A Temporary Refuge: Fourteen Seasons with Wild Summer Steelhead
By Lee Spencer. Published by Patagonia Books, 2017; $27.95 softbound (to be released in June)
There once was a time when Lee Spencer would spend up to 15 hours daily fishing for summer-run steelhead on the North Umpqua River in Oregon. These days he is content to sit in a makeshift perch on a ledge above Big Bend Pool on Steamboat Creek which is a major spawning tributary of the North Umpqua, patiently observing resting steelhead while raking copious notes. When he bothers to cast at all in the main river, he cuts the points off his hooks so his flies won’t hurt the fish.
Lee Spencer is the “Fishwatch Caretaker” at Big Bend Pool. His function from May through December each season is to be a “human presence” that will deter would be poachers from wiping out the wi1d steelhead that gather by the hundreds in the pool to await winter rains that will send them upstream to spawn. Big Bend was once known as the”Dynamite Hole,” but thanks to Spencer’s presence, the explosions that would turn massive numbers of fish belly-up are now a thing of the past. Spencer is now in his eighteenth season at Big Bend, patiently observing his surroundings and taking meticulous field notes. He has given up secure employment and a comfortable life in order to study and protect these fish. A prehistoric archaeologist by profession, Spencer says he is “peculiarly trained to document the unknown.”
What he found, A Temporary Refuge, is a distillation of 14 seasons at Big Bend Pool, mostly in the company of Sis, an Australian cattle dog, a heeler who saw her “job” as greeting visitors and herding them down a footpath to an observation platform that her master had set up for his field work. In season, Spencer lives onsite in an old Airstream trailer, with no phone, e-mail, or Internet, and it is almost too easy to think of him as a modern-day Thoreau. No doubt comparisons to Walden will prove irresistible.
But if Spencer’s book brings to mind any literary antecedent, let me suggest it is another, older classic, Gilbert White’s 1b, Natural Hi1tory of Sdhorne. First published in 1789 and never out of print, it is one of the most beloved works in English literature. White’s classic was the first natural history to suggest that the lives of birds and other animals have their own richness and rhythm. Like White’s masterpiece, A Temporary Refuge is a natural history written by an amateur “naturalist,” a distinctly old-fashioned term. And like White’s book, A Temporary Refuge, is in essence a work of phenology, which is the study of seasonal changes in plants and animals from year to year- such as flowering, the emergence of insects, and the migrations of birds and fish – especially in their timing and in their relationship to weather and climate. Both White and Spencer based their books on their field notes, which became a sort of annual calendar of observations that took in all the Rora and fauna, migratory patterns, and seasonal shifts and transformational changes in their immediate habitats. White was a Protestant clergyman focused primarily on birds. Spenser is more Zen-like and inclined toward salmonids. Neither seems to have missed a thing.
In making the transition from obsessive steelhead fisherman to the guardian of a single pool – first as a volunteer at Big Bend, later as a full-time •fishwatcher” getting paid a modest per diem by the North Umpqua Foundation – Spencer learned to see his riverine habitat afresh.
The first day of that season, I realized that the pool represented an unusual opportunity to take notes on whatever these wild summer steelhead did. Note taking and observation are what I spent more than twenty-five years doing as a prehistoric archeologist . . . For the previous four or five years I had been spending fifty to a hundred days each summer and fall casting flies to steelhead in the North Umpqua, and my interest in this species of Pacific salmon was fully developed, though I had far more questions than answers Plainly, so did everyone else. In the more than seventeen years that I had been casting flies for these fish, the how-to and the whys of steelhead and flies had accumulated in random layers of half-truths . . . By[now] I have spent more than 3,400 days mostly without a fly rod in hand, just sitting with the wild steelhead at the pool. I can now leaven most angling myths with natural history observations.
Big Bend on Steamboat Creek is what Spencer calls a “refuge pool,” a place where steelhead can gather to wait out the warm-weather months. They choose the pool at Big Bend because it is refreshed by a feeder creek that provides water that is much cooler than the temperatures found in the rest of Steamboat Creek. Over the summer and autumn months, as many as four hundred to eight hundred wild steelhead, along with a few spring chinook salmon, come to rest in this pool. They are exquisitely attuned to their surroundings, especially to the presence of visitors at the pool. No fishing has been allowed on Steamboat Creek since the 1930s, but the presence of humans can stress the fish. Because he is now getting around fifteen hundred visitors there each season, Spencer has chosen not to name either Steamboat Creek or Big Bend Pool in the text of his book. Which is a bit ridiculous, because its location is com mon knowledge, and both Steamboat Creek and Big Bend Pool arc named prominently on the book’s Amazon page, on the cover of the advance reading copy I received, and in the promotional literature put out by its publisher, Patago nia. (Spencer also appears in Patagonia’s documentary film DnmNation.) Perhaps this is a Zen riddle we are supposed to solve, because this book could have come out of the mind of Chuang Tzu. Is Spencer dreaming he is a steelhead, or is he a steelhead dreaming he is a prehistoric field archaeologist
This is to say that the author has the ability to think outside the ordinary human perspective and perceive things from the point of view of an animal whose mind is mostly a mystery to us. For example, based on long observation, he believes steelhead leap out of the water primarily for a better view of their surroundings and often in response to even the smallest changes in their environment. One season, a lightning strike caused a protracted wildfire near a tributary stream three miles above Big Bend Pool.
The steelhead were more active than I had ever seen them. They carried out an estimated 25,000 jumps, flashes, accelerations, and rises. Eleven days after the start of the fire, I counted 303 jumps during the course of one day. On an average day prior to the fire, a large number of jumps for a day might amount to forty.
Virtually all jumps by steelhead are for the purpose of getting their eyes above the surface. One, undertaken for the sake of taking a good look around, involves a steelhead jumping as much as six to eight feet out of the water. During this vertical jump the steelhead keeps its head up, which causes the fish to drop back into the pool tail first or on its belly. l11ese “looking leaps” were the main type that I saw executed during the time of the fire.
My guess is that the steelhead in the pool were receiving continuous signals of the fire carried to them by the currents of the [tributary] creek. Seeing very little in the water, they jumped up into the air to look about. Because they could discern nothing above the surface either, they continued making their jumps.
Why do steelhead take flies? Is it aggression, fear, or some latent feeding response? Steelhead and salmon don’t feed in any meaningful sense once they return from the ocean to their natal river. Spencer thinks they seize flies out of what we humans call “curiosity.” Steelhead are constantly rising to organic debris such as leaves and twigs — seemingly more often to this stuff than even to living insects — and are forever nosing around the flotsam and jetsam of a stream. To “match the hatch,” steelhead anglers might as well tie their flies to resemble twigs.
The wild steelhead pay sharp attention to the world around them, both above and below the surface, and they are interested in even minute changes. When the first few red leaves of the Pacific dogwood drift through the pool in the fall, steelhead line up close to the surface and take turns examining or mouthing the leaves. The same thing happens with the first brilliantly yellow and lanceolate Pacific willow leaves, the first woolly bear caterpillar, the first gigantic and yellow broad-leaved maple leaf, the first orange vine maple leaf, and other first-time events. In the quite rare event that a steelhead actually takes an item floating through the pool, the steelhead moves into the path of a leaf or lichen, opens its mouth, and shakes its head to release the item after mouthing it. The same is true when certain bugs first appear.
Spencer used to think all steelhead rising to his flies were would-be takers. Now he knows better. “I [am] more prepared to regard steelhead as fellow creatures adapted to their own perceptual world, and not as myopic creatures responding to the magical reality of steelhead flies.” This “curiosity,” he believes, is part of a steelhead’s adaptability to an ever-changing environment. “With a creature the size of a steelhead, its interactions with its environment must include learning, and that curiosity can be a powerful tool in any learning process. Learning is especially useful in dealing with change, and the Pacific Northwest high-gradient streams are one of the most changeable environments on the North American continent.”
What they might not be able to adapt to, he says, are the ecological ravages mankind has brought about with our modern way of life. The author makes a compelling case for closing hatcheries in every river basin that has sustaining populations of wild steelhead and salmon. “Native” hatchery steelhead can’t really be considered “native” to a given stream, because “there are probably more than twenty-five different local breeding populations of summer steelhead in the North Umpqua Basin, and each is native to a different tributary or main stem reach.”
Finally, “the best we can do for them is to let them be.” Fly fishers will have to think long and hard about that. Or start cutting the points off our hooks.
There is more to dwell on in this book than in any other I have read about fly fishing. It’s not just about the way of the steelhead. It’s about an entire world of forest and stream teeming with life amid seasonal changes: plants, fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals — and the people of the river basin who tell their stories. Spencer seems to know everyone up there by name. A Temporary Refuge is arranged in the form of an almanac, with each month in the vigil from May through November being given its own chapter. His narrative is drawn from his working diary of 16 volumes of annual notes that he kept and posted on the North Umpqua Foundation Web site (where they can be viewed at northumpqua.org.) His field notes are often used by biologists and other employees of the U.S. Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. But the real appeal of this book is to a general audience and to anyone who savors fine nature writing.
In that regard, it is very much in the spirit of Gilbert White’s classic The Natural History of Selborne, whose admirers have included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden. David Attenborough called White “a man in total harmony with his world.” You can say the same about Lee Spencer.
Lastly, this is the story of a relationship between a human and a dog.
While heartfelt, the story avoids the kind of sentimentality that usually dooms such narratives — especially in their “Go toward the light” chapters. When the time comes for Spencer to put down his beloved heeler, there is grief. But there is also a deeper understanding. Every living thing dies, though it may only be humans who “know” death. Spreading the ashes of his pet, the author summons the opening stanza of the Eighth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke.
With all its eyes, the animal world
beholds the Open. Only our eyes
are as if inverted and set all around it
like traps at its portals to freedom.
What’s outside we only know from the animal’s
countenance; for almost from the first we take a child
and twist him round and force him to gaze
backwards and take in structure, not the Open
that lies so deep in an animal’s face. Free from death.
Only we see death; the free animal has its demise
perpetually behind it and before it always
God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity,
the way brooks and running springs move.
Rilke’s famous sequence of poems called Duino Elegies begins with lamentations but ends in rapture. And in The Sonnets to Orpheus that are the companion poems to the Elegies, the poet finds complete acceptance in all things alive and earthly. Rilke’s open- ness is the eternal and infinite nature of reality into which all animals gaze.
But our human perspective is limited. We set up barriers around what we see, and these become traps to our living a life that is fully aware and in the moment. But there is a way to experience the world more fully and joyously. Fly fishers know such moments. They come to us when we find ourselves caught up in the flow of an activity that is so immersive we lose ourselves in the fascination and joy of what we are doing. But we tend to think of such moments as circumscribed — reserved for special activities, like fly fishing. If we can learn to see the world from all perspectives — not just the human one — we might see life as always flowing and transformational. And we might come to know, even within the limitations of our human perspective, some of the freedom that animals must feel. And find in love and nature consolation for our mortality.
For Lee Spencer, Big Bend Pool is the Open in Rilke’s poem. I can hardly think of a more profound testament to a river or of a scientific and sociological document that is so human, beautiful, and moving.
— Michael Checchio
The Fly and the Fish: Angling Instructions and Reminiscences
By John Atherton. Published by Skyhorse Publishing, 2016; $24,99, hardbound.
Skyhorse Publishing has reissued one of the classics of modern American angling literature, John Atherton’s The Fly and the Fish, first published in 1951, now with a new foreword by angling historian Mike Valla. It is a companion volume to the publication of The Fly Fisher and the River: A Memoir, by Atherton’s wife, Maxine, chronicling her life as an independent female angler after her husband died of a heart attack while fishing on the Miramichi River in 1952.
In the age of fluorocarbon tippets and Bobbicators, what’s a California fly fisher to do with a book written almost seventy years ago, when gut leaders and silk lines were still the norm, by an East Coast commercial artist who was born in 1900, when Theodore Gordon was still experimenting with fishing the dry fly?
Its discussions of gear may be dated, but this is by no means simply a historical document. One of the perennial debates in the fly-fishing world involves what the fly imitates. There are those who, following Datus Proper in What the Trout said, emphasize presentation, or imitating the behavior of an aquatic insect, over size, shape, and color, rather than imitating the appearance of the bug. I have a friend who argues that a trout will take a bare hook if it is properly presented. But there also are many who devote all their energies to tying flies with the exact size, shape, and color that match the bugs on which trout feed. Atherton is principally known for his contribution to the “appearance” side of this argument, with special emphasis on color: his theory and practice of “impressionism.” It is rooted in his own theory and practice as an artist thinking deeply about the fly and the fish.
Although Atherton made his money and his reputation as a commercial artist, designing ads General Motors, Shell Oil, and Dole and creating covers for magazines such as Fortune and the Saturday Evening Post, he also had another side, exhibiting work in a Surrealist-influenced genre termed “Magical Realism” at a New York gallery that also exhibited works by Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, and Pavel Tchelitchew. (Google “John Atherton artist” to view examples of both kinds of his work.) He was a serious artist who used to chide his Vermont neighbor and fellow Post contributor Norman Rockwell for the sappy subject matter of his covers.
It is from the point of view of a practicing artist that he declares: “The flies used for so discriminating a fish as the trout should, first of all, have the appearance of life,” and “If you will look closely at a live dun” during a mayfly hatch, “(not one in a specimen bottle), you will observe that his coloring is ‘impressionistic.’ It is built up of many tiny variations of tone such as we find in the paintings of Renoir, Monet, and others of the impressionistic school of art As they studied the form which reflected or absorbed light and thus took on certain color qualities of its surroundings, they were dealing in life, not death. Anglers should do the same.”
For dry flies, Atherton argued, blends of different colors of fur should replace monochromatic dubbing for bodies, and impressionistically mottled wood duck or similar feathers should replace the quill wings still in use, while gold ribbing provides “the shimmer of the insect,” in addition to adding segmentation and reinforcing the fly. Basically, the same goes for nymphs: “employ the lifelike materials which lend the soft outline and impressionistic color effects.”
Atherton’s “Numbers” series of dry flies, the Atherton Number One through Number Seven, ranging from light to dark, put these principles into practice, and the dressings are all presented here. (There’s a similar range of nymphs.) They cover a variety of hatches over the season, and it’s important to realize that with them, Atherton is not imitating any specific insect. Citing the Quill Gordon as “a good example of impressionism,” he quotes Gordon as saying “I like to use imitations of typical flies that fairly represent a class of insects if a fly looks right to you on the water, it is apt to
look right to the trout. It is the effect one wishes, not so much its appearance close to the human eye.”
The italics for emphasis are Atherton’s, and they point to the foundation of his theory of imitation: what Atherton believes fly tyers should imitate, in the broadest sense, are not aquatic insects themselves at all, but simply the effects of light. He writes: “when a fish sees a floating fly approaching, outside his window” — the ellipse through which the world beyond the water’s mirrored surface appears — “he sees only the ‘light pattern’ of sparkling dots created by each tiny part of the fly that touches the surface.” Within the window, lifelike color effects are important, but more generally, Atherton believed, what the dry fly imitates is not so much the size, form, and color of the insect, but the pattern of light that it presents to the fish.
That means that the success of a dry fly also involves the quality of the hackle and how it’s used. Contrary to the classic Catskill style of strictly vertical dry-fly hackle, Atherton, like Vincent Marinaro, advocated splaying the hackle, the better to imitate the light pattern of the naturals. He no doubt would have been delighted by the quality of today’s genetic hackle, but he also would have missed something: the very long, very stiff feathers known as spade hackle, because of their shape, that are found on the throat of the rooster, protecting its body from the sharp spurs of other roosters. They once were included on the outer edge of a dry-fly cape, but now routinely are trimmed away.
Atherton’s theory of light effects made him an enthusiastic advocate of flies that are seldom seen today because the spade hackle necessary to tie them is so hard to find — variants and, especially, dry-fly “spiders” or “skaters.” Variants are upwing-divided dry flies tied with oversized hackle. Spiders, as developed by Atherton’s friend Edward Ringwood Hewitt, are tied on hooks as small as size 16 using tightly palmered spade hackle to produce flies as large as two inches in diameter. Both rely on Atherton’s theory of light patterns as “sparkling dots,” and spiders, especially, continue to fascinate some fly tyers and anglers I know, who report that dancing a spider across the tail of a riffle on a short line can bring the same explosive strikes that Atherton enjoyed.
That technique, of course, is a matter of how the fly is presented, and in the debate over what the fly imitates, it is wrong to say that Atherton is at odds with those who emphasize presentation. The book fulfills the promise of “angling instructions” in the subtitle by also discussing presentation extensively and for every form of fly fishing for salmonids, from nymphing for trout to pursuing Atlantic salmon. Where some would see imitating behavior and imitating appearance as an either-or question, Atherton quite sensibly thinks it is a matter of both-and.
“Thinking and fishing go well together somehow,” Atherton writes. “And the thinking is usually of the creative sort rather than the summing up of those difficulties with which we are all beset at times.” That outlook, finally, is the real appeal of the book. Atherton’s theories are themselves enough to justify its status as a modern classic, but what I principally valued, on rereading this reissued text, was the voice that speaks from within it. Like his contemporary Roderick Haig-Brown, Atherton is calm, lev- el-headed, and intelligent. He also can tell a good fishing story, and a funny one, too. It’s a welcome voice in a time indeed beset by difficulties.
— Bud Bynack
