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. "