The most revolutionary development in fly fishing had nothing to do with rods, reels, or terminal tackle. The greatest advancement in angling came about with the invention of the internal combustion engine. The automobile expanded our fishing horizons. The deeper the carbon footprint, the closer we get to nature.
There is nothing quite as exhilarating as a road trip. Every year, 1.3 million humans are killed in road crashes worldwide. That comes to more than the number killed in our wars. It’s good to know that human sacrifice is still immensely popular. We offer ourselves up on the altars of speed and convenience. As they say, freedom isn’t free.
I first glimpsed California on a version of the Great American Road Trip. My view of the Pacific Ocean became one of the signal events in my life. The year was 1987, and I had driven cross-country from my home on the northeastern Atlantic seaboard. The Atlantic and Pacific are bodies of blue salt water, but one can’t help being more impressed with the one on our West Coast. I learned this rolling into Southern California after eight hours of driving through the desert. I had started my morning in Kanab, Utah, had driven across Nevada and the Mojave in one straight burst, had suffered the smog and traffic snarls of San Bernardino, and now suddenly there was the ocean at Santa Monica, looking like a Beach Boys song. The view farther up the coast at Malibu was even more spectacular. It was late afternoon, and the sunlight on the western shore of America was a rich, golden haze. I followed the coastal highway to the surf town of Ventura, parked, sat on the sand, and watched the sun sink down into a god unknown. There it was, the last great romantic wilderness on the planet. It takes up most of the earth, yet we can’t live in it. Even her tide pools seemed cosmic, full of wriggling sea creatures, a glimpse into the underlying engines of life on earth.
The all-American road trip goes better with fishing tackle. So early next morning, I walked down to the shoreline, armed with a fly rod. Back home on the Jersey shore, I had taught myself the rudiments of saltwater fly fishing. But the Pacific Ocean was more than I had bargained for. No ocean suffers fools gladly, but the Pacific was something else entirely. Everything about it was bigger and more. More wind, larger surf, stronger rips, colder currents. Try as I might, all I made were holes in the water.
Defeated, I drove north to Big Sur to gape at the continuous spectacle of the California coast and from there on to San Francisco to enjoy that city’s hills and waterfront. I was quite taken by the aquarium light on the City by the Bay, and I allowed myself to become acquainted with several North Beach bars. The next morning, I drove into the Sacramento Valley, passing in time the Sutter Buttes, and then I got my first glimpse of the snow cone of Mount Shasta. Shasta isn’t the tallest mountain in California — it just looks that way, rising out of the landscape and dominating it like Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro. I was bound for Hat Creek in California’s volcano country.
In those days, the trout fishing on Hat was still in its prime. The spring creek hosted a rich salad of water weeds, and mayflies were plentiful in the air. I made more of those holes in the water. But I also caught some respectable trout. Hat Creek clinched the deal for me. I decided I would move from the East Coast to the Golden State. I’ve been out here ever since, although like everyone else, I’m thinking about Seattle.
I make my home in San Francisco, a town where all right-minded humans once aspired to live. Today, life in the city of start-ups has become downright unlivable for folks not making it in high-tech. People will tell you San Francisco is Northern California, but it’s not true. Look at a map. San Francisco sits dead center on California’s coast. The City by the Bay is part of California’s central coast — it is Spanish California. Everything about it, from its languid Mediterranean climate to its history and culture and Spanish-language heritage names says old Mexico. Northern California is somewhere else.
The open road is good for what ails you. Just ask Jack Kerouac. And Frisco is still a great place to begin a road trip, much as it must have been back in the days of Jack London and the old stagecoach lines. Its location seems ideally suited for launching a fishing trip anywhere in the Golden State — or anywhere in the West, for that matter. On the East Coast, driving to any good trout stream is an ordeal. In the West, it becomes a journey of the soul — that is, after you get out of Bay Area traffic. The West has plenty of those wide-open spaces that I crave for psychological reasons.
My rule on a road trip is never to listen to news on the radio or look at a newspaper. That way, some grace may be allowed to reenter one’s life. I used to make my living as a newspaper reporter, so I know there’s nothing older than the news. They say it’s the first draft of history, but the only thing history ever tells us is that the world is in a state of flux and always will be. If we were honest about it, we would call history by its true name, which is mischief. High school would have been less dull if our textbooks had titles like World Mischief or The Mischief of the United States.
Nor do I weigh myself down on these road trips with a whole lot of fishing paraphernalia and other nonessentials. I’m with Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, Inc., who says: “The more you know, the less you need. You want to replace all that gear with knowledge and experience.” A road trip is a good way to gain some knowledge and maybe even a little satori. So I try not to worry too much about the exhaust coming from my car’s tailpipe that is killing everything that grows. As Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain, or in the petals of a flower.”
As you might tell from the above quote, I always bring something inspirational to read on a fishing trip. Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth are indispensable for California’s Sierra trout streams. Robinson Jeffers will do nicely for any drive along our rock-bound coast. I am drawn toward the kind of literature that I call magical naturalism. It’s a genre that I define as writing with an attention to natural detail as seen through the lens of transcendence.
My fly fishing, like my driving, always involves certain rituals that I have developed over time. Confucius taught us how the importance of ritual can instill a certain sensibility in a person. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” My overall goal someday is to be able to fish in a manner monks call wu-wei — a Taoist concept meaning “nondoing,” or natural action, that is, without effort or excessive struggle, cultivating a natural state in alignment with the flow of life. My actual practice is to make holes in the water and curse a lot. Hanging out with California steelhead fishermen early on didn’t help my cause. Their simian behavior on-stream could have been the subject of a study by Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey.
Despite uncouth behavior, I remain faithful to a conservation ethic. I am biocentric, not anthropocentric. Edward Abbey said “We must never forget that we are animals as much as we are gods, and that every animal and plant has an inherent right to their portion of the earth.”
Road trips provide us with an opportunity to ponder deep philosophical questions on long drives. Here’s one: Is fishing cruel? Shouldn’t any angler who is not too stupid or stuck on his sport suspect that what we do might be morally indefensible? In other words, are these poor, harassed fish self-aware, or are they just the sum of their biological impulses? Are they sentient creatures that feel pain and fear, or are they just a bunch of reflexes? I used to think the latter, but now I’m not so sure. We are making great gains in neuroscience. But the more we learn, the more we realize we still don’t know. Not because truth is an illusion, but because the universe is overly generous in hoarding her secrets, and nature is infinite in its design and detail.
Fish probably have a biological basis for consciousness — birds certainly do, though neither fish nor birds have a neocortex, the part of the mammalian brain that is involved in cognition, spatial reasoning, and sensory perception. Their seat of consciousness might reside in another part of their brains — in birds, the paleocortex, in fish, the pallium. I suspect that fish can feel pain and maybe even terror. But can they make choices, regulate their behavior, recognize other fish as individuals — in short, is there anything like a thought process going on in there? And should we care? In nature, the weak don’t survive. And neither do the strong. Life and death are interwoven into the natural order, and it is not possible to be alive except at the expense of another life form. “Life lives on life,” said Joseph Campbell, who once defined a vegetarian as “someone who is not sensitive enough to hear a tomato scream.” That might justify fishing for food, but not for entertainment. I’ll take the coward’s way out and dodge the big question. If challenged to justify why I fish, I’ll just say I’m not fully evolved. I am well read however. I’ve never cared much for Robert Frost — more dos and don’ts than the Farmer’s Almanac — but sometimes the road less traveled really does make all the difference. Most of our road trips are well-planned, and not much is left up to chance. Sometimes we make a trip to new waters. Other times a return to a favorite stream that can be like rediscovering a well-loved novel or poem. But sometimes it pays to jettison the itinerary and act on a whim.
Once, while fishing Hat Creek, I suddenly took it into my head to make a ten-hour drive to Idaho. I don’t really remember why. Maybe I wanted to compare Hat with Silver Creek. Or maybe the gods told me to do it. In either case, I exited California by a back door that I otherwise I would neither have noticed or thought twice about checking out.
I reached this escape hatch by driving through the lava fields of the Modoc National Forest, which is located in the far northeastern corner of California, but felt to me like the middle of nowhere. Goose Lake, which appeared to be drying up, looked ghostly, even in bright sunshine. The highway led me into the Great Basin Desert in Oregon, a moonscape of stark desolation. Some might have found the emptiness appalling. I admit the landscape left me feeling a little unhinged. Lake Abert came into view, an alkaline mirage under an immense escarpment, and I followed its shoreline for eighteen hallucinatory miles — and from there into the heart of being and nothingness. It gave me a big dose of otherness that made even San Francisco feel strange upon my return.
The trip was definitely worth it. Those Californians who have exited by the back door at Goose Lake know that this is one of the ways to get to the desert town of Burns, which is a little north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a bird sanctuary that was recently liberated by armed “patriots” and “sovereign citizens.” The highway catches up with the South Fork of the Malheur River at Drinkwater Pass and then follows the main branch east a long, long way. There is good trout fishing on the Malheur, but one is advised to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes. Finally, after what feels like the longest ride of your life, you reach Idaho, a Shoshone Indian word for “Sun Comes Down the Mountain” or “It Is Morning.”
Idaho is my favorite Rocky Mountain state. Its mountains and scenery make up for the holes it has torn in the social fabric. Idaho allows religious crackpots to withhold life-saving medicine from their children on dubious biblical grounds. And it is the sole state in the union where lawmakers have removed all references to man-made climate change in setting school science standards that establish the minimum students need to know. But it is the most spectacular Rocky Mountain state by far, in my estimation. If I wax poetic about it, it is only because no one can write truthfully about Idaho and leave out the poetry. And it has the best trout fishing in the Rockies, mainly because Montana and Wyoming don’t have steelhead. Steelhead and salmon swim up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and pass through two major mountain ranges, the Cascades and the Rockies, to spawn in the basins of Idaho, a journey of nine hundred miles. John Gierach wrote: “Fishermen claim to love the sea-run fish for their size, but what they really love is the unimaginable size of their lives.”
Anadromous fish have accounted for a majority of my road trips. I started out as a trout fanatic, but grew to love salmon and steelhead. I had not accounted for the fact when I first moved out here that it was already the twilight of the gods for them in California. Still, the weather’s great, and it’s a nifty lifestyle, and there’s oxycodone in the sunshine.
But to return to my Idaho trip: I drove out to Ketchum and fished Silver Creek in Sun Valley for a few days, then checked out the Big Lost River, because I liked the name. Then I had to decide whether to head east through the lodgepole pines so I could fish the Henrys Fork of the Snake River on the Railroad Ranch or search out new water. The Henrys Fork, where it flows through the old Harriman property, is my all-time favorite stretch of dry-fly water. Returning to a lovely and cherished trout stream can be like watching a favorite movie all over again: you are delighted and refreshed anew. Instead, though, I decided to be adventurous and point my car in another direction. I took the road north over Galena Summit, which is the highest mountain pass in the Pacific Northwest. It crosses the divide that separates the Big Wood and Salmon River drainages. Coming down the pass, I got an eyeful of a basin encircled by three mountain ranges. Its high meadows were carpeted in blue camas flowers. The upper Salmon River flowed through the Stanley Basin, its meadows nurtured by creeks tinkling out of the mountainsides. The river passed by the tiny town of Stanley, population less than a hundred. A thought crossed my mind: this is what Jackson Hole, Wyoming, must have looked like before it was discovered. This is what Sun Valley must have been like before anybody knew about it.
For a few days, I fished for cutthroat trout in the relatively peaceful currents of the upper Salmon. Many miles downstream, the water around my hips was to become the raging River of No Return. The Salmon gathers from a maze of drainages in the mountains of Idaho and runs for more than four hundred mostly wilderness miles. It is the longest river wholly contained within a single state. Its whitewater rapids carve through some of the deepest gorges in America. It drains the largest roadless wilderness in the United States outside of Alaska. And it is only a tributary of a tributary of the mighty Columbia River. The water passing by my feet would one day be mingling with the Pacific Ocean.
There seemed to be a hundred lakes and ponds nearby. I was drawn to Redfish Lake, an alpine lake five miles south of Stanley, at the base of the snowcapped Sawtooths. It was fed by Redfish Lake Creek, the terminus of the longest sockeye salmon migration in North America. Redfish Lake was named for the scarlet sockeyes that once arrived in such great numbers that the lake shimmered red during the spawning. Nowadays, precious few salmon of any kind make it back to Redfish Lake or to the great Salmon River named in their honor. Historically, Idaho’s Salmon River Basin produced almost half of all steelhead and nearly half of all spring-run and summer-run chinook salmon passing through the Columbia, the paramount river of the Pacific Northwest. Four dams and reservoirs on the lower Snake River tributary in eastern Washington, near the Idaho border, are blocking the upstream and downstream migrations of most of Idaho’s Columbia salmon. Only a pitiful few make it home to their ancestral spawning waters in the Rockies and to lakes such as Lower Redfish and Upper Redfish that once teemed with these sea-going fish. Think of all that beauty vanished from the earth.
But I’d rather be savoring the world than trying to save it. And one man can do only so much. As V. S. Naipaul said, “The world is what it is.” And what a beautiful world it is. So I’ll agitate to remove those four dams on the Snake River. And keep on fishing my brains out. All road trips should be celebratory in nature and not end on a downer.
For the last leg of that trip, I took the highway that follows the main branch of the Salmon River all the way to the base of the Bitterroots. And Lost Trail Pass brought me over those mountains into Montana to fish Rock Creek around Missoula, which some say is a suburb of Seattle five hundred miles distant. From there, it was back into Idaho over Lolo Pass, and I remembered something I had read in a mystery novel written by the late poet Richard Hugo:
Soon after I crossed the border into Idaho at Lolo Pass, I found myself twisting and turning down a heavily wooded highway that was running along one of the loveliest rivers I’d seen. The Lochsa’s olive-green water made the stones and huge boulders on the bottom yellow or black, or dark, dark green. The river danced gold in places. In other places it pooled so deep, light was turned away two fathoms down in the olive water. It was a playful river, a mysterious river, a creepy river, a horrible river, and for all of that, a lovely river. I ached to fish it someday.
Hugo was a great poet and a manic trout fisherman, and he wrote that passage in his novel Death and the Good Life. He passed away soon after his detective book came out, his only novel, and I don’t know if he ever got a chance to fish the Lochsa. I certainly hope so. In any case, I fished the river that day in his honor. It was indeed a playful and mysterious trout stream that didn’t yield its secrets readily.
This sort of thing went on for a while as I drifted a little aimlessly in a mostly westerly direction, until one day I found myself under the rainy skies and inky green trees of Astoria, Oregon, close by the mouth of the Columbia River. I had gone from the terminus to the beginning of a sockeye salmon’s journey — from the omega to the alpha, so to speak. It wasn’t anything I had set out to do. It just happened on a road trip.
There’s so much out there for us to love. My rambles throughout California, the Northwest, the Desert Southwest, and the Rockies have had deep emotional resonance for me. I realize they might not do the same for you. The essence of any fishing trip is emotional experience. The point is to follow your own road. And remember that journeys sometimes don’t reveal their true meaning until after they are over.
