Tuesday, June 23, 2015

A Quality Angling Experience

This area is restricted to catch-and-release fishing with artificial flies and single, barbless hooks in order to protect native cutthroat trout that inhabit these waters and to guarantee all park visitors a quality angling experience. —sign in Yellowstone Park, circa 1974

The Buffalo Ford on the Yellowstone River is not listed by name on the free maps that visitors receive when they pay their $10 entry fee at Gardiner or West Yellowstone, but most anglers know where it is. It is a flat section of water that passes through the meadows between Fishing Bridge and Inspiration Point, just downstream from LeHardy Rapids. Though I have been there only three times, the memories I have of the place and its fish are like a core sample of my adult life. At the Buffalo Ford, I caught my first big, wild trout on a fly. It was also the place where I learned about barbless hooks and releasing fish unharmed. It has now become a place where I try to pass these lessons on to my children.

My first trip to Yellowstone Park was in conjunction with a voyage of discovery in the early 1970s. Torn between seminary and law school, I did what any red-blooded American male would have done at the time and “lit out for the territory” by spending the summer on the road. Since I couldn’t afford Europe, I decided to explore the American West. My guide and erstwhile traveling companion was an Oregon native named Ol’ Norm who promised excitement, adventure, and trout “as big as your leg.” To someone who’d barely been west of the Mississippi, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

So we started out for San Francisco, Ol’ Norm in the role of Dean Moriarty and me as the reticent Sal Paradise. Besides the fact that he was an experienced fly fisherman, there were several other things that made Ol’ Norm a passable if not ideal traveling companion. Among them was a red 1969 Jaguar XKE convertible and road trip skills like the uncanny ability to piss in an empty beer bottle while driving 85 mile an hour through the Wyoming desert. There are some things you just don’t learn in seminary.

The trip was an eventful one for me, an odyssey of sorts. Though I’ve long since lost the notes I was saving for the great American novel I hoped to write upon our return, I still recall one of the highlights that occurred on our journey homeward. Low on money but still high on enthusiasm, we stopped at Dan Bailey’s fabled fly shop across the street from the train station in Livingston, Montana.

I could hardly believe I was actually walking through the front door of a place I’d only read about in fishing magazines. Despite our road-weary appearance and lack of spare cash, the man behind the counter was most helpful. When we asked him to recommend a place to fish, he responded without hesitation. “If you’ve never fished the park before, you really ought to try the Buffalo Ford on the Yellowstone. You can get by with a few patterns and the license is free.”

The next morning, we got up early in order to make the drive south from Livingston through the Paradise Valley to the Park. It was a beautiful morning in late July and we were soon fishing the few #16 Royal Wulffs that we’d been able to afford. My inexperience and a used, ten-dollar, fiberglass fly pole made for inept presentation of the small dry flies but the trout were forgiving. And what marvelous trout they were; fat bronze Yellowstone cutthroats with a trademark red slash under their jaws. The smallest were 14 inches while the largest were well over 20. They were the biggest trout I’d ever seen.
This area is restricted to catch-and-release fishing with artificial flies and single, barbless hooks in order to protect native cutthroat trout that inhabit these waters and to guarantee all park visitors a quality angling experience. —sign in Yellowstone Park, circa 1974

When we finally quit fishing late in the afternoon, our arms were too sore to cast and we’d broken off the last or our flies. Seeing the sign posted next to the parking lot, we could only laugh and agree that ours had truly been “a quality angling experience.”

My next trip to the Ford was a decade later under decidedly different circumstances. A beautiful pair of blondes—my wife and our three-month old daughter, Liv—had replaced Ol’ Norm as my fellow travelers. The Jaguar convertible and empty beer bottles had given way to a Toyota mini-van and disposable diapers. Instead of heading back east, we were headed west to our new home—a parsonage in Olympia, Washington.

One thing hadn’t changed, however, and that was the fishing. Using a pattern similar to the one I’d fished with Ol’ Norm ten years earlier, the big cutthroats proved every bit as cooperative as they had a decade earlier. With my wife and daughter asleep on a blanket under the shade of a Ponderosa pine on the riverbank, I remember sipping a beer, watching trout hungrily rising to a mid-afternoon hatch and thinking that I must be the luckiest man on earth. Once again, the Buffalo Ford had provided a quality angling experience.

The last time I visited the Buffalo Ford, it was also with my family, though by this time a second daughter, Britt, had joined us. We were on our way back to Wisconsin for a family reunion. Due to a combination of circumstances including unfortunate timing, our trip through the park took place a week prior to the opening of the fishing season on the Yellowstone. Undeterred, I asked the girls if they wanted to stop off at a special place. After overcoming their initial disappointment at not being able to actually do some fishing, they agreed—much as I had 16 years earlier—that an opportunity to see trout “as big as your leg” sounded too good to pass up.  Under the shade of the same pine tree that my ten-year old had slept as an infant, the four of us enjoyed lunch and watched the wild cutthroats of the Yellowstone enjoying theirs. Though we never wet a line, we experienced yet another quality experience on the river.

When I think of places like the Buffalo Ford, it is with a combination of gratitude and hope. On the surface, my life has certainly changed since my first visit almost half a lifetime ago. Yet in important ways, it really hasn’t changed that much at all. I’m still attracted by wild trout “as big as your leg” (who isn’t?) and the places where they live continue to fire my imagination. So, too, the people with whom I’ve experienced those places. Ol’ Norm and I occasionally meet up for a beer and to relive our memories. Liv and Britt, my two daughters, have indicated that a fly rod under the Christmas tree is not an inappropriate gift for a girl. (“After all, dad, this is the nineties!”) I still feel like the luckiest person on earth. And every so often, I find myself whispering a prayer of thanks for the Buffalo Ford and the memories I have of it.


May wild trout and the places where they live that carry the promise of “a quality angling experience” be part of the world our children inherit from us.

[This piece was published in the Angler’s Club of Portland in January of 1991. Ol’ Norm died several years later. He was 50.]



Monday, June 15, 2015

Father's Day

I’m sitting at the vise, attempting to tie up a #16 elk hair caddis. It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living. I’m usually slow but tonight, I’ve got other things on my mind.

In less than two weeks, my parents will arrive from Wisconsin. Part of their brief stay will include a day on the Deschutes for my father and me. In anticipation of his arrival, I’ve been hitting up my fishing buddies for an extra pair of sea-worthy waders, tying elk hairs and stonefly nymphs, and generally looking forward to the trip.  Fishing is often a special time for fathers and sons. That’s been especially true for us.

Like most people who fish, I was introduced by my father. It was one of those things that fathers just did, like the purchase of a first baseball glove and the mandatory lecture about the birds and the bees. Since ours was a large family, he had to do it a half dozen different times but he handled it well and it seems to have taken. We all enjoy fishing and my sister recently had a pair of waders custom-made for herself because she couldn’t wait for the local shop to figure out that fathers teach daughters to fish as well as sons.

My father was a teacher by trade and his lessons in the art of angling covered a wide variety of areas. He taught us about worms and how to find, keep, and—most importantly—use them effectively. When we got a little older, he used his income tax refund one year to purchase an aluminum canoe. With the canoe on top of the station wagon, we put in lots of miles looking for local “hot spots.” It was my father who introduced me to the native brook trout of North Wisconsin and clipped the notice from the paper about a fly-tying class at the local high school.

But fishing was more than catching fish for him and it has become that way for me as well. (That’s just as well since I have a younger brother who always manages to catch more and bigger fish than any of the rest of us. When my dad really wants fish, he goes with him!) Above all, fishing served as an island of tranquility during the stormy sixties when my brothers, my sister and I were growing up. The battles over civil rights and the Viet Nam War were also fought around our dining room table along with all the other adolescent conflicts over drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

Sometimes my father must have felt like he was living in an emotional war zone. But somehow, a separate peace was declared whenever we went fishing or at least a temporary truce. Those evenings spent in the canoe looking for bass or stalking wild brookies on the Prairie River were magically reconciling. It was fishing that helped all of us survive those days. Because of that, I associate fishing with the unspoken peace and acceptance of one another that my father and I seem to have worked out about the time I got married and moved west.

Fishing is a celebration of friendship for my father and me. It was something we shared together even when it seemed like there was nothing else we had in common. I will always be grateful for that.

John Buchan, the former Governor General of Canada, has written, “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable; a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” For my father and me, it has become a perpetual series of occasions for celebration as well. Happy Father’s Day.


[Note: I wrote this piece in May of 1989 and it was published in the newsletters of the Angler’s Club of Portland (June 1989) and the Flyfisher’s Club of Oregon. Sunday is Father’s Day and it seems appropriate to share it again after 26 years. My father suffered a stroke several years ago and silently contemplates life in a care center on a bluff above the Wisconsin River near the house where we grew up.]