I got hooked on the world of fly fishing and trout when I was a teenager growing up in Astoria, Oregon, which is where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean. That area abounded in salmon and steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout to catch, deer and elk and ducks to hunt, clams to dig, a monstrous river and much larger ocean to explore.
I sampled all those things, but over time narrowed my few free days to bounding up headwater streams, in pursuit of resident cutthroat trout. Something about the environment in which those trout lived--the sun striking through cathedrals of trees, the beautiful streams that plunged swiftly, then abruptly put on their brakes to pool deeply, the predaceous trout that left their lairs to arise suddenly into sunlight and strike my dry flies--pleased me, and kept me coming back. Even in the face of failure.
My first fly rod was a cheap bamboo that snapped a foot from its tip, got handed past two older brothers and down to me. My first fly line was a level D, about the thickness and weight of kite string. Somehow I learned to cast with that line, on that rod, though they were as poor a match as you might imagine.
I practiced continually in the back yard. I caught far more trees and huckleberry bushes than I ever did trout when I got onto water. But the persistent mystery of the streams, winding down out of those hills, and the native cutts, emerging up out of those pools to toss spray in the air, gave me no choice but to be on those waters, after those trout. I still fish them whenever I can.
I commanded a small Army signal detachment on the Mekong River, another monster river, for six months during the dust-up over there. I ordered out an Orvis catalog, and spent hours of spare time studying its pages, closing my eyes, letting those pictures of bamboo rods, reels, lines, and flies escort me in dreams back to my streams. I ordered an entire outfit, glass, not bamboo, for seventy-five dollars, had it waiting for me when I got home. It was a 6-footer, for a 6-weight line. To say it was brisk would be an understatement, but it was the first balanced fly fishing outfit I ever owned. It was perfect for those small streams. I still have that rod, and still fish it on those same streams.
When I got back to the states, I went back to college, audited an aquatic entomology course taught by Professor Norm Anderson, whose lab assistant was a fellow named Rick Hafele. He had all this knowledge about bugs that trout ate, and by then I owned a bamboo fly rod, so I conned Rick into going fishing with me by offering to let him take a few casts with my rod. He bit.
My favorite memory of that first day fishing was when a big golden stone adult descended out of the overhead canopy of alders, lowered its flaps and wheels, and flew lower and lower over the stream, probably on a mission to deposit the eggs of the next golden stone generation. Rick and I were eating lunch on a gravel bar. It was the age of Latex waders, and it was a hot day. Rick had his waders peeled down over his Levis, to cool off, while we ate. He saw that golden stone descending, grabbed his bug net with one hand, held up his waders with the other, and tore off down the middle of a long, shallow pool after it. I'll never forget the sight of Rick running and jumping in a shower of spray, flailing at the insect with his long-handled net, holding his waders up, trying to keep from tripping, and yelling "Holy s___! Holy s___!" He caught the poor bug, embalmed it, probably still has it in his extensive collection. We've been fishing together ever since, and something still always happens that makes the fishing a lot of fun.
Rick and I began teaching a workshop with the unwieldy name Entomology and the Artificial Fly. He did the insects. I did their imitations. We went all over the West with it. We noticed that our early students would spend the entire two-day seminar with their heads down, furiously writing notes, and would rarely look up at the slides we worked so hard to get. We wrote a 30-page booklet, handed it out to each attendee, so they could relax and enjoy the workshop. The great Don Roberts, then editor of "Flyfishing the West," got ahold of a copy of the booklet, told us to flesh it out and add photos and we'd have a book. We did, and it became Western Hatches.
That led to a life of going fishing, writing articles for all the fine fly fishing magazines that arose in the subsequent years, even for Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, and Field & Stream, the magazines I'd read when I was a kid. It also led to a long string of books--I've never figured out if I'm a fly fisherman who loves to write, or a writer who loves to fly fish, but I suspect behind it all I'm a reader who loves to write and loves to fly fish.
If that life seems simple--going fishing, coming home to write stories about what happened out there--think back to that first outfit of mine, the broken rod on which I tried to cast kite string. A life of writing is about like trying to cast that poorly-balanced outfit. I spend my average day now, in the studio I had built behind our house in Portland, fighting technology, which generally seems to win. I'm best to just set it all aside and go fishing.
That's what I'm going to do right now.
See you out there!