The eight-mile descent from White Wolf was a knee-slaying 4,500-foot drop, the grinding pain of which was dulled by the drug of pure beauty. It was already afternoon when we reached the floor of Tuolumne’s Grand Canyon, light lengthening in the towering granite gorge, but the day was just beginning. We turned off the beaten track and brushbashed on, in search of an obliging fishing hole.
Borrowing bear trails, we sidestepped scat and jumped a rattlesnake while climbing over rock falls and around poison oak. We were in a full, heady state of wildness. But as with any mind-blowing thing, the more wild you get, the harder you have to hit it for the same euphoric result. Turns out, fly fishing hits pretty hard.
I’d grown up on spinning rods and had tried fly fishing once before, on the Frying Pan in Colorado. As a bona fide river nerd, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time watching current flow. But seeing the water through the fisheye perspective of my friend, Mike Wier, was another experience entirely. I’ll never look at a river or stare a fish in the eye the same way again.
Bushwhacking with full packs is brutal. When we spied a shred of beach big enough for a tent, we dropped our gear, stripped off sweaty layers, and dunked into the shallows. By the time I wiped the water out of my eyes, Mike was standing on a rock midstream, sizing up the eddy line along the far bank. I hopped onto the rock beside him, looking where he was looking, not seeing what he was seeing.
His eyes are the secret. They don’t miss much. It’s hard to tell if his skill is innate or developed over a lifetime of looking. He’d taken in the depth, structure, and current speed of the pool before I had my shoes untied. “There are fish here,” his senses told him. “What a pretty campsite,” said mine.
I sorted gear while Mike pulled out his fly rod and tied on an E/C Caddis. He skipped over to the middle of the river and guided a few shoulder-powered loops through the air before laying the line on the water, the fly flipping a quick circle at its end before alighting. A full breath later, the water gaped upward, a fish lost somewhere in its midst. Mike ripped the rod up, and the fish threw itself into the pain of the hook. After a quick fight, it twisted off, a sudden silence.
Mike handed the rod to me. I tossed a couple of awkward casts around, looking for a rhythm, and threw the line forward. It didn’t make midstream. I pulled up and tried again, this time almost making the eddy line. I let it drift. Another quick hit shocked me into setting the hook, and the line danced before I, too, lost the prize.
That moment of conversation between the fish and me, as intrusive and bullying as it was, is what I keep coming back to. What are you? What kind of fight do you have in you? How much do you want to live? How much do I? Questions swirled in the eddy.
We settled in: moments of imagined grace interrupted by instruction. I loved the cadence of looping the line back and forth, watching water slip by. Quit casting so much. Get the fly on the water. Keep it in front of the fish as much as you can. Up and down, up and down, 10:00 to 1:00, back and forth. Just throw it. Nice. But stop the rod right at 1:00, that’s where you get your power. Then get the rod down on the water and point the tip at the fly. Good. A moment, hypnotic patterns of color spackling the slick in low light. Can you still see your fly?
Nope. Recast.
I was contemplating beauty and my rapport with the natural world, and Mike was fishing. He’s spent his life hashing all this out. He taught me to mend the line, looping slack upstream to let the fly drift-free, to cast 10 feet upstream of a rise, to stop my back cast before 90 degrees, because I will inevitably take it too far.
A pattern developed. Cast, cast. Drift. Mend, mend. Drift. Nope. Flick up the line and start again. The water moved on, time moved on, and I tried to drop my tiny fly onto just the right thread. I was less seeking an escape than finding a way back in. A way to be without mourning what has passed / is passing / will pass, without wondering what will come next, just flowing along, following my fly. Memories from trips like this one are burned into my head in a different kind of detail, times when I tune so far in that I forget there’s an out.
The next morning, we were lazily harassing the same sore-lipped crowd when Mike hooked a little brown. It came in fast with a bigger brown on its tail. The little guy swam panicked circles around Mike’s rock, dodging the gaping mouth. By the time the fish was off the hook and free, he was loath to return to his violent home and hung, panting, in a nook by our feet. I still haven’t resolved my guilt about those moments. While there’s danger in anthropomorphizing, fish have nervous systems — they register pain. And it sure looked like that little guy was scared out of his little fish brain.
I know that because I saw it, or think I did. When I fish, I’m hurting fish. But if I pay enough attention, if I learn them enough, I hope I won’t harm. So I’ll keep looking, like Mike does, for life rippling through our oft-beleaguered streams, for the little aquatic guys giving the finger (or fin) to damn dams and progress and pollution, living on as well as they can, as they’ve always done, eating what comes along.
