With Seth Norman’s carp story running as a feature in this issue, we’re borrowing this column’s space to reintroduce a writer who last appeared in California Fly Fisher a couple of decades ago. Meet Monty Orrick, a fellow Meanderer . . .
In 1992, I took a job at Western Sport Shop in San Rafael, California. The business had existed with various owners since 1947 at the corner of Third and Lootens Streets. It was more of an institution than a business. Most everyone shortened the place name, calling it simply “Western.” It was a perfect place and time for the lucky tribe who worked there — six of us full-time. We were all passionate: an overused word that usually reveals some emotion less than passion. Not in this case. We each had a streak of pure passion for the outdoors and the specific areas of sport and gear we were hired to sell to customers. Shooting ducks. Deep sea fishing. Surfcasting. Striped bass. There are a lot of ways to catch fish in California — including fly fishing, which, after the movie A River Runs Through It came out, became even more popular. Western had an enormous collection of books on hunting and fishing. Particularly in the area of fly fishing, we had thousands of titles on the shelf, in print and out, including the Norman Maclean book that inspired the film. Gene Fassi tended the books, mainly while serving as our full-time manager and mentor. Everyone had a specialty, but knew at least a little about the other stuff. Enough to sell it.
For many employees and customers, Western remains clear in our memory. One physical characteristic that set the place apart was the complete encircling of the store with enormous trophies of bears, moose, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, and more. Not like the modern super stores with their trophies so clean they look fake and probably are. Every mount at Western back in the day had at least a pound of dust on it and appeared two steps from complete disintegration. They were just in terrible shape, most of them. If they were ever dusted, I never saw it. But for me, the single most memorable thing about Western was a coworker I met there and ran with for several years afterward. Everyone called him Wily.
In the first few weeks working with Wily, I mistook his age for roughly the same as mine. He was calm, confident, possessed of a sense of humor that could be wicked and generous at the same time. So I thought he was closer to thirty, like me. In fact, he was almost eight years my junior.
Wily was a nickname he’d more or less given himself. In fact, he referred to himself as “The Wily.” A noun. A thing. Like some kind of weird animal. But the name, The Wily, described an attitude, too. One could possess “wiliness,” in other words. It sounded pretty unusual to me, but Wily was a unique character, which I would soon learn.
We fell in together quickly. Our bond was severalfold: deep love for the Sierra, fish catching of any kind, and the San Francisco Giants baseball club. When we couldn’t explore the first two, after work we would frequently go to the Flatiron Bar a few blocks away to watch the game and talk about fishing. This is where I got to know him and he gave me a nickname that is my given name. Montgomery. Wily appreciated formality and tradition.
I quickly learned that Wily had grown up in Kentfield, where I’d grown up. And that we’d attended the same high school as well as the University of California, but eight years apart.
At work, Wily cut an extremely unprepossessing appearance. He favored calf-length basketball shorts and hightops — for comfort, but also because he played basketball after work. This eventually was the cause of a back injury that required surgery, but that was in the future. Despite his extremely casual manner of dress, one couldn’t help but notice when speaking with Wily that he was extremely bright. He read widely all types of books, from true crime to science texts. It was a weird mix, but he was interested in all that. Wily was also sophisticated beyond his taste in literature. He’d had the opportunity to travel quite a bit and was familiar with places that seemed pretty exotic to me — cities in Europe, fishing destinations in Mexico, too.
Wily loved music and collected records his entire life, compiling a sizable library. We shared a love of jazz music. Herbie Hancock, Coltrane, Miles, and Latin jazz. Characteristically, Wily’s jazz tastes were farther out than mine. Or anyone’s that I knew. He was always seeking obscure recordings by esoteric avant artists and playing them around camp or in the car. We’d be driving someplace listening to Neil Young or a Miles Davis record we enjoyed and Wily would swap discs to something like Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Volume One. Wily would be tapping his hand on the steering wheel to a beat only he and the drummer on the recording and probably Mr. Ra could hear.
Our work at Western was unusually satisfying for a sales position. All day we were encouraged to engage customers about the particular sport and area of the store we worked. I worked the fly-fishing end. Gene was a master fly tyer, upland bird enthusiast, and book collector. Wily, as it turned out, was well-versed in all these areas. He had a fishing guide’s knowledge of the Burney area and Hat Creek. He could speak with authority about hunting and firearms. He knew the book section as well as anyone besides Gene and had years of experience saltwater fishing in San Francisco Bay. Wily could guide anyone around any of these areas of the store. Amazingly, he was just a few years out of college.
The little corner of Western Sport Shop that Wily was most interested in and was most familiar with was contained in a specially built metal cabinet five feet high with thirty drawers fairly filled to the top. Not with fishing flies or ammo or any type of fishing tackle. Inside it were stored United States Geological Survey maps of the Sierra and virtually every other area of California of interest to sportsmen. Wily loved these maps. Whenever he would bring customers over to this imposing cabinet and pull out a map of the area that they were hoping to visit, he was authoritative. And specific — which is what anglers crave when seeking a new spot to fish. Always quick to point out and circle the best spots on the Stanislaus, Tuolumne, or “Moke,” Wily seemed intimate with every fire road and trailhead. It was beautiful to watch. Wily sold a ton of maps at $3.25. He made each one seem a bargain for the wealth of fishing and adventure he’d just described and that was contained inside the margins. Wily sold fishing like he owned the franchise, because he imparted pure stoke.
Wily studied cartography at UC Davis. His love of maps ran deep, and he had more than a backpacker’s knowledge of how to use them. A few times he actually drew maps for fishing trips we were planning. Starting point, destination, features along the way drawn larger than scale and a legend at the bottom for distance. Wily was a cartographer. He was accomplished. I’d love to have one those maps now.
The part of the store we generally least enjoyed working was the gun counter. It was fairly dreaded by Greg Blank, who had been a guide around the Burney area and could cast a fly farther than anyone in the store except Gene. Noel Plumb did his best, but was frequently disabused by cranky customers for rolling up his shirt sleeves and the cuffs on his jeans — sort of a fashion at the time. It was a pretty rough crowd by Bay Area standards. The riffraff almost never messed with Gene. They’d get thrown out or bawled out by him, which was twice as bad. For the sake of accuracy, Jim Kelly could talk duck hunting and retriever training for ten hours straight. He never had a problem there, either, but he was uncommonly placid. No normal person could deal with the gun counter crowd without losing their cool at least occasionally. I quit working there after an irritable man wearing a dress took a box of ammo from my hand and began loading shells into a revolver she pulled from her purse — to make sure the round was the appropriate size, I guess. That’s why I didn’t like the gun counter. The customers were unpredictable and sometimes fairly prickly. Not like the attorneys and physicians browsing five-hundred-dollar Sage fly rods, imagining themselves like Brad Pitt on the Big Blackfoot.
But Wily loved working the gun counter. He loved the demanding, macho hunters who couldn’t wait to brag about getting their buck or pheasant. He genuinely liked these guys. When I asked him once what he could possibly have enjoyed during a seemingly obtuse conversation with some old duffer in overalls from West Marin, Wily just smiled.
“He’s totally wily.”
How this makes sense is difficult to convey. But Wily, the man with his education and sophistication for his years, loved to hang out with the troglodytes at the gun counter. And they loved him: his dark, squinting eyes and the deep, menacing chuckle. Wily was one of them.
When it came to fish catching, Wily was an equal opportunity angler, preferring whatever was the most effective method. He was not a fly-fishing snob, though he was expert at it. When he wasn’t casting a fly in the Sierra or the Burney area, Wily’s chief interest was spin fishing the farm ponds in West Marin and in Sonoma County. He was not averse to visiting water district impoundments, springs, or golf course water features for his sport. Anything was in play if it had bass in it. We had rationalized a kind of Robin Hood attitude when it came to fishing water that was private or out of bounds: we didn’t keep fish, so we really weren’t taking anything from these places. And like Robin Hood, we employed a great deal of stealth in every operation — ready to evacuate in the time it took to reel in our lines and hop on our mountain bikes.
With a detailed map of an area, Wily was a potent force. But a force for what? Adventure. The unknown. And a little bit of lawlessness up in there, too. But let’s be clear. We’re not talking about jump-shooting deer on Point Reyes. That’s poaching, and we had no tolerance for the guys we knew who did that. What we’re talking about is riding our mountain bikes into an isolated farm pond to fish for bass. That’s just exciting. That’s sport.
Of course, we frequently got permission to fish a property, because the owner was a customer. But as often, it was a low spot in the hills indicated on a map by a tiny dark circle. Wily would lick his lips, loosen a deep chuckle, and make it official. “Looks like a wily caper.” That’s how we described several expeditions that first summer.
We came in the back way to the Boy Scout Camp above Sir Francis Drake Boulevard one late summer afternoon. I can picture Wily now, riding down the dusty fire road on White’s Hill — his rod broken down and sticking out the top of his day pack. Off in the distance we could see a group of buildings near the main road. Then we dropped down around a bend to the lake. It was really a glorified swimming hole — just a deep, muddy spot maybe two acres large. The ground around it was steeply banked and dusty from use. The lake appeared fifteen feet deep in the middle, with a wooden wharf for swimming.
Even though the pond was the color of Ovaltine, Wily assured me it was rife with bass. Wily had heard that at the shop or maybe he just suspected it when he saw it on a map. In any case, he was convinced, and if he was convinced, you could be convinced. I was definitely convinced. While I was positioning my bike for a quick getaway if need be, Wily had his outfit all rigged up and in no time took a few steps toward the wharf. Two false casts lengthened his line so his brown Woolly Bugger landed directly under a wooden diving board hanging off the wharf. The weighted fly hit the water like a small rock and disappeared. He lifted the rod tip once or twice, then let it settle, and WHAM! A nice bass. First cast. Our only fish of the day, as it turned out. I had no luck at all in Lake Ovaltine casting nymphs. Wily’s effort redeemed the entire mission and made a beautiful evening trail ride back to Fairfax even sweeter.
During the years I fished with him, I saw Wily catch a fish on his first cast more times than I can recall — and I remember him doing it a lot. First he found the water he wanted to fish, then he found the best spot to cast from, and it didn’t matter if he was casting flies or rubber worms. He went to the most advantageous location to get the cast he wanted. He rarely waded in, but kept in a little crouch and made just the motion he needed to present his lure. He’d load the rod and make one false cast, at most. He always had an idea where the fish lay and tried to put his fly or jig right on top of them. It was a lesson in the First Rule.
Put your fly in front of the fish.
Wily did not tell secrets. But you could trust him to keep yours. The secret he held tightest was whichever fishing spot he was sneaking into or planned to. He never divulged these locations and if pressed could get a little agitated.
The best bass water he refused to tell anyone about concerned a situation he found on the back side of Kent Lake in the watershed of the Marin Municipal Water District. While there is terrific bass fishing in virtually all the District’s lakes, boats or wading are not allowed because the lakes provide drinking water. Venturing deep into an area without a road or trail leading to it, Wily discovered a dark corner of the lake that was fairly thick with stumps and cover. Eventually, Wily found some big bass hiding there, too. On his next trip, he packed in an inflatable raft and fished the water with great success. Largemouth bass. Big ones. Fishing from the raft sounded risky to me. It was a several-hundred-dollar fine, but he dismissed it. Wily was so low-key about impending danger or mayhem. As he explained it, there was no road or trail nearby, so there could be no rangers. Thus, Wily had this most remote location all to himself. It was too good to be true. The poison oak had to be thick in there, but he had piqued my interest. After all, the Boy Scout pond expedition had come off easily. I had to ask.
“So you’ve got the boat stashed where?” Wily’s eyes narrowed, sensing where I was steering the subject.
“Aren’t you afraid the ranger’s going to see you? There must be a fire road back there somewhere.” Wily’s mouth drew taut.
“Even if they saw me, they’re on the other side of the lake. I’d just pack up and go.” Now I could picture it.
“Why don’t you take me back there sometime? I could pack in a float tube!”
Uh oh. I’d crossed the line — inquiring too deeply about a secret spot. Wily exploded.
“There is no way! I can’t take you back there! You’ll tell some customer at the shop! Then he’ll take his friends back there. Ruin everything!” He was pretty hot about it, but not for long. A few weeks later, I asked him again to take me to the back side of Kent Lake — his angling paradise, where big bass swam unmolested and lazy rangers feared to tread.
“Sure, Montgomery. I’ll take you back there. Soon as you’re ready.”
I was ready. My day pack and rod were lying on the garage floor next to my Stump Jumper. That should be the illustration beside the definition of “ready” in Webster’s. It might have been epic, but fishing from a float tube illegally in the corner of Kent Lake never happened. Exactly why we didn’t go is lost to time. Perhaps it’s for the best, but I doubt it.
Our car-camping experiences were less thrill-seeking than the nefarious farm pond excursions. When we drove to fish, we sought solitude and fast fly fishing for trout. By this time, I’d begun a journalism career, and Wily, to everyone’s astonishment, took a hard right turn as well — a very successful one. He took a sales position with a big national company. Wily rose up the ladder to become the top seller in several states and make a very nice living for himself. I think I speak for most of his friends from Western that we did not see that coming. But for all the change, responsibility, and seeming maturity, there was always the spark inside of him: to see a place he’d never been before, try something new, and push the boundary a little. I think that’s why Wily was so game to fish the new spots. They always look a little larger in the sights of one’s imagination than the tried and tested.
Over several decades fishing around the West, it’s our experience that the very first trip to any of the spots we like to revisit looms largest for stories and recollections. These are the epic places we return to year after year, decade after decade: East Lake, Davis, Milton, Rockbound, the Deschutes, the Missouri — all the biggies. So it was here, too — at the Alphabet Lakes on our first trip with Wily, Jake, Junior, Teddy, and myself.
There’s nothing routine about driving for the first time to a desolate lake high on a desert plateau. In basin-and-range territory, one must have a good map and not allow seductively distracting scenery to get you lost. This can happen anytime one drives to, from, or in between the Alphabet Lakes — a very large area taking up an entire page in DeLorme’s Northern California Atlas & Gazetteer (page 29). On the page, it’s nine hundred square miles with a few dirt roads that faintly connect a few features, such as swamps and buttes and meadows. No one lives here year-round. Some people refer to this high-desert region as the Devil’s Playground. I think this designation appealed to Wily, too. Going in there the first time meant keeping to the map at every fork in the road. Fortunately, this first trip I had Wily sitting beside me to navigate, and he took us directly to the lake — Reservoir C.
As soon as we arrived to meet the other boys, the camp chairs came out and were placed in the shade. Then we made a few toasts to our great good fortune to be together in such a beautiful location. After a painful back surgery, Wiley kept his camp chair as comfortable as possible. It was a chaise lounge overstuffed with bed pillows. In keeping with his desire for complete comfort wherever he went, his apparel around camp was similarly overstuffed — nearer to something one might expect to see at the Playboy Mansion instead of rough camping in a juniper-and-sage desert. Even at midday, Wily preferred pajamas, because he claimed they afforded him coolness, comfort, and protection from mosquitoes. Whenever and whatever he drank, it was from a cherished beer stein he’d acquired at Oktoberfest. To see him luxuriating on the padded chaise, drinking from a huge beer stein, attired in his jammies, no single feature stood out. The whole wacky ensemble fit.
While getting our float tubes and gear together to go fishing, Wily noticed a profusion of delicate blue damselflies resting on the reeds near shore. As I recall it from a mental snapshot, Wily had not launched, but was standing in a few feet of water with his tube floating beside him. He cast into the reedy shallows by the boat launch, and just that quick, Wily had a decent fish on — what turned out to be a colorful pound-and-a-half rainbow. As a group, we stopped what we were doing and watched Wily land and release it before he’d even gotten his waders damp. Watching your partner catch a nice trout before you’re even on the water puts a little extra powder in your charge.
After a terrific afternoon session where we all fished an olive marabou damsel like the one Wily had cast in the first place, we wound up back at camp sitting in the shade again, drinking beer. After a few, we decided to survey our kingdom and took a short stumble in the direction of the boat launch below camp. Wiley unfolded himself from the chaise and struck a rambling path in its direction. As soon as his feet met the gravel there, he stared straight down at his slippers as if he were admiring them. Then he bent down without saying a word. There at his feet, he found an almost perfect worked arrowhead lying in the gravel.
He held it in the palm of his hand as we leaned in. Miraculous! Who finds a perfect arrowhead in the gravel?! It sounds impossible. We would have accused him of planting it there had any of us not been drinking. As he delicately turned over the sharpened obsidian jewel, his wonder was genuine, and ours too. Every time we cross the boat ramp, we expect to see an arrowhead face up like Wily’s. Of course, there’s never been another.
I learned of Wily’s passing from his best friend Richard — my friend, too; we keep in touch on the Internet, and that’s how I found out. I read the message that awful morning: “Wily’s gone. Sad day.” I felt, when I read it, the same way I do writing it here. Just worn out tired in my head and my heart.
Losing a great person at any age is unfair and harsh. It’s going to add up to a lot of years not fishing with our friend. Or talking about jazz records we’d found. Or listening to the Giants. We’ll never be able to tell the stories we’d told too often already the same way again.
Talking to Wily’s closest friends has made it a little better, though: recalling our last few trips together — looking at the pictures and sharing them. Oddly, I get the most comfort thinking about the trip we never made, the one to the back side of Kent Lake. I like to picture the stumps submerged in the channel and a dark shade stretching to cover them. I think about that raft, too. The inflatable. Years ago, he told me he’d left it in a box and buried it for his next trip, but he’d hurt his back and could not return. I like to think about that old raft sticking out of the earth and oak leaves. And below it in the water, a nice bass hangs suspended in the shade, waiting to ambush an unwary minnow or a leech.
