A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  “You can still fish Yellowstone,” he said, when I asked him for advice. “The ban doesn’t apply there.”

  Irony never knows when to quit. You could fish in Yellowstone Park, only you couldn’t drive into Yellowstone Park, all the entrance roads being closed. But again, it was a matter of clinging to wisps now, literally and metaphorically, and so I decided to drive to West Yellowstone and wait for some shifting pattern in the fires to give me my chance.

  As I drove up the highway I saw the warden wading through the river toward another fly-fisherman who cast all unsuspecting upstream—set in the glorious riverscape, the mirror image of what I had just been: a man a moment away from heartbreak, flailing away at the sky with grace, rhythm, and—dwarfed as he was by the rolling smoke clouds—a small penumbra of the absurd.

  West Yellowstone must be a tawdry enough place under normal circumstances, filled as it is with vacant-eyed tourists seeking to find in the garish streets that which escaped them in the park, but in early September of 1988, with the fires making headlines everywhere, the flames just a single block away, it was against all probability one of the most interesting places in the world.

  It’s hard to do justice to that exaggerated, surrealistic scene. The improvised, graffiti-like signs that met me as I drove down Route 20 into town (Welcome to Charcoal-broiled National Park); the line of yellow fire trucks lined up ready to spring into action if the flames crossed the street separating the village from the park; the lawn sprinklers borrowed from every golf course in Montana, covering the scrubby border zone with their arcing white spray; the ghostlike emptiness of the motels; the heartbroken fishermen roaming about like me, absolutely at a loss; the legion of green-panted, yellow-shirted fire fighters, the way they crowded the restaurants and lined up at pay phones calling home they were safe; the army jeeps swerving around corners on two wheels as if under fire; the way the T-shirt factories had switched gears and were churning out designs for the current market (a fat grizzly picking his teeth with a toothpick, saying “Who needs tourists? Send more firefighters!”); the high-school football team running wind sprints under falling ash as behind them the cheering squad practiced their splits . . . It was a place under the gun, and like all such places, it had gone more than a little bit nuts.

  Seeing all this, seeing the school buses taking fresh fire fighters into the park while other buses brought exhausted ones out, smelling the smoke, seeing the huge, iodine-colored cloud that kept expanding and moving closer (tending to a mushroom shape, but never quite taking it on), it was impossible not to think of combat. The enemy was out there in the hills, its whereabouts constantly shifting; there were retreats, furious counterattacks—communiqués issued hourly for the reporters and TV crews camped in the larger, luckier motels.

  As with combat, it was impossible to get the story straight. Everyone you talked to had a different rumor. The town was going to be evacuated at eight that night; the town was going to be evacuated at eight-thirty; the town was going to be evacuated at nine, but only if the wind shifted to the east. The forlorn fishermen gathered in the tackle shops exchanged rumors of their own. It was going to snow on Thursday and the season would be reopened; it was going to snow on Thursday, but the season wouldn’t be reopened; it wasn’t going to snow and the season wasn’t going to be reopened and the fires would never stop burning and all of us might as well pack our fly rods and go home.

  The strangest rumor concerned the West Entrance Road. Was it open or wasn’t it? Some insisted yes, it was; others were equally adamant in saying no way. Since the West Entrance is approximately forty-five yards from the café in which this discussion took place, I decided—now that dinner was over—to walk past the sprinklers and take a look-see.

  By some miracle it was open—the booths were manned by rangers just as on a normal day. The woman at the booth I stopped at didn’t bat an eye when I asked for a fishing permit; she gave me the standard spiel about regulations, and before I quite realized what was happening, I was driving alone into the park along the Madison in a sunset that was starting a good three hours before it was due.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get very far. There in the opposite lane was a convoy of campers and cars being escorted out by rangers in jeeps; the scene, in the black-and-white haziness, reminded me of newsreels I’d seen of refugees fleeing the blitzkrieg in France. I still had no idea what they were doing letting people in at this time (I found out later the decision to open the West Entrance Road only lasted an hour or two); it was just one of those inexplicable windows of opportunity that open even in the messiest of wars. I drove about eight miles to the point where the land on either side of the road was blackened with smoldering embers, and there, open road or not, decided to stop.

  I didn’t go back right away; in fact, I did something I’m rather ashamed to admit: I put on my waders, tiptoed around the embers, let myself down into the cool Madison water, and began to fish.

  West Yellowstone craziness had gone to my head. But irony, my nemesis, played a part, too. Having allowed me by a miracle into the park, it permitted me to advance only to a point on the Madison that was, I found out later, notorious for its absence of trout. I cast for an hour or more, pleased to have the river to myself, taking mental snapshots of the bizarre, otherworldly scene, only a little disappointed the fish weren’t rewarding my foolhardiness with the appropriate bravos. By the time it was dark I realized something I’d been hiding from myself all along: that I wasn’t enjoying myself—that with men and women being ferried in behind me to fight this awesome, unknown thing, fishing for trout seemed, as it never had before, the idle occupation of the vain.

  There comes a point on any trip that is as much psychological as geographic when you’ve gone as far as you’re going and everything else is simply return. That roadside pull-off eight miles inside a burning Yellowstone Park was that point for me. From then on in, my trip was only a kind of mopping-up exercise and I traveled without expecting much at all.

  Still, I gave it one more try. When I woke up in the morning I drove south into Idaho toward the Henry’s Fork, making what had been the obvious move all along. The fishing season was still open there—the rumors all agreed on that. That I had postponed going down there as long as I had was only due to my fear that every other disappointed angler in Montana would be doing exactly the same thing.

  And that’s pretty much how it turned out. I drove past campground after campground of troops getting ready for another day of fighting fires in the south part of the park. Crossing the state line, I stopped at Lee’s Ferry for a license; the man who sold it to me said he’d issued over a hundred on the previous afternoon.

  I should have turned around right there. But I didn’t—I drove to the “mailbox” just upstream of the famous Railroad Ranch, parked my car, suited up, then started the long hike into the river. It was a lovely morning, or at least it would have been if it wasn’t for the smoke; if anything, it was even more biting and acrid than it had been farther north (and this was the day back in New York that people noticed an even stranger pall in the air than normal—the smoke from burning forests drifting eastward across the continent).

  What’s there to say about the Henry’s Fork that hasn’t been said before? It’s beautiful water, set in a glorious vale, and once the sun warms the surface, the river comes alive with flies and rising trout. I didn’t catch any, of course—no one actually catches a Henry’s Fork trout. I took a certain amount of consolation in managing a rise or two. I took a great deal more consolation in seeing none of the other forty-three fishermen I could count from where I was standing catch one either.

  Forty-three fishermen—the scene resembled a New Jersey trout stream on opening day. There were fishermen everywhere, not only wading, but riding along the riverbank on their dirt bikes, rods propped up on the handlebars like the bike-riding jousters in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Every few yards they would pull over, put their kickstands down, hop into the river, cast, t
hen climb back out and pedal on some more.

  It was all rather interesting in its way. I hated it immensely.

  I walked back to the car and drove toward Montana, my spirit pretty well broken. After a few miles I came to one of those places you see so often out West—a combination restaurant/motel/gas station/bar. I parked, went over to the phone booth, and in a few quick phrases made a reservation for a flight home the next day.

  There didn’t seem to be too much to do after that except eat lunch. At first, I was the only customer, but then three young fire fighters came in dressed in the green pants and soft yellow shirts I was beginning to envy. They were coming off the fire line for a reason I couldn’t quite pick up; that they were tired and relieved was evident from their expressions. The two bearded ones were from Wyoming, and the thinner, slighter one, the one sitting across from them with eager, ash-ringed eyes, talking rapidly, was from somewhere in Utah.

  “There’s no turkey today,” the waitress said, handing me a menu.

  “Hamburger’s fine,” I said, handing it back.

  To my left at the other table I heard the word Jews. I glanced around and saw it was the thin, beardless one who had said it. He was talking even faster now, caught up in his explanation.

  “From Odessa, which is in the southern part of Russia. The Black Sea? That’s where the Revolution began. Did you ever see the movie The Battleship Potemkin? They lived there and ran a shop that sold leather stuff. My grandparents. Do you know what a pogrom is?”

  The huskier of the bearded men said he didn’t know what a pogrom was.

  “Mobs went around killing Jews and burning their homes. It had to do with rumors they spread about ritualistic killings. Jews were supposed to go around murdering children, and it was just an excuse to take their property. The czar encouraged it.”

  The waitress came back with my sandwich. “Pretty bad out there, huh?” I ventured.

  “We’re waiting on the wind,” she said, with no inflection I could catch. “It blows from the east we’re going to lose some stock. Already moved them twice.”

  “So they left,” the young man said. “You know about the Lower East Side? In New York City?”

  “We lost a mule back in July,” the waitress said, wiping the hair back from her forehead. “Wandered too close to the fire, I guess.”

  “How did they get to Utah?” one of the bearded men asked.

  “Tough,” I said, shaking my head.

  “They were afraid of cities. After the pogroms, all those walls. My grandfather wanted to live somewhere where there were no walls. No walls and lots of leather.”

  “Nobody tells us anything,” the waitress said softly. “All we do is have to wait.”

  “Is a pogrom like the holocaust?” the second of the bearded men suddenly asked.

  “I came out here to fish,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” the thin one said, chewing away at his sandwich. “Like that.”

  “Tough,” she said. “Pie?”

  And so there we were, an odd enough quintet, the boys fresh back from fighting the apocalypse, talking in casual phrases of obscure destinies and ancient wrongs; the waitress with her stoic acceptance of tragedy that was just over the ridge now; me with my silly disappointment, a fisher of the absurd glutted with his catch—the five of us slumped there at the fag end of that summer of drought and ozone depletion and global warming and a burning Yellowstone Park.

  The boys were still talking when I left. I envied them, and not for their shirts this time, but for their youth—for being immersed in the center of experience while I circled the edges coughing in the smoke. But if nothing else, before leaving I could get my belly full of that. I got in the car, rolled the windows down so it would stream right in at me, then headed north on the highway toward being forty after all.

  July 2

  Morning swim, six-thirty a.m. The fog so thick I have to thrash through it just to find the shore of the pond. Lots of surprises emerge from that fog in the course of the summer. Snapping turtles laying their eggs, bitterns slipping through the marsh grass, raccoons tidying up the picnic area, once—miraculously—three lovely campers taking their morning baths. I make a point of coughing to warn whatever’s in there I’m afoot, but this time the only thing that materializes is Cider, my golden, whose nose has taken her on an elliptical orbit from our car to the beach.

  It’s amazing how much moral credit I get for these morning swims—to hear people talk, you’d think I was flailing myself with ice. And yet there does come a time, stripping off my sweatshirt, coming skin to skin against the fog, that my every instinct is to turn around, run back to the car, and turn the heater on full blast. The fog is generated off the pond’s surface so fast, with such turmoil, it creates its own damp breeze, so there’s a reverse double shock in braving it—that first chilly plunge through the mist, followed by a warmer slap into the water.

  So I always hesitate. If nothing else, it gives me time to check out the fishy population of the shallows. Trout, bass, contented sunfish. The pond contains them all, and there’s almost always a troller out there making the rounds. Me, I prefer not to, even though it’s the nearest body of water to my house. This is neutral territory in my conflict with the piscine kingdom, a buffer zone between my resolute pursuit and their resolute fleeing, a watery Switzerland where both of us can swim without worrying about who is or who isn’t attached to whom.

  And yet a fisherman has been at work here already—a blue heron who, seeing me now, lets out a deep, halfhearted squawk of protest, pulls its legs into its body, and flip-flops those lazy wings away into the fog. He’s left his breakfast behind—a rock bass that lies spinning on its side in six inches of water, the body folded back on itself like a target that’s been drilled.

  A feeding heron, a dead rock bass—this is the pond’s natural order at work. Still, coming upon death so suddenly on a morning so tranquil adds a deeper chill to the mist, and I hesitate there on the beach longer than usual, trying to get up the nerve to plunge through the various layers of vapory indecision and metaphysical doubt.

  Deep breath, flapping of arms, stutter step, plunge, double plunge, stroke stroke stroke! There’s nothing graceful about my entry, but all the splashing and yelling dissipates the fog just enough for the horizontal admittance of a man and his dog. Out I swim, rolling on my back to stretch the morning stiffness out, flopping back over and digging in freestyle, working myself gradually up to top speed. Cider, who has two speeds, mine and double mine, turns on the jets and disappears after some surface-skimming swallows, her jaws chomping open and closed like a crocodile’s.

  The swallows have nothing to worry about—they enjoy leading her on. In the meantime, I’m swimming in what I hope is the direction of the eastern shore, navigating between strokes by quick glances at the branches of a dead elm up on shore. The fog hides everything except that. After a while, I hardly know whether I’m swimming in water or air, the horizon is lost to me, and the fog muffles even the dipping sound of my hands as they reach, cup, and pull. With the body so disoriented, the mind retreats, too, until it hardly seems me swimming there at all; I’m off somewhere imagining all this, irritated at myself for dreaming up a waterscape so featureless and gray. Time to turn around before I bump into something—in this thick nebulosity, it’s the only thought that coheres.

  And then it happens.

  I’m retracing my course, swimming through the trail of foam left by my kicks, when—my head rolling underwater—an all but imperceptible wave of pressure comes against my eyes and causes them to open. There three feet to my left and slightly deeper than the surface, moving on a parallel course to mine, is a flash of something gold. I say “flash” and “gold” as if my mind had time to register these things, shape the experience into words, but what really happened happened so fast it was over before I had time to blink. Still, re-creating it now, I remember the movement and gold coming to me in one sensory packet, like a sheaf of sunlit rays—how the gold s
eemed so bright and happy I wanted to fasten on to it the way a child at Christmas wants to grab an ornament off the tree . . . how my left hand reached from my normal stroke in a greedy, grabbing motion that came sweeping down toward the golden bauble, and—fluttering the shape of it—just barely missed.

  These things—and how, missing, I felt both an ineffable sadness and a sudden fear. I rolled over and started treading water, gasping, all but shaking, just in time to make out, disappearing through the fog twenty yards ahead, the square stern of a fishing boat trolling the treble-hooked spinner for which I had grabbed.

  A narrow miss then—my skin could all but feel those barbs sinking in. But there was as much disappointment in my reaction as there was fear, and it’s only now I can make sense of it. That sudden appearance of color in the colorless element in which I swam; the tactile definiteness of it in my haze; the envy created by a speed that was greater than mine; the curiosity it engendered, the longing that was far more impulsive than any hunger; the nostalgic compulsion of that possessive juvenile response, mine. Here I’d been all season trying so hard to figure out my why, I’d forgotten the fish’s why, and suddenly I had it, in a demonstration that could hardly have been clearer, more dangerous or plain.

  What makes a fish take a lure?

  I know now. For one fleeting moment the fog dissipates and I know.

  Golden Age

  Picture this for a golden age.

  Trout that are widespread and plentiful, flourishing in waters that are perfectly suited to their rapid growth. A growing number of flyfishermen with increased leisure time to pursue their avocation. The rapid development of lightweight tackle—new fly-rod designs that are much lighter and more powerful than anything seen so far; new and innovative fly patterns tied by fishermen with a deep understanding of aquatic life. A new conservation ethic that persuades even the lowliest trout-chaser he shouldn’t keep all his catch, but must return some to ensure future propagation. Growing scientific interest in the species, with much that was left to hunch and instinct now being studied and described. A literature that celebrates the trout in all its splendor with a delightfully sweet lyricism that makes books on fly fishing the proudest body of writing on any sport.