The Drive Home

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.

Hopper and Mouse Fishing: Communing with Killers

My first fifty-five years were spent living in cities. Some of my more cosmopolitan friends would not include my six years in Anchorage, but Anchorage is to Alaska as Mexico City is to Mexico. There’s nothing else close to it in terms of size. Heck, it has two Costcos. Anyway, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston and London definitely meet the relevant criteria, so I won’t quibble if you want to hold Anchorage against me.

The point is that, like 80% to 90% of city dwellers everywhere, I spent a lot of time professing my longing to be outdoors “communing with nature.” I think I can safely say that I was among the 10% or 20% that actually did something about it. For two or three weeks a year, as vacation benefits and weekend commitments would allow, I got out and fished, hiked and “communed.” Or, at least I thought I did since I was never entirely sure of the steps involved in “communing” which is defined as “being in intimate communication or rapport.” Nonetheless, after fifty-five years I concluded that what I wanted more than anything else in retirement was to live in the country so that my wife and I could “commune” with nature more regularly.

The good news is we were blessed to find a place that friends and family enjoy coming to visit as their vacation benefits and weekend commitments allow. We love where we live and love hosting our guests. They typically drive off content after, in so many words, advising us of how great it was to “commune” with nature.

So, no matter what I say after this, don’t get me wrong, life is good.

With each passing season, however, I have a stronger sense of being party to, as a former President liked to say, a hoax. My study looks out at a pastoral scene of swaying grass or golden leaves or sparkling snow as the season dictates. Out the back windows I can watch the creek roll on interminably with trout dimpling the water, mink and muskrats cavorting, osprey and eagles cruising and Blue Heron fishing. Out the front, white tail deer and wild turkey graze on acorns, apples and whatever else the trees and bushes bestow upon them. “Idyllic” is a word that frequently drifts up and down this canyon.

In small helpings, this is nature as most of us envision it. In the large helpings I am privileged to consume now, if I am honest, it is a horror show of mayhem, death and destruction.

The osprey and eagles don’t just soar gracefully overhead, but regularly seize unwitting small animals like fish and squirrels and voles and snakes and fly away with them in their talons that they then use to rip their catch into bite size pieces. Our small dog was in danger of such a fate but was saved thanks to the intervention of our large dog. Since that day, they never get far from each other.

One night, I watched off and on from 6:00 in the evening until 6:00 the next morning as an owl that looked (as a neighbor put it) like a flying shoebox methodically sat across the creek from me and stripped a muskrat down to the bone with violent jerks of its beak. Sitting 50 yards away staring through binoculars I was still nervous and ready to bolt for the back door in case I was next.

The Blue Heron are marvelous fishers. They can remain motionless far better than any of the humans I have tried to keep still while fishing. But rather than presenting their fly or bait with finesse, their inertness is broken with a vicious stabbing of their beak that has to be a terrifying shock to the fish, just before the life is squeezed out of it. 

The muskrat and mink are adorable…until they meet and the mink crushes the back of the muskrat’s skull before dining on it. You can almost hear the mink saying “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

The deer and turkey are the essence of “communing” themselves, until you happen upon their remains littered in the tall grass or the shade of a tree or rock where the mountain lion that seized them made camp. “Back away slowly” is good advice that is almost impossible to follow in these instances.

None of this begins to touch the tenacity of the plants and insects. The whole “survival of the fittest” thing plays out every day here in the place we call “nature.” I have yet to find a pacifist in the whole lot.

My beloved trout are no exception. As I learned to fly fish, Stan Spangler instilled in me the notion that there is nothing more satisfying than presenting a small dry fly well and watching the nose of a rainbow barely disturb the surface as it slurps the fly and descends again, having burned the minimum number of calories possible in the process. I still relish those catches.

I have concluded over the years, however, that trout do not succeed in their quest to be the “fittest” by slurping mayflies day in, day out. To take things to the next level, they eventually have to graduate to meals of greater substance. In short, they need blood and protein.

From the first time Stan showed me how to chuck a streamer, I knew that the fly was intended to mimic a crippled minnow. For the most part, the action happened below the surface and I was only a party to the jolt of the fly line that told me it was time to set the hook. It was great fun if you didn’t think too hard about what the fish was trying to accomplish.

Then J went to Alaska and came back telling me of how he fished mouse patterns and, shockingly, said it was the most fun he ever had with a fly rod. That did not seem particularly genteel to me until I tried it about a decade later and, I am a little abashed to admit, had as much fun I ever had with a fly rod.

I stood in a creek a few years ago and looked down to find a two foot long brown trout nestled up against my wading boot. It was in shallow water and did not move when I lifted my boot. That was when I noticed that its midsection bore the perfect shape of a small muskrat. Much like me after devouring a whole pizza, movement was simply not an option. I could almost see the plea for a Pepsid in its eyes. But I was still grateful to have missed the carnage as it undoubtedly drowned the muskrat before it could return to its den.

Then there are the terrestrial flies like grasshoppers and dragon flies that large trout will explode out of the water to chase, knowing that success will more than offset the calories burned. This summer started out very wet leading me to believe that it would be a weak hopper season, since I usually associate hoppers with dry conditions. But, the lack of rain the last month dried things out enough to cause me to break out the hopper flies as I watched the trout exert themselves to an extent rare on our placid little spring creek. The gurgling of the flowing water is interrupted only by the splashes of trout intent on murder. Well, that, and my laughter as I egg them on. And then I release them so they can continue their homicidal tendencies.

We tend to put ourselves at the center of nature. We think of ourselves as all that stands between the destruction or preservation of the great outdoors. But as I watch “nature” continually do anything but “commune” among itself or with me, I have come to appreciate that my fly rod and I are bit players in a drama/comedy where I will never be privy to the full script. More importantly, my immersion in “nature” has strengthened my passion for human vs. natural rights. To paraphrase Timothy Keller in The Reason for God, we do not hold “animals guilty for violating the rights of other animals.” If we truly are ruled by natural law and nothing else, then there is no reason to hold us guilty for violating the rights of other humans.

My wife and I continue to enjoy the beauty of nature with our family and friends, delighting in both its order and its chaos. But we don’t commune. We are privileged to watch nature do what it has to do to exist, and would still do if we had never been born. Then we take those lessons and pray that, as humans, we strive to “commune” with one another.

The View from the Study…

Hopper fishing

Stan's Gift

When I told my first boss Stan that I was going backpacking in Wyoming with my father, Stan said, “There should be good fishing up there. Take this fly rod with you.” With that, I was on my way to being a fly fisherman. 

The backpack trip happened sometime in the late 1980s. I took the 5 weight Orvis rod with me and tried it out on a high mountain lake. I grew up with spinning rods and did not know the first thing about how a fly rod worked. In both law and fly fishing, Stan was big on providing opportunities for experience but not particularly enamored with providing instruction. Just as he would send me into court or negotiations as a young lawyer with little idea about what I was doing, he did the same with the fly rod. My mental image of that first time is standing on a rock with fly line tangled about my feet. My first few trips to court were not that different. 

I landed a few fish that afternoon, all by retrieving line hand over hand like a longshoreman hauling rope rather than using the $200 reel that clearly had a function that I had yet to discern. But, I did notice that when I could get one of the flies that Stan supplied me with to rest on the water, the fish readily gobbled them up. I was intrigued but not sure what to do next with the fly rod (this was before one could pull up a Youtube video to show what people actually did with a fly rod). 

I told Stan that I appreciated the use of the fly rod when I returned it to him. I fudged a bit and said it worked great and I really enjoyed it. I suspected Stan was pleased to think he had a new convert. He told me to keep the rod and reel. I protested but ultimately thanked him and sheepishly took it home wondering how long it would be before he discovered that I was a less than deserving recipient of his largesse.

Not long after that, I received an offer to join a company as an in-house lawyer and had to tell Stan that I was moving on. A few days later Stan said he was going to take me out with a fly fishing guide as a going away gift (even though I wasn’t “going” far since my new office was just across the street). I responded enthusiastically while silently pondering the fact that Stan was about to find out how hapless I was with a fly rod.

A couple weeks later, Stan and I joined a couple other lawyers in the firm, some clients and two guides on the Colorado River. Todd was the guide assigned to me. By the end of the day, I not only understood the mechanics of the fly rod (and reel!) and had caught a couple fish, I began to grasp Stan’s passion for fly fishing. Like so many trout guides I have met since, Todd was both a marvel of knowledge and patience. And he cooked the best stream-side lunch I’ve ever had.

I knew that Stan would welcome fishing with me but not until I reached a reasonable level of competence. I did a very small amount of research and was told that there was great fly fishing in Cheesman Canyon. The Canyon was about an hour and a half drive from where I lived at that time in Golden, Colorado. I started going to Cheesman Canyon at every opportunity, often leaving the house at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning so I could be first on the trailhead leading into the river. 

My first few times in Cheesman Canyon were not exactly successful. I used the techniques that Todd taught me on the Colorado River to no avail, despite being able to see very large fish in the water. After a few trips I mentioned to my new boss Gary that I was trying to learn fly fishing but I was finding it harder than expected. It turned out that Gary had recently decided he wanted to learn to fly fish as well and had purchased equipment to that end. We started meeting in Cheesman Canyon from time to time or reporting in to one another when one of us would go solo.

We quickly discovered a few things. First, what works on one river rarely is of much relevance on another river. Second, starting one’s fly fishing career in Cheesman Canyon is a bit like trying to learn piano by playing Rachmaninoff. To this day, I have yet to fish a more technically challenging river. We learned to use leaders that made thread look like cable and flies that were best viewed through a microscope. 

Gary and I were clearly in over our heads (not literally, that’s dangerous in waders) but we persevered. After a couple years of regaling each other with alternating stories of victory or stupidity that was only revealed with the clarity of hindsight on the drive home, we began to consider ourselves quasi-experts on Cheesman Canyon. Feeling emboldened, I worked up the nerve to ask Stan if he would like to go fishing. He readily agreed and said to meet him at the Colorado River to fish the stretch he took me to with Todd a couple years before.

I found that the Colorado was less challenging than Cheesman Canyon. I held my own just fine with Stan, even catching a large rainbow near the end of our day. Stan showed me how to do a reach cast that day which helps manage slack in the fly line when the fish you want to catch is on the other side of the river, but there is fast water between you and the other side. Now that Stan knew I was committed, he gave me many more valuable tips on fishing trips in the ensuing years.

Stan was a man of few words right up until the subject was trout and their ways. I was never sure whether he was happiest on the river or talking about the fishing over a beer at the end of the day. But I knew those two options outranked everything else by a wide margin. 

Ultimately life took me away from Colorado but I have been blessed to continue to fly fish in some incredible places. I rarely fish when I don’t think of Stan and how, as both a fly fisherman and a lawyer, he gave me tools but knew that the passion would have to come from my own effort. 

When Stan died a few years back, I went to Iowa for his funeral. A few of us from the old firm were there along with some of Stan’s family. Stan had not stayed in close touch and I was struck by how little his family knew about him. I flew home feeling a little melancholy. I regretted that none of Stan’s family had stood knee deep in a river and watched Stan chuckle while he played a trout with the sun reflecting off the water and his aviator sunglasses. We’re all capable of moments of beauty. Those moments were Stan’s. 

Last summer, my son and I backpacked in Wyoming and did a little fishing. At the end of the trip, I gave him the Orvis rod that Stan sent me into the backcountry with three decades ago. My son does quite a bit of backpacking. There should be good fishing up there.

Stan with a big pike in Canada.