Not Always Easy

By Ron McFarland

In hopes that my favorite trout stream will not be as low and slow as I fear will be the case, I defy an unusually dry late summer and an early fall day in October. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother driving an hour out of Moscow with such slight hope of locating a willing West Slope cutthroat on the Saint Maries River, this northern Idaho stream I’ve fished lovingly for more than fifty years. But tonight the Clearwater Fly Casters (CFC) meet for the first time since early May. This time I hope to have something to report, not including the three small perch, one tiny rock bass, and an even tinier crappie I hooked on worms off my sister-in-law’s dock on Mason Lake in Washington.

The CFC gang generally does not fancy meat-fishing or for that matter even spinner-fishing. They tend to be catch-and-release folks, which is doing the right thing by their lights and, over the past few years, by mine as well. A fair number of them are world-class anglers who mention excursions to Alaska, the Scottish Highlands, the Caribbean, New Zealand. Someone says she may join a fly caster friend on Christmas Island next Christmas. Seriously.

Readers might recall the opening lines of my essay, “Ice versus Fly,” in IDAHO magazine’s May 2015 issue, where I mention my intent on entering the state in 1970 not “to fall prey to the allure and blandishments of fly-fishing enthusiasts.” I did fall, against my better judgment, although when I wrote that piece, I was not a member of the Clearwater Fly Casters. Membership in that fine organization, which this year celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, does not promise expertise with casting (in my case “throwing”) the fly. While I cannot claim to be the World’s Worst Fly Caster, I do own some rights to the title of Worst Fly Caster in the Palouse. Possibly the Idaho Panhandle.

In the cover photo of my 2020 book Professor McFarland in Reel Time, I tend to my fly line at this same stream I’m driving to. Fortunately, my poet-partner, Georgia Tiffany, snapped that photo on a late spring day at a distance sufficient to conceal my grimace as I attempted to unlatch the Wooly Bugger from the alder branch across the way.

All my angling instincts have advised me not to waste my time and gas, because on this day fall rains haven’t yet come to the Idaho panhandle, certainly not to the Palouse. I know my beloved stream will be low and slow, and the sky is nearly cloudless (serious fly casters prefer cloud cover), and I won’t reach the stream until about eleven. I love fishing, but I’m not one to sacrifice a good sleep on the off-chance I might catch a couple. The early bird catches the worm, you say? I’m not a bird, and trout aren’t worms.

I think of a 1917 poem by William Butler Yeats, which begins, “The trees are in their autumn beauty/The woodland paths are dry.” But Yeats’s poem occurs in “October twilight,” not late morning, and his water, he writes, is “brimming.” Mine isn’t.

An Idaho point-headed grasshopper. Bet Waterbury, Wikimedia.

Ron fishes his favorite stream. Georgia Tiffany.

Saint Maries River. Robbie Giles.

Wolly buggers. Alan Creech.

Today, several head of Angus mingle with swarms of early October grasshoppers that prompt me to tie on a parachute hopper with a tan body that seems to match what zip past me in the dry late-morning air. If unlike me you get out early, the grasshoppers won’t be quite as quick, and you can maybe snare a couple live ones to skewer onto a small hook, possibly a #12, and proceed the way Nick Adams does in Hemingway’s “Big, Two-Hearted River,” except I’m sure these won’t be blackened from a recent forest fire.

My old fishing pal Steve was expert at tossing his hat over a grasshopper and turning the bug into bait, but I’m not so adept. Also, as I recall, his hat was good-sized and mine is a ballcap, less plausible as a hopper trap even though it’s my official Clearwater Fly Caster chapeau. In memory of Steve’s inevitable success on this small stream we fished together about fifty years ago, I toss my cap a couple of times before giving up. Besides, the CFC folks look down on naturals. They prefer concoctions of yarn, feathers, fur, and whatnot wrapped up in thread, all of it requiring a vise, a magnifying glass, and a heck of a lot more patience and small motor skills than I possess. Yet it’s true that fish hooked on flies are usually easy to release.

Count me among those fly anglers who purchase their artful insects at one fly shop or another, accumulating a plethora of plausible-looking creatures, not half of which I can name and not a quarter of which I will ever cast upon the waters. The dry fly I knot onto my tippet isn’t a Joe’s Hopper or a Dave’s, and it certainly isn’t a Ron’s, but it must look appetizing. Or almost appetizing, as the cutthroat that gives it a go doesn’t manage to latch onto it. Perhaps he’s farsighted. After slashing the water a few more times, I con another trout into a lackadaisical nudge, but that’s it for the grasshopper fly, whatever subspecies it is.

I should stress that I need to land a fish of some sort because this evening is the new season’s first CFC dinner and brag-fest (lie-fest). We never meet in the prime angling months of June through September. When the club president goes from table to table for fishing reports I tend to listen quietly, enviously, mindful of Sir Izaak Walton’s parting advice in The Compleat Angler: “Study to be quiet.” So far, I haven’t been compelled to shrug mutely when my turn comes to report before this elite assemblage, although on a couple of occasions I have strategically excused myself to visit the men’s room.

Back on the water, I do what I always do after just missing: I panic. What if these two lunges represent the last two careless cuts on the stream? I plunge into my colorful collection of anonymous (to me) trout flies, starting with a flashy, iridescent green streamer that in this low, clear, slow (repeat “slow”) river has no (repeat “no”) chance of success. Then I tie on what might be a caddis, or not, followed by a mosquito-like thing, not that I’ve seen any mosquitoes in this near-midday sun, after which I spend several agonizing minutes attaching a fresh tippet, my theory being that the monofilament’s ply has now become so thick that the fish probably see it as a piece of cord. Ideally, it should be almost invisible.

Maybe the cautious cutthroat trout that replaced the once-stocked rainbow on this small river decades ago distrust the flies I’ve been tossing at them. So I tie on what seems to me a microscopic Renegade, maybe a #16 or #18 (the higher the number, the smaller the hook). Now, just because I once watched a five-minute tutorial doesn’t mean I would ever try to tie one of these critters. It’s a neat and simple-looking fly, though—brown fluff (hackles) at the back end and cream or white up front at the hook’s eye, dark green fuzzy peacock-feather body. It’s been good for me over the years on this and other streams, but not this day.

I move on disconsolately to my second favorite hole on this stream, once more scrambling under the loose bottom strand of barbwire without managing (for a change) to snag my shirt or puncture a finger. The depth and current here are no better than at my first favorite hole but I tie on an Adams, which ranks near the Renegade among my choicest bugs. This beauty was devised in 1922 by Michigander Leonard Halladay and named for his friend Charles Adams. The Adams is featured as the centerpiece in Ian Whitelaw’s The History of Fly-Fishing in Fifty Flies (2015), where he writes, “Most North American fly fishers would agree that if you were only able to use one dry fly pattern for the rest of your life, it would have to be the Adams.” He continues, “This buoyant grey and brown mayfly/caddis/you-name-it imitation marks another page in American fly-fishing history.”

On this rare occasion, I throw—dare I say “cast”?—the fly near the far bank without snaring a branch, and watch it move slowly along what bit of current carries it toward a small but perilous boulder. At first, I suspect my virtuoso cast has caught on that boulder, but no. A deep-chested cutthroat takes my fly. I think many poets are frustrated novelists (perhaps even Mr. Yeats among them), and if I were a novelist, I’d be able to describe our battle in such a way that you would feel almost as much of the excitement and anxiety as I experience in pulling in this baby.

Given past efforts, I always fear the fish will somehow work itself off the hook. But this time I do just what I’m supposed to do: rod tip up, steady pressure but let it run, don’t horse it in (as I too often do when fishing with bait, lures, or spinners). It measures sixteen inches, a sizable trout for this stream, and it’s beautiful, to employ an adjective Norman Maclean uses sparingly and intentionally in A River Runs through It.

I proceed carefully to release this beauty in good condition, rinsing my hands in the cool water before touching it, rinsing them again. But for whatever reason, my Adams has lodged deeply into the trout’s jaw, and no pressing and twisting can extract it. I would surely make the world’s worst surgeon. I’ve never had such difficulty releasing a fish caught on a fly, but I can see that this Adams is not barbless, and I’ve failed to crimp the barb. Before I know it, she rolls over in the inches deep water, and I know she will not survive.

I put the quietus to her with a fist-sized rock, and she shudders and dies. And it is a female, as I discover when I slit her belly and find a hefty mess of roe. In a lifetime of fishing with dinner in mind, not just for fun but for food, only during the past couple of years have I been converted to catch-and-release, at least when it comes to trout—rainbows, cutthroats, browns. When it comes to Georgia’s and my favorite freshwater food fish, the predatory walleye, that’s another matter, except when they’re undersized.

My heart sinks at what I’ve done. Cliché, perhaps, but that’s how it feels, and the fact that she’s a she does factor in. Yeats’s poem that had come to my mind earlier, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” is winsome. He feels his age and his “heart is sore.” All is changed, he says since he first came upon those swans nineteen autumns ago. “Their hearts,” he writes, “have not grown old.” Unlike his heart, I think. He was in his late fifties when he wrote it. I’m in my eighties. In one line he describes the swans as “mysterious, beautiful.” That’s how I’d describe this cutthroat.

At the CFC meeting that night, I cannot bring myself to confess having to euthanize the fish. Coward that I am, I allow my fellow anglers to assume I’ve done the right thing.