I’ve always been a reluctant student. In school I was either bored and half asleep, or rebelling against my teachers. Like Saul Bellow’s Augie March, I need to “go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” That was certainly true of fly fishing. I learned by trial-and-error, one mistake after another, slowly and at times painfully, but when I finally hooked my first trout I felt the unseemly pride of the self-taught.
Given that attitude, it’s astonishing I became so friendly with Paul Deeds, the most dogmatic angler I’ve ever met. He called me over the holidays to brag about an 11-pound steelhead buck he caught on the Russian River shortly after Thanksgiving. His call was notable on three counts. Such big steelies are rare in Alexander Valley so early in the season; Deeds had just celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday; and he’s phobic about using a telephone. Even when we were neighbors, he never gave a shout before heading to my place for a visit. Instead I’d hear his truck rattle along the drive, and I’d set out the cribbage board and open two cans of Brown Derby, the supermarket beer I drank in those cash-strapped times.
Playing cribbage with Deeds wasn’t exactly fun. As on the stream, he was an avid competitor. His fingers trembled a little when he pegged the winning points, and he wasn’t above cackling and attributing his success to superior intelligence. He meant it, too. I’d laugh to myself, but I can see at a distance of years that there was some validity to his boast. Deeds isn’t a great reader and gets his news from various suspect sources including the Fox Network, but in a few narrow areas of expertise — prune farming, cribbage strategy, his home stretch of the Russian — he ranks in the ninety-ninth percentile.
I’d never fished for salmon or steelhead before I moved to the valley. If you’d quizzed me, I couldn’t have told you the precise difference between the species. I assumed that steelhead died like salmon after spawning, but a fair number survive each run and may spawn two, three or even four times. The most robust individuals, whether male or female, sometimes live as long as eleven years and tip the scales at nearly 60 pounds. Oddly, steelhead don’t turn up in commercial nets. They have an uncanny ability to disappear once they enter the ocean, off to the Bering Sea or maybe Japan — nobody’s certain. A saltwater migration isn’t essential to them, either. Steelhead planted in lakes will spawn there, as well.
As a seasoned fly fisher for trout, I thought I could simply transfer my hard-earned skills to the Russian. That proved to be naïve. For starters, the river flooded after the first big storms, and the holes and riffles I’d studied when the water was low all but vanished. The water changed color, too, and was never the same from day to day. I had no idea how to read those changes, so I often fished in such murky conditions even a steelhead blessed with 20-20 vision couldn’t see my fly. And speaking of vision, I put in long hours of worthless blind casting. I am not prone to despair, but I came awfully close as I retreated to my trailer wet and cold and eager for a belt of Wild Turkey, thinking I’d never get it right.
Then I met Deeds. It would be a baldfaced lie to pretend that he was thrilled to make my acquaintance. When he discovered I’d rented a place overlooking what he considered his private beat, a quarter-mile or so that other anglers couldn’t reach without trespassing and risking a confrontation with the notoriously feisty Deeds, he threw a fit. I’ve told the whole story elsewhere, but suffice it to say that he treated me coolly at first. If I’d been swept away by the current, which almost happened once when I took a fall, he’d have been overjoyed and would’ve treated himself to a steak dinner at the Tip Top Inn. Only when he saw that I was determined to stick with it did he take pity and decide to help out.
As a teacher, Deeds resembled a drill instructor. He seldom put a lesson into words. He’s just not the talkative type. If you sat next to him at a dinner party — not that he’s ever been to one — you’d be starved for conversation. Instead I learned by example. That wasn’t my choice because it involved watching Deeds catch fish after fish. Never once did he say,
“Now Bill, just cast your fly below that rock and let it tick along ” No, he’d cast his own fly below the rock and bingo, he’d be into a nice steelie. But at least I realized I’d been wasting most of my time on the stream. Angling for steelhead really was different from trout fishing. For a fly fisher to succeed, the conditions had to be nearly ideal.
Deeds fished whenever possible, but he was especially partial to the Russian when it began to drop after a storm and hadn’t yet cleared. When the water acquired a milky green hue, slightly opaque to the human eye but not to the eye of a steelhead, he attacked it with a military fervor and concentrated on the lies and riffles he knew from past experience were productive. He worked them in strict rotation, never lingering for more than a few casts if he failed to hook up or at least notice the swirl of an active steelie. At dawn he’d be back and at work again unless the conditions had changed. He only bothered with blind casting in the early evening when the fish were on the move. As part of my education, I kept a mental log of Deeds’s favorite spots, yet he always grabbed the best one before me, no matter how early I got out of bed. When I began to catch a few fish, he was half pleased to witness the positive result of his teaching, and half disgusted for allowing himself to teach me anything at all. Deep down, he understood I was no real threat as competition, but that didn’t prevent him from acting as if I was just another city slicker from San Francisco poaching on his territory. Only when I rented my trailer for a second year and then a third did he drop his guard. After he gave me a half dozen streamers he’d tied, I realized I’d passed some sort of test and felt I’d been inducted into a obscure but highly selective tribe.
Early March was a lovely time on the Russian. The river was calmer, the first California poppies began to show, and the small spawners known as bluebacks arrived. Along the edge of my property there was a creek, and when I walked by it I could see the hens preparing their redds and depositing their eggs. The bucks often hung by the mouth of the creek before their upstream run, and it was wonderful sport to cast to them. The bluebacks were terrific fighters in spite of their size, yet Deeds, who caught plenty, would never bother to sing the praises of a steelhead under ten pounds.
But eleven pounds? That was a different story. He even overcame his phone phobia to report the news. His call took me by surprise. I hadn’t seen or talked with him for about three years. Almost forty years had gone by since we’d first met, when he was almost forty and I still qualified as young. After he recounted the tale of his catch, each phase of the struggle described in minute detail, an awkward silence fell between us. That was natural, I suppose, but it still threw me. For a moment I didn’t know what to do or say. But durable friendships tend to find their footing despite the passage of time, and soon we were chatting as anglers everywhere do about fish caught and fish lost.
I asked Deeds how it felt to be seventy-seven. “Better than the alternative,” he said dryly. He was in tolerably good shape, still able to wade the Russian in high water and troubled only by some minor arthritis. He’d fashioned a good life for himself, and if he missed having a companion as he aged, he didn’t let on. I couldn’t help feeling a little concerned about him anyway, but then he tossed me a curveball — he was seeing a “younger woman” from Santa Rosa, who was just seventy-two! Not only that, she’d talked him into enrolling in a weekly class in ballroom dancing. “I had to buy new shoes,” he muttered. “Forty-two bucks at Kmart.”
I offered my congratulations. I was delighted for Deeds. The image of him twirling around a dance floor in his shiny new shoes elevated my spirits and reminded me once again that the unexpected plays a more significant role in our affairs than we choose to believe. I wondered what the future held for my pal and his paramour. Would they decide to marry? If so, where would the wedding take place? A chapel in Reno or South Lake? Or maybe the Alexander Valley grange hall? The scene was easy to picture. There’d be a long table laden with potluck dishes and bottles of wine. Deeds would be shy but beaming. Would he teach his bride to fish for steelhead? That, I thought, would be true love.
