Bill Stokes - Trout Friends and Other Riff-Raff

Bill Stokes grew up in northwest Wisconsin, a landscape of forests, rocky pastures and, most important, trout water. Bill was introduced to that water by relatives and friends in a way that left him permanently trout impaired. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Bill began his newspaper career at Stevens Point. He later was an outdoor writer and columnist in Madison and Milwaukee, winding up his newspaper days with ten years at The Chicago Tribune. Bill has authored two childrens books, and his newspaper work has been compiled into four books. Two are now available in eBook, audio and paperback.

Since trout fishingor any kind of fishingis not innate, we must be taken by the hand and led to the still and raging waters. Over the course of a lifetime, those who lead us become the big ones that get away, and brooding over their mortality and your own is a constant temptation.

But it would be a dumb thing to do. Better to get out on a stream somewhere and feel the presence of the old wormers and others in the backcast that inexplicably snags on every last alder twig.

Then in the exquisite environs of trout, you can hear their voices and be with them again.

What I know as trout fishing was shaped by an incredible lineup of uncles, neighborhood geezers, and extraordinary friends. The collective lesson I learned from thembelatedly, of coursewas that all things are cyclic, and the cycles are unbelievably brief. Therefore, you are obliged to have as much fun, frivolity, and fishing as possible before you end up like a spent mayfly, drifting with the current until the big trout takes you down.

Bill Stokes

Then the soft gurgle of the rivers current wrapped around us like tentacles and we walked downstream to a grassy bank where a male blackbird fluttered overhead in a frenzy of indignation. Trout Friends .

A lot of water has gone over those slippery midstream rocks since Trout Friends was first published. And I have stumbled over most of them, maintaining my image as one of the truly great trout flounderers, a term coined by my wife after hearing endless accounts of piscatorial calamities.

The most recent floundering occurred on a trip to Colorado when I got totally stoned.

No, no, not that way, not with pot, which is, of course, legal in the state.

I was stoned by a kidney that made its insidious move in the middle of the night when we were fifteen miles up a dead end canyon where the exit road is on an ancient railroad bed that clings to the cliffs like an old spider-web.

Among those who have experienced both having a baby and dealing with a kidney stone, the consensus seems to be that the kidney stone pain is worse, perhaps, in part because giving birth produces something for your sufferinga baby, of course, and one would hope a cute one, at least in the eyes of its creators.

Experiencing a kidney stone, on the other hand, leaves you only with the sensation that you have somehow swallowed an ice pick and it is trying to work its way out of your guts through your penis.

Wemy son Larry and I, were on the tail water just below the Eleven Mile Canyon Reservoir on Colorados South Platte River. We were up in the catch-and-release area near the dam where bigsome of them 20-inch plus, rainbows and browns were willing to play with us if we threw them nymphs tiny enough to cavort with atoms. Larry is very good with that small stuff, and he was catching six or seven fish to my one, in part because it took me forever to tie on one of those size 20 or 22 nymphs and also because even in the relatively easy water, my legs kept reminding me that they would dump me on my ass if I did not pay close attention to how I was using them. (More about this later.) We were in the state campground near the dam, living out of my small motor home and thinking that rather than stumble around Colorado trying to find better fishing, we really had it about as good as it could get for a couple of flat-landers too cheap to hire guides.

Not a lot of attention was being paid to nutrition and dietLarry being so possessed with the fishing that he would stop only occasionally to wolf down a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, while I opened cans and heated things up, marking me as the gourmand of our duo. That was the situation one night when, after we crawled into sleeping bags, I began to feel strange little twinges. After so much rolling over and squirming and cursing, things began to slowly get worse until I was forced upright to rub the pain area and use more bad words about apparently having eaten something dumb.