A Hundred Yard Swim
I have dreams of northbound travel where I’m climbing up the impossibly broad plateau that drains the old Rio Grande, attention span sweeping from west to east spotting raptors and speed goats and wondering what it all looked like covered in mastodons and scores of bison. What a fantasy: tying into a leviathan, proto-cutthroat down in that gorge, the scars of humanity’s future ore extractions distant like some vaporous lurking nightmare. Far-off but inevitable, costly to everything downstream. They say there’s no part of the planet left that humans haven’t interfered with, even originated a new word to classify our epoch: anthropocene. What a vast shame that is.
No matter how often one travels that well-trod path to familiar, friendly waters, the anticipation builds as the miles roll past. Various mountains and one particular favorite, a hand-painted and faded mural proclaiming “Vote Straight Democrat” are roadside friends, and I swear they twinkle at me knowingly as I motor by, remembering howling storms of the past. Up one long climbing valley, memories of whooping, hollering, damn near yodeling vaqueros and their keen dogs as they worked a skittish herd of beef. More memories still, of my wife’s first tiny trout, caught on a fly, up that same valley.
Through one dilapidated down, that one with the backyard elk farm catering to shameless trophy hunters, the type so perverse about killing with the sole goal of impressive taxidermy that they’d shoot a canned ungulate, a radio-tagged lion. What sort of upbringing yields such spiritual deformities? What a sad little existence, finding joy in the killing of an animal to spruce up one’s trophy room. May they startle the herd and be run through the gut by a frightened, malicious bull, left to die alone and in pain, bitter and unrecognizing of the irony of their station, their gastric acid spilled, dissolving them in slow motion. It’s just as well; our country will produce more halfwit hunters and they’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that it’s not wolves that are the apex predators any more, it’s us.
Blessedly off the pavement now, I take note of the sign proclaiming the Forest Service has abandoned maintenance of this particular road. Good. Let it well and truly rot so the Texans and Okies by their hundreds are sufficiently discomforted. May the axles on their obscene, satellite television-equipped living rooms on wheels break and cause massive frustration. We climb. How is it just that a landowner can string a barbed wire fence across a river? May those pudgy curmudgeons slip on rock snot, drown and be washed to the lower border of their land, hung up grotesquely to bloat in the runoff.
My attention splits, peripheral vision catching the details of the water — future riffles to drift, a hole here and there made deeper by dam releases, something moving and looking suspiciously like a rising fish. Impatience sets in, but is tempered by the knowledge that our spots are drawing closer. The rougher the walk in, the fewer the footsteps to follow, and all the better for it. We make our camp and tuck into good whiskey, gaping at the diversity of birdsong, the rattle of the foliage and the way the sunset lights the farway cliffs, reminiscing about backpacking trips of the past when we walked down the very valley we’re now visually ascending. Piñon and cedar fragrantly smolder and we kick ourselves now as always for forgetting fixings for smores. When I wake blearily at some dark hour, I’m shocked that I can read the print on my shirt by the moonlight. Nothing like altitude and distance from city lights to remember just how distant one can get.
We rise early like birds lusting after worms, me hustling my fishing partner all the while striving to balance her comfort and enjoyment with my base, single-minded need to get in the water and stay there forever. A stellar day unfolds for us, cold and wet but rife with easily fooled trout. We emerge to catch the last rays of sun and the dry feel of capilene and fine wool against my skin makes me glow with satisfaction and comfort. This is my place, this is my woman, and we are here together. How fortunate.
The next day dawns and we take more time, me capitulating to a greater degree regarding my wife’s hopes and dreams of a placid morning. We pack slowly and with a bit more care given a near-emergency we’d endured the day before when we realized mid-squall that our tent and its entire contents sat exposed and unzipped, like I mindlessly (and predictably and hilariously) forget so often to do to my fly. Not born in a barn, I wasn’t — but the truth is that I was born in a farmhouse with no running water and no electricity. Attention Deficit Disorder and my preoccupation with the inside of my own mind collude to render me unzipped, more often than a man of my age ought.
Having reckoned a steep section of pocketed river to explore, we tromp clumsily along a game trail and I begin to envy the forest creatures their four-wheel drive. We make for a slide on the opposite bank, knowing there must be a deepening bend. The sun shines, we revel in the beauty and the rushing roar of 168 cubic feet per second. Fish come quickly and without much guile, my wife forgetting the mosquito bites on her ass and the campfire grease in her hair as she hooks up time and again. She’s learning, tenacious, she’s talented and every so often I glimpse on her face a look of determination and genuine enjoyment gained through hard-won experience. She’s piecing together the puzzle and with every day she takes big strides. Helping her cross the torrents — I’ve got 8 inches, 60 pounds of mass and 15 years of wading experience on her — we fish shoulder to shoulder, her working the left seam while I work the correct side of the river, we tie into browns and rainbows and today’s become a very easy, productive day. They’re right where I think they are, greedy and easy to fool and not at all choosy. Not the most challenging, but there’s nothing wrong with an embarrassment of riches every so often.
Rocketing up out of a foot of water, I am utterly surprised by an absolutely hefty fish which annihilates my fly — without exaggeration one of the biggest I’ve ever hooked. Having repeatedly learned my lesson to always keep tension on my line, I immediately have a strong hookset, but the fish bolts directly at my feet and as I strip madly to retain tension I turn too quickly downstream and splash ass-first, flopping awkwardly backward, my feet no longer under me and suddenly, I’m treading water and going for quite a swim. I keep pressure on the rod and the fish is coming under control, but it rolls and wraps itself in my tippet and I’m splashing and hollering and trying to gain my feet again but the tongues of whitewater pull magnetically, or at least gravitationally and together, man, fish and rod gather pace downstream and I briefly register the cold and wet but my Great White Hunter instinct kicks in and I scarcely care. Bobbing along downstream but with my right arm locked to my side keeping my rod tip high I spot slower water and clumsily stumble to my right, the line singing under tension and suddenly TWANG!
Few things are as acutely disappointing as losing a big fish, and no matter how hard one wishes or the force with which one screams at the sky, there’s no putting that fish back on the hook. It’s an empty feeling, one that a thousand percent of a time causes me to feel low and amateurish and worthless and clumsy and in moments like this where what was surely among the fattest, thickest trout I’ve ever had on my line, my ire at my own self is acute, burning hot. I look bleakly at the limp end of my line and feel the nut-punch of recognition that it was my own surgeon’s knot that had given way —I tied it hurriedly out of a sense of impatient urgency to keep my flies on the water where fish can actively eat them. Clumsy. Avoidable. That fish is going to be wearing a #14 neon orange Parachute Adams in its jaw like one of those stretch-pierced modern primitives who specialize in latte foam art. I hope its piscine friends ignore it like I do people with facial tattoos rather than getting too inquisitive and forensically investigating this food-looking hook dangling uncomfortably from its jaw. We don’t need the trout getting any wiser. It’s already humbling enough matching wits with a salmonid and coming out on the losing end — we definitely don’t need them gaining Enlightenment.
I stagger to a rock, dejected and wanting to dash Cautro, my beautiful little Sage four-weight against a tree, my shoulders heaving and my heart rate easily above its anaerobic threshold. Dejected like I was when punished as a child by being banished to the garden to pick disgusting potato bugs, I sit down to do the only thing I know how to do in this situation: kick myself inwardly and insist to myself that I tie a better goddamn double surgeon’s knot. I was once told by a woman with whom I shared relations that I was “relentlessly self-improving,” — she intended that as an insult I took it as a compliment — so there I was sat, rueing what could have, should have been, but I focused my self-loathing into tying a Platonic knot. This shit will not stand, man.
Cold, with what I’m sure was multiple gallons of water sloshing in my waders, I climbed out of the river, stripped off and dumped my boots out, just in time for a huge, billowing, crackling thunderstorm to split the sky open. Standing soaking wet in a river while holding a 9-foot length of carbon, graphite and aluminum is foolhardy, so having reached an emotional ebb, we glumly trundled upriver. As the rain and lightning intensified, we shelter under a giant pine, consoling ourselves with only moderately cool beer and me starting to feel the heat leak from my core. We bicker a tiny bit, not quite knowing what call to make — to head or to stick it out — and as the rain persists we decide to seek the truck. The walk doesn’t generate any meaningful body heat from me, but I keep eyeing the river as we retrace our steps through the forest.
Like surfing in anything more than decent conditions, when the urge for just one more wave silences hunger, pain, common sense, soreness, schedules and even hypothermia, fishing on rivers draws me in. Unavoidable. Knowing full well my wife is Over It, I keep poking my head through the bushes to look for choice hydrology. I cave (I’m sure Pants knew I would) and am soon back in the river, my fixation engaged again. We both make our way again, not saying so much now and incredibly, the sun shines through, giving away just how off-color the water’s become. Noticing worms in the water we switch flies and both immediately get rewarded. Deep, deep down the rabbit hole I go, lost in that all-my-senses sort of way that’s oddly passive. Thump, thump, thump goes my worm and it occurs to me that I’m cold two ways: cold from my swim and the stormy chilly aftermath, and cold also just below the wrists because I’m catching so many fish my hands never dry.
We work up both sides of the river, right up to the truck and with the end inevitably, obviously upon me, I walk out of the river and look for my wife. “Ready to head?” I inquire.
“Just one more hole here.”
And all I can think is WHO ARE YOU DREAM WOMAN?!?
