Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

The angler parcels out the midsummer months with pocket situations, good for a few amusing visits. I always make two or three trips to my nearby beaver ponds, wallowing through swamp and chest-high grass to the beaver houses, beyond which stands water full of small brook trout. In the still ponds are the gnawed stumps of trees, big enough in diameter to suggest the recently solid ground which the advanced rodents have conquered.

If we fish here in the fall, we bring back wild crab apples for baking along with the easily gathered creel of brook trout. The fish in these ponds live on freshwater shrimp and their flesh is salmon pink on either side of their pearly backbones. The trout themselves are as surpassingly vivid as fine enamels, and the few meals we make of them are sacraments.

The stream that flows through our place is lost in irrigation head gates by August, so it has no trout. Obliviously, my young son fishes the pretty pool next to our cattle guard, increasing his conviction that trout are a difficult fish. Morbid friends say he is a sportsman of the future. I will explain to him as an acceptable realpolitik: if the trout are lost, smash the state. More than any other fish, trout are dependent upon the ambience in which they are caught. Whether it is the trout or the angler who is more sensitized to the degeneration of habitat would be hard to say, but probably it is the trout. At the first signs of deterioration, this otherwise vigorous fish just politely quits, as if to say, “If that’s how you want it …” Meanwhile, the angler qualitatively lapses in citizenship. Other kinds of fishermen may toss their baits into the factory shadows. The trout fisherman who doesn’t turn dangerously unpatriotic. He just politely quits, like the trout.

IT’S OCTOBER, a bluebird Indian-summer day. Opening day for ducks, it will be over eighty degrees. You’re going to need your Coppertone.

Standing on the iron bridge at Pine Creek, I look upstream. I suppose it is a classic autumn day in the Rockies; by some standards, it is outrageous. The China blue river breaks up into channels that jet back together from chutes and gravel tongues to form a deep emerald pool that flows toward me on the bridge with a hidden turbulence, a concealed shock wave. Where the river lifts upstream on its gravel runs, it glitters.

The division of the river makes a multiplicity of banks, but the main ones are shrouded with the great, almost heartbreaking cottonwoods that are now gone to a tremulous, sun-shot gold, reaching over the river’s blue rush. Where the pools level out, the bizarre, free-traveling clouds with their futuristic shapes are reflected.

I can see my friend and neighbor, a painter, walking along the high cutbank above the river. This would be a man who has ruined his life with sport. He skulks from his home at all hours with gun or rod. Today he has both.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Trout fishing and duck hunting.”

Only fishing, I feel like a man who has been laid off.

“As you see,” says the painter, gesticulating strangely, “I’m ready for anything. I spoiled half the day with work and errands. I have to pull things out of the fire before they go from bad to worse.” Across the river, the Absaroka Range towers up out of the warm valley with snowcapped peaks and gold stripes of aspen intermittently dividing the high pasture and the evergreen forest. My friend heads off, promising a report later on.

The last chance you get at overall strategy in trout fishing, before you lose yourself in the game itself, is during the period called “rigging up.” I stand next to my truck, looking upstream and down, and remove the knurled brass cap from the aluminum tube. I am deep into the voodoo of rigging up. I draw the smoky-colored bamboo shafts from their poplin sack and join the rod. I fasten the old pewtery Hardy St. George reel my father gave me to the cork seat and knot the monofilament leader in place. Then I irritate myself over the matter of which fly to use, finally darting my hand blindly into the fly box. I come up with one I tied myself that imitates the effect of a riot gun on a love seat. I swiftly return it and take out a professionally tied spruce fly and attach it to my leader. I get into my waders, slipping the blue police suspenders onto my shoulders. Rigging up is over and now there is angling to be done.

Once my friend is out of sight, I scramble down the bank to the river, which here is in three channels around long willow-covered islands. By cautiously wading the heads of pools in these channels, one can cross the mighty river on foot, a cheap thrill I could not deprive myself of. Regardless of such illusions, I am an ordinary wader and usually have to pick my way carefully over the slippery rocks, my heart in my mouth. I have friends who are superior waders. One of them, a former paratrooper, glides downstream whenever he loses his footing until he touches down again, erect as a penguin all the while. At any and all mishaps when wading big rivers I tend to feel that I am too young to die, then fob off this cowardice as “reverence for nature.”

This late in the year, the first channel crossing is child’s play. I practically stroll over to the long willow island that is decorated on this shore by a vintage automobile, a breakaway bit of Montana riprap, high and dry, with river sand up to the steering wheel.

The brush willows form an interior jungle, all the details of which contrive to slap you in the face over and over again as you bushwhack through them. I come to a small clearing where a shallow sandy-bottomed slough has penetrated. A school of fry, a couple of feet wide and maybe ten feet long, dominates the end of the slough. With my approach these thousands of fish scatter toward the river; this is as fertile a nursery area as it is possible to imagine, dense and dark with infant fish.

I continue across the island, sweating in my waders, and end up at a broad, bright channel. The tenderloin of the spot is a 150-foot bevel of current, along the edge of which trout persistently hang. I wade into position, false-casting the necessary amount of line to get under way. Then I make my first cast, up sun, and coronas of mist hang around the traveling direction of the line. I mend the line, throwing a belly into it to make the streamer continually present itself broadside to trout holding upstream in the current. I have a short strike early on but miss it.

Then nothing except the steady surge of the river against my legs until I can feel it bending with enormous purpose toward North Dakota and its meeting with the Missouri. In the green of the river, ghostly orbs of white boulders are buried in running channels. The river is a fluid envelope for trout, occasionally marred by the fish themselves rising to take an insect and punctuating the glassy run with a whorl that opens and spirals downstream like a smoke ring. The boulders are constant, but the river soars away to the east.

After a period of methodical fishing, I finally come up tight on a trout. He holds throbbing for a long moment, then without any run at all is suddenly aerial. Four crisp dashes later and the trout is vividly alive and cold in my hand. As I return him to the river, I bend over and watch him hold briefly in the graveled current between my feet. Then quick as light he’s gone.

I stand up and can feel that mild, aching joy of the first fish as I look to the long river moss in the crystal gravel channels, streaming and wavering like radio signals.

My trout memories precede any actual sighting of a trout. They go way back to a time when, inflamed to angling by rock bass and perch, I read hunting and fishing magazines and settled upon the trout as the only fish worthy of my ability, along with the broadbill swordfish. I had examined the Rockwell Kent illustrations in my father’s copy of Moby-Dick . I didn’t for the moment see what I could do about the white whale. Among my friends a rumor persisted of giant squid in the Humboldt Current that assaulted cabin cruisers and doused anglers with black ink before sinking a parrotlike beak into their brain pans. Not even this enormity could compete with the trout for my attention, though putting the gaff to a wilderness of tentacles had its appeal for a bloodthirsty child.