These Rivers

"MY NAKED BRAIN" BY LEOPOLDO MARIA PANERO

2012-01-25T09:39:00.000-08:00

"I have not forgotten the confused feelings of fascination and revulsion that Panero's poetry--at once violent and vile, beautiful and lyrical, insane and cogent--produced in me. I felt not a little disturbed by the fact that I could be drawn so powerfully by his starkly brutal imagery and raving expressions of tortured misery.

"I knew almost immediately that I had to translate him into English."

--Arturo Mantecon, from the Translator's Note.

"OTHER SUNS" BY PATRICIA KILLELEA

2012-01-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

Jim DenBoer is the managing editor at Swan Scythe Press, a fine poet, and a friend of mine. We've had lots of fun figuring out how to make short videos using a Flip camera and iMovie software to promote books of poems newly-released from Swan Scythe. We've managed to create yet another one (our first featured poet was Burlee Vang and his book The Dead I Know).

This video features Patricia Killelea reading from her book, Other Suns, and introduces original music by my friend Clemon Charles. This is my second collaboration with Clemon, an extremely talented singer, songwriter, and acoustic guitarist.

To celebrate the release of my new chapbook of poems last fall, Clemon and I put together a set of songs, poems and acoustical transitions that we performed at the Urban Hive in Midtown Sacramento. It was an absolute delight to collaborate and perform with Clemon. Out of that collaboration came many original, musical phrasings. One of which we tapped for use as the theme music for our poetry videos.

Enjoy.

A NEW YEAR FILLED WITH WONDERS

2012-01-01T08:23:00.000-08:00

FOOTSTEPS OF THE MASTERS

2011-11-10T08:24:00.001-08:00

Basho said, "Do not follow in the footsteps of the masters. Seek what they sought."

When Basho talks, I listen. As does another of my favorite poets, the late Olav H. Hauge.

NOT BY CAR, NOT BY PLANE

Not by car,
not by plane--
by neither haysled
nor rickety cart
--or even by Elijah's fiery chariot!

You'll never get farther than Basho.
He got there by foot.

In October, my wife takes an annual business trip to Monterey. I tag along on this trip, treat it as an opportunity to walk in the literal footsteps of two artists I consider modern masters, artists who continue to have a profound effect on the way I write and think about writing.

The lives of these two artists became intertwined in the early years of the twentieth century, at what was then an artists colony in Carmel. And at the rock and cypress landscape of nearby Point Lobos.

Photographer Edward Weston captured the iconic, black & white images that define Point Lobos in most people's minds. Years (decades, I suppose) ago, I trudged the dry river beds of my hometown with a 4 x 5 view camera, mounted to a proportionately heavy tripod, on my shoulder, trying to figure out what it was he sought; to catch a glimpse of it on my camera's ground glass.

As art historian Nancy Newhall wrote, "Deliberately he stripped his technique, his living, and seeing of unessentials and tried to concentrate on the objective and eternal--only to find that he could not and would not be bound even by his own dogma. How could he tell what he would see on his ground glass tomorrow?"

Weston described it as a search "to present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty ... without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique."

This was true whether his subject was a lithic landscape, a still life of peppers brought home from the market, or the unretouched portraits of a woman singing or a man shooting. He also made portraits of his neighbor, the other modern master I'd come to the coast to acknowledge, poet Robinson Jeffers.

It's difficult to take a photograph of Jeffers' home, Tor House, without the modern mansions that have surrounded it encroaching in the frame. Beautiful homes, to be sure, but in such contrast to the rock structures Jeffers built by his own manual labor.

Reversing the angle, though, one still sees what Jeffers saw, as he described it in his poem, "Carmel Point."

Meanwhile the image of pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of granite.
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.

Tonight, I'm reading from my new chapbook of poems, Standing in the River, in Midtown Sacramento. Reflecting on Weston and Jeffers, I'm finding a sense of satisfaction and an artistic peace of mind in the fact that we share a common thought.

In the forward to his 1938 Selected Poems, Jeffers wrote that he'd come to the point where he was "writing verse that seemed to be--whether good or bad--at least in my own voice."

PELICANS, POINT LOBOS

2011-10-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

STANDING IN THE RIVER

2011-10-07T11:57:00.001-07:00

My second chapbook of poems, Standing in the River, is hot off the press from Tebot Bach and available on-line at www.tebotbach.org/publication.html. Standing in the River was the winner of their 2010 Clockwise Chapbook Competition and Tebot Bach did a wonderful job producing the book. I couldn't be more satisfied.

That's my friend Adrian Psuty in the cover photo, swinging the Lower American on a winter morning. He and his wife Teresa taught me how to spey cast and continue to fuel my obsession with wild steelhead and home-brewed beer. Good friends, indeed.

I'll be reading from my new book at the Sacramento Poetry Center -- with Kathleen Winter -- on Monday, 10/10; at Angar Mora's Salons for Wooing Our Imagination! in San Rafael on Monday, 10/17; at the Urban Hive in Sacramento -- as part of the Color, Words & Rhythm event with Clemon Charles -- on Thursday, 11/10: and at The Other Voice in Davis -- with Danyen Powell -- on Friday, 11/18. Shoot a message to me if you're interested in more details.

A special thanks, too, to Toni Wilkes for including Standing in the River -- and me -- in the Sonoma Book Festival on 9/24.

GOOD TIDINGS

2011-10-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir

FISHING WITH THE BOYS

2011-09-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

Standing in the river, we become boys again.

"AN ACT OF SMALL REBELLION"

2011-08-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

"... my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion ..." From Anatomy of a Fisherman by Robert Traver.

MARBLE CANYON RAINBOWS

2011-07-24T08:55:00.001-07:00

Mick Lovett shows us how it's done.

YOSEMITE WATERFALLS

2011-07-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

UNCLE ALEX

2011-06-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut passed along some sage advice -- advice his Uncle Alex had given him -- in his last published work, A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories Press 2005).

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

MARCH BROWNS

2011-06-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

The March Browns are hatching in June this year.

On Saturday, I watched two trout feasting on emergers just below the surface film. Newly emerged adult mayflies, however, drifted safely by on the surface overhead. As their cohorts were being eaten right below them, they raised their elegant wings to dry so they could fly away and mate.

When I got home I watched Ralph and Lisa Cutter's amazing DVD, Bugs of the Underworld, for the who-knows-how-many-ith time. If you look at it a certain way, it's an existential masterpiece.

For most of their lives, these bugs crawl around on the bottom of the river. Then one day they go through a kind of puberty completely beyond their control. They fill with gas and float toward the surface.

To best of my knowledge, insects don't panic the way people do. But some of these bugs are clearly freaked out by the change and swim back toward the bottom and the life they knew down among the rocks. Those days are over, like it or not.

Eventually, the nymphs that resist the change exhaust themselves swimming against their new buoyancy. They float flaccidly to the surface where they're trapped below the film. Which is where those trout I watched were feasting.

Some mayflies embrace the change and swim toward the surface. Go with the change. These bugs generate enough momentum to penetrate the surface film. Floating downstream on the water's surface, their wings break through their husks and are raised like sails to dry in the air. On Saturday, those were the March Browns that survived the trout gauntlet.

Once I got thinking about the existential aspect of the March Brown hatch, I couldn't help but remember the Tibetan Book of Living and the Dying. It was extremely popular when I was going to college and gave us the famously popularized admonition to "go to the light."

Today, a book of poems arrived in my mailbox. The Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller. Her poem, "In Passing," was the final link in my chain of thought.

IN PASSING

How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

"GOOD BOY"

2011-06-05T09:45:00.001-07:00

Brian Slusser and his avalanche rescue dog, Shooter, wade the Truckee River during spring conditions on the first Saturday in June.

CROP CHECKING THE AMERICAN III

2011-05-30T09:48:00.001-07:00

Rain. Sleet. Hail. Snow. Even some sunshine. The last days of May in the Sierra.

During an ambling Sunday drive, my friend June and I checked in on the Silver Fork of the South Fork of the American. It was a good day to leave the fly rod in the truck.

NATURE POETS

2011-04-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder are old friends and especially good ruminators. The bit of rumination below is taken from the transcript of an outstanding documentary film, The Practice of the Wild: A Conversation with Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison (San Simeon Films 2010). The DVD is included in the companion book, The Etiquette of Freedom (Counterpoint 2010).

I found it especially delightful to watch Jim Harrison in motion. He is an intellectual force of nature. Watching and listening to him was like encountering a loquacious forest creature. Here's a snippet of their conversation about nature, the wild, and wilderness that resonated with me today.

GARY SNYDER: You know, to go back a bit for a second to The Practice of the Wild, I find that it's hard to--people, including environmentalists, have not taken well to the distinctions I tried to make there between nature, the wild, and wilderness. You know, I want to say again, the way I want to use the word "nature" would mean the whole physical universe.

JIM HARRISON: Truly.

GARY SNYDER: Like in physics.

JIM HARRISON: Yeah, right, exactly.

GARY SNYDER: So not the outdoors.

JIM HARRISON: No. That's a false dichotomy--

GARY SNYDER: Yeah.

JIM HARRISON: --or a dualism.

GARY SNYDER: Yeah. Nature is what we're in. If you want to try to figure out what's supernatural, you can do that, too.

JIM HARRISON: Uh-huh.

GARY SNYDER: But you don't have to. And then the wild really simply refers to process, a process that's been going on. And wilderness is simply topos--it's areas where the process is dominant.

INNER WILDERNESS

2011-04-21T13:40:00.000-07:00

"The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now."

--Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, "The Etiquette of Freedom"

THE VERMILION CLIFFS

2011-04-16T12:48:00.001-07:00

THE ARIZONA STRIP

2011-04-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

FISHING WITH MICK LOVETT

2011-03-30T14:19:00.002-07:00

That's Mick Lovett, owner of Marble Canyon Outfitters, waving a "Hi, Mom" to my mother down in Chandler, Arizona.

When I snapped the photo, Mick and I were heading upstream for what was about to become an epic day of fly fishing. Epic not only for the number and size of the fish Mick guided me to but also for what Mick taught me about fly fishing. Another thing, fishing with Mick is plain fun. Mick is as enthusiastic as he is capable. Quite a combo.

Before we rigged, Mick asked what I wanted to get out of the day and I said I wanted to catch fish in as many ways as possible, that numbers didn't matter as much as the variety of methods employed, and I said I hoped he'd be willing to teach me throughout the day -- i.e., put up with lots of questions.

This request was right up Mick's alley and I learned about fly tying, knot tying, the coloration of different trout at different places in the river, the steelheadiness of these Lees Ferry fish, and how to use my own damn fly rods effectively.

Most of the day we switched between a midging rig and a rod rigged with a dry-dropper; I'd brought along two rods, a rod for nymphing and a rod for casting dries. Mick taught me how to use the comparative stiffness and softness of the two rods to cast and mend effectively, and to use them to do what they were designed to do. As a result, I am on my way to being capable of fishing up to the level of my highest-quality fly rod, the rod my wife and parents chipped in on as a 50th birthday gift to me. I had no idea it was that good a rod.

This was my third trip out with Marble Canyon Outfitters. My father and I went out on the river with M.C.O founder Dave Foster a couple of years ago and had a great day. We enjoyed our first foray up Glen Canyon so much that we went out again in October of last year with my mother and brother, too, and with M.C.O.'s new owner, long-time guide Jon "Rocky" Lovett. (I wrote about that trip in a previous post.

Rocky gave the four of us the trip of a lifetime; a trip my mother had been wanting to take for decades. The trip was so satisfying and complete that when I asked my mother if she'd like to go again sometime, she said, no, our trip was perfect, and that's exactly how she wants to remember Lees Ferry and the Colorado River. Our only regret was that my sister Lisa wasn't there to share the day.

Rocky's good nature was a big part of what made that trip perfect. His good nature and the way he ran that river. My mother loves thrill rides. She loves motorcycles and roller coasters so Rocky had his hands full getting a response out of her but he managed.

Throughout the day I could see how much satisfaction he got from making my parents happy. Something he knew was important to my brother and I, too. As a result, our dad caught twice as many fish as my brother and I combined.

You can imagine the sorrow we all felt when we learned Rocky passed away in January of this year. And you can imagine how heartening it was to learn that Rocky's son, M.C.O. guide Mick Lovett, is carrying on the family business. I am pleased to report M.C.O. is still going strong, as Mick reports on their blog.

There's an old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. In the case of Mick Lovett, that's a good thing. A damn good thing. Go fishing with Mick Lovett. I recommend him.

ROWING THROUGH

2011-03-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

rowing through
out of the mist
the wide sea

This haiku, written by Masaoka Shiki (1867 - 1902), came to mind when a friend told me she was taking her father's ashes to the sea. To me, this poem is both mournful and transcendent.

Shiki suffered from spinal tuberculosis most of his adult life and he wrote an especially poignant poem, a tanka, from his sick bed. It seems like an appropriate companion to the poem above.

stuck in a vase
clusters of wisteria
blossoms hanging,
in the sick-bed
spring begins to darken

Shiki is the last of the Four Great Masters of Haiku. Others in the pantheon may be more familiar names: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa.

These two poems were translated from the Japanese by William J. Higginson and are from his book (with Penny Harter) The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku (Kodansha International 1985).

WHEN YOUR ANKLE IS BLOWN OUT

2011-03-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

The steelhead season has been frustrating for me this year. First, the river was blown out. Then, when it was finally fishable, I blew out my ankle wading in the river my first day out.

These things seem to happen more frequently as I wade deeper into middle age but, as is usually the case, there was a silver lining to the dark cloud that descended on my spey rod and I that morning.

Between applications of ice and heat, my friend James Den Boer and I explored the iMovie software. We'd been talking about doing so for quite a while. Jim is the managing editor for Swan Scythe Press and a poet, translator, independent scholar, and rare books dealer. In other words, a good guy to go exploring with.

The result of our iMovie explorations is a promotional video, about a minute and half long, for a new book from Swan Scythe Press. The book is the winner of the 2010 chapbook contest. It's by Hmong Poet Burlee Vang and the title is, The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth. His poems are wonderful.

"After Our Honeymoon in Laos" genuinely captures my imagination. Fortunately, Jim had captured some footage of Burlee reading that poem at the Sacramento Poetry Center and we included it in the video.

The poem is written in the voice of the wife. She tries to assure her husband there's nothing to be concerned about when he says he's turned into a tiger and "the jungle is calling my name." I know exactly how he feels.

AT THE NIMBUS HATCHERY

2011-02-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

THINKING ABOUT MY DEATH
AT THE NIMBUS HATCHERY

Raceway ponds teem with salmon fingerlings.
Emerald scales

flash when they rise, break my shadow
on the luminous surface.

Day and night the young fish
nose the artificial current.

Do they sense winter coming?

Great canal gates will open,
flood the ladder, link the river

to cement holding ponds where fish,

returned home from the sea, rest

and ripen. There, the crowder’s metal grip
lifts them to the stainless kill room

where skilled hands work fluid knives,
slice ripe bellies of red females, spill new life—

in orange roe—over shining steel;
egg by glistening egg.

"Thinking About My Death at the Nimbus Hatchery" was first published in Susurrus: The Sacramento City College Literary Journal, and appears in These Rivers, a chapbook of poems from Rattlesnake Press.

GRAVY

2011-01-31T08:11:00.000-08:00

The river is finally fishable. Flows are steady at around 2,500 cfs. It's steelhead season, the season of morning fog and a metal travel mug filled with hot coffee tucked inside my waders' bib.

This winter, thanks to an intervention by my friend Adrian and my wife, I'm wearing waders that don't leak and boots with traction. My feet are enjoying the luxury of wool-lined booties. I'm warmer and drier than I was at this time last year. And a year older, I'm reminded, as my birthday falls in January.

A year older, I am better outfitted and a better spey caster. I am not any better, though, at connecting with steelhead. Or at keeping my mind from rambling when I'm feeling skunked. This morning, my mind rambled to a haiku Issa wrote on his fiftieth birthday:

From now on,
it's all clear profit,
every sky.

I suppose I feel that way. I want to. Raymond Carver called Issa's "clear profit" by another word. He called it "gravy."

GRAVY

No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."

Maybe I'm imagining things, but the fog seems to be colder this year, clings longer to the day. This year, though, the merganzers and mallards seem more comfortable with my presence. I move slowly and deliberately downstream between casts. Even my casting stroke is slower. Maybe the ducks are more comfortable with my presence this year because ...

Another of Issa's haiku comes to mind, written after looking at a portrait of himself.

Even considered
in the most favorable light,
he looks cold.

RISE FORMS

2011-01-19T11:54:00.001-08:00

The premiere issues of Rise Forms: Fly Fishing's Literary Voice is up and running on the web and I highly recommend you visit the site.

This "magazine for anglers" provides a perfectly balanced offering of fly-fishing-inspired arts: fiction by Dave Moats; narrative by Sydney Lea; three poems, one each by Cameron Scott, Anthony Naples, and myself; Justin Cober-Lake reviews Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In the Wild with Ted Hughes by Ehor Boyanowsky (the poet, Ted Hughes, was a fly fisherman!); and an especially-interesting interview with painter Rod Crossman that includes a slideshow of his work.

In his Editor's Note, Editor-in-Chief Scott Carles writes about his aspirations for Rise Forms. While there are a substantial number of on-line and print publications that focus on gear, travel, photography, and methods ... well, he says it best himself:

"Fly fishing has a long history, and a long and rich literary history as well. Although it has spanned changes in publishing methods, from illuminated texts to the digital age, what hasn’t changed is the passion with which anglers write about their piscatorial pursuits. And because sometimes it’s not just about what is said, but rather how it is said, that Rise Forms exists."

Take a minute and give Rise Forms a look; check out the menu. If you're like me, that minute will turn into an hour, as each offering makes the reader hungry for the next. Which brings me to something else I really like about this magazine. It is just the right size. The entire magazine can be enjoyed in one leisurely sitting.

I consider it a real honor that the editors chose to publish one of my poems in their premiere issue. It's nice to find myself among such good company.

WHEN THE RIVER'S STILL UNFISHABLE IT'S A GOOD TIME TO VISIT OLD FRIENDS

2011-01-05T12:21:00.000-08:00

There were days I wondered if the river was going to swallow the footbridge below the Sunrise crossing.

Downstream, closer to home, my river-height benchmark, Duckshit Island, was completely submerged.

In the mornings, though, when I'd step out onto the porch to fetch the paper, the air was cold and wet in the way that says: The steelhead are back; grab your spey rod.

Since my home waters were blown out and unfishable, I turned to The River Never Sleeps for consolation. I listened to Roderick L. Haig-Brown talk to me again about fly fishing for winter steelhead on his home waters.

“And now, if all goes well and the Campbell, on whose bank I live, does not rise in full freshet, I know January for the best of all winter steelhead months. The fish have come in in good numbers by that time, but they are still fresh and silver and clean. There may be snow on the ground, two feet of it or more; and if so, the river will be flowing darkly and slowly, the running water below freezing but not ice, just flowing more slowly, as though it meant to thicken into ice--which it never does. steelhead fishing can be good then, and there is a strange satisfaction in the life of the river flowing through the quiet, dead world. On the bank the maples and alders are stark and bare, drawn into themselves against the cold. The swamp robin moves among them, tame and almost bold for once, and perhaps an arctic owl hunts through them in heavy flight whose softness presses the air until the ear almost feels it. On the open water of the river are mergansers and mallards, bluebills, butterballs, perhaps even geese and teal. Under it and under the gravel, the eggs of the salmon are eyed now; the earliest of the cutthroat trout are beginning their spawning, and the lives of a thousand other creatures--May flies, stone flies, deer flies, dragonflies, sedges, gnats, water snails and all the myriad forms of plankton--are slowly stirring and growing and multiplying. But the steelhead, with the brightness of the sea still on him, is livest of all the river’s life. When you have made your cast for him, you are no longer a careless observer. As you mend the cast and work your fly well down to him through the cold water, your whole mind is with it, picturing its drift, guiding its swing, holding where you know he will be. And when the shock of his take jars through to your forearms and you lift the rod to its bend, you know that in a moment the strength of his leaping body will shatter the water to brilliance, however dark the day.”

I've heard poetry described as a conversation with the past, the present, and the future; between the living and the dead. So, too, the conversation among steelhead flyfishers.

WHEN THE RIVER'S RUNNING AT 30,000 CUBIC FEET PER SECOND

2010-12-19T00:32:00.000-08:00

(Photo: Kennedy Tanaka)

When the river's running at 30,000 cubic feet per second, gather your wife and her best friend, your niece and her best friend, get in the car and drive through the rain for two hours to the de Young Museum.

Take some time to stand in front of Robert Motherwell's "At Five in the Afternoon" and tell your turning-fifteen-years-old niece and her just-turned-fifteen-years-old best friend who Federico Garcia Lorca was and talk about the language of abstract expressionism.

Tell them that Lorca's poem, "The Goring and the Death," inspired Motherwell and that the poem foreshadowed Lorca's own execution at the hands of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Then listen to them explain the relationship between the white background like the sand of a bull ring and the black shapes like death in the painting; how the thick black columns seem to be crushing the round black shapes. Listen, and learn something.

SUN BURNING THROUGH FOG

2010-12-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

For the past several days I walked and waded a gem of a coastal river. I'd arrived ahead of the steelhead but that didn't keep me from exploring the sandbars and side-streams, nor from experiencing the changes in the river's smell and taste, its rise and fall, caused by changes in the ocean tide --- an experience quite different from those I have on the inland rivers I regularly search for steelhead.

On this trip, I satisfied a long-standing desire to swing a steelhead fly in the fog and shadows of a redwood forest. Half a dozen feisty smolt engaged my fly and let me know there was new life in the river; that there was another generation gathering size and strength in preparation for a journey to the sea.

Despite everything my reasoning mind knows about the decline of steelhead populations on this river, and with the image of the clear-cut forest I'd wandered into fresh in my mind, I felt hopeful in the way I always do when I'm in touch with the primordial.

When I wasn't exploring the river I was reading Visions from San Francisco Bay, a collection of essays written by Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel Prize-winning poet whose writing and thinking influence my own writing and thinking. The book was a gift from Jim DenBoer, another award-winning poet who also influences my writing and thinking.

On the morning I took the photograph above, as the sun burned through the fog, I walked and waded and thought about some lines by Milosz that were almost haunting me:

"The last spiritual remnants of the epoch of the steam engine are already disintegrating and dying out; man has found himself before something still unnamed, and though his consciousness lags behind general transformations, he does perceive that everything now happening to our entire species is enormous, ominous, and perhaps ultimate."

A logging truck banged down the rutted road above and behind me. When the truck stopped at the locked gate that bars the public from private timber land, I listened to its diesel engine idle, its door creak open. The door slammed shut and the truck banged off into a landscape that absorbed its sound.

Right then, a smolt bit at the wings on my wet fly, each attack sending a shiver of its life-force up the fly line and into my hand.

A merganzer surfaced nearby and I thought for a moment that a big fish was in the river with me. The fish duck, as they're sometimes called, shook his beak and spiky, feathered Mohawk in my direction and disappeared back into the water.

In that moment, the river's current felt eternal.

PLEASANT ENCOUNTERS

2010-11-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

My friend Richard is balancing the scales against cynicism at his blog www.signalhillvoices.blogspot.com.

He and his wife Maria believe in community and have been actively involved in making the place they live a good place to live.

At his blog, Richard reports on the many pleasant encounters he has with the people who share the open space on Signal Hill with him: an engineer who keeps a kite in his car "just in case I come across a breezy hilltop on my lunch hour"; a Long Beach artist out for an early morning walk who describes her work with monoprints as "a fascination with process, how I might push the medium I'm using in new, interesting ways"; a cyclist with whom he exchanges a smile and encouragement as they they puff their way uphill, "Good goin'," "You, too."

I thought of Richard when I was looking at mushrooms along the American River Parkway last week. A man out walking his dogs stopped to admire the mushrooms with me and told me he'd gone on-line and learned there are 136 species of mushrooms, two of which are poisonous.

He described with enthusiasm the restoration project we were in the process of enjoying, how well the willows had grown, and the different methods that were used to keep the beavers from chewing them up when they were tender saplings. He was a wealth of information on the health of the annual salmon run based on first-hand observations of fish swimming upstream to spawn, and their corpses floating downstream afterwards.

Yes, I've had my share of unpleasant encounters along the parkway -- walking into drug deals, dealing with drunks, and I'll never forget the guy who blew up a pile of river rocks with a can of black powder -- but, on balance, I am pleased to report the majority of my encounters are pleasant. The vast majority.

ALONG THE AMERICAN RIVER PARKWAY

2010-11-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

FISHING WITH MY NEPHEW

2010-11-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

When I fish with my nephew he says things like, "Uncle Shawn, we should get a machete." And I say, "I'll bet we can get one at the Army Surplus store."

I say, "Maybe we should go to Alaska when you're sixteen." And he says, "What about the bears?" I say, "We may need to carry shotguns." Two weeks later, he says, "Maybe you should show me how to point a shotgun before we go to Alaska."

Two years later we're emptying a rusty Folgers can of rusty nuts and bolts on the workbench. He tears off a piece of masking tape and wraps it around the can. With a black Sharpie he writes: "Alascan." His idea.

He puts the money he earned mowing our lawn in the can and I add a twenty, to "prime the pump," I say. "Like priming the lawn mower," he says. "Yeah, like that."

(Photo: June Clark)

PACIFIC RIM

2010-10-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

READING BORGES AT LEES FERRY

2010-10-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

"To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water."

This is a stanza from the poem "Ars Poetica." It was written by Argentina's visionary writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin. I've been reading Poems of the Night, a new selection of Borges's poems from Penguin Books (2010), and I took the book along with me to Lees Ferry last week.

My mother and my brother joined me there to celebrate my father's 75th birthday. It would have been impossible not to think about time when celebrating a milestone birthday, but add to that the presence of the millions-of-years-old rock the river's relentless current has exposed. And then the presence of the dam that brings us suddenly back to our own brief moment in geologic time.

During this trip, Borges's "Someone" became a favorite poem. I personally enjoyed the "mysterious happiness" he describes while on the river with my parents and my brother. Again, the translator is Merwin.

SOMEONE

A man worn down by time,
a man who does not even expect death
(the proofs of death are statistics
and everyone runs the risk
of being the first immortal),
a man who has learned to express thanks
for the day's alms:
sleep, routine, the taste of water,
an unsuspected etymology,
a Latin or Saxon verse,
the memory of a woman who left him
thirty years ago now
whom he can call to mind without bitterness,
a man who is aware that the present
is both future and oblivion,
a man who has betrayed
and has been betrayed,
may feel suddenly, when crossing the street,
a mysterious happiness
not coming from the side of hope
but but from an ancient innocence,
from his own root or from some diffused god.

He knows better than to look at it closely,
for there are reasons more terrible than tigers
which will prove to him
that wretchedness is his duty,
but he accepts humbly
this felicity, this glimmer.

Perhaps in death when the dust
is dust, we will be forever
this undecipherable root,
from which will grow forever,
serene or horrible,
our solitary heaven or hell.

And, yes, we caught lots of fish.

(Final Photo: Trent Pittard)

"This should keep you going for a while."

2010-09-19T22:02:00.001-07:00

Halfpounders are back in the river here in Sacramento and I've managed to move a few. As for landing fish, I'm doing exceptionally well with smolt.

The few adult fish I've made contact with have kept me going, though, kept me watching my line swing across the current when my mind starts wandering after memories of steelhead past. Like the fish in the photo, above, caught at about this time last year.

Lately, I've been thinking about the similarities between submitting my poems for publication and chasing after steelhead. Success in both arts requires equal amounts of stubbornness and patience. On top of whole-hearted enthusiasm.

While I didn't connect with a steelhead last week, my manuscript of poems, Standing in the River, was announced the winner of Tebot Bach's 2010 Clockwise Chapbook competition.

When I shared the good news with my friend and poetry mentor, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, she had a great line: "This should keep you going for a while."

Publishing poetry is like swinging for steelhead, where landing one nice fish can keep a guy going for another 1,000 casts.

(Photo: Adrian Psuty)

"WE NEED A BIGGER BOAT"

2010-09-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Roy Scheider famously delivered that line after seeing the shark for the first time in the movie Jaws. I muttered a variation on that line this morning, on the banks of the American. "I need a bigger fly rod," is what I said.

Friends had told me tales about the striped bass that migrate into the river to spawn in the summer. Tall tales, I thought, about adult ducks being slurped underwater, down into the predator's maw.

It's possible, I thought. My field guide to Sacramento's Outdoor World says some stripers can reach 70 pounds. Big Mo is what one of my friends calls that fish, the mythical fish that gets him up before first light and out the door with a 10 weight rod. The guide book also says most stripers weigh less than ten pounds and, until this morning, stripers hadn't captured my imagination.

The steelhead is the fish that gets me out before dawn -- with a six weight spey rod in my hand on fall mornings. On this particular fall morning I was walking downstream, shadowing two does and two fawns on the river's other bank. Lost in that moment, I rounded the bend on a brushy island just as a fisherman connected with a steelhead.

The silver fish leaped into the air and tore across the deep pool. I joined the fisherman in shouts of marvel and wonder at the half-pounder's athleticism and positioned myself up and above him to get a good look down into the pool.

That's when I saw Mo. That's when I knew I needed a bigger fly rod.

Mo's gray shape came up from the depths of the pool and attacked the steelhead. It was like watching a shark. The fisherman's pole bent in half and he asked me if I saw what he just saw.

The fisherman didn't surrender the steelhead. He hung on as the steelhead twisted free of the striper and ran downstream, trying to escape the pool. But the steelhead was unable to escape the hook and the line and when the fisherman turned him back toward the edge of the pool that dark shape reappeared and struck again. The steelhead disappeared behind the striper's jaws.

The fishing pole folded over and the fisherman slid down the bank and ankle deep into the river. He held on, determined not to lose "his" steelhead to the striper. Eventually, he was able to move both fish closer to the bank.

When that striper moved into shallower water, when he was within two or three feet of the surface, he saw us and simply released the steelhead. He vanished under the cloak of deep water.

Tomorrow morning, in the dark, on the tailgate of my pickup, I'll rig the biggest rod I have, an eight weight, and tie the biggest clouser minnow in my streamer box to the strongest-test Maxima I have; and I'll mutter to myself, "I need a bigger fly rod."

A RODNEY DANGERFIELD MOMENT AT THE CASH REGISTER IN A ROADSIDE CAFE

2010-09-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

"MAYBE YOU SHOULD ALL GO FISHING" II

2010-08-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Sharing last light in Oak Creek Canyon with my father.

"MAYBE YOU SHOULD ALL GO FISHING"

2010-08-17T09:02:00.001-07:00

There's a line in Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" that I enjoyed thinking about last week. It comes at the end of the scene where Norman bails his brother Paul, and Paul's girlfriend, out of jail. On their way out the desk sergeant says, "Maybe you should all go fishing."

Neither my brother nor I had to bail the other out of jail last week but there was still plenty of metaphoric resonance in that line. Like everyone, we've had our share of trials and tribulations. We've done our best to help each other through them -- with the inevitable mixed results. Which reminds me of another line from Maclean's book that stayed with me. He quoted his brother as saying, "maybe what he likes is somebody trying to help him."

Last week, Trent drove up from the valley heat and joined me on my writing retreat at the family cabin. He helped me trouble-shoot Lonely Dell, the new screenplay I'm working on. Then we ate a couple of burgers in Flagstaff and fished the evening rise on Oak Creek. Trent caught the only fish of the day on his trusty mosquito pattern.

Being the older brother, I tend to think of myself as the one who takes the other fishing. While watching Trent fish, though, I realized the dynamic changed somewhere along our lives' timelines. Now that Trent's pushing forty, and I've pushed past fifty, it's hard to tell who is taking whom fishing.

THE LOYALTY OF BLUE JAYS

2010-08-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

My plan was to drive down Oak Creek Canyon and see if I could connect with a wild brown trout.

I'm in Flagstaff again this summer to recharge my creative well --- to paraphrase Hemingway. It is suffering from an overdraft. Hanging out in and around the family cabin, and fly fishing Oak Creek, are some of the ways I recharge that well.

As is so often the case when I'm here, first light woke me. Actually, it was the morning air that got my attention and lured me out of a deep sleep. I climbed down the ladder from the loft and put the percolator on the propane burner.

We keep ground coffee in a silver can labeled "tea." I had loaded the can with Late for the Train's North Rim blend. Beyond French Roast, they describe it as Volcanic, like Flagstaff's geology.

While I waited for the water to boil and the coffee to perc, I picked up a copy of a new book I brought along to read on this trip, Shedding Skins. It is an anthology of four contemporary Sioux poets.

The morning passed as I read poems and drank coffee on the porch. The sun rose and warmed the meadow. The aspen and ponderosa pine and bunch grass transpired and the air became pleasantly humid.

When I read a line by Steve Pacheco, the first line of his poem, "The Lower Sioux Rez: Three Scenes," a trickle of creative water started to refill the well.

"I feel I owe something to the blue jays for their loyalty."

RENEWAL

2010-08-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

(Photo: Kennedy Tanaka)

I finally renewed my lapsed Trout Unlimited membership; put the check in the mail. But that doesn't mean I wasn't doing my part until then. Money is just one way of helping out. Another way to help preserve our streams and rivers is to take a kid fishing. Educate the next generation.

This way of helping is my personal favorite. Especially when those kids are my niece and nephew. And it's not just because they like to eat french fries and hot wings, or that we work the morning paper's crossword puzzle during the drive. They are genuinely fascinated with the whole of nature. Watching and listening to them make connections in their minds about the connectedness of ecosystems thrills me.

Actually, fishing with these kids doesn't qualify as volunteering my time at all. I'll send my membership renewal check to TU on time next year.

YOUNG ENVIRONMENTAL WRITERS ON THE SOUTH FORK OF THE AMERICAN

2010-07-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

Volunteer. You'll meet amazing people. Most recently, they were students from three El Dorado County high schools participating in the first-ever Young Environmental Writers and Storytellers program. YEWS for short. Here's their mission statement.

"To create a dynamic and self-sustaining environmental education program for El Dorado County high school students, enrich the quality and availability of rural environmental news, and celebrate El Dorado's unique natural heritage through good storytelling and new media."

The program was conceived by two soon-to-be-legendary foothill residents, Emily Underwood and Shawn Dunkley. The program is cosponsored by Family Connections El Dorado and the inaugural weekend was hosted by the Mother Lode River Center.

My role was to help out during the poetry hike, with fellow volunteers Moira Magneson and Alexa Mergen. In the photograph above, we're enjoying some much-needed shade and fresh cherries. And writing about the sense of taste.

I left the workshop invigorated and inspired. Our future is in good hands. But that doesn't mean the next generation can't use our help. To learn more about the Young Environmental Writers and Storytellers of El Dorado program, and to find out how you can pitch in, follow the link to their website.

JUNK SICK

2010-07-04T13:33:00.001-07:00

(Photo: Kathy Pittard)

My neighborhood celebrates the Fourth of July with a brunch followed by a parade. Bands play on front lawns. Young families push their kids in strollers. Dogs tag along. Even the fire department joins in on the fun by sending an engine to lead the happy throng. Last night, the occasional firework boomed or whistled. Roman candles will light the street tonight. So why am I feeling so restless?

After the parade, I jumped in my truck and went out to check on the river, driving my usual circuit that gives me up- and downstream views from our town's bridges. The flows are wadable again, somewhere around 4,000 cfs, and the spot I like to bushwhack my way down to looked pretty good for shad and maybe stripers. There wasn't a fisherman in sight. So why wasn't I excited? Over a beer at my local dive I realized the reason why.

There are no steelhead in the river. And I miss those migratory fish. The feeling I have today reminds me of something my rugby coach used to pull on us now and then, back in college. For a couple of days we'd play nothing but basketball and soccer. We liked the break at first, enjoyed playing other games that were similar but different. Pretty soon, though, we were trying to make these games a little more like rugby. By the third day we were demanding to play rugby again and our practices were transformed from tedium to pure joy.

Last weekend, my brother and I were in Burbank pitching "Junk Sick," the screenplay we wrote together. It's a horror story set in a detox facility. Writing the script required lots of research into the nature of addiction. So I have to ask myself: When did I become a steelhead junky? And when will I get my next fix?

DIG

2010-06-17T11:25:00.001-07:00

Conversations, lately, have ranged from the catastrophic impacts of pumping a million gallons of oil, daily, into the Gulf of Mexico, to the inevitability of nuclear warfare. Thinking about the destruction we human beings are capable of inflicting on ourselves can lead a guy to despair. Which is why I took the 3 weight rod, the one I bought for my young nephew, and went to "the mountains to get their good tidings."

The rivers are running fast with snowmelt, so I ambled along a creek that passes quietly through an alpine meadow. Lush grasses and colorful lupine are part of our late spring, along with crouching behind a tree stump to watch a trout rise and take a Cutter Caddis. John Muir's promise was fulfilled. "Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees."

That doesn't mean I completely forgot about our troubled world. Being neither a fatalist nor a believer in miracles myself, Jack London's advice came to me again and again over the course of the day. "Dig moved more mountains than faith ever dreamed of." Come on, folks, let's pick up our shovels and dig.

THE NEXT BEST THING

2010-06-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

Flows of 8000 cfs are keeping the walk and wade fisherman off the river. Myself among them. As the days of not fishing tallied up, I came to realize I miss the friends I fish with as much as I miss the fishing.

So I called my buddy Larry yesterday and met him for a beer and a dog at Onespeed, down the street. This morning, my buddy David and I met for coffee and omelets at Nopalito's. We talked about the flows on the American and the fishing on the small streams in the Sierra, quick with snowmelt.

Hanging out with friends over food and drink is the next best thing to fishing with them. Naturally, road trips are in the works.

WHAT I DIDN'T SEE

2010-06-03T12:58:00.000-07:00

In the morning, before I could see, I listened.
The West’s fragrance rose off the ebbing tide.

A chorus of sea-gulls gathered on a thick raft of sea-kelp
inside the offshore reef.

A young buck’s hoof-beats paused on the bluff-trail.
Quail rustled the bunch grass.

There was more—

Gray whales rolled southward, along migratory songlines,
to calve in Baja’s warm lagoons,

pelicans rode the bluff-winds northward,
toward the mouth of the Gualala,

where salmon schooled in the river’s slack water
before pressing upstream to spawn.

And when first light broke the East’s dark silence,
it was the tolling of an ancient bell.

(My poem, "What I Didn't See," was first published in Susussurus: The Sacramento City College Literary Journal)

DownStream Fly Fishing 2010

2010-05-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."

I had the opportunity to contemplate this quote, by the legendary college-basketball coach John Wooden, all day yesterday. It was written on the backs of the t-shirts everyone was wearing at the 4th annual DownStream fly fishing event.

DownStream fly fishing's Program Director, Ryan Miller, describes the program like this: "DownStream fly fishing was created as part of a movement to inspire people with Down Syndrome to try fly fishing. It is my hope that through fly fishing, people with Down Syndrome can improve coordination, fine tune motor skills, boost social skills and attain a sense of accomplishment while having fun. Additionally, my goal is to include family members in order to promote family activities in an outdoor environment." All these goals and more were met yesterday.

You can read more about the history of the program at Downstream's blog, and how Ryan's brother, Mark, helped inspire the program. They'll be posting pics and will tell you all about yesterday's event at the blog, so I'll just say a few, quick words, about the highlights of my day.

What a joy it was to watch kids with Down Syndrome "do what they can," with gusto! I've never given more high-fives or enjoyed landing a fish more than I did with the kids at this event. Also inspiring were the young volunteers who netted fish and co-fished, for lack of a more artful word, for and with the participants. And I was especially tickled to hear the young angler I was co-fishing with repeat this fly fisher's mantra to his mother: "One more cast."

The kids went from station to station, making art, tying flies, learning to cast, and fishing. Actually, there was one more station, manned by my friend, Adrian Psuty, and me. The bugs station. But midges and mayflies in an aquarium were no competition with the fishing station and pretty soon, we were all fishing. Which was a good thing, as Adrian is an exceptional casting teacher and has a real knack with kids.

Which brings me to my favorite recurring experience of the day. Time after time, I watched the kids track Ryan down with something exciting and urgent to say to him. No matter how busy he was coordinating the event, he stopped what he was doing and completely engaged the young person. The extent to which the kids truly enjoyed him, and he them, was obvious. And it was obvious that the day was, as Ryan told the volunteers first thing in the morning, all about the kids.

This morning, I've been reflecting on yesterday's event. Coincidentally, "The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing," a collection of essays written by Thomas McGuane, caught my eye on the bookshelf. I pulled it down a thumbed through it.

In his introduction, McGuane "suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves." I'm still reverberating from the 2010 DownStream fly fishing event.

QUINTON DUVAL: IN MEMORIUM

2010-05-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

Quinton Duval crossed over to another shore last week. He was a hell of a guy and a hell of a poet. Here's one of my favorite Quinton Duval poems, from Joe's Rain (Cedar House Books 2005).

Fishing

It's a walleye, the guy on TV says.
Last time it was a catfish
that filled the boat with violet light.
They let that go.
But they keep the walleye for lunch.
I can foresee the filet knife nick
open the silver muscle
at the tail, and the clean slide
down to the gills.
Then the campfire on the bank,
smoke, grease muttering in the pan,
the applause the fish makes
in the black bottom of the skillet.
We have ourselves huddled over
open coals turning fish or meat,
talking, smoking, drinking
out of green bottles something
bottomless and pale. When you leave,
when you must fall into your night sleep
on a distant shoreline filled with camp smoke,
raise your arm, please. Let the others
know it's the same whatever shore
we land on in the end.

CONDUCTING "RESEARCH" WITH DEC HOGAN

2010-05-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

Ever since I started writing a screenplay about the grown son of a legendary steelhead fisherman, I’ve been able to convince myself that a daily trip to the river to swing a run or two is essential research. During this winter’s steelhead spawning run I found myself doing more research than writing, though, and I realized that I needed to pick up the pace—on the writing side of the equation.

Whether it was some Muse with a twisted sense of humor or a literal Freudian slip, I managed to tweak everything below my shinbone while tele-skiing on the last weekend in March. As a result, April was my most productive month of writing since Thanksgiving—when the first of the winter-run fish start swimming upstream toward Sacramento, and I start going down to the river to greet them.

Despite being sidelined, April still had its fair share of research-related activities. I reread my dog-eared copy of Dec Hogan’s A Passion for Steelhead (Wild Rivers Press) and, while conducting research at my local fly shop, I saw an announcement for a one-day, on-river, steelhead-fishing seminar taped to the cash register. Taught by Dec Hogan himself.

Dec Hogan qualifies as a legendary steelhead fisherman. Among his many innovations, he pioneered two-handed casting techniques during a fourteen-year career guiding Pacific Northwest rivers. The price of the seminar seemed more than reasonable when I thought about how important this research would be for writing my story. I could tune my ear for dialogue while hearing, first-hand, Hogan’s stories about the Pacific Northwest’s epic steelhead rivers.

As it turned out, Hogan is every bit as gracious and gregarious as the fictional character I’d created for my story. And a gifted teacher. There were two things, in particular, that he explained, and demonstrated, that improved my casting technique immediately—and significantly. The first, and most important, is slow down. The other is: things that start bad, end bad.

If you’ve read Hogan’s book you already know “slow down” is the most likely solution to any casting problem. This advice applies not only to casting but also to presenting the fly to the fish. While Hogan offers this advice again and again in his book, there’s nothing like a hands-on experience to truly get the message.

In my case, hands-on came in the form of a head wind. A head wind so strong that I thought it might undermine the value of the class. Instead, it made the day even more valuable for me. Hogan convinced me that I could use the headwind to help form my D-loop and load my spey rod. Which it did.

He also convinced me I could make a normal forward stroke. I didn’t have to add additional speed or muscle to the forward cast to account for the wind. Instead, the basic principles of the forward cast applied more than ever. Accelerate to a stop, activating the lower hand—like you would a double-haul—at just the right moment. The result was a tight loop that cut through the wind. I am a believer.

Hogan’s second adage—things that start bad, end bad—solved a problem I was having with my single-spey cast. My D-loop wasn’t forming well and I was muscling my forward cast. Hogan worked the problem backwards with me. He said the problem is usually in the step before what appears to be the problem.

In my case, the problem wasn’t with my secondary lift, or anything associated with forming the D-loop. The problem was in the previous step—I was initiating my cast too fast (see “slow down,” above). Hogan asked me to make my initial lift of the rod tip as slowly as possible, and to raise the rod tip a little bit higher and toward the riverbank. My “D-Loop problem” was solved.

If you get a chance to spend a day on a river with Dec Hogan, take it. It will be some of the best research you’ve ever conducted.

TRANSITION DAY IN THE WATERSHED

2010-04-26T07:26:00.001-07:00

(Photo by Kennedy Tanaka)

Yesterday was Opening Day of the trout fishing season in the Sierra. It was also Closing Day of the alpine ski season at the resort where my wife and I spend many winter Sundays skiing with our niece and nephew. I guess it’s Transition Day for the four of us.

Closing Day came complete with a young man wearing nothing but a speedo swimsuit and a snowburned-strawberry on his pale-skinned hip; skiers in cartoon-character costumes that included my personal favorite, the Tasmanian Devil; a three-piece classic-rock band cranking out songs that triggered flashbacks to dances in my high school gym; and a parking lot full of tailgate barbeques.

As much fun as all of this is, my favorite part of Transition Day is checking out the creek below the meadow with the kids. Actually, we keep track of it all winter. We enjoy aerial vantages from the chairlift and mountain ridges, and ground-level inspections at the end of a ski day. In the dead of winter we watched a midge hatch above several brook trout that simply looked too cold to care. At least that’s how it looked to us.

The creek looked especially cold yesterday. When we’re fishing, we bring along a thermometer but I didn’t think to bring one along on Transition Day. We found out just how cold the water felt, though, by taking turns taking underwater snapshots with our point-and-shoot camera. This is an entirely new way for us to explore the creek. Stick your hand in the water, click the shutter, pull your nearly-numb hand out of the water, then view the image on the screen to see what’s going on in there.

This is the same creek we splash around in during summer backpacking trips. This is the creek where my nephew caught his first trout on a dry fly; where I woke early one brisk morning and spotted my niece already up and sitting on a stump beside our fly rods—patiently waiting for me to roll out of my warm sleeping bag. This creek is the place where the idea of what a watershed is took concrete, physical shape in their minds. “Uncle Shawn, is this the same water we skied on in the winter?” I couldn’t have been prouder.

These watershed moments with the kids are especially important to me. I want them to understand their watershed—this most essential part of where they live. By getting out and moving through the landscape with them, across the four seasons, I feel like we’re providing a vital element of their education. And fly fishing adds so much to this experience. Words like caddis and brookie are part of their vocabulary—along with alder, Pygmy Nuthatch, and black bear.

Fly fishing is not only a way to learn about the lives and habits of the various fish that inhabit the watershed’s ecosystem, it is also an effective way to learn about the bugs that share the land-and-waterscape. Engaging these creatures through the science of fly fishing is a way to get a hands-on understanding of the food chain. Eventually, creatures that start out in one’s mind as nothing more than fish food become exciting beings in their own right.

On Closing Day of the ski season, we gathered around a barbeque in the parking lot with the kids and three delightful friends. We grilled asparagus and prawns and sausages while telling stories and bad jokes. The kids enjoyed the fact that they’re collecting their own stories to tell—stories from their own experiences in the watershed. Stories about long hikes, tricky stream crossings, wild trout, and things that go bump in the night.

While talking with my friends I came to realize how much it matters to me that my niece and nephew can pitch a tent, catch a fish, start a fire—that they’re starting to understand the map and compass. There’s a fundamental confidence about themselves in relationship to the world that I can see in the way they move.

One of the things Trout Unlimited asks its members to do is take a kid fishing. I whole-heartedly agree. And I’ll offer this corollary: Take a kid outside. As John Muir put it: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

FISHER-POETS

2010-04-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

Last week, I had the good fortune to meet Cameron Scott via the world wide web. Cameron is a fly fisher and a poet and he wrote to say there's more than a few of us fisher-poets out there. You can read some of Cameron's poems in the Tailgate section of The Fly Fish Journal. You'll also find poems by fisher-poets Greg Keeler and Jon Anderson. The Tailgate Section is worth a look. It's loaded with good photos and good writing.

ODYSSEUS

2010-04-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

Chinook Salmon spawn only once. Born in freshwater streams and rivers, they migrate to the sea to mature. Those who survive struggle back upstream to reproduce, then die.

ODYSSEUS

Corpses line the riverbanks.
A mass grave cloaked in tule fog,
scavenged by one stiff-legged heron
and a noisy murder of crows.

Thrashing in the riffles
below the railroad bridge,
a red male, fasting since he left the sea,
swims his journey's final reach—
hump-backed, hook-jawed—
to gravel beds where he began.

Pilgrim, wanderer, prodigal son.
Spreading seed in childhood waters:
a deathbed offering to a god unknown.

("Odysseus" was first published in Rattlesnake Review, Issue #2.)

SWUNG FLIES AND SPANISH REDS

2010-04-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

(Photo: Jennifer Simpson)

Like so many good plans this one was hatched over Spanish reds and tapas. Most Tuesday nights, I talk poetry and fly fishing with my friend, and fellow fisher-poet, Danyen Powell. Jennifer tends the bar and introduces us to combinations of wine and food that fuel our imaginations. Before the night is over, someone comes up with a good idea.

The winter steelhead run was coming to a close and that night’s good idea was to get out and swing a few runs. I’d regaled Dan and Jennifer about the pleasures of swinging streamers for steelhead and the reward that comes from a well-presented fly. “The grab,” as people call it. And the smash and grab that it sometimes is.

I wanted Dan to have the best possible experience so I touched bases with my friend Adrian Psuty. He runs Anchor Point Fly Fishing and is the person responsible for teaching me how to swing for steelhead. Adrian and his wife, Teresa, are avid fly fishers and spey casters. Between the two of them they were able to make a decent spey caster out of me, too. It’s been months since I’ve hooked myself in an ear lobe.

My big question for Adrian was how to rig Dan’s rod. He recommended a Scandi head, a slow-sinking polyleader, and eighteen inches or so of tippet attached to a relatively-light fly. Dan would be two-handed casting with my switch rod so Adrian suggested the river-left run below the Sunrise footbridge to allow ample room for backcasting—while Dan got the hang of it—then jump in the truck and move downstream to a river-right run that’s always offered productive fishing for us. The slow-sinking polyleader would be perfect for the tailout on that run.

Dan swung by my house in the early morning dark and we were in the river at first light. I couldn’t have ordered up a better scenario: fog on the water, honking geese, and a flow that allowed Dan to really get the feel of a fly swung under tension. A conversion experience was in the making.

Dan immediately liked this style of fishing—for the same reasons I do. There’s a rhythm in the casting, mending, swinging, stripping in line, stepping downstream, and casting again. Swinging requires—and allows—a relaxed attentiveness that let’s the fly-fisher enjoy the smell of nervous water, the first rays of light angling through the water column, the blue heron on the gravel bar that holds his wings open wide to dry in that cool breeze that blows east to west every morning. When Dan looked upstream and gave me a thumbs-up I wished I’d remembered my camera.

We finished swinging our first run right about the time other fisherman were showing up so we hoofed it back to the truck and drove to a downstream access point. This is one of the delightful aspects of fishing our urban river. Driving across town in wet waders. And I always enjoy leap-frogging the drift boat that floated right on top of the run I was fishing upstream.

Backcasting on the next run was tricky so I coached Dan through the C spey so he could move his anchor point upstream, then forward cast right-handed over his left shoulder—cack-handed. He picked it up almost immediately and a learning theory took form in my mind. Dan logged hours in a martial arts dojo while he was growing up and there’s a way of learning a dojo teaches. Students watch their instructor demonstrate a movement and then they try to imitate it. Dan had been picking up the basics of the C spey and forming a D-loop during our first run—just by watching me out of the corner of his eye.

All of which led to Dan casting well, mending well, and swinging well as we approached the sweet spot of the run. Since I was fishing with a heavier sink tip and fly than he was, I fished the deeper, upper section of the run and warned Dan not to set the hook when a steelhead grabs. “You need to be patient,” I was jabbering, when a fish hit my fly, turned, and ran. Dan and I both hooted in surprise. Then I raised my rod too soon—proving the point I had just been making. My steelhead was gone.

Dan waded out into the run to swing the tailout. I climbed up on the riverbank to watch for the tell-tale white flash of a steelhead opening its mouth. Dan had already found his rhythm: Casting, mending, swinging, letting the fly dangle at the end of the swing, stripping in line, stepping downstream, and casting again. I couldn’t help but think about how cool it would be if Dan connected with a fish as his fly swung slow and sweet into the sweetest spot of the run.

“Hey, Shawn,” Dan said. “I have a fish on.” Dan landed that steelhead.

The next Tuesday night Jennifer listened to our story and introduced us to a new red just in from Spain and a duck-and-spinach tapa that was, perhaps, the best-tasting tapa I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. We were on the verge of another brilliant idea. “Wagner would love swinging for steelhead,” Dan said. “He likes being on the move.” The three of us fished for trout on the Little Truckee and the Truckee last summer and had one hell of a good time.

Time was running out on the winter steelhead run so I hauled out my pocket calendar while Dan consulted the electronic calendar on his iPhone. We found a couple of mornings that could work for us and Dan called Wagner from the bar. Another fine plan was hatched.

AN EXCUSE

2010-03-24T22:01:00.000-07:00

"Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers. If so, I'm glad I thought of it." Roderick L. Haig-Brown.

FISH THREE WAYS

2010-03-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I ate lunch in a little village on the shores of Sun Moon Lake on the island of Taiwan. There were four of us dining and, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't understand the waiter's recommendation. "Fish three ways," he kept repeating in broken English. "But there are four of us," I kept responding. "You will like," he said and walked away.

Fish were caught fresh in the lake each day and awaited their demise in large, glass tanks the patrons were invited to inspect. The waiter selected a fish he thought was the right size to feed the four of us and brought it to our table "three ways." "Three ways" meant our fish was prepared three ways: deep-fried, stir-fried, and broiled. The meal was delicious. And the phrase stuck with me.

It came to mind when I was fishing for steelhead on Friday morning. There were three of us on the same run on the river and we were each fishing a different way. One fellow was bouncing an egg pattern off the bottom. The other was bouncing an egg-sucking leech off the bottom then letting it swing. I was swinging a Pimp, a buggery-pattern Jason Hartwick turned me onto during last winter's run. We were fishing three ways.

As the fog lifted and the rain started coming down I had another fish three ways experience. First, a bright buck rose out of the water nearly beside me. He seemed to walk across the water on his tail. His gills and cheeks burned red as he made his way upstream toward the spawning beds. Minutes later, I spotted a steelhead swimming downstream, heading back toward the salt. Its purple back porpoised through the riffles. And then I had a fish on.

It was a solid grab that made my heart jump. I let the fish take line. A leap and a twist revealed it was a youngster and when I brought it to hand I was happy to see the adipose fin of a wild fish.

Within minutes I'd seen a fish making its way upstream to spawn, another heading downstream after spawning, and, finally, I held the next generation in my hands. I released him, hoping I'd done no harm and, when the time was right, he would make his way to the sea. And come back again.

GRIZZLY SCENE BELOW THE HATCHERY

2010-02-13T08:37:00.000-08:00

My friend calls the scene below the Nimbus Hatchery "trout fishing in America." I fished there for the first time this past week. From the bluff, where this picture was taken, scores of steelhead trout can be sighted over the course of a day: travel-scarred fish holding in gravel depressions; hens flashing their silver sides when building redds; larger bucks chasing smaller bucks away from the hens and the redds they want to claim as their own. The entire spawning drama can be observed.

This is the end of their journey from the salt-water ocean to the brackish tidal marsh to the fresh-water river of their origin. For these steelhead, and the salmon who were here just weeks before them, the journey ends at the base of a dam. I worry for these fish.

Denied access to more than 125 miles of upstream spawning habitat by the dam, they depend on the 25 miles of river access left to them and a multi-million dollar hatchery for their survival. Their fate also hangs on how much water we choose to release into the river from the dam, and when it is released. Changes in flow can leave their redds high and dry or blow them out. Basically, they depend upon the kindness of strangers.

An interpretive sign on the bluff above the river shows an artist's rendering of what the river would have looked like not just before the dam, but before hydraulic mining and urban pollution, before the Gold Rush. In the painting, a black bears ambles down to the riverbank to feast on the migratory fish. Like you, I've seen photographs and video of grizzly bears feasting on salmon and sea-run trout in wild places like Alaska.

As I try to imagine bears on the banks of the Lower American, I realize the scene below me is a human variation on a theme. Like bears, the fisherman congregate at a slot the fish must squeeze through in order to get to either the river's last gravel beds or the hatchery. A narrows.

I watch as a hearty steelhead pulses through the narrows, through a gauntlet of lures and flies chucked and cast from the river bank, and disappears into the darkness of the deeper water.

Then a salmon, mottled and dark, rises up from those depths. He fins into the shallows. I watch as he noses into the current and swims behind an angler standing no more than shin-deep in the river. The spawned-out fish rolls onto his side and dies. His pectoral fin seems to reach up into the air in a final gesture of surrender.

MAKING MEMORIES ON THE LOWER YUBA

2010-01-27T12:10:00.000-08:00

(Photo: Trent Pittard)

Sometimes the most memorable moments of a fishing trip aren't about catching a fish. The other day I sent a text message to my brother, Trent, telling him I was heading to the Lower Yuba to chase steelhead. He sent me a cell phone pic to remind me of our last trip there together.

Look closely and you can see a person sitting on the roof of the Jeep he drowned below the Highway 20 bridge. Trent and I called in a rescue. What a fiasco.

AMERICAN RIVER SLUMP

2010-01-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

I met my friend Adrian at 6 am and we started fishing at first light. Adrian put an end to his American River slump by landing a wild fish. His first of the new year. My slump, unfortunately, remains unbroken. The last solid grab I experienced was just before Thanksgiving. It is not for lack of trying.

In so many ways, swinging for steelhead is like writing poems. When I don't connect with a steelhead after a few weeks of trying I start to wonder if I'll ever catch another one of those wild beauties. The same kind of feeling settles on my heart, and in my gut, when I haven't written a poem to completion for a while. Well, it was a good run, I tell myself. Be grateful for the poems you got. Treasure them. Write prose. Fish with an indicator.

The fact is I'll wake early tomorrow and try again. I'll try to catch a wild steelhead on a swung fly, steal some fire from the gods with my pen. These are things I do. Just do. No new year's resolutions are required.

GIVING THANKS ON THE LOWER SALT

2009-12-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

I set my brother up with a lightweight fly-fishing outfit for his birthday about a year ago. He loves to fish. We said we'd celebrate on a river when he was finished with the rehabilitation program at a methadone clinic. And we did. With our father, we celebrated his freedom from heroin, and methadone, the day before our Thanksgiving feast this year. The river was the Lower Salt, a tailwater trout fishery in the Sonoran Desert just thirty minutes from my brother's home. There are saguaro cactus on the rugged ridgelines and palo verde trees along the river's banks.

Trent is fourteen years younger than me. We've always been close in a big-brother/little-brother kind of way but over the past several years he's become a best friend and my screenwriting partner. Our writing partnership got started when he was in a detox clinic, kicking heroin. He sounded miserable when we talked on the phone. I said, "This has the all makings of a classic movie formula: the protagonist is having the worst day of his life when an even bigger challenge confronts him." I asked, "What's the worst thing that could happen to you right now?" "Zombies," Trent said. And Junk Sick was born.

Over the next two years we learned how to write a script and wrote one. We learned how to make a Hollywood pitch and we've pitched Junk Sick more than a dozen times so far, getting, like flyfishers do, everything from looks to plucks and, occasionally, that exhilarating strike. Our script has been under consideration by an indie studio for over a year now but they've yet to give it the green light. We've come close with two other studios during this time but we still haven't landed a Deal. Last month, Junk Sick was one of 10 Finalists for the Dark Hart Screenplay Award at the 2009 Spooky Movie Film Festival.

Being flyfishers, it's in our nature to wake early and try again. And it doesn't hurt that Trent's a musician and I'm a poet: rejection is part of our daily lives.

The people I've met in the drug rehab world during this journey with Trent are always quick to remind me that "Trent is a miracle." He is among that 1% that not only survive addiction but live to thrive again. Our friend Colin, a drug rehab specialist and a screenwriter, too, stressed how important it is for an addict to find something that matters more to him than his particular drug. When you understand the nature of a drug like heroin, and the physical changes it actually makes to how a person's brain functions, you appreciate what a tall order that is.

Fortunately, Trent found that sense of purpose in screenwriting. A life-long horror film fan, he always dreamed of writing a movie himself. Right now, he is writing a new script and an article under the working-title, "Writing Myself Clean: How Horror Saved My Life."

My Thanksgiving trip, and our heroin-and-methadone-free fly-fishing celebration, became all the more poignant for me this morning. I received an e-mail from a woman I loved many years ago. She wrote to tell me that her little sister recently died an alcohol-related death. She was Trent's age. Memories of our much-younger siblings tagging along with us on dates came rushing back. So many smiles. So much laughter. My heart is broken.

RIVER PSALM

2009-11-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

Tule fog threads the red tips
of bone-gray willow stalks. Water lisps

in an eddy’s clot, cackles through the riffles.
The murmur of crows descends on a downdraft.

The sand and gravel bar below the bridge—
inscribed by braided streams—is a mosaic

of polished stones, lost feathers, the skeletons
of spawned-out salmon: a cuneiform of death and drift.

How many mornings have I stepped into this river,
felt its inexorable pull—a muted ache

unspool an old affliction that never found redress.
And how many mornings have I watched the fog

gleam radiant with the sunrise—
a luminous blizzard of refracted light:

an alchemy, a transubstantiation.

My poem appeared in Inspirit Magazine in 2005. When I took this photo, just this morning, I knew the two would go together.

A FAVORITE RIVER POEM

2009-11-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

ASK ME
by William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

This poem can be found in Even in Quiet Places (Confluence Press 1996). It's a plain-spoken collection of intimate and thoughtful poems. Stafford also had a way of saying something serious in a playful way. In a piece he called "Sayings for a Dedication Page," William Stafford wrote this about rivers.

What the river wrote we can read:
"Build on high ground."

PASSING IT ON

2009-10-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

David taught me how to fly fish for trout with dry flies on the North Fork of the American. A generous and patient teacher, he talked me through the process of stalking wild fish in clear water. I was especially grateful to David last week—not only for teaching me how to fish these streams but also for teaching me how to teach my nephew how to fish them. Let me untangle that sentence though the following story.

Last week, I took my ten-year-old nephew fishing near Kirkwood Meadows. The trip started with a hearty breakfast at the Lucky Café in Sacramento. We both ordered silver dollar pancakes and bacon—appropriately hearty fare. During the drive along Jackson Highway, Riley called out the clues for the crossword puzzle in that day’s newspaper. We spent nearly two hours trying to solve them. When we reached the trailhead, we geared up on the tailgate of our pickup. We followed the creek through a small meadow and scrambled alongside it as it plunged into a valley—where it resumed its meander through another meadow.

Catching one of these brookies would require stealth and Riley was intrigued by the idea of thinking like a predator. We crouched in the pine tress and crawled through the bunch grass to observe the wild fish from the stream banks. They were feeding voraciously. Riley and I applied all the techniques David taught me to catch and release fish after fish that day. There was a moment—when I was moving Riley into position to cast and telling him just where to drop his Cutter Caddis—that I realized I was coaching him the way David coached me. I was using the same words.

I called David the next day to thank him for teaching me, and now Riley, how to fish that creek. He demurred and asked if I’d teach him how to swing for steelhead.

FISHING WITH MY CHARACTERS

2009-10-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

Writers talk about going to coffee with their characters; I go fishing with mine. Most mornings I’m in the water at first light, swinging a wet fly and listening to the river and the city start their days. Sometimes, my stainless steel coffee mug is hot against my chest inside my waders’ bib. The smell of Coffee Works Italian Roast mixes with the cool air rising off the water.

I’m getting to know the American River, step by step. Several dozen times each morning I lift my spey rod, sweep the tip out and across the river, lift again and feel the D-loop form behind me—loading the rod—then make my forward cast. When all goes well I toss a mend in the line and let the fly swing across the current. At the end of the swing I let the fly dangle for as many seconds as my patience allows. Then I strip in line and take two steps downstream.

Lift, sweep, load, cast, mend.

While I’m getting to know the American I’m also getting to know the characters in Marian’s Mandala, the screenplay I’m currently writing. I bring them to the river with me—sometimes in my conscious mind, always in my subconscious.

Lift, sweep, load, cast, mend.

I’ve met new characters on the river, too. I knew Marian well—from the start. She and her adult son are the script’s co-leads. Their relationship with Tom, her husband and his father, is essential to understanding their relationship with each other. The problem was that I didn’t know Tom. We hadn’t been fishing together. We’d never sat down over a cup of coffee. I tried to write around him for almost a year but I was getting nowhere. I reached a point where I thought about giving up on the script completely.

Lift, sweep, load, cast, mend.

And then Tom appeared, right there on the river with me, the details and the meaning of his life unfolding with each step we took together downstream. Since meeting Tom, I’ve fished the last hours of daylight several times. He’s the kind of character you want to have a beer with—maybe even a wee dram of whiskey.

A PALM-OF-THE-HAND STORY

2009-09-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

A twenty-fish day on the Trinity; swinging wet flies. This would be an epic fish tale if it weren't for the fact the average length of those twenty fish was probably six inches. Palm-of-the-hand fish, I thought to myself, admiring the parr marks on the next generation of steelhead. Maybe, a palm-of-the-hand story.

A palm-of-the-hand story is a literary form developed by the Japanese novelist, and Nobel Prize winner, Yasunari Kawabata. Throughout his life, Kawabata wrote short short stories that many consider the novelist's equivalent of the haiku: rich in content yet extremely compressed. Kawabata said of his stories: "Many writers, in their youth, write poetry: I, instead of writing poetry, wrote the palm-of-the-hand stories."

My Trinity River fishing story began in Roseville at a steelhead clinic taught by John Fachetti; with the gracious gift of a steelhead fly, tied by John himself; and a tip to swing it through the run behind the Del Loma RV Park. It was at the Del Loma that I met Patrick and Michelle, the park's owners, and learned more about the fly John gave me. Patrick told me that more than one generation of John Fachettis have fished the Trinity and the fly the youngest Fachetti gave me is a local favorite. John actually learned to tie the fly at the Del Loma when he was boy, from an older gentleman who nurtured his interest.

The fly was effective. It worked on the run behind the Del Loma, and in every run I swung the day my wife and I floated the river with Patrick. While other fisherman pulled twenty inch salmon out of the deep holes using crawdads and sardines for bait, I plucked little fish from the seams, one after another. My heart jumped during the first five or ten grabs and, for a long while, at least, I enjoyed the opportunities to observe the wild fish closely.

I'd come armed for an adult Trinity River steelhead, though, with my seven weight, 13'9" spey rod. As such, I didn't know there was a fish on half the time. To prevent sending one of the little guys on the single-spey ride of his young life, I lifted my rod tip carefully before initiating each new cast to check for a fish on the line.

And so my days went. Each palm-of-the-hand fish an exercise in both patience and persistence. They were preparing me, I told myself, for larger fish to come. The way Kawabata's palm-of-the-hand stories prepared him to write his great novels.

Eventually, a great fish did take that fly. But not on the Trinity. I connected with a sea-bright steelhead my first morning back in Sacramento. At first light, I swung through a run on the American that lower flows had made accessible. The silver fish smashed John's fly and ran and jumped and dove and jumped again, and again. Then he was off the line and gone.

Part of me wished I'd landed him. Okay, most of me. But after bringing so many little fish to hand the previous days, I have a new appreciation for the cliche: "the one that got away." I'm still thinking about that fish today.

CROP-CHECKING THE AMERICAN II

2009-09-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Everyone, it seemed, was getting ready for the Labor Day Weekend. My wife was shopping for exterior house paint. I was trying to beat a deadline for a book of poems I'm reviewing. Then Adrian called. "Up for a crack of dawn float tomorrow morning? Jason and I want to check out the Arden rapids at these lower flows." The book review would have to wait. "Count me in," I said.

Flows were down to 2,300 cfs and the guys were getting ready to teach a steelhead clinic. Time for some crop-checking, as the farmers in my family call it (you can read more about this venerable tradition in an earlier post). We put in at Rossmoor at first light and took out at Gristmill a few hours later. Along the way we noted good swinging water, changes in the riverscape, and realized we weren't the only people out on the river getting ready for the weekend.

Sheriff's rescue was on the water, running up- and downstream at will in their high-powered inflatables. One crew was kind enough to slow down as they passed and point to a place they'd moved fish. Our drift boat moved a pod of four salmon. Jason spotted them while standing in the bow. They shot off at a right angle and we all scrambled to get a look at them.

Our urban river always offers something unpredictable. When Adrian and I floated the river a week or so ago we saw a naked hiker, strutting along the riverbank, t-shirt wrapped around his head. This week we saw a man, fully-clothed, walk into the river until he was fully submerged. As we got closer he resurfaced, and we saw he was carrying a net in one hand.

We floated past half-a-dozen homeless people setting up lawn chairs for a good view of the infamous Mud Island. Front row seats for the inevitable collegiate mud wrestling festival that breaks out during holiday weekends. Despite the ban on alcohol.

Days later, I'm still thinking about the middle-aged woman we saw standing on the riverbank, looking lost and lonely. She watched us drift by, not bothering to shield her eyes from the intensifying sun. Hands hanging at her sides, she just watched. There was poetry in that moment. Which reminds me, I better get back to that book review. I want to go fishing tomorrow.

FIRST FISH

2009-08-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

We chose an olive E/C caddis, our go-to fly, a fly that drew at least a dozen hard strikes from wild rainbows during our trip to the Ishi Wilderness a couple of weeks ago. On that trip, my niece Kennedy was really getting the feel for casting and her dead-drift presentation was nearly perfect. The sudden strikes startled her, though, or made her laugh so much she either didn’t think to set the hook or she snatched the fly away from the fish’s eager mouth—much like her uncle does.

On this trip, we were fishing the edge of a Desolation Wilderness lake we’d backpacked to and we could clearly see the fingerlings schooling around sunken logs and sedges. We spotted an occasional three-inch lunker so we decided to cast a fly. “We’re going to need a really small hook,” Kennedy said, leaning in to study the open fly box with me. That's the main reason we chose the olive caddis. It was simply the smallest fly we brought along.

When her younger brother, Riley, caught his first fish on a dry fly he launched the little creature through the air and onto the granite slab behind him. Kennedy was going to be more cautious when she had a fish on, she said, and she was. Despite being photographed while suspended in midair, the little fish was returned safely to the water. Actually, the fish in the photograph was the second fish she had on the hook. The first fish on was eaten right before her eyes by a bigger fish: a true National Geographic moment.

Kennedy was thrilled to catch her first fish and considered the fingerling an excellent starter fish. I was thrilled by everything associated with the moment: the five mile, uphill hike she handled like a trooper; her ability to pitch her own tent and help me and her Auntie Kathy establish a comfortable camp; and her willingness to pump water and tend to other camp chores. But I was especially thrilled by her genuine excitement over the four weight outfit I put together for her before the trip.

Kennedy and I consulted several times during what she believed was a hypothetical selection process. We decided a four weight rod around eight feet in length would be just right for the kind of streams we fish on our backpacking trips. My friend Larry had recently loaned me his copy of Lefty Kreh’s Presenting the Fly so I was under his influence and chose a rod Lefty designed. Jason Hartwick helped me match the right line to the rod and loaded it onto a reel that had been waiting in the fishing closet at home for some action. “Is this a surprise?” he asked, eyes smiling, when I told him the rod was for my niece.

After her first fish, we walked along the lake watching for signs of active feeding. Ducks flushed and grumbled. The afternoon turned into evening. The wind picked up and we tied on a slightly bigger fly, a yellow humpy, hoping to draw out a bigger fish. We also wanted a chance at seeing the fly on the darkening water.

Kennedy’s second fish of the day and her life was bigger, that’s a fact, but it was little more than bait itself. Two fish on a new fly rod was more than enough for us to declare victory, though, and I suggested we head back to camp and help with supper. I smiled when she asked for one more cast, then one more, and another.

Walking toward camp in the dark, Kennedy twitched and wiggled her new rod, getting to known its personality. “Uncle Shawn,” she said, “I think this is going to be my lucky fly rod.”

WILD STEELHEAD

2009-08-15T22:56:00.001-07:00

Anchor Point Fly Fishing's Adrian Psuty swinging home waters.

A wild steelhead caught and released right here in river city (Photo by Adrian Psuty).

TAKE MY BOY FISHING

2009-08-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

Bill Baird was an Outdoorsman. Born in Pine Valley, Oregon, in 1913, he began fishing and hunting to help feed his rural family when he was still a boy. This way of life suited him and he could tell story after story about the deer, the pheasants, the trout, and the salmon that sustained and nourished him both physically and metaphysically.

During his last years in the field with us, Bill tried to get into the spirit of catch-and-release. Kill-and-eat remained his mantra, but he indulged our younger-generation ethics graciously. He knew, far better than us, I'm sure, that times had changed. Bill died at 93 and he is the reason I started to fly fish.

One time when Bill was down from Idaho to visit his son, Larry, he pulled me aside to express a concern. "I'm worried about my boy. He's not going fishing nearly enough." Larry is my friend. He was also my professor and a professional colleague. Larry had asked me if I was interested in fly fishing many times over the years but I wasn't quite ready for the quiet sport.

Then there I was in Larry's kitchen with Bill. "Take my boy fishing," he said. "He needs it." How could I refuse?

Ten years later, Larry and I are experiencing a particularly, even by our standards, unproductive day of fishing on the Lower Yuba. Flows are high and it's hard to tell where a fish might lie, especially a feeding fish. I suggest we rerig to fast-sinking polyleaders and strip streamers, and Larry agrees. Rerigging also offers us the chance to pull a couple of river-cold Black Butte Porters out of our stash spot. We sit down on the cobbled bank.

A pair of nesting Osprey call out. The sky goes from clouds to sun then back to clouds. There's a light sprinkle of rain. And the sound a river makes. You know the sound.

Larry chooses a "pimp" from his streamer box, a fly Jason Hartwick turned us on to earlier this year. We try to come up with a tagline for an ad. Lines like, "my pimp swings for steelhead," and other boyish things. The beer goes down smoothly.

Thanks, Bill, for bringing me to this moment on a river with your boy.

ANY LUCK?

2009-08-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

After getting shut-out yet again on the Lower Yuba, I admire the moonrise with fisher-lawyer David Abelson. Dave asks me a question taken straight from my poem, Asked A Philosophical Question While Fishing Off Paradise Beach:

"Any luck?"

I answer with the poem's last lines:

"How to answer? In a world of achievement, I have no fish."

REMEMBERING ISHI ON MILL CREEK

2009-08-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

There’s nothing quite so fun as fishing with kids. Especially, I’ll assert, my niece and nephew. Kennedy and Riley are thirteen and ten years old, respectively, and a day on a river with them is a mixture of earnest dry-fly presentations into tight shadows under bay trees, and joyous Huck Finn explorations. Invariably, after proving his prowess by landing a fish, Riley lures his Auntie Kathy away on a river scramble. Last weekend, the rugged and storied country in and along Mill Creek, in the Ishi Wilderness, nurtured our collective spirit of adventure. But first, let me try to discourage you from exploring this backcountry treasure that I’d really rather keep to myself.

Rattlesnakes. Twenty-five miles of dirt roads that climb up and down river canyon walls. Black bears. No cell-phone reception. Mountain lions. Not a single drive-through espresso stand after you leave Chico. More rattlesnakes. A vile-smelling pit toilet at a primitive campground with no potable water. Still with me? Fine. Then I’ll mention Mill Creek still supports salmon and steelhead runs, and a hearty resident rainbow trout population. These are wild, native fish in wild country that took a dry fly aggressively. E/C Caddis, Elk Hair Caddis, and the Yellow Humpy all drew strikes.

Mill Creek drains snowmelt from Mt. Lassen to the Sacramento River and on to the Pacific Ocean. Volcanic terrain, the canyons are deep V cuts. At some points it’s over a thousand feet from rim to riverbed. For at least four thousand years it was home to the people known as the Yahi, a sub-tribe of the Yana. They were hill people who followed seasonal routines and rituals that depended on gathering acorns to make a flour and a soup, and the annual return of the salmon. These great fish were taken with two-pronged, wooden harpoons and nets, then dried, smoked and stored in woven baskets to sustain the Yahi through the long, harsh winter. The Forty-niners actually called the Yahi the Mill Creeks, and the two cultures collided with disastrous consequences—for the Yahi.

But Mill Creek itself still teems with life. The salmon still come in on the high water of the spring runoff then hold in the creek’s deep pools throughout the summer. On our next summer visit, we’re bringing swim goggles. If we make it back to Mill Creek this fall, we may get to see the salmon spawn—the end of their lifecycle and the beginning of the next generation.

Mill Creek runs through the federally-designated Ishi Wilderness, named for the last surviving Yahi, a man many of us learned about as kids in school: “the last wild Indian.” You may recall that Ishi walked out of that wilderness in 1911 and, fortunately, into the care of University of California anthropologists and linguists. His name literally means “man” in his native language. A Yahi’s real name is sacred and secret.

Even when their population was at its greatest number, the Yahi people traveled no father north than Mt. Lassen, which they did each summer, a distance of four "sleeps" as Ishi described it. They favored the creek canyons of the hill country and avoided the lowlands along the Sacramento River. When Ishi walked out of the wilderness, he walked, literally, out of the Stone Age and into the Industrial Age. Starving, near death, painfully lonely, he walked out of his known canyon world and into an unknown world as a last resort.

I brought Theodora Kroeber’s book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (University of California Press, 1961), along with us on our trip. As I mentioned in a previous post here at These Rivers I’ve always been fascinated with survival stories. Ishi’s is one of the most intriguing and intense survival stories I’ve ever read.

Take a look at the picture of Riley again, smiling and relaxed at the edge of that deep pool. And remember Riley is ten years old. At ten years old, Ishi and a mere handful of surviving Yahi entered a thirty-five-year period they called The Long Concealment. They were, Kroeber wrote, “a macrocosmic nation victimized by the common killers: invasion, war, famine, and intolerance.” The massacre at Kingsley Cave—where thirty-three Yahi men, woman and children were murdered and scalped—and the kidnapping of several young Yahi led the vigilantes to believe they’d “wiped out the Indians.”

In fact, the few surviving Yahi became elusive to the point of invisibility. They jumped from rock to rock so they would leave no footprints behind, traveled at night in the creeks, or crawled on all fours under chaparral thickets a deer would find impossible to negotiate. They retreated into the harshest reaches of Deer Creek and Mill Creek canyons, ultimately establishing a completely camouflaged village on a cliff-shelf that was once a grizzly bear’s den. At this point only four Yahi remained in existence: Ishi, his mother, a sister, and an old man.

Their village was stumbled upon by surveyors in 1908, flushing its inhabitants like wild game. They ransacked the village, showing Ishi’s mother, who was dying and unable to flee, faint to no concern. Ishi returned to his mother when the intruders left but she died soon after. He never saw the old man or his sister again. Ishi was alone in the wilderness for three more years.

Before I travel into remote country like this, I inspect my pickup’s spare tire and make sure my jack’s on board. I bring an extra battery and ten gallons of water. I toss in all the odd-flavored Cliff Bars I’ve never quite felt like eating. If I had to, I know I could put on my rucksack and simply walk out over the course of a day or two. The point is, though, I feel the weight of the solitude in places like this as soon as I start planning my trip. I can’t begin to imagine the psychic weight Ishi felt during his three years of isolation.

There’s a photograph in Kroeber’s book that shows Ishi swimming in Deer Creek. He’s returned home with a team of anthropologists to demonstrate his lost way of life for them. His smile looks genuine and expresses a delight in the body. He is free, perhaps, for the first time in his life in his own country. Free to swim under the midday sun like Kennedy, Riley, Kathy, and me.

WILD OATS

2009-07-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

Fisher-poet Danyen Powell waist deep in wild oats, laughing at the obvious metaphor.

THE RIVER'S DARK MEMORY

2009-07-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

Once, I read a story about a Chinese poet who rode through the hills and valleys all day on his little pony, writing lines of verse. He carried two pouches with him. One was filled with blank strips of paper on which he would write about the things he encountered and imagined. After he wrote a line or phrase on one of the paper strips, he would put it into the second, empty pouch. In the evening, he would empty the second pouch and arrange and rearrange its strips of paper into a poem. Over a glass of red wine, I like to think.

I thought about this distant poet and his method when I encountered a deer’s foreleg along the Truckee River. Someone hung it on a pine trunk. On this rare occasion, my pocket-sized notebook wasn’t with me. It was back in the truck. These are new times, though, and new technologies are available to the plein air poet. My cell phone’s text messaging function enabled me to write a line, and send it to my own e-mail address.

Severed deer’s leg hung eye-high on a pine trunk.

The game was on.

As always, I watched for insects during my approach to the river. I kicked the meadow grass and shook the bottlebrush aiming to “match the hatch.” Grasshoppers everywhere.

Grasshoppers jump one step ahead on the meadow’s edge.

The day was hot. I tossed my thermometer into the water and soaked my hat. The sky was Sierra blue and vast.

One small cloud and the sky no longer empty.

Sixty-four degrees. Trout thrive in water between fifty-eight and sixty-four degrees. The oxygen content is just right in that temperature range. When the temperature is higher or lower they seek out lies with higher concentrations of the oxygen they need to breathe. And when the sun is high and bright the trout simply want shade like the rest of us.

Brown trout slumbers in alder shade.

Over the course of half and hour, the brown trout refused the dry fly, nymph, and streamer I did my best to present to him. I text-messaged the line about the alder shade to myself while standing waist deep in the calm spot behind a big boulder, after I eased my cell phone out of my shirt pocket—the highest dry place on my body. Then the rubber hatch was on. A dozen kids floated by on inner tubes and makeshift rafts.

A young girl giggles through the rapids.

I was as careful and deliberate as I could be when I used my cell phone in the river. I’d dunked and destroyed my digital point-and-shoot camera the week before, on home waters. As can happen when the flows are high, I found myself pressed into much deeper water than I’d intended to wade. My fanny pack was completely submerged and I learned its old seams weren’t waterproof anymore. Now my cell phone doubled not only as a Moleskine notebook, but also as a camera. I used it to snap the (low-quality, I admit) image of the deer’s leg.

Bright trout struggles in Osprey’s talons.

While I was texting myself, an Osprey snatched a Rainbow trout from the riffles, just like that, from the shallow zone at the downstream edge of a gravel bar. The bird carried the fish up and up, onto a tree branch. The trout writhed high above the river, over an abandoned ice pond’s rock walls. An ice pond that was handbuilt by Chinese laborers one hundred forty years ago.

The ice from the pond was used to preserve the flesh of the river’s wild Lahontan Cutthroat trout. They were packed on this ice and shipped on trains to supper plates as far away as Chicago. Perhaps millions of these much-desired "cutts," which ran about the size of a salmon, were harvested during their spawning runs. These spawning runs were very effectively put to an end in the 1930s, with the construction of Derby Dam and its associated water management practices. Imagine, humans put an end to more than 4,000 years of a wild trout species's spawning run.

The river's dark memory pulls at stones beneath my feet.

Truckee’s Chinatown was the second largest in the West when workers built the Central Pacific railroad over Donner Pass, across the Sierra. Standing in the river, I thought about the transience of the Donner Party, the Chinese laborers, and finally the near-mythical Lahontan Cutthroat—all here on the Truckee River in their times.

Later that night, while drinking a glass of red wine, I thought about the Chinese poet and began assembling the day’s lines into a poem.

THE LOST MEMORY OF MY WILDNESS

2009-07-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

This week, I encountered wildness in two unique and diverse ways. First, I connected with a steelhead on the American, a rare event during the summer season. With the flows high and the river blown-out, my friend Larry and I went out to practice casting in the evening. Larry introduced me to fly fishing years ago but that’s another story.

We went to a favorite spot on the river, a place that gave us room to cast and didn’t present a wading risk. A side channel that usually runs low was ripping. Where it rejoined the main channel a nice bucket formed in the slower moving, oxygenated water. If a steelhead was in the river, I thought to myself, it would be right there.

In case one was, I tied on my go-to low-visibility streamer and swung it into the lie. Most of me thought there were no fish around, so when line spooled off my reel and headed downstream it took me a moment to realize a fish was on. Through the connection of wet fly, fly line, and fly rod, I felt that predator take his prey and turn back into the current. I applied pressure and he reacted. After a leap, a flash, and an exquisite barrel roll this silver fish was gone. To experience such wildness is why I fish for steelhead. And that such wildness exists in an urban river helps me begin to understand one of Thoreau’s famous quotes.

“In Wildness,” Thoreau wrote, “is the preservation of the world.” In an essay of the same name, Jack Turner writes that there is a “tension between wilderness as property and wildness as quality.” Turner, a philosopher turned climbing guide and writer, observes that fewer and fewer humans “have a concept of wild nature based on personal experience.” For this and other reasons “most of us simply don’t know what Thoreau meant.” Despite my own years in the wilderness, you can count me among them. For me, Thoreau’s quote is less a maxim, a saying with some proven truth, than it is a koan, a Zen riddle to develop one’s intuition. While puzzling over Thoreau’s koan, I experienced my second encounter with wildness.

That came in the form of live theater. My wife and I saw Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo performed at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. This stage play explored Thoreau’s koan. In the first of two acts, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class, married couple share a lazy Sunday. Despite being together in the same elegant apartment, Ann and Peter are each isolated in their individual spheres. Ann enters the living room from the kitchen and asks her husband if they can talk.

She cautiously questions whether the life they’ve chosen, “a smooth voyage on a safe ship,” was the right one. They’ve tamed their lives, and those of the children, the cats, and the caged birds we never see but assume are in their own safe places. She asks Peter if it he thinks it’s possible to make contact with their animal selves. She wonders if a place to make contact with that wildness is in sex, asking why they can’t make love like wild animals. Peter becomes uncomfortable because he fears the primitive wildness he knows is in him, and confesses that he’d lost control over it once when he was in college. That event still causes him to live cautiously, with restraint.

To escape the discomfort caused by the conversation, Peter essentially flees the apartment and, in the play’s second act, encounters a dangerous wildness in the form of Jerry, a self-described “permanent transient.” The park where they meet could as well be a wilderness. Albee, the playwright, doesn’t let Peter escape this difficult conversation or avoid its tragic outcome. Civilization’s thin veil is torn for him. He is no longer in control of things and he must act. Whether or not he acts to save himself from a life of quiet desperation, back in the apartment, is left unanswered.

Before I go, I want to explain that the title to this blog post is a line from “The Silver Fish,” a poem I once wrote. It appeared in Runes, an especially-well-conceived literary journal. The poem’s inspiration began with a Chinook salmon I caught near the Farallons, twenty-five miles off the Pacific Coast. A fish I brought home and grilled “on the fire I built in my backyard.” I went on to write, “His taste was the lost memory of my wildness.”

Whenever I bring a steelhead to hand its wildness stirs my genetic memory. Wildness is a quality you can feel. And sometimes, I still feel that wildness in myself.

ON WADING AND DEEP SURVIVAL

2009-07-08T12:25:00.001-07:00

This is a photograph of my father on his 74th birthday, smiling and laughing after a dunking in the fifty-degree tailwater at Lees Ferry. Minutes before I snapped this pic Dad was floating calmly downstream, feet first, waders filling with water, taking care not lose track of the fly rod his son gave him while using his arms like oars to steer himself in the style of a seasoned driftboat guide. I moved into position below him and gave him a quick assist into shallower water and to his feet. As is always the case when the unexpected happens, his eyes sparkled with delight as he extolled the virtues of an invigorating swim.

Clearly, I inherited what a friend once called “the sick gene” from my dad. Richard diagnosed me with this genotype during a midnight march out of the Tuolumne Meadows backcountry. We’d spent a spectacularly long day with our wives on the Matthes Crest Traverse and staggered our way toward the trailhead in the dark with two headlamps between us. “The worse things get,” Richard said to me, “the happier you get.” Actually, I was hungry-loopy going on dehydrated-delirious rather than happy but it had the same effect a good attitude has on getting one through a rough spot.

My dad’s good attitude came to mind again the other day when I was reading Laurence Gonzales’s Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. I’ve been fascinated by survival stories since I was a boy and read Slavomir Rawicz’s epic, The Long Walk. The tales in Gonzales’s outstanding book affirm the attributes that carried Rawicz, and six other escaped prisoners, thousands of miles on foot from a Siberian Gulag to British India: Stay calm, be decisive, and don’t give up.

My early interest in survival stories eventually led me southern Utah, way back in the eighties, and into the care of an outdoor survival school. Upon completing the demanding, 30-day program I was invited to sign on as an apprentice instructor. I jumped at the chance and stayed in the field for another 75 days. During that extended summer, I experienced everything from flash floods under lightning skies to the biting deer flies that made the most pious students among us question Intelligent Design. Along the way, I learned first hand that the key to survival is to stay calm, be decisive, and don’t give up.

I’d like to add one thing to Gonzales’s maxim for survival, something essential that I learned from observing my father. Laugh.

CROP-CHECKING THE AMERICAN

2009-07-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

My friend June and I enjoyed the last day of her namesake month skating caddis flies from dusk until dark. We knew right where to be because I’d run into Jeff Putnam on the river, earlier in the day. He said the shad were taking caddis off the surface the night before—upstream a ways. Jeff spends about as much time as anyone on the American River—where he guides and teaches all aspects of fly fishing—so I knew the intelligence was legit. He was kind enough to point out the very fly in my fly box that the fish were taking.

Naturally, that fly was sold out at the fly shop when I swung by for more, but while I was there I got word that the flows might be increased that night by as much as 1,500 cubic feet per second. About forty percent. Now was the time to get out on the river. When I relayed this information to June she borrowed a line from California surf-culture: “we gotta do a go-out.”

Once again we marveled that we were standing in a river, watching a sunset while the swallows fed on a caddis hatch, mere minutes from our urban homes. After it was too dark to fish, we lingered in the park drinking Black Butte Porter. I enjoyed another pull on the stub of a cigar that’s traveled in my fishing vest since January. We wondered what the river would look like the next day if the releases were made. I told June I’d do some crop-checking and let her know.

Crop-checking is a venerable tradition practiced by the farmers in my family—back in North Dakota. On any given day someone might get a notion to check on the soybeans in a neighbor’s field. Or wonder if the wheat is ripening on the farms closer to the Red River. Everyone not pinned down at the moment will cram into a pickup and hit the section road, stirring up dust while surveying the land. That’s what I did this morning.

My route took me over the H Street Bridge for a look upstream, up Fair Oaks Boulevard to the Watt Avenue Bridge for a look downstream, and onto highway 50 to the Howe Avenue Bridge for another look upstream. The circuit ended back where it started at the H Street Bridge for the downstream angle along the golf course. From there, I could check my go-to landmark, Duckshit Island.

You won’t find that name on a map but I haven’t been able to call it anything else since the time I half-swam, half-crawled out of the current and onto its sand and gravel safety. That was the first time I flooded my waders. Actually, Canada Geese did the dirty work but I like the sound of duckshit. It resonates on my poet’s ear.

I decided I wanted a longer look at the river than passing over it at thirty miles per hour allowed so I parked my truck and walked out on the bridge. The river was running high and fast. I watched the water, which this ecosystem will so desperately need during the coming fall and winter to support spawning salmon and steelhead, flow copiously over Duckshit Island. I muttered to myself: All that water flowing south on the first day of July.

My years working in environmental planning and policy taught me that any conversation about allocating water—or using any natural resource—is inherently complex. Driving home, I wondered why it is, though, that we still seem so unaware of how interconnected we all are in this great web of life. Then I pulled into my driveway, where I was confronted with my own role in taking a precious resource away from the lives that depend upon it. Lush lawns as far as my eye could see.

ANY RIVER

2009-06-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

In Self-Interviews, James Dickey wrote, “I think a river is the most beautiful thing in nature. Any river.”

The past week took me to several rivers, streams, and creeks—in the company of new and old friends. It was just what I needed after a couple of whirlwind weekends. The first weekend was spent reading a selection of my poems in Santa Rosa at the Londonberry Salon. What a delight. The next was spent pitching Junk Sick, the script I co-wrote with my brother, Trent, at an event called PitchFest! down south in Burbank. It was intense. Months before the Londonberry Salon reading and PitchFest!, I signed up for a trout clinic at Ralph and Lisa Cutter’s California School of Flyfishing. The timing couldn’t have been better. I needed some river-time.

A two-day program, mornings were spent studying hydrology and entomology in a classroom setting. Ralph understands rivers like no one I’ve met, including my Fluvial Processes professor back at Arizona State—who was top shelf. Ralph’s knowledge is unique in that it includes countless hours underwater, wearing a mask and snorkel, crawling along riverbeds like an ephemerella tibialis.

The afternoons were spent on the Truckee River practicing wet- and dry-fly presentations and line-management techniques. The Truckee drains Sierra snowmelt in the Lake Tahoe area and flows north, then east, for 140 miles—into Nevada’s Great Basin. We spent our time downstream from the Town of Truckee in a section of the river that is a designated Wild Trout Stream. Only barbless flies are allowed and catch-and-release is the ethic. Ralph taught us a technique for fishing a streamer that allowed us to swim it both downstream and across the stream. Using a goblin—sans hook for demo purposes—one of the most adept students, Steffan, provoked a wild rainbow. The big fish crushed the streamer and made instant believers of us all. I’m eager to see how a steelhead will respond to this presentation.

Ralph and Lisa have a way of simplifying the complex, and making sure you know what really matters. For example, Ralph explained the role water temperature plays in fish behavior. Understanding why and how trout react to changes in temperature helps the fisher find the best lies on any given day. Ralph suggested we all buy a thermometer before we spend $700 on a fancy new fly rod—as it will do more to help us catch fish. I’ll offer a corollary of my own. Take a class with the Cutters before you buy that rod. Or the thermometer.

Those two days on the Truckee would have been more than enough for me to declare the entire week a success. Fortune, however, continued to smile on me. My buddy David and his wife Carol were in the midst of their annual two-week summer vacation in a rustic cottage near the Sierra Buttes. They invited me to swing by on my way home. If you love rivers, the route from Truckee to Sacramento lies not on the Interstate. Instead, it passes through the alpine meadows around Sierraville, up and over Yuba Pass, and down along the North Yuba River through Sierra City and on to Downieville. David promised to take me to a couple of his favorite, and secret, headwater spring-creeks and introduce me to the redband trout. Part of me thought I should get back home and back to work, follow up on the pitches I’d made just days before in Burbank. But I couldn’t resist David and Carol’s offer. As my wife will attest, I’m not any good at resisting temptation. This was actually a done-deal from the get-go.

The landscape was spectacular, with abundant springs, wildflower meadows, and a golden-colored Black Bear that gave us several angry looks. “Interlopers,” he muttered, before lumbering off into a stand of pines. Like the bear, the rainbows in these remote creeks are wild, native, and used to calling the place their own. And they hit a caddis dry with reckless abandon. I had great success with the downstream-dead-drift technique Lisa Cutter taught me two days earlier—once I remembered to be patient when setting the hook on a downstream take. This adjustment came after jerking the fly away from more than one eager mouth.

The fish we landed ranged from three to ten inches in length. In the first creek we fished the rainbows’ coloration had adapted toward a tint that matched the yellow-ochre of the rocks along the bottom. In contrast, the fish we caught in a creek that meandered through a boggy meadow were tinted a rich red to an almost blood-black. These are the redband trout David told me about. He made sure I saw the distinctive white tips on their anal, dorsal, and pectoral fins. Despite being in the second-worst mosquito swarm of my backcountry life, there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Another nod to the Cutter family—and Deet—is in order.

Four solid days of fishing and friendship revitalized me. The brain cramp I’d developed during twelve pitches to twelve production studio representatives and movie agents, during two two-and-half-hour pitch sessions, was eased as gently as the precious fish David and I released back into those streams and creeks. Back in my truck and following the North Yuba home, fresh ideas for poems, stories, and scripts were rising in my creek-clear mind. When I hit the interstate my cell phone rang for the first time in two days—just as I entered coverage. It was my buddy Adrian, wondering if I could get away the next day to drift the Lower Yuba River with him and Riley. Riley is Adrian and wife Teresa’s amiable Irish Setter. “I know it’s a last minute thing,” Adrian said.

Adrian runs Anchor Point Fly Fishing and guides the Lower Yuba, among other northern California rivers. Any chance I get to spend time on a river in his good company is time well spent. He is also a talented casting instructor and shares his knowledge generously. With his continuing help I’ve become a decent enough two-handed caster to be able to fish effectively for my favorite trout in the rainbow family, the steelhead. Switch casts, spey casts, snake rolls, and circle speys are not just new ways for me to hook myself in the earlobe with a streamer anymore. Adrian’s offer was clearly another I could not refuse. The only problem was I had a meeting the next day at 5:45 p.m. that I did not want to miss. “No problem,” Adrian said, and it was on.

The Lower Yuba differs significantly from the freestone river and spring creeks I’d explored during the previous days. The Lower Yuba is a tailwater fishery, created at the outflow from Englebright Dam. The trout-friendly water temperature is consistently cold year-round because water is released from the lower depths of Englebright Lake. These are optimal conditions for the resident wild rainbows and for the seasonal spawning runs of steelhead and salmon. Adrian and I both like to swing streamers so we scouted for productive runs. I always look forward to casting a new rod from Adrian’s arsenal and found myself adding several of them to my after-we-sell-a-script list.

The surprise of the day was drifting into a run of rising fish at high noon. Drop anchor. Tie on a caddis. The fish were taking but I was missing the hook-set—again. One aggressive rainbow followed the fly I jerked out of its mouth all the way into a magnificent, aerial leap. Adrian and I passed the rod back and forth between us and we finally hooked a silvery-scaled rainbow. The set came just after Adrian ran a perfect dead drift with no takers. He handed me the rod to take my turn with the next cast just as the caddis skated. Fish on. We each claimed half-credit for the fish.

When I arrived at my 5:45 meeting that evening I was still wearing the river and a cologne of sunscreen. Being reasonable persons, my buddy Bill and I chose DeVere’s Irish Pub in downtown Sacramento as the place to meet for our strategy session, and Guinness as our fuel. Bill is another of the wonderfully bright people I’m fortunate enough to know. On the cutting edge of technology, he’s helping me make practical use of new media technologies to bring attention to my writing. At the top of our to-do list was figuring out how to make the most out of my pitches at PitchFest!

Naturally, toward the bottom of our second pint, our conversation started to meander, and we made plans to get out on a river together. Any river.