Fly-Fishing the 41st (34 page)

Sonnhof—
German: sun yard. The name of the bar in Sankt Veit, Austria (
Schwarzfischer
capital), where
Schwarzfischers
stop to have a drink on their way home from an expedition. The word connotes the physical bar, Sonnhof, but also an expression of faith, and an emblem of home. Usually expressed with a sigh of relief, “
Ah, Sonnhof,
” and joined with a
kleines
Gösser or Villacher beer.

çanli—
Turkish for alive or live. Pronounced
chanli
(
ç
in Turkish is “ch” sound). Used in Turkish phrases such as
çanli muzik
(live music). Adopted by
Schwarzfischers
to describe a trout's condition,
çanli alabalik
(live trout)—opposite of
muerto.

beer
—la bebida oficial del pescadores furtivos—
the official drink of the
Schwarzfischer,
known variously as:
cerveja
(Portugal);
cerveza
(Spain);
birra
(Italy);
Bier
(Germany);
birre
(Albania);
mpirra
(Greece);
bira
(Turkey);
pivo
(Russia);
garejur
(Armenia);
pichiu
(China);
shad airag
(Mongolia);
uTshwala
(Zulu).

 

Any additions to the
Schwarzfischer
lexicon are welcome.

G
OLDEN
T
ROUT

I
called on a friend to harbor me during my first days back in the States. I had last seen Greg on a trip we'd taken to climb Mount Shasta in northern California and wanted to go back to that area now to fish. Near the base of Shasta were several wonderful trout rivers on the 41st parallel.

I had been to Greg's house on Oxford Street in Berkeley before, but now I noticed how its decor had been carefully chosen to portray its inhabitant as an explorer. At the door I was greeted by K2 and Eiger, Greg's two Maine coon cats (named after famous mountains). The style of the furniture was African colonial, rattan, hemp, and leather, but a vegetarian version without the big game heads. On the walls were photographs from Shackleton's Antarctic expedition and his ship, the
Endurance.
Greg's shelves were stuffed with adventure books and expedition journals, the walls hung with ice axes. On shelves were photos of him and his friends, on Mount McKinley, on Everest, at the base of Machapuchari. He drove a Land Rover Defender to his daily job as a lawyer in San Francisco.

Greg and I spent the next several days on the 41st parallel in California, reliving memories of trips we'd taken together. North of San Francisco, through Napa and Sonoma, the country was dry and hot, amber and ochre, dotted with deep green oaks. For three days we fly-fished the upper Sacramento River near Mount Shasta for hard-fighting native rainbow trout, flattening pennies on the train rails, camping under the redwoods, sitting by roaring campfires under thick white stars. Then we traveled south to Yosemite National Park and hiked to the peak of Half Dome Mountain, overlooking the Merced River, which wound like a serpent through the
valley floor. Greg gave me rudimentary climbing lessons on nearby rock faces and I contributed to his knowledge of fly-fishing.

We continued our trip southward to Death Valley and took the portal road near the base of Mount Whitney to a trailhead where paths began to wind toward meadow streams holding native golden trout. I had threatened to take this trip to Big Whitney Meadow so many times that I felt I had already been. On the hike up to Cottonwood Pass it all felt familiar, like I was revisiting one of my haunts at home. Perhaps I was nostalgic because the distant peak called Whitney was also the name of my first girlfriend.

It was twilight when we walked in among the redwoods and camped at the tree line on Cottonwood Pass, 11,600 feet. Before the sun set we could see Big Whitney Meadow below us and the faint glimmer of a ribbon of water. It got cold as soon as the sun went down. We made dinner in the vestibule of the tent, and were snug in our sleeping bags by the time night set in. I went to drink some water from my bottle but it had already frozen.

“It must be ten degrees Fahrenheit,” Greg said. “But up here in late September you could get snow.” Greg rolled over to sleep. “Thanks for giving me an excuse to take some time off from work,” he said.

As we drifted off to sleep a peculiar thing happened. I became very paranoid and began to hear noises. I felt the ground shake and swore I saw a man through the tent standing over us holding a flashlight. He must be very cold, I thought. Why isn't he moving or speaking to us? An hour passed and still the illusion held. I tried to reach for my knife in my pack without making noise, and when I had it, I held it out, the blade open, waiting for the intruder to make a move. He never did.

“Isn't it always strange how the first rays of sun work to remove fears,” I said to Greg the next morning. “I felt the ground shake last night, I know I did, it wasn't a dream, and I thought I saw a man through the tent holding a flashlight.”

“Maybe you felt a tremor,” Greg said, boiling water on a portable gas stove.

“Hey, I bet that's possible. There're a lot of tremors in California. But what about the man with the flashlight.”

“Maybe it was the moon.”

The grass underfoot was crunchy with ice, and the moisture in our boots was still frozen when we set off for Big Whitney Meadow with our fly rods. We packed our frozen water bottles and hoped they would melt.

The sun had spread across the low ground where we were headed. We moved swiftly down into a series of treeless soggy meadows where the sources of springs combined to make small brooks. In every tributary, every trickle, every finger that snaked up into the yellow grasses there were golden trout.

The trail came to water first beside a small pool maybe four feet across. I stood before it with my eyes fixed on the bottom and could easily see a half dozen fish lying above the gravel.

“Stand back,” I cautioned Greg. “We don't want to spook the fish.”

I strung my fly rod and rigged it with a small dry fly, trying to calm my excitement so I could make a good cast over the pool. When I did, the fly landed too perfectly; I saw no ripple, no wake, and no fish rising to take it.

“There's a film of ice,” Greg noticed. “You see it? The stream froze over.” The golden trout swam quietly and safely beneath.

We continued down the trail for a half hour waiting for the sun to grow stronger. The trail came to another brook, which my map called Stoke's Spring. All the springs in the meadow fed into Golden Trout Creek, which eventually ran into the little Kern River.

I caught my first golden dapping a dry fly in a two-foot-wide pool. From Greg's point of view several yards away, the pool of water was hidden in the tall grass and it must have looked like I was fishing for meadow voles. I lifted the trout out of the water and Greg
came running to see it. I was astonished by its brilliance, the reds and yellows that seemed to have been burned into its sides by the California sun.

I proposed to Greg that we walk for one hour in search of bigger water, farther south where the multitude of stringers would join to make a larger stream. As we walked, Golden Trout Creek began to take shape and grew into a beautiful spring creek with a good even flow. The water was clear and I could see it was full of trout taking natural flies on the surface with abandon. The small trout took our flies recklessly, each a little jewel.

One fish among the many we caught outshone the rest in its brilliance. It was dark olive on the back with big indigo parr marks, a broad crimson band and yellow sides, a cadmium-red belly, a cerulean-blue rim on the jaw and over the eye, a big black iris the shape of a watermelon seed in a pupil of amber, the fins fine golden ochre and orange, and every color in its place and in the stream perfectly camouflaged.

When we stopped for lunch I took off my day pack and lay on a boulder by the stream with my face toward an all-blue sky, not a single cloud in it or anything, save a golden eagle passing from horizon to horizon. I had chosen to sit by a large pool for lunch; a cold breeze streamed through. In a small eddy of the creek between two big boulders, a half dozen golden trout between four and seven inches rose continuously to mayflies.

The whole earth was a meadow of golden grass with a thread of blue winding through.

“So you're heading east tomorrow,” Greg said. “I just bought a small place in Colorado. It's a cabin on a hundred acres surrounded by BLM land. I've only stayed there once. I want to get out of here sometime and build a place there. You can stay, it's in the mountains and there's a small creek running through. There's supposed to be brook trout in it.”

T
ROUT IN THE
N
EVADA
D
ESERT

I
rented a car and made my way from Berkeley, via Lake Tahoe's southern shore, into Nevada. I made it all the way to Elko, a casino strip in a desolation as vast as Central Asia's. In my room that night and into the morning, I could hear and feel the boom of trucks passing on Interstate 80. I slipped out of bed early and, following some information I had, headed up into the quiet desert in search of native trout.

I took to a gravel ranch road in Deeth up the dry bed of the Mary's River in the Humboldt basin. In a fisheries report published by the Nevada Fish and Game in the 1970s, the biologists detailed all the streams with native cutthroats left in Nevada. I had chosen one to fish called Wildcat Creek.

Skirting the rabbit brush at a good clip, a bristling yellow mass of flowers, a medium-sized bird hit my windshield. I was so startled that I spun off the road into a dry ditch. The front bumper was a little scuffed and I dropped hot coffee on my lap, but I managed to muscle the car out and things seemed to work fine.

I thought it may have been a kestrel or a whippoorwill and spent some minutes scavenging the roadside looking for it. It was a whippoorwill and I pulled a couple wing and breast feathers, and thought someday I might tie a fly with them.

On my map I had marked Wildcat Creek; it lay on the fringe of the Humboldt National Forest. I thought I was getting close but saw no forest. Ahead of me was parched ground and sagebrush. I saw a man standing beside a pickup truck and stopped to ask directions.

“Mornin',” he said.

“Hi. I was looking for a creek called Wildcat,” I said. “I was thinking of doing some fly-fishing there. You know where it is?”

“I should, I own it and the several thousand acres around it. My name's Bill Gibbs.” He shook my hand. “There should be trout still, but I was tending young cows soon to be shipped off to feed lots in Nebraska the other day and saw that the fire'd burned over it. I don't know if the trout survived.

“You'd better not go up this way,” he said, looking at my dusty compact car. “It'd be difficult to get to Wildcat in that—the road's washed out. If you go back north up the Deeth County road you'll come to a small dirt road on the left just past the next cattle grate. Take that as far as you can and then you'll have to walk at least two miles before you get to any water. It's been a real dry summer and like I said, the fire jumped the creek but a few might've made it.”

“So,” I said, leaving
Schwarzfischer
protocol behind. “I can fish it?”

“Sure,” he said.

I thanked Bill Gibbs, made for the cattle grate, and took the first left, flushing rabbits, crushing ants, through sage and rabbit brush, until I got to where the fire had burned and the road became impassable.

I made my way on foot through the burned country. The brush was standing charcoal and drew patterns in black lines on my calves as I walked. The sun was intense. I spooked a dozen antelope from a water hole. There was a basin between the hills. I thought the creek must be there; then in the distance I saw a lone green aspen and some willows. Somehow they had been left untouched by the fire.

As long as I had walked the willows didn't seem to be getting any closer. Was this some kind of trick? And then I was there, staring into a thin ribbon of water that barely flowed.

Looking carefully into a pool, I saw a small trout that I recognized as a cutthroat. It was a different shade of olive from the algae and detritus on the bottom and was sparsely spotted with round black points.
I strung up my fly rod, but only the front half, and dropped a nymph in the pool. As soon as I did, the trout took it and I was holding it in my hands, admiring its Tuscan red sides, its violet cheek, and its look of wildness. I thought of a discussion I had had with Johannes about how you knew a native trout when you saw it. Everything just seemed to make sense; the trout was not only a fish, but all the colors of the land around it. Its spots were charcoal black and its sides the color of a desert sunset. It had survived the fire.

 

Content, pleased, lost, I drove eastward on the highway through the largely desert land. Soon I was in the Bonneville Salt Flats and then on the south shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It was so like the inland seas of Asia, backlit by dust devils, vast and desolate. I had once traveled, years before, around Utah with a friend from high school who was Mormon. We had borrowed his grandfather's truck in Toole (pronounced
Towilla
), a small town near Salt Lake, and spent the trip fishing for trout and sleeping in the homes of his relatives. Saying his name in my mind, Josh Blackwelder, conjured the warm backyards of his relatives' homes, plum trees hung with ripe fruit, goats tethered to stakes in the grass, the earth dry and fragrant, blond Mormon girls with eyes like golden raisins, prospects of a different reality, of religious hallucinations from the intense heat.