When it gets you early, there is no escape.
— Paul Gartside
They’re building a hotel where you used to be able to park before climbing down to the river, a backdoor approach below the pedestrian bridge that put you out on a bar on the wrong side of the run, except right on top, near a pocket of holding water no bigger than a pair of drift boats, where the first guy through will often find a fish. The hotel, currently plywood sheathing and an armada’s worth of Tyvek flapping in the breeze, put an end to this inside move. Now that you have to park on the other side of the river, in the little lot by the county history museum, very few of us are willing to cross the bridge for those few quick casts into that little bucket and, in doing so, risk losing the spot we might have already claimed in the lineup parading through the heart of the run.
Unless you’re Gabe Cunningham. Gabe’s of an age, either wretched or enviable, when no shot is too long — when any spot in a river where a steelhead might lie is worth visiting, no matter the time, energy, or forfeited opportunity it takes to give that wheel a whirl. Gabe goes fishing the way you hope your bird dog smothers a field. Sometimes, when he’s on the water the same hours I am, I think there are two of him. Awhile back, I was into a bunch of worthy fish in the eastern part of the state with Mr. Kelly, another teacher from the high school. I asked him, rhetorically, if he could imagine Gabe with us, getting into this remarkable wilderness sport. Mr. Kelly shook his head — he knows Gabe as well as I do — then he proceeded to recreate the scene that had passed before his eyes, descending into images far more graphic than anyone wants me to depict here.
How many of us can remember what it was really like when we were young? In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense. At the start, fish just drove us crazy. I find it laughable when I hear or read old-timers worry about the future of the sport: Where is the next generation of fly fishers? By simply asking this question, the old-timer reveals he’s forgotten the furious passion that once consumed him, a restless desire that a certain type of youngster finds impossible to resist. Where you won’t find kids crazy to fish is hanging out where old farts sit around brooding about the future of the sport — or their distaste for texting, tattoos, body piercings, or what kids call music these days.
Last spring, I arrived at school one morning and was swept up in the excitement surrounding “Gabe’s fish.” Before the first bell rang, half a dozen kids came by my classroom to show me pictures on their phones. Two of the students were especially eager to share; their inclusion in the photo was offered up as evidence that they had played a part in landing the fish, a role I didn’t doubt when, on closer inspection, I counted five teenagers, side by side, holding up a sturgeon that extended head and tail beyond the boys, all smiles, at either end.
Finally Gabe arrived. He was already grinning, sure I had heard the news, his eyes lit up beneath his black eyebrows and unkempt shock of dark hair. There were actually two fish; his buddy Russell broke one off. They were out on the end of the sand spit.
You can get right to the edge of a 40-foot-deep hole in the big river when the water’s low enough. He and Russell and the other guys had brought beach chairs, sand spikes, bait — a goofball teenage fishing expedition, were it not that Gabe had been waiting for just such a spring afternoon.
Next thing he knew, his salmon rod was getting dragged across the sand. “I thought you had sand spikes.”
Gabe looked at me as if I were a teacher who expects way too much. “They were just sticks we found on the way.”
Asked what happened then, Gabe raised his right hand across his body and, with a pair of backhand thrusts, mimicked coming up tight to a fish, a gesture complemented with clenched teeth, pressed lips, muscles showing at the hinges of his jaw.
And?
Back in the moment, Gabe grew starry-eyed.
“Big fish,” he said, shaking his head. “It took awhile.”
If it troubles readers to learn that Gabe Cunningham doesn’t fish exclusively with flies, let me remind them that nearly all good anglers began catching fish by less sophisticated means. The first chapter of Roderick Haig-Brown’s A Primer of Fly-Fishing is titled “On the Virtues of Worms.” Although it’s possible, of course, to become an accomplished fly fisher without having ever fished with bait, lures, nets, spears, diving ducks, or domesticated sea otters, I’ve generally found that those whose fire burns hottest to fool fish with flies — and to do whatever it takes to protect these fish and the habitats in which they live — discovered that passion before they ever picked up a fly rod.
Gabe’s appetite seems limitless. Smallmouth bass, carp, tiger muskies — not a weekend approaches when he doesn’t have a plan on the burner. An understanding mom with a willingness to visit every corner of two states hasn’t shorted Gabe’s rations, either. This past summer, Gabe held a job as an intern at a lodge at the mouth of one of British Columbia’s most famous steelhead rivers. Okay, the most famous BC steelhead river. In exchange for clean-up and maintenance chores, Gabe got room and board — and lots of opportunities to experience firsthand the steelhead for which the river has gained its widespread fame.
“You should really try to fish there,” Gabe tells me, after describing yet another fish, festooned with sea lice, cartwheeling back to the sea. He swipes through his phone and shows me pictures of cradled spacecraft, their exquisite profiles sparkling without hint of color beyond that of a goblet of gin. In a pinch, he learned to plunge Spey rod and reel into the river, strip off 25 yards of line, and let the current carry the loose line downstream; pressured from a new direction, the fish comes back upstream — your chance again to try to control it. Fish in the high teens aren’t so much routine as they are the size that actually get landed.
“Any bigger and they don’t stop,” says Gabe, smiling like a teenage surfer washed up on the beach after getting swallowed by the first big barrel of his life. He’s sure, of course, that fish like these will grab his fly forever.
Will he ever suffer loss so joyfully again?
“You really ought to try to go there,” repeats Gabe. He often has advice for me. Besides his certainty that I should dip into my writing riches and set aside $10,000 for a week of summer steelheading, he visits my classroom each week to suggest a river or fishery I should consider in the more immediate future. What possible reason could anyone have for not driving three hours to the coast for a shot at a pod of steelhead seen ascending some creek? And a grown-up, no less. Now that he has an imported pickup of his own to drive, Gabe is more convinced than ever that any week that passes during which I don’t fish proves some sort of sad truth about me. Like there’s anything else but fishing I’d rather be doing?
He’s just trying to help. Why? Because Gabe also happens to be one of those bright young anglers who understands that old farts have something to offer, that they actually know a thing or two — that if he wants to solve the mysteries of evening hatches on the Wolf, or how and when and where to fish a riffle-hitched waker, it’s worth putting up with the rambling tales of 20-fish days and 40-steelhead autumns. Much as it’s easy to believe that old-timers weren’t good so much as they were just lucky — lucky to be around when rivers and beaches were uncrowded, the fish abundant and dumb — Gabe recognizes that 50 years on the water can add up to inside dope that no amount of money can buy.
And no doubt the opposite is true: kids on the water stumble into their own insights and inspirations. Better yet, this latest generation of fly fishers — Gabe and his pals — finds itself with opportunities that others have never had. Right here in our own state, dams are coming down. Conservation groups continue to purchase lands that have waters never fished by the public. Others are improving fish habitat, achieving better flows, fighting water pollution and sedimentation. There are places where fishing is in fact improving.
Opportunities — or portentous anomalies? The obvious answer is that nobody knows what the future holds. Except this: kids like Gabe Cunningham have a vested interest in the shape of what’s to come, and I’m willing to bet that Gabe, for one, will go as far as he needs to go to help keep our waters alive.
In the meantime, he dropped by this week to see if I’d been out since the last big rains. Salmon, he reported, were spawning just above the mouth, spread out on fist-sized gravel. I asked how the new fly worked. Gabe’s got a pattern he’s been tweaking all season, a concoction he’s pretty proud of because of the number of fish it’s brought to hand. It may not be much to look at — whether it’s clownish or sublime, it’s hard to say — but when you’re a teenager tying flies for sea-run fish, looks are probably beside the point.
It turns out, however, that Gabe saw all of those spawning salmon and decided to tie on a little bead that he could swing down below the redds. Steelhead, of course, love to hang out in just such lies, picking up salmon eggs that wash downstream.
“Is that even fly fishing?” I asked. Gabe looked at me and frowned.
It was as if he hadn’t understood a word I said.
Materials
Shank: 15-millimeter Waddington shank
Thread: Wine Uni-Thread 6/0
Trailer-Hook Wire: Black Senyo’s Intruder Trailer Hook Wire
Body: Large opal Mirage Tinsel
Thorax: Mint Antron dubbing
Wing/Tail: Olive variant black-barred rabbit strip
Tentacles: Bronze Flashabou
Collar: Small pink schlappen
Lateral Line: Natural Lady Amherst pheasant tail
Trailer Hook: Owner Straight Eye Bait Hook, size 4
How to Tie Gabe’s Fly
Step 1: Secure the Waddington shank in the vise and start the thread. Fold a length of trailer wire in half and lash the forward quarters to the shank. The loop for your trailer hook should be about equal to the length of the Waddington shank.
Step 2: Secure a short length of tinsel to the aft end of the shank and advance the thread about two-thirds the way toward the eye of the shank. Wind the tinsel forward and tie off with several wraps of thread.
Step 3: Wax your thread and create a dubbing noodle. Wrap the noodle over the front portion of the tinsel body, creating a chubby dubbing ball.
Step 4: Cut a rabbit strip long enough to reach just past where the bend of your trailer hook will eventually ride. Trim the fur off the forward tip of the rabbit strip and taper the tip to a point. Tie in the forward tip of the rabbit strip just ahead of the Antron dubbing ball.
Step 5: Fold three or four strands of Flashabou around the thread and secure them just forward of the front tip of the rabbit strip. Jockey the strands of Flashabou so that they lie along each side of the hook shank. Trim the Flashabou to about where the trailer hook will ride.
Step 6: To prepare a schlappen feather, hold the tip in your right hand with the outside of the feather facing you. Strip the quills from what’s now the top half of the feather above the stem. Secure the tip of the feather directly in front of the rabbit strip. As you wind the schlappen forward, try to twist the stem so that the remaining quills lie back along the hook shank, rather than springing outward like a bottle brush.
Step 7: For lateral lines, tie two quills from a Lady Amherst tail feather along each side of the fly. Whip finish and lacquer the head. To attach the stinger or trailer hook, squeeze the loop through the hook eye, then run the loop around the bend of the hook and past the hook point and pull the loop tight. Gabe is still young enough to wonder if it matters whether the hook rides point up or point down.
