Summer ain’t what it used to be.
Growing up in Shasta County, I spent summers finding reprieve from Northern California’s sweltering heat in its ample blue lines. The tradition continued after I moved to San Francisco for college. I’d leave Saturday after work, drive hours to the streams of my youth or explore new rivers to the east, fish Sunday and Monday, then turn around for work on Tuesday. Fueled by nicotine, Red Bull, and youth, there wasn’t a drive I wouldn’t make for a trout. Summer and wet wading were like pie and ice cream.
But the obsession took its toll when I opened my fly shop, where customers also did most of their trout fishing in the summer. Back to searching couch cushions to round out a dollar, I couldn’t pass up desperately needed cash flow to do something I had done hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
The confluence of two failsafe adages—“It is what it is” and “Make hay while the sun shines”—led me from trout to the Pacific Ocean and its stripers. The five-hour after-work race to the Pit River became an eight-minute morning drive to the beach and a much more rested George behind the counter.
Fourteen years later, the constraints remain, but the beach now defines my summers. This year, anglers are even traveling four hours to fish San Francisco waters, chasing the dream of a large striper. Admittedly, the beach cannot replace what a trout stream offers, and when you’re obsessed with anything, self-control is hard to exhibit. The orderly nature of a river—the hatches, seams, and lies—is a welcome contrast to the chaos of the coastline. Every May, before the summer rush begins at the shop and the stripers get going, I feel the urge to replay a few of summer’s greatest hits.
This year, I dusted off a vintage favorite: summer on the Trinity. I remembered fishing dry flies to steelhead still in the system, slapping down Chubby Chernobyls and PMDs, only to watch them get inhaled. I pitched the California Fly Fisher editorial committee on a trip north to see whether memory had embellished the experience.
Thankfully, summer’s rhythms delivered an experience that rivaled my selective recollection. Labeled a fall and winter fishery, the Trinity is largely abandoned once anglers migrate to the McCloud and Upper Sac. We found the river empty and full of opportunity, with more rising fish than we could reasonably cast to.
On my way home, I stopped to see Herb Burton, a character from my youth and one of the original fly-shop owners. He smiled and said, “Well, I haven’t seen you up here in a while.”
Just like that, I was back in my early twenties, when trout bum was my career path. We drank beer on the porch and BS’d as anglers do. The Trinity Fly Shop inspired Lost Coast Outfitters, and seeing Herb there felt like returning to where the idea first took shape.
“Still here,” he remarked.
He didn’t mean alive, the way old men sometimes do. He meant the shop. Still open. Still in business. I know now that there is nothing inevitable about that. It was a relief to see him smiling on the porch, holding his place in the world.
I may have turned in my trout-bum card for adulthood, but it’s good to know that it remains almost exactly as I left it: the river, the shop, the porch, and Herb. I can still return when life allows, now with a fully formed prefrontal cortex.
Maybe summer ain’t what it used to be, but it’s pretty good.
Stay fishy, California.
