A road trip gets all the cards on the table. The usual hardships of getting out early, getting in late, getting lost, getting rained on, getting skunked, and all the other things you can get tend to reveal character in a matter of days. Creeps and idiots cannot conceal themselves for long on a fishing trip.
John Gierach, The View from Rat Lake
I have always loved road trips. It started with drives from Southern California across the Arizona and New Mexico deserts in July and August in the mid-1960s to visit my grandparents. My parents, three sisters and me would pile into a Buick or Bonneville and make our way with the obligatory stop at a Best Western or Motel 6, depending on how the finances were shaping up. If we drove straight through without a motel stop, that was a pretty good sign that money was tight. We did it all: Flat tires, gushing radiators, cracked head caskets and, of course, car sickness. My mother dealt with the latter by doping us with Dramamine.
There was the obligatory “hamburger, french fries and a milk shake,” which was pretty much the only food I ordered at any dining establishment until I was about fourteen. Around then, I took the bold step of trying pizza. And, of course, there was music. My sisters would sing and harmonize while my mother sang along sweetly, if very quietly.
By the time I could drive, the die was cast and I was routinely planning the next driving adventure. The drive from Los Angeles to the Rockies to explore colleges with two of my best friends in the dead of winter during my senior year of high school could be a thrilling novella in and of itself. My two-month odyssey around the country (with a bit of Canada) after college with one of the same friends remains etched in my memory as among the most carefree times of my life.
In the years since, I have done road trips with my own family as well as solo, shorter trips. While the former are more memorable, the latter usually involved some fishing. Sometimes those fishing trips were only overnight, sometimes they were for a few days and nights. Most of them happened in Colorado, and then Alaska. Thanks to a very patient wife, there were a lot of them.
A few years ago, J said, “You know, we really need to do some Western U.S. fishing road trips.” Now, J and I have fished a lot of different places together over the last thirty years and, from time to time, we had to do some driving to get where we were going. But the driving was always incidental to the other completely necessary transportation we had to take to get to where we were going. We never talked in terms of the driving being a significant feature of the trip—only the fishing.
J was right. We’re blessed to live in a part of the country that has great trout streams sprinkled around within a thousand mile radius. We could do a trip every summer for the next fifteen years and not come close to covering them all…and never have to endure jet lag.
So, a few years ago, we made a start. We had mixed fishing results but loads of fun. Well, there was the time that J slipped in a high mountain creek after a great day of fishing and I had to put his wading boot on for him the rest of the week since he couldn’t bend his leg. But he assured me he was fine. “Just put the *&%! boot on and let’s go fishing.” J has always been tougher than me.
This year, I started the summer with a fishing road trip and finished it with another trip. In late May, J and I set out for Grey Reef near Casper, Wyoming. But not together. In general, I am the organizer and planner for our trips because, well, I am better at that than J. This year though, despite my best efforts, J managed to book another trip the week following our road trip which involved him getting on a plane in Denver the morning after our last day. Without belaboring the details, this necessitated two vehicles rather than one. By midday, J was apologizing profusely for our inability to sit in one vehicle and solve the world problems that we would forget about the moment we strung up our fly rods and made the first cast.
Sure enough, once we were fishing Grey Reef, all logistical snafus were forgotten. We had two peculiar days of fishing. Normally, J and I tend to have fairly comparable results. He is a better caster than me but I see flies and fish better, largely because J is color blind and I am not. On Grey Reef, J caught at least a dozen more fish than me the first day, but then I caught at least a dozen more than him the second day. We both know this happens sometimes and we wouldn’t still be fishing together after all these years if either of us pouted about it, but it does introduce an element of awkwardness as the prolific fisherman lamely tries to assure the other that he’s still a very good fisherman and there are just days like this and blah, blah, blah….
We moved on to the Big Horn in Montana. J and I have fished the Big Horn before but were excited to get out with a guide who some Black Hills friends recommended. He turned out to be very knowledgeable as well as personable. The weather, however, was not as appealing. The first morning Biblical amounts of rain descended on us. We gamely tried to fish through it but it was very slow going. By noon, the jacket that J mistook for a rain coat was providing no protection and he sat shivering in the front of the boat for about an hour before saying “I really need to get out and go warm up.” As I said, J is a lot tougher than me, so this was roughly akin to Donald Trump saying, “I may have lost that election.”
We did go warm up and the rain slackened enough to allow for some decent fishing that afternoon. The next morning was still slow when J had to get in his truck and head for Denver to catch his plane the next morning. Of course, the fishing in the afternoon after he left was nothing short of spectacular. I had fun, but the drive home would have been much better if J and I were regaling each other with our assumed brilliance when we were landing fish after fish just hours earlier.
I ended the summer with a road trip with my son, J.C. As I have written before, J.C. has become a good fisherman. He has honed the most important trait for successful fly fishing which is perseverance, which is not the same as robotically flogging the water until the sun goes down. It is the ability to keep studying the fish, the flies, the water and everything else that is going on and changing as you fish. Those who persevere eventually find the right combination and catch fish.
We drove to Southern Colorado where J.C. had scouted some locations the summer before on his way back from a wedding in New Mexico. We set out from Denver with Jessica by the Allman Brothers blaring through the truck speakers (The McKims start all their road trips with Jessica--as tradition goes, it’s not going to threaten turkey at Thanksgiving or Christmas trees, but, it’s our thing).
We fished the Rio Grande the first day. We hiked a few miles to get to the water we wanted to try out and the effort turned out to be worth it. We didn’t catch loads of fish but we caught enough fish several different ways, which, for a fly fisherman, is about as good as it gets. It was pretty and, remarkably, we saw no one else all day.
Then came the type of mistake that almost always afflicts every road trip. Sometimes it can rob the trip of all its potential. Other times, it leads to a lot of laughs on the path to setting things back on course. Fortunately, this was predominantly the latter. Suffice it to say that when Plan A proved unfeasible due to low water levels, I conceived Plan B, and we drove three hours to fish a river…that was not the river I was thinking of. It was in a beautiful valley and was beautiful water. And we got skunked.
I will never be the featured fisherman on a Saturday morning fly fishing show but I can safely say it is very rare for me to get skunked. J.C. did a little better getting a few half-hearted splashes at a dry fly but we ultimately hiked out shaking our heads and dreading the two hour drive still ahead of us. Thankfully, J.C. is still relatively young and intrepid and was willing to drive. We managed to find some mediocre Mexican food on the Sunday before Labor Day and at least had the pleasure of a bed after two nights of camping out.
Our last day started slow on a small creek but picked up nicely by late morning. We fished together taking turns with two rods—one strung to throw dries into shallow riffles and one strung to throw streamers into deep cutbanks and bends in the river. We knew we needed to get on the road early to compete with Labor Day traffic and so that J.C. might get some sleep before returning to work the next day. But we probably stayed an hour later than we should have because, well, we were catching fish.
Nonetheless, we did leave earlier than we would have if we had nowhere to be. The hike out was difficult for the third day in a row, but our spirits were good because the effort seemed roughly equal to the pleasure. We chatted a little about the fishing but soon were consumed with trying to navigate our way back into Denver by the most efficient route. I lived in the Denver area for twenty years so it was remarkable that our efforts led us to two roads that I had never traveled before.
As I make my way through another Wyoming winter, I will look back fondly at my summer road trips with one of my best friends and my son. And, if history is a guide, I will start planning the next road trip. As I plan, the lessons I will take from this year will be one I already knew, and one that I probably knew, but had forgotten.
First, notwithstanding droughts and threats of global calamity, there is a lot of water to fish in the West. Patience is usually rewarded. But, occasionally not, and those are the days that separate the passionate from the mildly interested.
Second, never sell the drive home short. It’s the part of the story that is hardest to write, coming as it does after the climax. It’s where the insights, laughs and the memories that are worth incubating are shared, where the successes start their journey to legend and the failures begin the process of moving from tragedy to comedy.
Getting safely home from a road trip is always a blessing. But, done well, the drive home is why you will turn off the TV, throw the rods in the bed of the pickup and do it all again next year. Not because you have to catch fish, but because you have to share a road and a river with someone who appreciates the road and the river as much as you. In ten years, your companion will readily confirm that it was as wonderful as you remember. Whether it really was or not.
J
J.C.