T wo flyfishermen and 50 Mennonites walk into a train station... Our fishing trip was starting out as much like the lead-in to a good joke as it was the welcome culmination of a year spent scheming and planning. It was almost midnight when Mike and I finally boarded the train in Rochester, NY. We had sim-mered in the terminal for over an hour with about two dozen Mennonites all bound for a wedding somewhere outside of Chicago. A lightning storm blazed outside. The air conditioning didn’t work in the terminal and the inside of the passenger car felt no different given the mass of humanity already gathered within. It was a poorly lit, damp-smelling and crowded free-for-all for any empty seats, but we managed to grab two across the aisle from each other. “It’s an adventure,” Mike said, just before pulling his ball cap down and falling asleep in the reclined seat. He was right. We were headed to Montana to meet our buddy Rich and fish a few storied western rivers. We’d happily survived far worse in the past for the sake of chasing various piscine quarry. In Chicago, we gathered our backpacks and rod tubes, claimed our checked bags, and parted ways with the Mennonites. The next leg of our journey would be aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder for the 31-hour, 28-stop run to Essex, MT, in the heart of Glacier National Park. continued through Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Shelby, Cut Bank, Browning and East Glacier, before pulling into Essex Station—a single, ground-level, concrete platform among towering Ponderosa pines, small enough that the giant train could only unload one car at a time and had to back up to do so. The smell of the pines was intoxicating and the August air was cool. I’d spent some time in Montana in the past, so it was a familiar and glorious welcome. Being Mike’s first time under the big sky, he didn’t know where to look first and was rendered to a smile and a slow shake of his head in disbelief. Rich was waiting by his pickup truck. The moment coalesced into handshakes, hugs and a couple of off-colored jokes, and the trip that we started loosely planning more than a year ago suddenly became a reality. A Massachusetts striper junkie, retired Connecticut State Trooper and for-mer fishing guide, and a writer from western New York at a train stop in far-northern Montana—it was either the beginning of a really good joke or an even better fishing trip. THERE IS A LOT of America between Chicago and northwest Montana. The line of passenger and bunk cars barreled northwest to La Crosse, WI, and then farther north-west to Fargo, ND. Taking a sharp left at Grand Forks, our western run then passed through Devils Lake, Rugby, Minot and Stanley, out of North Dakota and into Montana just past Williston, and • RIGHT • “It was my first summer living in Montana after moving here from Pittsburgh. I was eager to get out and fish for native fish in some big, idyllic country, so I went to Lary’s Fly and Supply in Columbia Falls to get some flies and beta. The weird dude behind the counter sent me up to the North Fork, and six years later the scenery fills me with the same sense of wild wonder that it did that first day.” Photo: Aaron Agosto THE FLYFISH JOURNAL 065
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 15.4: Page 63
