OPEN WATER WHY PURPLE? 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 ances-tors 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 ev-erything 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. LEFT “A Yellowstone cutthroat fooled by a purple Thunder Thighs Hopper on one of those days where you tie on a fly and it never comes off. As I wrapped up the day in Yellowstone National Park, I clipped the hopper off and placed it in my retirement box, where special flies go on display like a personal museum.” Photo: Jakob Burleson 104 THE FLYFISH JOURNAL
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 104
