On an average of once a year I fall in love with some restaurant for totally eccentric reasons. The Water’s Edge, I decide, is my new sweetie.
It snows, sleets, and rains all night, becoming, maybe, the big drop we don’t need, and Melrose’s two streets are puddled this morning when Latham and I cross them for breakfast back at The Water’s Edge. After I had gone to bed the night before, Latham walked over to one of the two bars in town to have a beer and play a dollar’s worth of nickels in a poker machine. With twenty cents left he hit a royal flush in clubs and it paid him out two thousand nickels. There was a silence in the bar when the machine stopped paying. A cowboy in the bag looked at Latham from the bar and offered the opinion that he was “one lucky sonofabitch.” Another bar-sitter suggested that it might be nice if Latham bought the house a drink. He did. It cost him two hundred nickels.
We order hash browns and sage sausage, Montana toast, eggs, and one of the five kinds of coffee from Phil. Latham and I are the only ones in the restaurant, so Phil stands behind the coffee bar and chats. He has a hot dog stand on order, he says. That will free him up for lunch—just hire someone to sell the dogs, and he can shut down the restaurant and go fishing. I ask him what it was like to be a mercenary. He says that it and Vietnam turned him from a spontaneously violent man into someone who could control his anger. Most of the time.
“I still get violent when I see a man mistreat a woman,” Phil says. “I’ll break a guy’s face for that. I don’t care if he’s seven feet tall, I’ll break his face, drag him outside, and let the dogs piss on him. That’s all a guy like that is good for.” Phil stares at me in the eyes. I chew my sage sausage and nod. “I can’t understand guys who don’t appreciate women,” he says, “the best creation God ever put on this earth. They ought to be someplace where there aren’t any women for a while, then they’d learn to appreciate them.”
Phil fought for seven countries after Vietnam, and put $250,000 in the bank one year. Then he was in the pool-building business. Then he owned strip clubs in Connecticut. He met Carol in one of his clubs. She was part Puerto Rican, part Indian, and one of the best strippers in the East. Now they are in Melrose with a brightly painted coffee bar/restaurant, getting the cowboys and ranchers used to nuts on ice, king crab and haddock, and appreciating their women.
Montgomery and Bailey have been out since a very cold daybreak, photographing at Lyle Reynolds’s fee water on a ten-thousand-acre ranch north of Dillon. Latham and I are to meet them there at ten o’clock. We are a little early, and before they arrive we look over Tom Bailey’s custom-built Econoline, road-angling van. It’s a nomad fisherman’s dream machine. It has a bed, a kitchenette, a closet, a fly-tying table, tubes above the bed for ten fly rods mounted with reels, storage under the bed for more rods, and a TV and VCR for fishing tapes. In this van and a predecessor, Bailey has road-angled the state a dozen times, covering somewhere around fifteen thousand miles since 1983, and he is still finding good new water.
Such as Lyle Reynolds’s. Lyle runs Sundown Outfitters in Melrose. He has a deal with the owners of this ranch to bring in a maximum of two anglers a day for a rod fee (plus Lyle’s daily guide rate) to fish the three miles of spring creek and four miles of lower Beaverhead River that the ranch controls.
Like them or not, rod fees are a permanent feature on the new face of Western trout fishing. As recently as ten years ago, you could knock on a rancher’s door and get permission to fish almost any water that ran through private land. Now the state’s blue-ribbon trout water, particularly that with no public access, is as valuable as oil. Much of it has been bought by wealthy individuals and posted, some has been privatized by lodges, and on some you can still get permission to fish—but usually you get it now by handing over a rod fee of up to and sometimes over a hundred dollars a day per person. As with other exchanges in life, sometimes you get a bargain, sometimes you don’t. With Lyle Reynolds you get more than your money’s worth.
Montgomery and Bailey pack up their cameras and leave for our next river, an hour and a half south of Melrose, and Latham, Lyle, and I fish a one-acre pond full of feisty rainbows. We catch a dozen or so on Wooly Buggers, then drive down to the Lower Beaverhead for the main course. The water is in good shape after all the precipitation the night before, and very fishy looking. Not much bigger than a spring creek here, the river snakes across its broad agricultural valley in wide coils that organize the flow into runs and corner pools. The Ruby Range rears to the east of us, the Pioneers to the west, both hatted with fresh snow. Latham and Lyle and I stroll the banks in and out of cottonwoods and willows, and probe the pools with weighted nymphs. The upper Beaverhead, with its amazing seven hundred fish over twenty inches per mile, its deep, fast current, willow-choked banks, and exacting fishing, is one of my favorite rivers anywhere, but there is nothing relaxing about it. This lower stretch is an idyll. Downriver, Lyle’s rod bucks. “A fish in ever’ hole,” he whoops. There is, in fact, and many of them are whoppers.
Less than three hours later, when Latham and I have to leave to meet up with Montgomery and Bailey, we have caught or lost five fish of twenty inches or better, including one hook-jawed, two-foot old brown that comes unstuck right at Latham’s feet. It is exceptional fishing on lovely water, and we tell Lyle we will be back as we take to the road again—Highway 41 south to 15 this time, to somewhere south of Dillon.
Tom Bailey is putting his rod into one of the tubes over the bed in the Econoline and taking off his waders. I have come back to my car to get a fly box and am surprised to see him ending his fishing with a couple of hours of daylight left. He has just walked, he says, a couple of miles upriver to a pool where he and one of his best friends fished once. That day, Bailey was hung over and took a nap on the bank while the friend caught two nice fish out of the pool. Bailey had wanted to see the pool again and make a cast into it and remember different road trips with that friend, who was now, I knew, recovering from a serious cancer operation in a hospital in Boston. Bailey had just come from visiting him there. Now he has decided to go home. He is just no good for the rest of this trip, he says, though he hates leaving it, particularly on this river.
After Bailey drives off, I go back to the river, to a series of pools upstream of the bridge where I want to finish my evening’s fishing. I watch a muskrat swim the river with some hay in his mouth, and swallows strafe the big bridge pool downstream. The light has gone flat and amber. The ragged white Lima Peaks are to the south; to the east, across a few miles of honey-colored pastureland, is a beautifully crumpled range of hills, sculpted like sand dunes in mauve, tan, and olive. We have been fishing for three hours, since around 4:00 P.M. I have seen a bald eagle, Canada geese, redwing blackbirds, many mallards, sandhill cranes, a stuffy-looking phalarope . . . The river is off-color from two days of rain, but Tom Montgomery, Latham, and I have all caught fish, some of them big, and all of them in beautiful condition. Moreover, this river has caught me. I wade into the dull shine of its current, chance a cast, and think, If this were the river in the last valley over, that would be okay with me.
Eleven miles of the river run through the five-thousand-acre ranch that has been in Debbie Tamcke’s family for six generations. A number of rich and powerful people know how good the fishing is in that eleven miles, and have tried to buy the ranch from Debbie’s family, offering such attention-getting sums for it that the place’s value no longer has anything to do with its cattle-ranching potential. The family is tempted to sell, but they don’t want to see the river zipped up and put on a shelf by some absentee-waterlord tycoon, as so much of Montana’s best water has been recently.* Debbie thinks about building a lodge on the river, but she and her husband know nothing about the lodge business. In the meantime they charge a daily rod fee, and, as with Lyle Reynolds’s operation, the fishing and the river experience on the Tamcke ranch is worth every penny of what you pay for it.
We spend this night and the next on the ranch in a comfortable cabin that the Tamckes
rent out at a reasonable cost to anglers. Tim Linehan drives up from Idaho, towing his drift boat, to join us for the rest of the trip. And at the end of our second afternoon’s fishing on the river, Latham drives the rental car back home to his job and wife in Jackson Hole. Before he does that, he ups his biggest-ever brown, on an afternoon when Tom and Tim and I all have hard-to-forget fishing in cool, nervous weather, the creased and folded sage-colored hills glowing to the east like giant runes, and release a fair number of trout back into the off-colored water, some of them of a size that stays between me and the trout.
After fishing, Tom and Tim and I dine at the Peat Bar in Lima, “Home of the Cook-Your-Own Steak.” While enjoying a beverage of your choice at this establishment, you pick any size steak you want from a freezer in the back and throw it on a big grill in the middle of the bar. There are deer heads on the wall; poker machines; a pool table. While you cook your slab of frozen beef, you might strike up a conversation with the two pudgy, good-natured girls at the bar, or one of the startled-looking adolescents at the pool table, or the desultory proprietor of the Peat with his feet on the bar, expounding on why whitetail deer are superior to mule deer: a conversation, perhaps, about the road, since everyone here seems equally a Bedouin.
At least once on most road-angling trips the fish will whip you like a rented mule, and that’s what the pale Missouri River rainbows did to us yesterday. We drove north up Interstate 15 from the Tamcke ranch through Butte and Helena, just past Wolf Creek to Graham Deacon’s Lazy-D Fly Fishing Lodge in Dearborn, arriving at about 3:00 P.M. on a calm, hot, high-pressure afternoon that had all of us, Graham included, looking forward to an easy bite.
An old friend of Tom’s, Graham is a big, good-humored redhead from Oregon with a ruddy face and a cheerfully doomed sense that he has sacrificed his life to sport. He runs the Lazy-D from early May through mid-October, then goes back to Oregon to guide and outfit for steelhead and ducks. When he is not fishing for a living, he is fishing for fun, as he was yesterday. With no clients presently in, he had offered to put us up for a couple of nights at his comfortable lodge and to show us some of his water.
The thirty miles of the Missouri that Graham guides on, from Holter Dam to the town of Cascade, is a tailwater that looks and fishes like a hundred-yard-wide spring creek. There is a lot of weed growth, and the water is alkaline and slow, with ornately eddying currents that scroll the surface with glassy, oval boils and meandering foam lines. There were flocks of white pelicans on the river and its islands, and we saw geese, mergansers, goldeneyes, mallards, and a few deer coming to water on our float from around four to nine-thirty. We also saw lots of trout, slurping mayfly duns and caddis, and porpoising for emergers, but we caught damned few of them. In our two boats were three professional trout-fishing guides and a geezer who has been to the trout-fishing picnic himself more than once. On this hot, still, perfect afternoon, with fish rising in pockets all up and down the river, we went to fifteen-foot leaders and 7x tippets, tried PMDs and CDCs, beadheads and emergers, ants, Baetis, sparkle duns, spinners, and soft-hackles . . . and, mostly, we had our butts handed to us.
The late light was beautiful on the rock cliffs, though; the fish we did catch fought and jumped spectacularly; and the soups, huge, fresh salad bar, and creative entrées we ate just before midnight at the Dearborn Inn, just a few steps down the hill from the Lazy-D, won the blue ribbon on this trip for best meal under ten dollars.
Today, of course, is another story. Graham wants us to float the Dearborn, a tributary to the Missouri that only fishes well for about three weeks a year, between its water being either too high or too low. We are here in that window, and grabbing opportunities as they float past you is part of what road-angling is all about, so we put in on the Dearborn around ten o’clock.
It is another hot, clear day, and a long one, as the float covers twenty river miles. Twelve of those miles are in a canyon of steep organ pipes and spires of volcanic rock that matches the better-known Smith River canyon for loveliness and solitude. Wild pink roses grow in crevices in the rock cliffs, and swallows wheel in and out of nests there. The river is a glacial blue green, making up into a couple of interesting rapids, choppy runs, and dark, slick corner pools that butt into rock faces. The fishing is tentative until Tom adopts an old Montana standby—a Bitch Creek nymph as dropper with a Wooly Bugger on the point, dead-drifted with lots of scope into the deep pools—and it is the right rig at the right time. From then on we catch fish steadily for the rest of the day, most of them the pale, hard-fighting Kamloops strain we met yesterday in the Missouri.
At the take-out, after nearly twelve hours on the river, Graham says it is the best day he has ever had on the Dearborn.
We are joined for dinner at the Dearborn Inn by one of Graham’s guides, a thin, bearded carpenter named Dave Ames, who tells, between soup and dessert, two affecting, detail-rich road stories about loss. One story features a client who up and died on him of an aneurysm while hiking out of a canyon after fishing. Looking perfectly normal, the client sat down beside a tree, said, “Oh boy,” and died with his eyes open. The other story is about a tarpon Dave fought for three hours from the shore on the island of Anegada, from the end of a late-night party into dawn, and finally lost to a shark. Dave described seeing the two halves of his fish, the front half still trying to swim, drifting out on the tide. For some reason, I ask him if he is married. He is palpably a private man, and I am immediately sorry I asked this question.
“I had a very unhappy wife,” he says after a moment, and smiles.
Later Dave tells me that if we are going to call this a real Montana road trip, we have to shoot up at least a couple of road signs. He also tells us about the Battle Creek Ranch lakes outside of Choteau, and we decide to try them out the next day on our drift north.
Choteau was a town I liked. Surrounded by rich ranch land but with the Front Range of the Rockies right there to remind people every time they look west that they are nothing more than human, it seemed a prosperous but modest, friendly place. There was the Munch and Lunch Restaurant, and the Foothills Woman Gift Shop, and men ambling around in big hats, with snuff cans making circles in the back pockets of their jeans. A Triangle Meat Company truck announced with Western forth-rightness that that company was “Hog enough to want your business, man enough to appreciate it.”
A man named Perry, who ran a tire store in town, directed us to the lakes. The country’s biggest dinosaur dig was on the road out to Battle Creek, he told us. The dig was mostly staffed by city folks, easterners, he said. “They pretty much treat us like a bunch of low-life, brain-dead, small-town motherfuckers. Those guys would really like you all,” he said, seeming to mean it as a compliment. “They’re used to the new.”
One answer to the attrition of available trophy-trout water around you is to create your own, which is what Jack Salmond has done on his forty-thousand-acre Battle Creek Ranch. Located thirty miles of dirt road from Choteau, right up against the Front Range at the edge of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, in the middle of hundreds of square miles of grasslands and nothing else, the ranch has been in Salmond’s family since the first whites settled this area of Montana late in the last century. It was once owned by his grandmother, Elizabeth Collins, the Cattle Queen of Montana, whose life became the subject of a movie by that title starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. Some years ago Salmond began experimenting with raising trout in a number of fifteen-to-twenty-acre man-made lakes on the ranch, and found the growth rates of the fish so satisfactory that he decided to open the lakes to fee fishing. Now he has an attractive, modern lodge that sleeps eight, and seven lakes holding brookies, browns, and Kamloops rainbows, which, in two of the lakes, average an honest five pounds and run as heavy as eight to twelve.
There are more and more of these carefully and expensively managed fly-fishing kiosks on private lakes throughout the West, and there will certainly be more yet. Salmond’s is one of the best, and if you want to catch trop
hy trout and have more money than time to do it with, Battle Creek Lodge is a fine place to find yourself almost anytime during the June-through-September season.
Salmond was away in Oregon, so we fished two of the lakes with Justin Hilgendorff, his head guide. Wading out of the first one at 6:30 P.M., we found our neoprenes covered with the maggoty, gray-green waterbugs called scuds. Justin pointed out that the amazing stew of scuds, shrimp, damselflies, dragonflies, midges, caddises, and snails in the lakes is what accounts for the phenomenal trout growth rate of a pound to a pound and a half and six to seven inches a year. Figuring from that information that scuds had to be powerful good for you, Tom and I scooped a few off our waders and tried them. They had the dull tastiness of snails, but moved around more as you ate them.
Young Justin watched us with a good Western effort at disguising his horror. “I don’t reckon we’ll forget you fellas,” he said.
Tired and hungry for something more than scuds, and not being much of a lake-fishing enthusiast anyway, I drove back to Choteau around eight o’clock. Tom and Tim fished with Justin until dark. Between them, on a late hatch of caddis, they caught around a dozen fish, and the smallest of those was over three pounds.
Yesterday we drove through the Blackfoot Indian town of Browning, then up into the conifers and ragged stone spires along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park to West Glacier, where we had the best and biggest burger of the trip at the Conoco station restaurant and talked to the young partners at Glacier Wilderness Guides about fishing the Middle Fork of the Flathead River for the big west-slope cutthroats we had heard were running there. But the float didn’t make a strong enough case for itself, so we drove on, into windy, showery northern weather, through Kalispell, then west on Highway 2.
The Next Valley Over Page 6
