Last night I ended my day as
I often do, out in the backyard watching for risers. Sixteen years ago,
through a combination of luck, timing and perseverance, my wife and I
were able to buy a house on six acres of land
beside the Upper Colorado River. Living next to the river is something
I’ve never regretted or taken from granted. Even in the high water years
that we’ve had to form sandbag walls to keep the water out, buying a
house next to the Colorado River is one of the
smarter things in life that I’ve done. I can honestly say that I have
the best backyard of anyone I know of, and its hard to imagine living
anywhere else. After many years of travelling all over the world, now
it’s hard to go any further from home than the
nearest ski hill.
Now that its April and the
river has warmed up, the fish are becoming more active. Even with the
absence of bugs, most of whom have yet to hatch, in the waning hours of
light the odd fish or two find something worth
sipping out of the surface film. When they do, they create a visible
rise form which betray their presence. Some evenings, I’m content to
just watch the river flow slowly past, and don’t feel the need to grab a
rod to try and fool it’s denizens. Other times,
I can’t resist the urge to grab my little three weight to make a
connection to the fish.
I’ve heard variations of the
theme that a fisherperson goes through several stages in their angling
career. When one first begins fishing, they just want to catch a fish,
any fish, by any method possible. Then, as
your technique and knowledge improve, you want to catch a lot of
fish, and begin to count the amount of fish you get in an outing.
Whether a day of fishing is considered successful or not can hinge on
what that final number is. At some point, once you’ve
caught enough fish in your life, you begin to target the larger fish,
and size becomes the metric of what is considered a good day of fishing.
Note that the amount of time an angler spends at each level depends
entirely on him or her. A sizeable proportion
of my fishing clients are still on levels Two or Three, and are all
about the numbers. I try to accommodate them to the best I can, for they
pay a lot of money being out here stoking their passion. If I can nudge
them up one level while they’re in my company
all the better, but either way as long as they’re happy then odds are so
am I. When you’ve got enough grip-and-grin shots of yourself on your
phone cradling some kype-jawed brown trout, or a morbidly obese rainbow,
you advance to the next stage. This next step
of an anglers progression involves deliberately increasing the degree of
difficulty in some way. This might involve catching fish that either
smart, or spooky because they get lots of pressure and aren’t easily
fooled, or feed in lies that are hard to cast
into, or are just difficult to get to at all.
One of the nice things about
being obsessed with trout is that they don’t generally live in ugly
places. They love clean, clear cold water, and in the Rockies that often
means headwater streams. A fair bit of shoe
leather might need to be worn out to get to these fish. But the higher
you go, the dumber they tend to be, and you might begin regressing back
down the size/difficulty of the catching chart. The fishing experience
begins to be more about your surroundings and
overall experience than your ability as a Master Angler. This is the
level I’ve been stuck at for a few years, though I used to think that it
was the highest one, the pinnacle of the fishing experience.
Yesterday with my evening
chores finished, there was still some daylight left setting over the big
rock formation across the river. I decided to go down the to the
river's edge, and look for risers. When we first
moved here, my riverside spot used to be a bunch of big rocks that jut
out and form an eddy behind it. There’s often a trout there in the seam,
but its hard to cast into due to the dog fence immediately behind.
Then, eight years ago I took advantage of a low
water year to build a small dock that sticks out over the river. It’s a
great spot to watch for risers from, with a commanding view and plenty
of room for a backcast. Last year, I put in a chairlift and that’s
become my primary Looking For Risers spot. Its
very comfortable, and once seated you can’t help but gently swing back
and forth in it. If I close my eyes, I can imagine that I’m going up the
Pallavinci lift at A-Basin, which is an identical chair to the one I’m
in. Conversely, when I’m A-Basin going up
the Pali lift, I can pretend that I’m in my own backyard, and the breeze
in my face isn’t coming off a 10,000 foot mountain but off the Colorado
River.
But last night, I was really
more interested in what the fish were doing, and since the view is
better from the dock I put a plastic Adirondack chair there and sat in
it. The waning clouds above rock formation the
had taken on a bright pink salmon color, in stark contrast to the
clearer bits of sky which were still blue. The river just beyond the
dock slows due to the widening of the channel, but there is distinct
current in the middle. From that thalwag, bubble lines
form and curl away, and beneath those microcurrents are sometimes fish.
At first I thought I would want a rod in my hand, but the longer I sat
there, cold beer in hand, the less necessary it seemed. The fish weren’t
rising, but that was fine, they didn’t need
to. Just being next to a force as powerful and unyielding and beautiful
as the Colorado River was enough. Then I began to sense that I has
attaining a level of fishing than the one I’d been at, one that I didn’t
even know existed. It was a kind of fishing
nirvana, one that lies above and beyond actual fishing, a higher and
more evolved state of being. Being able to look out over water you know
must have fish in it, without having to put a pointed hook in their
mouth to appreciate it, was very liberating. If
my knees were flexible enough, I might have sat cross-legged like a
budda to see if waves of light would emanate from the top my head.
But just when I was feeling
like an enlightened spirit, there was a distinctive little splash out in
the water. Out of the corner of my eye, a swirl formed and in an
instant was gone. I tried to ignore it, and to
keep the Oneness Of All Things in mind. As I began to slip back into the
state where there was no me, or the world around me, but that
everything was all just the one thing, there was another small splash!,
and another swirl. It’s hard to be an Enlightened
Being with fish rising fifteen feet away. I closed my eyes so that I
would not have to see the temptation, and just listened to the wind, and
the gentle lap of the water on the dock pylons, and the distant call of
Canada geese. Surely it was just one fish I
had seen rise, and it must of moved on. I opened my eyes again to the
splendid scene, and then right in front of the dock, maybe ten feet
away, a trout came up and sucked something off the surface exposing his
whole dorsal fin in the process. It was enough
to knock me down one evolutionary rung, back to Unmotivated Predator. I
got up and went over to the chairlift to get my fishing rod. The rod is
attached to the back of the wooden frame my A-Basin chairlift hangs
from, and is kept ready for action whenever the
mood strikes. It was handmade for me years ago by my oldest friend, the
one who introduced me to fly fishing forty-five years ago. It’s gotten
pretty weathered by spending seven months a year outside, but I’ve also
caught more fish with it than any other rod
I own. Every April, I rig it with a ten foot 6X leader attached to an
Elk Hair Caddis, with a small hi-vis BWO pattern connected to the caddis
by a 7X leader. Those two flies are what I usually keep on it all year
long, and if they make it ‘til October they’re
usually beat up looking. Because I crimp the barbs, I usually don’t have
to handle the fish. I just get them as close as I can to the bank so
that I can see them, and then drop the rod tip to let the line go slack
so they shake themselves off.
Having a rod this handy only
five feet from the river’s edge makes it possible to quickly transition
from watching for risers, to trying to fool the lovely creature who is
performing the rise. Back out on the end
of my dock with rod in hand, I played out some line, made some false
casts to get the flies out over the water, and began to cast, mend, and
repeat. Cast, mend, and repeat. Whatever fish had been rising seemed to
have gone, but the just the act of fishing felt
like therapy. Cast and mend, cast and mend. My beer was beside the
chair, so I sat back down and finished it, rod across my lap. I was
beginning to evolve again when there was another rise, this time out in
the middle of the river near the current. I stood
up and peeled out a lot of line, making as long of a cast with that
little rod as I could, dropping the flies just this side of the moving
water, right in the bubbles. Once I blinked I lost sight of the flies,
for they were very small and it was getting dark
and they were very far away. There were no splashes that I could see in
the purple light, so I stripped in a bunch of line and tried again. Now
it was so dark I couldn’t even pick up the flies when they landed, so it
was purely Ray Charles fishing. Then, with
my flies and line thirty feet out, there was a rise ten feet away from
my feet, under the belly of my line. My first response was a low
expletive, but then I could only laugh. So much for Enlightenment. If
that trout had a middle finger to show me, surely that
would have been it. I pulled the line back in, secured the flies to the
rod, and said one last Good Night to the river and everything that
depends on it.
***************************************************************************
Backyard fishing is
something I do most evenings when I happen to be home, even if only for a
few minutes. Being at home is something that we all doing more of now
in the strange new world of “social distancing”.
Because of that, I’ve been spending more time here than usual. This
should be the time of year when my winter job of delivering propane
slows down, and my summer occupations of taking people float fishing or
doing shuttles for those floating themselves ramps
back up. This usually leaves me time for spring skiing, and I typically
spend lots of time doing that. Most Aprils, the weather is warm enough
that only light clothing is needed to ski, and the base thick enough
that the conditions are great. But this is not
a normal April in Colorado or anywhere else in the world. Ski slopes are
empty of skiers, and my downhill gear is still stuffed into my rocket
box waiting to be used again. I can’t bear the thought of putting it
away for the year,which I don’t typically do
until June. Since it appears that the resorts are not going to reopen
this year, I had held out the hope that I could still drive to Loveland
Pass and do the hitchhike/ski thing there. But I’ve heard that even that
isn’t being allowed, and that cars are not
permitted to park at the bottom switchback where skiers emerge.
When the stories about the
coronavirus were first emerging from China, and it became apparent that
it was going to find its way into the United States, I didn’t think it
would affect my lifestyle that much. But then
our last men’s hockey league game got cancelled, and coming off of two
wins in a row that hurt. On a Friday I went to Aspen and skied Ajax for
the first time in thirty years, and stopped an hour early thinking I’d
save my legs for the next time, not realizing
that the “next time” might be eight months away. The next day would be
the last time that chairlifts would run in Colorado for the season. Even
with everything happening all around, I didn’t think my fishing
business would be very impacted. After all, what
could be a healthier and more stress-relieving thing to do than to go
fishing? I thought that other than the clients who might not be able to
fly in from wherever they live, it wouldn’t affect my business that
much. And to a point, that has been true, the local
rivers have seen more early season fisherpeople than ever. The ice
wasn’t even off the river yet when I started seeing lots of anglers
standing in that cold water, hoping to hook some drowsy fish. For the
first couple of days after the lifts closed, local fly
shops had a huge unexpected bump in business from out of towners here
for the skiing that they could no longer do. But once they got out of
town, that business evaporated. Going fishing only works for
self-directed folk, and not for those who might otherwise
have hired a guide. Once you insert a guide into the equation, you now
have to think about the guide’s truck, or the guide’s boat, or the lunch
the guide prepared for you.
I also assumed that I could
still do shuttles, and that might even be busier than normal. But once
social distancing became the norm, it became apparent that driving other
people’s rides were off the table, too. After
all, a person’s car is their personal space, and as germed-up by them as
anywhere can be. Would I want to go into other people’s personal space,
or ask my drivers to? And would these potential clients want us in
theirs? The answer was obviously no. There are
plenty of guide’s rigs that I hated to drive in last year, before
the pandemic. Though some guides (like me) keep their trucks clean and
free of personal items, some appear to be where the guides eat, sleep
and procreate. Having to drive vehicles that
have cigarette butts and trash on the floor, or uncapped Gatorade
bottles half-filled with saliva and tobacco juice bouncing in a
cupholder is unfortunately common. Practicing personal hygiene does not
seem to be at the top of many guide’s to-do list.
And yet through it all, the
Colorado River just keeps flowing by, unaffected and unaware of the
changes happening above its waterline. The fish and the geese and the
eagles and the gophers and the magpies and the
deer and the otters don’t care either. Yesterday morning my wife and I
were in our kitchen looking out the window at the river and saw some
splashing. A merganser was out there not practicing social distance
guidelines, juggling a decent-sized trout in its
beak. The trout looked too big to swallow, and it shook itself free
after a short battle. In our backyard, the only “flattening of the
curve” is from the stomachs of the wild neighborhood turkeys, sitting in
the grass waiting for their next helping of sunflower
seeds. The “hot spot” here is found sitting on the chairlift in the
afternoon, when the sun is low enough to reflect off the river into your
face as well as warming it from above. There is no “emergency shutdown”
for the river that can be ordered by any politician,
it is way beyond the concerns such insignificant creatures such as
ourselves.
Colorado’s namesake river
just keeps moving slowly past 24/7, 365 days a year (366 this year),
year after year, as it has for at least 290 million years. Back then,
the only creatures on the planet that weren’t fish
were called tetrapods, and their footprints can be found next to the
water only a few miles upriver from here. The tree of life has many
branches, but at the trunk can be found tetrapods. Every day I’m
surrounded by the rocks and cliffs along the river valley
that are millions of years old, which help to keep our short-term
worries in perspective. Not only is the lifespan of a single person a
mere blip in the big scheme of things, so too is the entirety of all
human existence. We’re all here on this spinning blue
and green ball for just a short time, geologically speaking. We live, we
love, we suffer and laugh, we play and toil, and too soon we’re gone.
And through it all, the river just keeps flowing past, whether we are
there to appreciate it or not.
