Montana is so large and contains such a diversity of distinct regions that a trip from where I live to the southwesternmost corner, the Big Hole, provides a tremendous transition of environment, change of weather, change of terrain, and culture. The Big Hole ranchers are different from others in the state, and many of their farming and stock management practices also differ. The age of that district is seen in the old ranch headquarters, the hoary barns, the places founded by Frenchmen and fur traders, the stables that once held famous racehorses and, one valley over in the Bitterroot, the old mission churches.
But to head across Montana this year is alarming. With limited annual rainfall, much of its appearance is desertic to begin with. But this year the yellow desiccation of midsummer crawled closer to the green shapes of mountains, until finally the wooded high country stood in ghastly attendance over what looked to be a dying landscape. Then all the fires began, first in Yellowstone, then in the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall areas. Inspired by this festivity, Missoula arsonists began to have at it until the feeling began to be that, generally speaking, Montana was on fire.
Water had become fascinating. It was fascinating to water the lawn. It was fascinating to direct a fine mist at a flowerpot. It was fascinating to take a bucket and measure the flow that filled the tank that watered my cows. It was fascinating to watch the saddle horses dip their muzzles in a spring. Suddenly other things in the landscape were not interesting. Wind generators were not interesting. Electricity was not interesting. Power lines were not interesting. Telephones were not interesting, and all the wires and relays over the prairie that laced this largely empty region to the fervid nation were not so very interesting anymore. Water had become the only interesting thing. It had rained one-quarter of an inch in three months. I had watched water-laden clouds go overhead at terrific speed without losing a drop. Montana was getting less rain than the Mojave Desert. The little clouds that look like the clouds on a baby’s crib were the sort of thing you wanted to shout at. Wind beat the ground on the rumor of water. Stockmen hauled water to battered, unusable pastures for their cows and calves. Forest springs remembered by generations suddenly evaporated.
I drove west on the interstate along the Yellowstone River. A long Burlington Northern train came around a curve in the river in the dry air, approached in silence, then was alongside me at once in a whirring rush of metal and movement. Astonishingly, the air was filled with a train smell, an industrial odor that stood out sharply in the drought-stricken air. But the ash in the air was from the fires, and the smoke that poured out from the valley of the upper Yellowstone had the inappropriately sentimental tang of autumn leaf-burning. Still, the train rolled on, and the first thing one wondered was whether or not it was a machine for starting fires.
As I climbed toward the Continental Divide, things did seem a little greener. Some of the hay meadows actually looked like they might be producing hay instead of emergency pasture. Passing through the round red rocks of Homestake Pass, wadded together like enormous pencil erasers, I descended toward Butte and stopped to refill my tank. While the attendant cleaned the windshield, I stood inside the cool gas station and looked at pictures of Our Lady of the Rockies, now under construction. Great cranes brought workers and their equipment to her vast robes. A helicopter arrived with her head. No other town in Montana felt so strongly about the Virgin Mary, and it brought to her memory a mighty effort.
As I headed south toward Idaho and the Missouri headwaters that I love to fish, I entertained some nervous thoughts. I knew that sections of the Jefferson, the Red Rock, and the Big Hole itself had dried up because of irrigation. Montana has no provision for decreed instream use of water; in a bad year, agriculture can take it all without regard to fish or the fishermen who spend more than a hundred million annually. Montana farmers and ranchers make thousands of new enemies each year over this issue, and those enemies are becoming a political force that would like to review not only the efficiency of their water use but other subjects as well, such as the constitutionality of their grazinglease arrangements on public land. Vestigial rivers flowing out of the smoke only make the plight more emphatic.
I took the turnoff toward the Divide and saw the Big Hole for the first time in a year. The extremely low water merely percolated through rubble rock. Nevertheless, the beauty of the river’s narrow valley, the sage-covered walls, and the slit of railroad bed on the far bank seemed quite intact.
I turned up the Wise River from the town of that name. The river headed into the Pioneer Mountains, and as I started up its valley I eyed its floor with but one thing in mind: Any water? A short time later I unpacked in my wonderfully comfortable little cabin by the side of the river. Water raced by! Irrigation water went overhead on a trestlelike affair. Standing underneath it on my way to dinner, I could smell the cold runoff dripping down the timbers that held it up. I was starting to feel encouraged that my fly rod might not have been a purely comic utensil. There wasn’t even any smoke in the air.
I had a beautifully prepared meal with the Fellins and their guests. This small lodge seems to attract fairly serious fishermen. So the gloomy enthusiasms, the bursts of ill-directed sexuality, the unwelcome appearance of the alter ego, the showdowns between couples, and the displays of minor violence that one associates with high-powered sporting lodges are absent here. One dines well and sleeps contentedly, storing maximum energy for the rivers.
I headed for my cabin early and the Fellins’ big Labrador male accompanied me partway. He didn’t stray far, because in the nearby bush were moose who chased him back to the house. It is a great pleasure for a family man to sleep in some building by himself once in a while; I slept the night away in a kind of mock-bachelor bliss, the windows wide open and the chilly mountain air pouring over my lofty comforter. My first home was made of logs, and the smell and solidity of those structures restored my highly eroded sense of well-being. I began to think of sallying forth with fly rod in hand to tune and sample the universe in the name of trout. This has been an issue of consequence since my bowlegged early childhood, and the feeling has grown stronger.
The morning of a beautiful summer day in Montana. What more could be asked? Hawks threw their cries against tall red cliffs along the Big Hole, then soared into transparency against the brilliant blue sky. The peculiar sluicing movement of the dewatered but still beautiful river at the base of the cliffs and railroad bed, the powerful sage smell, the bright yellow clusters of drought-resistant resinweed, and here and there the slowly opening rings of feeding trout brought me on point. I suddenly longed to see the loop of my line stretch over moving water. The float, the gulp: This way, please.
We went to a portion of the river that split into two channels, one of which slowed down considerably and presented an ideal place to ambush fish feeding on tricorythodes, better known as “tricos.” These are minute, clear-winged mayflies as beautiful as all the mayflies whose poetic forms have found their way into the imagination of sportsmen, certain of whom have taken pen to paper.
By the time we reached the stream the duns were hatching and the forms of rising trout, variously called “sipping,” “slurping,” and “gulping,” opened upon the water. Duns are the immature forms of mayflies, recently transmuted from the nymphal stage, and they are reasonably easy targets for trout. The tricos are unlike other mayflies in that they complete their cycle in a matter of hours instead of days. To the angler this means that good fishing is to be had while the duns are on the water. A few hours later there commences an even better stage, the spinner fall. Duns that flew up above the riffles molt to achieve sexual maturity in a whirlwind of sparkling mayfly turbulence, then return to the surface of the streams to lay their eggs. At this point they are duck soup for feeding trout, and the alert angler may now slip up and still manage to catch a few.