August

I liked Cody the moment I arrived, and I’m not sure why. Good vibes, I suppose. You ever been to a place and been as comfortable as you would be if you were at home? That’s how Cody was for me. Like I’d been there in another life. I’m not sure I’d call it home, but it’s definitely somewhere I could stay for a while.

I got there without a clue, too. The vague program was to hit some of the area waters, recommended by a friend at the fly shop who had described the area as “The Land of Lonely Trout.” I wanted to test the veracity of that claim.

I stopped at two of the shops I saw on the strip downtown, to buy leaders and, well because, that just seems like an important thing for me to do when I’m in a new area. Visit the shop, see what it’s about. I’m curious about shops, about how they operate, about who frequents them, about whether they have character or if they’re quite as a library and loaded with flakes.

Two guys, an older one, and a younger one, a few years older than me though, with read hair. We talked.

“You goin’ up there tonight?” the red-haired guide asked.

“That’s the plan,” I responded, “hoping to do some fishing and find a Forest Service Campground up around there.”

He nodded; I’m not sure he was really looking at me. “Did you bring any green drake patterns?”

“Yeah, I tied a couple before I left. Parachutes.”

“They come off around seven. If you hurry you can make it.”

I drove fast, and wound up at a decent campground with fifteen minutes to spare. Except the hatch didn’t actually start till 7:15. But the bugs came off- what I assume were green drakes, if only because that’s what I was told they were. They were mayflies, and they were big. They seemed more brown than green, though I never had one in hand, and that may simply have been a reflection of the slanted, yellow rays of the sun hanging just above the cliffs overhead. Most importantly, the fish were eating them.

I was on the outside bend. Not ideal. The ideal water was where fish were smashing bugs constantly, a hundred feet across the stream, on the shoal. That’s where I wanted to be. But the water was deep and fast, and even if I could make it across, I didn’t want to come back across it in the dark. Strike one.

I opened my dry-fly box. Three green drakes. I tied more than three green drakes. But I only saw three green drakes. My tying bench consists of all the basics, plus an elaborate system of cups, boxes, and containers meant to hold finished flies until they’re ready to go into my box. Obviously, this system had failed, and the rest of my green drakes were sitting in a bin on my desk fourteen hundred miles away. Strike two.

I tied on a big parachute Adams. Well, a size 12 parachute Adams. That’s big for me. I picked a decent-looking boulder, the water of the river rising up and over it, creating a little plunge on the backside, and tossed the fly out, more playing than fishing. I watched the water crash over the fly just downstream of the boulder, and in an instant realized there was a fishes’ face in amongst all that water. I set the hook, but it was two late. Strike three.

Strike four though, that struck. A nineteen inch cutthroat rose textbook style just ahead of another boulder, a different one. And strike four was a seventeen inch rainbow. The last was a sixteen inch cutt. I had my fly snubbed once, by a rainbow of about eight inches. I missed two others. And that was it, it was done. All on a big dumb Adams parachute.

I went back and set up my camp in the dark, cooking the rainbow I’d caught. I normally wouldn’t, but I was hungry, it was the smallest non-native I’d caught, and it didn’t belong there anyway. And if it makes anyone feel better, I didn’t have a pocket knife, and had to resort to gutting the fish with a pair of fly-tying scissors. It worked.

I wrapped it in foil with onions, potatoes, zucchini and mushrooms, seasoned it, and sat back and drank a beer. A nice older man walking his wife’s two poodles came by and asked how fishing was, we talked for a while; he’d caught a half dozen or so that morning on rubber legged stoneflies downstream. I told him about the hatch and about the dry fly action, and he seemed fairly excited for it. I looked behind me, at the now dark cliffs, and set my mind back to the big bugs and the brown sandstone walls, the round gray stones under my feet, the darkness and the light of moving water, the radiance of a cutthroat won…