The Longest Silence (12 page)

So I drove on to the upper Madison, which was not exactly quiet either. Deciding to enjoy the uproar, I stopped at a general store and bought some bubble gum, read the cartoon, and rigged my tackle. A young boy came up and showed me his round, plastic fly box and asked why he hadn’t caught a fish all day. I gave him three of the mysterious, bristling worms. Without saying much, I communicated the idea that I had long relied on this remarkable fly. I could see hope renew itself in his face as he considered the logic of this irrational new shape wound on a small hook. But I was already violating my foremost rule for catching more fish: keep the fly in the water.

Clearly, the Madison was too high. But I was going forward with this thing by hook or by crook because no other options were currently available to me. I started at the top of a long braided channel, casting the new fly into the flow and studying the point of my line as it came back to me. Except for some bottom tapping, nothing enlivened the drift of the nymph, and a good spell passed with my arm starting
to tire from keeping the rod high and the line out of the water. I pushed through willows at the gravel bar and started down another channel with the same results. I felt guilty for giving the three useless flies to the youngster. I continued through three channels, two hours, and five fly changes: Peeking Caddis, Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, Prince Nymph, Squirrel Tail, and finally, the venerable English Pheasant Tail Nymph, size #16. I tried to keep the leader slicing deep into the water without drag, while the end of the fly line eased along behind, telegraphing the movements of the nymph drifting below. No dice; the river was too high.

I drove on to a small tributary of the upper Missouri. It lay in a high country with such long winters and high moisture that it had a peatish, muskeglike feel in places. The word “creek” seemed right for it and suggested its crumbling banks and easy meanders. The moose and colorful reed birds correctly implied a brief, damp summer. But the amount of water in it was exactly right, not too low and not too high. Here we would have an encounter.

I walked the level, rich-smelling pastures where sandhill cranes croaked out their love to each other. In sloughs off the river, the eared grebe swam daintily and rolled for a dive like a tiny, crested loon. Where irrigation drawdown had exposed luscious, wormy mud, the elegant Wilson’s phalarope stepped carefully in search of a meal. Along the ranch road that passed a small impoundment of water, a fertilizer truck sailed through clouds of drifting mayflies. This country was swollen with a sparkling exhalation of life: wild grass and bright yellow patches of balsamroot flowers, water igniting in spring light. As I stood on a bank over the river, drawing the tapered line through the guides of my rod and looking off toward the wild hills of new sagebrush to the east, I realized evening was coming on and I had forgotten to eat.

The water curled around boulders with a bulge and moved in a nervous rush against my legs as I fished upstream. Here and there were small glassy panels of undisturbed water, and in one of these panels the end of the line stopped. I lifted the rod tip and felt the weight that to an angler is not just weight.

A rainbow trout ripped straight downstream and with the full
strength of the river on his tail, prepared to defeat me and my tackle-fueled pyramid scheme. All the pressure of slow fishing rested on the solid shoulders of the fish and I stumbled and wallowed along behind, underplaying him, trying to remember if the leader had any wind knots and knowing that the tiny, barbless hook was but a faint connection. Still, I had managed to detain this fish, and for the moment we were living in each other’s lives.

When the trout held in a bar of current, his pink stripe shone up through the cold green water of springtime. And that’s where it stops in memory, so that such things may be accumulated and produce a renewable happiness. I led him into the slower water at the river’s edge, supported his cool belly in the water with my hand, and let him go.

The cafe in town had homemade soup, a jukebox, a telephone, and enough light in the booths to read the newspaper. It all seemed very complete.

T
HE FISHING LIFE
in Montana produces a particular apprehension that affects fishermen like a circadian rhythm: irrational dread of runoff. Early spring is capable of balmy days, and though the water is cold, the rivers are as benign as brooks in dreams, their pools and channels bright and perfect. But year-round experience shows that in short order they will be buried in snowmelt and irrigation waste, their babied low-water contours disappearing under a hoggish brown rush. Once runoff commences, the weather is often wonderful. The canopies of cottonwood will open like green umbrellas. But it can be a long wait before the rivers clear, a lull so long it seems possible to lose track of the whole idea of fishing.

In early spring, it is time to begin when friends say, “I know I should get out. I just haven’t had the time.” Here is the chance to steal a march, to exercise those fish whose memory has been dulled by the long winter. Crazy experiments can be undertaken, such as photographing a trout held in your left hand with a camera held in your right hand. Before-the-runoff is time out of time, the opportunity to steal fishing from an impudent year.

You know you’ve started early enough when the first landowner whose permission you ask stares at you with xenophobic eyes. His first thought is that you are there to pilfer or abuse his family. Let him examine your rod and scrutinize your eyes. Those of a fisherman are often not so good, so keep them moving. Spot a bit of natural history
and describe it for him: “Isn’t that our first curlew?” Above all, don’t say that your dad and your granddad before you fished this same stretch at their pleasure. The landowner of today is unlikely to appreciate any surprising seniority; he’s having hell holding onto the place. Turn and walk calmly to your vehicle. Don’t back to it.

I wandered around the various forks of my home river separated by many miles of rolling hills. One would be running off, the other clear, depending upon the exact kind of country it drained. I clambered down slick or snowy rocks to dangle my thermometer in the water. But in the spring there was, even on a snowy day, a new quality of light, as if the light had acquired a palpable richness that trees, grass, and animals could also feel, a nutritious light coming through falling snow. There had come a turning point and now spring was more inexorable than the blizzards. I knew the minute this snow quit there would be someplace I could fish.

The next morning was still and everything was melting. I went to a small river out in the foothills north of where I live. This early in the year, when I drive down through a ranch yard or walk across a pasture toward the stream, my heart pounds for a glimpse of moving water. Yet moving water has, all my life, been the most constant passion I’ve had. It can be current or it can be tide, though it can’t be a lake and it can’t be mid-ocean, where I have spent baffled days and weeks more or less scratching my head. Today the river was in perfect shape, with enough water that most of its braided channels were full. There were geese on the banks and they talked at me in a state of high alarm as they lifted and replaced their feet with weird deliberation.

As soon as I got in the river, I felt how very cold the water was. Nevertheless, a few caddises skittered on top. An hour later, some big gray drakes came off like a heavenly message sent on coded insects, a message that there would indeed be dry-fly fishing on earth again. I’m always saying, though it’s hardly my idea, that the natural state of the universe is cold. But cold-blooded trout and cold-blooded mayflies are indications of the world’s retained heat, as is the angler, wading upstream in a cold spring wind in search of delight. Nevertheless, the day had opened a few F-stops at the aperture of sky, a promise and a beginning. I caught one of the mayflies and had a long look: about a
No. 12; olive, brown, and gray the operative colors; two-part tail. I had something pretty close in my fly box, having rejected the Red Quill and the Quill Gordon as close but no cigar.

A couple of brilliant male mergansers passed overhead. They are hard on fish and despised, but their beauty is undisputed. In a short time they would migrate out of here, though I didn’t know where they went. They were referred to in Lewis and Clark’s journals as the “redheaded fishing duck,” a better name.

The river combined in a single channel, where the volume of water produced a steady riffle of two or three feet in depth. I started where it tailed out and worked my way up to where slick water fell off into the rapids. The mayflies were not in great numbers but they were carried down this slick and over the lip into the riffle. My staring magnified their plight into postcards of Niagara Falls, a bit of sympathetic fancy canceled by the sight of swirls in the first fast water. I cast my fly straight into this activity and instantly hooked a good rainbow. It must have been the long winter’s wait or the knowledge that the day could end at any minute, but I desperately wanted to land this fish. I backed down out of the fast water while the fish ran and jumped, then I sort of cruised him into the shallows and got a hand on him. He was a brilliant-looking fish, and I thought I could detect distress in his eyes as he looked, gulping, out into midair. I slipped the barbless hook out and eased him back into the shallows. Two sharp angles and he was gone in deep green water.

It started to cloud up and grow blustery. The temperature plummeted. I went back to my truck, stripped off my waders, put up my gear and started home, passing the old black tires hung on fenceposts with messages painted on them about cafes and no hunting. I kept thinking that the sort of sporadic hatch that had begun to occur was perfect for leisurely dry-fly fishing, if only the weather had held. By the time I got to the house it was winter again and I was trying to look up that dun, concluding for all the good it would do me that it was
Ephemerella compar
. Even as I write this, I visualize a trout scholar in pince-nez rising up out of a Livingston spring creek to correct my findings.

When you have stopped work to go fishing and then been weathered
out, your sense of idleness knows no bounds. You wander around the house and watch the sky from various windows. From my bedroom I could see great gusts of snow, big plumes and curtains marching across the pasture. Did I really catch a rainbow on a dry-fly this morning?

The next day broke off still and sunny, and spring was sucking that snow up and taking it to Yucatán. At the post office I ran into a friend of mine who’d seen a young male gyrfalcon—a gyrfalcon!—hunting partridges on my place. Within an hour I was standing with my fly rod in the middle of a bunch of loose horses, looking off a bank into a deep, green-black pool where swam a number of hog rainbows. I had been there before, of course, and you couldn’t approach this spot except to stand below where the slow-moving pool tailed out rather rapidly. The trouble was you had to stay far enough away from the pool that it was hard to keep your line off the tailwater, which otherwise produced instantaneous drag. You needed a seven-foot rod to make the cast and a twenty-foot rod to handle the slack. They hadn’t built this model yet; it would need to be a two-piece rod with a spring-loaded hinge driven by a cartridge in the handle, further equipped with a flash suppressor. Many of us had been to this pool to learn why the rainbows had grown to be hogs who would never be dragged onto a gravel bar. They were going to stay where they were, with their backs up and their bellies down, eating whenever they felt like it. I had to try it anyway and floated one up onto the pool. I got a drag-free drift of around three-eighths of an inch and then went looking for another spot.

Geese and mallards flew up ahead of me as I waded, circling for altitude in the high bare tops of the cottonwoods. The air was so still and transparent you could hear everything. When the mallards circled over my head, their wingtips touched in a tense flutter and made a popping sound.

In a little back eddy, caddises were being carried down a line of three feeding fish. I arranged for my fly to be among them and got a drift I couldn’t begin to improve upon, so a nice brown sucked it down. I moved up the edge of the bar to other feeding fish. The geese on the bar who’d been ignoring me now began to watch and pace around. I noted one of the fish was of good size and feeding in a steady
rhythm. I made a kind of measuring cast from my knees. The geese were getting more nervous. I made a final cast and it dropped right in the slot and started floating back to the good fish. I looked over to see what the geese were doing. The trout grabbed the fly. I looked back and missed the strike. I delivered an oath. The geese ran awkwardly into graceful flight and banked on around to the north.

This was a wonderful time to find yourself astream. You didn’t bump into experts. You didn’t bump into anybody. You could own this place in your thoughts as completely as a Hudson Bay trapper. The strangely human killdeer were all over the place, human in that their breeding activities were accompanied by screaming fights and continuous loud bickering. When they came in for a landing, their wings set in a quiet glide while their legs ran frantically in midair. The trees in the slower bends were in a state of pickup-sticks destruction from the activity of beavers. A kingfisher flew over my head with a trout hanging from its bill. I came around a bend without alerting three more geese, floating in a backwater, sound asleep with their heads under their wings. I decided not to wake them. I ended my day right there. When I drove up out of the river bottom in my car, I looked back to see a blue heron fishing the back eddy where I’d just caught a trout. On the radio were predictions of high temperatures and I knew what that low-country meltoff would mean to my days on the river.