An Angler's Astoria

1981

1

One Fish for Us All

Trout hit best when the sun is on the water," Dad used to say. Then he piled us, my two older brothers and me, into the black Chevrolet coupe and took us fishing on the streams that finger down through the hills around Astoria. These little streams were robbers’ roosts for bandit cutthroat trout. They were my favorite fishing then, when that ’52 Chevy was still a young car. They are my favorite fishing now, more than twenty years later.

We bounced through the hills on bumpy base-rock logging roads, or, when no rain had fallen recently, drove swiftly over dirt roads packed to smoothness by years of passenger car travel. Some of these roads should have been listed among the seven wonders of the woods. For miles they ran through dark tunnels along the hillsides, under canopies of alder and hemlock and fir, two parallel tire tracks separated by tufts of tag alders that were bowed and beaten by the thrashing of axles and oil pans. In fall the tracks were sprinkled with leaves: green of alder, red of vine maple, yellow, brown, and gold of beautiful broad leaf maples. In summer, when we travelled in search of trout, sunlight and shadow were cast across the roads in patterns that shifted with every tug of breeze in the trees. But these roads were as nothing compared to the roads to which they took us.

The railroads were the true wonders, the old abandoned railroad beds that ran right down alongside the streams.

Virgin timber was taken off the coastal hills in the years surrounding the turn of the century. That first logging was done by rail. The gentlest grades were in creek bottoms, and the tracks were laid on the first bench above them, just beyond reach of spating water. When a watershed had been stripped and stood naked, the rails were pulled up behind the retreating loggers, probably to be laid once again in the next watershed over. As new growth crept up, it found the abandoned beds difficult soil in which to take root. The wooden ties slowly rotted and became turfed with green moss. Slender stems of bracken fern poked between the ties and spread broad fronds. Clustered blades of sword fern unsheathed on the berms on both sides. Delicate lady ferns settled beside the beds wherever the topsoil was disturbed. Trees, alder and hemlock and fir, came back alongside the beds but not in them, and eventually grew into mature forest again. Carpets of candyflowers and wood sorrel crept around the bases of those trees, mingled with the mosses and ferns, and added a sprinkling of white to the green of the abandoned railroad beds.

These beds were eventually grown over by tag alders and underbrush as the land reforested, but they always remained the line of least resistance for the many wild feet that walked woodland paths. How many generations of deer grew from spotted fawns to timid forked-horns, and then to wise and randy old bucks; how many generations of awkward calf elk became shunned young bulls, and then finally heavy-antlered, parchment-white-hided combatants that met in clearings to fight for tan ladies; how many cub bears were cuffed by mothers as they padded along those faint trails, and how many grew up to cuff their own cubs, before my father, my brothers, and I walked there more than fifty years after that first logging? These were the remnants of roads that we walked deep into the woods to fish for small and reckless trout.

As we walked the abandoned beds we could hear the streams, and sometimes get a glimpse of their tumbling swiftness, very near below us. We hiked downstream so that when we fished back up we would finish at the car. Time was our only measure of distance. We did not walk one, two, or three miles; we walked one, two, or three hours. The formula we went by was pretty vague, but vaguely accurate: half an hour hiking downstream created two hours of fishing back up.

Dad dropped us off, one by one, as we marched down the moss-grown railroad beds. We did not use the term beat, for we had never heard it, but we were dividing the stream into beats. Barney took the first. He was the oldest at fourteen, and liked to cover the most water. He would fish up to the falls pool, at the car, and then climb over the falls and fish upstream until the creek dwindled away to something so small no fish of legal size could make a living in it. Then he’d quit, reel up, and hike the abandoned bed back down to join us at the falls pool.

Gene took the second section. He was the next eldest, twelve years old. He was content to fish to the falls pool and then bait up with a fresh single egg, drop it into the deep, black water, and lay back on a rock to snooze while he waited for the rest of us to gather up. We were fly fishermen then, but our faith in flies was transient. Occasional eggs were wet, and even a worm drowned now and then, on our account. Only those who come to fly fishing later in life are born fly rod purists.

I took the third beat. I was the youngest, ten years old. Dad walked down the trail for another half hour, then fished slowly back upstream behind the three of us. I’m sure he took the last turn in part to get some water to fish himself, in peace and quiet, but also in order to follow along in case any of us needed policing up, although he still has not said it was so.

Dad always timed our arrival so we hit the stream just when the sun stood high enough to spill a few rays down through conifer boughs and alder leaves and onto the surface of some of the pools. When left alone there on the old railroad bed, I would listen to the quiet of the woods, think of all the bears they held, calculate the nearness and numbers of them. I always felt slightly surrounded. Then I would hear the soft swishing call of the stream, and struggle down to it swiftly through the thimbleberry and salmonberry and devil’s club thorns, getting clawed up but leaving those bears behind.

At ten I was never able to wait long enough to look around. Not until many years later would I begin to notice the etchings of erosion on a cliff face or the maidenhair ferns cascading down its slope. I would not turn over an alder leaf to find a caddis adult, antennae aquiver, hiding in the darkness of the leaf’s underside, or lift a streambed rock to see nymphs of mayflies and stoneflies and larvae of caddisflies scurry and lumber and crawl in their attempts to escape the sudden arrival of light. The stairstep stream plunged toward the Pacific; at ten I had no more in mind than to stairhop and plunge against it toward its source, and to catch as many of its trout as possible along the way.

I rigged, always, first with flies. But my coordination was so poor that I did most of my fishing in trees, and my patience was so short that I tolerated only a few minutes of fishing so far above the water. Then the eggs were out, and then, perhaps, a trout was on. The eggs were flipped, with the aid of a single split shot, to the frothed whitewater where the current of a riffle sliced into a pool. The bait was washed beneath overhanging roots, or down to great depths in the shadow of a boulder, or along a dark seam on the surface that delineated a deeper trough in the bottom. While the leaves of the alders quivered in the breezes above, the fins of the fish quivered in the currents below. At times they were tempted: they tapped, they tugged, they were mine!

My affection for these native cutthroat trout was then broad enough to encompass them while they were still free, in the stream. But I preferred them cradled in bracken in the bottom of my canvas creel.

One sunny day Dad dropped me off last, and I worked my way upstream, caught several trout. Some were on flies; more were on single eggs. Some were small and were released. Others reached the legal mark on my rod. These were killed, cleaned, and creeled. In one larger fish I placed ten-year-old hopes that it would exceed in length any my brothers or father caught that day. Such longings are never outgrown, I’m afraid, although they are sometimes successfully repressed.

I wore tennis shoes, slick-soled shoes to walk on slick-topped rocks. Carpet glued to their bottoms came later, and felt soles many years after that. By the time I reached the place where Gene started fishing, I’d fallen once and nearly toppled twice more. I was worn-out. When I saw rocks still wet from Gene’s earlier passage, at the beginning of his beat, I sat down to rest for a few minutes. I found a huckleberry bush loaded with sour, blue berries. I sat where, without moving, I could bend the branches down and strip them of their fruit. When I was rested and the berries were gone, I laid down on my belly and drank from the stream. Then I tried a few casts in the water Gene had already fished. But I had no more patience for fishing used water than I had for fishing in trees. I shouldered my rod and splashed upstream to join him at the falls.

Gene slept on a rock alongside the minor five-foot waterfall, apparently with one eye open to make sure no fish got away with anything, for he saw me as soon as I turned the bend below his pool. He roused up with a self-appreciating smile that warned me against any immediate comparison of fish.

How’d you do? he asked.

Okay, I answered.

Catch many? he asked.

A few, I answered.

Any big ones?

I hesitated. This was tricky. What if he was bluffing and really didn’t have a big fish?

Nothing really big, I finally offered as a safe reply.

I got a thirteen-incher, he said and stretched back on his rock. Fish the other side of the pool if you want. He made a gesture of generosity with his hand, the beneficence of one who tenders a bone from which the meat has already been gnawed. He had my trout beat by an easy inch. It was the biggest any of us had caught from that stream in a year or two.

I hooked an egg and dropped it into the pool, laid my rod over a rock, and then stretched out on the other side of the pool below the falls. I pulled my cap low over my eyes to shade them from the sun, but not so low that I could not see the tip of my propped rod. I was half-asleep, half an hour later, when the rod twitched. It straightened, twitched again, and then bent toward the water.

I rose up and set the hook and a trout began to run and jump down the pool. Gene saw the size of the fish, bolted upright, reeled in his own line to get it out of harm’s way, then started shouting advice over the noise of the nearby falls. Keep a tight line! Don’t horse it! Don’t try to land it till it’s tired!

To my surprise he gave unselfish instruction, offered to help me catch the fish, all of which I ignored. I bullied the trout to the lower end of the falls pool, dragged it flapping out onto a gravel bar, then pounced on it, got a grip on it with both hands, on my knees and with my back to the water, blocking any hope of escape.

How big is it? Gene hollered.

Fourteen inches, I guessed according to the excess of it that went on and on past the eight-inch legal mark inscribed in the butt of my rod.

Ooooh! Gene said as if the slightest bit of air had been let out of him. Then he said, Good fish. Barney said the same when he came down the stream from above. Dad said it, too, when he finally fished his patient way up to the pool from below. A fourteen-inch resident cutthroat from that stream, at that time, was measured as a monster.

On the way home they all asked me questions, even Gene, who pretended not to have seen the catching. By the time we swept dustily out of the hills and rolled into the driveway at home, I had already caught the trout three or four different ways. I might even have extended the duration and expanded the fierceness of the fight, and contracted the diameter of my tippet. I don’t remember now. It was all over too quickly.

But it was a big fish, I do remember that. I recall it as I compare the fish to the size of the stream from which I caught it, and to the age I was when I caught it. And I remember how we shared it: my dad, my brothers, and I. It seems, as I look back on it, that we all caught it together, that we all caught something from its catching.

It was one fish for us all.

2

Exploring

I  seek different things from fishing in response to different moods. Sometimes I take to the rivers a problem in need of careful thought, the kind of thought that is not always easy at home. It has been written that we go fishing to leave our problems behind. I’ve found that if I take my problems fishing and leave them behind out there, they’re not waiting for me when I get back home. They also seem to have a harder time catching up with me later. There is something lasting about a solution reached on a river.

When I’m in a thinking mood, I fish old familiar places: rivers I’ve waded a hundred times, paths I can walk, and pools I can cast over without wondering where to place my feet, where to drop my flies. Sometimes, though rarely, I resent even the disturbance of catching a fish. On such days I might sit next to the stream for an hour or two, or just walk along it, absentmindedly, without casting.

In other moods I want stimulation, something new and different. I want to be surprised. Old waters please me always and surprise me often. But when one of these moods takes me, I take it and go exploring.

It’s one thing, and a fine thing, to be shown a new river by another fisherman. It’s another thing to discover it yourself. It’s exciting to go with a friend, especially if he or she should be a new friend, to a river you have never fished but they have fished often, to be told what fly to use, where to cast it, what fish to expect, and then to catch one as expected. But it’s a remarkable thing, most remarkable, to approach unfamiliar water, to cast upon it untested, perhaps ungrounded, expectations, and to have them rewarded with the startling rise of a trout to a dry fly.

Twenty years ago Dad, brother Barney, and I chased down a rumor called Grassy Lake Creek. Dad had been there once before, twenty-five years earlier, and had never been back. He’d forgotten all about it. Grassy Lake Creek, on the map, was a small feeder to the North Fork of the Nehalem River. It had, in the rumor, a waterfall just upstream from its junction with the bigger river, and therefore should have resident cutthroat in the water above the falls.

Dad parked the old Chevy alongside the highway above the Nehalem River, and we were delivered in a chute down which we shot on our butts in clouds of dust, rubble, and rock, to land on a gravel bar. To reach Grassy Lake Creek we had to wade the larger river. We waded wet in those days, tennis shoes over two pairs of wool socks into which were tucked cold, clammy blue jeans. We cut staffs from a clump of willows that grew on the gravel bar. The crossing presented no great difficulties, but as the shortest I gasped the loudest where the water was deepest and coldest.

We found the mouth of the feeder and followed it away from the Nehalem, sometimes wading up its middle, sometimes walking along its banks. A deep roaring increased in volume as we went up. Within one hundred yards we found the rumored falls.

There was no doubt it blocked passage of anadromous fish. It fell twenty feet or more in an unbroken sheet down a dark basaltic cliff brightened around its edges with mosses and lichens and ferns. We were trapped in a gorge below the falls. To reach the stream above it we could retreat to the main river and try to find another way through the woods, or we could try to climb around the falls. Being two parts young and foolish, only one part older and wiser, we voted for the hazardous ascent.

Barney led us up a slippery ledge, overhanging the deep pool beneath the falls, careful to show more nonchalance than caution. I was soaked by spray and intimidated by the roar of the falls, but Dad followed Barney, and I was at an age when it’s acceptable to fall and drown, but not to let anybody know that you’re afraid. Barney pulled himself over the top with handholds of root and branch and then pulled Dad and me up behind him.

The creek above the falls was a miracle. It cascaded over a series of miniature waterfalls on its way down to the big one. It carved, in layers of basalt and slate, a series of tiny perfect pools. Huckleberry bushes, borne down by the weight of fat fruit, drooped over the water. Alder trees leaned from each bank of the creek and linked limbs high above it, like rows of square dancers joining hands to form a tunnel through which other dancers might march.

Dad took the first cast in the first pool above the falls, and that first cast took our first trout from Grassy Lake Creek. It was a cutthroat, ten inches long, dark and strong and quick-striking to the dry fly that danced near the foam of a one-foot waterfall.

Barney and Dad and I leapfrogged up the stream, surprised by new pools at every turn, startled by the slashing rises of undisciplined trout, pleased by the trails and tracks of elk and deer, hushed at finding bear prints in the soft soil of a backwater alongside the rush of the stream.

Many more days were spent on Grassy Lake Creek that summer, in following summers, and in many following years. There were days when we caught more and better fish, but never were there better days than the day we first discovered and explored Grassy Lake Creek.

Sometimes what is explored is more important than what is discovered. A rumor of native cutthroat isolated in the headwaters of a Tillamook Burn steelhead stream piqued my curiosity last summer. I called Kerry Hoyer and proposed a trip to track down the truth. I have no idea what we’ll get into, I told him. It’s rugged country; there might be no fish at all.

That’s okay; let’s go! he said, so we went. There were fish; lots of fish.

We could not find a road to the river, but we found an elk trail plunging down a dirt bank from hundreds of yards above the headwater trickle. We locked our knees and skied to the bottom, taking an awkward step every few feet to get over a rock, to catch our balance, or to reset our momentum into synch with our velocity. When we got to the bottom Kerry shook himself off, looked back up the hill, and said, We might have to stay down here. It won’t be so easy going back up.

The tiny stream dropped sharply over boulders, through steep-walled gorges, down chutes between giant logs stacked like matchsticks in the aftermath of the great forest fire that had happened many decades earlier. But the stream itself was a miracle of easy traveling. Elk trails materialized to transport us gracefully around gorges. Logjams were piled nicely along the river rather than in it. Bottom rocks were clean, not silted, not slippery. Wading was easy.

It sounds like we found Camelot, but we did not. There were no resident cutthroat. We caught fish. We caught tens of fish. We could have caught hundreds of fish. But they were all steelhead smolts. They were wonderful fish: fat, wild, and willing to jump for dry flies. After a while Kerry and I got edgy about catching six- to eight-inch smolts that might one day become eight- to twelve-pound steelhead, native fish that had never seen a hatchery. To injure one, to blind an eye or deform a mandible, would reduce its chances to survive in the ocean. Their mission was to become steelhead. Our mission was to find resident cutthroat trout. We found none, so we quit fishing.

Kerry and I walked up the stream hoping to find a cataract, a waterfall, a block to spawning steelhead, above which we might find an isolated population of cutts. But there was none. Finally we came to a fork in the small headwater. Beyond the split each branch became too small to nurture cutts of catchable size, had they been present. We ate lunch, drank cold stream water, joked about Kerry’s heavy wool stockings, which he had pulled over each boot to substitute for felt soles, and which were now tattered and slipping off every few steps. We went back down the stream to where we’d hit it, and followed our own skid marks laboriously back uphill to the car. The climb was easier than we feared because we found blackberries, sweet wild ones, not the city and cropland kind, growing across the hillside down which we had slid so fast we’d not noticed them earlier. We rested and ate berries whenever we got tired.

Kerry and I did not discover the kind of fishing on this headwater that draws one back to fish it again. We did have, however, the kind of exploring, and the kind of day, that keeps a stream forever in one’s mind.

Although it was not a perfect stream to fish, it was a perfect stream to have: to tuck away in the mind, to know its course, and to know that while it lacked a population of resident cutthroat, it’s a rich nursery for wild steel-head, producing strong little fish that will one day become strong big fish.

There is only one way to acquire such a stream: listen to rumors, look at maps, give in to a restless mood, and go exploring.

3

The Caddis Connection

Its name slips my mind at the moment; I’ll call it Copper Creek. I stood at the lower lip of the pool, looking up into it while I absent-mindedly dried and dressed my fly, righting the damage from the last fish and preparing it for the next. This pool presented a problem.

The busy little stream polished its way over a fistful of riffle rocks, chattering all the while. Then it plunged into the business of the pool, scattering contrails of bubbles before shouldering deep and dark beneath the undercut roots of a Sitka spruce. It turned aside then, to escape over a slate run and into the riffle below.

It was not hard to see where the trout would be, in the water where the bubbles broke along the rim of the jutting roots. But the pool protected the native it had nurtured through seasons of sunshine and spate. The riffle’s specialty was too-quickly delivering a dry fly into the capturing roots. Sweepers from the spruce fanned over the holding water to catch any cast that might stray too high. Salmonberry stalks, with prickly spines and broad green leaves, blocked any reasonable backcast. Huckleberry bushes, with rust-colored leaves hiding dark blue berries, were eager to snare any errant forecast.

Beneath the water the black-spotted cutthroat held against the current. It was suspended over the dark bottom. Spruce roots were the ceiling of its world. Fins changed angles imperceptibly to hold it constant in its lie. Body and tail pulsed rhythmically against the movement of the water. The edge of its window on the surface was just at the outside edge of those protective roots.

When a piece of drift came with the current, a twig, piece of bark, or hopeful alder seed in search of a place to grow, the trout’s fins would quiver, its body arc, and its tail would thrust the fish into position to accept or reject the current’s offering. Then the trout would slowly drift back to its lie, returning without apparent aim or effort to the exact spot from which it had launched.

A cased caddis larva, a member of the Limnephilidae family, in its house of sand and stone, crawled clumsily along the bottom at the head of the pool, where the sun-struck riffle came up to gulp air and dive under to blow it out again in playful bubbles. The caddis grazed the layer of diatoms and algae on the top side of an underwater rock, sweeping into its mouth to eat the same slippery stuff that fishermen slide on and curse.

All was well in this watery world. Mayfly nymphs sheltered under riffle rocks, waiting their time for ephemeral maturity. Stonefly nymphs prowled about, some in search of prey, others feeding more peacefully on fallen alder leaves and other bits of decaying detritus. The caddis larva, held against the flow by the ballast of its heavy home, grazed across its subaqueous pastures. The trout waited with the patience of a predator whose meals are served at the whim of Copper Creek currents.

A water ouzel flashed up the stream, swerved to land on a rock in the riffle, and stood bobbing up and down, in the way that named it the dipper. When the ouzel’s shadow crossed the riffle rock, the caddis larva reacted instinctively by pulling its head and legs into its case. It tumbled down the hillside of the rock it roamed and was swept down the pool on a mischievous tendril of current. The trout’s fins quivered, then its body arced to the left and shot ahead to intercept the luckless limnephilid, which it swallowed, pebble case and all.

I saw a wink under water from my position at the foot of the pool. I could not draw the lines that connected the dipper to the caddis to the trout, but I knew now I must try to cast the line that would connect the trout to the trout fisher.

I moved up to the middle of the pool and stood still while I let things settle down, including myself. Then I blew on my fly to be sure it was dry. I kneeled in the shallows to cast beneath the spruce, at the exact edge of its roots. Nine feet of leader and fifteen feet of line coiled at my feet. My eye and mind calculated the backcast and forecast. Then hand, wrist, arm, and the split bamboo moved quickly and precisely in ways that are mysterious even to me.

The size fourteen Royal Wulff landed on the riffle upstream from the trout’s lie. I followed the fly’s white wings as it danced downstream and swept cleanly and close along the roots. Then I saw that same wink under water. The take was the abandoned splash of an opportunistic trout. The fish was halfway back to its lie along the bottom before I lifted the rod and pulled home the hook.

A cutthroat barbed in shallow water will head for the safety of the depths. One hooked in deep water often comes out to jump, but more often tries to bore even deeper. This one took to the roots.

Fish are fought in our minds as much as with our rods. I must quell my pen for the moment and admit that though the fight excited me, it did not endanger me. The trout was easily turned, even on a fragile tippet, before it reached the safety of those sheltering roots. Yet to me the hazard was real. When the trout came out to jump under the spruce, I saw it flirt with the sweepers, high in the air. In reality it was only halfway there. As it swept by on a final run to the lower lip of the pool, I deflected its flight and beached it still full of fight on a bed of moss, to avert the imaginary disaster of its breaking over into the rapid below . . . which was only another short riffle.

The barbless hook slipped easily from the corner of the trout’s mouth. I held the fish for a moment to be pleasured by its dark and spotted colors, the crimson slash under its jaw, and the muscular feel of it in my hand. Then it struggled, and I clumsily directed it out over the water before it flipped from my hand, splashed in, and darted unerringly again to the lie it had left to take my fly.

I was glad the trout had escaped before I could measure or weigh it. I’m sure now that it was at least sixteen inches long, perhaps eighteen. But those who fish with me know how short are the inches on my scale, how light the pounds. If only there were a measure that figured the beauty of the stream, the difficulty of the cast, even the sweetness or sourness of bankside berries, along with the weight and measure of the fish,