2020 was a special year — not everyone’s cup of tea, and certainly not mine, being that I don’t drink tea, so no cup of tea is not my cup of tea, but especially not 2020. We had a virus raging across the land, and we had people raging across the Internet denying that there was a virus raging across the land. We had smoke, lots of smoke, and not the good kind that makes you mellow. And we had an election, and that added to the fun that was 2020.
But what made 2020 even worse for me is that I stopped fishing. I stopped fishing because so many others thought that going fishing was the solution to the problem that was 2020. That was great for flyshop owners and guides, at least those who continued to work in 2020. But if one of the reasons to go fly fishing is to get the hell away from people, the year was just ruined. We tried. My gal and I tried in the spring. We tried the McCloud, but like the trashcans there, the campgrounds were overflowing. Even when we drove a few more hours to get to what I once thought was a secret piece of water with a secret campground, we found both also overflowing. We thought a solution might be to hike long distances to weed out the less dedicated angler, but, unfortunately, just as fly fishing’s popularity boomed in 2020, so did long-distance hiking. The trails were crowded, and when we got to the waters that we had spent all that effort to find, as often as not, there were anglers. By about midsummer, we just kind of threw in the towel.
So instead, I thought about some of the great fishing experiences that I once had. I think that officially makes me an old man — thinking about the great fishing that had been, rather than thinking about the great fishing that will be. And that made me think about Raul.
I met Raul nearly thirty years ago, and he scared the shit out of me. I was thirty years less experienced and thirty years less mature than I am now, and was behind the counter of a fly shop by myself, with no one else in the store, pretty new to the business, or to any business, including the business of life, for that matter. In stepped Raul. Raul was without exaggeration twice my size. I was a svelte young hundred-and-fifty-pounder, and Raul was three hundred or more. He was Mexican. (He wasn’t really Mexican, he was American, just like me, but to the back-in-the-day me, he was Mexican.) He had a tattoo on his neck, which might not seem like much now, but thirty years ago, visible tattoos were very uncommon, and to me, a neck tattoo was probably acquired in prison, and the person wearing it was clearly a dangerous person. In flowing dark green script, his tattoo read “Brianna.”
“Mad Dog! Where’s the fishing, bro?” was the first thing that Raul said to me. Between the two of us, if anyone was a “Mad Dog,” it surely wasn’t me, but he never stopped calling me that. I have no idea why — it’s just what he called me. I don’t remember what I told him, but I probably told him to try one of the local standards, Putah, Yuba, Feather, American, etcetera.
I think that wherever it was that I directed Raul, he must have done well, because I started seeing him more and more often.
A few months later, a very cute small dark-haired woman came into the shop carrying a small very cute darkhaired girl about three years old. “Are you Jim?” she asked. “My husband is Raul, and he said to ask for Jim His birthday is coming up, and he said you’d know what he wants.”
“Are you by any chance Brianna?” I asked.
“No. She’s Brianna,” she said, proudly petting her daughter’s hair.
A while after that, Raul came in and said, “Mad Dog, let’s go fishing.” But I had to tell Raul that I couldn’t. Back then, I drove an old Ford Bronco — this was long enough ago that driving an old 1970 Ford Bronco was barely cool, if even cool at all, and I drove it because it was cheap to buy. (Try finding one now for cheap.)
“I can’t. The transmission in my Bronco is broken. I’m stuck. I can’t do anything. I rode my bike to work.”
“Mad dog! Is that the white Bronco? Bro, I’ll fix it.”
The next night, and this is no lie, Raul showed up at my house with his dad and a working transmission, and in less than two hours, they had it installed.
“Raul, I don’t know when I can pay you. It might take a while.”
“Mad Dog, you take me and my dad out fishing and we’ll call it good.”
Seriously, that’s what he said. We had a superfunky red whitewater raft at the store, “Big Red,” which was the only watercraft I had that was big enough to carry three, so I took Raul and his father down the Yuba River. At their insistence, they brought lunch. I don’t remember the fishing, other than having the entire river to ourselves, which was common back then, but I remember the lunch.
They brought a big ice chest. They had made carnitas and had made salsa the night before. It was Raul’s dad’s special salsa. They brought avocados. They brought tortillas. They brought a two-burner Coleman stove, oil, and a pan to cook it all up on. Just amazing. And this was me paying them for fixing my transmission? I know I had a photo of Raul, the food, and the stove, but I just can’t find it. I wish I could.
I remember sometime later again taking Raul down the Yuba, but this time in my canoe. That was a bad watercraft choice. Canoes don’t steer well with twice the weight up front and half that in the back. I think that we didn’t flip it until we were within sight of the takeout, but we did flip it. I lost track of Raul. The last time I saw him, I had moved to San Francisco and was working in a shop downtown. Raul and his wife and daughter popped in to say hi. But that was still well over twenty years ago, and I haven’t seen him since. I hope he is doing well.
