Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  I dialed Deeds’s number. The phone rang and rang. I could see him sitting in his ratty kitchen with a cup of coffee at his elbow, looking out into the prune orchard that surrounds his place and hoping that the ringing would stop.

  “Who is it?” he asked when he picked up the receiver. He must have been holding it yards from his mouth; I could barely hear him.

  I told him who it was, and what I had in mind.

  “You’re crazy,” Deeds said. “Hat Creek is too crowded. There’ll be all kinds of people around.”

  “It’s almost October, Paul. It won’t be too bad.”

  “Maybe not for a city person,” he said.

  Deeds can be very stubborn when it comes to matters of principle or opinion. From his reluctance to discuss Hat Creek, I figured that he’d probably been there once when four or five other anglers were on the river, and that this horrible crowd had so disconcerted him that he swore never to return.

  “If you were making a trip, where would you go?” I asked.

  “McCloud River,” he said. “Down in the canyon, near the Nature Conservancy preserve. I’d camp at Ah-Di-Na Meadow. I’d fish downstream from there to Ladybug Creek. Hang on for a second, my dog wants to get out.”

  The only part of the McCloud that I was familiar with was a tame stretch than runs parallel to Interstate 5 near Dunsmuir. It’s a decent but unspectacular stream in that region, similar to many other streams that border highways and are subject to the passing fancies of motorist-anglers. The McCloud that runs through the canyon is completely different—far less accessible and so less popular. It flows through rugged terrain that still has a few bears and mountain lions. In the canyon, the trout are wild.

  “It’s getting cold out there,” Deeds said, when he came back on the line.

  “You don’t think it’ll be crowded on the McCloud?”

  “I sincerely doubt it. The road in is about eight miles of bad dirt.”

  I checked a map of Siskiyou County. The town of McCloud was just fifty miles or so from where I’d be. “Suppose I fish Hat Creek first, then meet you in McCloud?”

  “I can’t just drop everything and take off.”

  This made me laugh. Deeds is divorced. He has no job. He lives off his faltering prune crop and the small portfolio of stocks and bonds that he inherited.

  “What can be so pressing?” I asked. “The harvest is over.”

  “There’s still the dog to be fed.”

  After further negotiations, he agreed to call me in the morning. I told him not to be too late, since I wanted to get an early start, but I didn’t have to worry. Deeds woke me just after six o’clock, while the sky was still black.

  “Friday at the McCloud Hotel,” he said. “I’ll meet you there about noon.”

  Almost nothing makes me happier than to leave on a fishing trip. I feel like I’m doing something active for a change instead of hanging around on a street corner waiting for a bus to jump the curb and run me over. One of the secret terrors of the age is that we are all dying slowly of complacency. I carried my tackle to the car and put it in the trunk. The sky was red now, streaked with pink clouds. I could tell from the haze and stillness that it was going to be hot. By the time I’d reached Redding, around midmorning, the temperature had risen to eighty-four degrees. Redding is at the northern tip of the Sacramento Valley. It’s a wonderful spot to experience heat, since it’s hemmed in by two mountain ranges—the Salmons and the Cascades—and the air in town moves not at all.

  I stopped at a tackle shop that specializes in materials and gear for those who fish with flies. The clerk told me that the fishing on Hat Creek had only been fair for the last week or so. He said that I shouldn’t look for much in the way of insect hatches, except for orange caddis flies and maybe a few blue-wing olives. The trout would most likely be feeding below the surface. They’d go for nymphs and streamers. (Nymphs imitate insect larvae; streamers imitate baitfish.) He suggested that I use a fly line with a sinking tip. I bought one and also some stone-fly nymphs and some leeches. When I asked the clerk about places to stay, he recommended Lava Creek Lodge, in Glenburn.

  That afternoon, I got my first glimpse of Hat Creek. It snuck up on me without any fanfare. I went over a highway bridge just past Burney and saw a stream on both sides of me and then a sign that said HAT CREEK. I turned the car around and pulled down an access road that led to a picnic area by the water. After Deeds’s warning, I expected the picnic tables to be occupied by hundreds of chubby guys in T-shirts and funny hats, but nobody was there. Nobody was fishing, either. I walked to the creek and knelt on the bank. The water was very clear. I could see almost to the streambed—about five feet down, I guessed. There were weeds—red, brown, purple, many shades of green—shifting around in the current. The motion had a witchery to it. In spite of what the clerk had told me, there was a good hatch of mayflies going on. The bugs floated toward heaven on lacy wings.

  The setting was so serene, and so perfect for trout, that it was hard to remember that Hat Creek was once a decimated stream. Its transformation began in 1968, around the time that the Department of Fish and Game came under pressure from conservation-minded angling organizations for having let the quality of trout-fishing in California deteriorate. The department had been slow to protect prime habitat against environmental degradation, and there were fewer and fewer productive wild trout streams around. To make up for its losses, the department relied on what’s known as a “put-and-take” program. In essence, the state kept dumping millions of small, hatchery-reared trout into rivers as fast as anglers reeled in the old ones. That’s pretty fast—hatchery fish are easy to catch. At the hatchery, they’ve been trained to answer the dinner bell. They’ll chase after almost any type of bait—worms, salmon eggs, even mini-marshmallows. They’ve never learned any survival skills, so when they’re planted in a stream, they panic and school together in fear. Most of them are hooked right away. Predators pitch in to make short work of others. Only a few hatchery fish in any river manage to last from one season to the next.

  The put-and-take program was (and is) popular with weekend anglers who were only interested in filling their creel, but it didn’t satisfy the purists. The project to reclaim lower Hat Creek was an attempt to please them. When the project started, trash fish made up about ninety-five per cent of the creek’s population. They’d eaten or otherwise interfered with most of the native trout in the project area—a three-and-a-half-mile stretch between Lake Britton and Baum Lake. Biologists went to the stream and captured wild strains of rainbow and German brown for later restocking. The stream was then treated with chemicals. About seven tons of trash fish eventually turned belly-up—Sacramento suckers, hardmouths, buffalo fish. Next, a barrier was constructed at the northern end of the creek to prevent the trash fish in Lake Britton from moving upstream. The wild trout were planted again, and they flourished. They had more food, less danger and competition. The project was such a success that, in 1971, the department established a more elaborate wild trout program to restore and perpetuate quality angling throughout the state. Currently, seven-teen streams and a lake are designated for wild trout management.

  For a while, I sat on the riverbank, watching the insects hatch. The sunshine felt good, a tonic to the bones. Every now and then, I saw a dimple on the water when a trout rose to swallow a fallen bug. I had to stifle my desire to run to the car and grab my rod. The sitting still was an act of discipline. The notion was to be calm instead of frenzied, as I usually am on the first day. I concentrated on the creek, its flow, the channels where fish were feeding, trying to commit the details to memory. It takes a long time before you begin to see things with any degree of actuality. After thirty minutes of meditation, I got to my feet, stretched my legs, and drove to the lodge.

  …

  Glenburn is not so much a real town as a name on a map. It’s located in the Fall River Valley, at an elevation of about thirty-five hundred feet. The valley has a cowboy feel to it. Beef cattle are t
he major agricultural industry, so pasture-land is conspicuous. I passed fields of grass and alfalfa, of grain hay. There were sprinklers in the fields—the sort with long pipes and spoked wheels. Blackbirds were riding them. I saw hundreds of mallards overhead, beginning their annual migration, winging south along the course of the Fall River. Like Hat Creek, the Fall is spring-fed and extremely productive. It supports an estimated two thousand trout to the mile. The property that borders the river is all privately owned. The only way to fish the Fall (unless you’ve got a rancher friend) is by boat. A boat opens up twelve miles of countryside. You drift by farms and ranches, weathered barns, aspens, grazing cattle. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of Mt. Shasta with its eternally snowcapped peak.

  Lava Creek is a relatively new place. It consists of a lodge with a bar and a restaurant. The lodge sits right on the edge of a pretty little lake called Eastman. There are a few cabins, too, set among scrubby pines, and I rented one. It came equipped with a dented pot-and-pan combo and several back issues of Family Circle and Cosmopolitan. I don’t think I’ve ever rented a cabin anywhere that didn’t have at least two or three women’s magazines on the kitchen table. Some Gideon-like organization must be responsible for distributing them to resorts throughout the Pacific Northwest.

  After I unloaded the car, I took a stroll to see if I could ferret out any hot angling tips from the locals. Near my cabin, I ran into a young guy in a down vest who was chopping wood. By the look of the pile he’d stacked against a shed, he was preparing for a cold winter. His name was Kyle. He and his wife managed the place. He told me that Hat Creek was going to be a tough mother to fish. I’d have to cast perfectly if I hoped to score, because the water was clear and slow-moving and wouldn’t disguise my mistakes. Most of the big trout had already been caught, then released, and they were especially wary. Kyle knew guides who refused to let their clients even try to cast. Instead, the clients had to deposit their flies on the water, then strip line from their reels by hand until the flies floated in front of feeding trout. For novices, Kyle said, the best spot on the creek was fifty yards of broken, riffly water that flowed out from a Pacific Gas and Electric Company powerhouse. The riffles helped to hide a faulty presentation. Your fly didn’t have to land as smoothly there, since the water was in a state of perturbation and even real insects bobbed around like mad. “You try there first,” Kyle said.

  I got to the powerhouse at six o’clock. It was just off the main highway, down a well-maintained utility company road. Four men were already fishing in the riffles. They’d left enough space for me to sneak in among them, but I hated it when somebody did that to me, so I put on my waders, climbed over a stile, and walked upstream toward slacker water that rolled idly through a meadow. Some black Angus cattle were plodding around on the opposite hillside, their heads lowered to the ground. The trees at the edge of the meadow were incense cedars. Their bark was red-brown, ridged and covered with scales.

  The calm attitude I’d cultivated during my meditation vanished completely once I had my rod assembled. Trout were rising everywhere, making circles with their lips on the smooth, slick creek. Occasionally, I heard an explosion—some really monstrous lunker leaping into the air to nab a bug. I couldn’t decide what the fish were taking, so I tried a leech that I’d bought in Redding. Properly speaking, leeches are ugly, segmented, bloodsucking worms of the type that attached themselves to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. The imitation is not so repulsive. It’s a feathery black fly that’s best fished just under the surface.

  Once I had the leech tied to my leader, I moved closer to the stream. I wanted to wade it, like the men below me in the riffles, but it was too deep where I was, and I had to do my casting from shore. Whenever you’re casting, the idea is to fall into a hypnotic rhythm, so that you and the rod become one—so that thinking becomes impossible—but I failed to accomplish that. The rod and I were bitter enemies. It wouldn’t do a thing I asked it to. I kept hooking the leech on the tall star nettles and giant mulleins behind me. It seemed to me that if I went further upstream, where the banks were not so overgrown, I might do better, but the soil there proved to be marshy and I slid into it up to my knees.

  The whole scenario would have been tragic if it hadn’t happened to me so many times before. One of the few advantages of maturity is that petty failures no longer make you break rods, get drunk, and curse at strangers. I brushed the muck from my waders, then wiped my hands on my shirt. (In a pinch, fishing clothes are a tolerable substitute for towels or handkerchiefs.) I snipped off the leech and tied on an orange caddis. It was a dry fly, so it floated. With its wings propped up, it looked like a princely specimen, but it found no takers. Neither did the mosquito I tried next.

  As I was trading the mosquito for a black ant, I glanced up and saw a mangy cocker spaniel running toward me. For some reason, fishermen’s dogs are always friendly. They love to dance around and do tricks and stick out their tongues in a totally joyous way. Some of their masters’ joy at being outside in the good world God made must get transmitted to them. I patted the spaniel on the head, and he licked my hand. His master came along in a minute or two—a stocky guy who was grunting from the effort of walking. He’d chewed his cigar to an interesting mass. I asked him how he’d done, and he said he’d taken two minor-league trout the night before, but that he’d been skunked this evening. “The moon, it’s almost full,” he said. “Those fish have been stuffing themselves on caddis all month long.”

  At dusk, I packed it in. About seven or eight men were in the riffles now, pressed in much too tightly. I watched them for a bit—they were all using nymphs and streamers—but none of them got any action. I opened a can of beer and drove to the lodge. The country night was sweet. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, enjoying a rush of speed, and the liberating sensation of being unpoliced. Traffic cops are scarce in the Fall River Valley. The dark, twisty roads impose the laws. I pushed the radio button and on came Charley Pride singing “You’re So Good When You’re Bad.” A little later, the white clapboard face of Glenburn church jumped out at me. It was built in 1886. Services are still held in it once a month, even in winter, when the deacons have to fire up a potbellied stove to ward off the chill.

  …

  There was frost on my windshield when I left the lodge the next morning. I was tempted to go back inside, crawl under the covers, and read Family Circle until the sun was higher in the sky, but I pushed myself forward, into the wintry air and then out into the valley. A man and his son were launching a skiff in the Fall, and they both waved and smiled, blowing clouds of breath. The leaves of the aspens along the river had died some more during the night, and they were a brighter yellow than ever. A powder of new snow was on the mountains. The light was intense, a shock to the eyes.

  I hoped that I’d be rewarded for bucking the cold, but the powerhouse riffles were again occupied by several anglers. One guy was wearing earmuffs and gloves. The sight of this coward so unnerved me that I had a very Deedsian reaction and took off in a huff for the picnic area I’d stopped at the first afternoon. It was still deserted. I followed a trail that went under the highway bridge into another meadow, thinking it might lead me to a secret, uninhabited, fruitful run of water.

  The trail took me around a bend in the creek. Ahead, I saw a short stretch of fast water. It wasn’t as fast as the riffle water, but it was fast enough to sink a wet fly. I chose a stone-fly nymph from my fly box. Western stone flies emerge in spring and summer, but, as nymphs, they’re present in streams at other times, and they’re an important food for trout. The fly must be fished deep to be effective, so I wrapped a little piece of lead around my line. This made casting more awkward. I kept wishing for an insect hatch; the trout would start feeding, and I’d know which imitation to use. But the bugs stayed quiet all morning, and I had to fish blind. Around one o’clock, hunger got the best of me, and I walked to the car to eat. I had a sandwich of Safeway cheese, and then an apple, and then I had a nap. I must have been
tired, because I didn’t wake until midafternoon. I went to the creek and washed my face, then drove to the powerhouse again. All the back-and-forth driving was beginning to take the shine off my fishing experience.

  On the utility company road, I had to brake to a halt when a porcupine raced in front of me. Actually, “raced” is too strong a word to apply to any porcupine, even if the animal is moving at top speed. The porcupine waddled. It seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see it. In the mountains, you get used to the chipmunk and squirrel kamikazes who are always darting in front of your tires, risking their existence for a thrill, but porcupines are pretty rare. They appear to have stumbled into the wrong century, and they’re not happy about it. Once this porcupine made it across the road, he waddled into a gully and started climbing a hummock, toward the shelter of some toyon bushes. The hummock was wet from the morning’s frost, and the porcupine had difficulty with his footing. He’d almost make it to the toyons and then the earth would give beneath his feet and down he’d roll, quills-first, into the gully. The show was so good that I switched off the motor and sat there watching him. The curious thing was that he never bothered to look back. I knew that if I were doing the climbing, and I sensed the presence of an intruder, I’d be peeking over my shoulder whenever I could. Maybe that’s a good definition of neurosis—to be constantly peeking over your shoulder to check what might be wrong. The porcupine was incredibly determined. He must have fallen fifteen times before he finally reached his goal. I wanted to applaud him. In fact, I would have applauded him if I thought he’d care, but he didn’t even stop at the top of the hummock to celebrate. He wasn’t anywhere close to being human.

  For once, nobody was in the powerhouse riffles—I had the spot to myself. I tied on a new leader with a very fine taper and, to that, I tied a caddis nymph. I waded into the creek rather cautiously—the current was strong—and began to cast. It went well for a change. I was able to concentrate on what I was doing, but after thirty fishless minutes, a thought unrelated to angling came into my head, and then another thought came—inconsequential, both these thoughts—and I drifted off in pursuit of them. Of course, I had an immediate strike. A trout with a sense of humor grabbed the nymph while I was playing around with the little fist in my skull. The bite was like a reminder from nature. It brought me back to attention, but then I drifted off again, into a fantasy about how I’d tell Kyle of Lava Creek that I’d hooked and lost a terrific fish. The fantasy gave way to speculation about why anglers are pathological liars, and before I knew it I’d worked myself to the end of the riffles.