A brown trout. A good brown — how long had it been? — from a small water, a creek, maybe a meadow stream. One wary, mysterious fish that requires stalking, even kneeling to present just the right cast, a fish that would fight deep and make me hold my breath.
Splayed naked against a wall, I stare at lines of mortar between cinder blocks, marveling at how masons keep everything so even.
“So how long have you had scoliosis?” asks one of two roughly identical doctors standing behind me — White-Smocked Lords of Army Medical Exams, Masters of Intimate Inspections, Probers of Private Places.
“What is —” I reply, turning my head in time to see them roll eyes at each other.
“So you’re saying nobody’s ever told you that you have it,” asserts Doctor #2, his voice less nasal but more condescending than his colleague’s. “Spinal scoliosis. Your spine bends left. Anybody can see that.”
“No —”
“Yes, it does,” insists Doctor #1, etching a cold curve down the low end of my back with what I sincerely hope is his pen.
“And here’s the cause,” offers Dr. #2 brightly, enjoying himself more than I am. “Didn’t you ever wonder why your legs are so muscled? How the left foot turns out and the right one points straight forward?”
I believe these questions are rhetorical. Even so, “Well, yes, I —”
“Because if you had wondered,” interrupts #1, “you might have realized the bones in the right leg twist. Spiral — do you know what ‘helix’ means? A mild birth defect, which mostly likely created or influenced the scoliosis in your back.”
“So —”
“The answer is ‘no’,” #1 says firmly. Then the pair of them share a chuckle. “They won’t excuse you from military service. The scoliosis might or might not get worse over time, perhaps cripple you when you’re older.”
Ever helpful, #2 adds “Meanwhile, the helix will overstress both legs when you walk, run, bike or skate. Too much will leave you muscle-bound.”
“Completely, because you’re already on your way. So do as little as possible.”
“The less the better,” agrees one of them, who by this time I’m having trouble telling apart. Well-smocked, they walk on to the next guy in a long line of other subjects, probably hoping to find leprosy, syphilis, or elephantiasis to keep the day interesting.
Alarming news, at eighteen, this. But not entirely bad. One appreciates an excuse. I was by then not a fan of the activities I’d been told to avoid. Running was fine, on a football field or baseball diamond, and a month before this diagnosis, I’d crossed the Sierra from Devil’s Postpile to Yosemite, looking for fish (though the scenery was fine, as I recall). Aside from these enjoyments, however, I have followed the recommendations of the smocked-doc twins. I will ambulate for play and work, but not, shall I say, pointlessly. “Love to, but sorry. Birth defect. Rather not talk about it.”
For many decades, everybody who knows me has at some point heard of my aversion/“disability,” which has only increased by collaboration with maladies readers of a certain age will recognize: hips, knees, shoulders showing symptoms of wear. While I am lucky that rowing, paddling, and swimming create few problems, nobody can pretend ignorance about my reluctance to indulge in bipedal endeavors not related to fishing. Certainly not those family members who surrounded me with smiles last Christmas, so I had no reason to worry while unwrapping an oddly shaped package to find —
“Walking staffs!” cry spouse and spawn, almost in unison. “At spring break, we’re going on a hiking vacation in — !!!!”
High desert. Vast vistas. Reefs of mountains divided by deep, deeper, and roughly bottomless canyons. Gorgeous red, gray, ocher, and burnt sienna landscapes so barren of flora I’m pretty sure pioneers had to import lichens. A million acres of dirt and rock that have buried the inhabitants of many oceans over eons, crushing myriad small lives into layers of sand between which enormous bones have turned to stone, petrifying. A place where a night’s dry cold could, in theory, freeze solid the blisters that afternoon’s sunburned onto your face. A place that
— let’s just be honest — hates you, both personally and as one of your species.
But . . . now I have sticks! — high-quality sticks for hiking endless miles through this wasteland that parches with each step, listening to the hiss of bodily fluids sucked into pale air. . . .
You know those smiles you force. Well, this one threatened to charley horse a lip. “Because the Sahara is booked?” I wanted to ask. “Sudan’s too touristy, it’s rainy season in the Negev, and those desiccating walkabouts Down Under have been done and done again?”
Instead, I manage to sputter, “Walking staffs, all right,” which even to me sounds as delighted as “Arterial stents, set of three, with staples.”
“A pair of really good ones!” somebody chirps hopefully.
“Collapsible!” chimes in another person I have loved with all my heart until this moment.
“And,” announces a third, her voice rising high with genuinely contrived enthusiasm. “We’ll be there eight days, so can you fish if you want to! For like an afternoon or something, because — well, you know — the rest of the time the rest of us will need the rental car. Still!”
Hold complaints please. When you’ve got two kids in college who’d prefer to spend spring break with their parents — one had nominated this destination — rather than enjoying beer, cocaine, mollies, and ecstasy in Cancun, you’re seriously lucky, am I right? Also, though the season was all wrong, fishing might be possible, because high deserts are sometimes adjacent to higher mountains, with lakes and streams you’ve never heard of or only heard rumors about.
Still! An afternoon is only that, so my early efforts to prepare myself might have been a bit desultory, and they continued that way when I found surprisingly little information on the area on the Internet — and because of the season, the end of March into April, nothing more recent than last year’s autumn. Interestingly enough, another one of my Christmas gifts — this from a someone not in the family — was a large-format trade paperback with a trio of relevant chapters. Terrific fish-porn photos, as requisite these days, too. I lingered long over shots of brutish brown trout caught from small streams — my favorite fish and fishing. But after a couple of rereads, I’d have sacrificed a lot of the photos for better maps, maybe showing topo lines, and definitely callouts identifying waters mentioned in a text that meandered, but not in a helpful way. As in, what’s the “upper” part of a river that runs 100 miles through three national parks and two states? As to fishing seasons and hatches. . . .
Finally, I caught on. The book wasn’t meant as do-it-yourselfer. One chapter declared, “the best fishing is outside the Park, mostly on private land,” so hire a guide, and both the others offered variations of “Public access is tricky, so you’re advised to hire a guide,” along with “There are no fly shops in the area to give information, so consider . . .” hiring one (or two) of the outfitters mentioned in sidebars.
After weighing my pennies, I made calls before we left. I got no call back from the first fellow, then none from a second, probably for reasons the third explained with brutal honesty: “Too early. Everything you can reach is crapped out with runoff,” he said, the moving waters chocolate torrents by the time they dropped out of mountains still snowy. He was testing a pair of lakes the coming Friday. Though he figured both would prove busts, I was welcome to call back for a report.
Well then, surely that sounded promising enough. So I packed a 5-weight, a reel spooled with floating line, a second with a sink tip, tucked a couple of boxes of flies (OK, four), tippet, and tools into a well-sewn, but abominably designed chest pack on which all exterior pockets zip across the bottom and up. Decided against waders and boots, discovered I could buy a license online.
Then I stared again at those photos of brown trout, creamy flanks sporting crimson spots the size of dimes.
You never know.
“Vacation” is a relative term, as you realize if you’ve gone on one with a person or people whose definition of the word varies from your own. While not a beach or poolside loller, I don’t mind sleeping in, staying out late, or relaxing early, chatting up locals — it’s remarkable, how many taxi drivers are socialists. And naturally, I enjoy seeing as many wonders as can be appreciated in the moment, rather than in pictures staged and shot so quickly that three weeks later, you wonder if you’ve been Photoshopped into a postcard.
But never mind. As vacations go, this one ran smoothly. None of us were beaten badly by airline stewards, though a splash of water prompted such lamentations from the plump young drama queen seated on my left that the older, ex-CIA wife on my right began to barb him. After a rental car agent failed to convince us to upgrade from midsize, the lot attendant did so anyway, explaining that all vee-heckles in our class had already been rented. The drive was long, but filled by catching up on news and laughter, and we all agreed the first sprawling motel (called a “lodge”) was really quite nice.
Yes, I hiked several times in the days that followed, several times extending my high-quality Christmas walking sticks, which I found completely emasculating but embarrassingly useful. If I ever begged assistance from my children or strangers — called in a rescue copter, perhaps — I’ve chosen not to remember this. I do recall meeting most of the 360,000 tourists who visit the park each month at this time of year, passing them on narrow trails, nodding and smiling in many languages. At one wider spot, five extremely elderly Asian monks stopped, turned, and bowed to my wife — deeply, specifically to her — as their leader spoke several long, gentle, formal-sounding sentences. She bowed back, enormously flattered. “Was that Chinese?” she asked a few moments later. “What do think he was saying?” “Mandarin,” I assured her. “An ancient mandarin speaking Mandarin. He congratulated you on your children, and especially on your choice of husbands.” “Oh, was that it?”
“In passing, he also mentioned my incipient arrhythmia.”
“I bet. And did he say ‘suck it up,’ politely?” she responded, because anatomy is not her forte.
Another reason things went swimmingly is that during our drives to and around the park, every stream and river we saw was just as the honest guidebook had described. Even so, I had not completely abandoned hope, though by the end of Day 2 I had learned lessons I must pass on to other fishers who may fall into a company of rabid hikers, especially fishers hoping to enjoy their allotted afternoon.
1. Except for monks, every semiserious trekker wears a product called a “CamelBak.” “Every” means men, women, and small children already prematurely stooped from hauling heavy book bags. Outside the park, dogs carry something similar. CamelBaks look like smallish backpacks, but in fact are very personal, very private water supplies. Wearers believe that only these glorified canteens stand between them and impending, but drawn-out and agonizing death, so they will defend theirs with their lives and mourn, loudly, at length, if ever they discover that some innocent, God forbid, has “filled my bladder with lemonade!” thus “ruining it completely.” For their sideways profiles, outliers privately call these folks “Humps.”
2. When a Hump assures you a trail is “only” 3.2 miles long, make sure you determine if they mean one way or round trip, also that they understand at that moment what these terms mean. Do not take chances based on previous experience. Note also that hydrophobic hikers eager to drag you off somewhere have terrible trouble telling “3” from “8.” (Curiously enough, blindness is a symptom of later stages of the real disease.)
3. Applied to hiking, the word “gain” indicates a rise in altitude from point A to point B. Humps will use “gain” to suggest the steepness of climbs, as in “There’s only 300 feet of gain in three [eight] miles of trail.” This is a trick. Consider that crossing the Grand Canyon from one rim to the other involves little “gain” either way, because the word fails to measure that little trek down and then up.
Somebody was going fishing. But where?
By now we’d visited three more parks, driven four hundred more miles, and I, lacking help from the book, had talked to seven local anglers.
The first two were clerks at outdoor stores that sold no fishing tackle. Both gave the same, reasonable story: never mind the runoff, all the streams in the area were “too alkaline for trout,” also too warm in summer, though in July, you might get lucky with catfish or carp.
The third source was Hans, lodge manager at our first stop, who had grown up fly fishing in Sweden. Hans was friendly, eager to help out, and had reason to hope for my success: in the fours years he’d lived here, he had failed to find local information of value. Yes, probably all the streams were out at the moment — and from what he’d been told, too alkaline — but he had heard about a not-too far-away, higher-elevation lake he didn’t think would be iced over. Please, would I let him know how I did?
Twenty-four miles up a mountain, I hit snow, then a gate locked by the Forest Service. Nothing to report to Hans, sadly, but I did lend him the book.
The family moved on. At our second park, three sources — two of them clerks — repeated the too alkaline, too hot script I’d heard before. Since I’d seen no fishers anywhere, I’d no reason to doubt them
Third stay, another hike, I stood not thirty feet from a not-so-turbid meadow stream, talking to a hearty ranger with many opinions. What about the fishing?
He hesitated. Then, “Hell, that water’s too alkaline even for people to drink, cattle just barely.”
“And muskrats,” I told him. “ I watched one for five minutes.”
“Muskrat? Really? How about that.” Have you ever recognized an expression on the face of somebody who’d rather tell you the truth, but didn’t? Of course, technically, he might only have lied by omission, if at all. . . .
Suddenly something snapped in to place. But of course.
Your house, your waters. Somebody passing through asks you for the best places to fish. Problematic? Now double down and down again on the dilemma: we’re talking about small streams, unprotected by catch-and-release laws, trickling though destinations visited by hundreds of thousands of people per year.
You would say what?
Some years ago, when asked to write a guidebook, I stuck to describing excellent, well-known waters already sustaining catch-and-release pressure, inviting experts to provide advice on how to fish these well and wisely. That approach worked and didn’t make me feel like I needed to hang a red bulb above my porch.
That said . . . among myriad places not mentioned was a jump-across creek in the eastern Sierra — another high desert. Funny thing, how closely that stream resembled the one near where I talked to this ranger.
Sure, he was a federal employee. But he knew the risks that a chatty fisher with nothing to lose might represent to a place he tended every day. Maybe he told the truth, maybe he meant to mislead — was I really going to press him against the wall?
Fourth and last stop, Day 7. I spied a sign for a “Fish Lake” that a river guide said was stocked for locals, and I had taken a flier asking him about the stream that fed it. “So that’s a good place for brown trout,” I said. Clearly surprised, he blurted “That’s where I go,” then immediately regretted himself. “But you’d do better . . .” at a river I’d already heard was alkaline and carpy.
Ten miles from a busy tourist town, on a gravel road off the highway, Fish Lake was a small reservoir behind a long dam. The gravel turned to dirt at the far end, into a canyon where layered cliffs alternated umber and gray. I found a pullout beside a falls, parked, and rigged up. The creek was roughly a dozen feet wide and looked deep. Twenty feet up the bank, the faint trail disappeared and stayed gone for as far as I beat my way through dense brush, following nothing until a yard round clearer spot allowed me to set up.
The run above me was level and long, with an undercut bank on the opposite side. I knelt behind a piñon pine deadfall, watching. No hatch, no rises, so I chose a yellow and green Woolly Worm matching the color of winter grasses, decided against an indicator, and crawled.
First cast, up close. Second, five feet farther out. I rolled the third cast all the way up to the undercut, then let the fly sink deeper.
I can’t tell you how I knew the fish was there. But I did, and he was, and after a while, he planed close enough to show me those crimson spots. Not a giant, but nice, maybe even eighteen inches. I slipped into the water to land him — didn’t mind a bit — shot a photo, then released him with a sigh I felt like I’d been holding since seeing those brown trout photos soon at Christmas.
Hours later, enjoying the reverie, I wondered how many little streams I had missed out on this trip, starting with the one where I’d seen the muskrat. I’d been a fool, I realized, for not checking something obvious: can a brown trout, or a cutthroat, survive in water that cows can drink and where a muskrat could make its home?
Silly me. As for the bluff ranger and those locals? Who knows. But let me never resent an “alka-lie,” told for a reason I get.
