Words and Photos: Copi Vojta 2021-11-16 08:39:09
With purple mountain volcanic majesty in the background, Evan Slater keeps hope alive in the foreground. You drove across the desert seven hours for me and waited patiently, reading newspapers and listening to the radio while I learned the effectiveness of the San Juan worm on its namesake river, fishing in rolled-up blue jeans, skin also blue like icicles. After graduation, wearing a bikini top and oversized waders with a wilted dandelion in your hair, you caught trout and a pair of one-lensed sunglasses on a size-10 20-incher and we both wished you didn’t have to move so soon. Holding back hangover dry heaves, we dumpster dove for tuna carcasses, careful with the gaff, a pendulum of flesh and metal swiveled into burlap sacks and then the trunk of your Cadillac. Marinating in the blue water, the sacks brought the angriest fish I’ve ever seen. You showed me how to tie the clinch knot on the bank of a Yellowstone river before the PMDs started hatching, and when they did you left upstream to find experienced friends and catch the fish yourself like any angler worth a shit would do. We hot-boxed the tent so many times I’m surprised I have memories. The Full Sails quenched our underage, cotton-mouthed thirsts in the July sun while cottonwood seeds snowed in breezes and hid our view of the gigantic prince-nymph-eating brown trout. I’ll never forget those summers. In a hard northwest rain, we quit our casts and tried to roll cigarettes under a towering cedar. The water falling from the sky ruined four papers and the four-day steelhead bender ended fishless, but the party we threw in the Airbnb was popping—a woman came and two dudes were still in their waders at midnight. You slept on the floor of my un-plumbed cabin up Three Mile Creek, and we drove the old pickup for miles on dirt roads to a wilderness meadow with smiling friends and spinning mayflies and gorgeous falling light. In the foggy morning there was bacon and almost nuptials, and you caught your first cutthroat and brook trout on a fly rod and liked my old friends. In the morning there was frost on the rocks that was the same color as the steelhead you caught and we celebrated with a nip from your flask. Downstream, in the sunny afternoon, an airplane landed next to us on a long, cobbled bar. We thought he was crash landing, but the pilot just wanted to know how the fishing was. You cous-coused and boiled brown trout caught on orange flies in black canyons. We slid up and down steep chutes called trails in low tennis shoes muddy from creek crossings and swam across the tailout of a slow run to get to the other side’s fish. You kept going and going and I couldn’t keep up, the whole way back to camp to go and a rising river. I’d been driving dirt roads early in the morning, listening to sad country songs on the way to meet you in the parking lot, and your cooler had tiny Heinekens in it. We finished them all and walked the bank to find carp, and lots of them, and I watched your 6-weight bend in half multiple times. We ended hot and thirsty with a brush fire putting up smoke against the clear blue desert sky and it was an excellent reunion. We fished the flat-topped creek in the clouds, the surface boiling with rain and rises. We killed our limit and stuffed their bellies with fresh mint and ducked back to town to the grocer before dark and then home to prepare pan-fried trout, homemade noodles and spinach. That was the last time we’d ever fish together.
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