The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 15.3 • ORIGINS

“An aurora so vivid it defied belief along the Idaho-Montana border.” Photo: Joey Mara

We drive west, away from the vast and open Montana prairie, toward a canyon that will lead us into the mountains and to the streams that feed the big river in the valley. A moonlike and foreign landscape lies behind us.

Ever since we arrived, I’ve felt strange, dislocated and unsettled. Looking out over the plains, I struggled to fix my eye on any single point, and as we fished the river last night, casting until darkness made it impossible to see, I kept losing my balance, dizzied by the sweeping space and the pace of the water as it swept by.

I slept restlessly and dreamed of falling from the face of the Earth. When I woke, I recognized this ridiculous melodrama for what it was. If I’d rolled off the mattress, I’d simply have landed on a stained, musty carpet, divots from old cigarette burns at eye level.

Heading into the canyon, we follow one of the tributaries that helped cut the stone walls. As we climb, aspen and alder rise around us, thick willows at waterside. Pines and spruce and larch cling to sharp bluffs, a native maple on the higher ridges.

I begin to relax. I’m accustomed to being in the woods. Forests make sense to me. Game trails lead up and down, taking efficient angles through trees. Our kinship with other mammals is a comfort, knowing they’ve made paths that lead to water and places to forage and bedding grounds. What more do any of us need?

Noah and I are here with hopes of finding Arctic grayling. We’ve caught them before, in a mountain lake we hiked to a year ago when snow still held on rockslides, the flat sheets of stone descending to water’s edge. That June afternoon the grayling were gracious, responding to our flies with most every cast. We held them in the wave’s lap, spread their dorsal fins to reveal a glistening constellation before releasing them. Slowly they swam out of our hands and back into the remote basin that sheltered them through some of the most difficult months of a Montana winter.

While grateful for that experience, we talked on the hike out from the lake about the fact that these grayling were descendants of fish stocked in the 1950s, not the original native who swam the rivers and streams of Montana before we interfered—introducing brown and rainbow trout, sending silt into the river with our excavations, diverting water for irrigation, all of it leading to warmer temperatures and a place increasingly difficult for grayling to inhabit.

So much has disappeared in my lifetime. Back home in the Appalachians, in less than 20 years I’ve watched the forest grow thinner as the insatiable mouths of emerald ash borers caused the deaths of nearly all our ash trees. Our hemlocks labor against the threat of woolly adelgid, and now a blight is ravaging our beech trees. The dismal prognostication regarding wild trout in the east sends my mind racing anxiously for some solution.

While disappearing acts aren’t new—species have come and gone on the earth for millions of years—the rate at which trees and mammals and insects and fish and reptiles and all sorts of other living things are vanishing, mostly because of the ways we’ve chosen to live, brings on a sadness that can be overwhelming.

One of the reasons I spend so much time seeking out wild spaces with my sons involves my efforts to ward off this malaise. I don’t want to live without hope. I still think there’s a chance we might remember Earth is our only home and the other animals our kin.

It’s true that I want to touch these unique fish, witness them in their original habitat. But that’s only part of why I make these journeys. Being in the presence of wildness, in the presence of a native that has every right to live, opens me to a love that is deeper and will last longer than my own small life, a love I hope to share and pass on to Noah and Nathan.

I think this is the foundation of awe. Placed next to a creature who has lived longer, who has inhabited a space and changed it with that long and loyal habitation, emphasizes the transience of our existence as humans and demonstrates how deep our debt is to these other creatures. To their beauty. To the roles they play in giving gifts of sustenance. To the way they give themselves back in death to make the place they’ve lived healthier.

The water is cold and clear. The turbulence of snowmelt is now a month-old memory. We walk in and out of the creek bed, casting to pools upstream, to pockets behind boulders. Sun at midday clarifies every branch and bathes the brilliant scarlet of Indian paintbrush and the muted blues of lupine.

The fishing is slow. A few small browns and rainbows. Nothing else. We’ve changed flies several times, discussed and complained about possible reasons for the lack of action. We can’t make sense of it and revert to bad jokes, saying in the most ridiculous old-timer voice we can muster, “That’s why they call it fishin’ and not catchin’!”

I’m stubborn and curious. It’s hard to get me to leave a stream. Even when the fishing isn’t good.

Today’s no different. But after covering more than a mile of water with little to show for it, Noah suggests we hike back to the car and head deeper into the forest on a truck trail to explore an even smaller tributary.

His plan makes sense, but the desire—maybe the more accurate word is “temptation”—to see what is around the next bend tugs at me. So we compromise. We’ll fish another quarter mile, then bushwhack out to the road to walk down to the truck.

A substantial beaver dam appears just past where the stream turns south, hugging the mountain. Above the 7-foot dam, the water is deep and placid. From more than 100 yards away I think I see the spreading rings of a rise. Noah confirms another rise a few seconds later and we make our way to the promise of possibility, which is enough hope for most anglers.

On the first cast, Noah takes a nice brook trout, a fish we love back home but wish had never been transplanted to the American West. Catching a wild, native brook trout on our Appalachian mountain feels like meeting a saint in the flesh. While brook trout in Montana are wild, they feel like a reproduction of an icon in a church—beautiful but recast, a simulacrum of the sacred, which isn’t fair to that individual fish, that flesh and blood we hold, and I try to remind myself of that each time I catch one.

I cast toward the head of the pool with the same result as Noah. After bringing a few more brookies to hand, we agree to forget our quarter-mile agreement. It doesn’t take much encouragement to keep my feet moving. My imagination is firmly fixed on cutthroat and grayling.

There’s a deep bend ahead with an old pine trunk lodged nearly parallel to the far bank. The water moves toward the bend with good speed and slows a bit just along the line of the submerged log. A hedge of willows bobs its branches in the water. We’ll have to lift our lines quickly after drifting the seam or we’ll be snagged.

My first cast bumps the top of the drowned trunk, fly falling into the water like an ant might if it lost its footing, legs askew, searching for a way out of the stream. The float looks natural and I don’t have to mend much as the fly drifts. Midway along the log the smallest of changes occurs, hardly anything to notice, but it seems out of place. I pull back to set just in case. And with that I have a fish on that doesn’t behave like a cutthroat or a brookie. Noah grabs the net from my back and declares we have an Arctic grayling.

I’ve glimpsed the northern lights on occasion, when I lived along the Canadian border, and once on a trip to far northern Wisconsin, wolves howling in the distance beneath the undulating light, my breath moving in and out in rhythm with those primal sounds and the changing patterns from the solar storms on the surface of our sun. At times aurora borealis manifests as an ethereal green and at other times an airy dance of purples and reds. Staring at that sky it seemed as if river weed was moving and pulsing over my head, awash in the flow of time and space from which we’re all born.

Arctic grayling are sometimes called the sailfish of the north, and gently holding the sail of that fish’s dorsal in the waters its ancestors called home, I glimpse those northern lights, a horizon mint-tinged and swaying with lavender.

We’re made of the universe, composed of the oldest stars, and our bodies reveal this clearly at certain times.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3

ORIGINS

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The Flyfish Journal 13.4