Guest Writer: John Larison

John Larison, author, guide and friend of C.F. Burkheimer has kindly contributed a story to our blog.  Enjoy.

A Steelheader Farms Another One

John Larison

Every serious angler among us knows the blunt force trauma that is losing a good fish.  And if you’ve swung flies a few seasons, you know the dizziness following the loss of two extraordinary chargers in a row.  Only a few of us, though, have felt the profound lightness of rod and mind as a third big fish comes unpinned.  But to lose four—to watch four chrome panels waver off downriver and dissolve in a tail stroke—now that could only happen to a man with moons and planets and whole galaxies aligned against him, a man depleted of karmic reserve.

I am that man.

And though years have passed and lessons have been learned, and maybe even some sins atoned, I can not shed this image: the plasmic shimmer of that fourth fish as he contorted at eye-level.  Nor can I forget the clarity of view in the minutes thereafter, standing on a waist-high boulder, the rod straight and cruel above me, a nest of fly line at my feet.  Rock-bottom for anglers, as for alcoholics maybe, offers a surprisingly keen view.

That buck came to me on a shorts-sleeve afternoon in September on a river best fished with an 8134; you know the type, boulder-targeting waist-deep runs with seventy to eighty foot casts.  On this particular river, otherwise standup-guys might be seen casting from their drift boats.

Picture me: Alone and standing on the oarsmen’s seat, shielding my vision so I might just make out the lateral line of a mint fish as it slips into the tailout from the violent cascade downstream.  I’m sending absent-minded loops into the glare.  Waiting.

I’d been here before, a few hundred times, just as the evening sun left the tree tops, so I knew that a squadron of fish was in the whitewater and that at any moment this tailout would come alive with active fish.  What I didn’t know was that one of these fish would nearly sink my boat before it broke my mind.

The first exceptional fish I lost had come a year before, on a little-known (yeah right) river called the Deschutes.  He took at the head of a pool already at full steam, one of those grabs I’ll remember on my death bed, when a non-angler would be thinking I should have done more in life.  The fly line was gone before my brain even registered the grab, the backing going fast enough that I panicked and tried to tame the reel, earning a cracked fingernail for my trouble.

The second and third fish came that winter, on the same day, from the same run, one bright and airborne, the other double-striped and rolling.  Both off after I’d already considered them beat.

Of course there were fish between these pigs, average specimens in terms of size and fight but each of them remarkable because they were steelhead and I had battered my body, mind, and career to touch them.  In fact, ten minutes after losing the fourth, the best fish of all, as if by some sick cosmic joke, I landed my smallest ocean run steelhead ever: a thirteen inch chromer.

But in angling, as in love, it is the surprises we remember. And that fourth fish, as he slid up from the whitewater, was a surprise from the first glance.

First of all, he was wide where the others were narrow, thick as a chinook was my first thought.  And so maybe he was a chinook, but he was holding in the depression before a small boulder, a lie only twenty-five inches deep maybe, not the usual preference of a springer.  And besides, I reminded myself, this was September, and the springers were dark, and this fish was aglow with pelagic enthusiasm, bending and nipping and chasing away curious trout.  I needed to touch him.

The first cast was the best cast because my hands weren’t shaking.  The fly was my most trusted wet at the time, and yet the fish didn’t flinch.  But nor did he seize up.  So I sent the fly three more times before flipping it high, catching it, and biting it off myself.

Like any sensible angler, I went smaller and darker.  But to no avail.

So I got innovative, and hitched on a waker.

Then a chugger.

And still the fish nipped and strutted and held fast, his white mouth flashing as he tested drifting particles.

What I did next, I wouldn’t admit in mixed company.  I dug to the bottom of my bag and found that ancient and largely forlorn box of trout flies, included in the bag only because I suffer from a neurosis that requires I bring every fly on every trip.  I opened the box’s lid and unceremoniously selected a Pheasant Tail, and a flashback beadhead no less, size twelve.  Then dead-drifted it (no indicator, I’m not a heathen—well, less often now than before.)  But that big buck wanted none of it.

If I’d been a smoking man, I would have lit a cig in the fish’s honor.  Another big steelhead smarter than me.  May you reach the redds, friend.

But I’m not a smoking man, so I knotted on the biggest, blackest, most articulated thing I had in the boat, a fly one friend refers to as John’s Rope.  It hit the water with a definitive Slap—and that big buck was already on his way.

He was airborne beside me before I felt the take, a stamp of chrome against the green bank.  In my memory, I was looking up to him, though that memory might have more to do with admiration than with reality, the same form of altered remembrance that makes our best friends seem taller and our nemeses seem hunched.

And then I felt him in full force, a force that grew in magnitude until it reached the supernatural—he had turned and was evacuating the run.  I was mid-river and he was in the next run, but I couldn’t lose four in a row.  Such a streak was impossible.  The rivergods owed me this one.

That’s when my anchor began to drag; the fish was pulling that hard.

And the lip of the rapid inched closer.

Or rather, what was inching closer was the downed tree that separated me from the rapid.  A down tree that had already flipped a boat this year.

So my choices were simple, though their simplicity made their selection no easier.  Let out some line on the anchor and hope that it found better purchase before I became personally acquainted with the log, or pull the anchor and try to run this rapid while still holding the rod and the absurdly large fish pinned to it.

In that moment it was Keanu Reeves I remembered, which isn’t something I’m proud of.  Keanu Reeves in that stupid Buddha movie he did in the nineties, “Take the middle path.”  (For the record, I didn’t rent this flick; a ladyfriend did.  Give me a little credit.)

Well, the middle path screwed me.  Just for the record.

I freed the drag on my reel, bit down on the rod’s cork until my teeth met graphite, pulled the anchor, and used every fiber of oaring muscle to back away from that log, and quarter the boat all the way to the shore—where I dropped the anchor, let the boat slam down into the rapid until the anchor caught and the boat was wedged tight to the rocky bank.

Now I had him, or so I thought, running down the shore and reeling up the backing and finally the neon line and then tightening down the drag.  I will tail you.

And for almost three minutes, three glorious minutes, it seemed I might just, him running back upstream against the flow, then turning and rocketing to the tailout, only to meet me near shore, thirty-six inches if he was an inch, and maybe I should have reached for him then, but I didn’t—and then he was charging back into the center of the rapid.

What happened next, I’ll never know for sure, though I have some suspicions.  The line came tight, suddenly and abnormally tight, and then it wasn’t the animate flex of a fish I felt but the firm resonance of current parting over fly line.  I leapt onto a rock to change the angle, and felt the resonance increase to a hum.  And then felt nothing.

Sometimes nothing is the heaviest thing of all.

A rock or log severed the line, maybe.  That’s my best guess.

Keanu would have cried in that moment, then gotten laid.  I did neither.  I just stood there.  Overcome.

Overcome first with the loss.  With the unfairness.  Then with the dark humor of it.

Then the unfairness again.

And finally, though this revelation took some time, I was overcome by the gift of that fourth fish.

The certainty of uncertainty—the promise of surprise—now, that’s the best gift of all.

And the reason I fish steelhead.

John Larison is a superb  angler, dedicated river steward, talented guide, and the author of three books on steelheading, including Northwest of Normal and its widely acclaimed sequel Holding Lies.  The Oregonian has praised him, saying,  ”Larison is Norman Maclean two generations along.”  We’re honored to feature his writing on our site and blessed to call him our friend. John can be reached at [email protected] , and his blog can be found at http://www.flyfisherman.com/blogs/spey-today/