From the Fishing the World 2015 issue of Sporting Classics, on newsstands now.
Our days are measured by the sun; our nights, its absence. And our years by its path through spring, summer, winter, fall—passing time with animal migrations, coat colors and antler sheds, weight loss and gain. But for everything there is indeed a season, and they too shall pass—a biblical truth that is a thorn in the side of tragedy; in good times and bad, the sun rising and the passing of seasons are sobering, like a cup of coffee. Especially in the high country, where we’re grounded with names such as Never Summer Wilderness and Desolation Peak, keeping us off any high horse.
My cabin sits in a mountain canyon at 7,750 feet above sea level—here, the air is thin, water boils slower, recipes need adjusting, and my red blood count has increased, says my doctor, marking me as one who lives at high altitude. And here, spring doesn’t come until summer, if at all.
Twin fawns suckle their mother on the mountainside behind my cabin, and milk foam wells at the corner of their mouths. They look up and lick their shoe-polish noses, missing some. Got milk? They seem to ask.
When fawns begin to arrive in the canyon, I know runoff will soon be over and river flows will be fishable again. But now, the melting winter snows rush down mountain streams as if late for a dinner date but will arrive to a warm welcome once they reach the dry plains.
Just as rufous hummingbirds arrive when raspberries ripen mid-summer, as days shorten and back-to-school sales begin too soon, I look for the signs. The plants and animals, their births and deaths. As Thoreau wrote of his animal neighbors, “By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me.” Constant in their tidings of change. And similar to stars for ancient mariners, they tell me where to go and when.
Now in early spring my 4-weight bamboo fly rod sits in a closet with the tube cap off for safekeeping just as Frank Drummond told me. He’s the man who showed me how to slowly plane cane and glue splits together, and tie them up like a bodice on a dress—carefully, thoughtfully, with anticipation. The 6-weight graphite comes with me, down to bass ponds and reservoir mudflats on the plains, where carp wallow like cattle trying to keep the flies away.
I lived in a world without seasons once, in that foggy, beautiful City by the Bay where men leave their hearts and young women, their naïveté. Where I was confused by the lukewarm weather that always tried to be something it wasn’t. Where I missed cable-knit sweaters and snow. Where I even missed the winter brown that makes you drink in the arrival and colors of wildflowers during their short time under the sun, like a desert bighorn slaking its thirst at a bedrock tinaja, not knowing when it’ll find water again. Not knowing if the heavens will rain or if that last time was an accident. Like feeding the dog off the table, you always think it’s an isolated incident. And yet you cave, and so do the clouds.
Each spring I live in two worlds. One growing quickly, the other, mine, in limbo as if waiting for a sentence to fall. As if one year it will be found guilty of something and my world will always be dark and punishment, always winter. Always cloudy with a chance of snow. Just as I’m losing my mind late-March, a voice will tell me, Robin-egg-blue skies are for someone else. Like clean clothes, straight hair, beach-front vacations.
Yet I get anxious and annually feel forgotten when leaf-blades green and daffodils and hyacinths bloom on cue in a chorus of soprano yellow down at 5,420 feet—but snow still falls in my canyon. When black bears begin to wake, hungry with cubs, and rumble through garbage cans (disappointed when they find a vegan’s refuse).
When cottonwoods bud along Boulder Creek in town but alpine lakes remain frozen and the snowpack’s three feet deep, and the high small streams roar as rivers, I head to the flatlands—what canyon folks call the sprawl of Colorado’s Front Range, a place everyone up here works to avoid at all costs. I head there to carp; a small price to pay.
The trout fishing I love won’t open for a few months. The trout fishing I love doesn’t involve tailwaters or large rivers that keep up good flows through the year and have unrelenting currents of people and bugs.
Instead, my streams and my trout are small and remote; the hike in always turns out to be longer than the drive. And at this point of spring, those streams and trout are still under snow; just like the cabin. Just like me.
So come spring, I start itching for angling—which means the flatlands and warmwater for carp and bass and the odd crappie or two.
It’s sad, but for the love of my mountains I miss the best of the warmwater season—midsummer when the carp are hot and bass hit hard on topwater. On those sweaty, sticky days, with runoff an echo and streams fallen back into their banks, I’ll be as high as I can get into thin air, catching palm-sized trout in clear, coldwater streams that many anglers don’t care to notice. Just blue lines on the map. Overlooked. Like unpaved back roads—you only travel them if you have a reason, if you know the way. And I do. The way is through moose beds and tangles of willows—huckleberry-covered hillsides—and century-old pine squirrel middens passed down through generations like a family farm.
But while I wait for spring to move up the mountain a few thousand feet, I will tie deer-hair dry flies and simple soft-hackles to use later this summer in deep, glacial-fed lakes. I will drive from woodfires and snow-mold to sunlight, warming my back. From winter to spring in 20 minutes, downhill all the way at a steady 40 miles per hour, give-or-take for canyon curves. And while reservoirs are still cool (waders required) and cattails rimming ponds are still dirty-brown with growth, carp move and feed. Slowly at first, hungover from the long winter night. They chase crayfish and corral shad into riprap dams. And sometimes, they eat my fly when presented just right.
As dual as my spring, so too is my fishing. It doesn’t make sense at first glance, like Dewey Decimal call numbers or the way I stack dishes in open kitchen shelves. But there is a reason I pursue both, and if you look hard and long enough, it’s there as evidence, like bits of flint knapping in a krumholz root ball, felled by the snow of too many winters. The connection between carp in the flatlands and alpine trout is sight—a witness to that moment when a fish decides to take a fly. Or when they don’t, which happens more often. When everything hangs, suspended in the water column as I wait for the thing with a pea-sized brain to make a decision. Then I hope, then doubt. Then rejoice or try again.
Whether slinking along a shoreline trying to move like a heron, or navigating willows like a cow moose—on mudflats and small streams, I stalk. I listen.
And look for fish tailing in the shallows or holding in pocket-water tailouts, before they see my shadow or hear my steps and disappear in a wake or back into the foam line. A calm surface belies interior movement in the still of these carp waters—but just like the anxieties and fears of someone with nerves of steel, someone with their life neatly put together, the existence of something that wants to remain hidden is perceptible when you know where to look, when you know the ticks and troughs.
That’s one of the addictions with fishing, You just never know, even if you think you do; and that’s the fly fisher’s eternal cry, isn’t it? One last cast, because you have to see how it all turns out—a hard thing to know the last page without The Brothers Grimm and their convenient “The Ends.” We depend on stories long after they don’t get read to us at bedtime anymore. But that’s why we keep going. To get to the page that holds a surprise.
This spring, while I wait on my mountain streams to settle down, while I watch those fawns grow and play and eat my garden, maybe I will catch the biggest fish of my life—an early-season carp that will take me into my backing and leave me breathless, muscles shaking from the fight. And maybe standing in the mud I will look from the plains to my home, to the two nameless peaks at the mouth of my canyon that I drive between as if through a triumphant arch each workday, and I will be tired of waiting. Tired of feeling forgotten—tired of waiting till the end of spring for winter to pass.
Yet when I become anxious at the distance between my two worlds, when I grow impatient with how slowly spring comes and flummoxed with how quickly it goes, I remind myself that when the brook trout begin to spawn, leaping upstream as if they were salmon, and elk rub bark off aspens like young lovers on college- campus trees, the high-country season will be nearing its end—the year fetched about me. I remind myself of this: How short are our days, as I wait for this spring, and that in a few months, the flowers will have dried and I’ll be thirsty for all of it again.
Photos by Jay Zimmerman