Rocks to Rivers
I read an article this week about a guide who took a personal float day and managed to land a record breaking Snake River cutthroat measuring in at 31 inches. A 30 inch or bigger trout is typically said to be a product of 10,000 casts. In his case, the guide mentioned it was more like 10 million. Conditions were hot and it was a miserably slow float. I imagine self doubt and inevitability were sinking in, then, WHAM!--the trophy strikes. I bet it was spectacular.
That got me thinking about my first trout on the fly. It was a cartoonish little brown in the 10 - 12” inch range. It had a slightly blue iridescent gill plate and an array of widely spaced spots that extended all the way down to its tail.
Truth is, when I finally slid that average sized Salmo trutta into my net, I cried.
Here it is.
I wasn’t exactly bawling beside the stream that morning, but I was choked up, eyes moist, mouth pinched at the sides. I straightened up, muttered a few honest prayers of thankfulness to the river gods, and snapped the picture above. I was elated, not just because of my close encounter with an honest-to-God Colorado brown trout, but because months of pain, depression, anxiety, and effort had finally culminated in success. Dejection turned to relief, and I was on a new path.
I had better back up a bit.
I don’t remember catching my first trout. It was surely a rainbow stocker I snagged with a rooster tail on the banks of the Tellico River in eastern Tennessee. An improbable stroke of luck, at best I reckon my 1/8oz spinner finally dodged enough tree branches and river weeds to entice a fish. I’m sure I was giddy. In my family catching a trout out of the Tellico is a right of passage. It’s manhood. No doubt my dad was coaching me and beaming with pride, “That’a boy! Keep his head upstream...reel ‘em in steady...let ‘em run if he wants.”
Back then I never caught many fish, but my heroes did. My dad and my older cousin competed to see who would “limit out” each day. My grandfather ran camp and chuckled at them. He was the wise old sage that knew all the secrets of the stream. Our fishing trips I’m sure are much alike those of other anglers. We say we go to fish, but in truth we are chasing the lore of our family traditions, old and new. The trout is the symbol of that journey.
The early days. Dad and Daniel.
I was most likely back at camp chugging Dr. Pepper and plowing through a bag of gummy worms. If I caught one fish I considered my job met for the week.
While these finicky fish have remained the embodiment of our kinsfolk, trout fishing wasn’t always a major focus (to me). Growing up I dabbled in a bit of everything; art, photography, athletics, politics and so forth. I’ve always been a hobbyist. Whatever the schtick, I immerse myself in it and commit. Sophomore year of college I found rock climbing, which turned into an obsession for nearly fifteen years. I don’t think I ever came close to qualifying as a dirtbag. I never quit my job to pilgrimage to the Yosemite Valley. I never spent a full season at the Red, kicking around at Miguel’s and soliciting beta to conquer The Motherlode. But, I did focus all my physical and mental goals in progressing in the practice of anti-gravity. Climbing was my identity; a constant across many stages of life.
It was December 18th, 2018. I was in prime shape. I was gliding through bouldery “V-hard” problems and sticking moves I considered above my ability. That night I breezed through a difficult crux and then cranked underhand on a good sized block. Only two easy moves to top out. My right hand was an inch from the final hold when something in my left arm snapped. I fell off the wall and landed on the crash pad below, dazed. Two weeks later I’m sitting in the DTC Surgery Center prepping to have my bicep reattached. During the procedure they also found my labrum was shredded. In the long term both would heal.
Recovery time is eight to nine months before any substantial physical activity is possible. Now, this is no Aron Ralston situation. I didn’t have to squander under a rock, drinking my own urine for five days before chopping off my arm and hiking out through the desert. I’m thankful for that. Climbing is inherently dangerous. People get hurt. I’m one of them.
That doesn’t mean my injury wasn’t life changing, though. My job requires me to be stationary. I’m in a chair for nearly nine hours a day during the week, and I cherish any time I have to be active. Take that away and I start fraying at the edges. Life post-surgery was hazy. I was doped up on oxycodone. I hated the meds and was disgusted at the notion I use any saved up PTO on such unjust circumstances, so I went back to work and did my best to adjust.
There was a lot of pain. It hurt to move. It hurt to sleep. It hurt to laugh. I was a faberge egg. The boredom was worse. Anxiety permeated my mental space. I smiled through the pain and told folks I was healing nicely, and yes, it’s a bummer but I’ll get through it. Only, I still wasn’t sure how. I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself. A few weeks later the sling and bandages came off. My arm was a mashed potato horror show. Still swollen and colored like fading sunset, my arm could barely support the weight of a cup of coffee.
The joy of losing my sling faded quickly. I had to find some way to fill the time outside my working hours. Mid-January I sat sulking in my unmade bed wearing an old flannel shirt, socks, and underwear. I sipped a lukewarm IPA and tried to keep my attention on another low grade sitcom marathon streaming on Netflix. The mind doesn’t have much time to process in those five seconds they give you between episodes. Regardless, a memory popped into my head. It was a conversation with my cousin Daniel from a few years before.
We sat around the fire pit at North River, our base camp when fishing the Tellico.
When the trip ended I wouldn’t be returning to Atlanta, but instead swing north toward St. Louis and then west to Denver. I was leaving the South for good. As such, I was muttering a sentimental thought here and there about how I hated to think I can’t just drive to Tennessee anymore, and I wonder what things’ll be like next time we can all get back here again, and of course I’ll always make the trip back to snag a few more trout by the lip.
“Aw, well hell man, where you’re going is pretty much trout Mecca.”
“Huh?”
He took a drag of a Marlboro and swigged a Bud Light, “Shoot, there’s more good water out there than you can ever fish. Big boys, too. I’ve seen pictures of some fuckin’ huge trout. Not like the stockers here. Fly fishing is the big thing out there.”
“Huh.”
I filed that convo in the “good to know” folder of my brain. I knew my dad and grandfather used fly rods sometime way back, but I’d never seen it. We always used spin gear on the Tellico. If they didn’t fly fish I didn’t imagine there’s any reason I would need to, either. After that trip I joked a few times about how I should learn to fly fish so that I could get a head start on my retirement hobby.
It came much sooner than I expected.
I never finished my IPA. The brew was full-on hot, sitting by the fireplace, when I closed my laptop at 3 a.m., eyes bleary from five or six hours of googling. My search history showed pages with titles like, “Fly fishing 101”, “What is tippet?”, “Do fish bite in the wintertime?”, “What do I need to start fly fishing?”, and so on. The next day I found a guy on Craigslist who sold me two rods, two reels, a mesh vest, two spools of tippet, about 70 flies, some random tools, bobbers, nail clippers, and fly floatant, all for 75 bucks. The lot of gear smelled like pot, but it seemed in decent shape. I found boots and waders a few days later; used Simms gear with enough life left for a season or two. The previous owner was a little shorter than me and two times rounder. As a wind sock they could power a small sailboat. If I were to fall in the river and these things filled up with water, I’d be done for. Kaput. Like the Kraken was dragging me to a watery grave by my ankles. But they were the right price and I was on a budget.
January 20th, 2019 was my first day fly fishing. It was a balmy thirty-something degrees with a foot of snow on the ground. I spent the day using a thingamabobber and split shot rig like a rodeo lasso. I fashioned a crude dry fly leader and whipped it across the water like Indiana Jones. The idea of a dead drift hadn’t come up in my google searches yet. Actually, there was no drift at all. I plunked the flies in the water and immediately snatched them out. That’s how it’s done, right? I caught zero trout. Determined, I kept it up. I did more research and found Tom Rosenbauer’s podcast. Saturdays and Sundays were always the same; up at 5 a.m., streamside by 7:30, fish ‘til dark. I rounded out January and fished straight through February this way. No trout. I listened to a lot of Alan Jackson.
Day 1 on the fly.
Zero fish. Side arm casting. Waders tied in the back like a ponytail.
Winters in Colorado give you roughly nine hours of daylight. If we assume I fished hard on every trip, which I did, that totals to about 90 hours of me standing in waist deep water during the dead of a Colorado winter, waving a nine foot stick around and having nothing to show for it. Each day I ate a mound of tuna salad and drank a lot of beer. I chain smoked Parliaments to keep my fingers busy, each cloud of smoke a reverie to warmer times. I will write about the cold purgatory of winter fly fishing elsewhere. What I will say here is that hell is hot and often it seems like the more favorable option.
That finally brings us to March 2, 2019, when an unsuspecting spring trout was hungry enough to eat a size 22 midge right next to my feet. The drift was nearly at its end. My leader paused just so, like the Matrix glitched and respawned a fresh set of fish right there in my cold little run on the South Platte. I was lucky the eat came only three feet away. An unfamiliar jiggle at the end of the hookset meant I was, in fact, finally catching, not just fishing. I was frantic and likely would have bungled the whole thing had I fought the fish longer than fifteen seconds. But that was all the time it took.
An honest-to-god Colorado brown trout.
And that’s all the time it took me to transition, in spirit, to a level of acceptance I’d been fighting since I got hurt. The anxiety and depression I’d been suppressing wasn’t rooted in my arm healing. It was underpinned by the feeling that I was a sellout. I knew that even though my arm would get better, I had fundamentally changed. Years earlier I’d broken my ankle at the climbing gym. I’ve never walked the same since. Now I’d given an arm and shoulder to the sport. The thought I kept having and didn’t want to say to anyone was, “If I’m honest, I really don’t think climbing is worth it anymore. I’m tired of getting hurt”. For me that’s an identity shed and a life narrative lost.
But let’s not forget that at this moment I have my first brown in hand, who is terrified, peering up at a bearded buffoon who is beaming ear to ear, not because he caught a fish, but because he now has a purpose. Chasing trout.
I can’t say whether the journey began when I was a youngin’, slinging lures in east Tennessee, or if it was in the recovery room after my surgery. I once read that you should never assume you know enough to write about why something happened. Only write what happened. Well, I never climbed outside again. My wanderings now lead me toward creeks, rivers, and alpine lakes. And the trout continues as the symbol of growth.