The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 15.3 • SMOKE ON THE WATER

One of Chris Farley’s characters talked about living in a van down by the river like it was a bad thing, but Logan Allison and Noelle Mullen seem pretty stoked on the Montana dirtbag experience. Photo: Aaron Agosto

I saw the hippie four times before I finally met him. On the first, he was grilling a steak or, more likely, a king oyster mushroom or butternut squash patty, beside his monolith of a van, its matte-black paint swallowing sunlight beside Michigan’s Escanaba River. Without windows to betray its owner’s secrets and no corporate stickers to affirm his lifestyle, it looked less like a trout bum’s carriage and more like an obsidian relic from ancient times.

The second time, he was fishing far upstream near dusk, with a persistent contrail of smoke rising from his head, likely flowing from the business end of a tightly rolled American Spirit. Three times that evening, I saw his left arm hold a bent rod high in the air while his right netted a fish, the smoke tendrils unaffected by the commotion, painting a portrait of serene concentration against the fading evening sky.

The third time I saw him, he was downstream and upwind from me, sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. We were both waiting for some light-colored mayflies to hatch so the trout might make those telltale halos on the river’s surface, signaling their positions and willingness to eat. The micro-brewery crowd with overstuffed backpacks, lightweight hoodies and neck gaiters call the bugs we want to see light Hendricksons, while the senior-discount-fishing-license crowd call them invaria. I say sulphurs to annoy them both, but we all call the bugs we don’t want to see mosquitoes, and an epic season for these carnivores is the reason the hippie and I were both waiting in the river instead of on a stump or rock in the woods along the bank.

Those first two times, he wore a nondescript black baseball cap, but on the third his hat was a hybrid between a Chinese bamboo worker and the straw hats Curt and Punkinhead Martin wore when they tried to shoot Bugs Bunny during his vacation in the Ozarks. As he sat on the rock and waited, the steady upstream wind delivered the earthy, slightly sweet, herbal and woody aroma of the hippie’s smoke to my nose. At the top of each hour, with a regularity you could almost set your watch by, I’d get a whiff of something different—a rich and skunky fragrance that used to be more common at Grateful Dead concerts than in settings like this. When the mayflies finally emerged, he hooked and landed four nice fish beneath that unwavering trail of smoke, always with the understated grace I’d now come to associate with him.

This was the year I discovered tippet rings. Of course, I didn’t discover them the way Copernicus discovered a motionless sun, or Sam Phillips discovered Elvis. No, this was more like stumbling onto a shortcut to work after taking the long way for seven years or finally realizing the metal hook at the end of a measuring tape is intentionally loose so it will make accurate readings whether measured from the inside or outside of an object. As their name suggests, these tiny metal hoops make connecting a tippet to your leader as simple as tying a fly to your tippet. In the process, you don’t whittle away your leader, which I suppose makes the folks who track leader sales wish some mad angler hadn’t actually discovered them during an inspired bout of late-night tinkering many years ago.

Early the following evening, with the hippie fishing upstream in his dark cap, I cast a snowshoe rabbit emerger to a steadily feeding trout near a large boulder. On my second cast, the trout took the fly and I lifted my rod, but all the tension dissolved when the knot connecting my leader to the ring busted loose. I’d caught several fine fish the previous evening with that rig, so a rock must have nicked the line during one of those battles. The fish’s back came out of the water during the brief encounter, showing me enough to put the trout in the 20-inch class. I caught fish steadily over the next two hours, but my 60-something bladder insisted I retreat to the bank, and just as I finished that task, the smell of burning tobacco signaled the hippie’s approach.

“How are you, sir?” he asked, with the hand-rolled cigarette bouncing between his lips.

“I’ve had a good four days, my friend, but I don’t think I’ll fight with these mosquitoes tonight. I’m on to my next destination.” He now held the cigarette between his first two fingers, the way Sean Connery’s James Bond might have done.

He took a long pull from the cigarette, and rather than blow the smoke back out, he let it escape the way steam rises from a freshly poured cup of coffee. I told him about the fish that broke my tippet and how I wished I had another shot at that one.

“Well, you can probably catch that one again. I worked as a cook in Colorado several years ago in Silverthorne, where the Blue River flows through town. An old brown trout lived near a boulder behind an outlet mall. If it was behind the boulder, it was resting, and you couldn’t catch it. When it was in front, it was feeding, and you could.”

He took a long drag, squinting his eyes to shield them from the escaping smoke and to emphasize his next sentence.

“I shit you not, sir. I caught that fish 23 times that summer, and I bet you can catch that one tonight. Happy trails, mi amigo.”

It was close to dusk then, and after his dark silhouette disappeared down the trail, I tied a small spinner to my 5X and waded out near the boulder, writing off his encouragement as the sort of thing hippies say when they want to say things that can never happen. Another fish was taking every spent mayfly that floated by, and my fake proved no exception. After my leader and tippet survived the first encounter, the fish turned and swam downstream, pulling line from my reel in a manner that suggested I’d hooked it in the tail or side. When my backing knot was just past the tip of my rod the fish stalled, and I felt the shake of its head. I reeled in the line and started moving—running, actually—in the fish’s direction. First the backing reentered the reel, followed by the blue running line, then the gold belly, and finally the gray front taper. I guided the trout into the shallow water near shore, coaxed it into my net, and squatted on my knees to remove the fly. I gently pushed a small snowshoe emerger from the corner of the trout’s mouth and briefly thought my leader had somehow come free from the tippet ring.

“What the heck?” I asked out loud, before realizing what had just taken place. I caught a whiff of the burning weed, looked up and saw a dark figure standing on the trail behind the cedar trees.

“Nice job, my friend,” he said through clouds of smoke and mosquitoes. “Nice job, indeed.”

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.3

SMOKE ON THE WATER

Issue List

The Flyfish Journal 13.4