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.