John Gierach - Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers

ALSO BY JOHN GIERACH

A Fly Rod of Your Own

All Fishermen Are Liars

No Shortage of Good Days

Fools Paradise

Still Life with Brook Trout

At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman

Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders

Standing in a River Waving a Stick

Fishing Bamboo

Another Lousy Day in Paradise

Dances with Trout

Even Brook Trout Get the Blues

Where the Trout Are All as Long as Your Leg

Sex, Death, and Fly-fishing

Fly-fishing Small Streams

The View from Rat Lake

Trout Bum

Fly-fishing the High Country

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by John Gierach

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2020

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Jacket design by Alison Forner

Jacket illustration by Bob White Studio

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-6858-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-6859-8 (ebook)

I no longer require a wished-for future to cancel the present.

DONALD HALL

I live in the foothills of the northern Colorado Rockies with dozens of trout streams within day-trip range, so its easy for me to recommend fishing close to home. The advantages are obvious. You can play hooky to go fishing at a moments notice; it only takes one trip to the pickup to pack your minimal gear (you know how little you need because you need so little); you know right where you want to go and have plenty of backups in case someone has high-graded your spot; and a rained-out day isnt a deal breakeryou just go home and come back when the creek clears. Eventually fishing becomes such a normal part of daily life that you can stop for a half gallon of milk on the way home.

I understand that not everyone is so lucky; a precious few have it easier, but most have it harder. I might once have said that you make that kind of luck for yourself, and in some ways you do, but its just as often true that people end up where they are through no fault of their own and are then faced with making the best of it.

I know that because Ive temporarily ended up in a few places I didnt care for over the years (Cleveland comes immediately to mind), but I was young and unattached enough to be able to move on as soon as I comprehended my predicament. I may also have understood that the option to move on would begin to wane with the accumulation of possessions and entanglements, which at the time only made the idea of blowing town seem more attractive. In fact, there were a number of years when literally or figuratively blowing town at the slightest provocation was my modus operandi.

I didnt exactly weigh all my options before I finally bought property and sank roots where I am now; it was just that when the opportunity came for that to happen I liked where I was and thought, Why not? Id recently turned thirty and my father had died, leaving me a small inheritance: two things I didnt see coming. A few years earlier this might have gone differently, but by then I was just old enough to realize I only had two choices here: wake up in five years dead broke and with an epic hangover, or spend the whole wad on something I could hold on to and make use of, like a house. There were those in my family who said my modest windfall would be enough for a down payment on a nice little starter home in a decent neighborhood, but theyd overlooked my position as someone with no credit rating whod be hard-pressed to convince a bank that I was employed as a freelance writer. Even I could see I wasnt the type to come up with a mortgage payment once a month like clockwork.

So I found a wretched but habitable little house with an asking price of about what I had on hand and bought it outright. It was the cheapest house for sale in the county and with good reason, but it was within walking distance of a sleepy little town I liked and across the road from a trout stream I fished often, which made up for a lot. There was a tense moment when the seller balkedeven though people werent exactly lining up to buy this placebut in a rare burst of insight I realized hed taken one look at me and assumed a cash transaction of this size must involve drug money. So I took him aside and straightened him out. He said he was sorry to hear about my dad and the deal went through.

As I said, I already knew and liked the stream across the road from my new house, but with a home base just downstream of the confluence of its three forks, I set out to explore the entire drainage as time permitted. The majority of it was on federal landnational forest, national park, and wilderness areathat was sometimes difficult to reach, but at least it was public. A few stretches lower down were private and had to be finessed in one way or another. (By that I mean I always at least tried to get permission.) The project went on for decades in a haphazard way and I cant swear that it was ever actually completed, but to this day if someone asks me whats down in here or way up there I can tell them in convincing detail.

Naturally I discovered some sweet spots that held good-size trout and where I never saw another soul and I believedor wanted to believethat these places were unknown to anyone except one young, intrepid trout bum. That was the kind of glamorous notion thats irresistible at a certain age, even though it stretches the bounds of belief.

Some years later, on a junket to Canadas Northwest Territories, a friend and I talked a guide into taking us to some bona fide virgin water. It was a feeder creek that the lodge we were fishing fromthe only lodge that had ever operated in the regionknew for sure theyd never taken sports to. Furthermore, this wasnt the kind of place First Nation netters would ever have gone; theyd have stuck with the bigger water that would be easier to fish and yield better hauls.

So we alternately paddled and walked a canoe a few miles up that creek, where we caught arctic grayling weighing around a pound each and some hammer-handle-size pike. The only thing that was exceptional about the place was that we were pretty sure we were the first ones to ever fish there. It was an ambition satisfied, but by then new ideas about preservation had stolen the romance from the notion of breaking new sod like a pioneer and replaced it with the sneaking suspicion that maybe we humans, with our monstrous egos and appetites, should leave a few places unspoiled. So I came away with mosquito bites and mixed feelings. I never felt guilty about fishing there, but I wasnt as pleased with myself as Id expected to be and I dropped the part of the fantasy where I named the creek and then went on to live long enough to see that name on a map.