There’s Magic in the Hills, Ya’ll
Gods reside atop the highest peaks. Zeus reigned from Mt Olympus. Meru and its five spires are the center of the spiritual universe in the East. Moses traveled up Mt Sinai to meet God, then returned with the ten commandments.
Further down the mountain mythical beasts of all kinds are known to roam: the bigfoot and the yeti, the mothman, witches, coonbears, and the misted spirits of Appalachia. Mountain lore and local flavor color these characters differently. The witness accounts are too numerous to deny, yet photographic evidence is sparse and muddled. I’ll say this—there’s magic in the hills, ya’ll. I can prove it.
This is a true story.
March 16th, 2019 landed on a Saturday. This is significant for two reasons. First, St. Patrick’s Day was on Sunday. The good people of Denver never waste an opportunity for parades or hungover brunches. In order to facilitate the latter, our annual St. Paddy’s Day extravaganza was held a day early. Second, I was two weeks into catching trout on the fly. I snagged my first brown on March 2. The following weekend I doubled my number and caught two more. After three trout I was no longer just obsessed, I was manic. Can I get four in a day? National holiday, be damned—I’m going fishing.
Mckenzie wistfully refers to that spring as when, “we just kind of lost Jonathan for a while.” Friday after work I’d come home, rig up my rods, make some tuna salad, pack the cooler, eat, and then get to bed as early as I could. I’d wake up at 4:30 or five in the morning and head toward the stream. Sunday I’d repeat. Weekdays included working, driving home, then researching knots or sight fishing or rod action or whatever. And so on.
But sometimes you have to consider others, too. Though our friend group ran deep and was protective enough, the thought of my significant other bopping around our grungy little corner of South Broadway amongst the shenanigans and revelry was somewhat unsettling. She will be irritated at me for saying that. Had I mentioned the same to her back then, she’d have replied, “Go fishing, I don’t need no man!”
And she’s right. She once broke the jaw of a guy who deserved it.
But I also like a good green beer, so I applied Solomon’s logic and sawed the day in half. Surely I could pull off an early rise, have a productive day on the river, and be back in the city in time to either celebrate my catch or sink into the drunkard binging that sometimes happens on the days you get skunked. Win-win.
In most public facing articles about fishing the author does everything they can to obfuscate their location. We all want a good fishing buddy or two on the river with us, but by god, that’s it. Finger nails have to be coming out of their sockets in order for a good fishing location to get disclosed. I won’t be selective on information here, though. One reason is that Deckers is no secret. If I’m honest it’s my least favorite place to fish in the front range. The main motive I have to mention it by name is because I want to know what being is responsible for what I’m about to tell you. I want to document where I was, when I was, and what happened to me in the off chance someone reads this, reposts it, and lets the internet do its trick. I firmly believe the mythical beasts I mentioned earlier are shapeshifters. That is to say...maybe human during the day and scary-me-doodle at night, or vice-versa. Either way, if they take a human form it means they surely have a cell phone, internet, and may eventually be in a position to reach out to me later.
As I say, there’s magic in the hills, ya’ll. Here’s what happened that day…
I was standing ankle deep in the South Platte River around 7am. This is the famed gold medal stretch of Deckers at a very obvious hole where Brush Creek meets the Platte, about two major river bends before you get to the town proper (a restaurant, a liquor shop, a fly shop). If you’re not at this particular fishing hole early it will be occupied by the time the sun comes up.
For two straight seasons every time I drove past that stretch the same guy would be there. His name is Typewriter Richard. Nice guy, but no joke, if I noticed his SUV at 8:30 in the morning then I’d surely also see it on the way back out at 4pm parked in the same spot. He’d be standing there in the same run, wearing his Russian hat, roll casting a standard rocky mountain nymph rig over and over again. He’d start at the tail of the run, work through the pool, finish at the head, then ride the carriage return back to the tail, repeat. Typewriter Richard.
So there I am standing in the run where I caught my first fish a few weeks earlier. The sun just started tipping the peaks to the east. The river glowed. It steamed as the sun’s rays hit the icy flows before me.
Serene is what it was; also very cold, somewhere in the teens. Seeing as how I was first in line for a prime fishing hole and Typewriter Richard wasn’t anywhere in sight, I focused on my hot coffee for a few minutes. A bald eagle flew twenty feet in front of me and a muskrat dove into a pool across the currents. My coffee went cold. It was time to fish.
I always have a wee bit of anxiety during the first hour of fishing. In terms of hooking up with the first fish of the day, like, how long is it going to take? Especially in the early days you can’t help but think, Am I doing this right? And that can be a problem, because instead of being mentally ready to catch a fish you’re more focused on whether or not you can catch a fish, which is thoroughly deflating.
So, again, it was time to fish. I can’t remember for how long, but after a handful of drifts and sequential Am I doing this right?s, I was stopped mid-sentence. My god, this rainbow was huge.
He fought like a monster; first by taking short five to ten foot runs, then bulldogging to the bottom, then running the other direction, repeat. This was my first freshwater fish fight and I was freaking out. I took a step forward to get a better angle on mini-Moby Dick, then somehow ended up elbow deep in the South Platte instead of ankle deep. I have no idea how I fell. Tripped on a stump, maybe? Stepped into a hole? Ice? No clue, but I was on my side in 16 inches of ice water and my rod was bent sideways between me and a boulder. The tip of the rod is going nuts because the damn trout is still hooked. So, up I stand. The fight is on.
He runs. I reel. He’s getting closer. At four feet away I get all jittery because this nonsense has gone on way too long, so I step forward to get into netting territory. This time I step into a hole and fall the other direction. Now my right side is in the water and my rod is totally submerged. A LOT of water has splashed up on the inside of my sunglasses. I’m blind. I can’t see much other than haze and the prismatic effect of sunlight refracting through water droplets, but no shit, this fish is still hooked. The fight is on.
Back on my feet, I’m focused. I’ve regained tension on the line and have this goliath’s head breaching the surface. His mouth agape, the hook jaw is spread and he’s rolling like an alligator. He is tiring. He’s close now.
I triumphantly engage in the fly-fisherman’s bow, where the legs squat just slightly and the knees are pointing away from each other. The rod arm is held back as far as it can go, while the rod is bent in a perfect arch, like a rainbow leading toward the pot-o-gold reward that is sliding slowly toward the net.
The fish is a foot from my net, then inches. His head slides over the rim of the wooden frame. Simultaneously the size 20 blood midge pops out of his lip and the released tension of the line sends me lurching backwards, one more time, into the South Platte river. I’m only now realizing that my non-waterproof hip pack is totally submerged and contains my dslr camera, my lunch, and my phone. My fish is gone and my pride is water-logged. What luck.
This was like the time Amber broke up with me in the sixth grade. Total heartbreaker. Surely this can’t happen to me. This was the type of grief I hadn’t learned to deal with yet. The kind that makes you stare at nothing for a while with an ambient ringing that you can’t hear, but you can feel sure enough, until you finally look up and think, How long have I been here?
That was the first fish I lost that day. Fifteen minutes later I got another one on the line; same place, smaller fish. My eyes were wide with excitement at the chance of redemption, but this one popped off the hook after a few head shakes. Then there was a long lull with no action.
I moved up to the head of the run where a three foot wide chute runs next to a boulder. It spills over some rocks to form a decent pool bookended by some back-flowing eddies that are tough to get a good drift through. If you cast in the middle and get the flies deep, there are big fish to be had. I did just that, and sure enough I hooked one. I never saw it. It had to be a rainbow because this thing peeled 40 feet of line from my reel in a few seconds. I made an attempt to slow it down with my line hand, but finesse wasn’t a learned skill yet. The line snapped and shot back at me, a tangled mess of wind knots and frayed ambition.
Three fish lost. This is where things get interesting. Pay attention to the specifics.
I’m pissed, just to the point of shaking. I’m waist deep and have a tangled disaster at the end of my line. I turn and walk out roughly twelve feet to a hedge of bank-side scrub brush that is a little taller than me. It’s persistent along the area where I’m fishing. There’s no good way to access the road above without walking a good twenty or thirty feet in either direction to find the footpath. I set my rod on the ground and lean it against the brush so I can change out all the components in my leader, tippet, and flies. This takes about fifteen minutes, during which time my back is facing the river. I can see clearly in all directions. No cars are passing by.
Once re-rigging is complete I turn and march with intent back to the stream. Mentally refreshed, I’ve decided I can’t let the morning’s misfortune dictate the remainder of my day. The sun had almost reached mid-sky. Time was short. I needed a change in luck. Fishing from the bank seemed too noncommittal. I needed to be in the river to get back into the good graces of the trout. Mid-thigh felt far enough, about eight feet in, a perfect casting distance to the tail of the run.
I cast, drift, and set. There’s a nice little she-brown on the end of my line who comes to net without much of a fuss. I released her at 11:39am.
I feel better. I couldn’t very well walk into a St. Patrick’s Day celebration and answer, “No Luck,” when someone asks if I caught anything that morning. “I got one,” followed by a wink is a much better response, especially with a green beer in your hand. My luck had changed.
I square back up in the river and start to make sequential drifts. Twenty four minutes later I have another fish on the line, but the fly breaks off. Silent again, I’m wondering whether or not I should just start to head back. Clearly short-lived, my luck has run out.
In those days I tethered my landing net to a hip pack with a short bungee cord. It stayed tucked between my lumbar and waistband most of the time, but on occasion my arm would knock it out during a cast and the net would float in the current below me. When I’m focused on fishing it may float there unnoticed for 30 minutes before I look back and return it to my side.
But right now my net isn’t just floating in the river downstream of me. It’s dragging. Black mesh is swirling back and forth and is pulled under sporadically by something in the bucket of the net. I tugged the cord in and grabbed the handle. A stick, maybe?
No friends, it’s a beer.
I have run through this countless times in my head. My net was tucked in at my side while I was re-rigging. Plus, I was far enough on to the bank to have noticed dead weight dragging in the sand behind me. I faced the road and had a clear view of everything to my front and sides. I walked into the river and remained eight to ten feet out in hip deep water for roughly 30 minutes. When an angler fishes a long run in a thin section of river they don’t stand in the fast current. They stand in the medium to slow water and fish the seam next to the fast current. Effectively this means a stray upstream beer could not have plunked into the water, swirled in behind me, and washed over into the rim of my net. No, from where I was standing the beer would have bobbed haplessly and slowly to my position. My eyes were upstream the whole time. The water inlet from the chute I described earlier is only a few feet wide. I would have seen it. This beer did not come from the water above.
Five feet below me a protruding rock sat dry and inviting. There in the South Platte it served as my barstool. Water rushed over my knees and my feet swirled aimlessly in the current. My rod lay across my lap. Hunched over and grinning I cracked the beer, took a sip, then held it high in salute and appreciation. I scanned the banks, the brush, and the bushes for a wave or acknowledgement of any kind. Emptiness called back. The meandering country road above was silent. It was just me and the fish and the bald eagles.
I took the picture above as proof that on March 16th, 2019 at 12:06pm a stream side Leprechaun did, in fact, take pity on a poor, dejected, Scotch-Irish lad who thought his luck had run out. The little man tossed in a brew and some luck to brighten the day. Magic is what it was. I’m an observant wretch; there is no other explanation. The beer was not there when I entered the water. The beer did not wash into my net. It was placed gingerly and discreetly by a rascal that is wily, stealthy, and mischievous.
We all like to believe there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I can’t speak to that. I didn’t land any rainbows that day. I can attest that there’s at least one good beer at the end of a brown trout. I gulped down the suds and poured the last sip back into the river beside me. It felt appropriate.
Twelve minutes later I landed another brown. Admiring my catch, I quickly noticed the pitted flesh on his side—talon marks, the result of what was surely a horrendous escape from my bald eagle friend. It made me realize I wasn’t the only one with a bit of luck. We both had our lives and the river. I watched him dart back to the depths, then turned and made my way home.
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.