Still Life with Brook Trout (eBook)

This was one of those trips that, before it was over, ate up nearly a thousand miles, five tanks of gas, three quarts of oil, God knows how many cups of coffee, and cost me one sixty-six-dollar speeding ticket from a polite but humorless cop outside Moneta, Wyoming, one of those towns where the elevation exceeds the population by hundreds of times. In this case, 5,428 feet, ten residents. As near as I could tell, there hadn't been a hiding place in the last fifty miles big enough for a jackrabbit, let alone a police car. I wasn't pleased about the ticket, but the cop had apparently come out of thin air and I had to hand it to him.

It's easy to drive too fast across these flat, empty basins between mountain ranges where a trip of any distance can dissolve into a kind of pointless, caffeine-induced speed. It's daylight. You can see for miles. The roads are straight and there doesn't seem to be anything to run into, although the small white crosses along the side of the road suggest otherwise. Once you slow down closer to the speed limit, you notice more of them.

I was on my way to float the Wind River on the Shoshone and Arapaho reservation with Tom McGuane, Mike Lawson, Jack Dennis, and guide Darren Calhoun. Tom is the novelist whose work I've admired all my adult life and whose fishing books are among the rare few that read like they're true. Mike is the author of the landmark book Spring Creeks, but I first knew him as the slow-talking guru of the Henry's Fork of the Snake River in Last Chance, Idaho, and Jack wrote the fly-tying book that was propped open on my desk when I tried to tie my first trout fly sometime in the early 1970s. I've always been impressed by writers and, oddly enough, being a writer myself hasn't tarnished that one bit.

These are men I don't get to see often, but who I know and like, so there were none of the usual worries about celebrity fishing. It's hard to describe and impossible to predict, but there's often some sort of nonsense from the well known. I once fished with a famous angler who was actually a pretty good fisherman, but who only enjoyed catching trout when there was someone nearby who wasn't catching them. As for writers, I once met one who claimed that he couldn't start writing a book until he had 'dreamed extensively in the voices of all the characters.' That kind of thing.

For my own part, I've never been able to manage anything like dignity while fishing and I've never met anyone else who could manage it either. The few who I've seen try all ended up looking like pompous fools, although to their credit, many of them came to realize that and eventually would only fish with other pompous fools.

Anyway, I'd never fished the Wind -- which is reason enough to go -- but Jack had also told me there were some big trout in it. I probably asked 'How big?' because that's the automatic response, but I didn't pay attention to the answer because it wouldn't have mattered. As always, we'd go to the river with no clear plan except to fish, and something would either shake out or not.

I stopped in the town of Shoshone and bought my reservation fishing permit at a twenty-four-hour gas station called the Fast Lane. Then I drove the thirty-some miles down the canyon to the motel where we'd check in and meet Darren for a half day shakedown float. I was ahead of schedule, so I drove slowly to calm the road jitters a little and pulled over here and there to look at the water. Stopping to check out the river before you start fishing amounts to a kind of foreplay, but it can also be the longest and best look you'll get. Later on, you can be too busy to take in the...