Time on the Water

I’m a fly fishing guide. I have lived it and loved it for almost 2 decades now. There are gracious rewards, none of them financial, but all of them real. The people you meet are, in general, incredible and you certainly can’t beat the office and the view.

This said, my work as a guide is not always entirely enjoyable. Some days it seems monumentally impossible to teach certain tightly-wound business types to appreciate time on the water. These are the clients that keep track of every fish they catch, tracking and comparing numbers, inches, weight and species; then balancing these against flies lost, time spent, distance walked, and wind (tailing loop) knots tied as if the sum of their fishing were like the P&L statement’s bottom line. They seem to yearn for a spreadsheet to make sense of their day.

An insightful client, not a fish counter of course, once explained to me that competitive people will turn everything, even the most pure leisure, into a competition. That is just their nature, and that is what they do.

I realize that every job has its frustrations. It must. Otherwise nobody would pay to have it done. Sometimes mine comes with incredible pressure and strain. It can be an impossibly weighty feat to put a fish on the line for Mr. Smith, or whoever, of the firm of Smith and Smith, or whatever. This morning was one of those heavy mornings.

It had been a fishless day, or at least 4 excruciatingly painful fishless hours. The firm hadn’t wanted to pay for a full day; thank goodness. The way things were going it only would have further diminished their ROI. I dropped the clients off in front of their lodge, practically keeping a slow roll as they unloaded. There was no use waiting for a tip. I quickly retreated.

I needed to regroup, to erase that morning entirely. I needed to reconnect, to feel a part of something, be in tune, be alone. I needed to fish.

I drove straight to a big gravel lot I knew well, grabbed my gear, and worked my way quickly through the willows toward a slowly winding section of the Provo River. I intended to see if I might solve the riddles of at least a small section of water or of this day. The trout that morning had been so entirely a mystery that I knew I had to find something familiar and foremost, alive.

Breaking through the last springy red willows I popped out onto the gravelly bank and surveyed this familiar section of stream. It is a big slow run, just upstream of a rapid and 2 swift bends and just below a gradual riffle with an angled drop off. With a quick survey of the scene I saw something that assured me I was successful in my quest to be alone.

Two birds, with vision far more keen than my own, watched my preparations intently. One peered nervously from slow water on the next bend just upstream and the other calmly stared from atop a leafless cottonwood just off the water.

The first was a mottled brown mallard gliding back and forth on the slick water. She watched me nervously at first, glancing my way, then back toward the river, and then back at me. After some time she decided I was ok and went about her day, tipping her tail high to forage below the water’s surface. Each time she came up for a breath I caught her eye peering my way, but she didn’t seem worried now, just aware.

The black streaked osprey in the tree top was not concerned with my presence at all. So there we stood, swam, and sat, three fishers together and alone.

The water and light breeze began to wash away the morning’s frustrations and weight. Time passed, I assume. I had begun to think about current and little else. The mallard eventually left and the fish hawk took flight. In fact, the osprey and I fished together for nearly 4 hours. We were each successful. She managed to spectacularly capture what would sustain her, and in a subtle way so did I.

The osprey perched back in the top of the grey-branched cottonwood and ate. I connected with several golden hued brown trout, with glowing haloed red spots and I felt the power and speed of a stout red-sided rainbow. It occurred to me that the scene was missing the ancient Bonneville cutthroat trout that once called this river home. For years they had been neglected and displaced. Their territory invaded by transplants from California and Europe. The cutthroats have now been pushed far up the drainage to much more remote reaches of stream.

I knew this was not the Provo River of eons past. Dams now back two great reservoirs, which have buried canyons, valleys, and miles of the old stream bed in silt. It was a sobering thought to think of the acres and acres underwater. Yet, I may have never been brought here had my ancestors not captured the water, just as ancestors of all once captured fire.

It’s an imperfect nature we’ve got on our hands. We are left to ask, “Now what do we do?” How do we make the best of the imperfect world we’ve been given? or taken? The osprey and mallard once fished here on this river alone, then it was the native people, the Fremonts and later the Utes. They had eventually been forced out, to fish no more forever. Would we be forced out, maybe by spreadsheets that can’t balance beauty?

These questions drift around in the mind like little strike indicators on the riffle waves. They are questions without easy answers and ones we’ll need to address. But, for me, in that moment these questions were far off. What mattered is that the morning’s frustrations were washed away. I had fished, with a duck and an osprey, and felt at home in an imperfect natural world, still possessed of its power to heal.