by Scott Sadil
Dawn, breeze out of the southeast, the curdling gobble of sandhill cranes somewhere out in the field beyond the poplars, a mix of cottonwoods and aspen, with cedar waxwings sprinkled as if sunflower blossoms in the riffling leaves. Coffee, steel-cut oats, the raisins and cranberries soft and plump as over-ripe plums after the standard three-quarter hour simmer atop the HalfGen stove, quiet as the nearby river.
Peter stirs, crawls out of his tent, accepts his half-filled ceramic mug. After fifty years it’s no surprise when he tumbles into a story. He was out at a restaurant with his wife of many decades, plus others, not important to the tale, except for his younger son, whom I’ve known, of course, all his life, now a beast of a man, a surfer and angler and ex-Division 1 waterpolo player, with a chest and shoulders on him such that whenever I greet him, with a hug, the tips of my fingers remain two feet, if not more, apart.
Other salient details? None, other than that Peter’s wife, Emma, comes from the sort of Italian family that holds food, as far as I can tell, in somewhat higher esteem than they do the Pope.
Come time to order their meals, Emma dithered. Would anyone like to split a dish with her?
Luke, Peter’s son, was the first to respond. Turning to his mother, those broad hulking shoulders, I imagine, casting a shadow over one end of the table, he made himself perfectly clear: “I didn’t get this big by sharing.”
For anglers anywhere, but especially those roaming the interior West, it’s an important concept. Big trout – whether cutthroats, rainbows, or browns – didn’t get that way by sharing, either. Their intemperate manners, in fact, offer us our best chance to hook a genuine lunker. Landing such trout, of course, can be a very different matter. But just hooking a big fish is all that really matters.
Isn’t it?
I’m prone to such nonsense in the wake of a few recent mishaps, moments to bring one to tears, or his knees, were I not the sort of seasoned angler who has learned to take things in stride, the good with the bad, leave the past in the past where it belongs. Either that or drink heavily. I still can’t believe how that one cutthroat, big as a hatchery steelhead, raced my way down the creek, forcing me to strip line while frantically back-pedaling, only to have the fish turn, race upstream, and as it did, and I gave chase, my loose line caught the limb of a bush, bringing line and tippet to a halt while fish and fly continued on their merry way.
Yecch.
Or how about that brown trout, tucked alongside a ledge at the tail of the pool below the little canyon falls, that exploded on a pair of Twenty-Incher stonefly nymphs, tossed precisely where I knew a fish should be, and in three tail-walking shakes destroyed my terminal tackle as if I had momentarily stepped in toe-to-toe with Michael Tyson?
Ouch.
Or was it really only yesterday, I wonder, pouring hot water through the coffee grounds and saturated filter once more, that a rainbow that looked like a skateboard deck took the little swinging black caddis and undulated, mid-air, as if stung by an electric shock, sending said caddis sailing halfway back to me, where I stood with my mouth open, barely realizing I’d just risen a fish.
Hmm?
Still, it’s good to be fishing, I tell myself, where you don’t land ‘em all. It happens to the best of us, I conclude, trying hard not to think about the Calvados I’d love to sprinkle into my morning coffee.
Gray’s angling editor Scott Sadil has already changed the oil in his pickup twice this season as he hunts for trout in the West.
