Truchacabra

Conversations About Fly Fishing and the Outdoor Life

Category Archives: Things I Like

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 5 – The Resurrection of Fly Fishing Jones

Imagining the bleakness of the Dust Bowl is difficult enough without viewing it against the backdrop of the Great Depression. And look out, here comes the Second World War, during which humanity comes as close to exterminating its civilized self as it will until the defecation known as reality TV. Cheese and rice!

Exhibit B

After a 15-year night of a biblical deluge, the morning sky dawns without a cloud. The war is over, and the United States of America briefly finds itself to be the master of the universe. Not only is the world finally at peace, it is desperate for what the U.S. has made itself capable of producing over the century it was growing too fast to go fly fishing. So we produce, for the sake of war-ravaged Europe and Asia, as well as our own enormous profit.

Back home, we tend to our needs. There is plenty to do, not the least of which is nursing the commie fever we can never seem to kick. Almost immediately, we raise our monuments to capitalism. An unprecedented scale of economic activity begins churning out everything from cars and appliances (that will soon include televisions), to subdivisions and drive-in restaurants. Truman gets it started, then Deewight D takes over with his greatest accomplishment since taking down the Axis.

"Hey, Hitler, come over here and pull my finger."

As president, he builds the national interstate system, which leads to movement, construction, and lots of decent paying jobs for what will proudly be heralded as “the middle class”. This leads to a moderate sense of national well-being, even happiness. Which can sometimes lead to…….

Babies. Lots.

It feels safe to conclude that fly fishing as we now know it – for fun and nothing else – is the logical next step. Why not? We’ve only just conquered evil (ironically, anyway, since we did it with TWO ATOMIC BOMBS!). As a society, we’ve climbed our highest mountain, and by gum, we deserve a moment to savor the view. Fishing is that view, and skiing and surfing and lots of other pursuits whose profound utility, we’ll soon realize, resides in their being food for our tired and hungry souls. Pull off the freeway, young man. Rig up, your country appreciates your service.

Recreation, in other words, a practice of creating anew. It can scarcely be exaggerated how close to the abyss WWII brought us. As beautiful as victory was, we had seen too much, had bled so profusely that a serious and perpetually recurring repair job was in order. We have all experienced it in our own lives, the streak of horrid darkness that boils to a point where life looks like death, and then death doesn’t look all that bad. I hate such moments, as certainly as I know that they will pass; something must burn for you to rise from the ashes and all that.

I just love Ike.

In modern times, this feeling is called a fishing jones, brought to you by the human race. Don’t try to tell me that it’s not real.

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 4 – World War I Meets the Dust Bowl Slash Depression Slash Forget It

We’re into the 20th century now, still holding our bamboo rods and looking for the best time and place to fish with them. Charles F. Orvis has shown us how much fun it can be to throw the fly, and Teddy Roosevelt and his ilk have at least tried to make our country a bountiful place to explore with rod and gun.  Now if we could just make time stand still so we could wet a line. Not really happening too far beyond the east coast, where Orvis, Theodore Gordon, George LaBranche, Edward Hewitt, and Ray Bergman kept the fires burning.

Dear Joe Brooks, I'd hardly learned to set a hook, and you were already gone. I miss you still.

Out west, while Joe, Roderick, A.J. McClane, Lefty and other lions of the art were climbing onto the stage, dreamers were still running around in search of the big score. In spite of the nascent land ethic sparked by Roosevelt, people were still busy shooting, cutting, plowing, or laying claim to anything they could. I’m still curious, though, wouldn’t mind jumping into my time machine and fishing the Sacramento in the 1920s at the confluences of the Pit and McCloud. Or the Rio Grande gorge before the pike were introduced. Give me the Great Basin, the Lahontans and Alvords before the land was desertified by cows and sheep. And the wild horses, don’t get me started.

Pull over, anglicized Native American lady! I'm going to have to write your pegasus a ticket for eating Nevada.

Back then, a family couldn’t expect the kind of lifestyle enjoyed a few decades later when the middle class was invented. Maybe my grandparents (on my dad’s side, born during Teddy’s administration) would have done well enough to help my parents get a leg up so that I could own a fly rod and have a day in the woods on a pretty regular basis. I suppose that was possible but it’s hard to imagine it, especially in the days of the Robber Barons and World War I.

Unity of purpose, that’s what wars can bring about, and World War I provided it in spades. Back at home, we were keeping the machine running – manufacturing and growing food, putting to use our seemingly endless domestic supply of labor and fossil fuels. We made the war stuff, grew the food, drilled the oil.

And we speculated on all of it, most notably, on wheat. The Formerly Great Plains were skinned so that fortunes could be made off the stuff, setting the stage for the famous sandblasting called the Dust Bowl.

Going to need a stiff rod for this one.

“Jeez,” we didn’t seem to think, “sure hope there isn’t a collision of our roaring behavior and a couple ass-sucking catastrophes like a ten-year super drought and a depression. God help us if it all happened right before an even bigger world war.”

Obviously not a modern day public school teacher.

If you weren’t of royal blood, you might have wet a line once or twice a year during the Depression, not for fun, and certainly not much if your stringers ever came home empty. After exploring the decades between The Little House on the Prairie and The Grapes of Wrath, I guess one could say that once or twice a year might have been acceptable given all the time required to not die of starvation.

Since I am pretty sure I would not have been of royal blood, I am going to hit the fast forward button at this point.  As fun as this journey through history has been, I want to go fishing. So I’ll see you when you get home from Europe in 1945, young man, if indeed you do.

Yellowstone River, 1920.

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 2 – Hats Off to Orvis

Throughout the 19th century, there was plenty of fly fishing in America, particularly among folks who’d retained a taste of British culture, the tradition of the art, and, of course, the wealth. Others fished, but it was mainly to feed families who were under constant pressure from underpaid work or no work at all. Again, Pa wanted his Little House on the Prairie (read Part 1) because he felt pushed out of his Little House in the Big Woods by the expansion of industry and population. The east was choked with people who wanted better, and most of what was there had been gotten.

By the time Pa hit the prairie, Indians were on the run, the east was firmly settled, and California was bustling with its mining boom. In search of mineral riches, fertile homesteads, or just open space, people were hauling ass to fill the vacuum in the middle. There was immigration, Asians coming east, Europe hustling west.  From all sectors of power and vision, there was unanimity of belief that our nation needed a railroad to sew itself together. Throw in the Civil War and its aftermath, and it’s safe to say that America was little if not chaos and inertia. In summary, poor Pa.

Like Black Friday at Walmart, only for land.

And poor every other living thing. Not only were the plains-blackening bison reduced to zoo populations, but whitetail deer were devastated by commercial and subsistence hunting. Fur bearers were trapped to within an inch of extinction (watersheds of today still bear the wounds of a lengthy, trapping-induced absence of beavers’ critical influence on riparian ecology), and birds were annihilated for meat and for plumage.

Native trout were far from immune to this suffering. Irrigation and overfishing made sure of that. As the 1800s passed the halfway mark, the fly fishing you take for granted was headed for a death so certain and so complete that today might have come and you might never have even known trout existed.

Charles F. Orvis started his business in the late 1850s to serve recreational tourists who came to the Berkshires on trains from New York and Boston. As a reader of this blog, you might be addicted to fly fishing. Maybe you remember how you came to be that way, so you can understand that if Charles F. Orvis was peddling the fishing drug, it definitely wasn’t long before he’d grown himself a serious gang of junkies. Thanks to him and other tackle dealers of his day, fishing with a fly ceased to be something people did, became something they loved, and then something they could not live without.

Breaking bad, gots me some dog beds too!

In the Charles F. Orvis era, what the junkies had been seeing for quite some time was the rapid decline of brook trout from overfishing and industrial pollution. Remember when you were a meth addict? How it felt to imagine – because your friends who weren’t stealing from you weren’t cooking either because there definitely wasn’t any Sudafed within a three county radius – that the crank you couldn’t live without was nowhere to be found when you needed it, like, fricking yesterday? Now imagine that same desperation in the late 1800s, when getting bailed out of rough situations was a lot tougher than stalking truck stops for suckers or moving back in with your parents. Not so nice.

Yellow Sallies under my skin.

America back then had a couple reliable options for salvation. Known as Europe and California, these options were home to two species of trout, the brown from Germany and Scotland, and the rainbow from the San Francisco Bay area. These fish were nothing if not hearty. For that reason, they were stocked pretty much everywhere in this country to compensate for the demise of other trouts. As we know, they have since thrived wherever they’ve been introduced (brookies too, when transplanted to colder and cleaner habitat). As we know too, this thriving came at the further expense of native trout.

If it makes you feel better, remember Glen Canyon and the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which now only exist in the recesses of your imagination.

Still, brown trout and the rainbows are perhaps equally responsible for fly fishing and, as a result, native trout existing at all. It’s a tree falls in the forest exercise to be sure, but our fantasies of uncrowded streams take place in a world that doesn’t care about trout. And for the most part, we care about trout because, for better or worse, browns and/or rainbows live in most of the waters we fish (even in Texas, home to the largest and richest chapter of Trout Unlimited, which funds cutthroat restoration in the Rockies).  It simply could not be otherwise.

In closing, I must confess to my discomfort at admitting that Charles F. Orvis had a significant hand in making lemonade out of the lemons of our historic rapaciousness (yeah, I’m one of those). As a man over forty years old, I experience a similar discomfort at my annual physical, that rubber glove snapping behind me and what happens next. But as a man over forty, I also have a greater understanding of what is true in life, and just because something is true does not make it pretty.  It just makes it real, and the better I understand reality, the better odds I have of surviving it.

OK, I love Orvis. I swear I love Orvis!

 

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 1 – The Land Bridge to The Little House on the Prairie

How many of us have wished we had lived in a time when fly fishing was even more fun than it is now? Imagine the rivers so packed with steelhead that you hooked ten to thirty every time you went out. Imagine fishing a western river that didn’t have a boat train steaming down it every day, or a time when anglers viewed fishing as fishing and not just another round of golf.

I waste lots of time indulging such fantasies, mostly in the wee hours of the morning when trying to put myself to back to sleep. For the past few weeks, my son and I have been reading Little House on the Prairie, and I’ve been wondering what it would be like to fish in the Era of Pa.

McGyver meets Bill Cosby meets Augustus McCrae, that was Pa. He could dig a well, till a garden, build a notched log cathedral, befriend whomever came within a hundred miles of him (including Indians), and saw a fiddle for his family after a supper comprised of the beast he’d shot a few mile’s hump from the cabin. The guy showed up, he brought it, and he kept some in store every night for making sweet prairie man love to Ma.

"Pa is so hot right now. Pa."

I’d say the Ingalls family was closest to the South Platte, the Arkansas, or some other Front Range stream. We should all be so lucky right? But if they went fishing in the spring, they’d encounter heavy, uncontrolled runoff. In the summer, warm water would drive them deeper into the mountains. In a horse-drawn wagon mind you, which means that by the time they got anywhere good, Pa’d only have enough time to fish the evening hatch before he’d have to haul their butts back out of there before winter (yes, Pa, I know you could just throw up another cabin, but I ask you, is that a life?)

It’s important to remember that Pa went to the prairie because he felt crowded out of the big woods in Wisconsin.  Still, even around 1870, when Pa was at his mac daddy best, there were already plenty of settlers along the Rocky Mountain front. I would speculate that the proportion of humans to miles of accessible trout stream might have been as high as it is today if not way higher. Also, these folks were grazing lots of stock, diverting streams onto plowed up land, and every trout they took from a stream went to the table.

Then there was the mining. Butte, Montana is still getting over the 1860’s copper boom that annihilated streams and denuded mountains for miles around. At the headwaters of the Arkansas, where Pa might have gone, the town of Leadville was a moonscape in its 1880’s heyday, compromising the river’s ecological function in ways that have endured as well. All this was decades after the California gold rush where ore was panned from the streams and dug from the ground, not to mention eroded from the hills with high pressure water hoses (the Yuba River, my favorite in the world, was done in this manner).

Butte area fishing reports stayed the same for about 100 years.

 

Doing it for the spawners.

To summarize, land rush, mining rush, Civil War, Mexican War, Indians everywhere starting to say, “WTF? I think it’s time you all got the hell out of our kitchen!”

Doesn’t look too good, Pa.

Perhaps we could venture back to Lewis and Clark days, go deep into the country to what must have been the most awesome cutthroat fishing ever. Imagine all the bull trout, the hatches! But then the grizzlies would probably come and ruin it all, or wolves. Horsehair leaders could never hold a steelhead, and every time you’d try to go fishing, you’d get a hundred feet from camp and someone would call you back to fix a wagon wheel or attend to a fever.

Imagining fishing during the Ice Age when the ancients crossed the land bridge would bring us to the same predicament: habitat was pristine in its nature-made perfection, but the technology of the times would limit enjoyment to a point where, in my opinion, it wouldn’t even exist.  Heck, I can’t even have fun with bamboo. How could I get off catching a monster arctic char on a hook made of bone?

"Dial it down, dude. Me and Ma were just looking for a spool of flourocarbon."

The best era for fly fishing? Let’s change that to the best era for fly fishing as we know it. Even redefined, our mission will not be easy, for among many questions, when did we first know fly fishing as we know it? Time to move on to Part 2, when Pa’s little house becomes a town.

 

Public Lands Cage Match

 

In one corner a team that, at its worst, is extraordinary for its sentimentality, at its best, for its passion. A mixture of red and blue, give it up for Team Purple:

HUNTERS

WEAKNESSES: It occasionally satisfies you to arrange birds you’ve killed into the letters P, E, T, and A. This behavior dishonors your quarry, is juvenile, stupid, and reeks of the hypocritical righteousness you abhor in anti-hunting zealots. Take Ted Nugent.  Those familiar with his oeuvre know of his ability to sustain a guitar fart for a really long time. In spite of being excellent to the max, this talent is no excuse for Nugent being a rotten ambassador for your sport.

Saluting means you're American. Or Sadaam Hussein, or just someone who thinks smart people are fooled by random saluting.

STRENGTHS: Pursuing wild creatures in their native habitat promotes the only practices and philosophies that can save humanity from itself. From hunting and fishing we learn about death and grief, compassion, respect, mercy, wonder, forgiveness, humility, and most of all, love.

BAIT AND LURE FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: You do not clean up after yourselves very well. The fish you hook happen to die in large and frequently illegal numbers. Also, all commercially-produced baits and most homemade ones taste like crap.

STRENGTHS: Circle hooks enable catch and release bait fishing, and in one Behnke-cited study, treble hooks caused less mortality than single barbed or barbless.  You have an enviable ability to wake up, see a pretty day, and get out in it with your toes in the water and your fingers around a can.

FLY FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: Not only do many of you confuse catch and release with the moral high ground, but you are too often averse to sharing. All it takes is you believing your favorite spot is a secret (which is rarely, if ever, true), and suddenly nobody but you has a right to go there. You behave as though you invented rivers, if not water itself. Anyway, lots of people find you arrogant, often for good reason.

STRENGTHS: Not to say releasing most of your catch is a bad thing. And you love rivers, need them in fact. If not for rivers, you would go insane.

OTHER OUTDOOR RECREATIONISTS

WEAKNESSES: You take too much for granted, figuring that since you and your friends love skiing, birdwatching, and mountain biking so much, your favorite mountain can’t get hurt by anyone, including you. Many of you seem to think that wildlife and trails exist due to the efforts of hikers and mushroom hunters instead of management agencies that operate on the dollars of people who buy licenses and permits.

Oh yes you did.

STRENGTHS: Many outdoor pastimes are expensive to engage in. Affording snowboards for the kids requires a healthy income, which is usually associated with challenging yet stressful jobs. Outdoor recreation, being an easy way to alleviate stress, addicts many highly functional people to clean and abundant wildlands. Addicts get mean when they don’t get their fix.

VEGANS

WEAKNESSES: While trumpeting the high morality of your eating habits, you ignore the cloudy morality associated with not eating animals. By not supporting hunters and farmers who treat food animals with respect, you make it more difficult for natural and wholesome animal products to make the necessary impression on the mainstream palate. As a result, factory farming will endure.

STRENGTHS: Hard to knock people who dedicate their lives to minimizing cruelty and maximizing compassion towards sentient beings. Not to mention, anyone contributing to the global availability of steak, bacon, farm fresh eggs, lobster and butter, sharp cheddar cheese, and pastrami. You consume the world’s muddest tasting foods so the rest of us don’t have to.

Oh boy! Someone's eyes are getting bigger than his stomach.

SECOND AMENDMENT HUGGERS

WEAKNESSES: Too many of you think that giving your daughter a Glock for her first birthday, a kid being shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer, drug cartel firepower, school mowdowns, household defense, and hunting must all be viewed through the same lens. Your blindness to the color gray manifests itself politically in ways that are needlessly detrimental to society.

You got a problem with that?

STRENGTHS: Guns are used for hunting; hunting is good. Guns are used for personal protection; personal protection is good. The Outlaw Josey Wales is hands down the best movie I’ve ever seen.

The Original Gun Nut

LEAVE-IT-ALONE ENVIRONMENTALISTS

WEAKNESSES: For the sake of your definition of pristine, you sometimes stand in the way of healing the land and restoring ecological function. Your righteousness is frequently unearned and unproductive.

Guys, could we do a prescribed burn first and save the lawsuit for later?

STRENGTHS: You’re nasty fighters who never back down. Plus, in this day and age and especially in the United States, being left alone once in a while is really sweet, and pleasant, and quiet, and………..

FARMERS AND RANCHERS

WEAKNESSES: In the mistaken belief that you always act in society’s long term best interest, you sometimes consume too much water, fodder, and land.

STRENGTHS: Land is something you’re particularly good at. You might not want to admit it, but you have a knack for using science to solve problems.

ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

WEAKNESSES: The animal rights you seek come at a cost in animal welfare. For example, pets and feral animals have huge negative impacts on wildlife and natural ecosystems, and you are unwilling to accept aggressive measures to mitigate this. Also, by opposing hunting and fishing, you build walls between children and the outdoors.

How beautiful, they're running. To the one patch of grass they haven't eaten.

STRENGTHS: You love animals. Animals are cool.

NUMBERS GUYS

WEAKNESSES: Bulls and lunkers, doesn’t matter if they come from pens or the wild, just that they come. Over the last few years, this quantity-over-quality attitude has led to a rash of unnecessary lobotomies being performed in the name of government-funded predator control. It also threatens initiatives to restore sensitive habitats and species.

Numbers guy. Hatin' on the cutthroats.

STRENGTHS: Since quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive, it helps to know how upset you’d get if neither standard were being attained.

 

In the other corner, into which all light is absorbed, and from which none escapes, Team Black:

SPECIAL INTERESTS

WEAKNESSES:  None, because screw everybody. To you, fish, wildlife and public lands only exist as objects for you to exploit to the exclusion of all, even your society. Seriously, if there was such a thing as the grandmother of special interests, you would tackle her for a crust of bread.

You eyeballing me Grandma?

STRENGTHS: You have the ability to divide your enemy into factions that, while enormously powerful when united, fight like cats and dogs otherwise. In fact, you excel at making the segments of your enemy behave as special interests themselves, though without enough muscle to accomplish much of anything. You also use your magic to charm or, as some would say, “own” the referees.

 

You know the drill. If Team Purple wins, there will be an immediate rematch and another if need be, until such time as Team Black takes the crown. At that point, the whole thing is over.

 

Guides – Part 3

In Which She Says, “Put a rock in your pocket for that one, Bob.”

Not that you don’t draw a stinker assignment every now and then. A couple from suburban Chicago once requested me to be their guide for their week at the lodge where I worked. They were both quite capable anglers. In fact, whatever her name was fished better than her husband Bob, probably one of the reasons they fought the whole time.

"Honey, want to get away on a nice Alaska fishing trip?"

And not just Zoolander versus Hansel tit for tat stuff either. This was British soccer times World War II times Animal Planet squared. If they are not divorced by now, I am sure they each made good on a mutual murder pact.

One of my life’s most white hot memories is the day I took them up the Tazimina for rainbows. The sockeye were in so thick that in places the stream was red from bank to bank. Before we began, Bob told me that he liked putting a pebble in his pocket for every fish he caught so he’d have an easy time tallying at the end of the day. He decided to fish eggs behind the sockeye, and I warned him to keep his drifts from swinging so he wouldn’t bump the salmon.

He couldn’t do it. No matter how hard we worked at presenting to clearly visible rainbows, his rig would drag to one side, tap a sockeye, Bob would do a hookset, and the snagged salmon would take off. With each snapped-off glo bug, Bob’s roars grew louder, until I asked to be excused so I could attend to the wife downstream.

Having chosen to fish where there weren’t any salmon, among the rapids and big rocks, she was sculpin-hooking rainbows on almost every cast. It was the kind of action that on most days would thrill a guide to no end, but she had to go and let out a victory hoot after every fish she landed.

"Sorry, I can't hear you over the screaming of my reel."

I soon distanced myself from her too, ostensibly to keep both of them in my sight but really to prevent Bob from thinking I was taking sides (also, because three consecutive days had greatly lowered my tolerance to her toxicity). Upon finishing the run, she walked up to me, her huge smile reflecting her opinion of her performance. Her man was finally fishing like I’d instructed him to and was hooking a few rainbows and grayling. She and I watched him until he inevitably swung a drift wide, the line stop hard, and he stuck another sockeye.

From fifty yards away you could see his face go red as the curses erupted from it. To pop the tippet, he repeatedly jerked back, knowing, I’m sure, that rods get broken that way. His Hall of Fame moment, the mother of all tantrums in which he left it all on the field. After a couple minutes, the line finally snapped, and Bob threw his rod to the bank and hung his head.

That was when she said it.

Though I forget the exact details of what ensued (they either fought like mongooses or were silent), her words were definitely a new sliver of bamboo up the thumbnail of our day.

So was my boat driving on the way home. At a shallow bar I sucked gravel bad enough to kill the motor. I tried to start it a few times, praying silently, for I hadn’t run many boat trips yet and had blanked on my troubleshooting lessons. Bob, his wife and I walked the boat down a few bends, and they both seemed sober and a bit spooked. Then I finally took the motor apart, took out the gravel, and, happy days, the thing fired right up.

What followed was a slog. No matter how I gunned the motor, the boat could not get on step, and I almost hit every sweeper in the river. When we reached Three-Mile Lake (which I believe was seven miles long) the thing was pure whitecaps, which felt like speedbumps at 35 mph when I rammed them. The lake drive took forever, and as I knew would happen, one or both of them started to bitch.

“Grab a coffee can,” I said. “Bail.”

Story short, I was relieved of their company for the rest of their stay. I took this as a slap in the face, but when Bob and his wife told me later that I was the best guide they’d ever had, I figured they’d made a mercy call. Perhaps they thought they’d slapped me quite enough.

If only they’d known that I’d mistakenly put the exhaust thingy on backwards when I reassembled the motor, so the jet was blowing forwards instead of backwards like it should have. We’d made it to dock with approximately one drop of fuel left. Though we probably would have been rescued, it might not have been soon enough. They could have died. I could have killed them.

Guides – Part 2

In which, “What, you want me to teach you how to cast too?”

And then there are the bad ones, the guides who caught a few trout and girlies in high school and figured that they were destined to be rock stars.

How he thinks he looks......,

I recently read a fly fishing novel in which the guide protagonist’s real job is babysitting his daddy’s McRanch and the spring creek that flows through it. Some stuff happens, don’t remember the details. Reason being, it’s a masochistically bad book (I read the whole thing), though in a way it’s as honest a treatment of the guiding profession as Miles Nolte’s Alaska home run. Enjoy, reader, this tasty snack:

“OK,” Marshall said, struggling not to sound patronizing, “here’s the thing; when you have clients in a boat, well, most clients can’t cast more than thirty feet. It’s stunning how bad these people are.”

“They pay all that money and they can’t fish?” Kyle asked.

“Right. If you can’t actually fly fish well enough to catch fish on your own, you spray four hundred bucks on some guide and think he’s supposed to do the work for you.”

It’s an unfortunate truth that in the minds of many trout guides who’ve never worked in a fish camp, fly shops suck, other guides suck, Californians, Texans, East Coasters, wives and kids suck. Tell me who doesn’t suck and I’ll answer that he’s not a client. Common whines are that clients can’t cast and are either too stupid (though smart enough to earn enough money to spray at fishing guides) or spastic to set the hook. Clients talk too much, own too much, think too highly of their own fishing ability and too lowly of how masculinely their guide is floating them down a spectacular Rocky Mountain stream. Whatever the case, they certainly don’t deserve a lot of effort for the huge tip their guide expects from them.

....and what he really looks like.

Too many guides carry an inflated notion of their own guruness and therefore don’t understand that when someone pays you fairly, they expect you to endure whatever it takes to get the job done right. Untangle their tangles, share heartily in their triumphs and disappointments, partake of their friendship and hard won wisdom (ever notice that your clients are somewhat older than you?). Who knows? Someday you might want a job wherein you don’t remove musty work pants and gag on the smell of pickled rat corpses. A sympathetic client might be able to help you with that

I definitely had the rock star fantasy myself. Then I began guiding and realized that rock stars not only made a lot more money than guides but had to possess real talent.

Well, most of the time anyway.

It might surprise you to read that you can get into guiding without knowing much about fly fishing. It doesn’t take long, however, before you will either conclude that you like it or you don’t. If you don’t like guiding, you will eventually stink at it, a fact that will become increasingly difficult to hide. If you do like it, you probably see the work as a reasonably challenging way to suit your desires and temperament (subjectively speaking at least, I must say that the average day of guiding is plenty fun). And yes, people will hire you for the exact reason the protagonist in the crappy fishing novel I read says they shouldn’t: BECAUSE THEY HAVE DIFFICULTY CATCHING FISH ON THEIR OWN; BECAUSE THEY WOULD LIKE YOU TO DO THE WORK FOR THEM.

 

 

 

I Am Not A Sailor. I Am Not A Sailor, I’m A Captain

Take My Hand on YouTube

I saw Los Lobos play an acoustic show the other night. They brought their A game as I’d hoped they would, but I couldn’t help being taken back through the years I’d lived since I first saw them play at the Fillmore. To be exact, I saw in each one of them – the gray hair (Hidalgo), bad back (Rosas), and general slowness of movement – the aging that has us all in its relentless grip.

Though I was never distracted from the music, an impossibility, for it was unmitigated beauty, it was also impossible to ignore the fact that the lives in the auditorium were well advanced from the randy and muscular moment when the band first left the launching pad. You know you’re getting old when you go to a concert and there’s an intermission, and during said intermission the line to the men’s room is longer than the girls’. When Cesar Rosas asked us if they were loud enough, I figured it was out of respect to those in the audience wearing hearing aids. Or perhaps it was he who was hard of hearing.

I went to bed with their songs in my head, and smiled at the memory of Hidalgo losing his voice for a second while his hands and brain remained well in command. I realized how much a great band is like a river. Like a river, the music follows a nature-ruled order of rapids, runs, riffles, bends, and deep, mirror-surfaced stretches of calm. It will wander with time, perpetually losing and finding itself. Material will accrete, life will take root before the flood takes it elsewhere. Everything is beholden to the current.

Guides – Part 1

In Which You are Meat

I just finished The Alaska Chronicles, a wonderful account of a season in the life of a fishing guide. Having read my share of mags and lots of dishing on fish camps, every part of me was expecting another guide’s version of himself as thankless public servant, cultural visionary, and God’s gift to the ladies.

Hello. I'll be your guide for the day.

What I got instead was a brutally honest tale of the mistakes, evil thoughts, and moments of joy and reverie that can befall any mature guide who has the guts to be honest with himself.

Until I got used to it, this honesty of author Miles Nolte was almost embarrassing to behold. I guess I hadn’t appreciated, at least not completely, the role of ego in the guiding game. In Nolte’s day-by-day rendition, there is a pattern in which every moment of him shooting himself in the foot follows an episode of excellence and victory that might have floated him just a little too high. The author seems to notice the trend himself, a fact that makes me root for him all the more.

I’ve felt for years that the way to grow the best guide is to send him

......or her......

to Alaska for his first tour. I’ve brought this up to guide friends, who’ve been almost unanimous in disagreeing with me. Sure Alaska fish are big, they say, but they only eat eggs, and who wants to go to the top of the earth for that? They’re rainbows, not cagey spring creek browns, or they’re salmon, something that doesn’t even eat. These guys, I should add, had never guided in Alaska and the majority had never been there. So they don’t know from shinola.

In the lower 48, we think this guy wears a pink bra and thong.

Guiding in Alaska has very little to do with fishing and a lot to do with camp. Depending on your “lodge”, you will be housed in a tent, a plywood shed, or log cabin. Food and acoutrements are hauled in at great expense, which is passed to clients. Contrary to what many think, any profit a lodge makes comes from a strong blend of parsimony and guile, a lesson perpetually taught by the Alaska wilderness itself. Everything is stretched, or margins and sometimes people are lost.

This is especially true of a lodge’s labor supply. A guide, for example, is a 24/7 combination of fisherman, mechanic, carpenter, bed changer, floor sweeper, table clearer, dishwasher, outhouse slopper, wood chopper, fly shop, and all around kisser of asses. And no matter how much you’ve spent on your Alaska trophy experience, what you’re really investing in is your guide’s ability to pilot a fast boat and to aim a steady shotgun while brownpantsing himself. A level head, in other words, and the pride in a tough job well done.

McGeary Creek Boatride on You Tube

Cavernoscopy

As a born New Mexican, I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never been to Carlsbad Caverns before President’s Day weekend. I am definitely a big fan of geological wonders, even bats, but I guess I don’t crave them like I do trout streams and verdant mountainsides. I think that’s all changed now.

So this is really going to be about Carlsbad Caverns.

One of the great things about the desert is that it forces you to mentally plant trees and shrubbery in the sand and to populate your view with animals of yore if not those already existing but holed up out of the sun and heat and wind that are probably thinking “Why the hell did I evolve where you can’t just go out and get a sip of water when you want one?”

Another thing is the slowness of process, the growth of what will and its decomposition. A type of evolution, though what’s so striking about the caverns is not the timeline of living things but the story of the earth as told by rock. In the Grand Canyon, you can read the story on the multicolored cliffs and even from an airplane. But at Carlsbad, you literally have to penetrate the story in order to understand it.

In the parking lot, you stand on a reef at the edge of what was once an inland ocean spreading south and east before you. Then down you go into thousands of feet of dead and carved marine life. While Dimetrodons became T-Rexes became T-Mobiles, drop by drop of mineral-laden and acidified groundwater calved out chunks of limestone, made rooms, then proceeded to decorate them with speleoforms of every conceivable shape in the divine universe.

Nope, still about the caverns.

The kicker is that if it weren’t for the installation of electricity, Carlsbad Caverns would be amazing in the dark. Talk about trees falling in the forest. “It’s like going into a butthole,” said my nephew, who, like most 7 year olds, has a knack for boiling life down to its most basic truths. Given the theoretical state of our near future world, I fear the worst for my family’s youngest generation, which is why I was quick to take advantage of such an obvious teaching moment. “Mind you, not just any butthole,” I said. “It’s the butthole of time, so of course no light can get through.”

My weekend epiphany came from that. It’s something I’ve been chasing for years, and I finally see that to qualify as a national park, a wild place must be able to cause you to say or feel anything without appearing ridiculous. In other words, a place must be so awe-inspiring, must possess so much cosmic, psychic, and spiritual space that everything that every imagination can and will ever produce fits easily inside it.

Yea, and the Lord spoke verily unto them, "Oh this little old thing? Just something I've been toying around with for a few billion years. You like?

In this respect, I believe we have chosen well – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Denali, Carlsbad, to name a few – and I believe we still have a national soul as a result. I hear often of eliminating the Park Service. Parks are wasteful luxuries. We can’t afford them. National soul, I said. That’s something we can never not afford.