THE NEXT BEST THING

Flows of 8000 cfs are keeping the walk and wade fisherman off the river. Myself among them. As the days of not fishing tallied up, I came to realize I miss the friends I fish with as much as I miss the fishing.

So I called my buddy Larry yesterday and met him for a beer and a dog at Onespeed, down the street. This morning, my buddy David and I met for coffee and omelets at Nopalito's. We talked about the flows on the American and the fishing on the small streams in the Sierra, quick with snowmelt.

Hanging out with friends over food and drink is the next best thing to fishing with them. Naturally, road trips are in the works.

WHAT I DIDN'T SEE

In the morning, before I could see, I listened.
The West’s fragrance rose off the ebbing tide.

A chorus of sea-gulls gathered on a thick raft of sea-kelp
inside the offshore reef.

A young buck’s hoof-beats paused on the bluff-trail.
Quail rustled the bunch grass.

There was more—

Gray whales rolled southward, along migratory songlines,
to calve in Baja’s warm lagoons,

pelicans rode the bluff-winds northward,
toward the mouth of the Gualala,

where salmon schooled in the river’s slack water
before pressing upstream to spawn.

And when first light broke the East’s dark silence,
it was the tolling of an ancient bell.


(My poem, "What I Didn't See," was first published in Susussurus: The Sacramento City College Literary Journal)

DownStream Fly Fishing 2010

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."

I had the opportunity to contemplate this quote, by the legendary college-basketball coach John Wooden, all day yesterday. It was written on the backs of the t-shirts everyone was wearing at the 4th annual DownStream fly fishing event.

DownStream fly fishing's Program Director, Ryan Miller, describes the program like this: "DownStream fly fishing was created as part of a movement to inspire people with Down Syndrome to try fly fishing. It is my hope that through fly fishing, people with Down Syndrome can improve coordination, fine tune motor skills, boost social skills and attain a sense of accomplishment while having fun. Additionally, my goal is to include family members in order to promote family activities in an outdoor environment." All these goals and more were met yesterday.

You can read more about the history of the program at Downstream's blog, and how Ryan's brother, Mark, helped inspire the program. They'll be posting pics and will tell you all about yesterday's event at the blog, so I'll just say a few, quick words, about the highlights of my day.

What a joy it was to watch kids with Down Syndrome "do what they can," with gusto! I've never given more high-fives or enjoyed landing a fish more than I did with the kids at this event. Also inspiring were the young volunteers who netted fish and co-fished, for lack of a more artful word, for and with the participants. And I was especially tickled to hear the young angler I was co-fishing with repeat this fly fisher's mantra to his mother: "One more cast."

The kids went from station to station, making art, tying flies, learning to cast, and fishing. Actually, there was one more station, manned by my friend, Adrian Psuty, and me. The bugs station. But midges and mayflies in an aquarium were no competition with the fishing station and pretty soon, we were all fishing. Which was a good thing, as Adrian is an exceptional casting teacher and has a real knack with kids.

Which brings me to my favorite recurring experience of the day. Time after time, I watched the kids track Ryan down with something exciting and urgent to say to him. No matter how busy he was coordinating the event, he stopped what he was doing and completely engaged the young person. The extent to which the kids truly enjoyed him, and he them, was obvious. And it was obvious that the day was, as Ryan told the volunteers first thing in the morning, all about the kids.

This morning, I've been reflecting on yesterday's event. Coincidentally, "The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing," a collection of essays written by Thomas McGuane, caught my eye on the bookshelf. I pulled it down a thumbed through it.

In his introduction, McGuane "suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves." I'm still reverberating from the 2010 DownStream fly fishing event.

QUINTON DUVAL: IN MEMORIUM

Quinton Duval crossed over to another shore last week. He was a hell of a guy and a hell of a poet. Here's one of my favorite Quinton Duval poems, from Joe's Rain (Cedar House Books 2005).

Fishing

It's a walleye, the guy on TV says.
Last time it was a catfish
that filled the boat with violet light.
They let that go.
But they keep the walleye for lunch.
I can foresee the filet knife nick
open the silver muscle
at the tail, and the clean slide
down to the gills.
Then the campfire on the bank,
smoke, grease muttering in the pan,
the applause the fish makes
in the black bottom of the skillet.
We have ourselves huddled over
open coals turning fish or meat,
talking, smoking, drinking
out of green bottles something
bottomless and pale. When you leave,
when you must fall into your night sleep
on a distant shoreline filled with camp smoke,
raise your arm, please. Let the others
know it's the same whatever shore
we land on in the end.

CONDUCTING "RESEARCH" WITH DEC HOGAN

Ever since I started writing a screenplay about the grown son of a legendary steelhead fisherman, I’ve been able to convince myself that a daily trip to the river to swing a run or two is essential research. During this winter’s steelhead spawning run I found myself doing more research than writing, though, and I realized that I needed to pick up the pace—on the writing side of the equation.

Whether it was some Muse with a twisted sense of humor or a literal Freudian slip, I managed to tweak everything below my shinbone while tele-skiing on the last weekend in March. As a result, April was my most productive month of writing since Thanksgiving—when the first of the winter-run fish start swimming upstream toward Sacramento, and I start going down to the river to greet them.

Despite being sidelined, April still had its fair share of research-related activities. I reread my dog-eared copy of Dec Hogan’s A Passion for Steelhead (Wild Rivers Press) and, while conducting research at my local fly shop, I saw an announcement for a one-day, on-river, steelhead-fishing seminar taped to the cash register. Taught by Dec Hogan himself.

Dec Hogan qualifies as a legendary steelhead fisherman. Among his many innovations, he pioneered two-handed casting techniques during a fourteen-year career guiding Pacific Northwest rivers. The price of the seminar seemed more than reasonable when I thought about how important this research would be for writing my story. I could tune my ear for dialogue while hearing, first-hand, Hogan’s stories about the Pacific Northwest’s epic steelhead rivers.

As it turned out, Hogan is every bit as gracious and gregarious as the fictional character I’d created for my story. And a gifted teacher. There were two things, in particular, that he explained, and demonstrated, that improved my casting technique immediately—and significantly. The first, and most important, is slow down. The other is: things that start bad, end bad.

If you’ve read Hogan’s book you already know “slow down” is the most likely solution to any casting problem. This advice applies not only to casting but also to presenting the fly to the fish. While Hogan offers this advice again and again in his book, there’s nothing like a hands-on experience to truly get the message.

In my case, hands-on came in the form of a head wind. A head wind so strong that I thought it might undermine the value of the class. Instead, it made the day even more valuable for me. Hogan convinced me that I could use the headwind to help form my D-loop and load my spey rod. Which it did.

He also convinced me I could make a normal forward stroke. I didn’t have to add additional speed or muscle to the forward cast to account for the wind. Instead, the basic principles of the forward cast applied more than ever. Accelerate to a stop, activating the lower hand—like you would a double-haul—at just the right moment. The result was a tight loop that cut through the wind. I am a believer.

Hogan’s second adage—things that start bad, end bad—solved a problem I was having with my single-spey cast. My D-loop wasn’t forming well and I was muscling my forward cast. Hogan worked the problem backwards with me. He said the problem is usually in the step before what appears to be the problem.

In my case, the problem wasn’t with my secondary lift, or anything associated with forming the D-loop. The problem was in the previous step—I was initiating my cast too fast (see “slow down,” above). Hogan asked me to make my initial lift of the rod tip as slowly as possible, and to raise the rod tip a little bit higher and toward the riverbank. My “D-Loop problem” was solved.

If you get a chance to spend a day on a river with Dec Hogan, take it. It will be some of the best research you’ve ever conducted.

TRANSITION DAY IN THE WATERSHED

(Photo by Kennedy Tanaka)

Yesterday was Opening Day of the trout fishing season in the Sierra. It was also Closing Day of the alpine ski season at the resort where my wife and I spend many winter Sundays skiing with our niece and nephew. I guess it’s Transition Day for the four of us.

Closing Day came complete with a young man wearing nothing but a speedo swimsuit and a snowburned-strawberry on his pale-skinned hip; skiers in cartoon-character costumes that included my personal favorite, the Tasmanian Devil; a three-piece classic-rock band cranking out songs that triggered flashbacks to dances in my high school gym; and a parking lot full of tailgate barbeques.

As much fun as all of this is, my favorite part of Transition Day is checking out the creek below the meadow with the kids. Actually, we keep track of it all winter. We enjoy aerial vantages from the chairlift and mountain ridges, and ground-level inspections at the end of a ski day. In the dead of winter we watched a midge hatch above several brook trout that simply looked too cold to care. At least that’s how it looked to us.

The creek looked especially cold yesterday. When we’re fishing, we bring along a thermometer but I didn’t think to bring one along on Transition Day. We found out just how cold the water felt, though, by taking turns taking underwater snapshots with our point-and-shoot camera. This is an entirely new way for us to explore the creek. Stick your hand in the water, click the shutter, pull your nearly-numb hand out of the water, then view the image on the screen to see what’s going on in there.

This is the same creek we splash around in during summer backpacking trips. This is the creek where my nephew caught his first trout on a dry fly; where I woke early one brisk morning and spotted my niece already up and sitting on a stump beside our fly rods—patiently waiting for me to roll out of my warm sleeping bag. This creek is the place where the idea of what a watershed is took concrete, physical shape in their minds. “Uncle Shawn, is this the same water we skied on in the winter?” I couldn’t have been prouder.

These watershed moments with the kids are especially important to me. I want them to understand their watershed—this most essential part of where they live. By getting out and moving through the landscape with them, across the four seasons, I feel like we’re providing a vital element of their education. And fly fishing adds so much to this experience. Words like caddis and brookie are part of their vocabulary—along with alder, Pygmy Nuthatch, and black bear.

Fly fishing is not only a way to learn about the lives and habits of the various fish that inhabit the watershed’s ecosystem, it is also an effective way to learn about the bugs that share the land-and-waterscape. Engaging these creatures through the science of fly fishing is a way to get a hands-on understanding of the food chain. Eventually, creatures that start out in one’s mind as nothing more than fish food become exciting beings in their own right.

On Closing Day of the ski season, we gathered around a barbeque in the parking lot with the kids and three delightful friends. We grilled asparagus and prawns and sausages while telling stories and bad jokes. The kids enjoyed the fact that they’re collecting their own stories to tell—stories from their own experiences in the watershed. Stories about long hikes, tricky stream crossings, wild trout, and things that go bump in the night.

While talking with my friends I came to realize how much it matters to me that my niece and nephew can pitch a tent, catch a fish, start a fire—that they’re starting to understand the map and compass. There’s a fundamental confidence about themselves in relationship to the world that I can see in the way they move.

One of the things Trout Unlimited asks its members to do is take a kid fishing. I whole-heartedly agree. And I’ll offer this corollary: Take a kid outside. As John Muir put it: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

FISHER-POETS

Last week, I had the good fortune to meet Cameron Scott via the world wide web. Cameron is a fly fisher and a poet and he wrote to say there's more than a few of us fisher-poets out there. You can read some of Cameron's poems in the Tailgate section of The Fly Fish Journal. You'll also find poems by fisher-poets Greg Keeler and Jon Anderson. The Tailgate Section is worth a look. It's loaded with good photos and good writing.