We headed back to Sakonnet Point and put the boat on the trailer. Fred and I changed clothes, then followed Dave to his house in South Dartmouth, where we loaded his canoe on top of his car. Through judicious use of sandy roads, car, and canoe, we found ourselves in a remarkable world illuminated by sea light. Through a long bank of dunes, the ocean had made a hidden inlet. Once inside, the tidal channel formed a salt marsh. On the high ground encircling the marsh, old houses looked on, their windows shining in the late sun.
The channel made its serpentine way through the cattails and was the size of a trout stream, which it resembled in other ways, except for the blue crabs that backed away from us and the stone-heavy quahogs revealed by our sinking feet.
We spread out along the stream, finding places where sandbars faced the deep flowing water on the outside of bends and their undercut banks: easy casting in an absorbing world. That from beneath those banks, oceangoing striped bass took our streamers and fought the good fight seems a matter for wonder. Looking across the cattails and spartina, I could see Dave, then Fred, with deep bows in their rods.
I slept well that night, with all the windows open so the fog could creep around my bedclothes and I could better hear the sonorities of the sea buoy. All night long I received cheerful visits from family ghosts and remembered how I once longed for a single striped bass. I wondered how my life would have gone had I known at age twelve that at fifty-five I’d have a twenty-fish day. Perhaps Fred can tell me.
Henry’s Fork
I WENT TO IDAHO to fish the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River. I had heard grave reports about its present condition and the impact of dewatering on a great resource whose natural values have little standing in local law. I had the feeling that the Henry’s Fork was managed with a sharp eye on potato production, the modern equivalent of killing buffalo for their tongues.
I spent a couple of days, fishing and driving around with Mike Lawson, a guide and operator of the fly shop, Last Chance on the Henry’s Fork. He and his wife, Sheralee, have lived in the area all their lives. Mike grew up in Sugar City, one of the sacrificial hamlets in the pathway of the Teton Dam, a dubious waterworks that not only swindled the American taxpayer with an indisputably lousy cost-ratio but was also built in such a bad place that, upon bursting, it killed people as predictably as Uzis in the hands of crack dealers.
Mike took me to a small tailwater fishery downriver on the Fork, where it is less like a spring creek than a real, if small, river. As we passed the farms and ranches on our way, well kept by an industrious people, Mike said with real feeling, “I grew up with these folks. I don’t want anything bad to happen to a single one of them. But if they don’t learn to negotiate and compromise, they’re going to lose it all.” Mike is right in the middle of it, as an angler, as a conservationist, as a native son, and as a Mormon. Mike is serious about his faith, an elder in his church, a great fisherman, and a perfect angling companion, relaxed and persistent, informed about his immediate natural world. That he is also an active conservationist on behalf of his beloved rivers has put him in direct conflict with many people in these same communities. One would need to have spent substantial time in these closely knit western farm and ranch towns to understand what personal strength this requires. Mike Lawson’s ability to temper this toughness with his love of the native people is absolutely remarkable.
One of the unpleasant subcurrents of the conservation movement is a general loathing of Mormons as dam builders and irrigators and subverters of the Bureau of Reclamation. It is naive not to understand that Mormons are the irrigation pioneers of the arid West, or to fail to see a certain heroism in their survival against persecution and the poor gambler’s odds of desert life. But the appropriateness of some of their water practices is now dimming. The slogan on Idaho license plates, “Famous Potatoes,” has come to seem like some obsolete farmer joke instead of what it is, the merest insinuation of the power of Idaho’s all-powerful water lobbies as well as her many nature-hating politicians with their zero ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.
At the spot where we encountered the river, there were several rapid channels deflected by a narrow, wooded island. Though the crossing Mike chose looked difficult to me, this was Mike’s river, so we locked arms and set out. I soon felt the strength of the river and erosion of gravel under my feet as the current sped by. “I’m going,” Mike said, a remark which at first seemed obvious until he was swept into a crablike grasp over the top of a submerged boulder. By then I was already floundering downstream myself. We wallowed back to shore, reconsidered, started out again, and this time we made it.
Now we could look around from the gravelly, mid-river shallows. “All kinds of birds winter in here,” Mike said. “Some of them stay the whole winter. I’ve seen a great gray owl here.” The little canyonlike enclosure did seem protected in every direction with its tall, stately rock walls and floor of twisting river currents.
We caught a few trout and then, fishing upstream, I hooked a fish on a nymph, a most delicate take and a rather measured reaction as I set the hook. When the fish eased out of the current to the slack water, it rolled once and I saw that it was an enormous rainbow. At first it fought, as large trout sometimes do, like an annoyed dog, shaking its head in the current, and planing off at a leisurely angle to turn and shake once again. I had enough sense of the fish’s size to resist making him mad. Then, with one sand-filled boil, he turned and ran downstream. At the point where the channels rejoined each other, the river deepened too much for me to wade after him, so I pushed my fingers through the arbor of the reel and tried to slow the spool down. I got nowhere. As the line peeled off and the diameter of the spooled line decreased, everything got faster. The reel’s click ran together in a little screech as the hog trout roared off.
By now, Mike had passed me and was trying to find a path downstream to follow the fish. Thirty yards below me, the backing passed over his head, parallel to the riverbank. Watching the hundred yards of line shrink, the last look I’d had of the fish — its dull red stripe wider than my hand — seemed to hang before me as I acknowledged that this was the largest resident trout I’d ever hooked. I thought of the fish I’d stared at on restaurant walls in northern Michigan as a boy. Most of them would have seemed like cuisine minceur to this beast.
Then the trout stopped. A single turn of backing remained on the spindle at the center of my empty reel. Yet the fish had stopped right then and there! It was like literature! He paused long enough for me to consider how wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence and fate and elegant ironies. Then, in that moment of anti-magic, when literature is converted to the far more familiar aspects of the land in which we actually live and breathe and spend our days, the great trout turned and straightened my hook. I had so much line downstream that there was still a substantial bow in my rod. I had to reel it all in. I had to salute the now-absent great fish who had made such short shrift of me. The more line I reeled in, the less bow there was in my rod, and finally, with nothing to commemorate the fish except the whispering river around my knees, my rod was nothing but a straight, dead stick. But there was a terrific, evangelical silence. It is a fact that we are made almost entirely of river water, but the flesh that remains organizes this spectral borrowing from riparian valleys and, rod in hand, blesses our origins by counting coups.