A River Trilogy

by W. D. Wetherell

  A slow start. Back at Slide Inn to get some coffee we meet a couple of fishermen who are just getting into their car. Men in their seventies, in that kind of khaki good shape that suggests ex-military, enjoying each other’s company, having a great time, judging by their smiles—the kind of old-timers Ray and I wouldn’t mind being someday ourselves.

  “Well, you gotta remember two things, boys,” one of them says, after we sing our little song of not much luck. “First is, all these fishermen you see, all the drift boats. Most of them can’t fish worth a damn, so don’t feel shy about going in after they leave. The other thing is—”

  His partner finishes for him. “They’re there. You might not think so, but the trout are there.”

  Good basic advice—and it becomes our motto for the entire trip, trotted out every time we face new water without a clue about what to do with it. They’re there; you’re not fishing over empty water, and you’ve got to act like that with every cast. And yes, we do much better in the afternoon, moving downstream toward Lyons Bridge, waiting for the drift boats to pass, then stepping into the shallows and fishing like every twenty-four inches of water holds twenty-three inches of fish. I catch my first one (a modest brown, but I’m amused at his pretension), and hold it up for a picture; a few casts later Ray catches a rainbow and it’s my turn to snap him. We’re chucking and ducking with black Woolly Buggers, nothing fancy, but at least we’ve discovered that the fish like to hold not only in front of the boulders but also in tight along the banks.

  I relax more with each fish, begin to pay attention to the surroundings, the osprey soaring brown and white over the trees, the blue, wedge-shaped mountains on the horizon to my right, the grazing horses, the exuberant rushing sensation the river gives you that you’re being swept along toward happiness whether you want to go there or not. Ray has been watching the water, gauging it, working up the nerve—and there, he hitches up his vest and wades right across to the opposite bank, making a dangerous, strenuous feat look easy.

  We break for lunch at the Grizzly Inn, indulge ourselves in double hamburgers and double pilsners, feel pretty rosy by the time we go back out. We finish the day on the short stretch of water where the river powers out of Hebgen Lake. There’s a wide side channel where you enter from the road, then a faster, deeper stretch past a narrow island; by the time we pick out good positions the air is dusted up by tiny brown caddis. Here we stumble upon our second good source of advice. A younger fisherman this time, short, wiry, a blond cowlick leaking down from his Stetson, he’s all but bubbling over with suggestions, every one of which we later follow, every one of which turns out to be right on target. Who wouldn’t listen to him? He is a natural, and as the three of us sit there on the island talking things over he glances up at the water, says, “There’s one,” roll casts out a caddis, and hooks an eighteen-inch rainbow he leads into our laps.

  River Three: The Firehole. And advice is what we’re talking over at breakfast this morning; what we’ve managed to garner so far is forming a stepladder against the mountainous stack of our ignorance. Perhaps because there are simply more good flyfishers in Montana than elsewhere, or perhaps because they’re more generous with strangers, we’re finding it’s worth asking almost anyone for suggestions, including our waitress. Plates balanced on her suntanned arms, in a beautifully husky voice that has a good bit of Patsy Cline, she tells us her boyfriend works as a guide and that his favorite river is the Firehole, hands down.

  The Firehole has the reputation of being an expert’s river—the boyfriend must know his stuff. We fish the stretch known as Biscuit Basin in intense and windless sunshine, so it’s not surprising we get skunked. For once it hardly matters. We’re out here to learn, and that humility turns out to be part of the lesson is eminently reasonable. Skunked—but who cares! Who, standing in a gin-clear river that winds its way in lovely sinuosity through a lush meadow that hasn’t changed since the white man first saw it two hundred years ago, a meadow that features on its upstream edge an aroused elk with his head stretched out making a sound unlike any other we’ve ever heard, a deep, sirenlike wobble that is so rich and lonely and molten it must be coming from the center of the earth, using the elk as its bulging mouthpiece . . . a river, for that matter, that curves in and around hot geysers of white spray that suddenly spasm skyward and take on all the colors of the rainbow in cresting, shivering, draping apart . . . who, taking all this in for the first time in their life, could possibly ask that in addition a trout come over and shake their hand!

  We see them anyway, holding under the fringe of meadow grass that forms a floating cover over one of the straightest runs. Beautiful fish, and maybe before our trip is over we can come back and fish a cloudy afternoon when something is hatching, at least stand a chance.

  Our morning on the Firehole does manage to convey an important lesson about Western fly fishing. The difference between here and back home is one of not only scale, but degree. In the East, an experienced flyfisher will often reach the water’s limit as regards trout before he or she reaches their own limit as regards ability; out West, you’re much more likely to reach your own limit as regards ability before the rivers limit as regards fish. We thought, quite frankly, we were pretty good; the Firehole began teaching us how much further we still had left to go.

  River Four: Nez Percé Creek. In Yellowstone you have three or four hours of morning tranquility before the elk jams (“There’s an elk, Edna! Stop the car!”) begin to form and driving becomes impossible. Walking, you only need a hundred yards and you’re free of the tourists, the RVs, the crowds. We’re hiking up Nez Percé Creek for several reasons. One, we need something simple this afternoon after the Firehole; two, I love tributary streams; three, this was the route the Nez Percé Indians followed on their famous flight through the park in 1877, and we want to get a sense of what this was like.

  In its lower reaches the creek winds through open meadows similar to those along the Firehole, sans geysers, but a mile upstream the pines close in, the shadows tighten, and the stream flows through a gently graded forest. Many of these trees are blackened leftovers from the great fire, little more than vertical chunks of charcoal, and its a wonder they still stand. A wonder, too, that the fire didn’t take everything; we spend a lot of time speculating about what trick of wind or rain spared some stands of trees and destroyed others. A light green carpet of vegetation underlines even the most devastated parts of the forest, so all that talk about regeneration is true.

  The fish aren’t hard here—nice rainbows, feisty and willing to take our nymphs. It’s good to have the creek to ourselves; good to play leapfrog as we go, me in front for a trout or two, then Ray forging ahead while I slow down to work one of the deeper pools. After lunch I find a shady spot and try taking a nap. It’s the first time I’ve ever been alone in the Yellowstone backcountry, and thus the first time I’ve ever really thought about grizzly bears in the way they’re meant to be thought of—as splendid embodiments of all we cherish in wilderness on one hand, and ferocious beasties that can eat you on the other. It adds a frisson of uncertainty to even catnap like this, and yet isn’t this the point? To take man down a peg or two from his top-of-the-food-chain kind of hubris and strut?

  There’s a noise in the woods behind me, the splitting creak of timber. Ray? Oh Ray? Is that you, Ray?

  Yep, it’s him, nothing like a bear at all he’s grinning so much. “Thought you were a grizzly,” he says, putting his hand over his heart. “Nice stream, huh? You see those little bluewings?”

  Back in town that night I stop in a bookstore and buy a couple of books on the flight of the Nez Percé. Eight hundred of them, led by Chief Joseph, Looking Glass, and White Bird, crossed over to Yellowstone Lake following the north bank of Nez Percé Creek (as it later came to be called), taking with them a captured group of tourists—an English earl, two women, a music teacher, a brewer, and someone history records merely as a “blowhard”—who, needless to say, must have had the surprise of the
ir lives. I find two aspects of this story incredible: that this was a national park that early and that you can imagine without any difficulty what this long column of warriors, ponies, women, and boys must have looked like as they passed, so little has the landscape changed in one hundred years. Isn’t this one of the secrets of Yellowstone’s appeal? The time-traveler aspect? Blink and it’s 1877, and if the grizzlies don’t get you the Nez Percé will.

  River Five: The Bechler. “Hey, Ray? You know Nelson Algren, the old Chicago novelist? His rules about living, like, for instance, ‘Never eat at a place called Mom’s’?”

  Ray glances over from the driver’s seat. “‘Never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than yours’?”

  “Right. And wasn’t there one about ‘Never take advice from a drunken bartender’?”

  “Sober bartender.”

  “I think it was drunken.”

  We argue the point for the next thirty miles, since the success of our day depends on it. Last night before dinner as we sipped some beers, our friendly bartender (steady of hand, glassy of eye) had raved on and on about what a sleeper the Bechler was, down in the park’s southwest corner. Hard to get to, guaranteed solitude, big fish. Sounded most interesting to us—but was he drunk or sober?

  To get to this part of the park you have to drive through Ashton, Idaho, a town I disliked on first sight. Industrial potato fields that roll quite literally to Yellowstone’s very trees—and would certainly go further if it was up to the powers that rule Ashton, right on across the entire park. This is not just an idle worry; back in the 1930s there was a plan boosted locally to build a dam across the Falls River (into which the Bechler flows), creating a huge reservoir over what is in many respects the loneliest, most beautiful corner of the entire park.

  There’s no entrance gate here, no highway, no tourists, no elk jams. You park at the ranger station (an old blockhouse from the days when the US Army had charge of the park), check in with the ranger if she’s about, and start off on a level trail through high, well-spaced pines. It’s about a two-hour hike to the Bechler. The trees abruptly end and you come out into an enormous and very flat meadow, decorated on the southeast by the unmistakable verticality of the Tetons, to the north by the closer, shaggier escarpment of the Madison plateau. Beautiful—and yet where in all this was the actual river? It flows in a deep, hidden trench, and since the hiking trail bisects the meadow’s center, it’s hard knowing whether to go left or go right.

  Right—and after a soggy hike through flooded grass it’s there: the purest, clearest water I’ve ever seen (or not seen), so we have to stare at the pebbles on the bottom for a long time before convincing ourselves that they are indeed covered by a flowing liquid, though to call this “water” is to give it more definition and substantiality than, on that first glance, it seems to have.

  As we stand there stringing up our rods the wind picks up, strong enough, cold enough, that we plunge down the bank to escape. A little better down here, with the bluff at our backs, but still tricky to cast in, and we have to do it between gusts, loading up quickly and slinging the line out sidearm. But the nice thing about the wind is that it’s blowing grasshoppers into the river; not the clouds you find here when the season is at its peak, but enough that the trout are looking up. Ray, using an orange-bottomed imitation, catches a rainbow of nearly twenty-five inches that leads him an enormous way down the river; on his way back, still panting from the chase, his face radiant, wind-burned, and happy, he spots another, even bigger trout finning under the overhung bank, and smoothly picks it off. Both of these are hooked, played, and landed on the same 6X tippet, which is to say on pure gossamer skill.

  If the Bechler is Ray’s finest hour, it turns out to be my poorest. I’m fishing badly, letting the wind bother me, pressing, and for the first time in my fishing life I learn what it’s like to experience an overwhelming envy, so it’s all I can do to clench my teeth, grunt out a perfunctory “Hey, nice fish.”

  What’s going on? I’m shivering in the cold, missing strikes (and what strikes—geysers exploding out of the river when you least expect them), there are big fish about, my back is killing me, and I’ve come such a long way. All these combine, so the thought of being skunked, a real possibility at this stage, brings me to the point of tears.

  We break for lunch on a sandbar where the bank dips away to give us a perfectly framed view of the Tetons. I let the mountains calm me down, do much better in the afternoon, even though the wind only increases. There’s nothing like a fish to restore perspective, and what fish these rainbows are, possessing a mature and self-confident wildness, not the furtive, withered kind of wildness trout often display back East. My best fish is just short of twenty inches, thicker than the proverbial football. I miss another, even bigger, but this time I can afford to laugh, as my grasshopper imitation, at the apogee of the explosion, does a slow-motion somersault in midair, lands downstream on its back, and—another trout spotting it—is immediately sent skyward again on the crest of another geyser.

  River Six: Boundary Creek. Bushed but happy, we head home about four in order to beat the dark. The cold has deepened, so that’s another factor—this is a notoriously bad place for late-summer snowstorms. Boundary Creek is a smaller version of the Bechler flowing out of the forest; where the trail crosses it on a very flexible bridge some trout are rising, so we stop and make a few what-the-hell casts. I’m pretty exhausted by this stage, so I let Ray do most of the fishing while I lie there staring out at the enormous meadow, trying to get a deep and lasting impression to bring away with me home—and click, I think I have it. Meadow, sunshine, river, fish, Tetons, forest, llamas.

  Llamas? Three of them in line, their arrogant, handsome heads snapping slowly back and forth as they glide effortlessly through the marshy ooze. They’re led by a happy-looking llama keeper, his head swathed in a red bandanna, and behind come the hikers whose packs the beasts are carrying. There’s a campsite a bit further up the creek; the llamas make for it instinctively, circle around the old campfire, crap in unison, collapse knees-first on the grass, and immediately go to sleep.

  “Sober,” Ray says, wading back out. “The bartender, that is.” “You think so? Anyway, what difference does it make? The man’s a genius. We’ll go back tonight and buy him three of anything he wants.”

  River Seven: The Gibbon. Wiped out from the effort of fishing the Bechler, feeling a heavy sense of anticlimax, we’re capable of only something modest today and the Gibbon fits the bill. It’s one of those friendly riffle-and-pool streams that stays conveniently close to the road; it’s longer than you would think judging by its breadth, and extends halfway across the park’s middle. Above the falls it’s ornamented with paint pots, plate-sized hot springs bubbling away in the shallows, so it’s a beautiful combination of classic trout water and world-class exotica, the true Yellowstone mix.

  The trout are small and tricky. You can get fifty strikes in fifty yards, and end up hooking only two or three, so fast do they reject a fly. But who cares! We’re out to relax and get a feel for this part of the park, and the fish, at least today, are almost an afterthought.

  The Madison-Norris corridor was one of the hardest hit spots in the 1988 fires, and blackened trees are everywhere. And while there’s new growth prying its way up from the crusty earth (the most delicate curls of a very soft green that you can’t look at without wanting to stroke), the dominant note, at least in the blackest groves, is still that of holocaust, a sudden and brutal death.

  It’s afternoon before the sun bakes the gloominess out of our muscles. We quit early and head back toward town, stopping only long enough to do some sightseeing along the famous park stretch of the Madison known as Seven Mile Run. (“Choice and challenging,” one guidebook calls this; “the trout are more elusive and difficult here than anywhere else on the entire river.”) Sightseeing, but the wide curve with its fascines of fallen timber, the weed-slicked bottom, and the protective boulders are all so trouty and p
romising there’s no resisting, even in our exhaustion. I catch a decent brown out in the deep current as far as I can cast; it’s like a free sample of goodies we’d have to pay dearly for if we really want them, and in the end we decide we’ve waded out far enough.

  On our way back to the car we stop and take a look at the famous Grasshopper Bank on the opposite shore. I’m not impressed—it reminds me of the kind of overly manicured lawn you see in front of corporate headquarters’ buildings—but that changes in a hurry when a huge trout leaps out of the river and cannonballs back in. Trout will do this to you of course. Wait until the precise moment you’ve taken down your rod and peeled off your waders, then boom—the old cannonball-in-the-water trick. It must keep them smiling for weeks on end.

  River Eight: Slough Creek. Little customs and habits are quick to form, even on a fishing trip, and one of the nicest we’ve fallen into is strolling over after breakfast to Craig Mathews’s fly shop. Craig is easily the most famous flyfisherman in these parts, something of a national celebrity for that matter, and why not, since what the man doesn’t know about Yellowstone flies and fishing is not worth knowing.

  We have some mutual friends. Between this and the instant rapport established between him and Ray, he’s taken the time to listen to us, learn what we’re after, then gotten us started with what always turns out to be infallible advice.

  I say something about fishing Grebe Lake, just for the sake of its grayling—a fish I’ve never seen, much less captured.

  “Oh, you’ll catch one all right,” Craig says, looking up from the counter where he’s just spread some freshly dyed capes. “Small guys, no bigger than my finger. If I were fishing today”—and here a note of wistfulness creeps in; even Craig Mathews can’t fish every time he wants—“I’d try Slough Creek. Here, take some of these. Mackerel Drake Emergers. You’ll slaughter them.”