Archive for the ‘Fly Fishing’ Category
Start ‘Em Young
Oskar went fly fishing for Arctic Grayling on the upper Chena River this weekend. At 3.5 years old, he had some challenges but got to help land his first fish.
Reeling the fish in – a tricky business
Then you get to see the fish up close for the very first time, which is actually kind of cool.
First Fish!
And then, of course, you get to look at the fish just before it is released. But you aren’t completely sure about getting too close.
Dad, Oskar, Mrs. WC and a Catch and Release Grayling
Always great to see kids excited about fishing. Props to Mrs. WC, who is a patient, cheerful instructor.
The Old Debate: Bait v. Fly
Among sport fisherpersons, the never-ending debate is whether fly fishing or bait fishing is more likely to be successful. There’s a terrific book that treats the subject, The River Why, by David James Duncan, reviewed here. But opinion is no substitute for experience, as this video of a Green Heron demonstrates:
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If you were taught in school that man is the only tool-using animal, your teachers lied to you.
*H/T to Mia Macpherson
R.I.P.: The Alaska Bar’s Only Honorary Member
It saddens WC to report the death of the Alaska Bar Association’s one and only honorary member, District Court Judge Hershel “Ed” Crutchfield. Ed died March 28, 2012 in a nursing home in Kentucky.
Ed was a successful businessman in Delta Junction, Alaska for many years, and eventually served as the Delta Junction Magistrate. He was appointed as the first (and only, to date) lay State District Court Judge in by Governor Jay Hammon on March 30, 1980 and served as a judge until his retirement in 1992. He was highly regarded by the lawyers who appeared in front of him, and in 1984 he was made an honorary member of the Alaska Bar Association; the Bar’s first and so far only honorary member.
The honorary membership speaks to the esteem layers had for Ed; his three successful retention elections – by two-third majorities each time – speak for his popularity with citizens.
WC appeared in front of Judge Crutchfield many times. He had excellent common sense and good instincts. He might not have had the technical aspects of the rules of evidence down cold, but he listened carefully to the arguments the parties made. He could almost always find the right answer in the fog of words.
Yes, Ed made some mistakes. He had a brush with the law that resulted in an Alaska Supreme Court decision. And he sometimes was generous when he perhaps should not have been.
Ed was also an accomplished pilot, and WC treasures the memory of a couple of flights back into lakes in the Shaw Creek Flats, chasing northern pike and conversation. A southern gentleman to his bones, WC never heard Ed say a truly harsh word about anyone.
Rest in peace, friend. Your service to Alaska did you great credit. WC’s sympathies to his widow, Sharon, and to Ed’s extended family.
Druther Be Fishin’
Stop SOPA
WC is a fairly serious fly fisherman. The virulence of his affliction varies from time to time. As he reported earlier, WC spent a three month sabbatical in 1993 fly fishing in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
WC started fishing fairly young.
WC, 1957, Two Chum Salmon
They are just Chums – Dog Salmon in a Yu’pik town like Bethel – but they weren’t bad when carefully smoked. WC has fished pretty much ever since, including twenty-plus years of trips to the Situk River near Yakutat, chasing spring run Steelhead Trout. For those who don’t fly fish, Steelhead are salt-run Rainbow Trout, and it can take 20-30 minutes to land a big one on fly gear. This particular fish involved a fight of more than half an hour.
WC, Steelhead Trout, Situk River, 2002
Yes, WC released the fish after the photo was taken. The Situk River has North America’s largest purely wild Steelhead Trout fishery, with the small 20-mile long stream supporting a run of 7,500 steelhead, as well as large runs of all five salmon species. It’s a crime against nature to eat a fish that, unlike salmon, can return to salt water and spawn year after year.
The problem now, of course, is that, in Thumper’s phrase, the water is all stiff on top. Fly fishing is past impractical. So instead, WC reads about fly fishing. And there are some very, very good books on fly fishing. WC willl briefly discuss three.
The River Why, David James Duncan [Amazon Link]
First, it’s not really a book about fishing. Duncan uses fishing as one kind of bait, along with wonderful humor, beautiful writing and memorable characterization, to make a much larger, much more important set of points.
Second, the plot isn’t about fishing, or living in harmony with nature; it’s about a young man’s discovering what life really is. The Perfect Schedule – young Gus’s plan for getting in the absolute maximum number of hours a day fishing – turns out to be a horrible failure. It takes a long time for Gus to realize something is wrong, including a harrowing adventure with a drowned man and some pretty serous sickness. Now it may be – ahem – that fisherpersons are more stubborn or more stupid, but Duncan has Gus discover that there are things more important than fishing, and that those things can lead to still greater things. And that all of that can make the fishing better.
Third, while Duncan and Gus poke immense amounts of fun at it, this really is a re-casting of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Fisherman, although Walton is nearly unreadable and Duncan writes extraordinarily well. This book is also about more or less the same thing as those “witlesses” that Ma brings to grief, although both Gus and the Witlesses would likely deny it. One of Duncan’s subtle messages is there, too.
Fourth and last, like a fish taking a fly, when you read this book you will be so dazzled by the gorgeous fly of Duncan’s humor, writing and characterization that you will miss the hook and line of his real message until, like Gus, the line of light has you and you feel that gentle tug in your heart.
Beautiful and subtle, hilarious and passionate, charming and amazing, this book is simply an astonishing piece of writing. It’s one of my ten or so favorite books, and likely will be one of yours, too.
A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean [Amazon link]
Sure, the books has been Redford-ized, turned into a pretty movie, but if you can get the movie out of your head, this is a fine book, probably the best written of the three. MacLean can turn a phrase as well as any English writer, and when he says, near the end of the novella, “I am haunted by water,” you feel the meaning in the small hairs at the base of your neck. This is the story of a profoundly dysfunctional family, united by a love of fishing, and especially fly fishing. When MacLean tells us, at the start, that in his family there was no clear line drawn between fishing and religion, he is telling nothing less than the truth. A life framed in four steps, between ten and two.
Where The River Why is generally upbeat, MacLean’s story is a tragedy, not just because of the death of the younger brother, Paul, but because of the utter inability of the brothers to understand, let alone help, one another.
Exquisitely written ad ineffably sad, this is a wonderful story wonderfully told.
The Earth Is Enough, Harry Middleton [Amazon link]
This is the story of a young boy growing up in a military family, stationed at a staging area during the Vietnam War. When one of his friends is killed – and Harry badly injured – playing with a grenade they found in the jungle, Harry is packed off to his grandfather, a subsistence farmer in the Ozarks of Arkansas. There, with his grandfather, granduncle and the old American Indian, Elias Wonder, Harry is healed, not just of the trauma of seeing his friend disappear in a “pink mist” but healed as well of a great deal of other things he may not have known ailed him.
As Harry learns the rhythms of the land and the mysteries of Starlight Creek from his grandfather and the irascible Elias Wonder, he grows and the reader grows with him. Like David James Duncan’s The River Why, this is a book about growing up and coming of age, and flyfishing – that “hopeless addiction to trout and the push of water against your legs” – is simply the author’s narrative tool.
Harry must have been a more patient and willing teenager than I was, or perhaps time has colored over Harry’s experience, but there is nothing else to criticize. Beautifully written, exceptionally well told, full of life, sadness, humor, death and understanding.
And if flyfishing became an addiction for Harry, that was to haunt him in his later years, well, he was warned and in any event there are far worse fates.
So there you have it. Three stories to read on cold winter nights, while we all wait for the creeks to melt, the streams to clear and the fish to rise. You don’t have to like or enjoy fly fishing to enjoy any of these books; in each, fishing is the frame in which larger, more important matters are drawn. But if you do fish, it’s a bridge towards liquid water and the twitch of the fly rod in your hand as the grayling takes the fly.
WC’s Epic Fails: Max and the Salt Chuck Mine Hike
Max, at age 7
In 1993, WC’s firm gave him a three month sabbatical. WC spent those three months fly-fishing across the Pacific Northwest. The first month was spent on Prince of Wales Island, at the southerly end of Southeast Alaska. At least back in 1993, there was a nice network of logging roads, Forest Service cabins and campgrounds, and some of the best fly-fishing in Alaska.
For technical reasons involving his ex-wife, WC had his dog with him the whole trip. Max (formally, Heimdal Maximillian) was a pure-bred, AKC Norwegian Elkhound. Like most elkhounds, he was utterly loyal to WC, suspicious of strangers and devoted to finding and barking at moose and elk. His devotion to moose required him to run off to look for them at every opportunity, so Max spent his time on a leash, in a fenced yard or tied up when traveling.
After 17 consecutive days of fly-fishing, including an epic 11-steelhead day on Staney Creek, Max lobbied pretty hard for a day away from the creeks, so we opted for a hike along the Salt Chuck Trail, to see the Salt Chuck tidal waterfall and visit the ruins of the old Salt Chuck Mine.
We parked at the primitive campground, probably 25 road miles from Thorne Bay. WC donned his hip belt, leashed up Max and headed down the trail. A few words about the hip belt. The zipper pouch held emergency supplies and rain gear; the left pocket held a water bottle; the right pocket held a can of pepper spray, purchased in the Yukon Territory, which sprayed a more jelly-like pepper goop than the traditional fog sprays.
About a half a mile along the trail, we came to the edge of a blow down, a place where a wind gust had blown down the big Sitka Spruce like so many jack straws, years earlier. The Forest Service had chain-sawed a path through part of it, and part of it was a scramble over a mess of trunks. Just as we got to our edge of the blow down, Max started a low, loud growl. WC glanced down at his dog, and Max’s lips seemed to have disappeared. His muzzle was all teeth and gums, and he was staring fixedly across the blow down. WC looked where Max was staring and, just as he looked, a big black bear came out of the woods on the far side of the blow down, probably 150 feet away. The bear looked our direction and, without breaking stride, charged at full speed.
This takes a lot longer to tell than it did to happen. You cannot imagine, if you have not been charged by a bear, how fast those animals can move.
WC reached back with his right hand to get his pepper spray (WC is left-handed), just as Max charged the bear. The result was that the leash was jerked off WC’s hand, and Max ran towards the bear. That quickly, the bear had crossed to within 8-10 feet of WC. Max charged in low, and the bear stood part way up, batting at Max. The critter hasn’t been bred that can hit a Norwegian Elkhound; several moose had worked themselves into a froth trying to kick Max. An Elkhound is a fur-covered superball. Max stopped the bear, kept him distracted and occupied while WC thumb-fingered out the pepper spray, got the safety off, and hosed down the bear at point blank range.
The stuff worked instantly. The bear was immediately disabled. He turned – it was plainly a male – and wiped with both paws at its eyes and muzzle, sneezing and coughing. Max bit the bear on his back left leg, hard enough to still have a tuft of black bear fur wedged between his teeth 15 minutes later. The bear bolted, blundering into trees and logs, headed back the way he had come. Max and I both had some slight blow-back from the pepper spray, and our eyes were watering and burning, and we were both sneezing, but otherwise we were both fine. For a wonder, Max stayed with me until I could get his leash.
We turned around, both hyper-alert, both whacked on adrenaline, and made our very careful way back to the truck. WC drove back to Thorne Bay and made them re-open the general store. WC bought a steak for Max, who had saved WC from, at best, a nasty mauling.
WC and Max never made it to Salt Chuck. Two days later we were off to the Karta River Wilderness Area to meet a buddy. Interestingly, Salt Chuck Mine is now a National Priorities Site on EPA’s cleanup list. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation has a nice write-up of the site in its Contaminated Sites Program.
WC urges the clean-up contractor to be careful about black bears.
Movie Review: The River Why
Gus, a Chinook and 3# Test
David James Duncan’s extraordinary book. The River Why, is one of WC’s favorite novels of all time. It’s always worrisome when one of your favorite novels get made into a movie. But, you know, this one’s pretty good.
The casting is very good. WC doesn’t get to movies a lot, and hadn’t seen either Zach Gilford, who plays the protagonist, Gus, or Amber Heard, who plays Eddy. They’re both pretty good, and Heard is exactly the right mix of tomboy bombshell for the part. Gus’s parents are played by William Hurt as H2O and Kathleen Quinlan as Ma, who are outstanding. Gatlin Griffith is perfect as Bill Bob.
The settings are quite good. The Oregon fishing streams (and occasionally Idaho and California fishing streams) are suitably photogenic. Gus’s cabin is exactly right.
The soundtrack is excellent, never intrusive and in many places exactly right. The credits roll to Henry Thomas’s great “Fishing Blues.”
The plot? Well, WC thinks you have to have read the book. Some pretty important stuff gets left out: Gus’s spirit quest up the Tamawamis River to its source. The Rogue River Fishing Wars. Gus’s Uncle’s redneck rendition. Gus’s baby sister. WC understands that a book has to be cut down to make a movie – this one is about an hour and a half – but a lot of the humor and a lot of WC’s treasured bits didn’t get filmed or, if they did, didn’t make the cut. Most of the important scenes are there: Dutch Hines, the fishing reporter; Titus and his dog, Descartes; Abe the Fisherman; Bill Bob and his drefree.
There’s at least one really bad mistake that’s immediately obvious to any fisherperson from the Pacific Northwest. In Gus’s big scene with the chinook salmon, he follows the fish as it swims downriver. Oops.
Still, it’s the best movie on fly fishing since A River Runs Through It. And it makes WC wish that water were a liquid and fish were in the creeks around here. David James Duncan apparently wanted nothing to do with it; the credit read, “Based on the book of the same name.”
Duncan Sets the Hook
Book Review: The River Why
by David James Duncan (1982)
First, it’s not a book about fishing. Duncan uses fishing as one kind of bait, along with wonderful humor, beautiful writing and memorable characterization, to make a much larger, much more important set of points.
Second, the plot isn’t about fishing, or living in harmony with nature; it’s about a young man’s discovering what life really is. The Perfect Schedule – young Gus’s plan for getting in the absolute maximum number of hours a day fishing – turns out to be a horrible failure. It takes a long time for Gus to realize something is wrong, including a harrowing adventure with a drowned man and some pretty serious sickness. Now it may be – ahem – that fisherpersons are more stubborn or more stupid, but Duncan has Gus discover that there are things more important than fishing, and that those things can lead to still greater things. And that all of that can make the fishing better.
Third, while Duncan and Gus poke immense amounts of fun at it, this really is a re-casting of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Fisherman, although Walton is nearly unreadable and Duncan writes extraordinarily well. This book is also about more or less the same thing as those “witlesses” that Ma brings to grief, although both Gus and the Witlesses would likely deny it. One of Duncan’s subtle messages is there, too.
Fourth and last, like a fish taking a fly, when you read this book you will be so dazzled by the gorgeous fly of Duncan’s humor, writing and characterization that you will miss the hook and line of his real message until, like Gus, the line of light has you and you feel that gentle tug in your heart.
Beautiful and subtle, hilarious and passionate, charming and amazing, this book is simply an astonishing piece of writing. It’s one of WC’s ten or so favorite books, and likely will be one of yours, too.
Cleaning Out the In-Box
WC accumulates a lot of stuff that is too short for a full blog post but to good to pass by. Some is from WC’s in-box; some from comments; some from Mrs. WC. At very irregular intervals, all that miscellany gets lumped into a post like this.
After going down in flames in the Beluga Whale endangered species lawsuit, and being kicked all over the courtroom in its other endangered species litigation, the State of Alaska, Department of Law has decided it is time to recruit an assistant attorney general with knowledge of the Endangered Species Act. Wouldn’t this have been a great idea, say, 18 months ago?
For at least the last 25 years, the State of Alaska has been working on widening Illinois Street on the north side of the Chena River here in Fairbanks. Probably longer than that. So far, that effort has gotten us a bridge across the river that is fenced so no one can use it, a lot of vacant lots and some partially relocated power lines. And the State still doesn’t have all of the right of way it needs to award the contract. Highway construction is paid for mostly with U.S. Department of Transportation funds, which are mostly the federal gasoline tax. The feds won’t let contracts be awarded until all of the land has been acquired. (Which proves they are smarter than the former Mayor of Wasilla.) Oopsie.
This isn’t original to WC but as WC traces it, but Eye of Newt is using his two daughters from his first marriage to attack his wife from his second marriage for claiming Gingrich wanted an open marriage so he could continue his adultery with the woman who is his third wife. That’s family values for you.
Speaking of bad water, it appears that the $50 million Ruth Burnett Fish Hatchery will start hatching fish this year, more than 18 months behind schedule. The problem has indeed been the water, and issue that’s the responsibility CH2M Hill. You remember them; they are the successor to Bill Allen’s VECO, having purchased VECO after Allen’s bust. Bad karma in the water, perhaps? WC has been looking forward to seeing more Arctic Grayling in interior streams, but at the rate this is going, he’ll be too old to fly fish by the time the fish are stocked.
To all of the obscure Asian companies who continue to solicit WC’s help collecting a judgment: can’t you dream up a new scam? This con is getting as old and tired as the Nigerians’ stupid pitch.
This cheerful tweet from Scott Simon: If you could thaw out Captain Scott at the South Pole, 100 years after he died, the Cubs still wouldn’t have won the World Series.
Alaska Airlines is eliminating prayer cards from its first class food service trays. A reader wants to know if this is a sign of the Apocalypse. The reader is posting her question to the wrong blog.
WC gets a lot of emails complaining he writes about _______ too often. You can fill in the blank. Recent complaints have included the Cubs, Republicans, nature photography, the Cubs, global warming and the Cubs. And writers have complained the WC is a liberal, a Commie, a libertarian, a Democrat, a fisherman, a nazi, a tree-hugger, arrogant and, worst of all, “uses big words.”
Whatever.
WC writes about what attracts his magpie sensibilities. Whatever bright, shiny issue appeals at the moment. WC follows Mark Twain’s abjuration, appearing in the frontispiece to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
A writer wants to know how much of the stuff WC writes about is real and how much is made up. Yes.
The rest of the stuff is too vulgar for even WC’s blog and will be used as digital mulch.
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Written by Wickersham's Conscience
January 28, 2012 at 6:15 am
Posted in Commentary, Fly Fishing, Miscellany, Parnell
Tagged with Commentary, Fly fishing, Parnell