I Know Bill Schaadt: Portrait of a Fly Fishing Legend
Written, edited, and published by Ben Taylor; available through him at bentayfly@aol.com or through the book’s Web site at www.billschaadt.com; $49.95 hardbound, with a limited signed and slipcased edition available at $100.
If you fish the North Coast for steelhead and salmon, you know about Bill Schaadt. If you’re old enough, you may have known him yourself, and if you didn’t, you heard stories about him. If you were on a coastal river and didn’t run into him, it was likely you were in the wrong place, because Schaadt was almost always in the right place. A steelhead and salmon angler with few peers, he had a host of admirers, as well as others who thought he was a showboat and a pain in the ass. But whatever you heard, it’s no stretch to call him a legend.
Why? His life was about fishing. He saw just about everything else, save for friends, as either avoidable or something that had to be dealt with efficiently and quickly in order to get back to what mattered. He made an extremely modest living as a sign painter and worked seasonally at the Bohemian Grove. Of necessity and by temperament, he was tight as a tick with money. But year in and year out, from the late 1940s to his death in early 1995, Bill rarely fished fewer than 300 days a year. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish, even if you’re a retired millionaire.
His home was in Monte Rio, on the Russian River. He didn’t like wasting things that might have value, and the lot on which he kept his trailers overflowed with “treasures” he’d found on the road or at the dump and not yet put to use, to the great distress of his neighbors. He didn’t like wasting things that might have value. He made many of his own clothes, drove junk cars, and fished what most of us would consider junk tackle. In Bill’s hands, it worked better than our fancy gear.
Schaadt was a superb fly caster, a skill interwoven with his exceptional talent as an angler. It’s not simply that he could cast the farthest or the most accurately, or that he was on the right water earliest and stayed latest, or that he maximized the time that his fly was in the water. He also had extraordinary fish sense and an uncanny ability to put a fly in the right place, at the right depth, and hook fish. He mastered the Russian River in the 1950s when it was one of the best steelhead streams in the country and continued to fish it until upstream dams killed off its once-astonishing runs. He then moved on to streams farther north, the Eel, the Smith, the Chetco, mastering them as well and a handful of other coastal rivers.
King salmon and steelhead were his main quarry, but he fished for stripers in San Francisco Bay, local estuaries, and off the coast when fly fishing the salt was a rarity. He fished Key West for tarpon out of a 14-foot skiff with a punky 10-horse outboard and for Costa Rican tarpon with ratty steelhead gear. He developed specialty lines for specific places, including lead-core shooting heads with which to fish the deepest runs. He stashed prams near the best water so he didn’t have to launch them every time he fished and would sleep in an anchored pram to be first on the best water. Fishing from as early as possible to as late as possible, from the
days when he was strong and healthy to those of a painful last illness, he kept his focus. He had run-ins with the law for fishing illegally at night, bartered fish he caught for gas or meals, and in the eyes of some was an outlaw. For the rest of us, he was a model of what we knew we wanted to be, but couldn’t.
That’s a paltry summary of the gist of a remarkable man’s remarkable angling life, lived for the most part during a time when steelhead weren’t the fish of a thousand casts and when king salmon were reputed not to take a fly. There’s more about Schaadt in a handful of articles in major angling magazines, written during the 1950s through the 1990s by the likes of Ted Trueblood, Bob Tusken, Ken Shultz, John Randolph, and Russell Chatham and in Chatham’s book The Angler’s Coast, first published in 1974 and reissued in an expanded edition in 1990. Now, to complete the picture, Schaadt’s friend Ben Taylor has edited and published I Know Bill Schaadt,a wonderful collection of reminiscences by a score or so of anglers who knew and fished with Schaadt.
Not surprisingly, a lot of these stories begin with someone running into Bill on a river and being ignored or dismissed. He was like that, not because he was a jerk, though he could be, if he had a reason of some sort, but because he was focused on the fishing and didn’t enjoy distractions or competition for the best water. But the second chapter in these stories is mostly about anglers getting to know and like the guy and being accepted, to one extent or another, into his orbit. That generally didn’t mean getting the benefit of his insight into the fishing. Though he was capable of considerable generosity, he played his cards close to his vest when it came to revealing technique. He made it look easy, and that was a part of his legend. You had to figure it out on your own.
There were, of course, folks who thought he was a fish hog or a guy who bent the spirit and the letter of the law to his own ends. Maybe so, but Schaadt made his bones in a time of plenty, and who among us hasn’t bent the rules? History is written by the winners, or about them, and Bill was a winner.
The stories in I Know Bill Schaadt frequently overlap or tell the same anecdote in different ways. For example, you read a couple of times about Schaadt becoming frustrated with an angler anchored next to him who wasn’t hooking anything because he didn’t know he was getting bit. Schaadt finally told him to listen up and to strike when Schaadt told him to. The guy makes a couple of casts, hears STRIKE! and does nothing. Steam coming from his ears, Schaadt gives him one more chance, hollers STRIKE! and the guy does, hooking a fish. Later in the book, a friend of mine tells the same story, but names himself as the hapless angler. Knowing my friend, it could even be true.
And there’s occasional disagreement about facts. Hal Janssen reports never seeing Schaadt wear sunglasses, because he was able to spot fish without them: “naturally polarized eyesight” is how Hal puts it. But the guy who tells us he struck when Schaadt told him to tells us that when he asked Schaadt how he’d known, Schaadt showed him his sunglasses, which let him see into the pool and see the fish. Hal knew Schaadt better than most folks, but I have to go with the other guy on this one, even though he’s been known to embellish the truth on occasion, as most anglers do. That’s because I remember scouting a pool for fish with Schaadt — actually, I think it was Schaadt getting me to scout the pool for him — and asking me if I had polarized sunglasses with me. When I put mine on, he showed me where he’d put his name on his own so that there was a chance he’d get them back if he was stupid and inefficient enough to drop them somewhere. There was clearly a lesson here for me if I chose to recognize it. Schaadt stories tend not only to become mythologized, but personalized. We all had our own Bill Schaadt.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Schaadt made his life something of a work of art. Real art strips things bare, and that’s what Bill did. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I go all literary here in recalling the German poet Rilke, who looked at a classical statue of the torso of Apollo and was so affected by it that he concluded “You must change your life.” Bill Schaadt’s desire and courage and focus represent a similar lesson for the rest of us who can’t or won’t change our lives. The reminiscences in I Know Bill Schaadt are a significant record of a generation or two of California anglers, and that may be just as important as what they tell us about Schaadt. These were regular folks who developed and defined a region’s angling culture, a culture that’s slipping away, just as the steelhead and salmon they chased are slipping away. Their stories are accompanied by scores of great photographs — of themselves, of Schaadt, of flies and tackle and rivers and fish. Along with Justin Coupe and Palmer Taylor’s 2009 film Rivers of a Lost Coast, I Know Bill Schaadt is a historical resource that deserves to be treasured.
Larry Kenney
Wild Steelhead: The Lure and Lore of a Northwest Icon
By Sean M. Gallagher. Published by Wild River Press, 2013, 2 volumes; $150 hardbound.
If steelhead are the fish of a thousand casts and contemporary steelheading is frequently something of an unintended Zen exercise, it’s still a powerful one for many of us. The old guys who fished California’s once wildly abundant rivers and the younger old guys like me who fished them when the decline started to became obvious repeat stories of how it used to be to fascinated new guys who actively take on steelheading’s mantle of athleticism, suffering, and delayed gratification. California steelheaders fish locally when and where we can, but often look north to Oregon’s North Umpqua and Rogue, to Washington’s Skagit and Hoh, and to British Columbia’s Dean and Babine and Kispiox to see if we can still get a solid taste of how it was before plenty turned to scarcity.
Not surprisingly, a resurgent interest in steelhead and steelhead fishing has been responsible for some serious introspection and nostalgia. If that started with the expanded reissue of Russell Chatham’s Angler’s Coast in 1990, it reached its height, for Californians, with Justin Coupe and Palmer Taylor’s film Rivers of a Lost Coast, which made it clear how badly we’ve screwed the pooch. Now Sean Gallagher’s new book, Wild Steelhead: The Lure and Lore of a Northwest Icon, brings the Northwest, with a nod or two to California, into the club, mining a vein of memory, legend, nostalgia, and innovation as rich as the one into which we Northern Californians tap. This is a big book in lots of ways: almost 700 elegantly designed pages, filled with exceptionally good photography and handsomely bound in two large slip-cased volumes that weigh seven full pounds on my kitchen scale. The contents switch seamlessly between tales of Gallagher’s growth as an angler, scientific commentary and natural history of steelhead and their rivers, long interviews with prominent steelhead anglers, and a look forward to how we can give back to the resource.
The good reading starts even before the book’s table of contents appears, with a special foreword by John McMillan, fisheries biologist son of angler/writer Bill McMillan. McMillan’s careful description of the life history, diversity, and behavior of steelhead provide a scientific platform from which the balance of the book can move to disccussions of angling, history, people, and tackle.
While Wild Steelhead isn’t a how-to book, after reading almost any of the chapters, you can’t help but come away with new ideas about how to approach the water. Why do some folks prefer doublehanded rods? What governs fly choice? When and where do you fish? It’s all there, to be uncovered amid Gallagher’s reminiscences about fishing over the past 40 or so years and in a series of terrific interviews he conducts with some of the best steelhead anglers on the planet.
That’s the part of the book that I like best: informative conversations with anglers who were there at the beginning of modern Northwest steelheading, such as George McCleod and Harry Lemire; more recent, but just as prominent folks, such as Northern Californian Jim Adams, British Columbia’s Bob Clay, and Oregon’s Bill McMillan; and contemporary steelheaders such as Ehor Boyanowsky, John Farrar, Pete Soverel, Judy and Adam Tavender, and Mia and Marty Shepherd.
These aren’t short interviews. The shortest runs 18 pages, most of the others run 30, and Gallagher’s interview with the late, great Harry Lemire of Washington runs over 50, mixed about equally between discussions of Lemire’s fly-tying innovations and how he fished. They all delve deeply into the lives and fishing history of folks who’ve taken more fish that most of us will ever see, and they are illustrated with terrific historical and contemporary angling photos of anglers and rivers, fish and flies and tackle. Spending time reading them is a treat for the eyes, as well as the mind, and I figure to go back to the book frequently to look and learn.
Despite the book’s long, informative interview with Jim Adams — replete with tales of the Eel, the Smith, and other North Coast rivers and the anglers who fished them — Wild Steelhead is mostly a book about the fishing north of the California border. That means a focus, though certainly not exclusively, on inland fisheries: the Skagit and Sauk, the Skykomish, the Green and Toutle before Mount St. Helens erupted, rivers of the Olympic Peninsula, even the Sandy and the John Day.
OK, we’ve got inland steelhead in California and a tradition of fishing them — think of the Klamath and Trinity and some Sacramento Valley rivers — and we fish them in much the same way as our brothers to the north fish their inland and desert rivers. But the legends of California steelheading and most of our tackle innovations spring mostly from coastal and estuarine fishing: the Smith, the Eel, the Russian, and a double handful of others. This, for the most part, is sinking-shooting-head winter angling over fish that are holding in pods of various sizes before moving upstream. It’s also often a kind of combat fishing, in the company of multiple anglers, some of whom we’d rather were elsewhere. Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia have that too, of course, but their history and legends, as Gallagher relates them, are more involved with the riffle, run, and tailout fishing encountered upstream, with floating lines and dry or damp flies or long sink tips and generally with only a couple of companions on the same water.
So what you get from Gallagher’s book, with the exception of the Adams interview and occasional other brief references, is the northern side of the story. And that’s a fascinating one about which every California steelheader should learn, in part because, like it or not, the waters to our north are where the steelhead still return in greater numbers than down here, in part because it’s the area that’s been responsible for the latest innovations in double-handed tackle and techniques, and in part because the guys who pioneered the fishery are just so damn interesting.
My only real criticism of the book is that I think Wild Steelhead is a crappy title. Maybe it was chosen because the publisher once published a fine magazine called Wild Steelhead and Salmon and liked the resonance. But the book’s subtitle, Icon of the Northwest, is as much a reference to the steelhead angler as it is to the fish, and for my money, Gallagher’s title should have been Steelheaders. That’s what it’s about, and that’s for whom it’s written. It isn’t cheap, at $150 for the two volumes, but I guarantee that you’ll be looking into them for inspiration and information long after whatever else you might have purchased with that money has gone to the recycling bin, or worse.
Larry Kenney
Classics Revisited
Blood Sport: A Journey Up the Hassayampa
By Robert F. Jones. Republished by The Lyons Press, 1997; originally published in 1974; available new and used at a variety of prices.
The late author J. G. Ballard once predicted that our latent psychopathy might become the world’s last nature preserve, a wildlife refuge for the endangered mind. In a society dulled by consumerism and banality, Ballard suggested, the disturbed mind might be the only engine powerful enough to light the human imagination and power civilization.
If Ballard’s wildlife refuge were to have its own trout stream, it might be the fictional Hassayampa in Robert F. Jones’s deranged cult novel Blood Sport. “ The Hassayampa River, a burly stream with its share of trout, rises in northern China, meanders through an Indian reservation in central Wisconsin, and empties finally into Croton Lake not a mile from where I live in southern New York State.”
So begins one of the true marvels in sporting literature. If Philip K. Dick or Harlan Ellison hunted and fished and wrote for Field & Stream, they might have come up with something as strange as this. You could say the same thing for the Marquis de Sade.
Blood Sport is about a father and son who go on a fishing and hunting trip like no other, a wild journey up the Hassayampa River that is like Deliverance on acid. Jones borrowed the name Hassayampa from a line in a fishing story written by Sparse
Grey Hackle. (“Just as the water of the famed Hassayampa renders those who drink of it incapable of telling the truth.”)
But the Hassayampa in Jones’s novel is nothing like those gentle Catskills streams fished by Sparse and his fellow members of the Anglers’ Club of New York. The journey upstream leads from modern suburbia into the Neolithic, where the headwaters are ruled by an insane free-for-all of banditry and barbarism. The villain of the novel calls this mythic land where anything goes “the one part of the world where the outlaw is regarded as an endangered species.”
A suburban father takes his young son on a long backpacking trip up to the Altyn Tagh mountains, where the Hassayampa rises. They have fished and hunted the lower river many times. But this trip is to be different. Maybe it will make a man out of the boy. (“He was a bit of a sissy — crying when his mother refused to make waffles for his breakfast. He prefers not to fight, though like the proverbial rat, will when cornered.”) Already the kid is a master of the fly rod, a deadly shot, and a stone-cold killer, not at all squeamish when it comes to slaughtering and dressing out game.
The father might have an ulterior motive for the trip. His own father was murdered on the lower Hassayampa a month before his birth. His father’s killer was rumored to be a legendary outlaw named Ratanouse, or “Ratnose,” for short. Ratnose is either a real bandit or a ghost who haunts the Hassayampa. When he was a teenager, the man might have shot and killed Ratnose, or at least wounded him, in a skirmish on the river. Now he feels that Ratnose is out there, watching as father and son hunt and fish their way upstream. The father and son might be traveling back in time. It’s hard to tell. There are mastodons to shoot, but they are “runts.” The kid hooks and lands a “freshwater marlin” on a bucktail jig. Game and sport abound, as do strange creatures, and father and son live off a mythical landscape as they journey farther upriver into bandit country.
Civilization seems to be on its last legs up there — or maybe it has never really come at all. They stumble upon the occasional shantytown, with its bar cum whorehouse and reruns of Green Acres playing on TV. Always there are rumors of Ratnose — although many claim he doesn’t exist.
Out hunting one day, father and son are nearly dry-gulched, and bandits make away with all their camping gear. The father suspects Ratnose is behind this and that they are in mortal danger. But the kid wants to track the bandits and get their gear back. (He seems most angry over the theft of his toy dump truck.) Father and son track the bandits and shoot them — but they turn out to be an old woman (“She looks like grandma,” says the kid, crying) and an old Indian whom the father once knew and whose life he once saved. The man tells his son that Ratnose will “string us up by our own guts” if they don’t clear out pronto, and the boy tells his dad that he will go out to a nearby salt lick to shoot a deer so they will have enough meat for the journey home. The boy doesn’t return, and the father loses his mind thinking Ratnose has captured and killed his son. But the boy has run away to join Ratnose’s bandit gang. (“I was plugged at my old man.”) In bandit camp, life is cheap, but vivid. Everyone is always firing guns, riding horses, getting high on crait, out hunting and killing anything that moves, or balling the women back in camp, the majority of whom appear to be syphilitic whores. The kid is accepted into the tribe after he is able to mount and ride a monster motorcycle that threw everyone else, including Ratnose. (The kid’s suburban dirt bike training comes in handy.) Most of all, the kid is fascinated with Ratnose, who might be the last free man on earth, an ageless villain who lives entirely on his own terms. The one-eyed bandit is no Robin Hood, but he might be Grendel. It soon becomes apparent that the kid will have to choose between his old man and the charismatic outlaw.
The mythic Ratnose has his own plans. The wily bandit is using the kid to get at the father. The old man, thinking his son is dead, has gone on a mad binge up in the hills, killing Ratnose’s men with godlike joy, and has taken on the spirit of the bear king Tilkut.
The showdown between Ratnose and “Tilkut” is inevitable and manifests itself as one of the oddest and most memorable duels in literature. Armed with Leonard bamboo fly rods and wet flies tipped with poison, the two men square off at the spot where the Hassa and Yampa rivers come together at the confluence of the main river to see who will drag the other into the deadly whirlpool that forms in the gorge. Will anyone make it out of this novel alive? Blood Sport merges Men’s Fiction with Slipstream, a genre that jumps the boundaries between fantasy and mainstream fiction and has been called “the literature of strangeness.” It was published in 1974, when Jones was a staff writer for Sports Illustrated. There is nothing politically correct about this novel, and nobody will be mistaking Jones for Jane Austen. It is not for quiche eaters, it might be for Deadheads, and it is definitely for anyone who lives with the spirit of the bear inside. This is a novel where the rituals of blood sport — hunting and fishing — are played to the death in a brutally funny, surreal fantasy that might be about freedom versus civilization or what it truly takes to be a man, but whether any of this is meant to be taken seriously at the end is left up in the air. No matter. Blood Sport is a romp. So grab the fly rods and shotguns, slip the knife into the heel of your boot, and come along. And remember: “The Hassayampa giveth and taketh away.”
Michael Checchio
