The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 13.4 • WHY PURPLE?

In northwest Montana, the summer of 2021 brought a long and smoke-filled fire season. High up in the Swan Range, lupine popped against muted colors from the haze of fires below. Photo: Aaron Agosto

It’s not so much the clear water or the vast wilderness or the too-close-for-comfort grizzly or the extreme isolation or the hundreds of cutthroats that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s the purple. I first noticed it on the hike into the Great Bear Wilderness—purple clematis gathering around ancient larch, the last survivors of a fire 100 years ago. You can still see the burns around their bases. Imagine holding a scar that long, growing into it, forming it into the foundation of your existence—dark bark mottled with violet flowers nodding in thick understory. Surrounded with color, we become more than what we were.

I saw it again when I finally got to Spruce Park—a small toolshed and one-room cabin in a little meadow with a lodgepole fence on three sides opening to a steep ledge looking downstream along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. A piece of mauve tinsel hung from a pushpin on a windowsill. Once I’d unpacked and settled in, I hiked down to the water to take a swim and there, right behind the cabin, dark huckleberries. I picked a handful and ate, something I’d end up doing throughout each day. Leaning down, sifting through the shrubs, gathering a handful, my palms stained purple so everything I held was smeared with that dark shade.

And again, there it was when I hiked up to Spruce Point. Looking out across the Charlie Creek ravine up to Mt. Baptiste, a cluster of lupines around the base of an old fire tower. A peak of purple. I’ve never followed a color before. Each day dropped another magenta morsel that I picked up and held and sometimes I think it was the only thing keeping me from falling down that steep slope of loneliness, or just going completely feral and losing any sense of who I am or who I’d be going back to when I eventually left the wildness. For two weeks, alone in the backcountry, I followed those indigo crumbs into water and onto mountains and through burnt-out meadows and to a dead elk, wondering where they’d lead me, wondering what I’d find at the end of the trail.

On that first day, I tied on a big purple foam hopper, something I’d never fish back home in Pennsylvania. It only took two casts before I saw the pink-streak-wink of a cutthroat reaching for my fly. I missed that fish and the one after and more than I want to admit. I’d never waded in water that clear. I’d catch myself watching the cutthroat reaching through that glacial mirror for the dark color floating on the bright surface, like the long suck-draw of a cicada through a summer haze cut by rain. Inevitably I’d set the hook too soon, succumbing to the anticipation of the snap and heft and motion of a hooked trout. I tried to force myself to slow down, but I am weak in the presence of so much beauty about to break water. The next day I switched and started fishing a shorter 4-weight fiberglass rod. Its slow action compensated for my greedy quick-sets and I finally started landing fish.

Finding and catching fish became a routine like filtering water, or eating jerky, or skipping stones to keep time. I’d wake up and drink coffee while sitting on the ledge, watching the sun touch the mountains and draw its way down to the river. Once the valley was in light, I’d fall into that slow glass rhythm of pauses, fly line loading and slow settle of cutthroat chasing floating plum. The trout would turn up from the deep-blue green riverbed toward alder touching water and I’d wait and wait and wait until the surface broke and the rod forgave my quick judgment. I stood in sandals in the cold water and the big stones moved so I moved with them and let the reel do the work of balancing the rod and the fish and myself in a fulcrum of desire and preservation. I finally worked the cuttie into the shallows and there it was, sangria stuck in the jaw. I kept asking why purple? as a pink throat slash cut water.

I’m accustomed to using flies that imitate specific bugs. Hare’s ear, pheasant tail, parachute Adams, elk hair caddis, woolly bugger—they all mirror some life that clearly exists in the stream I’m fishing. Here, the only purple I found was outside the water. These fish weren’t reaching for something they knew, something they were comfortable with. No, these trout were on a journey. They were on a pilgrimage toward some great fuchsia unknown, and maybe I was too. Maybe that shade tucked between red and blue was the tint of their god or their mother or a rock they eddied behind when they first fell in love. Maybe one of their ancestors thousands of years ago followed a halo of orchid alpenglow as glaciers receded and they found this river they’d call home until the next ice age or drought age, and each reach out of the water is a reach back toward that first sacred exploration of their elders. Maybe everything is a following and a reaching, a trek into the tone of an unknown landscape.

Each evening I’d sit on the ledge overlooking the river and watch the sun fade behind Red Sky Mountain. In the last light of a quarter moon after the first rain in over three weeks, a purple hue laid down across the sky. Everything stilled and turned into some variation of that color. Perhaps it’s that simple. Perhaps those trout are just reaching for the last of that purple light. Perhaps that’s all this life is, reaching for the last light we see, unforgivingly, with abandon, palms upward, eyes open, mouth wide, fierce and wild.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4

WHY PURPLE?

Issue List

The Flyfish Journal 13.4