After leaping over troughs and much of the time spent with the fish fighting him rather than the other way around, he was able to swing it into the reeds and muck and tiny white flowers that bordered the receding river. He couldn’t drag it upstream to the net, so he crouched and reached and slipped his net under its head and slowly lifted it.

The brown trout’s color had all but faded since the dusk faded minutes ago, and the river, the reeds, even those tiny white flowers were instantly blue. Neither the tail nor the hooked jaw and its rows of teeth fit in the net, but its mass did, and it was hefty, like a full milk jug. No longer was Tom’s heart racing. His eyes were wide, his ears massive and heard crickets and rushing water. Heat from his face made his head feel huge and not big enough for the blood rushing to it.

He set the net down and now Tom could see the trout’s full length in the oncoming darkness. Phrases like “as long as his leg” came to mind, and he reached down with his right hand to grasp the exhausted trout around its middle. It was a two hander, for sure, as his thumb wrapped around its spine, but he couldn’t get his fingers beyond its scaly side. He plucked the black McCune’s sculpin from its hard jaw, and he rolled it upright and slipped downstream of the fish and kneeled. With his left hand under the male’s abdomen, and his right around the base of its tail, he reintroduced flowing cold water into its gills, its system, its muscles.

He exhaled finally, and reached inside with his right hand and slipped the trout’s tail between his thighs to hold it in place. The camera wasn’t there. Neither was the cell phone. He looked upstream panicked. The vague silhouette of the parking lot’s outhouses looked a mile away, and across the river. There was no way to keep the trout alive and get it back up there to the car to photograph it. He wished a boat would come by, but at dark, that wasn’t possible. He thought about other verification. Clubbing it with a stick was surely possible. He looked to the bank on his right, and a bat-sized piece of driftwood was just out of reach. He reached into the river beside his right thigh, and picked up a wedged rock the size of a flat softball. He measured its size against the trout’s head, and it would be labor, force, brutality he needed to crush that trout’s cranium. He raised it, and practiced the blow. As he did, the long, relaxed body tensed for a minute, shocked by the cold night water.

But he doesn’t kill trout. Tom hadn’t killed a trout in decades. When he was a teen, he would kill 18 inchers or even a 22 incher, more to show off to friends than to eat. But now at 40, life meant more. No one would believe him though. Maybe he could clip its adipose and save it. It was bigger than Tom’s thumbprint.

He set the rock back down, and took that right hand and slid it alongside the trout’s nose, and rolled the fish on his forearm. Its tail extended beyond his own neck. It was easily 30 inches. It was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, and fate’s luck and what legends are made of. If he could prove it. And now he started to shake. Tom did. The fish started to crank its back half. It was reviving, and Tom’s adrenal glands were pumped clean, and his body was withdrawing, or shocked from the euphoria, and with his left hand opened wide, he cradled the fish’s front portion, as it started to swim in its human nest, and Tom admired the bottle cap sized spots on its flanks, its paddle sized tail as he let it swat between his thighs. He rose off his penitent knees, and shuffled into the current even more, and held this fish as it came alive, and he harnessed its power for merely another second, and in the blue-black flow the fish powered out of his grasp, and swatted the surface and was gone.

Tom’s tears mixed with the river water on his roasted cheeks and ran into the crow’s feet and down into his stubbled grey beard, dripped off his chin, and mixed with the river, and the darkness, and the night and Tom and fish and legend were one for a second.

Lordy Lordy

I turned 40 today. I think that could be a complete enough blog, but I am not sure that’s all I have to write.


My family has moved out of our home in Bozeman, and we are camping throughout the region while I attend a four week writing workshop at Montana State. This past week we spent it at Trapper Springs campground in the lower Madison, and each evening we make the walk down to the irrigation canal, and fish the river from the peninsula the canal formed. So far, I have not hooked anything, Cole hooked a good fish on a beaded San Juan Worm with the pink chenille Yankee Jim recommended last summer. The bad boy spun around downstream, and spit the hook without nary a jump. Cole was stunned and I was impressed, but that has been it. The water is murky, cold, and not as high as I thought it would be.

We have had other adventures near our campsite this week. Cole and I decided to recon some firewood from the abandoned campsites after the weekend. In 80 degree weather, we headed down the west road on the lower Madison, and at the same time we both exhaled something like “Holy Hanna-do you see that?!” There was a very firm and adequately voluptuous woman lying on her tummy on a picnic table at one of the campsites, topless, nearly bottomless in her thong, and appropriately turning red given the first real sunny day in a month. Cole looked at me almost embarrassed, and I said something like: “You don’t get to see that every day!” We then found a trunk load of cut wood at two other sites.

We have had tremendous thunderstorms nearly every night. We watched the bruised purple clouds start to unfold behind the juniper ridge across the river, and we started packing up everything. I am amazed at how efficient Erica and the kids are at this, and it is something we never practiced. Then we all get in the tent, and hang on. The first one was quite scary, because we didn’t know if the tent would even hold. We had to bang hail off the rain fly from the inside because it was accumulating on the roof, and I feared a cave-in. The back corner pulled up the stake from the wind, but otherwise we survived without a flood, and the next two were easy to handle. The baby just rolls around and walks around laughing and making her darling expressions.

So why are we camping with two dogs, two cats, two leopard geckos, and three kids? We cannot afford Bozeman right now. The house we were in was expensive to lease, expensive to pay for propane and electricity, and we do not get along with the landlord. So we moved.

Now we are struggling to find a new place, and I think for us that’s ok. Tonight we will be in Hyalite, and the kids can get into some good fish and we can relax under some big trees. Homeless at 40. Nearly penniless. I lost 10 pounds. Well-educated, good job, working on my doctorate. Making new friends. Fishing a little. All my children are healthy, and are enjoying the gifts of living in Montana.

When I was 20, 40 was ancient, and I didn’t want to live that long. Now, I want to live to be 100. Life is good. Forty is good too.

White Fish

I have been obsessed lately, as a result of the AMST 502 curriculum, with the possible appearance of fly tackle at a world’s fair, or world exposition. As a kid the only thing I really knew about world’s fairs was that the Space Needle was built for one. (One generation earlier, many recall going to them).  I have now discovered much more, and of course, these discoveries have me thinking.

Experts who study world’s fairs including MSU's Dr. Robert Rydell argue that the U.S. worlds’ fairs were platforms to establish the superiority of the white race, and their claims are valid. Various Filipino tribes were put on display in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and one tribe was renowned for eating dogs, and good white folk payed to watch. At the same fair I discovered there was a fish and game pavilion. Via Google Books I found a 1904 copy of Field and Stream that was dedicated to reviewing the St. Louis outdoor recreation areas. One article was written by Tarleton H. Bean, the commissioner of the Fish and Game Pavilion. Another by a sports writer, and another by the comical caricature of a rural low culture resident, Uncle David. He writes things like: “If a mule cud eat what they call a Hott Dogg, which is a kind of sausage you get on what is nown as the Pike, it would not be so Bad, fer you can get several Hot Doggs fur six bits. Ever thing else is fore dollars to set and look at it fur a little while.” He then goes on to call the beer exhibit the place where “you git yore high culchur”.1

Who attended these fairs? Middle and upper class Americans did, and they were able to see these displays as something to strive for. The world’s newest breech-loading rifles were on display, as well as fishing tackle. It framed the wild as a place to explore, safe from other non-whites who were feared, into the imaginations of millions of Americans. If you were white.

I then met with Paul Schullery, and we discussed this in relation to my research doctorate research. We started uncovering other pieces of fly fishing memorabilia at world’s fairs. Actually he started revealing them to me, and I am indebted. In 1876, at the Philadelphia International Exposition Orvis wins a medal for an innovative fly reel, which is still the standard to which fly reel shape and function still strive today. Then, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Mary Orvis Marbury directeda magnificent fly plate display, enhanced with amazing fishing and river photography. Her book Favorite Flies and Their Histories contained elaborate chromolithographs (had never heard of these before today). These are items still survive, and Schullery’s book The Orvis Story includes a remarkable history of the Orvis legacy, and amazing photographs of flies and images from the late 19th to early 20th century. 2. So, my research is paying off and this course is sending me into a direction I was unwilling to go earlier: race, class, and fly fishing.

Back to the world’s fairs, where the best of every country was put on display to inspire and give hope, and there was fly fishing. And its rich tradition of whiteness goes back centuries. And it might be racism; just today I have been contemplating whether there is still a latent racism, working in the cracks of upper class America, and trickling down.

Another idea might be that fly fishing appears so white, that other races don’t want to be perceived as that white. I feel that way sometimes. The actions of some put the racial connections associated with them in a shade of embarrassment. “The actions of a few have put a world in harm’s way/ and history has proven that they killed our leaders dead” (Citizen Cope “Healing Hands”).

It might be about imperialism, and economic expansion. Orvis made flies in Kenya. Most flies anglers purchase at shops now are made in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, or India. The gear is manufactured overseas. But the lore still exists, one of front window tiers in the west, cane rods and small flies, and pipes. Fly fishing serves as a display of certain racial attitudes in this country. It is like golf, or owning a major sports team, or winter sports.


1. http://books.google.com/books?id=f0BYAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA302&lpg=RA1-PA302&dq=hunting+and+fishing+at+world's+fairs&source=bl&ots=tDAdtFG71s&sig=-QNFtPb5XzFXNcmZF0qot5llHiw&hl=en&ei=T8_6S_IkhNo16eOVhAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
2. Schullery, Paul. The Orvis Story: 150 Years of an American Sporting Tradition. Manchester: The Orvis Company, Inc. 2006 (20-35).

Memory

In my current course titled Research in American Studies, listed as AMST 502 in the Montana State University campus catalog, we are discussing, via online posts, the value of memory as a historical resource. Memory is a compelling subject for me, because I have several conflicting experiences with it.

In the 90s I volunteered a few times at an Alzheimer’s unit in Missoula, MT. I would take in fly fishing and hunting magazines, and sit at a table with a few gentlemen and just read to them. They really never commented on them, nor did they tell me stories of the good old days. They usually just sat there and drooled.

However, one occurrence really set in motion the oddities of the disease, and the complexities of the mind. Two couples were sitting at an adjacent table. They were not married, they were not related, but they lived in the same unit. Ironically, they acted like they were two married couples. One of the women asked the other couple “When did you folks arrive in Minneapolis?”

The man of the house answered “Well, um, just a few minutes ago.”

The inquisitor responded “Where are you folks staying, because we are having a hard time finding anywhere with vacancy”.

The little lady of the house replied “We found a nice hotel right after we got off the train.”

Ok man--I thought--am I in Missoula? Am I not in a retirement home? What a trip these people are on.

Not many years later my grandmother Ethel had a stroke after trying to take care of my grandfather Ray, who had been secretly suffering from dementia for a few years. He remained alive long after she passed, and he lived in a similar home, unable to recognize or recall anyone who came to visit him. After a while family just didn’t visit because it was too depressing.

I think about these things when I can’t find my damn car keys, or my wallet, or (fill in the blank). I want to blame it on my wife, or my kids or dogs, but it’s really I just don’t give a damn about stuff like that. There’s never any money in my wallet, so who cares where it is. I will be lucky if the car actually starts, and there usually is no gas in it anyway, so who cares where I put the keys.

But, the moments I remember are laden with significance. They are pallets of color, sound, smell. I remember every fish I have ever caught, and that number is in the thousands. I can remember the fly used to catch significant trout, and whether I tied it or bought it. Often I can even recall when and where I tied it.

I remember the biggest fish I ever caught, and the assmunch who rowed his drift boat directly across the river and downstream of where I was, and how he let his obnoxious golden retriever out of the boat so it could run up stream to where I was fighting the 25 inch rainbow hooked on a #16 bead head tan hare’s ear. It was miraculous that I landed it in the cattails and dog legs.

I remember moments involving wildlife, like when a cow elk came ripping out of the woods to slam on her respective four hoof brakes and startle hundreds of carp lounging in a slough on the Missouri. It seemed like the entire river rose six inches, and that mass of elevation swam 800 meters across the mighty Mo. I remember deer hunting with my brother, and his reaction to seeing some tan hide moving through the woods at 20 yards: “Shhh, I see a deer.” Pause and scan through the lodgepoles. “Oh shit dude, a mountain lion.” Its shoulder muscles rippled underneath its hide. Its tail was like a big league slugger’s bat. Same color too.

Once I awoke from a nap while elk hunting, and while lying on my back looked straight up the dead snag behind my head to see a saw-whet owl looking down at me. Once my dad and I awoke under a tarp in the same prone position at Sheep’s Bridge campground to see a Great Horned Owl looking down at us from a tree.

In all of these I remember the temperature, the wind, the cloud cover, or not, and my state of mind. They were usually content, and peaceful, and open.

I also remember the day I met my wife. June 12, 2004. She was astonished last night when I told her this, just as she is every year when I remember that date. It was sunny, hot actually, and I had my feet nestled in the sand at a local park. My pickup line was “are you the babysitter or the mom?”

I also remember water and laughter and tears when Kerby was born July 14, 1995, and the sound of Bianca’s whimper on February 27, 2009 when she was yarded from Erica’s abdomen. I hope these memories will be etched in digital code forever. I hope I never remember a train ride to Minneapolis while sitting at a card table with three complete strangers.

Catostomus ardens

My step-son Cole is a good fisherman. He picked up fly casting quickly, and his favorite place to fly fish is Hyalite Creek. Every time he has been there, including the first time he fly fished, he has caught aggressive rainbows in fast water. The fish size coincide with the creek size, but their appetites and willingness to eat flies make it a special place for those looking for clean water during runoff, or a quite place to fish with a three weight.

But Cole has tenacity and hope when fishing, and he hasn’t hit that place in his fly fishing career where they type of stick really matters. He will catch fish on whatever is working, whether it is a fly rod, a landing net, or our family spinning rod. So, we fish a public pond near our home once a month or more, and depending on what’s working, he usually catches something on a Panther Martin or a worm, or a fly. Last month we were at the pond, and as I often do, I get the kids fishing and then try to figure out what is going to work on a fly rod. I tied on a #16 pheasant tail with an indicator high up on the leader and flipped it out. A 9 inch rainbow ate it in minutes. This happened a couple times quickly, too quickly to turn the rod over to one of the kids. Once I did, Cole hooked a Utah sucker, Catostomus ardens. I was astonished that a sucker came up from the depths of this pond to eat a pheasant tail suspended nine feet from the surface. He was astonished because it was about 10 inches long—the biggest thing he ever caught on a fly.

Now I introduce you to Pepper. She is a 4 month old border collie puppy with a penchant for smelly shoes and, as it turns out other smelly things. See, we are moving from this house, and last summer the kids had an idea to build a pond for frogs. They hollowed out a chunk of the yard next to the veggie garden, and began plopping things into it like store bought koi, minnows trapped in sloughs nearby, and this year, the sucker. But, yesterday I decided we needed to start filling it in, and began that by kicking in a few of the river rocks that rimmed its edges. In the remaining six inches of water --what was left of the deep end--Mr. Utah sucka feesh came flopping out. I felt terrible, because I had no idea the fish had survived all the grubby fondling at the pond, let alone a trip home and thirty some days in our backyard! My yellow lab Duke pounced on him. Given the way he salivates when I catch trout, and the way he catches and massages gophers with three bites and a gulp, I thought I would let him have the fish.

Baby Bianca silently observed all this from my arms, but as the wind blew, I left Duke, the sucker, and silent little Pepper to the overgrown soggy grass in the back yard. B and I went downstairs, played with her toy instruments, and it crossed my mind that before dark, I should bury that fish in the garden so the puppy wouldn’t bring it in that night. Well, after we played for about thirty minutes I decided we needed a snack, and carried Bianca upstairs, down the hall, and as I turned to the kitchen, I saw this…

There really isn’t that much more to say, except that a warm, dog-slobbered Utah suckerfish covered in dog hair and carpet really isn’t symbolic of glorious death, nor does it give puppy Pepper the delightful puppy breath that so many oogle over. I still haven't checked to see if the doggy door got slimed or not. I am sure I will forget before I am done typing.

Important in this story is that with gregarious kids and dogs, I sometimes let things go that I myself would never do--anymore. I don’t have the heart to kill a fish anymore, and I wouldn’t kill a sucker or a trout or a gopher unless it were suffering. I find myself even braking for the baby ground squirrels in the road this month. But I remember what it was like to be a kid, and I killed a lot of fish when I was that age. I liked to eat them, I liked to slice them open and see what they had been eating, and I liked to “match the hatch” by trying to find crawdads, dragon fly larva, pink power bait, or whatever else they were stuffed with.

So, I just shrugged when they asked if they could take it home, and I figured it would die a noble death by raccoon or skunk in our back yard long before Pepper got her pointy little puppy teeth on it. But he didn’t and I am left at 10:36 PM to contemplate the will to survive. In our human tendency to anthropomorphize other species, I assumed that fish was too dumb to live very long, because he sure looks stupid, and he is from Utah. But there it was, a month later living in six inches of dusky green water, maybe a little bigger than it was when Cole caught it. And I marvel at the curiosity of Pepper. She is so much like Bianca. And as an adult, I thank god for Peppers and Coles and Biancas, that keep me bright eyed and keep me seeing the “nuisance”, the “invasive species”, as something full of wonder, as something capable of inspiring awe.

Son On My Back

Two nights ago Michael Keaton was on Letterman’s show doing what many people who have dedicated their lives, at least their recreational lives, to fly fishing: he was animatedly talking about fly fishing. He had just returned from the Bahamas, with a cast of heavy hitters that included Yvon “the real deal” Chouinard, Tom McGuane, and Tom Brokaw. What Keaton said, is what many grasp while fly fishing in salt water: the fish are strong, and permit are addictive. He claimed the “black spike” is what he spent hours looking for after hooking his first Permit, which quickly swam right at him and spit the hook. After that experience, he let hundreds of bonefish go by as he scanned the flats for the spike.

This experience is unusual in the big picture of American and global culture, but it is common among salt water fly anglers. What is unique, and humble, is what Letterman said a few minutes later. He recalled a time when Michael said "there's no better day than having your boy on your back and going fishing".  Letterman brought this up because he too just fished with his "Boy on his back." They shook hands and everyone applauded. 

Fourteen years ago my son Kerby fell asleep in a backpack while I waded knee deep in a late summer run that had a gauging cable running over it on the big Blackfoot just minutes from Bonner. He was a year old, blonde, and happy, and shortly after landing a fourteen inch brown, I felt his soft blonde hair press against my neck; a sure sign he was out for the count. I continued to nymph that run and landed a few rainbows and whitefish, and one cutthroat. I never fished with him on my back again, but it was a moment that I have never forgotten. Fly fishing the Blackfoot in summer in shorts with my son on my back touched places at the time I was starting to seal off. My heart, my tear ducts. I never heard another man talk about this before, until two nights ago. Two men musing about the joy of fishing with their baby boys in backpacks-one of which I admire so much because, among other qualities, he looks and acts like my dad: goofy, handsome, and intelligent.

And around 11 PM the other night, I was right back there, with the green river wrapped around me, and Kerby’s little toes against my back. I knew what these men on TV had experienced, and I shared it with them for a brief moment.

There is something special for men when they share the outdoors with their children. In the woods, or balls-deep in a river, we feel like children again. The world has mystery and is veiled and lifted all at once, like how I imagine toddlers see it. And to share something so simple that means so much has become tradition, and that legacy lives on today, in pockets throughout the US. I don't know if it does in other countries, but as John Mclean expresses in his essays, that tie between a father and his child and a river is haunting, and joyful.

My dad read my first entry here, and said it brought a tear to his eye. He then sent me a video of a woman freaked out because she has raccoons in the belfry. That’s my dad, and I love him for it. Kerby turns 15 this summer. I turn 40. He and I rarely have fished together. I would like that to change sometime. I love him and what he is becoming.

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First post

I just read several posts from John Maclean's web page johnmacleanbooks.com and I was overcome with his ability to write commanding prose, and the legacy under which he writes. I am inspired by his simplicity, and when I read John tonight, I felt like I was reading a writer with his own style, but aware of his father's influence.

The experiences he had with his father Norman remind me of fishing with my father on the Upper Deschutes in Central Oregon. We were bait fishermen, and I never caught anything legendary, but I awoke with my dad each camping trip near 5 AM, with fog still on the river, and cast and reeled in until breakfast around 10, or until my brother Mike's reel, or mine, were birdsnests of eight pound monofilament. I would stand next to my dad with the same line, swivel, split shot, even the same end of the worm, and he would catch amazing browns and rainbows, and I would get snagged. We did this for years, until Mike was too involved in baseball tournaments, and I was a teen too involved in drugs, girls, and rebelling against my family.

When I returned to Salem, Oregon from college at the University of Oregon in 1992 Dave McNeese sold me a used 8 foot 5 weight fiberglass Fenwick fly rod, and a new Cortland Crown for $50, and told me it was his old personal rod, and it had caught thousands of trout; when I moved to Missoula, Montana in 1993, I never put it down.

And though the details in between then and now will undoubtedly emerge, I know am three weeks from 40, and a couple years worth of writing away from completing my PhD in American Studies at Montana State University-Bozeman. My children live in world class fishing towns: 14 year old Kerby in Ennis; Cole, Shae, and 15 month old Bianca in Bozeman. I also teach developmental composition to incoming freshmen. It is a life I dreamed of, but never imagined would unfold.