RIGHT Each morning the river was covered in a thick blanket of fog. Stinnett was on high alert, while author Dave Grossman was on coffee break. Photo: Dave Fason F og hangs low over a chilly summer morn-ing 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 reinforc-ing 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 after-thought 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 per-pendicular 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 constric-tion 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 inven-tory 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-nur-turing, 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. 042 ARKANSAS
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 42
