Mr. Duff gazed at me with the faintest of smiles as I dragged my duffel to the boarding area. A thin plume of motionless smoke extended vertically from his cigarette. Then he looked away, resuming his scrutiny of a back issue of Golf Digest. I was conscious that the weight of my duffel had come to seem tremendously heavy as I dragged it from boarding area to boarding area that day and night, in Murmansk, in Helsinki, in New York, in Salt Lake City. By the time I got to Bozeman, I apparently had become so weak that I could barely lift it. Finally home, I dragged it out of my car like a corpse. I hated it so much that I slept a full day before unpacking it. When I did, beneath the soggy wading shoes and dirty laundry, I found the most beautiful round river rocks and heard a distant howl from the shadows along the far shore of the Ponoi.
Of the Dean
THERE IS A MOMENT when you are waiting to meet a fishing companion, or you may even be by yourself, in the big lobby of a city hotel, the bellhop looking askance at your peculiar luggage, when you question whether this journey will really end in fishing. This is a frequent perception of today’s destination angler, whose often conventional background in angling hasn’t entirely prepared him for this approach. I like to compare it to the angling hotels that used to exist, especially in the British Isles. The best places, or those I like best, provide food and lodging in places where logistics are tricky and transportation specialized and indispensable. No one should ride a jet boat or bush plane if hiking would get it done. The serious angler, while no Luddite, likes to use the least machinery possible.
Yvon Chouinard, a real adventurer and great alpinist, has built his case on coolheaded coping; being unflappable has seeped into everything he does. Whereas I drag waders and rod tubes and carry-on bags into a corner like a sweating squirrel, Yvon, equally far from home in this Vancouver hotel lobby, merely appears ready to fish. My thought is, the airport shuttle may not go to the bush planes at Vancouver’s South Terminal at all. His thought is, we’ll get there. The first year we fished the Dean together his tackle and luggage never made it. He expected useful things to turn up and they did. I’d have broken my rosary over this one, spraying beads all over the Wilderness Air Terminal.
This year, we get to the airport, we get to Bella Coola, we get to our little cabin on the Upper Dean, we have all our stuff. I lie on my back the first night pinching a black Egg-Sucking Leech just behind the yellow lead eyes, making it do a little dance on my chest. “If the river comes up,” I say, “I’m putting this baby to work.”
“Don’t be a pawn of the gods.” Yvon yawns from his bunk.
The year before, I’d admitted to him my guilt about fishing constantly and going home mostly to do my laundry. I had decided that I had reached the time of life for less hesitancy in diving into the things I had always loved. Of my four fly rods, only one was left. The rest got siwashed on various rivers.
“Your wife has worked hard,” Yvon said. “You deserve a vacation.”
Our English friend, Bo, working on his duffel bag, suddenly sounds exasperated. “There goes the sodding zipper.” Through the haze of jet lag, he contemplates the ruptured duffel. “I bought this from the Iranian next to the office. It was marked down from fourteen quid to eleven. He said I could have it for nine. I said, ‘I didn’t ask for a discount.’ He said, ‘Six then.’ Good God, the same price as a prawn cocktail!”
On the Dean again. What would I do without this river? I design my year around this week, these pools, these beautiful fish. Dean fish are always appearing in articles about steelhead fishing. These dream slabs are just better-looking than other steelhead. Fishing the Dean puts us in an extreme state of mind that encourages the refashioning of our sport every single day. Last year, after the river blew out, we went to the bottom with evil sea snakes made of marabou feathers and kept catching fish. They couldn’t see well enough to run and chugged around like big brown trout, afraid of ramming into something. Each night, one of us would rise to urinate under the stars, only to come back inside having reinvented the wheel of fly-fishing. Twice during the same day, Yvon waded out deep, only to be turned back to the beach by the need to take a leak. He surmised his prostate was gone, a condition associated with shooting heads weighing more than three hundred grains. For diversion, we discussed evil luck in steelheading, when your companion once again has a deep bow in his rod, and you are on cast 62,509 without an eat. You get a terrible feeling: you’re not a man anymore. And whenever we can’t hook up, we become concerned with our diet, which in this case was high-octane North Canadian all-day power food. “Maybe we’ve reached the point in life where we ought to travel with our own cook,” said Yvon. “On the other hand,” he said before I could disagree, “we’re still pissing off the porch.” He unceasingly takes the balanced view except when noting the fact that the world will soon end.
Across the river, Bo is plying the run with regular strokes of his double-handed rod, single-Spey casting off his right shoulder and then, cigarette at his right hip between thumb and forefinger, watching the drift. One mend and the line comes up tight. Bo sets the hook, takes a last drag off the cigarette, drops it in the water, and witnesses a bright silver steelhead aerialize about sixty yards away while every drop of this mountain water hurries to the Pacific.
This has been a wonderful trip, each of us catching fish at the same rate. Steelhead can be quite unfair. A couple of years ago, one of my friends, a fine fisherman, shared a camp on the Dean with a drunk and disorderly orthopedic surgeon, a blowhard who never cast a straight line or tied any knot but a granny, but he outfished everyone nevertheless. He had been sure these steelhead bums were ninnies before he lit into the joy juice and headed for the river, and now he knew it; he went home to Texas without ever seeing his bubble burst, and every fish a photo opportunity. A twanging Texan in English tweeds is a hard pill to swallow, but my friend chose to consider it a kind of acid test.
My latest view of fishing, one I believe to be the evolutionary product of forty-five years of fly-fishing, is that everything has to do with smoothness, and that constant changing of one’s mind results only in not catching fish. Lee Wulff once said, along these lines, that the last thing to change is the fly. I have especially tried to practice this in steelheading, despite the fact that the available methods are all, at any given time, extremely tempting. Still, there is no better way to fish across and down than with a double-handed rod and a floating line; that’s how I fish steelhead. My exception to this is that, for summer fish, I usually switch to a sinking line when the sun is on the water; otherwise it’s the floater. Bo fishes the floater, stroke after elegant stroke. Yvon reaches deep into his toolbox and, unless forcibly convinced he’s on the wrong track, eases that fast sinking head right on down to the pebbles, further enlarging his prostate by trying to put the fly in a place where not much of a decision is required of the fish. At winter fishing, Yvon is far more realistic than I about how deep one must go, always fishing while I am sometimes merely casting. Sometimes I forget that a loop is an empty thing as compared with a tight line jumping off the surface and showering water drops.