A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons Read online

  Well, to be more accurate, she had good fishing while I mostly rowed the boat and took photos of her landing fish. But I wrote the story and sent it off to a brand-new outdoor magazine called World Rod and Gun, whose premier edition I had found on a newsstand. The magazine responded with a letter of acceptance and a promise of fifty dollars payment upon publication. I was elated; it was my first freelance sale!

  I looked forward eagerly to the magazine’s next issue and when it appeared, there was my story and my photos of Joan landing fish, and I felt a great sense of accomplishment. However, as time passed and the promised fifty-dollar check never arrived, I began wondering about the delay. Finally I called the magazine, only to receive a recorded message that its phone had been disconnected. I learned subsequently the magazine had folded after publishing the issue with my story.

  That should have been enough to discourage my freelance writing ambitions, but sometimes I’m a slow learner.

  Those days on the police beat were exciting, but after a year I was assigned to cover the county’s superior courts. That wasn’t nearly as exciting, although it had its moments. After two more years I was offered an editor’s position, which I accepted. Being an editor wasn’t quite as exciting as being a reporter, but it was always intensely interesting, and I still felt the sense of electricity every newsman feels when he becomes one of the first to know something big has happened and it’s his job to tell the rest of the world.

  The biggest story I ever worked was the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens. That one had a very personal impact because I was out fishing when the mountain blew and got caught in the fall of ash. I drove more than eighty miles through total darkness and swirling ash to escape and went straight to the Times newsroom, where I stayed almost around the clock for the next week. Sports Illustrated published an account of my experience, and a year later the magazine asked me to do a follow-up story. They also sent a photographer, who, like most photographers I’ve known, was a little crazy. Maybe it was because of the developing fluid they all had to use in those days.

  We chartered a small helicopter and took the doors off so the photographer could lean out and take pictures, then flew up to the crater of the volcano. It was too dangerous to land, so the pilot tried to hover but had trouble controlling the helicopter because of all the heat rising from the lava dome in the crater. That, along with the terrific noise of the helicopter, the rush of steam from the lava dome, and the overpowering smell of sulfur, made it a rather memorable experience. But the photographer got his pictures, and when he was finished he put down his cameras, reached into his shirt pocket, and took out a little brown envelope. He opened the envelope, reached out, and sprinkled its contents into the crater.

  “What the hell was that?” I hollered.

  “Marijuana seed,” he shouted back. “Next time this sucker blows, the whole state’s gonna get high!”

  Mount St. Helens has never had another eruption close to the magnitude of the 1980 blast, but in November 2012 a large majority of the state’s citizens voted to legalize the use of recreational marijuana. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe it was because of something in the air.

  After seventeen years as an editor, I became a manager, which wasn’t nearly as much fun, but offered better pay and benefits, which made some longer fishing trips possible. It also presented a whole new set of challenges—complex budgets, labor contracts, purchase agreements, and all sorts of personnel issues. I spent my last decade at the Times coping with those things.

  I don’t think it would have been possible for me to work very long as a reporter, editor, or manager without having some way to relax and unwind, and my way always was to go fishing. Getting away to spend a few hours casting a fly on a lonely lake or steelhead river never failed to do wonders for my blood pressure and outlook on life. Writing about it also helped relieve stress.

  Fly fishing has taken me to some magnificent places—the wilderness of Alaska and northern British Columbia, the coral flats of Christmas Island in the Pacific, the River Dee in Scotland, and the Southern Alps of New Zealand, to mention just a few. It has provided some of the best friends and finest moments of my life. In a way it has almost been like a second career, except I have always enjoyed it far too much to think of it in those terms. When I retired after thirty years at the Times, it was mainly so I would have more time to fish and write more stories about fly fishing.

  You’ll find some of them here.

  FREEZER BURN

  WHEN I was a kid there were no fly-fishing magazines, so I was stuck reading the so-called general circulation outdoor magazines. That meant I had to read selectively because they published few articles about fly fishing, and even those were sandwiched among pieces about fish species I considered well beneath my eleven-year-old angling dignity, caught by methods I considered far beneath anyone’s dignity.

  Once in a while, though, I’d stumble across a non-fly-fishing article that caught my attention and at least start reading. Articles about ice fishing seemed especially interesting, although I can’t now remember any earthly reason why—unless it was fascination with what looked like the most masochistic sport in the universe. I remember photos of grim-looking, hugely overdressed men squatting next to holes drilled in frozen lakes, waiting for their propped-up rods to dip in answer to the pull of a fish. I figured any fish they caught were probably committing suicide so they wouldn’t have to suffer in the icy water anymore. No way did it appear anybody was having fun.

  I might have felt differently if I’d lived where lakes routinely freeze over in winter. Not that they don’t occasionally freeze around here, but never thick enough to walk on, let alone drill holes in. Generally speaking, fly fishers in my neighborhood don’t have to worry about ice.

  Except on those occasions when we do—like the time I joined a group of angling friends for an outing at a lake that was open to fishing only during winter, when it was usually too cold for intelligent life to venture outdoors.

  We camped not far from the lake, parking our rigs or setting up tents around a large cleared space where we laid a campfire. Nearly everyone had brought firewood, so there was plenty of fuel—a good thing, because as soon as the sun went down the temperature plunged like the stock market in 1929. We built a roaring bonfire and everyone gathered around and stood close for the warmth, talking and sipping coffee, or maybe something stronger.

  Then Bill Rundall, a beloved member of our crew, stumbled out of the back of a camper and came over to the fire, carrying a bottle in one hand. Bill was a favorite because he nearly always kept us laughing—sometimes intentionally, sometimes otherwise—mainly through an incredible series of misadventures. Bill wasn’t a big man, but chairs seemed to have a nasty habit of collapsing under him without provocation. Sometimes his mishaps were much worse, and no laughing matter. Once he parked his truck at the head of his inclined driveway, then walked down to open his garage door. The truck slipped its brakes, rolled down the driveway, and pinned poor Bill to the door, which landed him in the hospital for a couple of weeks. Given that history, it wasn’t surprising that when Bill started making his own wine, not many people were anxious to drink it.

  On this frigid night, however, the bottle he had in his hand wasn’t wine, so when he joined the circle around the fire someone inevitably asked, “What’s in the bottle, Bill?”

  “It’s called ‘Old Cornfield,’” he said. “I got it on coupon special at a hardware store. Anybody want some?”

  At first there were no takers. Then one hardy (or perhaps foolhardy) soul held out an empty cup and Bill filled it nearly to the rim. The fellow took a huge swallow and his eyes swelled till they looked like a pair of eggs fried sunny-side-up. Then his cheeks ballooned outward and he spouted a great stream of Old Cornfield into the fire, which exploded in a mighty sheet of bright blue flame that singed everyone’s eyebrows. When we’d all recovered from the shock and concussion, someone started laughing. Soon all of us were, and another link had been for
ged in the Rundall legend.

  The fireworks were the highlight of the evening, which grew steadily colder, and as our supply of wood dwindled and the flames did likewise, people began heading for what they hoped would be the comfort of their overnight accommodations. In my case, that meant a camper, which, under normal circumstances, I’d always found comfortable.

  Not that night. The temperature continued to plunge and my usually warm sleeping bag seemed no thicker than onion skin. I piled blankets on top and that helped some, but it felt as if my ears were on the verge of frostbite. I didn’t have a stocking cap, so I wrapped a thick towel around my head, burrowed as deeply as possible into my sleeping bag and heap of blankets, and finally managed to get some sleep.

  Next morning I awoke and looked out at a world I didn’t recognize. Ice was everywhere, cloaking every limb, every blade of grass, every protuberance of any kind, including my truck and camper. An ice fog had descended during the night and pockets of it were still hanging around like mustard gas in every swale or pocket.

  After shivering through a cold breakfast, I coaxed my truck to start and piloted it gingerly over slippery tracks to a spot near the shore of the lake we planned to fish. Nobody else was there yet, but through the steam rising from the lake’s surface I could see it had frozen all around the edges during the night. The ice appeared thin, though, and I thought I could probably break through it easily in my aluminum pram.

  Dressed in so many layers I could hardly move, I donned a pair of thick gloves so my fingers wouldn’t freeze to the aluminum gunwales. Awkwardly, I got the boat off the camper and shoved it into the ice, where it broke through with the sharp crack and tinkle of icy shards. Then, without much hope, I went fishing.

  Rowing felt good in that frigid atmosphere and I headed for a spot I’d always liked near the far end of the lake. It was a fair distance, and by the time I got there I’d managed enough exercise that my body temperature might have been getting somewhere close to 98.6 degrees. I anchored on the weedy bottom of the lake, got up, worked out line, and made my first cast. When I started retrieving there was curious resistance on the line, which seemed to increase the farther I retrieved. That’s when I realized my rod guides were clogged with ice.

  There was only one cure for that, so I started thrusting my rod into the lake after every cast, then waited for the ice to melt in the water, which was warmer than the air. It was a pain in the you-know-what, but there was nothing else to do.

  That went on for a while until something happened that made me forget all about the cold, the ice, and the inconvenience of dunking my rod: A strong fish suddenly grabbed my fly, its hard pull sending the ice flying out of the rod guides. The trout rocketed twice out of the water, made a long, powerful run, then settled down to fight it out. The battle was a long one, helping generate a little more welcome body heat, but I finally landed the fish. It was a handsome rainbow of about four pounds, so cold it hurt my hands when I released it. A fourteen-incher soon followed, then another big fish, shaped like a cedar block and maybe even heavier than the first.

  It went on like that all the way until noon when somebody must have sounded a whistle I didn’t hear, because then the action suddenly stopped. The fog, which had been hovering all around, lifted gradually and the temperature crawled slowly upward from somewhere far below freezing to somewhere in the neighborhood of forty, which was much more comfortable. Maybe it was too warm for the trout, though, because, except for a couple of feeble pulls, I had no more action.

  No complaints. I was well satisfied with the day, and on the long row back I got to thinking again about those old photos of grim-faced men squatting on their haunches around holes drilled in frozen lakes, back in Minnesota or Siberia or wherever, waiting for their propped-up rods to dip, as if that was ever likely to happen.

  I felt very glad I wasn’t one of them. I’d just come too close for comfort.

  THE WOLCOTT FACTOR

  LIKE MOST fly fishers of my generation, I grew up reading the works of Roderick Haig-Brown, Robert Traver, Arnold Gingrich, Lee Wulff, Vince Marinaro, Nick Lyons, and others. But another author, one most people probably never heard of, had a more direct influence on my early fishing life than any other. His name was Ernest E. Wolcott.

  Virtually unknown outside the Pacific Northwest, and not very well known within it, Wolcott’s two-volume work was my virtual bible as a young angler. The same was true for several of my contemporaries who also discovered Wolcott’s opus, which remains one of the most remarkable pair of books I’ve ever seen—not for the richness of their prose, which is necessarily rather mechanical, but for the enormous magnitude of the information they contained.

  Wolcott retired as a navy officer in 1954 and went to work for what was then called the Washington State Department of Game as co-editor of the department’s “Game Bulletin.” His real interest, though, was the state’s water resources, especially its many lakes and ponds, and he spent a lot of his time trying to learn as much about them as he could. That meant traveling to remote areas of the state, climbing its mountains, exploring its valleys and canyons or flying over them, and taking copious notes about every body of water he saw. He also obtained information from a wide variety of other sources, including fishermen. The unique store of knowledge he collected about these waters eventually led to a transfer from the Game Department to what was then called the State Division of Water Resources, where he found his dream job: compiling a massive inventory of the state’s nearly 8,000 lakes and ponds.

  The first volume, published in 1961 after many years of research, contained descriptions of 3,813 lakes in nineteen western Washington counties. A second edition was published in 1965, and that was the one I bought as soon as it came off the press.

  The timing couldn’t have been better. Newly home from the navy myself, I was in the process of trying to explore nearly every likely trout lake, pond, or steelhead river within a day’s drive of Seattle. With Wolcott’s book and a set of detailed county maps, the task immediately became infinitely easier.

  Wolcott’s 620-page volume had all the information a fisherman needed. There was a separate entry for each water, including its elevation, surface area (in acres), and maximum depth, if known. Most entries also contained a brief description of the lake’s inlets and outlets, if any, along with trout-stocking records and reports of trout or other fish species encountered by anglers. Who could have asked for more?

  All this information had been painstakingly collected, compiled, organized, and collated by Wolcott and his assistants. This was long before the advent of computers, so each bit of data had to be recorded by hand and then arranged in geographic order. This also was long before navigational satellites or global positioning systems, so Wolcott had to determine the location of each lake or pond using the Public Land Survey System, a cumbersome method dating all the way back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The system relies on surveys describing the location of geographic features by township, range, section, or subsection, and Wolcott had to apply that system to each of the 3,813 bodies body of water in his western Washington inventory, then plot all of them on maps—a staggering feat.

  Many of the waters, especially small ponds, also had no names. Wolcott listed these as “unnamed lakes” but still described their locations as best he could by using the township, range, and section method.

  That wasn’t all. He also gathered black-and-white photographs of 297 lakes and included them in his book, along with bottom contour charts of 205 more—the latter of inestimable value to fly fishers.

  The entry for Pass Lake on Fidalgo Island is a good representative example of Wolcott’s work. Long one of the state’s most popular fly-fishing waters, the lake was listed in section 23 of Township 34 North, Range 1 East of Skagit County at an elevation approximately 130 feet above sea level. Its surface area was reported at 98.6 acres, its maximum surveyed depth at twenty feet, and its use was described as recreation. The entry also contained the information that
the lake was six miles south of the town of Anacortes, three-quarters of a mile north of Deception Pass, and drained into Reservation Bay and Rosario Strait. It also reported a portion of the lake “lies in Deception Pass State Park” (the park was later expanded to include the entire lake) and contained rainbow trout.

  Most entries didn’t contain that much information, but when you consider the number of entries, the incredible scope of Wolcott’s work is evident.

  Wolcott wasn’t finished, though. He went on to publish a second volume with the same information for 4,051 lakes in twenty eastern Washington counties. I doubt any other state has such an exhaustive record of its lakes, ponds, and other impoundments, or any source of information that could be of greater value to anglers.

  When I got my copy of Wolcott’s first volume, I turned to it eagerly and studied every page, beginning with the counties closest to home. Many lakes Wolcott charted were high in the Cascades and difficult to reach, although I noted some as possible future backpacking destinations. It was the lowland trout lakes that attracted most of my attention. They usually opened for fishing in late April and closed in September or October, and many were within a reasonable day’s drive. I began assigning numbers to the waters that looked most promising and wrote each number next to the lake’s name in the book’s index so I could find it easily in the voluminous text. Then, using Wolcott’s township-range-section method, I found each lake on a map and identified it by the same number. At least I tried to find them; some lakes or ponds were too small to show on any map I could find, so sometimes I had to be content with charting approximate locations. My maps rapidly became speckled with numbers.