It was afternoon by the time we unstrapped packs in what looked like an old abandoned elk camp. Bramble threatened to reclaim the clearing; the fire pit had the aspect of something you’d see in a pioneer cemetery. But all around us was the sweet cinnamon scent of ponderosa pine forest, enriched down here in the riparian flats, where the heaviest, straightest trees stand, their bark the color of pumpkins and dark yams.
We stood on the bank and inspected the water. There were no secrets where the trout would be. We waded across and headed upstream; I peeled off and pushed through a thicket of wild roses and pitched my red Humpy into a seam. A few casts later, tight to a small fish, I glanced around to see where Joe was. When I looked again for my little trout, a shadowy beast rose into view from the bottom of the stream, right beneath the spike of my tippet, only to vanish—as if an owl at twilight passing through your headlights.
Right then Joe hollered.
I don’t know what surprised me more—the fish he hooked or the fact that he had tied on, unbeknownst to me, a big black Dalhberg Diver.
“I could see it swimming on the surface even as it entered those shadows,” said Joe, pointing across the water, not much more than a wide stream spilling into a trough under a dense stand of oaks and alders. “Then this head came up and all I saw was a white background behind the fly.”
It got kind of silly for a couple of days. We hiked into a section of river that was entirely freestone, wide banks of round rocks, soccer balls to soft balls, grading all the way down to perfect spawning gravel. Both salmon and steelhead use the river; the bull trout, explained Joe, descend from their high country spawning tributaries and feast on fry, smolts, and anything else that swims. This is what can happen when you protect an entire watershed. Joe swung big black ugly things; I had a stash of Vanilla Buggers. It was like steelheading with 5-weights. Fortunately, we had only two and a half days of food. Otherwise, they might still be looking for us down there.
The way I see it, I’m paid to watch what I say. Not everyone agrees on what that means. This past summer a friend of mine, another writer, posted a story, including pictures, on his blog site—a report from a river, just across the border, that Joe and I had been lucky enough to suss out the summer before. When I saw the name, used in the title and throughout the piece, I cringed. I know there are no secrets anymore; I just don’t believe we should make it too easy. When I was young, I’d study the pictures in the surfing magazines, ready to run off like a kid joining the circus. It finally happened: when the first guys from Newport and Laguna Beach ventured south into deep Mexico and Central America and sold their stories—and photos—to the magazines, I was in the first wave that followed.
When I saw my friend’s blog, with photos of these absolutely juicy trout, wild as the river you can still have to yourself, all I could think of was other places in the Lower 48 where fish like these simply don’t exist. I imagined anglers, young and old, seeing those trout, and the name of the river, and packing up trucks and heading this way like characters in a Steinbeck novel aimed for California.
I confronted my friend. He got defensive—just as I would if he tried to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do with my work. In the end, however, he came around. I’d quote his concession here, what he wrote in an email by way of finally agreeing to delete the story from his site. But I erased the entire exchange, the whole thing troubled me that much.
All part of the job? Later this past year, while poking around islands aboard Madrina, my little beach yawl, I ran into a bunch of roosterfish along a beach where I’m inclined to think nobody had cast flies for them before. When I returned to shore, I shared pictures with friends, who never quite know where I am once I set sail.
“Pacific roosters,” I wrote—and left it at that.
Scott Sadil, Gray’s Sporting Journal’s new Angling Editor, lives and writes in the real town of Hood River, Oregon.
