Steve and I took a long drive recently to visit the favorite river we’d been avoiding since the early spring. While El Niño holds out hope for next year, this summer was so brutal that we waited for two weeks of cool autumn rains to freshen things a little. We hoped they had; certainly they had gutted the road in, eroding pits deep enough to swallow an ATV, though I’m pretty sure that’s not what I ran over.
Way down a lonely track, we parked at a blocked-off bridge where there’s a sign I like. It stands directly in front of a two-foot-high, several-ton pile of boulders stacked across the access, boldly declaring “No Commercial Vehicles Past This Point.” While a caution reading “Speed Bump” might be more grossly obvious, the message as written has drawn plenty of fire from many calibers. Something big-bore punched a hole behind and above the “s” in “Vehicles,” a circle that’s has rusted just enough to create a tiny tail at the bottom — what looks like an apostrophe that would make the word possessive. Whenever I see this, I find myself thinking, “Eh, even accidental punctuation has gone to hell these days.” Of course, it’s possible that I am easily amused.
We each tap bladders, then walk out to check flows from the bridge. They’re low, though not catastrophically so, and so we decide to wade wet, then rig up and clamber down to the bank. I scan the shallows for minnows and fry, finding only two tiddlers where I’d hope to see schools sheltering. I do a better job of guessing the bug population, though, in the minutes it takes to run a sampling seine through a riffle and small run.
The mesh shows about what I’d expect for a mid-autumn sample of a this stream. Descendants of Green Drakes that were fat 12s in May are barely short shanked 18s. A trio of clinging mayfly nymphs are much smaller, roughly as big as 38-point font comma in Times Roman, and a pair of baby Golden Stonefly nymphs that will grow to 6s or 8s next year that are now skinny 16 longs, about. I see no caddises in the screen — that’s very rare — not even Octobers, though I expect they’re around — nor do I see sculpins, crayfish, or any eggs loosed from redds above.
This means something. I know more about what fish are seeing in real time and can pick patterns to match likely prey. That’s not quite as simple as it seems, however. The small Drakes look like a good choice, for example, but even at this size, they’re burly, probably seldom available unless there’s a sudden increase in current. That also applies to the stoneflies, and for the mayfly clingers, a “ ‘ ” is not something I’m excited about imitating.
Conclusion: today’s a day when a stream’s marginal menu reveals the value of a standard late-season rule: “Try terrestrials” and, scarce as minnows may be, streamers. With luck, this knowledge will mitigate some of my other deficiencies as an angler. It has before, on this water and others, as noted in enough Meanders to suggest I’m a one-trick pony, or worse: I manufacture a collapsible aquatic seine now sold almost exclusively to entomologists. The fact remains that riffling has served me well since I started fly fishing, on my own, without a mentor or anything resembling adequate information. If I still can’t offer the Latin names of insects I find, that doesn’t stop me from selecting f lies more intelligently. And it was the live stuff I couldn’t find flies to match that most strongly encouraged my early tying efforts and to trust my own subsurface patterns more than store-boughts. After twenty years of this, I can give you scores of examples of when sampling has made a difference, including several I’ve mentioned before:
On the Trinity River, in the spring, when staggering quantities of Salmon Flies migrate into the shallows, often washing away to tumble along awkwardly, looking a fair bit like Brindle Bugs; also on that river, later on, when reluctant browns will fall to patterns matching the tubifex worms Don Johnson and I discovered in muddy sediments; and then there are times when the mesh fills with a Medusa mass of writhing lamprey spawn. On the Owens in the winter, midday, skimming the surface of currents reveals why those trout rising all around you won’t take a dry matching the pale mayfly duns you see in the air: they are, instead, feasting all-but-invisible Baetis spinners with dark olive bodies and dark wings.
On the McCloud, a bug bestiary, where by alternately dropping Golden Stone nymphs and horrible hellgrammites into a feeding lane, I learned that fish will move much, much farther for the former.
And then there are the distant, unfamiliar waters that revealed secrets to a visitor: a tiny Quebec creek, where I found an immature salamander living in surprisingly fast water. “But where you get this?” demanded the excited lodge host. “These what we finding in the biggest brookies when we cleaning for people.”
On the upper Skagit River in British Columbia, where I followed three fellows through a run, all of them fishing big Drake nymphs while waiting for the evening hatch. They took three fish among them, then watched some stranger land five, drifting a tiny Pheasant Tail that mimicked the dozen little clinger nymphs also found in a mesh screen.
And the Madison, where riffling revealed that sculpins living up by the slide were olive banded with yellow, unlike their black-and-white-striped brethren living under the bridge outside Ennis. I had by accident two smallmouth flies that matched. I lost one to a big rainbow that broke 3X tippet, but Bruce Chard, well-known permit guide, used the other to land what locals insisted was the largest brown of the year.
All that means something to me, but perhaps there’s a better way to convince you. Among truly expert fishers who riffle with one device or another count Andy Burk, Dave Hughes, Gary Borger, Rick Hafele, also the late André Puyans and Dick Talleur, and the guy who caught the U.S. record brown trout from Arkansas’ White River.
I could add to these a much longer list of guides. But here’s the rub, dear reader: the number of names above roughly equals the count of other fly fishers I’ve seen sampling streams.
Time to confess. The practical advantages of investigating waters are not the only reason I indulge. In fact, a fascination with animal lives preceded any other obsession I can remember. Perhaps it was the pony that pulled my fishing cart.
I’m not alone in that. A fair number of fly fishers were kids who at tender, but bold and curious ages hunted lizards and snakes, newts and salamanders, tadpoles, frogs and toads, crawdads and crabs, minnows, or equivalent saltwater treasures. Some collected insects long before these would suggest flies they try to tie; some babysat butterfly cocoons, fed a pet mantis, played God to an ant colony (or Dark Angel, if they fed their subjects to ant lions). The very few who raised blowfly maggots on pigs’ hearts were either unusual children or English and evolving into “coarse” anglers.
Most children grow out of this phase or suppress it after “encouragement” from parents and other agents of social conformism. Among the most persuasive dissuaders are potential romantic partners who fail to see the charm of amphibian exhibits or to embrace, sincerely, “crawly” pets, no matter how well-behaved. These days, there’s also an evolution of ethics, born of an understanding that wild things should remain so whenever possible and to exist in environs too often threatened as is. They often live brief enough lives where they belong, but shorter still in a captivity that prevents procreation.
I support that position, with mixed feelings — unless “skewed” is a better description. It happens that I learned a great deal from the pets I captured, fed, and began to appreciate. The first piece of writing I sold was the story of a horned toad that traveled with me from Arizona to college at Carnegie Mellon University, then on to Italy, where, after sunning himself on the Spanish Steps — admired by many! — he was crushed when a PLO bomb threat led to lunatic soldiers hurling him from the hold of a plane to Tel Aviv 15 days after the Lod Airport Massacre. I buried Moses in an empty lot beside a hostel in the Promised Land he had failed to reach, only later realizing that his excavation might sometime profoundly confuse the study of evolutionary history.
Perhaps his tragedy should have taught me more than it did. Because it didn’t, my son Max had for quite some time a favorite cricket named Petey, a handsome alto leg-barb player rescued from a batch meant to feed Bob, Max’s toad. To Max’s dismay, most of his five-year-old peers found Petey revolting. But Max championed his pet and spent much time explaining cricket virtues — “He sings, but doesn’t bite!” — to small people making disgusting disgusted noises.
I liked that advocacy. And I was happy when I learned Max’s appreciation for good Petey had expanded — a benefit revealed when his kindergarten teacher complained “Your son went a bit ballistic” confronting another boy drowning ants with a hose. “They were after all, just ants,” Teach observed, to which Max replied defiantly, “He was hurting them for no reason at all!”
That convinced me keeping Petey wasn’t a bad idea, however it might jeopardize a career as the Orkin Man. Respect for life, however much romanticized — Max ultimately insisted, with regrets, that we substitute worms for Bob for crickets — isn’t a bad thing to see in your offspring, I decided. So, much like Lassie and James Bond, Petey’s moniker was secretly transferred by a mysterious somebody when the cricket’s first incarnation overindulged on potato peels.
“Re-Pete-ing, I called this perpetuation, and it worked pretty well. But sadly, not for Bob. I’d culled him or her from a toad family reunion of several thousand I accidentally attended on the bank of a remote river, when Bob and his myriad kin were all the size of a quarter. By the time he’d been gorging on worms for three years, however, Bob was too large for any surreptitious substitution, a dilemma I faced after another one of Max’s parents decided Big Bob might enjoy lolling about on the deck, in the sun, when the family left town for a weekend. We returned to find what looked like an interesting wallet with a charming change purse at the pointy end.
Max mourned desperately. We buried Bob with pomp and circumstance — with tearful speeches worthy of Christopher Robin, Billy Graham, and Cicero, maybe — also a note Max writ in big block letters: “BOB THE BEST TOAD EVER.”
We still kept an occasional wild pet after that, but only for two or three days: garter snakes and skinks, a tiny tree frog, an enormous bullfrog twice Bob’s size, a vole that exuded a curious chemical stink, two surprisingly friendly pack-rat kits. These we returned to their habitats, except for the pack rats, which are colonizing the garage.
Max was fine with that. So was sister Sophie, and Mom was simply delighted. But last week, after returning from fishing, I wondered if the Peteys, Bob, et al. might have had more of an effect than I imagined. More likely I’m pushing things way too far — no, I am, for sure. . . .
But still.
The Max, who first appeared in this column as the Puppy Buddha, is now applying for college. His applications require essays, and the one he showed me required him to identify a “character-building moment in your life.”
No, Max didn’t write about an animal. But there was something familiar about the incident he chose. Or so it seems to me, proud father and all that.
For many years, Max attended classes with a boy who had cerebral palsy, whom I will call John here. John was the twin of Max’s best friend, so Max knew well how much he endured — speech and movement therapies, weekly injections of medications to strengthen his muscles, and shortly before this all happened, an operation to break and reset his legs, an operation that might someday allow John to walk. Max and his classmates grasped John’s challenges. They appreciated how he rose to meet these. Also, that — trapped in his chair, unable to communicate clearly — he was as vulnerable as . . . a cricket, let’s say.
Came the budding sadistic sociopath, a “BSS” — and yes, you can identify these in fifth grade — a new student and wannabe gangster taller than the teachers he called “bitches” and “hoes.”
John, with special needs, became the target of the BSS, who for months tormented him at every opportunity. His favorite game was to spin a terrified John around in his wheelchair — three times damaging it so severely that John could not attend classes for days. John’s parents complained; nothing was done.
The worst incident was yet to come. In front of fourteen students, the BSS dragged John in his chair into a field, spinning and jerking him hard enough to threaten a tip-over. The many spectators’ screams failed to halt this. So Max — eighteen inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter — stepped in.
No contest. Max was punched to the ground, then kicked unconscious. When he came to on his back and kicked up to defend himself against more kicks, the BSS dropped down and choked Max unconscious again. An hour later, the principal suspended Max, insisting that those kicks from his back violated the school’s zero tolerance for violence policy, an infraction he told Max would be entered into his “permanent record.”
Thirteen students — here’s the reason I noted fourteen — marched on the principal’s office to protest en masse. He refused to see them. Many of these kids’ parents called that afternoon and the next morning, John’s among them, to no avail. I visited that afternoon. Threats were exchanged. Mine trumped, and the suspension was revoked.
The aftermath — the support Max received — is the point of his college essay. Mine is a little different. I said it’s a stretch — surely it’s a big one — but at some point, your child decides it’s wrong, even intolerable, to see something hurt for no reason, no reason at all.
I’m not crediting the lessons learned from small lives for this. Not quite, or not specifically. Just sayin’.
Finally…
The angling on our favorite stream was poor, this late-season day. The few fish we took, trout or juvenile steelhead, rose to terrestrials and to trim Muddler Minnows. I did try imitations of the nymphs I found — no go. Riffling didn’t save the day. Even so, it did help me connect to the water that I waded, the animals in this place, at this time — to lives that are wild in a way that doesn’t make me sick to contemplate or remember. I’ve added to an understanding also informed by tracks of elk and deer, prints of raccoons and coyotes on the banks, to threats of drought and promises of clouds. That intimacy makes me feel better to be alive. Also, however indirectly, pleased to have spawned.
Addendum: Readers keen on kid collecting-animal stories might like to pick up My Family and Other Animals, a brilliant description of naturalist Gerald Durrell’s early adventures on Corfu — one of the funniest books ever written on this subject. Fishers interested in building or buying an aquatic seine may contact MidStream, at mriffler@aol.com; or, for a wider variety of options, see Field Collecting equipment at www.bioquip.com.
