walking in his footsteps

“My dad brought me trout here every summer when I was a kid. I’ve been back every year since.” The voice was that of a thin, leathery-looking rancher-cowboy with slightly graying hair who had just come out of the woods right where I was about to enter.

He put down the wicker basket he was carrying and his fly rod, put his two dogs in the bed of his beat-up truck, opened a cooler with some sandwich food, and sat in the door of the truck.

I had previously decided that as beautiful as this creek was, there were too many people camping, fishing, riding dirt bikes and just hanging around and I was going to leave or hike the creek right here where the trail left the creek and it formed a deep canyon that jutted out into the desert. I figured a couple miles of hiking might scare off most of these other folks and be enough of a challenge to keep all but the hardiest of them going.

As I put on my boots to do just that for the remaining hours of the night, a vision emerges from the trees of what I would have expected a fly fisherman to look like 40 years ago. He wasn’t wearing wellies, just blue jeans to protect his legs from the harsh California bushes and wellies. He had two small dogs following him, a 45 colt tied to his side and a classic wicker basket hanging low to his side ensuring the presence of no small number of fish. He had the face of someone who had spent most of his life outdoors, and at sixty-two he looked fit enough to walk wherever he pleased.

He had that upright posture that comes from always working outdoors and a face and hands that fit that life. Years of fishing had shown him what he needed and what he didn’t. On summer days, as hot as this, he certainly didn’t need wellies. The coolness of the spring-fed stream on his legs was a welcome relief from the heat he felt as he walked upriver on clear California summer days.

It was six o’clock in the evening and I thought I’d fish up the river for a couple of hours and then go for a walk.

Joe had that handsome Central California ranch accent in his voice with a mix of intensity, intimacy, and self-assurance. It was clear that the day in the creek was the kind of day he could cherish over and over again.

When he told me that he had gone to the canyon at seven in the morning and had just left, I revisited my decision to only spend a couple of hours here. The review was prompted in part by my periodic glances at his basket and assumed he either ignored the five fish limit in this stream or had some very large trout there. Given his life fishing this creek, I leaned for some latitude on the question of how many fish he would take home, but when he opened the basket to put the fish in the cooler, I was surprised by the size of the trout. he was taking out. There were only five fish, but each beautiful native rainbow was the length of his forearm.

He was now convinced that this might well be the place to spend the whole of the next day, as he recounted how he headed upriver and did not start fishing until he saw no footprints. He went on to refer to some holes that were a few miles upriver with large trout and the abundance of wildlife in this canyon, including bears. This explained the gun strapped to his side and made me consider the platform itself.

He talked about how fishing had changed over the years and was open with me about what he fished with. When I asked him if he had any dry fly fish, he just said, “I only fish with nymphs.” He said it with the confidence of someone who has been doing this for years, and I realized that I was only four years younger than him and could have made the decisive decision to fish dry flies whenever possible around the same time that he. the decision not to. I made the decision by comparing the thrill of a fish rising to grab a well-presented fly from the surface and its visual adrenaline rush to the other choice, which was a shot so subtle that without a taunt line it might be indistinguishable from hitting a rock. as he moved underwater. For me there was no comparison; one embodied everything that was important and visceral about fly fishing and the other was just another way of fishing, albeit more of them.

Now, it’s true that something like eighty percent of a fish’s diet consists of nymphs and the insects found below the surface of the water, but this didn’t matter to me compared to the thrill of catching a fish in the water. the surface.

I wondered how a more pragmatic thinker could come to the opposite conclusion when looking at the question of how to fish more. Joe struck me as gentle, confident, and pragmatic.

The next morning, as I entered the canyon upriver trying to distinguish his footsteps from the others on the bank, I realized that I was following in the footsteps of someone who had done this for over fifty years. As expected, it only took about a mile of fishing upriver for all other tracks to disappear except Joe’s and his dogs.

My insistence on dry fly fishing whenever possible has left me many days without fishing, but the huge wild native rainbow that hit my fly at the first big hole I came to assured me that wasn’t going to happen today.

Some of my best fly fishing memories are days spent with a good friend who enjoys the sport as much as I do, making our way down a small creek taking turns fishing. We each pitched until we caught one and then the other took over until he caught one. There is an intimacy and camaraderie in this approach to fly fishing that I can’t get any other way.

I felt that camaraderie with Joe this morning as I walked up the creek with just his footprints. It seemed that every time he decided to cross the creek to get a better angle on the next hole, there would be traces of him, having made the same decision as me.

I couldn’t help but wonder, when I caught a pretty rainbow in a deep pond, if Joe got lucky in the same spot. I loved the idea that we were two very different styles of anglers who actually thought a lot. That we were two very different kinds of worlds enjoying the solitude, beauty, and excitement that only this kind of “five-mile walk upriver” can offer.

I thought about this as I sat down to eat lunch and minutes later a deer came out of the woods about fifty feet upstream from me. It was one of those rare lucky moments that happened just because I was sitting perfectly still, downstream but downwind, and wearing sunglasses that hid my eyes. I stood perfectly still for the next ten minutes as he nervously drank from the stream, ate rushes from the bank, drank more, and finally crept back into the woods as quietly as he had left. A beautiful white tailed deer was the best lunch companion one could ask for.

The day got hotter and drier and I forced myself to keep drinking as I went upriver, but the puddles got bigger as Joe had promised, and the fish got bigger and wilder too.

I always see wildlife when hiking a creek, but today it seemed like an endless parade of nature’s best. At each step I was presented with a little piece of the river or the field in which I was. Frogs, snakes, quail, hawks, eagles, and deer, bobcat, and raccoon tracks let me know that I was never completely alone in this beautiful solitude.

When I hooked my fifth fish that rivaled Joe’s biggest, I looked over my shoulder to see if Joe would nod in agreement and decided it wasn’t just the heat that was driving me to do this, but the feeling of doing this trip. with the guy she just had. met, but felt as connected as anyone I’ve ever fished with.

After a long, hot hike, I converted my last beautiful pool into a bathtub. Glad I wore shorts today, I dove into the icy Spring Fed creek. A noticeable gasp arose as I realized how cold this water really was. I took off my shirt and used it to dry myself and wondered how many times Joe had done the same thing.

I realized that the steps I had taken were the result of a lifetime of Joe’s experiences like mine today, and today they were both of our experiences.