A River Trilogy Read online

  Watching this, feeling the sun on my face, the spray kick off the bow and wet me, I realize something else that fatherhood has given me: the gift to see all this as new. My daughter is a month old—it will be years before we can bring her safely out in a canoe—and yet for me her perception is already the measure of the pond’s beauty, and just in time, too, because my own abilities when it comes to perception are fast beginning to wane. As a boy and even into my thirties, I could stare enchanted at a perfect cloud or sunny waterscape for long minutes and be content. Now, thickened with life’s trivialities, distracted by disappointment, hurried, my own senses perceptibly dulled, I find it harder to take such sheer undiluted pleasure in “mere” scenery. But here is the possibility of escaping all that and starting fresh. Not just in the fictional empathies that are such a large part of my life, but every day, in the most commonplace ways, by this vicarious, fatherly looking-out . . . to see as Erin sees.

  I have them waiting at home, my wife, my daughter. Around five, after a long day’s drifting, I begin to wonder what they’re doing—how to put my gentle adventures into words and bring them back to my family intact.

  Big (Smoky) Sky

  As fiascos go, this was the worst—worse even than the time I landed in Ireland during the biggest snowstorm in forty years and sat eleven hours on a stranded train between an alcoholic priest from Boston, a homesick construction worker from Ohio, and a garrulous professor of Italian at Trinity College, Dublin; worse even than the time I went out to British Columbia for two weeks of mountain climbing and broke my arms falling over a six-inch-high fence my first day there. Worse because warned by both disasters I should have taken out an insurance policy against disappointment and thereby been armed.

  In a sense, I had. I knew about the forest fires. All summer the papers in the East had been full of them, each new article revising upward the amount of Yellowstone acreage involved. On Labor Day, two days before I was due to leave, I spent the afternoon on the phone to Montana, calling park rangers and tackle-shop owners and game wardens trying to find out exactly how bad the problem was. All my contacts were very patient with me, took pains in describing the current situation, and were quick to suggest others I could call to learn about conditions in adjoining watersheds. Most of them agreed that (1) the fires were bad, particularly in Yellowstone; (2) the rivers were critically low from the summer’s drought; (3) despite 1 and 2, the fishing, at least on headwater streams, was the best it had been in ten years.

  Before most trips I find myself looking for excuses not to go. The inertia of a settled life, my history of disaster, the disturbing, impossible-to-erase remnants of the chronic homesickness I suffered as a child—these are all excuses for not putting any part of myself at risk. But this was no ordinary trip—it was to Montana, mecca of American fly fishing even when all the advertising promoting it as such is discounted, a land so vast filled with waters so brilliant it would expand my notion of riverine beauty in one overwhelming flash. And it was no ordinary time, either; I would be forty in a month, and it seemed right to treat myself to one last thirty-something adventure that would launch me exuberantly into middle age.

  I had my plan all worked out. Starting at Bozeman, I would make a slow clockwise loop around the compass; fish the Gallatin upstream along Yellowstone Park’s western boundary, spend a day or two on the upper Madison below Quake Lake, then head over to Dillon to fish Poindexter’s Slough and the Beaverhead. The nice thing about this itinerary was that it kept me well in reach of Yellowstone; if the fires let up, if it started raining, I could make a fast raid into the park and try some of the famous water there (even the Firehole, which, given the circumstances, might have been an experience too literal to enjoy). If worse came to worst and the fires were still burning, I could make reservations on the spring creeks near Livingston and thus complete my circuit in style.

  It was a good plan, at least in theory, and I full believed in it until I landed in Denver on the late afternoon of September 6. Flying cross-country, the atmosphere had been unusually clear, and I’d gotten a good view of the mustard-colored scars left across the prairies by the summer’s brutal drought. It gave the impression—in its extent; in the lifeless way nothing stirred—of a land waiting for a match to be applied to its crusted, hemplike edge.

  And then in Denver . . . in my frantic change of planes there; in the quick gulp of air I managed as I raced between terminals . . . the match was struck. Denver’s air is always smoggy, but this was something far different that had settled in—an actual pall with an acrid bite. The moment the Bozeman flight was airborne we were immersed in thick, rolling clouds that were far darker and grainier than any I’d ever seen. My seatmate pointed toward them and shrugged; that it was smoke from the Yellowstone fires was too obvious to mention.

  The landing in Bozeman was scary enough, God knows, what with the nonexistent visibility and the sensation of descending through a force far too mysterious and powerful for a 707 to handle. The air over the terminal was thick with smoke, and this time, in the carbon reek of it, I caught the cinnamon underline of burning vegetation. It was odd in its effect. All the adrenaline that was building up in me, all the nervous irritation that comes after a long day’s flying, and yet after a few minutes on the ground I felt relaxed and strangely soothed.

  What my heartbeat was responding to was the smell—the smell that took me back thirty years to the vanished autumn ritual of burning leaves in the suburban town where I grew up. The memory was ludicrously out of proportion to its source—a burning Yellowstone Park—and yet something of this narcotic, lulling nostalgia lingered on all week, to see me through my perils with, if not equanimity, at least a certain amount of perspective.

  But all that was ahead of me. On the shuttle to pick up my car, the driver, a young man named Dave, was quick to rave about how good the fishing was, quick to offer me suggestions on rivers and flies.

  “What about the fires?” I said, as we peered up at a stoplight, trying unsuccessfully to make out its color. “As bad as it looks?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Water doesn’t burn.”

  He glanced up in the mirror to catch my reaction—it was obviously a joke he’d had a lot of fun with.

  Then, as he was helping me unload my bags: “September fishing is the best of the year. Tie on a hopper, work the edges, stay out of Yellowstone, and you’ll do fine.”

  I’d been in Montana twenty minutes and already learned one thing: people were either fatalistic about the fires or angry, and it paid to find out early in the conversation which type you were dealing with and gauge your remarks accordingly.

  “So you don’t think the government’s to blame then for letting the fires burn?” I asked.

  He shrugged like he had that first time. “Wood burns, Mr. Wetherell. Water doesn’t.”

  Dave’s terse optimism was just what I needed. When I went to bed that night at my Bozeman motel, I felt more confident than I had all day. True, the TV news was filled with scenes of a burning Yellowstone, complete with villages being evacuated, overcome fire fighters being borne off on stretchers, and the realistic sound of crackling flames (I could picture a producer back in New York shouting over a bad telephone connection: “Give me more crackle, Smithers! More crackle damn it!”). But still, I was convinced the fires would merely form a vivid backdrop to my fishing, add a little punch to the battle stories I was sure to bring home.

  Still on eastern time, excited at the prospect of beginning my trip in earnest, I woke up before five. Packing quickly, I ferried my luggage down to the car. With the smoke, the darkness was total—even the mercury highway lights, those harsh ugly deterrents to night, barely dented the blackness. Conditions had obviously worsened overnight. The smoke had a smothering, heavy quality that made it difficult to breathe. Even worse, the wind was out of the south, hot and desiccating . . . bad news to those thousands of fire fighters who must even now have been heading back toward the fire lines for another day of futile effort.r />
  “Water doesn’t burn,” I said, remembering Dave’s upbeat assurance. I said it out loud and I said it twice.

  I headed across the parking lot to the lobby to check out. As I did so, I passed a newspaper vending machine set against the motel’s window. Automatically, as I have a thousand times in a dozen different cities, I reached into my pocket for a quarter, dropped it in the slot, reached down, blindly grabbed, tucked the paper under my arm, then went into the lobby to the desk.

  There was no sign of the desk clerk. While I waited, I unfolded the paper to scan the headlines.

  GOVERNOR BANS OUTDOOR RECREATION IN MONTANA.

  Six words, fourteen syllables, thirty-eight letters, and together they spelled one of the worst five moments of my life. I read quickly on, praying there was some mistake, but fate had it spelled out for me right from that wretched opening line.

  The governor of Montana, in response to the fires sweeping across the state, has closed all land, public and private, to any unnecessary usage, including camping, hiking, hunting, and fishing.

  It would be impossible to describe my emotions upon reading this in anything less than four paragraphs. One to describe the sheer disbelief, the way I read and read again trying to end that sentence just one word earlier; another to describe the overpowering, physical sense of disappointment, the way it came over me like a giant’s hand shoving me to my knees; a third to describe the vexation and anger, the quick computation of how much money I had poured into this trip, the real sacrifice my family had made to enable me to come; a final paragraph—once the others were written, shed, and done with—to describe the absurdity of it all, the melodramatic, overwritten irony of a man landing in the West to celebrate his fortieth birthday with a fishing trip on the first day in history—the first day ever!—that a Montana trout season was ever prematurely closed.

  Only one paragraph—the irony, even after a year, is simply too great to be borne. After what seemed like hours, I put the newspaper back down on the desk. I spoke to the clerk in normal enough tones, paid my bill in cash, then walked back to my car, without the slightest idea what to do next.

  But that’s the good thing about turning forty—you have certain defenses. When you’re up against the big things in life, be it fire, foolishness, or fate, the best thing to do is fight back with a heavy dose of the commonplace. Among all the surging emotions that had hold of me, I found a homelier one and latched onto it in gratitude: I was hungry, hungrier than I remembered having been in a long time, in urgent need of a decent breakfast.

  I drove down the strip into town. The only place open that early was a pool hall/bar that probably never closed. It had that familiar college-town smell of urine and old beer, but at least the counter looked clean and there was a fresh pot of coffee perched on the end.

  I ordered an omelet with pancakes on the side. The waitress, bored, went off with my order; the only other person in the place was an old man slouched alone on a stool like a model for Edward Hopper. The Today show was on the television above the grill; there were vivid pictures of the flames approaching Old Faithful, and more of that loud, morbid crackling.

  Absurdity took full command now. With no one else to talk to, all but bursting with the need for sympathy and advice, I explained my predicament to the indifferent waitress and lifeless old man.

  “. . . all the way from New Hampshire,” I said, concluding. “And now the fishing season is closed? How long is this going to last? Does that mean everywhere or just on state land?”

  Both of them listened patiently enough, but all they could do for me was scratch their heads—the waitress metaphorically with a slow, sleepy frown; the old man literally, as if he had never come up against the like. Speechless, we turned toward the TV set and the glaring orange flames; surely someone would make an announcement and everything would be fixed.

  After a third cup of coffee, I took my troubles out to the street. There were several possible courses of action, none of them good. I could fly back East on the next available plane; prudent from a financial point of view, but to cut and run before the situation fully sank in would increase the hallucinatory effect even past the point where it was now (“You went to Montana for a day? Just a day?”). I could head down to Idaho and try the fishing there; a possibility, though I had already changed plans so often before coming that I didn’t have much heart for a third effort. I could hang around a few days and see what happened; a policy of default, but not a bad policy all the same.

  The weather forecast was for rain moving in for the weekend—this was Tuesday. Five days until rain, a day or two before the bureaucratic treadmill reversed itself, and that would bring me up to eight days at the earliest before the fishing season reopened—and even that was only a possibility.

  What to do?

  One of the things I had brought west with me was a list of contacts and friends of friends to look up in the course of my trip. One of these ran a tackle store in Bozeman. Obviously, he was just the man to seek out for advice.

  I pulled into the driveway just as he was unlocking the shop. To say it was a bad time to introduce myself is putting it mildly; if I was surprised and disappointed by the ban on fishing, the store owner—whose livelihood depended on the guiding he did in the fall—was shocked and irate.

  “That goddamned gutless governor!” he screamed. “The frigging gutless son of a bitch!”

  He would get his lawyer after him, that’s what he would do. He would get all the guides and outfitters together and force the state to rescind the ban. The governor was just covering his ass, same as always. He had already closed the bow-hunting season because of the fires, and the hunters had let out such a cry that he was extending the ban to fishermen just so no one could say he was playing favorites. If he was serious about the fire danger, why not extend the ban to loggers and miners? They were still allowed in the woods, and they posed a hell of a lot more fire hazard than a fly-fisherman sitting in a drift boat or wading chest deep in a stream.

  His anger—his perfectly justified anger—was awesome in its way; as the flames were to later, it dwarfed my own puny disappointment. Eventually, he mastered it long enough to give me some advice: go ahead and fish, at least for today. The rangers wouldn’t be issuing summonses for a while, but just ordering everyone off the water. He sold me a one-day license, then sent me off toward Quake Lake the long way around via Ennis (thereby avoiding Route 191 along the Gallatin, where the fires were said to be bad). When I went out the door he was already screaming at someone in Helena over the phone.

  As for me? At least I had a direction now, and an ersatz kind of hope that would do in lieu of the real thing. A few miles out from Bozeman the rangeland begins, and though the smoke kept it hidden behind a gray, gauzy veil, it still resembled the Montana landscape of my boyhood picturing.

  The Madison comes into view quickly at the Route 84 bridge, and the sight of it—open, rock-studded, and strong—was sufficiently impressive. There were some fishermen wading the edges by a beached drift boat; clearly, they were either ignoring the prohibition or out too early to have learned it was in effect.

  After a quick stop in Ennis (the tackle shops crowded with somber fly-fishermen seeking consolation), I drove to where the Madison leaves Quake Lake. Within minutes I was up to my waist in it, enjoying the cold, clear rush of the current, the interweaving side channels, the generous and willing trout. The Madison, I told myself. The goddamn Madison! In less than a half hour I had caught a dozen rainbows and browns on my old reliable Royal Wulff. In the instantaneous quality of it all, the way the trout seemed queued to welcome me, it was almost exactly the Montana fishing experience of which I had dreamed.

  But not quite. There was something missing—there were no mountains in the background, not even hills. The smoke hid the views in every direction but west, and not just any smoke, but smoke with rough, ominous edges that suggested the flames weren’t far behind. As I fished, I kept glancing over my shoulder to check where it wa
s, and thereby missed a good many rises. Then, too, fishing illegally is not what it’s cracked up to be; rather than providing a furtive, daring pleasure, it’s more apt to make you feel sordid—a dirty old fisherman worthy of contempt. Even if it were fun, the upper Madison is no river to poach; without streamside trees, a warden can spot you a good mile away.

  Which is just what happened. I was starting in on a new side channel, casting to the seam of a pool near a sheltering log, when I saw a jeep pull up behind my car back on the highway. A warden got out—there was no mistaking that hat. He shouted in my direction, but I pretended not to hear and kept on casting, working myself toward a small island and a protective screen of brush. Once past it I waded faster, hoping he would tire of chasing me and go back to his jeep. But this was a forlorn try—a last, pathetic rebellion against the irony that had me squarely in its sights.

  “Excuse me, sir?” he shouted, from a short distance downstream.

  My first impulse was to raise both hands in the air; my second, to play dumb.

  “Oh? . . . Oh, hello there.”

  I reeled in and waded over to the bank. He was very nice about it—his choice of words was simple and direct.

  “The governor has closed the state to fishing.”

  I looked into his eyes. “Why?”

  “Because of the fires.”

  “What fires?”

  “Those fires.”

  He turned and pointed—touché. But still, if I was going to go peaceably, I wasn’t going to go without registering an objection, so I trotted out my best shot:

  “Water doesn’t burn.”

  Give the warden his due; he laughed and shook his head sympathetically, and together we waded back across the side channels like old friends (“Mister,” he said, “You can’t even step off the road and pee in Montana while the ban is on”). He had a bear trap trailered behind his jeep; the ranchers were complaining about grizzlies being chased out of the park by the flames.