I bought my first fly rod, an inexpensive Fenwick, more than forty years ago. I saw the rod as a means to an end — a superior way to catch trout, that is, with an elegance I admired. I had no idea I’d make some valued lifelong friends in the bargain, but I soon discovered how complicated and even esoteric fly fishing can be. Feeling overwhelmed, I realized I needed to meet some kindred spirits to educate me on the fine points. My girlfriend wouldn’t sit still to talk about tying a Kreh Knot over a beer, after all. In the end, I was left with the company of my fellow obsessives, and that proved to be an unexpected gift.
First and foremost was Paul Deeds, a friend now for decades and my steelhead mentor when I lived in the Alexander Valley. If not for a mutual love of fly fishing, we might never have shared so much as a handshake, though. His taste differs from mine in almost every particular. Deeds can’t stand the liberal media and prefers Fox News, and Dinty Moore Beef Stew is his notion of an ideal dinner entrée. “Just open a can, and bingo! A great meal for a buck and a half,” as he puts it. I doubt he’s read an entire book since A Tale of Two Cities in seventh grade, but if you ask him to expound on Salmo gairdneri, he’s as authoritative as a Nobel physicist on wave particles.
Deeds taught me to read every riffle and pool on our quarter mile of the Russian River. He gave me flies, casting tips, and sage advice. But what I appreciated most was his kindness. He saw me for what I was, a young writer struggling to learn his craft, isolated in a beat-up trailer 15 miles from Healdsburg and often lonely, though I wouldn’t have admitted it. Deeds knew, and he looked after me in his fashion. When the river was out of shape and he couldn’t fish, I’d hear his truck rattle over my gravel drive and next the excited barking of his dog. He never called ahead. That would be too much like making a commitment.
“Game of crib?” he’d ask when I opened the door, a cribbage board under his arm, and I’d feel the loneliness begin to lift. He insisted we play for a penny a point and cackled if he skunked me.
That sensitivity vanished on the stream. I’d never fished with anyone so competitive. Steelhead are creatures of habit. On their spawning run, they rest in the same holes year after year, and Deeds knew all the hot spots. Moreover, he believed he deserved the first crack at each. Only once did I beat him to the punch, rising before dawn to be on the Russian when the light broke. Deeds arrived shortly after me and stared in disbelief as he watched me play a four-pound buck with, he thought, his name on it. If looks could kill. He gave me the cold shoulder for a full week.
If Deeds has a drawback as a fishing pal, it’s his reluctance to travel. He clings to his prune orchard homestead as Robinson Crusoe did to his island. I once talked him into a float trip down the Deschutes in eastern Oregon, a beautiful high-desert tributary of the Columbia. We hired a guide with a drift boat and caught plenty of small summer-run steelhead, but Deeds still complained. Though he’s hardly a gourmet — I cite Dinty Moore as evidence — he accused our guide of being a lousy cook: “The eggs are better at Denny’s,” and so on. I’m not sure he’s left California since then, and that was several presidents ago. Fortunately, I had another friend I could count on, one with a well-developed sense of adventure.
Bob and I met as Peace Corps teachers in Nigeria long ago, but we lost touch when we returned to the states. When I published a first book 15 years later, Bob wrote to me care of the Viking Press. He wondered if I could be the same lost soul he drank with at palm wine bars in the oil palm bush. If so, how in the hell did I learn to write when I was so useless in the old days? I got a kick out of the letter and answered it, and we began to correspond as folks did in a more enlightened age before computers ruled our lives. Bob lived and worked in Seattle and had lately taken up fly fishing, so I suggested a trip when he next visited San Francisco on business.
I chose the Middle Fork of the Feather, close enough to the Bay Area to squeeze into Bob’s schedule, but I still felt anxious. It can be awkward the first time you fish with someone. Would Bob be the sort of angler who brags about his exploits in Patagonia? Or the gearhead type who’d bore me to death with trivia? He had a grown-up job and wore a suit to the office, while I sometimes scribbled away in a bathrobe. Would we have anything at all in common? I needn’t have worried. As we talked on the drive to Graeagle, our veneer of respectable middle age dropped away, and we were the same dudes from those palm wine bars.
It was early June on the Middle Fork. The water was colder than normal, keeping the hatches to a minimum. We took only a few small trout, using Hare’s Ears and Pheasant Tails. The only exception was a fat rainbow I hooked while blind casting a streamer. I worried Bob might react as Deeds did, pissing and moaning about the unfairness of it all, but he was much more gracious. He expressed his delight and snapped a photo, later setting us up with shots of bourbon at a backwoods tavern where the jukebox was stocked with such relic crooners as Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney.
That trip launched a tradition. Every year, Bob and I fished together once or twice, mostly in California, Oregon, and Washington, where I caught my largest trout ever on the Yakima River. The week we spent camping in Yellowstone was notable, too. On the Firehole, a herd of moose ambushed us, and we sprinted to safety like city slickers while a ranger observed and laughed. In Idaho, on the Henrys Fork, it was a flock of sandhill cranes that spooked us, though we were braver that time and stood our ground, scaring them off by waving around our rods. And everywhere, we caught trout.
If asked to choose a favorite trip, I might pick the one we made to the old Arcularius Ranch on the Owens River. We arrived to perfect autumn weather, bright and warm by day, with a light frost on the meadow grasses in the morning. This was tricky fishing, dry-fly only and no wading allowed, for highly selective trout who’d seen every pattern in the Orvis catalog. Each brown or rainbow brought to net we counted as a trophy, no matter what its size. Equipped with a few bottles of good Oregon pinot noir, we ate steak and spuds for three nights in a row without a twinge of guilt.
When Bob fell ill a few months ago, we both knew he’d never wade a river again. I hoped he’d recover, go into remission, and regain enough strength to fish from a boat or the shore, but his doctors weren’t optimistic, and the tide gradually turned against him. I visited him in Seattle toward the end, and as ever, we talked for hours, each detail of all those fishing trips fixed forever in memory with the intensity of jewels. If we admitted to having a few regrets in life, there were none about the time we’d spent casting flies to trout in some of the loveliest places on earth, and I felt thankful fly fishing had rewarded me with such friends.
As for Paul Deeds, I spoke to him not long after the Kincade Fire. In spite of his dislike for phones, he answers his land line if I ring twice, hang up, and call back. He told me the flames on Chalk Hill Road had crept perilously close to his property, and he still sounded shaken. If the wind had shifted or the fire had jumped a barrier, he’d have lost it all. That made him realize, I’m sure, how tenuous our hold is on anything and how quickly it can slip away. I was used to Deeds being grumpy, not melancholy, so I changed the subject and asked if any steelies were in the river yet. He thought for a moment. “Not yet, but I expect they’ll show,” he said, his voice a little brighter. “At least that’s one thing I can still probably count on.”
