Bill Barich - Crazy for Rivers: Tales of Trout Fishing

ALSO BY BILL BARICH

Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California

Carson Valley: A Novel

A Fine Place to Daydream

Hard to Be Good

Hat Creek and the McCloud

Laughing in the Hills

Picturing California: A Century of Photographic Genius

The Sporting Life

Traveling Light

Copyright 1999 by Bill Barich

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015.

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

Cover design by Richard Rossiter

Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-422-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-913-4

Printed in the United States of America

TO YOU ALL

The many fine anglers I know and have fished with,
and those whose paths may never cross mine
except through the medium of these pages ...

On loan from Ray Bergman

Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let noon find thee by other lakes, and night overtake thee every where at home. There are no largerfields than these, no worthier games may here be played.

H. D. Thoreau, Walden

One

T hat autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers. The weather was unusually mild in northern California, where I live, and I had some time to spare and couldnt imagine a better way to spend it than in the high mountain country as the leaves began to fall. I fished the Merced and the Stanislaus, the Kings and the North Yuba, and I had some luck on them all and might have fished the Tuolumne, too, if nature hadnt dealt me a setback. It was a good period in my life, calm and reflective, even happy. The days flowed by unbroken, in perfect sunlight, and often I found myself thinking back over the years and thanking the heavens Id come to be where I was, knee-deep in a trout stream with a fly rod in my hand.

Some people are born anglers, but I was not, even though my father had a passion for fishing. When I was a boy, I used to hear him complain about his distance from a decent lake as he dodged the traffic between our Long Island home and his office in Manhattan. Hed grown up in rural Michigan, the last of twelve children. His older brothers had taught him to love the outdoors, so he came by his longing honestly. His fathermy grandfather, a stocky Slav always dressed for a wedding in a three-piece wool suit from Dubrovnikwas fond of the woods, as well, and saw no irony in decorating the tavern he owned with his cherished forest creatures (deer, moose, even hawks) stuffed and mounted.

For some reason, Id met only a couple of my paternal uncles, so I enjoyed being told stories about them, especially about John, the eldest, who was a legendary hunter. He had shared a bed with my father for a while. That wasnt uncommon in large families in those days, and it might never have been mentioned at all, except that John talked and hunted in his sleep. In the middle of the night, hed sit bolt upright in a trance, grab my father by the shoulders, shake him, and shout, Theres a bear in the room! Oh, no! Hes going to attack us! My father never saw the bear, of course, but it seemed real to him, and he would shiver and whimper until John stuck out an arm like a rifle, took deliberate aim, and fired a fatal shot.

Blam! Got im! hed cry. Were saved ! Then he would roll over and go back to sleep.

Though I couldnt have known it then, not when I was still a child myself, I understood later that my father told such stories because he missed the folks on the Upper Peninsula and felt nostalgic for his youth and its sporting pursuits. His success in business had separated him from much that he cared about and had affection for, so every summer he would saddle up his family for a two-week vacation at a fishing resort, ordinarily in Minnesotamy mother was from therebut once in darkest Maine, at Sebago Lake, where I was puzzled and a bit frightened by the taciturn, stiff-spined, pipe-smoking men in flannel shirts, who were already cutting firewood in July.

I got my first fishing lessons on those trips, but I was a lackluster student. I could swing a Louisville Slugger with aplomb and even hit the long ball, but I was terribly awkward with a spin rod. Whenever I snarled my line or tossed a Jitterbug into a tree, my father would become flustered, carrying on about the minutes he was losing as he untied the knots and retrieved the plugs from limbs. He had a temper back then and lacked the patience to be a sympathetic teacher. We hardly ever caught any fish, either, so my brother, David, and I, being enterprising lads, would amuse ourselves by liberating minnows from the minnow bucket, shooting at squirrels with a Whammo slingshot, and conducting stupid giggling fits whose sole purpose was to further annoy the old man.

The only rewarding fishing I ever had on vacation, in fact, was courtesy of Carl Peterson, my mothers father, who guided us kids around Paradise Lake in a rowboat, in 1956. Carl managed an apartment building in St. Paul and bought me my first official cowboy outfitchaps, spurs, boots, the works. I liked him a lot, although not as much as I liked my Uncle Ned, a former star player in a semi-pro baseball league, who worked as a mailman and let me walk his route with him sometimes. Ned always had a powerful thirst, and if the weather happened to be humid, we would be forced to stop at a few saloons along the way, where my uncle would polish off a quick draft beer, often paid for by an admiring fan, while I thumped the pinball machine and developed bad habits at an early age.

Carl Peterson didnt fish much himself, but he had patience in his favor and knew that children in boats are most content when they have something to do. He let us fish for easy-to-catch crappies instead of the tricky bass or pike my father went after, and we hauled in so many of them so fast that we got our picture in the local paper holding up a stringer to show off our forty or fifty victims. It still astonishes me to see how proud I look, a sophisticated East Coast youth of thirteen with his hair styled in a fashionable Hollywood crew cut (flat on top and slicked back at the sides), secretly imagining his future as a rock-and-roll star, even as he poses with a bunch of dead crappies at Paradise Lake.

That fine adventure and our mini-aura of celebrity werent enough to convert me, though. I really hated fishing by the time I turned sixteen. I rebelled against the entire concept of a family vacation and whined and protested until my parents agreed to let me stay home alone. (Not incidentally, that was the summer I lost my virginity to a lusty cheerleader in my very own upstairs bedroom, treating her to an ice-cream pop from a circling Good Humor truck immediately afterward because I had no idea what else to do.) I thought that sitting in a boat in the middle of nowhere was the dumbest activity known to mankind and swore I would never fish againand I might have kept my promise, too, if my brother hadnt intervened by accident, thirteen years later.