The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4
WELCOME TO COTTER: Nothing is Normal on the White River
Words: Dave Grossman 2022-06-24 09:57:33
“White River Fly Anglers guide Matt Stinnett took us to one of the best views on the river. The bluffs did not disappoint, and the view from above was even more impressive.” Photo: Dave Fason
Fog hangs low over a chilly summer morning ride up the White River outside Cotter, AR. Concealed within it is a flotilla of 20-foot-long johnboats with hopeful Midwesterners dunking grocery store shrimp cocktails off the gunnels, their trip’s success measured in how many dead rainbows lay in the cooler at the end of the day (thus reinforcing my disdain for hatchery rainbow trout). My friend Matt, running the tiller, tells me to keep my ears and eyes open for the other boats in the fog. Matt has been guiding the White for a while now. His former life in resort kitchen management is mentioned as an afterthought when he breaks out the charcuterie boards for client lunches.
Over the whine of the jet motor he says, “The dumbasses you gotta really watch for are the bait guys, who will throw two anchors and set their boats up perpendicular to the current to fish. Twenty feet of bad day right across the river.” I had moderately risked life and limb for less-assured interactions with oversized brown trout in the past, but a little sphincter constriction in these types of situations is inevitable. A few more uneventful minutes pass, lulling my brain into a contemplative state. Just as I am taking mental inventory of my pockets, the boat ass-slides left, narrowly missing a bait guide tucked into the fog, perpendicular to the current.
“See? I told ya,” Matt says, letting me know it’s OK to breathe again.
Pretty soon, we come off plane beneath a dam and its eight generators’ worth of man-killing, trout-nurturing, water-spinning electricity for folks hundreds of miles away. Nothing about the White River, the trout that live there, or the folks who make it their home would be considered normal anywhere else in the world we fish. It exists singularly, in its own place and time, whether outsiders notice or not.
The first time I went to Arkansas to fish, my friend and I got pulled over, our car searched and our contraband confiscated. As the police officer walked away from the car, he turned and with the smile of a peace officer who was about to consume my very high-quality weed, he said smugly, “Bet I ruined your fishing trip.”
Joke was on him though. It was the best trout fishing trip of my life until that point. I really had no concept of the biblical term gluttony until I had pulled out my fourth or fifth slab of Ozark gold with no end in sight. My soul filled to the size of a homebound hoarder, and I had no plans to stop. These browns were originally stocked either by the Fish and Wildlife Service as an experiment in the late ’40s or by some Grapes of Wrath-type characters in the middle of the night from a bridge, depending on who you ask. Either way, the trout are wild and large, validating my long-held belief that big water equals big fish. These particular specimens can be caught during the winter on streamers, on caddis in the spring, and on big foam hoppers at the end of the summer, which was why I found myself in Cotter, walking into the fly shop on a sunny afternoon. You can tie flies for a trip like I usually do, after painstaking internet sleuthing for the whisper of a pattern here, or the local name of another pattern there, or you can walk into the shop and grease the right palm of the right dude and buy the only pattern you’ll need all week. I did both, as usual, and, as per usual, “bought and paid for” beat tying blind every time.
But being able to buy the right pattern is only a side benefit of the shops in Cotter. It’s kind of like Ibiza for old white fishing-famous guys who are into brown trout. No other laboratory is like the White for great minds throughout flyfishing history to test their theories. I tend to nerd out on stuff like this. When told that Davey Wotton, the Welsh Nino Brown of the wet fly, was over at the Saturday morning tying/bullshitting session, it took every shred of self-respect I had not to fanboy all over the king of swing. He wasn’t hard to spot sitting at the table of overalls-wearing, camo-clad older men. He’s not a large man or a young man. He was also the only one speaking Welsh. With ink like a mid-level Russian gangster and a chiseled mouth cussing more than any I’ve encountered, he became cemented in my mind as the hardest man to ever fish soft. I have a sense that every trout town used to be this way—built on a foundation of like-minded individuals who actually enjoy being around each other, talking about fishing and slinging insults in only the manner that people who are fond of one another can. Too often these days competition and ego preclude anyone sitting around talking about anything at shops. A fly shop used to be the social and informational anchor of the fishing community. These days it has become just another transactional errand to run before the weekend. It’s easy to get lost in the nostalgia of the present around the White.
When Matt tilts the motor up, we all shuffle into our positions for the first drift of the trip. I ease into the rower’s seat, grip the oars and feel the heft of a 20-foot boat with a 200-pound motor hanging off the downstream end. You can’t really row an Ozark johnboat. Steering is the best you can do; pulling hard in these kinds of currents with this kind of boat is fighting the nature of the thing. I choose to row first because my buddy took the day off from being paid to be on the river to float me, and the right thing to do in this situation is to defer first shots. Also he told me he hadn’t had clients good enough to make the long cast under and between structure required for the hopper bite this time of year, and it’d been killing him. And anyway, this is the White—with a well-placed cast, every bank has the potential for the best brown trout you have ever caught. Shots will be plentiful if not constant during the next four days.
Dividing my attention between the silhouette of the black foam on the water and any downstream obstructions concealed by fog, we glide down the bank until an ever-so-subtle dimple of the surface gives way to a tail the width of grown man’s hand slapping the water in the telltale explosion that comes when trout realize there’s a hook penetrating their jowl. There’s no anchoring in 20,000-plus cubic feet per second, so fights usually flow downstream. You will get the kamikaze that heads into the current for its freedom, but with a motor those fights become one-sided—akin to motoring down a big tarpon in the Keys. This particular brown uses the current and we ease him into the net about a mile downstream. The difference between an 18-inch fish and a 20-inch fish is hard for even the most seasoned eye to discern. The difference between an 18-inch fish and a 24-inch fish is as plain as the nose on your face, and this fish is all nose.
“Well, that felt good,” Matt calls from the bow as the fish tails back into the current, taking all those client-based frustrations from the past couple of weeks with it. “You’re up.”
The next three days are awash with tails, fins and old friends playing musical chairs to see who can get out on the river and when. After a few days of cast hopper, set hopper, net fish and repeat, Arkansas has a way of changing your perception of success. It is the only fishery I have ever been in where “just another 20-incher” gets thrown around with such little regard. Cookie-cutter 20s are on the same rung as the smelly dude on the side of the highway trying to get to the next show on the “shit that matters” ladder. Anything less than 22 inches is looked at as a mere annoyance on one’s way to that 24-inch fish you fully, and with a straight face, expect to catch. A few days of this type of fishing does strange things to a person.
The White River generates as much trout revenue as even the most famous western destinations. Unlike out west, the White’s vistas alternate between classic Ozark sandstone bluffs and second-home mega-mansions with swaths of bright blue riprap replacing the riparian zone in what must be the best example of “you don’t buy rock, you rent it” I have ever witnessed. Every third house has an example of failed geologic hubris from the previous season, with the violent fluctuations in flow leaving no Texas oil baron safe from erosion.
The landed gentry’s draw to the river is the same trout that we and all the happy-go-lucky tourists on idle pursue. The White seems to be big enough for everyone, with more tips of the hat than wags of the middle finger given on any day, and a clear geographic distinction between its two user groups. While we prowl the banks with foam, they tend to stick to the middle of the river where the rainbows play. My eighth-grade science teacher would call this symbiosis, but it reminds me more of those “Coexist” bumper stickers with all the jumbled religious symbology acting as the letters. If there’s enough for everybody, nobody gets too bent out of shape about things. Though it’s annoying when someone uses an outboard as a trolling motor—a universal fact no matter where you are—it’s easy to forget those annoyances when the next wild two-foot brown swirls your foam an inch off the bank, and the next one, and the one after that, all adding up to a jolly indifference to your surroundings.
The last day of any fishing trip usually has a quiet desperation to it. An expiration date tends to put things into focus. Sometimes the fish can smell that desperation on you as easily as the morning biscuit musk you left all over your first fly of the day. I think the fish can also smell when you’ve beaten them up for three days straight and, like a true Arkansas hog, you’re back at the trough for more. That’s the only way to explain my sudden and persistent case of the yips. Three days of being on my game has left my hook set complacent. As we float yet another stretch of prime water, I make yet another cast at yet another juicy bank shaded by head-high branches. The take is one of those that only result when a fly is placed by chance directly on the nose of a brown trout on station—the fish hits it in pure reaction as soon as it lays down on the water. Yesterday I would’ve stuck him. Today I come up with air. “Fish of the trip,” hurls into my back from someone in the boat.
“Yeah, I know,” is the only thing I can say, the size of that white maw now burned into my consciousness. Any other trip, on any other river, my reaction may have very well been a blind burning rage followed by days of deep, dark, soul-crushing depression. But at this moment, devoid of malice and self-hatred, I realize the underlying beauty of the Ozarks, its rivers and the folks who ply them. The whole communal trout scene brimming with hospitality can be explained by the pure Buddhist understanding of nirvana—knowing that the White River is your fishery. This world-class, wild brown trout factory normalizes wild brown trout expectations that otherwise live in the deepest, darkest fish dreams we only admit to ourselves when the lights are out and the rest of the family is in bed. If you live and play in trout heaven, it’s easy to tolerate life’s minor inconveniences and foibles. A thought comes, too ridiculous to say out loud in anyone else’s presence. I hear someone else impersonating me, “We’ll get the next one, and hell I’m good even if we don’t.” Then I realize I’m the one saying it.
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