CUTBANK SMOKE ON THE WATER I saw the hippie four times before I finally met him. On the first, he was grilling a steak or, more likely, a king oyster mushroom or butternut squash patty, beside his monolith of a van, its matte-black paint swallowing sunlight beside Michigan’s Escanaba River. Without windows to betray its owner’s secrets and no corporate stickers to affirm his lifestyle, it looked less like a trout bum’s carriage and more like an obsidian relic from ancient times. The second time, he was fishing far upstream near dusk, with a persistent contrail of smoke rising from his head, likely flowing from the business end of a tightly rolled American Spirit. Three times that evening, I saw his left arm hold a bent rod high in the air while his right netted a fish, the smoke tendrils unaffected by the commotion, painting a portrait of serene concentration against the fading evening sky. The third time I saw him, he was downstream and upwind from me, sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. We were both waiting for some light-colored mayflies to hatch so the trout might make those telltale halos on the river’s surface, signaling their positions and willingness to eat. The micro-brewery crowd with overstuffed backpacks, light-weight hoodies and neck gaiters call the bugs we want to see light Hendricksons, while the senior-discount-fishing-license crowd call them invaria. I say sulphurs to annoy them both, but we all call the bugs we don’t want to see mosquitoes, and an epic season for these carnivores is the reason the hippie and I were both waiting in the river instead of on a stump or rock in the woods along the bank. Those first two times, he wore a nondescript black baseball cap, but on the third his hat was a hybrid between a Chinese bamboo worker and the straw hats Curt and Punkinhead Martin wore when they tried to shoot Bugs Bunny during his vacation in the Ozarks. As he sat on the rock and waited, the steady upstream wind delivered the earthy, slightly sweet, herbal and woody aroma of the hip-pie’s smoke to my nose. At the top of each hour, with a regularity you could almost set your watch by, I’d get a whiff of something different—a rich and skunky fragrance that used to be more common at Grateful Dead concerts than in settings like this. When the mayf lies finally emerged, he hooked and landed four nice fish beneath that unwavering trail of smoke, always with the understated grace I’d now come to associate with him. This was the year I discovered tippet rings. Of course, I didn’t discover them the way Copernicus discovered a motionless sun, or Sam Phillips discov-ered Elvis. No, this was more like stumbling onto a shortcut to work after taking the long way for seven years or finally realizing the metal hook at the end of a measuring tape is intentionally loose so it will make accurate readings whether measured from the inside or outside of an object. As their name suggests, these tiny metal hoops make connecting a tippet to your leader as simple as tying a fly to your tippet. In the process, you don’t whittle away your leader, which I suppose makes the folks who track leader sales wish some mad angler hadn’t actually discovered them during an inspired bout of late-night tinkering many years ago. Early the following evening, with the hippie fish-ing upstream in his dark cap, I cast a snowshoe rabbit emerger to a steadily feeding trout near a large boul-der. On my second cast, the trout took the fly and I lifted my rod, but all the tension dissolved when the knot connecting my leader to the ring busted loose. I’d caught several fine fish the previous evening with that rig, so a rock must have nicked the line dur-ing one of those battles. The fish’s back came out of the water during the brief encounter, showing me enough to put the trout in the 20-inch class. I caught fish steadily over the next two hours, but my 60-something bladder insisted I retreat to the bank, and just as I finished that task, the smell of burning tobacco signaled the hippie’s approach. “How are you, sir?” he asked, with the hand-rolled cigarette bouncing between his lips. “Great, how about you?” “I’ve had a good four days, my friend, but I don’t think I’ll fight with these mosquitoes tonight. I’m on to my next destination.” He now held the ciga-rette between his first two fingers, the way Sean Connery’s James Bond might have done. Words Timothy Schulz • TOP TO BOTTOM • One of Chris Farley’s characters talked about living in a van down by the river like it was a bad thing, but Logan Allison and Noelle Mullen seem pretty stoked on the Montana dirtbag experience. Photo: Aaron Agosto Taking five before hopping into a new run, the backlit smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette puts up some pretty signals. Photo: Copi Vojta THE FLYFISH JOURNAL 103
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.3: Page 103
