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.